Run River (11 page)

Everett folded the newspaper and smiled. “How long you been awake?”

She laughed and put her hands to her stomach. It was still swollen. “You needn’t whisper. Where’s the baby?”

He came back in a few minutes with one of the nuns, who held the baby wrapped in pink flannel.

“A girl,” she said. “That would have pleased Daddy.”

“It pleases me.”

Lily turned her head on the pillow so that she could see Everett’s face.

“Listen,” she said. “I was all right this time, wasn’t I.”

“You were fine.”

She lay back. “I can’t feed it, you know.”

“They’ll feed her.”

“It’s funny to hear you say
her
. I don’t even know what we’ll call it.”

“You said Julia. Julia Knight McClellan. I thought we decided that.”

“I just said that because of my grandmother. I never really thought it would be a girl. I was thinking of Walter.” She laughed. “It’s entirely too small to call something like Julia Knight McClellan. It sounds like a suffragette.”

“She’s big for a baby.” Everett turned to the nun. “Didn’t you say she was big for a baby?”

“Everett, I
know
. She’s a regular King Kong of a baby.”

“Listen,” she added after the nun had left the room. “We’ll have more. We’ll have about six. And Martha can have about six. And they’ll have these terrible fights because there won’t be enough land to go around.”

“And Sarah. Don’t forget Sarah.”

“That’s right, and Sarah.” She had in fact forgotten Sarah. “Anyway. There’ll be this one runt. Likable but you know, a loser. He’ll be conned out of everything but some little back piece with no water. Then one day while the rest of them are playing golf—they’ll be forever hanging around the country club, that type—and he’s scratching around his place, you know what happens then?”

“Gold.”

“Everett, baby. You live so in the past. It turns out his piece is the only exit for one hundred miles on a proposed transcontinental freeway.”

“A freeway?”

“An
exit
, Everett. Standard Stations. Motels. Piggly Wiggly Markets. Long-term leases.”

Everett smiled.

“Listen,” she said. “I behaved this time, didn’t I.”

Everett sat down by the bed and took her hand. “Yes.”

“I didn’t get scared and make a lot of trouble. I mean all the way through it was all right this time.”

“You didn’t make a lot of trouble before.”

“I did. Your father told Martha he hoped I never got pregnant again because I was impossible.”

“Who told you that?”

“Never mind. I was, that’s the point.”

“Martha didn’t mean it if she told you that.”

“Never mind. It was better this time, you saw.”

“It was fine.”

“You have to take care of me,” she whispered.

He held her hand and looked out the window a long while. “I will,” he said. “I do. Don’t I.”

Although she had thought for a moment that she had never been so happy, Everett had left when her mother came (“I meant to come earlier but I was downtown,” Edith Knight said, remotely bewildered, the way she had been since a few weeks after the funeral; despite a new vicuña coat and an absolute lack of any visible defect in her grooming, she presented a curious impression of disarray, twisting her rings, smoothing her hair; straightening the sheet as she kissed Lily goodbye), and after her mother left Lily was alone. The nuns had begun their evening visits, walking the corridor in pairs. When one paused outside the door, the light blinking off her thick glasses, Lily turned away from the door, pretending to be asleep, and as she watched the street lights blur through the blown branches outside the window she wondered how the nuns had known, and if they had once been as she was now. She thought of her mother, who by now would be sitting alone with a tray in the living room at home, picking at her inevitable lamb chop and watching the same rain. Rain seldom fell so long so early; if it kept up there could be floods before Christmas. Once when she was a child a levee had broken on Christmas Eve, and the churches were filled with tired women in raincoats and children in blue bathrobes. At Edith Knight’s insistence she had given all but one of her unopened Christmas presents to the evacuated children, whose own, Edith Knight had explained, were floating over to the poor Chinese children. Put that way, it had seemed an ideal situation, one in which only Lily came out behind.

Although Everett should have eaten with her mother tonight, eaten with her or taken her down to the ranch, he would not have thought of it. And her mother was so lonely that she seemed to have lost even the idea of communication. “Some nights when the wind comes up I think I’m the only person alive on the river,” she had said a few weeks ago. “Why don’t you call me?” Lily said. “Why don’t you call me or one of the Randalls?” “I could, of course,” her mother said without interest, as if Lily had introduced a quite irrelevant topic. In a sense she had: there was little that Lily or the Randalls or anyone else could do to mend the web of concern which Walter Knight and Rita Blanchard had woven around Edith Knight for a dozen years and had torn apart in June. It had once occurred to Lily that her mother missed Rita more than she missed Walter Knight; it had been Rita, after all, who provided her with her rôle, who might well have gone on providing it, walking proof not only of Walter Knight’s failure (dead or alive) but of Edith Knight’s strength in the face of it.

Well, her mother had chosen her rôle, the nuns theirs. But how did they know. How had Mary Knight known. Mary Knight Randall had entered the Sisters of Mercy the summer she was eighteen. She had gone to Europe with her father, Walter Knight’s cousin, and when they got off the boat in New York that August she told him that she did not intend to go to Berkeley in September. Although he tried to reason with her all the way across the country on the train, even promised that she could have a new robin’s-egg blue Ford convertible and spend the entire month of January skiing at Aspen, Mary Knight entered the convent the same week Lily went down to Berkeley. It was the week of rushing, and because Mary Knight had planned to be with her, Lily had a double room alone at the Durant Hotel. She lay awake every night, listening to the Campanile strike in the coastal fog and feeling intensely sorry for herself, partly because she did not know how to talk to the golden girls from San Francisco and Pasadena but mostly because she had been deprived of Mary Knight, who was older than she was but had never known anything at all, had moved through adolescence in an untroubled innocence which had obscurely reassured Lily, made her want to have Mary Knight with her always, a talisman. (Once at a beach party, Joe Templeton’s younger brother, Pete, had tried to get Mary Knight up on the bluff in a car with him. “Why do they want to do that?” she whispered later to Lily. “Never you mind,” Lily said, throwing sand on the fire. She had disliked Pete Templeton for trying and loved Mary Knight for not knowing.) Even the Catholics mourned Mary Knight; Helen Randall, who had refused to go to Europe with them because she wanted to go to Banff, still put the blame on Mary Knight’s father. Mary Knight was an impressionable girl and if he had not exposed her day after day to those morbid European cathedrals it simply would not have happened. He should have taken her, as she, Helen, had suggested in the first place, to the Calgary Stampede. Now there was a portrait in the dining room of the Randalls’ house, hung as prominently as if it were of someone dead, Mary Knight at sixteen, absurd but oddly indomitable in a pink tulle dress.

Mary Knight, her mother, the nuns in the corridor: they all seemed to know something she did not. Well, she had at least given Everett what he wanted. Even Martha could scarcely have given him two children. But she could not escape the uneasy certainty that she had done so herself only by way of some intricate deception, that her entire life with Everett was an improvisation dependent upon cues she might one day fail to hear, characterizations she might at any time forget. Except when she was in trouble (when her father died, or when she was pregnant with Knight), she could think of little to say to Everett: she was not, nor was he, a teller of anecdotes or gossip, and sometimes whole weeks passed without their having what could be called, in even the crudest sense, a conversation. Usually in bed she pretended that she was someone else, a stranger, and she supposed that Everett did too; when she did not pretend that she was someone else, she pretended that Everett was. The only times she did not pretend that either or both of them were someone else, she pretended that it had never happened before, that it was again that first time on the river. There had been about that first time a sharpness, a finality absent since. For a long time, even after she had done it hundreds of times, the fact that it had happened at all would come to her with a shock; it had seemed improbable that anyone else could do it, and the hearsay knowledge that not just anyone but almost everyone had done it remained a persistent flaw in her satisfaction with her own performance. It was as if she had stumbled alone across the plains and found that everyone else had already arrived, by TWA. Even now, two years later, those few minutes were more vivid than any since: she had lost neither the sense of wonder nor the sense of deprivation that the experience had not been uniquely hers. The summer smell of that morning, river water and sweat and the acrid sting of weeds breaking under them (and that would always be summer’s smell), was stronger still than all the roses and jasmine gardenias in the whole of Mercy Hospital.

I should have taken the Holy Ghost not Everett
, she had thought when she woke this morning, and she had snapped at the nun who was trying to take her temperature. A pillow over her head, she had lain still all morning, lifting the pillow only to watch the rain outside. She should sit up and comb her hair, wash her face, put on the silk bed-jacket her mother had brought. Everett would come again this morning, and she did not want to see him. She was not sure that it would be all right even if they could go back to that morning on the river and start over again; because she could not put her finger on what was wrong it would only go wrong a second time. She wanted now only to see her father, to go back to that country in time where no one made mistakes.
For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night
. She had memorized those words at the time of her father’s death, had repeated them as she walked down streets and brushed her hair, as she lay in bed and as she drove the river road, and she repeated them now against Everett’s arrival.

10

“You’ll get along fine,” Everett said, the morning he left for Fort Lewis. “You’re a big girl now. You wait. You’ll be all right here. Wait and see.”

He spoke very low; both Knight and Julie were asleep in the next room.

“You didn’t have to go,” Lily repeated. She could not view Everett’s enlistment as anything other than personal and possibly deserved retribution. Bataan might fall, Corregidor might fall, and the Japanese might occupy Attu and Kiska, but Everett could not have gone had she not failed him somewhere. “You have a son. You have a two-month-old daughter. Your father needs you.”

Everett sat up on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. Although light now filtered through the shutters, they had not slept. After Mr. McClellan went to bed they had, between them, drunk most of a bottle of bourbon, and then Lily had cried (partly the bourbon) and they had lain in the dark awake, oppressed less by the parting than by some uneasy apprehension of how the parting should be affecting them.

“Lily,” he said. “You keep saying the same things. I want to go.”

“I don’t see why.”

“I waited a year. Almost a year. Now I have to go.”

“You don’t have to. You want to. You said you wanted to.”

“All right. I want to. I don’t see any difference.”

Lily lay without moving, her head aching dully.

“I believe you want to die,” she said after a while.

“All right. I want to die. Now I have to get up.”

While Everett shaved she finished packing his bag, trying dutifully to memorize the way his shorts felt to the touch, the particular color and translucency of his toothbrush. They seemed things that she might want, at some future point, to remember. Although she considered putting on the same plaid skirt and paint-stained sweater she wore most mornings, she thought then of ships going out under the Golden Gate in fog, of Wake Island, of that hot golden summer before they were married, and pulled on instead the white cashmere sweater that Everett had given her on her nineteenth birthday.

He was to take the Shasta Daylight from Davis station at seven o’clock. It would take them close to an hour to drive there. Although Lily wished now that someone would drive over with them, all the goodbyes had been said already: Martha had come over from Davis for dinner, and had driven back before midnight to study for a midterm. (“Daddy is of the opinion I’m meeting all kinds of rich citrus growers from down South,” she had said at dinner. “When all I’m doing is taking midterms and lending my clothes to rich citrus growers’ daughters so they can go out with rich citrus growers’ sons.” Everett had seemed puzzled. “What do you want to run around with people from down South for?” he had wanted to know. “Oh you know me, Everett,” Martha had said. “An old One-Worlder.”)

The house was perfectly still, and cold from the November night. Chilled through, Lily stood in the hallway and ran her fingers along the grain of the stair railing. When she heard Everett on the stairs she began, nervously, straightening some letters left on the hall table.

“Now listen,” he said. “I’ll write you tomorrow. Then will you please write me and tell me how you’re getting along?”

“Yes,” she said, her eyes fixed on the fireplace in the living room. The house downstairs had the same curious appearance it always had in the early morning, the look of a house abandoned in an emergency years before. It was hard to believe there were not really dusty sheets thrown over the faded slipcovers, impossible to think that the magazines thrown on the tables were actually dated 1942. “I’ll write you,” she added. “Every day.”