Run River

by Joan Didion

  “She’s really too skinny,” Everett said. “She’ll lose it.”

  “I want it,” Lily said, opening her eyes; it was the first unequivocal statement she had made in two days.

  They did not have a Catholic funeral. Because only a handful of the Knights were Catholics in the first place and because even their Catholicism was more an accident of birth or marriage than an act of faith, the family was not troubled by the Episcopal service, the unconsecrated ground: the family graveyard, near the ranch, where no one had been buried since 1892. “I don’t care if he was brought up Catholic or brought up Hindu,” Edith Knight had declared. “I guess I know where he’d want to lie. I guess I know that much.”

  From all over the Valley and from the Sierra foothills the family came; everyone from the river came and everyone from town came. Gomez and Crystal came, the Governor came, and the bartender from the Senator Hotel came. As if she were immune to grief, love, all the transient passions, Edith Knight stood throughout the funeral without moving. Lily stood behind her, looking away from the grave toward the distant line of cottonwoods which marked the river. She had thrown the mantilla back from her hair because it seemed to draw the heat; now it lay, fallen from her shoulders, on the ground behind her. She could not stoop to pick it up.

  There was a certain comfort in the unkempt graveyard. Dried grass obscured the markers, and the wings had been broken years before from the stone angels guarding the rusted wire gate; there was about the place none of the respect for death implicit in a well-tended plot. Once, a long time before, Walter Knight had brought Lily to see this graveyard. He had made her trace out with her finger the letters on the stones, the names and their dates, until she found the small, rough stone which marked the oldest grave. Matthew Broderick Knight, January 2, 1847, until December 6, 1848. The baby had been the first of them to die in California. It was a favorite story, passed on from Knight to Knight and documented periodically in the historical supplements to the Sacramento Union. Born in Kentucky, the child had begun to burn with infant fever on the way west. Another child in the party had died of it, and that mother had carried the dead child in her arms for three days, telling no one, afraid they would bury her baby before they came to a station. But Matthew Knight had lived out the crossing; he died instead in a room in Sacramento that first winter, while his father, Lily’s great-great-grandfather, was building the first house on the ranch. His mother, twenty years old that winter, was deranged for months, believing herself at home in Bourbon County even as she hauled buckets of Sacramento River silt to cover the hardpan around her raw house. She wanted to grow a garden of forget-me-nots and love-lies-bleeding and the dogwood she remembered from her mother’s kitchen stoop, but as summer broke and she began to feel herself again she planted those same alien poppies and lupine that grew on the child’s grave. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, she had ordered cut into the gravestone, but that had been when she was ill. The symbolic nature of Amanda Broderick Knight’s first garden on the ranch was, for the Knights, this story’s raison-d’être. “I think nobody owns land until their dead are in it,” Walter Knight had said to Lily, playing a familiar variation on a familiar motif. Even as she recognized that all he was giving her was the official family line, Lily could not help but be disarmed. She answered in the same rich vein: “Sometimes I think this whole valley belongs to me.” “It does, you hear me?” Walter Knight said sharply. “We made it.” She had never doubted that.

  The grave was covered by noon. Her arm through Everett’s, Lily sat in the car, twisting the diamond on her finger and watching her mother. Edith Knight stood in the dry grass by the wire gate and received: accepted as her due the certified recollections, the ritual testimonials which serve as visas into that comfortable territory where no dead man is less than noble. You remember when Walter came up that summer, ’thirty-three, we were in the middle of a crop and there was all the trouble and Walter sent in his own men and cleaned up the crop. You remember how Walter held the note on the Hawkes place all those years after it was due until the son could pay it off. Remember now. Remember. The litany of Walter Knight’s shining hours continued until one o’clock, long after most of the mourners, including Mr. McClellan and Martha, had left for Rita Blanchard’s funeral in town; Edith Knight stood impassive and triumphant throughout. Were they not attesting, after all, that he now belonged to God alone and that she, Edith, had sole rights to his relics in this world?

  Two weeks later, the lawyers notarized her victory. In 1933, Rita Blanchard, needing cash, had sold to Walter Knight 120 frontage feet of a downtown block which had been in her family for eighty years. Although his will provided that this parcel be returned to Rita, their simultaneous deaths meant that it now belonged to Edith. To the lawyers, the family, and to the reporter who was writing up the disposition of the estate, she announced that she wanted the sizable income from that property placed annually in a University of California scholarship fund to be administered by the Department of English and to bear Rita’s name. “If there is one thing I will remember about poor Rita to my dying day,” Edith Knight explained, “it’s that Rita was a reader.” Because the entire estate went to Edith (passing to Lily at her death and held throughout both their lifetimes in a loose trust which would vest in Knight at some point after his twenty-first birthday), she could now afford, in every sense, to dispose of Rita with that grand gesture. (The impact of the Rita Blanchard Scholarships was somewhat weakened, however, when it became apparent a month later that Rita had left half the Blanchard estate to Lily, the other half to be divided among sixteen cousins, including Everett, Martha, and Sarah McClellan. As Martha said to Everett in the Blanchard lawyer’s office, you really had to grant that round to Rita.)

  9

  There were roses (so many for September) and late poppies: the room was full of them. Everett must have brought them in from the ranch. No matter what way Lily turned her head on the pillow she saw roses, dropping their petals in the closed gray room which looked exactly like the room they had given her when Knight was born. Somewhere among the roses were jasmine gardenias, sweet and heavy as the drugs. The nuns would not open the windows in the storm. The rain had begun the night before she started labor and was still falling; she watched it washing down the narrow windows all that morning. When she closed her eyes she saw rain beating the leaves from the camellias around the house. It must be raining in every part of the world, flooding all the valleys: she was certain that her baby had died in the night, that the nuns were concealing the death from her, and she knew as well that before long she would begin to hemorrhage and die herself. She had recently read A Farewell to Arms and now she cried to think of Everett walking out of the hospital into the rain like Lieutenant Henry.

  Everett had come yesterday. When she woke from the drugs he had been sitting by the window, and she had watched him for several minutes without speaking. The San Francisco papers were spread on the floor around his chair. He had been reading three or four papers all that year, since before Pearl Harbor. Although she tried every few days to read a paper through, she seemed always to have come in too late on any given action to understand that day’s plays. After a while she had tried concentrating only on the war in the Pacific, which as far as she could gather America seemed to be losing. Although this did not seem entirely credible, it seemed, winning or losing, more credible than anything about the war in Europe; what the war in Europe so notably lacked, for Lily, was a Pearl Harbor. As Mr. McClellan had said the morning of Pearl Harbor, when Martha ran downstairs wrapped in a towel to tell them, “That tears it.” (That was all he said, and he did not say that until he had shouted at Martha “You keep on listening to the radio in the bathtub, Missy, you’re going to fry yourself,” but he spent the rest of the day pacing up and down in front of the house, scanning the sky and muttering to himself.) Until Everett had explained to her that the Germans and the Japanese were pledged to defend one another, a point which had eluded her for the first two w
eeks of the war, Lily had been at a loss to understand what the United States was doing in Europe at all. The Pacific, of course, was another case. It did not please her to think, as she had thought, that this baby might have been conceived the morning of Pearl Harbor. It was not propitious.

  Everett, yesterday, had been looking out the hospital window into the rain. The lights seemed to be just coming on outside. It would be about five o’clock, she supposed, and there would be lights in all the windows down Thirty-eighth Street. Only Rita Blanchard’s house would be dark; the house had been empty since the accident. She could never remember that the house now belonged to her, to her and Everett and Martha and Sarah and thirteen other people, but mostly to her. Everett had talked a few weeks ago to a man who wanted to buy the place and have it rezoned for a day nursery. That would be the day. Painted wooden rabbits on Rita Blanchard’s lawn.

  “Tell me what’s in the newspaper,” she said finally. Everett was always trying to tell his father what was in the newspaper. Because Mr. McClellan neither read the papers (none of them, he said, carried anything but pictures of that crew in Washington) nor listened to the radio, his many ideas about how the war should be conducted were based almost entirely upon information given him by Everett. Once he had absorbed two or three facts, usually tangential, he would cut Everett off by saying that it was no news to him, he knew those yellowbellies and all their tricks like the back of his hand.

  Everett folded the newspaper and smiled. “How long you been awake?”

  She laughed and put her hands to her stomach. It was still swollen. “You needn’t whisper. Where’s the baby?”

  He came back in a few minutes with one of the nuns, who held the baby wrapped in pink flannel.

  “A girl,” she said. “That would have pleased Daddy.”

  “It pleases me.”

  Lily turned her head on the pillow so that she could see Everett’s face.

  “Listen,” she said. “I was all right this time, wasn’t I.”

  “You were fine.”

  She lay back. “I can’t feed it, you know.”

  “They’ll feed her.”

  “It’s funny to hear you say her. I don’t even know what we’ll call it.”

  “You said Julia. Julia Knight McClellan. I thought we decided that.”

  “I just said that because of my grandmother. I never really thought it would be a girl. I was thinking of Walter.” She laughed. “It’s entirely too small to call something like Julia Knight McClellan. It sounds like a suffragette.”

  “She’s big for a baby.” Everett turned to the nun. “Didn’t you say she was big for a baby?”

  “Everett, I know. She’s a regular King Kong of a baby.”

  “Listen,” she added after the nun had left the room. “We’ll have more. We’ll have about six. And Martha can have about six. And they’ll have these terrible fights because there won’t be enough land to go around.”

  “And Sarah. Don’t forget Sarah.”

  “That’s right, and Sarah.” She had in fact forgotten Sarah. “Anyway. There’ll be this one runt. Likable but you know, a loser. He’ll be conned out of everything but some little back piece with no water. Then one day while the rest of them are playing golf—they’ll be forever hanging around the country club, that type—and he’s scratching around his place, you know what happens then?”

  “Gold.”

  “Everett, baby. You live so in the past. It turns out his piece is the only exit for one hundred miles on a proposed transcontinental freeway.”

  “A freeway?”

  “An exit, Everett. Standard Stations. Motels. Piggly Wiggly Markets. Long-term leases.”

  Everett smiled.

  “Listen,” she said. “I behaved this time, didn’t I.”

  Everett sat down by the bed and took her hand. “Yes.”

  “I didn’t get scared and make a lot of trouble. I mean all the way through it was all right this time.”

  “You didn’t make a lot of trouble before.”

  “I did. Your father told Martha he hoped I never got pregnant again because I was impossible.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Never mind. I was, that’s the point.”

  “Martha didn’t mean it if she told you that.”

  “Never mind. It was better this time, you saw.”

  “It was fine.”

  “You have to take care of me,” she whispered.

  He held her hand and looked out the window a long while. “I will,” he said. “I do. Don’t I.”

  Although she had thought for a moment that she had never been so happy, Everett had left when her mother came (“I meant to come earlier but I was downtown,” Edith Knight said, remotely bewildered, the way she had been since a few weeks after the funeral; despite a new vicuña coat and an absolute lack of any visible defect in her grooming, she presented a curious impression of disarray, twisting her rings, smoothing her hair; straightening the sheet as she kissed Lily goodbye), and after her mother left Lily was alone. The nuns had begun their evening visits, walking the corridor in pairs. When one paused outside the door, the light blinking off her thick glasses, Lily turned away from the door, pretending to be asleep, and as she watched the street lights blur through the blown branches outside the window she wondered how the nuns had known, and if they had once been as she was now. She thought of her mother, who by now would be sitting alone with a tray in the living room at home, picking at her inevitable lamb chop and watching the same rain. Rain seldom fell so long so early; if it kept up there could be floods before Christmas. Once when she was a child a levee had broken on Christmas Eve, and the churches were filled with tired women in raincoats and children in blue bathrobes. At Edith Knight’s insistence she had given all but one of her unopened Christmas presents to the evacuated children, whose own, Edith Knight had explained, were floating over to the poor Chinese children. Put that way, it had seemed an ideal situation, one in which only Lily came out behind.

  Although Everett should have eaten with her mother tonight, eaten with her or taken her down to the ranch, he would not have thought of it. And her mother was so lonely that she seemed to have lost even the idea of communication. “Some nights when the wind comes up I think I’m the only person alive on the river,” she had said a few weeks ago. “Why don’t you call me?” Lily said. “Why don’t you call me or one of the Randalls?” “I could, of course,” her mother said without interest, as if Lily had introduced a quite irrelevant topic. In a sense she had: there was little that Lily or the Randalls or anyone else could do to mend the web of concern which Walter Knight and Rita Blanchard had woven around Edith Knight for a dozen years and had torn apart in June. It had once occurred to Lily that her mother missed Rita more than she missed Walter Knight; it had been Rita, after all, who provided her with her rôle, who might well have gone on providing it, walking proof not only of Walter Knight’s failure (dead or alive) but of Edith Knight’s strength in the face of it.

  Well, her mother had chosen her rôle, the nuns theirs. But how did they know. How had Mary Knight known. Mary Knight Randall had entered the Sisters of Mercy the summer she was eighteen. She had gone to Europe with her father, Walter Knight’s cousin, and when they got off the boat in New York that August she told him that she did not intend to go to Berkeley in September. Although he tried to reason with her all the way across the country on the train, even promised that she could have a new robin’s-egg blue Ford convertible and spend the entire month of January skiing at Aspen, Mary Knight entered the convent the same week Lily went down to Berkeley. It was the week of rushing, and because Mary Knight had planned to be with her, Lily had a double room alone at the Durant Hotel. She lay awake every night, listening to the Campanile strike in the coastal fog and feeling intensely sorry for herself, partly because she did not know how to talk to the golden girls from San Francisco and Pasadena but mostly because she had been deprived of Mary Knight, who was older than she was but had never know
n anything at all, had moved through adolescence in an untroubled innocence which had obscurely reassured Lily, made her want to have Mary Knight with her always, a talisman. (Once at a beach party, Joe Templeton’s younger brother, Pete, had tried to get Mary Knight up on the bluff in a car with him. “Why do they want to do that?” she whispered later to Lily. “Never you mind,” Lily said, throwing sand on the fire. She had disliked Pete Templeton for trying and loved Mary Knight for not knowing.) Even the Catholics mourned Mary Knight; Helen Randall, who had refused to go to Europe with them because she wanted to go to Banff, still put the blame on Mary Knight’s father. Mary Knight was an impressionable girl and if he had not exposed her day after day to those morbid European cathedrals it simply would not have happened. He should have taken her, as she, Helen, had suggested in the first place, to the Calgary Stampede. Now there was a portrait in the dining room of the Randalls’ house, hung as prominently as if it were of someone dead, Mary Knight at sixteen, absurd but oddly indomitable in a pink tulle dress.

  Mary Knight, her mother, the nuns in the corridor: they all seemed to know something she did not. Well, she had at least given Everett what he wanted. Even Martha could scarcely have given him two children. But she could not escape the uneasy certainty that she had done so herself only by way of some intricate deception, that her entire life with Everett was an improvisation dependent upon cues she might one day fail to hear, characterizations she might at any time forget. Except when she was in trouble (when her father died, or when she was pregnant with Knight), she could think of little to say to Everett: she was not, nor was he, a teller of anecdotes or gossip, and sometimes whole weeks passed without their having what could be called, in even the crudest sense, a conversation. Usually in bed she pretended that she was someone else, a stranger, and she supposed that Everett did too; when she did not pretend that she was someone else, she pretended that Everett was. The only times she did not pretend that either or both of them were someone else, she pretended that it had never happened before, that it was again that first time on the river. There had been about that first time a sharpness, a finality absent since. For a long time, even after she had done it hundreds of times, the fact that it had happened at all would come to her with a shock; it had seemed improbable that anyone else could do it, and the hearsay knowledge that not just anyone but almost everyone had done it remained a persistent flaw in her satisfaction with her own performance. It was as if she had stumbled alone across the plains and found that everyone else had already arrived, by TWA. Even now, two years later, those few minutes were more vivid than any since: she had lost neither the sense of wonder nor the sense of deprivation that the experience had not been uniquely hers. The summer smell of that morning, river water and sweat and the acrid sting of weeds breaking under them (and that would always be summer’s smell), was stronger still than all the roses and jasmine gardenias in the whole of Mercy Hospital.