Run River (21 page)

If she had not wanted to talk to Joe, she certainly did not want to talk to Everett. Nonetheless, she had to get home and felt incapable of explaining to anyone else what she was doing with her suitcase in the Greyhound bus station. She had meant to take the river bus out to the ranch, but the drivers had gone on strike. If it was not one thing it was another. Fumbling in her bag for a cigarette, she dropped two coins in the telephone and dialed her mother’s number. When her mother answered she felt tears rising, hung up without saying anything, and smoked the cigarette down to her fingers.
I would have cut off my right arm
, she thought viciously. He knew what he could cut off. She blew her nose, snapped her bag shut, and called the ranch.

Everett answered on the first ring. “Sweet Jesus, Lily. You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Where the hell are you?”

She hesitated. Where was she. It was the giveaway, the proof of how she felt, the evidence that she would never be the kind who could carry things off.

“At the Greyhound bus station,” she said at last.

“You fool,” he said softly. “You goddamn little ass.”

She drank some warm Coca-Cola in a sticky paper cup and went outside the station to wait for Everett. At six-thirty everything seemed still: the traffic had already thinned out and the thick branches of the plane trees hung heavy and motionless over the street. In front of the loading platform a sailor was trying to pick up two girls; both the girls wore white peasant blouses, pulled down off their shoulders, and one had her hair tied up in a magenta scarf. When the sailor, teasing, pulled off the scarf, Lily saw that the girl’s head was covered with pin curls. Snatching the scarf back, the girl struck an exaggerated pose with it, and they all laughed. They seemed to be having a very good time and it tired Lily to think that she was probably no older than they were.

Depressed, she turned her attention across the street to a parking lot where a few men, apparently late from their offices and obviously all acquainted, were picking up their cars. She reflected sadly that they would no doubt arrive home to find their well-behaved sun-tanned wives getting out of their swimming suits and dressed for dinner. It was too hot a night to cook; all over town those loving summer wives were brushing the chlorine out of their hair and putting on dresses to go out to dinner. The would be at the country club tonight, wearing their bright clean linen dresses loosely, as if they were unaccustomed to wearing clothes at all. They would talk about their diets and their children and their golf scores, display their even dispositions and their gold charm bracelets, and presently they would go home to take off the bright clean linen dresses, to lie on hot sheets and wait patiently for the day to begin again. You would never catch one of them standing around the Greyhound bus station in a tea-stained wrinkled silk suit not wanting to see her husband. You would never even catch one of them standing around anywhere in a tea-stained wrinkled silk suit. There was the kind of wife Everett should have, and look what he had instead. Martha had said it all: Lily had no right to her brother. Everett, like Sue Ann, had his right to happiness as much as the next one.

It was almost seven-thirty before Everett arrived. Unshaven and wearing a dirty khaki shirt, he double-parked the station wagon, swung himself over the rear bumper of a parked Chevrolet, and took Lily’s arm. She had not at first seen him, and smiled tentatively when he touched her. He picked up her suitcase, helped her around the Chevrolet, and opened the station-wagon door without speaking. Before they were home she had fallen asleep, dry-eyed for a change, her head in the way of the gear shift.

Later he put her to bed, opened the shutters which had been closed all day against the heat, and wiped her face with a washcloth soaked in witch hazel.

“Did you get the hops finished?” she whispered, opening her eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “Everything’s fine. Go to sleep.”

“Listen.” She took the washcloth from him and laid it across her eyes. “I love you.”

He looked at her for a long time.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” he said finally.

She took the washcloth from her eyes and threw her arms around his neck. “Everett, baby. I do. I love you. I know you and you know me and nobody else does. Everett please baby
love
me.”

She clung to him while he kissed her hair, and when he moved to take her arms from his neck she tighened her hold. “Lie here with me,” she whispered. “Lie here with me until it’s all dark.”

“Later.” He stood up. “Go to sleep now, baby.”

He sat with Knight for half an hour on the third floor, from where they could see the fireworks in town, for that day happened also to be the opening of the State Fair. There would be fireworks every night for twelve days, great slow bursts of white and pink and green, barely visible from the ranch. Long before the last distant sparks had showered out and drifted down, Knight fell asleep in Everett’s arms, and he carried him downstairs without waking him and put him to bed in his playsuit.

He went downstairs then, wandering absently from room to room. The house was quiet: Julie was at her grandmother’s; Martha had gone to the Fair with Ryder Channing. Insisting that Lily and Everett must come with them, they had waited an hour to see if Lily might arrive; Everett had gotten rid of them only by saying that the four of them would go to the Fair over the weekend. After they had gone Everett had sat in the kitchen with a bottle of beer and an article Channing had brought him about what was described as a pioneer shopping center in Kansas City. The kitchen chairs were uncomfortable and Everett had found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on why some developers preferred shopping centers with mall layouts to shopping centers with cluster layouts, whatever a cluster layout was; the kitchen, however, was the only place in the house where he did not feel oppressed by the presence of telephones. Although he knew that there were only two telephones in the house and five on the entire ranch, the house had seemed, while he waited for Lily to call, equipped with enough telephones to service a handbook operation.

Now he sat down again in the kitchen and tried to finish the article Channing had given him, but after three or four more paragraphs abandoned it. For fifteen minutes he sat reading the labels on the beer bottle he had left on the table when Lily called, and finally he went outside and set sprinklers to run all night on the south lawn, an extravagance justified only by the possibility that it would cool Lily’s and the children’s room some. He thought automatically now of
Lily’s room
, and when he went to sleep at eleven o’clock it was, for the first time of many, in his father’s bed. Although during the night he thought he woke and heard voices in the driveway, first Channing’s,
shut up you’re almost shouting
, and then Martha’s,
you think she’s so interesting-looking maybe you could knock her up yourself the next time
, by morning it seemed easier to believe that he had only dreamed it.

18

There was nothing wrong with Ryder Channing, Martha observed, that could not be inferred from his habit, when he was at any house within fifty miles of San Francisco, of asking his hostess if she had at hand a copy of the 1948 San Francisco
Social Register
because he wanted to look up a new telephone number.

Actually, Martha amended, Ryder took her calling in San Francisco so infrequently that she had only once witnessed him asking for the 1948
Social Register
to look up a telephone number, but she was certain that it had been no improvisation of the moment. It was of a piece with his routinely asking people from Cleveland where they lived in Shaker Heights.

“That’s not fair of me,” Martha added then with the instant contrition which tended, for a while quite successfully, to obscure the hostile edge on her voice; her standard conversational technique was that of a trial lawyer who pursues a tendentious line of questioning and then allows it stricken from the record.

“I mean that’s perfectly true about Ryder and the
Social Register
but it’s not fair. It’s not the
whole
Ryder. I mean Ryder goes around talking about big deals that never go through and all but that doesn’t mean Ryder’s a phony. Ryder just wants things. That’s not so bad, to want things. Is it.”

“Not at all,” Lily said, virtuously knotting a thread in a dress she was making by hand for Julie’s first day at school. The dress was an economy measure: Everett had said that their 1949 taxes would be double this year’s—both the riverfront and the Cosumnes ranches had been reassessed for the first time since the war—and Lily had resolved, without mentioning it to Everett, to save money. She had begun by saving the six or seven dollars she would normally have paid for Julie’s dress, instead buying four dollars’ worth of imported lawn and a sixty-cent pattern. After three weeks of intermittent work, the lawn was not only grimy from her fingers but spotted here and there with blood from her pricked fingers; it should, however, wash up very nicely. Good fabrics, good soap, and good hats, her mother often told her, were no extravagance.

Impressed with the fruit of her own economy, Lily added: “Wanting things and working to get them. It’s the basis of the American way.”

“Balls
. You aren’t even listening to me.”

“Really, Martha.” Although Lily had never known exactly what the word meant, it did not sound conversational to her. She had for that matter first heard it from Martha, the afternoon Mr. McClellan died in Sutter Hospital. Because Martha was having a cigarette with one of the doctors, Lily had been alone in the room, holding Mr. McClellan’s hand, when he woke from the coma. “You’re a good girl, Miss Lily Knight,” he said, opening his eyes and squeezing her hand weakly. “You’re sickly-looking but you’re a good girl.”
“Balls,”
Martha said from the doorway, seeing that her father’s eyes were again closed and his hand fallen free of Lily’s. Involuntarily, Lily had put her hand out to shield Mr. McClellan from Martha’s voice, but ten minutes later he was dead and possibly he had heard neither Martha’s invective nor, a minute later, her sobbing.

“I’m sorry,” Martha said now. “It’s only that you were at it again.”

“At what again?”

“You know.” Martha paused. “Your dress is coming along nicely. That blue should be very good on Julie.”

Lily smiled, and held the dress up for Martha’s further approval.

“If only there weren’t that gap between her teeth.”

Lily laid the dress aside and began threading a needle. Martha had told Julie that unless her teeth were straightened immediately she would grow up to be a very unattractive little girl. For several days Julie had been inconsolable, repeatedly climbing up on the washbasin to inspect her teeth in the bathroom mirror.

“I told you before, her second teeth aren’t even in.” Lily finished threading the needle and inadvertently jammed it into her index finger.

Martha shrugged, her interest in orthodontia apparently ebbing.

“Ryder just wants things,” she repeated reflectively. “That’s exactly the thing about Ryder.”

“What does Ryder want now.”

Martha looked at her a long while. “This is what they call a
mo-bile situation
, see, Lily. Ryder is what they call
up-ward mo-bile
. Or
on-the-make
. Didn’t you ever take any courses? Didn’t you ever read any books by Lloyd Warner?”

“There’s—” Lily stopped. She had been about to say that there was nothing wrong in wanting to get ahead. She did not know what it was about Martha that inflexibly brought out in her diction the best of both Mr. McClellan and her mother.

“There’s
what?”
Martha demanded.

“Nothing.”

“ ‘There’s nothing wrong in wanting to get ahead,’ ”
Martha mimicked. “I know you. Well there’s not. But you don’t understand about Ryder. He wants to
use
people.”

“Martha. Don’t get all upset.”

“Well he can’t use me.” Martha paused. “I don’t want anything from him. That’s the reason he can’t use me.”

“Martha,” Lily repeated.

“I don’t want his
jobs
, I don’t want his
favors
, I don’t want anything
about
him.”

What Martha did not want from Ryder Channing that morning was the job he had gotten her three weeks before on a Sacramento television station. It was the fourth or fifth such job for which he had arranged an interview; it was not only the first one Martha had taken but the first one, as far as Lily knew, for which she had even shown up for the initial appointment. The idea behind this particular job had been that Martha, after a month of answering letters from viewers and doing other small jobs around the station, would eventually work into doing both the morning interview program and the commercials during the afternoon movie, a job handled during the first year of the channel’s operation by the manager’s wife, now pregnant. It was, Ryder had declared, an unbeatable opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an industry with nowhere to go but up, and he had installed a borrowed television set on the sun porch so that Martha could observe the interview and commercial techniques developed by the manager’s wife, Maribeth Sidell. Martha had only to consider that Maribeth Sidell was a household word the length and breadth of the Sacramento Valley to realize, he pointed out, the future in the job.

Together, Lily and Martha had watched several of Maribeth Sidell’s programs, including one on which she interviewed, simultaneously, a retired disk jockey, Miss Sacramento, and two Japanese businessmen in the United States to arrange a trade fair. When the conversation turned to how Sacramento compared to Yokohama, Martha switched off the set and declared that she was a natural for the job. After avidly testing some of the products Maribeth advertised, in order to get what she called “fresh insights,” Martha drove into town, met Mr. Sidell, and reported at dinner that he had asked her to call him “Buzz,” had taken her to the Sacramento Hotel bar, and after two Manhattans (for him) and two sherries (for her) had announced that although she was no Jinx Falkenburg she had a lot of class and for his money ($75 a week) the ball was hers to run with. “I knew the sherry would get him,” Martha added enthusiastically. “The cornball.”