Run River

by Joan Didion

  She would arrive on the Saturday morning train, and Gomez would meet her in Sacramento. (“Como esta usted, Señor Gomez?” she called one morning as she stepped off the train. “I don’t get you,” he said, picking up her two bags and handing her the heavier one.) Although Gomez would sometimes agree to stop at a place in the West End where she could eat tacos with her fingers, he never spoke on those occasions unless Crystal was along. Crystal was his common-law wife by virtue of mutual endurance, and if Gomez brought her into town on Saturday morning it was only to confront her with the scenes of her Friday-night defections. In a moment of misdirected intimacy, Crystal once told Lily that she had worked the whole goddamn Valley in season before Gomez latched on to her in Fresno. “I don’t mean picking, honey, you get that,” she added, producing as evidence her white hands, each nail filed to a point and lacquered jade green. Ignoring Lily, Gomez would vent his monotonous fury in Spanish, which Crystal pretended not to understand. “You’re a nutsy son of a bitch,” she would drawl from time to time by way of reply, nudging Lily hilariously and inspecting the dark roots of her Jean Harlow hair in a pocket mirror. (Although Crystal had lived with Gomez three months before Walter Knight noticed her presence on the ranch, she had become, the moment he did notice her, one of his favorite figures, referred to alternately as “Iseult the Fair” and “that sweetheart.”)

  About seven o’clock, when the house was full of the faint sweet smell of wax and the almost palpable substance of Edith Knight’s anticipation, Lily, dressed in the pale blue crêpe de Chine her mother thought most set off her hair, would take a glass of champagne up to the third floor and sit by a front window, watching the cars swing off the bridge and up the road to the ranch. Everyone came to those parties: river people, town people, and, when the Legislature was in session, people from Red Bluff, Stockton, Placerville, Sonora, Salinas, everywhere. Even the people from down South came, proof to the doubtful that Walter Knight was more interested in California than in water rights, than in small disagreements, than in a bill he had once introduced proposing the establishment of two distinct states, the border to fall somewhere in the Tehachapi. “I’ll tell the world,” a lobbyist from down South once said to Lily, “L.A. is God’s own little orchard.” His wife echoed him: God’s own little orchard. Neither was actually from California; he had met the little lady in a band contest, an all-state high-school competition held in the Iowa State football stadium. His band won first prize, her band won third; and the three winning bands were awarded all-expenses-paid trips to the Palmer House in Chicago, where he and the little lady had decided, he said, to make it legal. “Came to L.A. with a bride on my arm and a dime in my pocket,” he added, “but baby won’t you look at us now. God’s own orchard.” “I’ve got a few of your compatriots in my orchard,” Walter Knight said; the Okies were still pitching tents at the far end of the ranch, near the main highway south. Although he said it pleasantly enough, Edith Knight looked at him, reproof in her eyes. That wasn’t the way to the green grass.

  No matter who else came, Rita Blanchard always came. As if she had lain in a dark room for days, conserving all of her animation for this one evening, she smiled constantly, watching Edith and Walter Knight even as she talked to someone else. Her apologetic inattention was part of her face to the world, vital to that air of being irrevocably miscast, fatally unfitted, the kind of woman who appears for dinner a day before or a day after the day appointed, who inevitably arrives dressed for tennis when the game underway is bridge. Her mooring in the world seemed so tenuous that every spring when she went away (to Carmel for the month of April, abroad for the month of May), there were those who said that she had in truth been committed. In spite of what she knew, Lily felt a guilty love for Rita Blanchard: even at thirty-five, Rita seemed always to be sitting on those gilt chairs at the St. Francis. Although she must have known that she was considered something of a beauty in the Valley, the very way she walked into a room belied that knowledge, announced her certain faith in her inability to please. She dropped her head forward, brushing her long hair back from her face with nervous fingers; should someone startle her by speaking suddenly, she would begin to stutter. Each tale in the folklore of spinster-hood had at one time or another been suggested in explanation of her official celibacy: the secret demonic marriage and subsequent annulment; the dead lover, struck down on the eve of their public betrothal; the father who would allow no suitor close enough. Not even the fact that Rita’s father, the gentlest of men when alive, had been dead since Rita’s twelfth birthday could abate the popularity of the last theory. The truth was simply that Walter Knight had kept her company for twelve years, and if Rita had once expected something else, her diffidence and Walter Knight’s lack of it had combined to dispel those shadows. Although it was rumored that there was not the money there had once been, enough remained of the Blanchard estate to enable Rita to give Lily expensive presents every Christmas (“You be sure now you thank poor Rita,” Edith Knight always ordered—the adjective “poor” was for her a part of Rita’s Christian name—“but French perfume is not what I would call a suitable gift for a jeune fille”), to bring home all her clothes from Jean Patou in Paris, and to ask favors of no one but Walter Knight.

  So Rita came, along with everyone else, and if everyone had a good time at those parties, who enjoyed them more than the Knights? When the evenings grew warm that year they threw open the French doors and set up the bar in the garden, to catch the first cool wind off the river. “Edie says hot nights make better parties,” Walter Knight would say, drawing her toward him, “and Edie’s right about most things.” There seemed a tacit promise between them, lasting the duration of each party: all they had ever seen or heard of affectionate behavior was brought to bear upon those evenings. One might have thought them victims to a twenty-year infatuation. As they said good night at the door, Edith Knight would stand in front of him and lean back on his chest, her face no longer determined but radiant, her manner not dry but almost languorous, her smallness, against Walter Knight’s bulk, proof of her helplessness, her dependence, her very love. “Take care now,” she would say softly, her eyes nearly closed, “we’re so happy you came.” All the world could see: there was bride’s cake under her pillow upstairs, and upstairs was where she wanted to be.

  After everyone had gone, she would hum dance music as she and Lily blew out the candles, closed the glass doors, picked up napkins here and there from the floor. Of thee I sing, ba-by, da da da da da da-spring, ba-by. “Do you know,” she would break off suddenly and demand of Walter Knight, “how many times Harry Scott’s sister saw Of Thee I Sing when she was married to that man who did business in New York City?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Fourteen. She saw it fourteen times. With customers.”

  “I trust she knows the lyrics better than you do.”

  “Never mind about that.”

  Still mesmerized by her own performance, she would go then to sit on the edge of Walter Knight’s chair. “You go on up, Edith,” he said invariably, kissing her wrist. “I’ll be along. I want to finish this drink.” Embarrassed, Lily would find more ashtrays to empty, more glasses to pick up: she did not want to follow her mother upstairs, to pass her open door and see her sitting by the window in her violet robe, filing her nails or simply sitting with her hands folded, the room a blaze of light. Of thee I sing, baby.

  Walter Knight would sit downstairs, looking at the pages of a book until it was time to go to the earliest Mass. He did not, however, go to Mass; only to bed. “I like to watch the sun come up,” he explained. “Most people are satisfied to watch it go down,” Edith Knight said one morning. “Ah,” he answered. “Only in California.”

  Edith Knight spent the day after every party in her room, the shutters closed. Although the doctor had told her she had migraine headaches, she would not take the medicine he gave her: she did not believe in migraine headaches. What was wrong with her, she told Lily and Walter Knight every Sunda
y morning, was a touch of the flu complicated by overwork and she never should have taken two drinks; what was really wrong with her, she had decided by the end of May, was a touch of pernicious anemia complicated by the pollen and she needed a change of scene. She would take Lily abroad. She had always wanted to see Paris and London, and the way they were abroad, you could never tell. It was the ideal time to go.

  A week later they left for Europe, and it occurred to Lily later that the highlight of the trip for her mother, who kept her watch all summer on Pacific Standard Time, had been neither Paris nor London but the night in New York, before they boarded the Normandie, when they met Rita Blanchard for dinner at Luchow’s. In New York for a week on her way home from Paris, Rita looked pale and tired; she dropped a napkin, knocked over a glass, apologized, stuttering, for having suggested Luchow’s: possibly Lily did not like German food. Lily loved German food, Edith Knight declared firmly, and it had been an excellent choice on Rita’s part. She for one did not hold with those who thought that patronizing German places meant you had pro-German sympathies, not at all; at any rate, anyone could see, from Rita’s difficulty with the menu, that Rita’s sympathies were simply not pro-German, and that was that. The night was warm and the air heavy with some exotic mildew—the weather was what Lily always remembered—and after dinner they walked down a street where the sidewalk was lined with fruit for sale. Rita noticed that some of the pears were from the Knight orchards; unwary in her delight, she drew both Lily and Edith Knight over to examine the boxes stamped “CAL-KNIGHT.” “Do tell Walter,” Edith Knight said to Rita in her dry voice. “Do make a point of ringing him up when you get home. He’ll so enjoy hearing.”

  After Walter Knight left the Legislature that fall they did not have as many parties. Possibly due to his failure to comprehend that three speeches at dinners at the Sutter Club in Sacramento and a large picnic attended mainly by various branches of the candidate’s family did not in 1938 constitute an aggressive political campaign, he was defeated in the November general election by the Democratic candidate, a one-time postal clerk named Henry (“Hank”) Catlin. Henry Catlin made it clear that the “Gentleman Incumbent” was in the pay of Satan as well as of the Pope, a natural enough front populaire since the Vatican was in fact the workshop of the Devil. In neighborhoods of heavy Mexican penetration, however, Henry Catlin would abandon this suggestion in favor of another: that Walter Knight had been excommunicated for marrying out of the Church and other sins, and he could send his Protestant daughter to Catholic schools until hell froze over and it wouldn’t make a whit of difference. “I don’t know how you folks think a family man ought to behave,” he was frequently heard to remark at picnics and rallies. Quite aside from Walter Knight’s not inconsiderable personal liabilities, he was, as well, the representative of “the robber land barons” and the “sworn foe of the little fellow.” Henry Catlin, on the other hand, stood up for the little fellow and for his Human Right to a Place in the Sun, and if he failed to quote Progress and Poverty, it was only because he had not heard of Henry George.

  On the night of the election, Lily and Edith Knight sat in the living room alone and listened to the returns on the radio. Although the shape of Walter Knight’s political future was clear by ten o’clock, Edith Knight waited until the last votes had been reported before she folded her needlepoint and stood up.

  “Don’t cry,” she said to Lily. “It’s nothing for you to cry about.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I can see you are. It’s your age. You’re going through that mopey phase.”

  “He can’t be Governor now. He couldn’t lose this election and ever get nominated.”

  Edith Knight looked at Lily a long time.

  “He never could have been,” she said finally. “Never in this world.”

  From the stair landing, she added: “But don’t you dare pay any mind to what those Okies said about him. You hear?”

  Lily nodded, staring intently at the red light on the radio dial.

  She was still crying when Henry Catlin came on the radio to accept his sacred burden. He explained in his Midwestern accent how humbling it was to be the choice of the people—of all the people, you folks who really work the land, you folks who know the value of a dollar because you bleed for every one you get—to be the choice of the people to help lead them into California’s great tomorrow, the new California, Culbert Olson’s California, the California of jobs and benefits and milk and honey and 160 acres for everybody equably distributed, the California that was promised us yessir I mean in Scripture.

  “Well,” Walter Knight said, taking off his hat. “Lily.”

  She had meant to be upstairs before he came, and did not know what to say. “I’m sorry,” she said finally.

  “No call to be sorry, no call for that at all. We’re in the era of the medicine men. We’re going to have snake oil every Thursday. Dr. Townsend is going to administer it personally, with an unwilling assist from Sheridan Downey.”

  She could tell that he was a little drunk.

  “Snake oil,” he repeated with satisfaction. “Right in your Ham and Eggs. According to Mr. Catlin, we are starting up a golden ladder into California’s great tomorrow.”

  “I heard him.”

  Humming “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” Walter Knight opened the liquor cupboard, took out a bottle, and then, without opening it, lay down on the couch and closed his eyes.

  “Different world, Lily. Different rules. But we’ll beat them at their own game. You know why?” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Because you’ve got in your little finger more brains and more guts than all those Okies got put together.”

  She tried to smile.

  “Now, Lily. Lily-of-the-valley. Don’t do that. I’m going to have a lot more time to spend on the ranch. We’re going to do things together, read things, go places, do things. I don’t want to think you’re crying about that.”

  “That’ll be nice,” she said finally, crushing the handkerchief he had given her and jamming it into the pocket of her jumper.

  “You’re still my princess.”

  She smiled.

  “Princess of the whole goddamn world. Nobody can touch you.”

  He opened the liquor cupboard again, replaced the bottle he had taken out, and picked up instead the squared, corked bottle which held the last of his father’s bourbon, clouded and darkened, no ordinary whiskey.

  “This is to put you to sleep,” he said, handing her a glass. “Now. What you may not have realized is that Henry Catlin happens to be an agent of Divine Will, placed on earth expressly to deliver California from her native sons. He was conceived in order to usher in the New California. An angel came to Mr. Catlin’s mother. A Baptist angel, wearing a Mother Hubbard and a hair net.” He paused. “Or maybe it was Aimee Semple McPherson. I am not too clear about Scripture on this point.”

  “He’s not at all a nice man,” Lily said firmly, encouraged by the bourbon.

  “Everything changes, princess. Now you take that drink to bed.”

  Everything changes, everything changed: summer evenings driving downriver to auctions, past the green hops in leaf, blackbirds flying up from the brush in the dry twilight air, red Christmas-tree balls glittering in the firelight, a rush of autumn Sundays, all gone, when you drove through the rain to visit the great-aunts. “Lily is to have the Spode, Edith, the Spode and the Canton platters Alec brought from the Orient, are you hearing me?” And although Aunt Laura dies neither that year nor the next, she does die one morning, fifteen years later: the call comes from the hospital while you sit at breakfast telling Julie that soft-boiled eggs will make her beautiful and good, and the Spode does pass to you, the Spode and the Canton platters Alec brought from the Orient. (You have seen only one yellowed snapshot of Alec, and that was much later, after he had lost his health and mind and all memory of the Orient. But imagine him a young man, a fine figure of a man or so they said, sailing out from San Francisco and Seattle in
the waning days of the China trade, touching home once a year with Canton for his sisters and sailing out again.) Things change. Your father no longer tells you when to go to bed, no longer lulls you with his father’s bourbon, brought out for comfort at Christmas and funerals. Nobody chooses it but nothing can halt it, once underway: you now share not only that blood but that loss. A long time later you know or anyway decide what your father had been after all: a nice man who never wanted anything quite enough, an uneven success on the public record and a final failure on his own, a man who liked to think that he had lost a brilliant future, a man with the normal ratio of nobility to venality and perhaps an exceptional talent only for deceiving himself (but you never know about that, never know who remains deceived at four o’clock in the morning), a good man but maybe not good enough, often enough, to count for much in the long run. When you know that you know something about yourself, but you did not know it then.

  5

  “You might marry Everett,” Martha McClellan had suggested to Lily, once when they were both children, “if I decide not to.” “You aren’t allowed to marry your own brother,” Lily had said, quite sure of her ground until Martha smiled wisely and predicted, apparently interpreting the regulation as something else initiated during the first hundred days, “Roosevelt won’t be president forever, you know.”

  It seemed in retrospect an amusing story, and Lily wondered, the June afternoon in 1940 when Everett and his father came to the house for a drink, whether or not she should tell it. She decided that she should not: his four years at Stanford and her one at Berkeley had made Everett seem almost a stranger. She could not remember even seeing him for a couple of years, except once that winter when she had gone down to Stanford for a party and had gotten sick on Mission Bell wine at the Deke house. (Everett had gotten her some cold coffee from the kitchen and had made her date stay in another room until she felt better; she had thought herself humiliated, and neither she nor Everett’s girl, a blond tennis player from Atherton, had much appreciated his gallantry.) He looked, now, taller than she remembered, and older. She wondered whether some small tragedy had befallen him and hardened his face, whether perhaps he had thought himself in love with and spurned by the tennis player. He would be, she thought, the type.