Run River (18 page)

“What’s going to happen to Knight and Julie?” He heard too late the uneven rise in his voice.

Martha looked at Channing, who shrugged, stood up, and walked over to the window.

“Now, Everett,” Martha said finally. “Knight and Julie are at this moment asleep. China Mary has fed them and I have twice recounted for them the story of the little engine that could. Ryder has obtained at Knight’s request three glasses of water, and perhaps you might—when you feel up to it—make certain that Julie has not misplaced her stuffed raccoon, which seems to do for Julie what Luminal does for Julie’s Mommy. Now I would assume that we could carry on in this vein until Mommy’s re
turn
.”

Everett saw that Channing was watching him, and forced himself to smile. He was irritated, as he frequently was now, by Martha’s tone: he was sure that if she could hear herself she would stop it, but did not know how to tell her that.

“We got the last of the hops down today,” he said finally.

“Ah,” Martha said to Channing. “We celebrate the harvest, chez McClellan.”

“Some harvest festival.” Channing smiled. “When the harvester won’t have a drink.”

“We call him the grim reaper.” Martha blew Everett a kiss.

“You’re wearing too much lipstick.” He could at least tell her that. But as he watched her turn away, trying to bite the color off her lips, he was sorry that he had said anything.

He picked up his drink. There was nothing to do now but wait for Lily to call or come home, get through the next day or so without letting Martha see that something was wrong, that everything had gone all wrong. She should have waited. He would have helped her. He swore to himself that he would have helped her had she waited. It might even have been his, and it would not have mattered much finally if it had not been. What real difference would it have made: it would have been Lily’s, and Lily was his, and as far as that went Joe Templeton was a distant cousin of his, distant enough for Everett to seldom remember it but close enough to think about now. They went to the same weddings and funerals, which was what mattered.

“You should have gone down with Lily,” Channing said now to Marth, filling his glass from the pitcher. “You look like hell.”

“The heat bothers Martha.” Everett wondered how much longer Channing would be at Mather Field now that the war was over.

“It sure doesn’t bother that Lily-maid,” Channing said. “She hasn’t looked so good all year.”

“She’s tired,” Everett said. “I don’t care how she looks to you, she’s tired and she needs a rest.”

“She’s your bride, Coop.”

It was a great little thing with Channing, the Gary Cooper routine with Everett and especially the “that Lily-maid” business with Lily. When they had gone, the four of them, to Lake Tahoe three weeks before, he had kept it up all weekend, needling Lily unobtrusively at first but at last so constantly that it had begun not only to set Everett on edge but to humiliate Martha: Everett had watched her trying to divert Channing’s attention from Lily, the strain on her face more and more visible as she began talking, too loudly, about things neither Channing nor Lily could know about, deliberately excluding them from recollections of how Sarah had behaved before her first dance, how China Mary had feared a Great Dane they had kept for three weeks a long time ago. But
aren’t we happy
, Lily had said, and despite Channing and despite Martha they had been: he had not been away with Lily since before he left for Fort Lewis, and they drove to all the places they had gone so often during the first year of their marriage: Reno, Carson, down into Glenwood. In the shining clarity of that afternoon in the mountains, the air so clear and sharp and the horizons clean and distant, it had seemed to Everett for a while that they could have again what he had wanted them to have, could lie in bed and laugh, neither accusing the other of anything. Their betrayal of each other (for had he not betrayed her in his mind, wished to stay away, wanted no trouble,
you don’t seem to realize there’s a war going on)
seemed for a few hours that Saturday afternoon and evening a simple dislocation of war, a disturbance no more lasting than the wash from a stone thrown in the river. They had stayed Saturday night in a house which belonged to one of Lily’s cousins, a brown-shingled place on the north shore of the lake, and they had gambled on the Nevada line until about two o’clock in the morning. Although Lily would not play (“Women don’t ever win, Everett, can’t you see. Because winners have to believe they can affect the dice”), she stayed close to the table, watching over his shoulder, reaching now and then into his pocket for a cigarette or change for a drink, playing idly with a stack of silver dollars he had given her but never taking her eyes from the play on the table. He had tried once again to explain the odds to her, but she claimed to understand nothing at all about the game: she liked only to watch the movement on the table, the chips and the silver and the dice and the rakes the dealers used.
Let the little lady roll
, the dealer said gallantly (it was a slow table), and Everett remembered now how she had leaned over the table and closed her eyes and thrown with one hand,
come seven baby
, while she clutched his arm with the other, delighted to be playing with the grownups; she put two dollars on the line and her yellow sweater fell to the floor and she had been his child bride all over again. All that evening he had pretended with her, had played her game because that was the way he wanted it too, and later they swam in the lake, the water so clear that with only the moonlight and the handful of lights strung out on the dock he could make out rocks thirty feet below the surface, so cold that swimming was like grappling with dry ice. Lily had turned white with cold, her pale tan fading at the first burning touch of water; long after they came up from the lake she sat shivering on the stone hearth, wrapped in a towel. He had found it absurdly endearing that she should warm her nightgown in front of the fire before she put it on.
Keep me warm, baby
, she had cried out later in bed, and he had forced her head sideways and her mouth into the pillow as she moved in his arms because he did not want Channing, in the next room, to hear her.
Keep me baby please keep me
. Well, he had not. He had lost her, and now she was in some San Francisco hotel room by herself and maybe it had happened already and maybe it had gone all wrong and she was dying there by herself (women died from abortions, you saw it in the paper every so often, you heard about it, and whether the odds were with her or not she would be afraid of it) and he was here drinking with Martha and Ryder Channing as if it did not matter what happened to Lily. It was all right for Martha to sit here. Martha could not know; had she known, she would have kept Lily from going. But he had known all along, and he sat here now with Ryder Channing, and it was all mixed up in some way with the war, and Sarah’s not being home, and people like Ryder Channing. Not that it was Channing’s fault.

The future was being made, he heard Channing say at some point that evening, right here in California. Starting now. Channing had the hunch they were in on the ground floor of the biggest boom this country had ever seen. Talk about your gold rush. And he wasn’t the only one who believed in Northern California. Just one example, the Keller Brothers believed in Northern California to the tune of five million berries.

“The Keller Brothers,” Everett said. “I don’t believe I know them.”

The Keller Brothers, Channing explained patiently, were developers. Los Angeles developers who believed in Northern California, in the Valley specifically, to the tune of five million smackeroos. Which they were putting into the Natomas District.

“I never heard of any Kellers in the Natomas,” Everett said.

With what appeared to be infinite restraint, Channing inspected and crumpled three empty cigarette packages before answering. “They aren’t
in
the Natomas right now. They want to de
velop
the Natomas.”

“Who’s putting up the money? How can they raise five million dollars on land they haven’t got?”

“Those sweethearts could raise five million dollars with a plot plan on the back of a goddamn napkin. Anyway,” Channing added, apparently abandoning his effort to justify the Kellers’ ways to Everett, “that’s just one example. The point is we’re sitting right here on the ground floor with the button pushed go.”

“Cut yourself in, Channing, it’s a free country, plenty of room for everybody.”

Everett realized that he must be drunk; he did not know what Channing had on his mind, but resented the “we.” Martha was asleep on the couch, her head on Channing’s lap. Lily had not called; he had known she would not. A few hours ago he had tried seven San Francisco hotels, the only seven he could think of, as well as the Claremont and the Durant in Berkeley. No one was registered as McClellan at any one of the nine. There had been a Miss Knight at the Mark Hopkins but when Everett got her on the line it had not been Lily at all. It had been some woman who wanted to know if she had met him with the National Cash Register boys and hung up immediately when he said she had not.

Channing seemed not to have heard him. “The point is we need everything out here. Absolutely
tabula rasa
. Christ, within the next ten, fifteen years somebody could make a fortune in the
agency
business.”

“You mean real estate? Insurance?” Everett made a determined effort to follow Channing. “Or automobiles?”

“I mean
ad
vertising. Advertising agencies. You think branch offices are going to be enough for long, you don’t realize what we’re sitting on out here.”

Everett had never known anyone who worked for an advertising agency, and although he had from time to time read articles in
Fortune
about Bruce Barton and Albert Lasker, he had no clear idea of what people who worked for advertising agencies actually did. When he thought of an advertising agency at all, which was not very often, he thought about Albert Lasker sitting around an office looking out into the falling snow and thinking about toothpaste, maybe even squeezing toothpaste onto a toothbrush. The next panel in his mind showed an electric light bulb over Albert Lasker’s head and the single word “Irium.” The falling snow was for some reason an integral part of the picture, and Everett had never considered it happening in California. Albert Lasker and Irium belonged to another world, a world teeming with immigrants and women who spent the day in art galleries and elevator operators who called you by name if you were a crack
Life
photographer. There was a kind of movie that always began that way, an elevator operator saying good morning to a crack
Life
photographer. They never called it
Life
but it was all part of the same goddamn world and it was always the same goddamn elevator operator.

The elevator operator brought him back to Channing, who had claimed to be sitting on the ground floor with the button pushed go. Speaking of go, he began to wonder why Channing did not go home to Mather Field or wherever it was he slept and he began to wonder why Martha was asleep with her head in Channing’s lap. Picking up her sweater from the floor, he moved to spread it across her bare legs.

She shifted in her sleep, flinging one arm back across Channing’s knee. “Ry-der?” she whispered.

“Go back to sleep,” Channing ordered.

Apparently reassured, she withdrew her arm. Everett dropped her sweater and poured what was left of a bottle of bourbon into his glass. They did not seem to be drinking martinis any more and there was only a puddle of warm water in the ice bucket.

“You’re like a goddamn radio announcer,” he said suddenly to Channing. “You’d make one hell of a radio announcer.”

“Maybe so,” Channing said amiably. “Maybe I’ll look into it.”

“Charm. That’s what you got, Channing, is charm. C-H-A-R-M.”

He could not now think why he had turned on Channing, but because he was now, whatever the reason, more or less committed to it, he stood up, rocking a little on the balls of his feet while he watched Channing.

Channing stood up, waking Martha, who lay rubbing her eyes with one hand and trying to smooth her hair with the other.

“What is it,” she said, her eyes still closed.

“Your brother,” Channing said, “could use a sandwich.”

“Screw a sandwich. I’ve just been telling your gentleman friend, in words of one syllable, that he’s not in your class.”

“Everett.”
Martha stood up, tucking her dress into her belt without taking her eyes from his face. “You shut your mouth, you hear me?”

“All right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She meant it, all right: he recognized that the tremor in her voice was not for Channing’s ears alone.
She’s in thrall
, Lily had laughed at the beginning of the summer. “Haven’t you ever read in books about women in thrall? Martha’s in thrall.” “What does that mean out of books?” he had asked. “It means he’s the first man she ever slept with,” Lily said, not laughing then, and he had slapped her, had hit her across the face with all the revulsion he had felt that night on the terrace toward Francie Templeton.
He’s pretty good. Or anyway he used to be, I wouldn’t know
.

When he started upstairs Martha was still standing there with Channing. She did not move her eyes from Everett, and she shook her head, almost imperceptibly, as if she wanted Channing to stop stroking her hair but was not really aware he was doing it. For an instant Everett wanted to go back down and get her, tell her to pick up her sweater and a fresh bottle of bourbon and get in the car, tell her that they were going to San Francisco to bring Lily home. But he did not know where to find Lily, and he was afraid that Martha would begin screaming if he even paused on the stairs. He had not heard her scream since they were children, but it was a scream he had never forgotten, all panic and blind hatred, so piercing it was almost sweet, and as he looked down at Martha standing rigid in Channing’s casual embrace it seemed to him that he could almost see the scream beginning in her eyes.