Run River

by Joan Didion

  “I tell him he ought to go into the law,” John McClellan said, taking off his rimless glasses and polishing them on a corner of his jacket. “Into politics. We could use some growers in Sacramento.”

  “Maybe I better get to be a grower first,” Everett said politely. He had been, Lily remembered, a precociously polite child. Her clearest recollections were of him assuming full responsibility for Martha’s social errors, gravely apologizing for the spilt strawberry punch, the uprooted azalea, the hysteria when someone other than Martha pinned the tail on the donkey.

  “You tell him how they need us,” Mr. McClellan said. “You’re the one to tell him.”

  Walter Knight picked up a pair of garden shears from the tiled terrace floor and pruned a branch from a dwarf lemon.

  “I’m not sure they do,” he said finally, intent upon the lemon. “I’m not at all sure they need us. The San Joaquin still makes itself heard.”

  “Hah,” Mr. McClellan said triumphantly. “The big boys. The corporation boys. There’s your point.”

  Lily did not look at her father. When he spoke at last there was no inflection in his voice.

  “This isn’t the San Joaquin. They don’t run ranches around here from offices in the Russ Building in San Francisco.”

  “There’s your point,” Mr. McClellan repeated.

  “Here’s my point,” Walter Knight said. “We’re expendable.”

  Everett smiled at Lily. The sun was setting behind his chair and his blond hair, cut close, looked white in the sunset blaze. Lily extended one bare foot and contemplated it, not smiling back. Neither she nor her mother ever mentioned politics to her father any more: it had been tactless to speak of the Legislature.

  Although Everett called her at six-thirty the next morning he did not wake her, because the heat had stayed all night and she had gotten up at five-thirty to lie on the terrace in her nightgown. By six o’clock the sun had been high enough to make the heat shimmer in the air again. Looking to the east and squinting to block out the sun, she could make out the Sierra Nevada swimming clear on the horizon.

  She wanted to go somewhere but did not know where. There was a glass of beer on the table, left from the night before, and she flicked a small colorless spider from the rim with her fingernail and let the warm flat beer trickle down her throat. That there was really nowhere to go (she did not like the mountains and had only a week before come home from the coast) made her no less restless, lying almost motionless in the still morning heat and chewing absently on the sash to her nightgown. She wanted to stay here and she wanted something else besides. Her grades had arrived from Berkeley yesterday, neatly and irrevocably recorded on the self-addressed postcards she had left in her bluebooks. One B-minus, in English 1B; a C in History 17A, a C in Psychology 1B, a C-minus in Geology 1 (commonly known as a football players’ course in which it was impossible to get below a B), and a D in French 2. Because the single B was in a three-unit course and the D in a four-unit course, she supposed that she was down grade points and therefore on probation. Had the postcards arrived at school, she would have been embarrassed. Here, it did not seem to matter. As her mother had observed, she had read some interesting books and gone to some nice parties; once she was home, that was about the sum of Berkeley. She did not want to go back anyway. She could read books at home; she could have a better time at parties at home. It was not that she had not been asked, at least at first, to the parties which were the parties to go to; she had. On a campus where healthy color and easy smiles were commonplace, her fragile pallor, her uncertainty, had attracted a good deal of attention and speculation. Only when the boys who asked her out discovered how real the uncertainty was did they begin, bewildered and bored, to lose interest. As one of them told Lily’s roommate (who, reprovingly, told Lily), taking out Lily Knight was like dating a deaf-mute. “You have to kid around with them, be more fun,” the roommate advised. “Be yourself.” Although these admonitions seemed to Lily in some sense contradictory, she tried, the next weekend, to be more like the girls who were considered fun. Out with a Sigma Chi who had just been accepted at Princeton Theological Seminary, she had attempted some banter about Reinhold Niebuhr; when that failed, she admired the way he played the ukelele. After several drinks, he told her a couple of double entendre stories, and although she neither understood them nor thought he should be telling them to her, she laughed appreciatively. When he asked if she would like to drive up in the Berkeley hills, she smiled with delight and said it sounded like fun; later, she reflected that it had not been entirely his fault that he had misinterpreted her behavior that evening, which had ended in front of an all-night drugstore on Shattuck Avenue where, the prospective theologian told Lily, he could get some rubbers. (“Rubbers?” she had said, and he had looked at her. “Safes. Contraceptives.” She had begun shaking her head then, unable to think what to say, and he, sobered, had driven her in silence up the hill to the Pi Phi house.) After that, she had refused all invitations for three weeks. During the spring semester she had gone out briefly with a graduate student who read for her psychology class, a Jewish boy from New York City named Leonard Sachs. He had graduated from the University of Chicago and knew none of the people Lily knew. They had taken long walks in the hills above the stadium, back through Strawberry Canyon; had eaten dinner by candlelight in the small apartment he shared with a friend who did not like Lily and made a point of going to the library whenever she was around; and had sat on Thursday nights in the empty box at the San Francisco Symphony for which the Pi Phis paid every year. He gave her articles clipped from The New Republic outlining the intrinsic immorality of an itinerant labor force, hunted up for her an old pamphlet demanding repeal of the California Criminal Syndicalism Law, took her to San Francisco on the F train to hear a tribute to Harry Bridges, and urged her, after he had observed her knitting a sweater for her father, to utilize what slender talents she had by teaching handicrafts in a settlement house. Unable to locate “settlement houses” in the Berkeley Yellow Pages, she finally abandoned that project. He referred to the ranch as “your father’s farm,” and regarded her with an uneasy blend of the disapproval in which he held defective mechanisms and the craven delight he secretly took in luxury merchandise; she asked him if he would not miss being home at Easter, and regarded him in constant and only occasionally unwilling wonder. What both aggravated and enthralled him was her total freedom from his personal and social furies, and those Eumenides at his back were what attracted and repelled Lily. “You’re my haunted lover,” she would laugh, although he was, literally, neither; a fact which, in his roommate’s eyes, tended to confirm Lily’s social uselessness.

  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 Eng
lish 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.