Run River

by Joan Didion

  What is it you want. He had said it to Martha (what do you want, baby, he had said, what did you want) the night she drowned off the dock where his gun now lay. He had wanted to say it to Sarah, every time she came home (only she did not now call it home). He had wanted to say it to Knight and he had wanted to say it to Julie. He looked at Lily again. She had the blank, frightened look that she had some nights when he woke her from bad dreams. She had always been afraid of the dark. Sweet Jesus, what had she wanted?

  “I want to go up to the house,” he said.

  3

  We could make the reasons. Everett’s mind began to function now for the first time since he had left the Templeton house (it must have been about midnight, because someone had shouted “no dancing on Sundays,” and then Francie Templeton had gone to get him a drink he did not need, Joe Templeton had asked him where Lily was, and he had walked out of the house, across the lawn and down the graveled drive to the car; he had seen Knight kissing Francie’s niece from Santa Barbara down on the stone bench by the swimming pool, had discerned Francie’s laugh among the voices and music from the house, and had seen then that Lily’s car was gone); began to weigh the potentialities now as he stood on the levee waiting for the headlights to pass so that he and Lily could cross the road to the house. (Oh God remember how it was to drive the river road late on hot summer nights with Lily asleep, her head dropped on his shoulder, to hear the mosquitoes above the sound of the motor and to know that ahead was the cool white room, the walnut bed with the mosquito netting, Lily’s room and his, his grandfather’s before him. Lost in the night fields, his body, Lily’s body, the house ahead: all one, some indivisible trinity. But maybe it had never been that way except late at night, never except when Lily was asleep. He knew this road so well that he could drive it with his eyes closed, could have plotted every curve in his sleep, knew exactly when to expect the jolt where the roadbed changed at the county line. Remember how it was. Asleep, Lily was any way he willed her.)

  “Don’t be afraid now,” Lily said, her voice harsh. She put her hand on his arm as if to pull him along.

  He realized then that the headlights were long past, that he still stood in the gravel with his head dropped forward. He had remembered, while they waited for the car to pass, what had happened between the time Joe Templeton asked him where Lily was and the time he walked out of the house. He had taken a swing at Joe, grazing his jaw and causing Francie, Everett’s drink in her hand, to step between them, almost sober for a change. What happened, she kept saying. Everett had not known what had happened but it had something to do with Joe. You’ve really got it made, haven’t you, Templeton, he had snarled. Swimming pools. New Thunderbirds. For a lousy dirt farmer you really got the world by the tail. As he walked out Francie was laughing: I don’t notice you driving any Model T, Everett McClellan. I don’t notice your kids swimming in the river. Between semesters at Princeton.

  Straightening his shoulders, Everett pulled his arm from Lily’s touch.

  “When’s Julie coming home,” he said.

  “I don’t know.” She dropped her hand. “I don’t know about Knight or Julie. She was with one of the twins again.”

  He looked toward the house. “The lights are on downstairs.”

  “I left them.”

  “I just don’t want to see Julie.”

  “Listen,” she said. “We can make it all right.”

  “Not Julie,” he said.

  She put her fingers against his cheek and he caught them there with his hand. Her skin was soft and in the darkness she looked about twenty again, and vulnerable. Well, vulnerable she was. Pity her simplicity and suffer her to come to Thee. It could be easy enough. He could go back to the river now, lift Channing’s body off that rotten log, weight it, and roll it into the river. It would lie there three, maybe four months, anyway until the river picked up a little water, began running fast enough to move the body downstream. Then it might be found: might catch on a piling or wash into a slough, be dragged up. How much could they discover by probing that disfigured, disintegrating mass of flesh? He tried to recall detective novels, but could think only of the kind in which the room blacks out an instant and the victim, when the lights go on again, is discovered slumped across the chemin de fer table. At any rate, he need deal here with neither the C.I.D. nor the Sureté, but only the incalculable expertise of the county coroner’s office, an unknown quantity. This was less the stuff of detective novels than of newspaper murder accounts, which he had read throughout his life with a disinterest born of disbelief. They had never seemed probable. Father Kills Daughter’s Swain, Argument over Car Keys. Wife Kills Mate, Wounds Child, Did Not Mean to Fire. Carhop Slain, Assailant Unknown. He could dredge from all those years of reading only the impression that dentists were frequently key witnesses when it came to identification; he had a further notion, even more dim, that no matter how advanced the decomposition an autopsy would show whether or not the cause of death had been drowning. The lungs either did or did not contain water, he could not remember which. Even if the body did not turn up for months, in that case, there would be inquiries, questions asked of all Channing’s acquaintances and particularly of him, particularly of him and of Lily. Everyone knew, everyone must know, about Lily and Channing, about Martha and Channing. Fifteen years.

  Anyway, it might be discovered tomorrow, next week. Nancy Channing would miss him, if nobody else did: she was suing for back alimony and had her father’s lawyers after him all the time. For all Everett knew a hearing was scheduled for Monday. Were Channing reported missing, they might think—would certainly think, in a summer when there had been three or four drownings a month—to drag the river; might drag up the weighted body, leaving no question of accident, no possibility that the generally disorganized details of Ryder Channing’s life had led him to drown himself. There were altogether too many variables.

  “Where’s his car?” Everett asked suddenly, and as he said it the variables began crowding in, the elements he could never calculate, the other factors overlooked. Channing’s car still on the ranch; China Mary, not at her sister’s as she usually was on Saturday night but maybe in her own cottage beyond the house, hearing the shot, knowing; the possible appointments set up for Monday. Not that suicides didn’t set up appointments; not that Channing, in any case, had made much of a practice of keeping appointments the past few years. But still.

  “Down the back road to the dock,” Lily said, calm, and the old resentment flared briefly, obscuring everything. (Parked just off the levee road, hidden in the trees and darkness along the old dock road; the black Mercedes still unpaid for. “I was down on the dock, baby,” she would have said in the same calm voice had none of it happened, had he simply come home from the party and found the house empty, simply waited upstairs as he had waited other evenings, listening for her high heels on the wooden verandah, listening for the screen door, for her humming. We will thrive on keep alive on/just nothing but kisses. “I was down watching the water. Didn’t Francie tell you I’d gone on home? Didn’t she tell you I had a headache?”)

  He could get rid of the Mercedes, all right, but it would be like sandbagging a levee already breached. Something else would keep turning up. There was still, however, Lily’s way, the almost straight way, the way which would still give them something to talk about but the way which would be, in the end, the easy way: he could call the sheriff’s office now—he could call Ed McGrath at home, they had gotten him at home the night Martha drowned—and tell him that he had shot Ryder Channing in self-defense. Or protection of property. Or whatever they wanted to call it. He had come home, heard Lily screaming on the dock, had picked up his gun and run down to investigate. When he found Lily struggling with Channing he had tried to break it up; Channing had gone for him and he had shot him. Rancher Shoots Friend in Row over Wife, Did Not Mean to Kill.

  It was plausible only if you accepted as given Lily’s alleged resistance. Get some hotshot District Attorney in there—w
ho would it be? Everett no longer knew—he could make something of that, make it clear how many times Lily had heard the song before. Although they could probably prove nothing about Lily and Channing (Nancy Channing, he thought, would not have bothered to get whatever evidence there had then been; she had divorced him a long time ago and simply said mental cruelty but of course she might have had the evidence anyway—more variables, incalculable again), they could imply plenty, maybe prove something else, possibly even drag Martha’s name into it once they talked to Nancy Channing (he did not know how much if anything Nancy Channing had known about Martha), sink the knife in Lily, make it hard for a jury to believe she would have drawn a line, started screaming after that many times around.

  But it was possible: Lily could probably make it work. They would drag it all out in the newspapers (give Francie Templeton two drinks, she’d probably testify herself) but Lily could make it work. She would say anything now, not particularly to save him but to save them all, him, Knight, Julie, herself. It would be a sweet trial, all right; a sweet trial for Julie. Well, he wanted to save them too. (Never had Julie seemed more precious to him than she had tonight: he would consider the world well lost to keep her intact, her small bones, her sunburn, her white dress, her hair so like Martha’s, her longing for a straight-stick Thunderbird. And his entire commitment to Lily had become an unbreakable promise to protect her from the mortal frailties which were, since they were hers, his own.) He wanted to save them and he would. It was only that he was not sure how. He could sort out no clear reason, no starting point. It was the kind of letters he got from Sarah and it was Martha buried there by the levee and it was the way Knight had talked in June; it was the way he had always felt about the kiln burning, only that no longer mattered. It was as if the kiln had burned already. Everything seemed to have passed from his reach way back somewhere; he had been loading the gun to shoot the nameless fury which pursued him ten, twenty, a good many years before. All that had happened now was that the wraith had taken a name, and the name was Ryder Channing.

  1938–1959

  4

  A little late for choosing, she had said to Everett, quite as if it hadn’t always been. Was there ever in anyone’s life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum of all the choices gone before? A little late for choosing: her father had known it, even as he denied it. But deny it he had. You say what you want and strike out for it, he told Lily on the morning of her sixteenth birthday: it was one of their rare attempts to grope through a conversation with each other, deafened as always by the roar of the blood between them. (Neither Walter Knight nor his only child ever forgot that blood: dumbly, they exchanged deliberate commonplaces, phrases perhaps dry and hard enough to carry the weight of something for which there was no phrase at all. Take care of yourself. Do you need any money. Write.) You say what you want and then go after it, and if you decide to be the prettiest and the smartest and the happiest, you can be.

  “Just you remember that everybody gets what he asks for in this world,” Walter Knight repeated, making two stacks of the sixteen silver dollars he had dropped on her bed.

  “Maybe that’s not such a prize,” she said. “Getting what you ask for.”

  She was aware that the attainment of her own most inadmissable wish, to be asked to play Scarlett O’Hara in the movie version of Gone With the Wind, was not only outside the range of probability but not, over the long stretch, in her best interests. It would not, per se, build character. On the other hand her father was not talking about her character, which was one of the things that distinguished him from other people’s fathers. Another was that he was good-looking enough, despite what was called in her mother’s family “a weak mouth,” to play Rhett Butler.

  “I didn’t say it was any prize.” Walter Knight took a fruit knife from his pocket and began cutting up the apple he had brought for Lily’s breakfast. “I didn’t say that at all. I said it’s nobody’s fault but your own. My own. Anybody’s own.”

  He paused, dropping the core of the apple in a waste-basket. “Eat this apple and we’ll get some waffles. You’re too thin. I said you play the game, you make the rules. I said if a lot of people a long time back hadn’t said what they wanted and struck out for it you wouldn’t have been born in California. You’d have been born in Missouri maybe. Or Kentucky. Or Virginia.”

  “Or abroad,” Lily suggested.

  Walter Knight paused. To have been born abroad was not, even within the range of his own rhetoric, quite conceivable.

  “Or abroad,” he conceded finally, seeing that the point was his own. “What I mean is you come from people who’ve wanted things and got them. Don’t forget it.”

  “Maybe I don’t know what I want. Sometimes I worry about it.”

  “I’ll do the worrying,” Walter Knight said. “You know that.”

  With a faith that troubled Walter Knight even as he encouraged it, Lily believed at sixteen, as firmly as she believed that it was America’s mission to make manifest to the world the wishes of an Episcopal God, that her father would one day be Governor of California. It was only a matter of time before he could be rightfully installed in Sacramento in the white Victorian house he still called, in an excess of nonchalance (it had been since 1903 the Governor’s Mansion), “the old Gallatin place.” Any time Walter Knight spent in town could be explained in view of this end, and he spent, the year Lily was sixteen, a great deal of time in town: more time than he would ever spend again, for 1938 was to be, although they did not then know it, his last year in the Legislature.

  Gomez ran the ranch, even bargained with the fruit buyers, while Walter Knight sat in the familiar gloom of the Senator Hotel bar and called at the white frame house on Thirty-eighth Street where Miss Rita Blanchard lived. (Miss Rita Blanchard was, as he so often said, his closest friend in town, a good friend, a loyal friend, a friend whose name could be mentioned in the Senator Hotel bar in the presence of Walter Knight only by Walter Knight.) Gomez was the most dolorous of men; one might have thought him intent only upon disproving the notion that our neighbors from south of the border were so muy simpatico. Patiently, he illustrated Walter Knight’s contention that honesty could be expected only of native northern Californians. “I pay that bastard more than any Mexican in the Valley gets paid,” Walter Knight would say periodically. “Yet he cheats me, finds it necessary to steal me blind. Add that one up if you will. Rationalize that one for me.” The challenge, although rhetorical, was calculated to lend everyone present a pleasant sense of noblesse oblige; as Walter Knight was the first to say, he had never hired a Mexican foreman expecting that they would operate under the Stanford Honor Code. Once Edith Knight had taken up the challenge, but the rationale she offered had little to do with Gomez. “Maybe that wouldn’t happen,” she said one night at dinner, her hands flat on the heavy white linen cloth and her eyes focused at some point away from her husband and daughter, “just possibly that wouldn’t happen if you were to spend, say, one-half the time on this ranch that you spend on Thirty-eighth Street.”

  Walter Knight demanded that Lily observe the delicacy of the asparagus, grown, despite an extraordinarily poor season for asparagus growers in the southern part of the state, not three miles away on the Pierson place.

  “Walter,” Edith Knight whispered finally, flushed and rigid with regret as if with fever. Without looking at her, Walter Knight reached across the table and touched her hand. “Sarcasm,” he said, “has never been your forté.” Edith Knight stiffened her shoulders and picked up her water goblet. “The word is forte, Walter,” she said after a moment, entirely herself again. “Quite unaccented.”

  Such lapses were rare for Edith Knight: a change for the better was among the prime tenets of her faith. That was the year, Lily’s sixteenth, when she tried parties. Through the holidays and late into spring, she entertained as no one on the river had entertained in years, confident that the next party would reveal to her the just-around-the-
corner country where the green grass grew. I thought of floating camellias in the silver bowls, she would write to Lily at Dominican, or do you think all violets, masses and masses of violets? p.s. bring someone home if you want but don’t come if it’s an Assembly weekend, you’ll miss meeting a great many nice people if you keep on missing those dances. Because Lily would have gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid an Assembly (the sight of the inexorable square envelopes in her mail slot at school turned her faint, chilled her with a vision of herself stranded on a gilt chair at the St. Francis Hotel, her organdy dress wilting and her hands wet in kid gloves), she always came home for her mother’s parties.