Run River (7 page)

She had even invited him up the river for a day during spring week. Once home, she regretted having asked him. But he was delighted by the prospect of observing her in her native decay, and so she drove to Sacramento to meet him one morning. As soon as she saw him standing on the lawn in front of the Southern Pacific station, radiating the same intense concern which had first charmed her in Berkeley, she knew that it would be a difficult day. He was as alien to the Valley as she might have been to the Bronx, and the alienation went deeper than his black turtle-necked sweater, went beyond the copy of
In Dubious Battle
with which he had been briefing himself on the train. By the time she drove him to the station that evening (he had tried throughout dinner to correct the errors in Walter Knight’s impression of Upton Sinclair and EPIC), she was too exhausted even to speak. “You’ll be glad to get away from all this,” he said tentatively, taking a last drag on a cigarette and throwing it out the window. “Get away from all what?” she said, watching the sparks in the rearview mirror. “I meant you’ll feel free in New York. You’ll develop.” Uncomfortably aware that she had at some point agreed to go to New York with him (although she had never had the slightest intention of doing so), she increased her pressure on the accelerator. “I’m not likely to get away from all this,” she said, for once safe enough to say what she meant, her hands on the wheel of her father’s car, driving the roads for which her father paid. “Any more than you’re likely to get away from wherever it is you come from. And we don’t throw cigarettes out the window here. It starts fires.” She had meant to go to bed with him but because she had still to discover, at seventeen, the possibilities in someone she did not like, she had not.

Abruptly, Lily stood up and lifted the damp hair off her neck. With aimless violence, she threw the beer glass down the slope, then ran after it to where the lawn faded into dirt and dry yellow grass. Kicking a faucet open with her foot, she let the clear water (well water, not the river water they used for irrigation) splash over her arms and face. It was a waste of water early in a dry summer, and its extravagance relieved her. That helped some, that and swinging from an oak branch about to break from the tree, and by the time she reached the house in her wet nightgown the telephone was ringing.

“Sorry if I woke you,” Everett McClellan said. “I’m about to take a truck into town for some extra help.”

“You didn’t wake me.” This was more like it. Hoping, although it could not matter, that her mother had not picked up the extension in her bedroom, she tried to smooth her hair with her free hand.

“I mean I thought—” He spoke with some difficulty. “I thought you might like to ride in.”

“Right now?”

“You’re probably busy.”

“Not really.” She wondered what he thought she did between six-thirty and seven-thirty in the morning. “I’ll get dressed.”

As she shook out her wet hair with a towel she hummed softly, and looked in the mirror for the first time in months without regretting the waste of her perfectly good but constantly depreciating body.

“You look younger than Marth,” Everett said when she climbed into the truck.

“I’m older. A year.” She glanced down at her thin arms, brown against the white of her dress. Martha McClellan was not yet seventeen, a freshman come fall at the University of California at Davis. When Lily’s mother, on the behalf of the Pi Beta Phi Alumnae Club, had urged Martha to enroll at Berkeley and participate in rushing, Martha had told her that it was necessary that she go to Davis, which was mainly an agricultural station, because her father wanted her to marry a rich rancher. And as a matter of fact so did she. Martha McClellan, Edith Knight had observed, was “a case.”

“I know how old you are,” Everett said without looking at her.

Lily pressed her forehead against the window, closed against the heat. Now in June the hops were starting up the strings, miles of them, ready to bear the thick green weight of the August vines. It was said to be a good year for the hops; because her father did not grow them she did not know why. She supposed that it had to do with when the rain had come. Everything else did.

“The hops are pretty,” she said.

“You think so?”

“Yes, I do,” she said, rather at a loss. When it came to conversation, Everett McClellan was not one to give much away. “I think they’re very pretty and I’m glad I’m home.”

They did not exchange another word until they reached the Labor Center in the West End, where Everett, getting out of the truck, ordered her to lock both doors from the inside and wait until he came back. As soon as he had entered the office, one of the Mexicans standing on the sidewalk outside made a face at Lily. She smiled, embarrassed, and then pretended to be reading a book in her lap. After Everett had recruited thirteen men, they started back out to the McClellan place; Everett looked once at her, when he had trouble starting the truck, and then neither looked at her nor spoke. Her eyes closed, she listened to the men in the back of the truck, singing Bing Crosby songs and passing around a bottle of dago red, and wondered why Everett had called her at all.

Mr. McClellan met them at the ranch, flagging wildly when he caught sight of the truck, an unnecessary exertion since he was standing where the trucks were habitually parked. Lily could not remember ever having seen him calm: even years before, when he had brought Everett and Martha and Sarah to call, he had given the appearance of a man beset by his own energy, scrawny with tension. He would leap to his feet when Edith Knight entered the room, accidentally knock over a chair, institute a prolonged search for a handkerchief, bound across the room to collar one of the children. He had always spoken to them as if they were puppies.
Down, Martha. Sit, Martha
.

“You should have got in there earlier,” he muttered now, leaning over Everett’s shoulder as Everett entered the names on the payroll ledger. “Nobody left come seven o’clock but high-school boys and drunken wetbacks. Here’s one fact you won’t learn in college, Miss Lily Knight: there’s nobody in God’s green world has less native intelligence than a goddamn wetback.” Everett had once explained that his father referred to all Mexicans and to most South Americans—including the President of Brazil, who had once been entertained on the river—as goddamn wetbacks, and to all Orientals as goddamn Filipinos. There was no use telling him that somebody was Chinese, or Malayan, or Madame Chiang Kai-shek; they were goddamn Filipinos to him. Easterners fell into two camps: goddamn pansies and goddamn Jews. On the whole, both categories had to do with attitudes, not facts, and occasionally they overlapped. His daughter Sarah had for example married a goddamn pansy and gone East to live, where she picked up those goddamn Jew ideas.

Lily stood watching Everett, aware of the dust on his Levis and of her incongruously white dress. There was one thing about the McClellans not true of her father: they wouldn’t run their ranches out of an office in the Russ Building even if they could afford to.

Everett looked up. “We could ride along the river when I’m finished.”

“I don’t ride very well.”

“Hah,” Mr. McClellan said. “I’ll say you don’t. She used to ride like she was sitting on a barbed-wire fence. I remember that much about Miss Lily Knight. Don’t be a fool, Everett. Take her swimming.”

“I don’t have my swimming suit.” Lily remembered that Martha not only jumped horses at the State Fair every year but had twice beaten the Del Paso Country Club junior swimming champion in unofficial competition. “That child sees a bird, she tries to race it,” Edith Knight had once observed of Martha. An admirer of competitiveness in all forms, Edith Knight had frequently urged Lily to “take a leaf from Martha McClellan’s book”; that Martha was a notoriously poor loser did not bother her, since she did not believe that losing was the point.

“There’s one thing Martha has plenty of, that’s tank suits,” Mr. McClellan declared. “We can suit you fine.” Pleased with this play on words, he repeated it, and then bounded up to the house, screaming ahead for China Mary to get Martha on the stick and rustle up some tank suits.

The McClellan house had the peculiarly sentimental look of a house kept by men. There were pictures of Sarah and of Mildred McClellan, who had died at Martha’s birth; above the piano (“How’s that for a piano?” Mr. McClellan liked to demand affectionately. “Came ’round the Horn in ’forty-eight”), the California Republic Bear Flag hung at what appeared to be half-mast. One wall was covered with framed certificates from the Native Sons of the Golden West and river maps showing channel depths during the summer of 1932; China Mary’s efforts toward brightening up ran to crocheted antimacassars on the chairs and orange zinnias crushed haphazardly into Limoges cream-soup bowls. In one corner of the living room, on a table covered with a mantilla, was an assortment of gold nuggets and ivory fans. Although the table had always been there, there had been, since Lily’s last visit to the McClellans, certain additions: over the table hung an old
Vanity Fair
cover, a photograph of Katherine Cornell and her cocker spaniel as Elizabeth Barrett and Flush, and a yellowed front page from the
Sacramento Bee
showing pictures of the Duke of Windsor and the English princesses. The headline read “KING EDWARD ABDICATES! DUKE OF YORK WILL RULE. ‘My Mind Is Made Up,’ Says King.” The words
Sacramento Bee
had been partly obscured with adhesive tape, in deference, Lily assumed, to Mr. McClellan, who had little use for the English but even less for the
Bee
.

“I see you’re admiring my memorabilia,” Martha said from the stair landing.

Startled, Lily looked up: she had not seen Martha since the Christmas parties, at which Martha had, night after night, in some indefinable way made a spectacle of herself. Although she had not been drinking and had done nothing extraordinary, it had been impossible not to notice her, as it might have been impossible not to notice someone running a high fever, or wearing a cellophane dress. She had the same look about her now: her long straight blond hair hung loose around her thin face, so tanned that her eyebrows looked bleached, and she had on what appeared to be a leotard and a long green silk jersey skirt which trailed after her on the stairs.

“What in the name of sweet Christ is that get-up?” Mr. McClellan said. “You been practicing your ballet dancing?”

“I haven’t taken ballet since I was twelve years old, thanks to the fact that nobody in this family except Sarah would ever drive me to my lessons. I’ve been reading.”

“Nobody gives a goddamn what you’ve been doing. Get Lily Knight here a tank suit.”

“Everett,” Martha called imperiously. “Guess what I’ve been reading.”

Everett looked up. Throughout this exchange he had seemed to withdraw: Lily had watched him fish in his pocket for a cigarette, inspect the cover of a
Reader’s Digest
which lay in a chair, whistle between his teeth.

“What,” he said now. “What have you been reading, baby.”

“The Anatomy of Melancholy
. It’s number twenty-two on the list.”

“She asked me for a reading list,” Everett said as Martha started back up the stairs. “I gave her one from Stanford. She’s already read about half the books on it.”

“Strange little creature,” Mr. McClellan said.

“You upset her,” Everett said with apparent effort.

Mr. McClellan ignored him. “Melancholia’s one study you don’t need any lessons in,” he shouted up the stairs. “You strange little creature.”

“Your brother thinks I upset you,” he added as Martha came trailing downstairs again with a swimming suit in one hand.

“Poor old Everett,” Martha said indulgently.

“Don’t be a fool, Everett. Now let that girl get suited up.”

They swam in the river, striking out for the far bank and swimming downstream with the current, still running cold with late melting snow from the mountains. When Everett reached the bank he waded back out to where the shallow ledge dropped off into the channel and pulled Lily, still struggling with the current, across the ledge and up onto the bank.

“You do all right,” he said, pulling himself up after her.

“I always think I’ll get dragged under.” She did not let go his arm.

He moved as if to push her back into the water and then caught her, laughing, his arms low on her back.

“You better not,” she laughed.

“Why not.”

“You just better not.” She was pleased with their dialogue: it had about it the authentic ring of teasing, of inconsequentiality, that had eluded her at Berkeley. She had known all along that she could do it with someone she knew. Delighted, she lay back over Everett’s arms and stretched her legs in the hot dry air. By contracting her stomach she could make it concave beneath the wet coolness of Martha’s swimming suit. She lifted one leg and saw, besides the water still glistening on it, a long scratch on her left thigh, gradually turning bruised where Everett had pulled her across a submerged root into the shallow water.

“You look good.” Everett touched the scratch.

“I feel good.”

“You have the prettiest legs,” Everett said slowly, “of any small girl I ever saw.”

“I guess you like tall girls better.” There: she was still doing it.

Everett looked at her, not smiling, and she was struck by anxiety: in her ignorance of how the game was played she had said the wrong thing, broken some rule.

“I like you all right,” he said after a while, still looking at her. “I never thought about it until last night.”

“Never thought about what?”

Everett said nothing, and she wondered if she had angered or disappointed him, wondered if it was possible that she could lose Everett McClellan, in the sense that you could lose people who were not your father or your brother.

“I wish you would kiss me,” she whispered, feeling again that Everett was suddenly not Everett but a stranger, someone to be won.

He kissed her, and she clung to him a long time, watching the oak leaves swimming against the sun and feeling the ends of her hair floating just on the surface of the water and after a while opening her mouth and pulling down the straps of Martha’s bathing suit, before his hand tightened over the scratch on her left thigh.
All right
, she whispered over and over, and after a while she began to think it could never happen because it hurt so much. When Everett finally said, again and again in a kind of triumph,
you feel it? baby feel it
, she assumed that it had happened. Later the scratch on her thigh became infected from the river water and left a drawn white scar noticeable whenever her legs got brown, but she did not think of it at the time.