Run River

by Joan Didion

  He saw a snapshot taken on the verandah of the Knight place when they were all children: Lily, he and Marth, and Sarah holding Marth by the hand. It looked like a birthday party but he could not think whose. He remembered one party, perhaps this one, when Martha had become sick from excitement. They had found her huddled in the corner of Edith Knight’s bathtub, the daisy wreath Sarah had made for her wilted and down over one eye. Everett smiled now, seeing that on that day they had all worn navy-blue reefer coats in different sizes. Knight had an identical reefer now; Lily’s mother had bought it.

  He wished that he could go upstairs to Lily, tell her it would be all right, brush away the physical fact by making her laugh over the snapshot with the reefer coats. Red Rover, Red Rover, let Lily Knight come over. He could remember how Martha had sometimes kept herself hidden for hours when they played hide-and-go-seek; how Lily, who had never liked being It, had never even liked games much, had sat down under the lilac once and cried because no one would come from hiding and it was getting dark. “I thought you’d all gone and drowned,” she sobbed, hiccuping, when they finally ran in from the dry place under the dock where Martha had insisted on hiding. “I thought you’d fallen in and been caught in a whirlpool.” (The prospect of falling in and being caught in a whirlpool had always loomed impressively in Lily’s imagination; he knew that she believed remotely to this day that whirlpools the size and power of the Maelstrom were commonplace in the Sacramento River.) Somehow that day, he could not recall how, he had made Lily stop crying and laugh. He had intended always to take care of her, to make her laugh. But somewhere they had stopped listening to each other, and so he remained downstairs in a paralysis not of anger but of lassitude and pride.

  He had stopped being angry months before, if he had ever been angry at all: had passed through shock, hurt, and compromise already, and alone. Even then he had been hurt not so much by Lily as by his own failure to see. Have a drink with me, Everett, Francie Templeton had said the night he finally saw; he had gone up to see Joe about buying a used Ford pickup, but Joe was in town.

  “We’ll have a drink together this fine June evening because Everett darling,” Francie said firmly, “it’s about to be one dry summer.”

  She emptied an ice tray into a pitcher and picked up a bottle of bourbon. Reluctantly, he followed her upstairs to the terrace of the second-floor landing; women who drank made him uncomfortable under any circumstances, and Francie fell besides into the category of women old enough to know better.

  “I so enjoyed talking to you the other night,” Francie said, dropping ice into two glasses. With an accuracy which surprised him, she threw one cube into the branches of an orange tree which brushed the terrace wall, tearing apart a spider’s web.

  “I enjoyed it too, Francie.”

  Everett was acutely uncomfortable; in the moonlight flooding the terrace Francie looked even more haggard than she had looked downstairs in the lamplight, and the other night had not been the other night at all, but a month before, on V-E Day, when he had drunk too much at a party down the river. “Walk me down to the water, Everett darling,” Francie had said about midnight that evening, and he had walked with Francie across the lawn and over the levee to the dock, had half-carried her down under the cottonwoods and big oaks and had sat with her there maybe half an hour, singing. Perhaps because he had been drinking as much as she had, Francie’s clear, slight voice did not seem in the least blurred to Everett, and she remembered all the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and even “There’ll Always Be an England,” a song which had always infuriated his father. On that warm May night with the lights on down the river and occasional strains of the Oklahoma! score drifting down from the house and Francie’s head on his shoulder, Francie whom he had known all his life, the world had seemed to Everett fine and noble and sweet and brave, a place of infinite possibilities for faith and honor and the grace of commonplace pleasures, and he was moved beyond any expressing of it by the worn words Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain. Her shoes off, one foot trailing in the water, Francie had gradually dropped her head into his lap and stopped singing, fading out halfway through “There’ll Be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover.” Thinking her asleep, Everett sat stroking her hair for a few minutes before she sat up abruptly and began to untie the knotted silk halter strap of her dress. “Let’s go in swimming, Everett darling.”

  “It’s too early, Francie,” he kept repeating softly, sober enough to see that neither of them was in condition to swim in the river, “it’s still running cold.” As he extricated the halter strap from her fingers and began to tie it again at the back of her neck, she at first dropped her head docilely, then, without saying anything, reached between his legs. “Don’t, Francie,” he said, getting to his feet and lifting her up; she had begun crying then, her hands over her face and the big diamond she had inherited from her grandmother blazing suddenly in the spotlight from a passing cruiser. When he tried to take her hands and hold her she wrenched away. “Go screw yourself,” she had whispered, “that’s probably the only way you like it anyway.” He had hoped she would not remember it later, and had not really thought she would. (The next morning he told Lily that while she was inside dancing he had been singing songs with Francie Templeton, and she had laughed: “Everett baby. That’s not much your style.”)

  “We had quite a sing for ourselves, didn’t we,” Francie said now, handing him a glass and touching it with her own. “To the old songs.”

  “That’s right, Francie. The old songs.”

  “Quite a sing,” she repeated reflectively. “On the Occasion of the Victory in Europe. A regular narrative by Norman Corwin.” She paused. “You think Francie’s changed since you went away.”

  “You always look the same, Francie,” he said quickly, embarrassed that she had caught him out. She was wearing an old denim skirt and a wrinkled shirt which probably belonged to Joe; he knew that she must have been drinking most of the day.

  “Well, yes and no.” She poured more bourbon into her glass and waved him toward a wicker bench. “Yes and no. I’m thirty-seven years old today.”

  “Happy birthday.” He wondered if she had a celebration in mind.

  “Ha. It’s not my birthday at all. I’ve been thirty-seven years old for months. Now old Joe,” she added thoughtfully, “is forty.”

  Everett smiled gamely. He knew that Joe was thirty-six. Joe was ten years older than he was almost to the day. He happened to know that much with certainty because once Joe had come down drunk for a game at Stanford and collared Everett after lunch at the Deke house and explained all through the first quarter how much they had in common, give or take ten years. One of the things they still had in common, Everett recalled, was fifty dollars Joe had borrowed that day because Francie had temporarily left him and transferred all the money in their joint checking account into her private account, where she said it belonged in the first place.

  “Forty—years—old,” Francie said. “Or anyway he is almost. Sic transit old Joe, and all that.”

  “That’s right, Francie.” She was sitting on the low brick wall that edged the terrace, her body in profile to him, and he was nervous that she would fall from the wall and down one story onto the lawn.

  “Tell me about the war,” she said, swaying gently, almost crooning. “Tell me about how you were out defending democracy in El Paso and other foreign fields while old Joe here kept the home fires burning.”

  “I appreciate Joe’s helping out after my father died.” He was uncomfortably aware that Francie had at some point passed beyond neighborly conversation.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Oh my yes. Joe was helping out down there right along.”

  “Martha and Lily appreciated it.”

  Francie sat holding her knees with her arms, her eyes closed.

  “I’ll bet Lily did,” she said pleasantly. “He’s pretty good.”

  Everett said nothing.
It did not seem possible that he had heard Francie correctly, but the words seemed to hang on in the warm air, as continually and unmistakably audible as a prolonged high note on a piano. Although he had never been good at extracting subtleties from conversations, he tried, now, to imagine something else Francie could mean, to remember a word he had missed that would, once inserted into its proper place in the conversation, clear the entire thing up. But all he could remember was Lily, how she had been this spring (had sat reading night after night until he had asked her to come to bed, had turned away afterwards every time all spring—what do you care, she had whispered once, what did you care when you were in Texas—had gotten up and brushed her hair and returned to one or another of a series of books on sacred architecture she brought home from the county library); he remembered Lily and he considered Francie.

  “Or anyway he used to be,” Francie said in the same pleasant voice, unmarred by any trace of alcohol. “I wouldn’t know any more. These days I’m just old Joe’s cross, or you might say I’m the curse that Joe was born to, his albatross, his middle of the night. His checkbook. You might put it that way.”

  Francie paused, chewing a piece of ice. “Because frankly, Everett,” she added finally, “I like to drink.”

  Everett said nothing. Beginning immediately to preserve what could be preserved, extending his carefulness of heart, he remembered stories he had heard about wives in wartime, and how it meant nothing. It would mean nothing to him if he could stop thinking about Lily, and think instead of a generalized Wife.

  “You might even say I’d rather drink. So you see.”

  Everett stood up.

  “I have to go, Francie,” he said gently.

  He had not seen, but he could not much blame Joe.

  He had not seen: there was the crux of it. He sat on the sun porch holding the picture of Lily and Martha and Sarah and himself in the reefer coats until the first light came through the east windows, as if by tracing his finger down the crack in that yellowed snapshot he could recoup all their mortal losses, as if by merely looking long enough and hard enough he could walk back into that afternoon, walk back into Lily Knight’s house, holding Martha by the hand, and begin again; could run with Martha up from the dock to where Lily cried beneath the lilac in the twilight and be home free.

  15

  He did not want to see Lily that morning, did not want to face her reddened eyes, her exhausted voice. You want to know who it was. She had placed the burden on him; all that had happened was in some way his responsibility. When China Mary came to the house he asked her to take Lily a tray, no orange juice, and to see that she stayed in bed awhile. “She’s tired,” he said. “The heat gets her. Try to keep Knight and Julie out.”

  He left the house then for the south fields to watch the last hops come down. Although he normally came to the house for lunch, at noon he instead drove one of the trucks down to a bar on the highway and had two bottles of Lucky Lager and a bologna sandwich wrapped in cellophane. While he drank the second bottle of beer he listened on the bartender’s radio to the Yankees beating the Red Sox in the seventh at Fenway Park and did not think about Lily. By seven o’clock, when he started back to the house, the entire ranch was stripped bare of the vines. They had been picking all week, and this was the day he had liked least all of his life: the day the last hops came down, the day summer ended. All he could see as he walked back to the house were the bare poles, the broken strings hanging motionless in the heat, the dust stirred up by the picking machines. Tomorrow they would start the kiln, and during the next four or five days while the hops dried the whole year could go to waste. The kiln and the crop with it could go up in a flash of dry flame, and beyond taking the most elementary precautions there was nothing he could do about it. During the next week the agents from the insurance companies would be dropping by the ranches where the hops were drying, watching their risks; almost every August a kiln burned somewhere in the Valley. Last year it had been on the Messner place, up the Cosumnes River, the night they were to have finished.

  Everett walked up to the house alone. Although it had been a custom of his father’s to invite the foreman and his wife to the house the night they finished picking, the new foreman (Henry Sears was his name, he had come from down the San Joaquin, near Bakersfield, had arrived on the ranch a few days after Everett came home from Bliss) had driven a truck full of Mexicans into town, leaving before Everett could have spoken to him, even if Everett had intended speaking to him. At any rate Henry Sears would not know the custom since he had not known Everett’s father, and anyway he had no wife. Everett did not know what he could have said to him if he had invited him. Everyone had always responded to his father: had liked him, disliked him, talked to him, talked about him; had become in one way or another involved with him. Five hundred and forty-seven people had sent flowers when he died, and every one of them had thought himself involved with John McClellan. He would have known, as Everett did not know, how to talk to Henry Sears. Even Martha would probably know, but Everett did not.

  Everett did not even know how to talk to Lily. Although he had no idea now what he could say to her when he got to the house, he would have to make it all right, at least for this week. At some point during the afternoon he had worked out an inarticulate pact, and had invested in it all his unthinkable prayers: should the hops come through the drying, the child she was carrying was his. It differed from the game Lily had taught Knight to play with the evening star only that in Everett’s game the odds were pretty much with him. Make sure it’s the first star you see at night, baby, and don’t stop looking until you’ve finished the wish. (“That’s Venus,” he had explained to Knight. “That’s a planet, not a star at all. A planet named Venus.” “I don’t think so,” Knight said politely, not looking away from the window; one twilight he waited at his bedroom window fifteen minutes so as not to risk seeing another star first.)

  Even before Everett reached the steps to the verandah he heard Martha’s laughter through the screened door and windows, and he heard in the particular pitch of that laughter the fact that Ryder Channing was with her. It was not that he disliked Channing. Channing in fact reminded him of Clark McCormack, his roommate at Stanford, and he admired their apparent easiness in the world even as he was vaguely troubled by it. Clark McCormack had seemed to Everett the center of a vast social network, the pivot for dozens of acquaintances, all of whom were constantly calling or dropping by the Deke house: one to bring Clark the stolen stencil for a mimeographed midterm; another to drop off a box of Glenn Miller records in anticipation of a party; others, usually extraordinarily pretty girls, to leave their convertibles for Clark to use. Like Clark McCormack, Channing conveyed the distinct impression that he could live by his wits alone. They were both free agents, adventurers who turned whatever came their way to some advantage; both pleasant, knowledgeable, and in some final way incomprehensible to Everett. Channing had once told Everett that wherever he was he made a point of getting a guest card to the best country club. It was that kind of thing, something Everett could not put his finger on. Channing had no business around Marth. He might even be married: you never knew about people like Channing. He would have to talk to Martha; he had meant to talk to her ever since he came home in February.

  “Everett?” Martha called now from the living room.

  He had wanted to see Lily before facing Marth and Channing, and he hesitated, playing for time by looking through the mail on the hall table. There were two pediatricians’ bills, a notice of a sale on Germaine Monteil Superglow Solid Powder at the Bon Marché in Sacramento, and a report from the Pi Beta Phi Arrow Shop in Gatlinburg, Tennessee: all addressed to Lily.

  “Everett,” Martha called again. “Come here.”

  He walked into the living room, oddly conscious of the muscles moving in his legs. He was struck by the thought, although it did not sound scientific, that if he forgot where the muscles were he would be unable to walk.

  “Ryder brought us so
me good gin for a change and I’m making martinis.”

  Everett did not look at Channing. “Where’s Lily?” he asked with an effort.

  Martha was sitting with her back to him, her rather too long hair hanging forward over her bare shoulders. She had on some kind of sun dress which made her look pale and thin, and the hair did not help. Although he had always liked it long she looked healthier when she kept it cut.

  “She’s in San Francisco,” Martha said finally, measuring gin into a pitcher. “I drove her in this morning to get the train. The City of San Francisco was two hours late coming in over the mountains and that’s why I wasn’t here for lunch. I told China Mary to slice the ham,” she added. “Was it all right?”

  “I wasn’t up for lunch.” He paused. “You say Lily’s gone to the City?”

  “She just decided to go as long as it was so hot—you wouldn’t believe how hot it was in town today, we saw Francie cashing a check in the Wells Fargo and she looked like wrath—and you’re so busy. Anyway she had to shop. She claimed she didn’t have anything to wear to the Horse Show in case you took her to the Fair.”

  “The Fair,” Everett repeated.

  Martha looked up. “The Fair starts Thursday. Anyway. She said to tell you she was going to spend all your money at Magnin’s.”

  Sweet Christ. He could hear her saying it. Tell your brother I’m going to spend all his money at Magnin’s.

  “She staying at the St. Francis?”