by Joan Didion
I should have taken the Holy Ghost not Everett, she had thought when she woke this morning, and she had snapped at the nun who was trying to take her temperature. A pillow over her head, she had lain still all morning, lifting the pillow only to watch the rain outside. She should sit up and comb her hair, wash her face, put on the silk bed-jacket her mother had brought. Everett would come again this morning, and she did not want to see him. She was not sure that it would be all right even if they could go back to that morning on the river and start over again; because she could not put her finger on what was wrong it would only go wrong a second time. She wanted now only to see her father, to go back to that country in time where no one made mistakes. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. She had memorized those words at the time of her father’s death, had repeated them as she walked down streets and brushed her hair, as she lay in bed and as she drove the river road, and she repeated them now against Everett’s arrival.
10
“You’ll get along fine,” Everett said, the morning he left for Fort Lewis. “You’re a big girl now. You wait. You’ll be all right here. Wait and see.”
He spoke very low; both Knight and Julie were asleep in the next room.
“You didn’t have to go,” Lily repeated. She could not view Everett’s enlistment as anything other than personal and possibly deserved retribution. Bataan might fall, Corregidor might fall, and the Japanese might occupy Attu and Kiska, but Everett could not have gone had she not failed him somewhere. “You have a son. You have a two-month-old daughter. Your father needs you.”
Everett sat up on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. Although light now filtered through the shutters, they had not slept. After Mr. McClellan went to bed they had, between them, drunk most of a bottle of bourbon, and then Lily had cried (partly the bourbon) and they had lain in the dark awake, oppressed less by the parting than by some uneasy apprehension of how the parting should be affecting them.
“Lily,” he said. “You keep saying the same things. I want to go.”
“I don’t see why.”
“I waited a year. Almost a year. Now I have to go.”
“You don’t have to. You want to. You said you wanted to.”
“All right. I want to. I don’t see any difference.”
Lily lay without moving, her head aching dully.
“I believe you want to die,” she said after a while.
“All right. I want to die. Now I have to get up.”
While Everett shaved she finished packing his bag, trying dutifully to memorize the way his shorts felt to the touch, the particular color and translucency of his toothbrush. They seemed things that she might want, at some future point, to remember. Although she considered putting on the same plaid skirt and paint-stained sweater she wore most mornings, she thought then of ships going out under the Golden Gate in fog, of Wake Island, of that hot golden summer before they were married, and pulled on instead the white cashmere sweater that Everett had given her on her nineteenth birthday.
He was to take the Shasta Daylight from Davis station at seven o’clock. It would take them close to an hour to drive there. Although Lily wished now that someone would drive over with them, all the goodbyes had been said already: Martha had come over from Davis for dinner, and had driven back before midnight to study for a midterm. (“Daddy is of the opinion I’m meeting all kinds of rich citrus growers from down South,” she had said at dinner. “When all I’m doing is taking midterms and lending my clothes to rich citrus growers’ daughters so they can go out with rich citrus growers’ sons.” Everett had seemed puzzled. “What do you want to run around with people from down South for?” he had wanted to know. “Oh you know me, Everett,” Martha had said. “An old One-Worlder.”)
The house was perfectly still, and cold from the November night. Chilled through, Lily stood in the hallway and ran her fingers along the grain of the stair railing. When she heard Everett on the stairs she began, nervously, straightening some letters left on the hall table.
“Now listen,” he said. “I’ll write you tomorrow. Then will you please write me and tell me how you’re getting along?”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes fixed on the fireplace in the living room. The house downstairs had the same curious appearance it always had in the early morning, the look of a house abandoned in an emergency years before. It was hard to believe there were not really dusty sheets thrown over the faded slipcovers, impossible to think that the magazines thrown on the tables were actually dated 1942. “I’ll write you,” she added. “Every day.”
“And try to get my father to slow down.”
“Yes.”
“And see people and get some sleep. Gain some weight.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll knit you some khaki socks.”
“Well.” He held out her coat. “The home front.”
“That’s right,” she said. “The home front.”
She drove to Davis; they scarcely spoke. She watched the road and he stared out the window. A light fog hung low on the river and the knotted, broken strings fluttered among the fields of bare hop poles. There had been frost in the night; it would warm toward noon.
Although the train was due in fifteen minutes, there were only a few other cars at the station. They sat in the station wagon, the heater on and the windows steamed, and Everett put his arm around her shoulders. She said that the sweater made her feel pretty; he said that she was pretty, pretty hair, pretty eyes, pretty arms. Be quiet, she said, pressing his arm. There was little now that she wanted to say, and in the end she did not say anything, because Martha came to the station. They saw her running down the platform, clutching a book and a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums, a dirty poplin raincoat over her nightgown.
“You look like a goddamn refugee,” Everett said, opening the door of the station wagon.
“I was afraid I’d miss you if I stopped to get dressed. So I just came.”
“Lucky you didn’t run across any rich citrus growers,” Everett said.
Martha pushed the book and the chrysanthemums into Everett’s arms. Embarrassed then, she stood outside the car, looking off toward the station, her hands shoved down into the pockets of her raincoat.
Everett opened the book and looked up at Martha.
“It’s my copy,” she said. “I knew you didn’t have one.”
“What is it?” Lily asked.
Martha did not look at her. “A family book.”
“The McClellan Journal,” Everett read. “An Account of An Overland Journey to California in the Year 1848.”
“Privately printed,” Martha added.
“Imagine,” Lily said.
Everett and Martha, she thought. Forward into battle with the Cross before. She remembered her surprise at finding on the walls of Martha’s room, when they had been children and she had been sent to play at the McClellan place, neither Degas ballet dancers nor scenes from Alice in Wonderland but a framed deed signed by John Sutter in 1847, a matted list of the provisions carried on an obscure crossing in 1852, a detailed relief map of the Humboldt Sink, and a large lithograph of Donner Pass on which Martha had printed, in two neat columns, the names of the casualties and the survivors of the Donner-Reed crossing. Martha’s favorite game as a child had in fact been “Donner Party,” a ritual drama in which she, as its originator, always played Tamsen Donner and was left, day after day, to perish by the side of the husband whose foolish miscalculations had brought them all to grief. (In Martha’s re-enactments, the Winning of the West invariably took on this unobtrusively feminist slant; in another game, “Central Pacific,” the power behind the transcontinental railroad turned out to be not Collis Potter Huntington at all, but Leland Stanford’s wife Jane, and Lily grew up with the distinct impression, planted by Martha and uncorrected for years, that the éminence grise behind the California Republic had been Jessie Benton Frémont.) It seemed to have been an ineradicable mote in Martha
’s eye that everyone from whom she was descended had, unlike Tamsen Donner, gotten through, and when Lily told her that someone in her father’s family had traveled with the Donner-Reed Party as far as the Applegate Cut-off, Martha had been despondent for several days. As a matter of fact she had mentioned it querulously only a few weeks before.
“You could lend it to people,” Martha suggested, her hands still in her pockets. “I mean it might be very inspiring.”
“It’s the nicest present you’ve ever given me,” Everett said, getting out of the car and putting his arms around her shoulders. “The nicest anybody’s ever given me.”
After they had put Everett on the train (“The train,” Martha screamed, and the three of them ran, Everett trying to take his other bag from Martha and Martha wrenching it away, to the platform, where Everett kissed first Lily, then Martha, and then a small girl who had wandered, carrying an American flag on a stick, from a family at the far end of the platform), Lily and Martha sat in the car, not speaking, until the train began to roll. Tapping an unlighted cigarette on the dashboard and humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Martha had seemed, until then, in trance. When the train whistled, however, she jumped out of the car and ran again to the platform, calling Everett’s name, looking in all the windows as the cars gathered speed, and then she walked slowly back to the station wagon, her raincoat fallen open and her pale blue nightgown trailing through the leaves that blew across the concrete parking lot.
“Get in,” Lily said. “We’ll get some breakfast.”
“He left the flowers.”
“He’s got The McClellan Journal. That’s what counts.”
Martha looked away. Lily saw that she was crying.
“They’d only have died on the train,” Lily said. “You put them in your room.”
Martha slammed the door closed. “I think I’ll go over home with you.”
“I thought you had a midterm.”
“I do.”
“We’ll get some breakfast,” Lily repeated, turning the ignition key.
They stopped at a drive-in near the Davis campus. Martha talked animatedly for a few minutes about the rôle played by Alice Lee Grosjean in the Long Administration in Louisiana (it seemed she was writing a paper about the Longs) and about someone at Berkeley who had invited her down for the Miami Triad dance. (It was to be at the Fairmont and she really wanted to go, except this boy had an unfortunate predilection for saying things like you’re the most terrific girl I’ve ever known, and she really wasn’t up to that kind of thing, not these days, not any more.) Then, abruptly, she stopped talking and began examining her fingernails, three of which were enameled a brilliant American Beauty red.
“Everett said last night I shouldn’t wear fingernail polish,” she said after a while. “So I started to take it off this morning but I was in a hurry and spilled the whole bottle of remover. All over Betty Jean’s V-Mail.” Martha giggled. Betty Jean, who was engaged to a Marine, was her roommate and current bête noire. According to Martha, Betty Jean saved on board money by eating cheese and crackers in their room instead of lunch downstairs; the further economy was that she then saved the cheese glasses for her hope chest. Martha claimed that Betty Jean had twenty-seven cheese glasses, fifteen with red tulips and twelve with blue cornflowers.
“It’s a pretty color,” Lily said.
“Everett doesn’t like it. I told you.” Martha began drumming her fingernails on the metal tray.
Lily did not say anything.
“You’ll miss Everett,” Martha said finally.
“Yes.”
“A whole lot?”
“Of course.”
Martha looked out the window. “How much?”
“A whole lot,” Lily said, faintly irritated. “What did you mean about the boy who asked you to the Miami Triad? Why don’t you go?”
“Daddy thinks I should get married.”
“What’s that got to do with the Miami Triad?”
Martha did not answer.
“Who do you want to marry?” Lily said.
“I don’t know. Somebody.” Elaborately, Martha lit a cigarette. “It doesn’t much matter who, does it?”
Lily shrugged, and after a while Martha reached in front of her and flicked on the lights to call the carhop.
“I better take my midterm.”
When Lily stopped in front of the dormitory, Martha opened the door but did not get out. “Listen,” she said. “Do you think I should?”
“Not unless you want to. Not unless you love someone.”
“Come off it, Lily. I didn’t expect you to talk like such a fool. Whoever loved anybody for more than two weeks. Except your own family. Or maybe somebody you’ve lived with for years and years, I don’t know about that.”
“There’s a lot of time.”
“ ‘There’s a lot of time,’ ” Martha mimicked. “There’s no time at all. That’s exactly the point. Everybody’s going away, and half of everybody’s going to die, and the war may go on twenty years, and Everett’s gone away—”
“Anyway,” she added. “I’m sure I don’t know who I’d marry. I’m sure I don’t know anyone who could take care of me.”
“Maybe,” Lily said after a while, “you could marry someone you could take care of. Maybe that’s the same thing in the end.” As she said it, it occurred to her that she might well have happened, while fumbling through platitudes for Martha’s benefit, upon an actual fact, a profound truth: someone could take care of you or you could take care of someone; you could be told or you could tell the comfortable loving fictions (If you loved me you would steal for me, and tell me fairy tales of a happy land, it was, she thought, a German song), and in either case what was involved—all that was involved—was a commitment. Perhaps it did not matter much who made it, or how or why: it might very well be the same thing in the end. It doesn’t much matter who does it.
Martha picked up one of the chrysanthemums and began rolling and shredding the petals into small balls.
“Maybe it would be the same for you,” she said finally. “You’re so strong.”
“I am not,” Lily said, jarred by Martha’s moodiness and by the note in her voice. “I’m not a bit strong.”
Martha shrugged and got out of the car. “All right, you’re not a bit strong. It’s your act, Lily baby, you play it any way you want. Anyway,” she added, “you’re strong enough to make people take care of you.”
Even if Lily had been able to think what to say it would have been too late: Martha was already running up the walk, her hands over her face, running and stumbling on the lace hem of the pale blue nightgown, last year’s Christmas present from Everett, picked out by Lily, extravagantly expensive, handmade at Maison Mendessolle in the St. Francis Hotel.
“We saw Martha this morning,” Lily said to Mr. McClellan at dinner. Although she had intended to stop by her mother’s on the way back from Davis, she had driven instead directly to the ranch, and had spent the rest of the day upstairs, aimlessly taking things from drawers and putting them in other drawers, sleeplessly lying on her back in their bed, still unmade, the sprigged lawn spread her great-grandmother had quilted thrown down on the floor along with Everett’s worn sneakers, the November Fortune, and the bottle of bourbon they had almost finished the night before. Not until five o’clock did she go downstairs to see China Mary and the babies; then she kissed Knight absently and carried Julie upstairs in order to feed her in the bedroom. Finishing the bottle of bourbon as she spooned Julie’s puréed carrots, she avoided Mr. McClellan for as long as she could and then felt guilty about even that: there she was, pointlessly depriving him of a small pleasure, the opportunity to watch Julie eating, one of the few activities on her schedule animated enough to interest him.
“I said we saw Martha,” she repeated. “She came to the station.”
Mr. McClellan did not answer.
They were alone in the dining room, absurdly cavernous, oppressively lined with glassed cabin
ets of crystal and china; the shelves held two complete services of Limoges, each for forty-eight, although in two generations the McClellans had not, to the best of Lily’s knowledge, entertained more than three guests at dinner on any given evening.
Mr. McClellan had not spoken since the fruit cup, during which Lily had said that she did not agree that the International Workers of the World were the principal threat facing the United States in 1942. Apparently because he had seen mention of Tom Mooney’s name in an unprecedentedly thorough reading of the San Francisco Chronicle, Mr. McClellan had been brooding all day upon causes and effects. He guessed Miss Lily Knight, since she was so smart, knew every detail behind the 1916 Preparedness Day Parade bombing in San Francisco. No, of course not. Well here it was: ten people in their graves, thanks to anarchists and Wobblies. He guessed Miss Lily Knight knew all about the 1913 Wheatland Riot, three thousand hop pickers running amok, a tragedy so close to home it might as well have taken place on the kitchen stoop. No, of course not. Possibly Miss Lily Knight still had a few things to learn about Wobblies. He, on the other hand, knew the details behind such events, and was therefore in a position to know that wherever you found trouble in California today you had those boys to thank for it. Cherchez le Wobbly, Lily had suggested, and Mr. McClellan had withdrawn into injured silence, broken only when he was moved to place his knife and fork side by side on his plate, wipe his mouth with his napkin, slap both hands palms down on the table and demand loudly: “What are laws for?”