Run River (19 page)

The bed was littered with things Lily had dropped when she was packing: her hairbrush, a satin case with stockings spilling from it, her book of telephone numbers, an alligator handbag he had given her on her last birthday. He looked in the bag and found nothing but pennies, tobacco crumbs, a couple of the silver dollars she always carried (“for luck, Everett baby”), and an old shopping list:
Arden hand lotion, white socks for Knight, birthday for E., two curtain rods for back bedroom, call Mother about platter
.

He brushed it all to the floor and pulled back the sheet. There was a note scribbled on a page from a calendar:
Everett darling I’ll try to make everything all right. Please. L
. Well, no one could say Lily had not hit her stride with this one. Notes under the sheet.

He crumpled the note and dropped it, then bent to retrieve it because he did not want China Mary to find it when she came to clean in the morning. He sat then on the edge of the unmade bed and absently rubbed the satin tie of Lily’s nightgown across his face and listened to the faint sound of the phonograph from downstairs.

Give me land, lots of land

Under starry skies a-bove

Don’t fence me in …

Well to hell with Martha. Let her make her own bed. With a goddamn radio announcer.

16

Keep me baby please keep me
, she had said that night with the fire down low and her hair still wet with the lake water: touched, Everett had accepted it as a trust. Or anyway he had wanted to, had longed to believe that she meant it, even as he knew that it was something women said; even as he remembered others who had said that or almost that.

Not that there had ever been, for Everett, that many others: the first had been Doris Jeanne Coe, Doris Jeanne of the glass-blue eyes, the lank blond hair, the bad teeth, and the smile that seemed to Everett at sixteen infinitely perverse. Two years older than Everett, Doris Jeanne was behind in school not from native inability, which had never held anyone back in the county consolidated school system, but simply because she had stayed out of school two years when her family moved out from Oklahoma in 1933. Her mother was tubercular and Doris Jeanne, the oldest child, stayed home to help with her brother and four sisters; their father used to be a farmer but now, according to Doris Jeanne, he fixed things, and Doris Jeanne thought California was strictly a drag.

Everett met her the week she enrolled, when they were assigned to debate the topic “John C. Frémont: Opportunist or Patriot?” She was wearing, he would remember always, a fuchsia-pink sweater with a harp embroidered in gilt threads over her left breast, a tight black gabardine skirt, and a coat which made Everett forever uneasy about Doris Jeanne, the coat about which Lily later said, when he told her about it one night in bed, “Didn’t it make you cry? Didn’t it make you want to cry for the world every time you looked at it?” Although he had laughed at Lily, there was little doubt in his mind that the coat had indeed lent his entire relationship with Doris Jeanne Coe certain aspects of a social passion play. A hand-me-down from someone for whom her father worked, it was a camel’s-hair polo coat with an I. Magnin label, and she let it out of her sight so rarely that two of the buttons were missing and the pocket bore a year-old Coca-Cola stain.

After class, Everett had stopped Doris Jeanne and asked her which position she preferred, a phrasing which afforded her a great deal of unconcealed delight. When Everett explained, blushing, that he meant did she want to argue John C. Frémont was a Patriot or did she want to argue John C. Frémont was an Opportunist, Doris Jeanne looked at him a long time, slipped the polo coat off her shoulders, removed from her large red shoulder bag a blue vial of
Evening in Paris Eau de Cologne
, and dabbed the stopper behind her ears and in the crooks of her elbows. Then she replaced the vial, snapped the bag closed, and asked Everett who John C. Frémont was. After he had told her, she smiled crookedly, arranged the bag on her shoulder, and said, “It don’t make me no never-mind, honey.”

Mostly because he would have preferred it himself, Everett offered Doris Jeanne the “Patriot” position, and she eventually stood up before the class with her polo coat on, daintily applied
Evening in Paris
to her wrists in full view of twenty-four entranced students and Mrs. Nalley, the English teacher, and presented an original defense in which Jessie Benton and John C. Frémont emerged curiously as refugees from some early-day phenomenon not unlike the Dust Bowl. Although she had taken a clear fancy to the Frémonts, she could not escape the impression that they had first entered California in a secondhand Ford, and the entire exercise left Mrs. Nalley so unnerved that she excused her classes for the rest of the day.

The debate was otherwise without incident, and Everett did not speak to Doris Jeanne again until the class picnic, when her brother, who played baseball with Everett, urged him to sneak off to the river and share a half-gallon of valley red with him and Doris Jeanne, who was included in the first place only because she had negotiated the purchase. After a while Alfred Coe went to sleep over beyond an Indian mound, and Doris Jeanne, with lifeless dispatch, took care of Everett. A few days later she cornered him in the hall at school, pressed up against him as he stood backed against his open locker, and began playing lovingly with his collar; she wanted to do it again out behind the backstop during seventh period, when there were no teams on the field, but Everett hesitated, and Doris Jeanne said he was strictly a drag and could stew in his own juice. Later that semester, after the intercession of her brother, Everett wrote a term paper for Doris Jeanne on the subject “Will Semple Green: Father of Irrigation in the Northern Valley.” Unhappily neither Mrs. Nalley nor the vice-principal who was called in as arbitrator could be persuaded that “Will Semple Green: Father of Irrigation in the Northern Valley” was entirely Doris Jeanne’s work, and in the pressure of this controversy Doris Jeanne quit school. That she never named Everett made him admire her, and feel obscurely guilty that he had failed to do a more convincing job for her. Several years later he saw a picture of her in the
San Francisco Examiner;
described as a “curvaceous model and sometime waitress at an El Camino Real supper club,” she had instituted a paternity suit against a football player with a Polish name. Although she had changed her name to Dori Lee, Everett recognized the picture, and wondered if she would remember him. He thought not.

After Doris Jeanne it had been nobody: necking in cars on hot summer nights with the back doors open so you could lie with your legs out and sometimes even lying almost naked and covered with sweat, but never doing it; once or twice or three times even lying in somebody’s bed at parties given by boys whose parents were away, lying naked under the sheet with girls who had been drinking bourbon and Seven-Up and wanted to go to sleep, lying there for hours and kissing girls who probably would have done it had anyone insisted, but Everett never insisted; it was not, as Lily would have said, much his style.

Then there had been, at Stanford, a couple of girls who required less insistence: Annis McMahon, whom everyone else called alternately “Annie” and “Pooh” but whom Everett always called Annis, wishing upon her the dignity implied by her tall, cold, blond good looks. He liked to watch her play tennis, and long before he knew her he developed the habit of walking back to the Deke house from his eleven o’clock class by way of the courts where she played every noon. When it reached a point where he thought he wanted to watch her play tennis for the rest of his life, he asked Clark McCormack to introduce him to her. Once introduced, he called her three times a day, played tennis with her every afternoon, took her to the movies every Sunday night, and in May of his sophomore year, still determined that she should be the girl he had hoped she would be in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, he drove Annis McMahon down to Santa Cruz on two successive weekends. (On the third, he found out later, Clark McCormack drove her down to Santa Cruz.) They lay in a motel room with a mission tile table and a framed color photograph of Bridal Veil Falls at Yosemite, and she told him in the high nasal voice which had been his first disappointment about the difficulty she was having arranging her courses to obtain her teaching credential at the same time she received her degree in physical education and therapy. She got up from the bed every time as if she were getting out of a shower, ready, in a companionable way he found dispiriting in the extreme, to discuss it; stretched her incredible golden arms, lit a cigarette, opened all the blinds, and wrapped herself in his shirt, a gambit which might have seemed more winning had his shirt not fit her almost perfectly.

The next year there was Naomi Kahn, a Jewish girl from Beverly Hills whose grades were good, whose clothes smelled always as if they had just come from Bullock’s-Wilshire boxes (as a matter of fact they had not: Naomi ordered all her clothes from Bergdorf Goodman in New York), and whose mother and father were both, as she put it, in the Industry. She told Everett that her deepest wishes for her mother and father involved their abandoning screenwriting in favor of writing something like
Winterset
, and when that day came she would be more than happy, in answer to Everett’s query, to stop ordering her clothes from Bergdorf Goodman in New York, although for Everett’s information, Maxwell Anderson was not exactly on the relief rolls. Everett ought to get around more. Once the Kahns came up to Stanford to visit Naomi, and Mrs. Kahn later wrote that she considered Everett divine, an honest-to-Christ set piece, whereupon Naomi’s ardor for Everett began to cool. One night toward the end of their junior year she announced that she was driving to Reno the next day to marry a Berkeley graduate student who was active in the Young Communist League; the Kahns, after getting the marriage annulled, transferred Naomi to Sarah Lawrence. Although Everett never knew what happened to Naomi after that, he noticed the Kahns’ names from time to time among the credits on B comedies, and years later he read in
Time
that they were up before the Tenney Committee for having participated in the October 1943 Writers’ Congress at UCLA. They were listed as members of several oddly named organizations the function of which Everett did not entirely understand, were later indicted in Washington for contempt of Congress, and Everett reflected that Naomi, wherever she was, must have approved at last.

Actually Everett had liked Naomi Kahn: he had liked the way her clothes smelled and liked the slightly derisive way she went to bed; she did it exactly the way she wrote out a midterm or drove a car, with a style and efficiency he had never observed in any of the girls with whom he had grown up, and he loved it. He sometimes thought he even loved her, usually when she had gone to spend the weekend with her parents in Palm Springs and he was left with the alternatives of sitting around the house drinking beer or calling up somebody like Annis McMahon. Palo Alto the winter of 1939 seemed full of girls like Annis McMahon, and Everett’s appreciation of Naomi’s singular virtues grew until he actually regretted, for something like four days after she eloped with the Young Communist from Berkeley, that he had not asked her to marry him.

Nonetheless, Naomi Kahn had not been, any more than Annis McMahon or for that matter Doris Jeanne Coe had been, someone with whom he could have lived on the ranch. During those four days when he wished he had married Naomi he never once thought of living anywhere with her: they were always driving someplace together, or he was putting her on an airplane, or they were registering at the Fairmont in San Francisco and she had on a black hat with a veil.

In the end Naomi had been just like Annis McMahon and a dozen or so girls he had known not as well: something he had tried and abandoned, before the effort became too strenuous, and none of it had to do with Lily. Even as he imagined himself registering at the Fairmont with Naomi Kahn, Everett knew without thinking that what he would do was live on the ranch with Lily Knight, knew it so remotely that if he had heard, during the years he rarely saw her, that she had married someone else he would have wished her well and gone on thinking about Naomi Kahn at the Fairmont, and only somewhere in the unused part of his mind would he have begun wondering, with an urgency he would not have understood, what he was going to do with the rest of his life. Lily required no commitment: Lily was already there.

It had not occurred to him that he could lose her (had not occurred to him even that he wanted her) until the week he came home from Stanford and saw her sitting on her father’s terrace in a faded pink dress, the late afternoon sun on her dusty bare feet and a large safety pin in place of a missing screw on her sunglass frames. It had seemed to him then that to risk losing her would be to risk losing Martha and Sarah and himself as well, that she alone could retrieve and keep for him the twenty-one years he had already spent. Convinced that he could ill afford to leave her untended for even that one night, he fell asleep finally with his clothes on, a cigarette still burning in the ashtray on his bedroom window sill, and when he woke in the morning he set out immediately to secure for himself the haven of her faded pink dress, her bare feet, the safety pin in her sunglasses.

As far as the safety pin went, it remained in her sunglasses until the summer she was pregnant with Julie, when he told her one night, irritated partly because she had just uncovered a grocery bill she had lost three months before and partly because she had dragged a sheet down to the sun porch the night before and slept there until ten o’clock but irritated mostly because it had been 105° for three days and she had accused him of not loving her as her father had loved her, that the safety pin in her sunglasses summed up all her unattractive habits, her sloppiness of mind, her inability to accomplish the routine tasks that could be done with one hand by any of the girls he had known at Stanford. She had gone upstairs without speaking. When he came to bed she had pretended to be asleep, and she had gotten up at seven the next morning to drive into Sacramento. She returned at noon with a new screw in her sunglasses and with, as well, a book called
The Managerial Revolution
in which she later read the first and last chapters (she pretended to have read it all but he read it himself and saw that she had not), an album of French language records which as far as he knew she never played, eight dollars’ worth of closet bags and boxes, and a large account book in which she wrote down, for two weeks, the exact amounts both she and China Mary spent on food and household supplies. The book was in fact labeled “Food and Household Supplies,” and she had shown it proudly to Martha. The first day’s entry, Martha reported with a degree of admiration, began with an itemized list showing the unit prices, the amount saved by buying in quantity, and a tax breakdown wherever a tax was involved, on twenty-four bottles of beer, twelve cans of mixed carrots and peas, twelve cans of puréed liver, four quarts of milk, two cartons of Lucky Strikes, six tins of smoked oysters, and fifteen cans of Campbell’s Soup; five consommé, five vegetable-beef, five cream of chicken. Totaled, these items came to $18.53, and were followed by an entry which read “Etc.—$27 (about).” When Martha asked what the $27 represented, Lily, absorbed in contemplating the neatness of her figuring, had shrugged. “You know. A mop handle. Things.” After Lily had abandoned “Food and Household Supplies,” Everett tore the entry from the book, carried it around with him for a couple of weeks and finally put it in a drawer where he kept his Stanford diploma, a clipping about a no-hit game he had pitched in high school, and a letter from Martha describing the only 4-H meeting she ever attended.