by Joan Didion
“It’s nice to be back,” she whispered, able neither to look directly at him nor to speak normally.
“You’ll be closer to home than you would have been in Berkeley, actually.”
Encouraged by this view of the situation, Lily nodded.
Her father smiled and patted her shoulder again. “The McClellans are old friends.”
She said nothing. In view of a fact she had just remembered—that Everett was a second cousin to Rita Blanchard, whose grandmother had been a McClellan—her father’s remark seemed obscurely pointed. The issue seemed confused beyond repair, and Lily, blushing, took a silver dollar from the pocket of her polo coat and began to throw it up and catch it.
“It’s snowing on the Pass,” she said rapidly. “We had a nice time in Reno. I won two twenty-five-dollar jackpots and ate a lobster.”
Her father nodded gravely.
She dropped the dollar, which Everett had given her one night when he was winning, and watched it roll across the floor.
“Well, princess, there’s no place like Reno.” Walter Knight picked up the dollar and dropped it into her pocket. “For all the mortal delights. Now let’s see if we can’t get a drink before lunch. You could probably use one. Or two.”
She tried to smile. Although she had hoped, all week and even this morning, that her father would tell her not to worry and somehow take things in hand, she saw now that it would be more or less up to her.
Whenever she thought later of that week in Reno—and she thought of it quite often that first year, thought of it while she sat at dinner, listening to the clock in the hall and to Everett’s father chewing; thought of it in bed, and reached to touch Everett’s face in the dark so that she would know she was not alone; thought of it sometimes before Knight was born, when she had been so frightened and Everett so reasonable, bringing her, every morning, the flowers she did not know how to arrange, the words she did not know how to accept—it was with a longing she could never quite place, a nostalgia neither entirely truthful nor entirely imagined. It was as if the week had existed out of time, as if they might happen upon it again one day by accident and find the same limpid air, forever suspended there between autumn and winter; the same faces in the Riverside bar; the same wild ducks lighting down on the same rocks along the Truckee, although even that week they had been on their way south: everything untouched, impervious to erosion, not exactly shining and not exactly innocent but preserved exactly as it had been, absolute proof against further corruption. She had said to her father that morning everything she could have said: We had a nice time in Reno.
7
Young married, river matron, mother of two: on the February morning in 1942 when she learned she was pregnant the second time she knew the rôles she should be playing. It had not seemed as urgent when she had only Knight. Knight’s birth had pleased Everett; Knight’s birth had pleased her, once it had happened. In the six months since Knight’s birth, however, nothing had changed. China Mary took care of him, just as she took care of everything else that needed doing in the house; Martha worried about him, just as she worried about everyone else. She would call up from Davis in the middle of the week. “That fever,” she would begin. “What fever?” Lily would ask. “That 104° fever he had a week ago Sunday. What fever. Anyway. You don’t think it could have damaged his heart?” “We had Dr. Dubois,” Lily would say. “Dr. Dubois. Dr. Dubois has been senile since shortly before he delivered you. Let me speak to Everett.” As far as Mr. McClellan was concerned, Knight was a small animal still too inert to be entertaining; he largely ignored his presence, pausing by the crib upstairs only when he suspected Everett or Lily to be watching. Nothing about Knight’s arrival, in short, had changed the mood of the house: Lily continued to stay upstairs as much as possible, nervous whenever she was downstairs that she was intruding upon the family she continued to think of as the McClellans, a house guest who had stayed on too long; Everett became every day more abstracted, the way, she saw, he had always been around his father. “If you don’t stop whistling through your teeth,” she had whispered one night after dinner, “I’m going to start screaming.” “Everett has always whistled through his teeth,” Martha had interrupted; it was impossible to say anything, when Martha was home from school, that Martha did not hear and work into an issue. “Whistling is simply Everett’s way,” Martha had added, looking directly at the book in Lily’s lap, “of pretending to be reading.” Everett seemed to Lily to act himself only when they were alone, and Knight did not change that. They could lie in bed in the mornings with Knight between them and laugh, but that did not quite make, Lily thought, a family.
With two children, however, she would have to make more of an effort. Nothing about her modus vivendi was appropriate to a young wife and mother of two: the doctor, quite inadvertently, made that much clear. Examining her, he asked whether any of her friends had told her about Dr. Grantly Dick-Read. “I suppose you mean natural childbirth,” she said quickly, uncomfortably convinced, as she lay in ignominy on the table, that both the doctor and his even more disapproving cohort, the nurse, had divined the shameful fact she had only then realized: she had no friends. She had her family, she had the McClellans; she had a neat leather address book respectably if not completely full of names, mostly those of girls with whom she had gone to school, to which she could address Christmas cards. But she had no one with whom she might have sat around over coffee and compared obstetrical notes. It was a failure she had never before fathomed: she did not much enjoy the company of women.
“Natural childbirth,” she repeated, stalling. “I’m not sure I’d like that. I was in labor thirty-four hours with Knight.”
“That’s because you were afraid,” the doctor said genially. He was a young obstetrician recommended by Martha; Dr. Dubois had retired.
“I don’t know.” Lily wondered with some irritation how she had happened to think Martha an authority on obstetricians.
The doctor patted her thigh, affably. “You talk it over with your husband.”
The notion that she might talk over natural childbirth with Everett seemed only slightly less ludicrous than the notion that she might have already talked it over with friends, and when Lily left the doctor’s office she walked through Capitol Park, distracted by the vistas of social failure opened up by the doctor; sat down on the wet steps of the Capitol Building, and tried to think exactly what it was that young wives and mothers did. For a starter, they did not sit around by themselves on the Capitol steps smoking cigarettes in the rain; she was sure of that. If they found themselves downtown after an appointment in the Medico-Dental Building they would have swatches to match, War Bonds to purchase, friends to meet for lunch. They would have an entire circle of friends with whom they lunched regularly, played bridge, talked about natural childbirth and saddle-block anaesthesia and twilight sleep and the last time the Lunts played Memorial Auditorium.
Deciding as she drove out to the ranch that the first step toward social regularity might well be the proper equipment (she could not think what else it might be), she wrote immediately to Shreve’s in San Francisco and ordered six hundred sheets of pale blue letter paper monogramed L.K.McC., four hundred lined envelopes engraved McClellan’s Landing, California (an address acceptable to both Everett and the Post Office and one which she thought had a good deal more innate style than the Star Route number Mr. McClellan persisted in using), six hundred folded notes (with matching envelopes) engraved Mrs. Everett Currier McClellan, and something she had seen described in Vogue as a “hostess-saver,” a small book similar to one used by Mrs. Roosevelt’s social secretary to record the preferences, disinclinations, and favorite menus of all one’s guests.
On the day the package arrived from Shreve’s, she set up a card table on the sun porch, filled Everett’s fountain pen, arranged a tray with a glass of iced tea and a fresh package of cigarettes, and set about writing some notes. Unable at first to think where to begin, she located the neat leather address book
and turned the pages methodically from A (Alice Adamson, an unattractive but popular girl with whom Lily had once shared a room at a Stanford house party and had never seen again), through the heavy concentration of relatives under K, right on to Z (Zenith Jewelry in Berkeley, where she had once left a bracelet to be repaired): there was no one to whom she could reasonably write a letter.
By the end of the afternoon, nonetheless, using rather larger than normal handwriting and in one case asking for a recipe she did not want (Baked Alaska made with cottage cheese would be beyond, she could not help feeling, even her expanding horizons), she had managed to write three: one to her roommate at Dominican, a girl she had not felt one way or another about; one to the rather sententious widow who had been housemother in the Pi Phi house the year she was at Berkeley; and one to Martha, who had not been home from Davis in eight days and had twice called Everett and urged him to write. Although the box of folded notes remained untouched, she had a definite purpose in mind for them: invitations. Starting with luncheons and afternoon desserts, she would progress to mixed entertainments—cocktail parties, Sunday-night suppers, little dinners so well planned that even Mr. McClellan could not turn them awry; simple but perfectly done, suitable wartime entertaining. “My mother is a great hostess,” she explained to Everett as they drove to the post office to mail her three letters. “When Daddy was in the Legislature she was possibly the most noted hostess on the river. Now. There’s no reason why I can’t give a simple little party. Is there.” Everett, his eyes on the road, could see none. “Let’s stop for a drink before we go back,” Lily said happily. “Let’s have a drink by ourselves in a roadhouse or something. There’s time before dinner.” All right, Everett agreed drily, kissing her hair at a stop sign, they would have a drink in a roadhouse or something. “To celebrate,” she added. To celebrate, he repeated after her, smiling, although she could see that he was not entirely sure what they were celebrating, or why.
Fifteen days later, after drawing up several lists and then abandoning them in periods of retrogression, she opened the box of folded notes and wrote out eighteen invitations for a luncheon one afternoon in May. Everett put up card tables on the verandah for her, Martha called from Davis to encourage her (as well as to suggest that the unprecedented number of people might upset Knight), and for a few hours that afternoon the McClellan place had about it the illusion that someone other than Lily lived there, someone used to casual friendships, at home with the sound of women’s voices, luncheon forks, bridge being dealt. But although Edith Knight declared after everyone else had left that it had been the loveliest afternoon possible, Lily knew that it had not quite worked. It was nothing she had done or not done. It was simply that there existed between her and other women a vacuum in which overtures faded out, voices became inaudible, connections broke. With increased apprehension but unalloyed determination, she set about correcting it: if she was incapable of having a circle, she would then direct her efforts toward cementing Everett’s circle. But when she discovered that Everett’s disinterest in her friends or her lack of them was equaled only by his disinterest in seeing his own friends with any regularity (did he have any friends? she sometimes wondered), she was at a loss as to what to do next, and when her father died in June she had every reason not to do anything. The single luncheon, the handful of letters and telephone calls, the Sunday-night supper to which Everett had finally agreed and at which no one, not even Martha, could think of any conversation that quite caught on: she could repeat none of it. She would become a wife and mother later, for as she said to Everett in the terror of the day she found out, I’m not myself if my father’s dead.
8
A man and woman from Chicago discovered the accident: they had been told at the Texaco station downtown in Sacramento that they might get a breeze that hot June night by taking the river road instead of staying on U.S. 40. They slowed down (the man told the Highway Patrol) because of the curious light rising off the river. Tired and bored and sticky from sitting all day in the car, his wife said at first it was another California trick, and wanted to go on. Five would get you ten there was another Giant Orange drink stand involved in it somewhere, and for her nickel you could take every Giant Orange drink stand between here and San Berdoo and sink them five feet under. He parked the car, however, and got out to stand on the levee. When reconnaissance of the terrain turned up no evidence of a Giant Orange drink stand, his wife became apprehensive (it was eerie, she said, it was so creeping eerie), and would not get out of the car. It took him three or four minutes to apprehend what anyone from the river would have known immediately, for this was a bad curve, frequently miscalculated, or at any rate frequently as that kind of miscalculation goes; to realize that the glow on the water was rising through twenty-five feet of muddy water from the headlights of a car. The light filtered up through layer upon layer of current and crosscurrent, and flickered all about the channel as the wind disturbed the surface water. If I told her once I told her twenty times, there was something funny going on here and it was up to us to see what was what, the man said again and again to the state patrolmen, his curiosity already transmuted into the sense of civic responsibility which would become, in future tellings, the leitmotif of the story about the night they were someplace in California and saw this light Melba claimed was a Giant Orange, which is a kind of drink stand they have out there shaped like a giant orange. It was well after midnight before the river salvage people could get there from Yolo County with a hoist, and nearly five o’clock before they knew enough to call Edith Knight.
She drove into town alone, a silk robe pulled over her nightgown, to identify the bodies. Because the accident had been discovered so quickly, identification was only a formality. Walter Knight’s face, unmarked, bore only the featureless look of the recently drowned. Rita had been cut, across her left cheek and down that long Blanchard throat; she had been thrown, they said, against the dashboard before the car hit the water. Her long hair was still wet, and Edith Knight wondered, irrelevantly but obsessively, if it would dry before they buried her. She did not see how it could dry in the grave. Although she asked the coroner’s emergency attendant if it could, he did not seem to know. A small man possessed of a large curiosity about people under stress (an interest which relieved the general tedium of his work), the attendant took advantage, however, of this opening: he wondered, probing delicately, if the lady with the beautiful hair had been visiting Mrs. Knight and the late Senator. The late State Senator.
“Miss Rita Blanchard has lived all her life on Thirty-eighth Street,” Edith Knight said sharply. “She is from an old, old family in the Valley. A family,” she added magnanimously, “which crossed the Great Plains a year before my own.”
“A great tragedy, Mrs. Knight,” the coroner’s assistant said, abandoning the opportunity to pursue Sacramento Valley genealogy further and reaching instead for her hand. “A tragic loss.’ ”
“The Lord gives it and takes it, Mr. Paley,” she said, turning away from his outstretched hand.
By the time she left the morgue the sun was completely up, and the heat rising. She drove directly to the McClellan place and found Lily in the kitchen. “Oh Christ,” Lily whispered. “He’ll never have the marmalade.” She had gotten up at dawn to make pear marmalade for her father before the heat came up. The marmalade was a kind he especially liked, from a recipe of his mother’s, and she had planned it as a surprise. She had gone to the ranch the day before to get the pears from Gomez. “The marmalade would have shown him,” she whispered. “Shown him what?” Edith Knight asked, but Lily did not answer because she had put her knuckles against her teeth to keep from screaming and had slipped down beside the sink to the linoleum floor. Shaking but not moving in any other way, she stayed there until Edith Knight pulled her to her feet, untied the apron she was wearing over her nightgown, and led her upstairs to Everett, who was shaving. Later the doctor gave Everett enough pills to keep her quiet for two days and Edith Knight said she had never
, never in her entire life, seen anybody react the way that child reacted to a death in the family, she had always been morbidly sensitive and frankly it would have been better if they had gotten the pills before they told her, they might have known it would happen and she of all people should have known Lily was not strong enough to cope with the things other people had to cope with, but when do you think at a time like that.
On the morning of the funeral, Edith Knight and Martha, together, managed to get Lily dressed. She sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the floor while Martha went through her closet. She had nothing which approximated mourning except a black silk suit she had bought in Berkeley; now, six months pregnant, she could not fasten the skirt. “Everett said it didn’t matter what I wore,” she said again and again, and finally, after her mother and Martha had conceded that it did not, she put on a maternity skirt, a pink and white flowered blouse that her father had once admired, and, an afterthought, a black lace mantilla. She looked, Martha whispered to Everett, like a stray from The Grapes of Wrath.
It was another bad day, close to 108° at eleven o’clock. Lily sat between her mother and Everett in the car, her composure so precarious that she could look at neither of them.
“I feel stronger every minute,” Edith Knight announced, trying to work her long gloves onto her fingers. “Here,” she added, pulling off one of the gloves and twisting a large ring from her finger. “I meant for you to have this some day anyway.”
Lily slipped the ring over her wedding ring and closed her eyes again. It was a diamond her father had given her mother the day she was born.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I don’t know.” Edith Knight lifted Lily’s left hand and appraised the effect. “You’re really too young.”