by Joan Didion
Lily raised her voice now. “I said Martha came to the station. She’s upset about Everett.”
Mr. McClellan cocked his head to one side, apparently to get a different light on the picture which hung on the wall opposite him, a large oil painting of a cornucopia.
“What about Everett?” he said finally.
“His going away.”
“She’s not a gold-star sister yet,” Mr. McClellan said, his voice flat.
11
Their communication did not improve noticeably during evenings to come, that winter when the rain fell for what seemed weeks on end. Quite often Mr. McClellan would not speak at all, not out of any hostility but simply because the capacity for random conversation seemed to him less a grace than the certain expression of a weak mind; other nights he would become quite voluble, usually on the subject of the county supervisor (who was, he had come to believe, a paid agent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt), and then he would settle down after dinner with a copy of the California Penal Code, pouncing with intense delight upon certain loopholes and inconsistencies. He had first hit upon this diversion some years before, not long after Mildred McClellan’s death, and had regretted ever since, he told Lily, that he had not read for the law. Aside from the evenings when he read aloud from the Penal Code, their liveliest times together were spent playing hearts, for small amounts of money which Mr. McClellan almost inflexibly won. If, after querying China Mary and checking the pockets of all the coats in all the closets, they could still find no change in the house, they played for toothpicks, redeemable no later than the next evening in cash.
Nonetheless, they had between them a curious companionableness, a real, if not exactly infectious, rapport, most apparent to Lily on the occasional evenings when Martha came over from school and upset it. It did not seem to matter if Martha were calm or nervous, buoyant or depressed (although in practice she seemed to come home only in states of aimless crisis): she invariably shattered the balance of reserve and aggressiveness which existed in the house when Mr. McClellan and Lily were alone with the children. Lily did not know what it was about Martha. She thought probably it was that neither she nor Mr. McClellan were what her father would have called “good company,” and that possibly Martha was.
But in spite of the unexpected comfort Lily took in Everett’s father, it was still the sad season: Everett gone from the McClellan house, her father gone from her own house. All that month before Christmas the house was cold and dark, and Knight could not play outside. In the afternoons Lily wrapped the children up and drove through the rain, past the eroded gullies where muddy run-off swirled along the ranch road, to see her mother; in the evenings, no matter if dinner had been silent or combative or comparatively festive with the promise of hearts or the Penal Code, Mr. McClellan went to his room at ten-thirty, and Lily sat on downstairs alone, listening to the rain and night noises. At first she had tried turning on the radio, and had learned the lyrics to a great many songs including one called “I Spoke to Jefferson at Guadalcanal,” but after a while the radio seemed only to intensify, with its impenetrable cheerfulness, whatever was ominous in the noises outside.
Again during those first few weeks after Everett went away, she began to think of little but her father’s death. During the five months since it had happened, she had been distracted first by Julie’s birth, then by Everett’s desertion; now, it was with her every night. Sitting downstairs alone after Mr. McClellan had gone to bed she would take first her father’s point of view, then her mother’s; then, more and more often, once Rita had been revealed to her in the rôle of victim, Rita Blanchard’s. It was not that there had not been something about Rita Blanchard from the beginning, some inability, some failure in her eyes, that marked her for Walter Knight. It was only that if he had wanted to love all of them and been capable of loving none of them, only Rita had really been deceived. Only Rita had put all her chips on that board.
Although Lily wrote to Everett at Fort Lewis every night, there was little to say. She could not write to him about Rita Blanchard; she had never even talked to him about Rita Blanchard. The babies and I miss you: that was what she could write to Everett. China Mary sings Knight a song about how you’re off to get a rabbit skin to wrap your baby bunny in, which delights him no end. Julie has a cold from the rain. You must please write your father to do something about the furnace. I do not mind eating breakfast in two sweaters but it is the last straw when he declares the cold is good for the children because look what it does for a collie dog’s coat. Last night we played hearts and I won for the first time, although as it turned out I was sorry. The thing is we played with toothpicks again, and because I won thirty-three cents I ended up with thirty-three toothpicks. Well. Tonight before dinner he appeared with a quarter and eight pennies and demanded the toothpicks. I couldn’t think what I’d done with them and he said in that case he could hardly be expected to turn over the thirty-three cents. I said all right, don’t, we’d forget it, but he held up dinner an hour and fifteen minutes while we enlisted China Mary in a search for the toothpicks. Finally she found them in my apron pocket, but unfortunately there only seemed to be twenty-eight left. He finally gave me the full thirty-three cents in exchange for the twenty-eight toothpicks, but said he was setting a bad example and lectured me all through dinner on the importance of property rights and keeping one’s accounts in order. It was, he said, the American way and we could not begin too soon setting an example for Knight and Julie. It seems funny now that I tell you about it but it was nerve-racking at the time. I love you and miss you especially at night.
The first week in January, there was at least some news: Joe Templeton came by after dinner and spoke to your father about buying the Braden place at Auburn. He’ll write you but your father hopes you won’t sell.
“Joe Templeton wants the Braden place,” she said to her mother the next afternoon. Their afternoons together had taken on an unvaried pattern: after Lily had put the children down, she and her mother would knit; Lily for Everett, her mother for the Episcopal Guild bazaar. While they knitted, Edith Knight would resume a monologue about things which had happened some years before; the details, for example, of how the Blanchards lost their river place on a note to a man named C.T. Godey in 1927, or an analysis of a rumor, current in 1931, that one of Lily’s second cousins (once removed) had been carrying on with a clarinet player in the orchestra at the St. Francis Hotel. (It was an untruth, according to Edith Knight, although it was no surprise it got started because Elizabeth was practically mental about jazz musicians and had once stood up in a speakeasy on Sutter Street with everybody on the river looking on and sung “Big Noise Blew in from Winnetka” with her arm around a colored drummer.) Once she had become familiar with the names and the chronology, Lily found these accounts generally interesting; she had never felt so close to her mother.
Edith Knight put down the Peruvian face mask she was knitting for the bazaar. “You saw poor Joe?”
“He came by last night. He didn’t realize the piece was in Everett’s name.”
“If the McClellans have the sense God gave them they’ll hang on to the Braden place. I used to go on picnics there.” Edith Knight paused. “Francie wasn’t with Joe?”
“No. He came alone.”
“Alone,” Edith Knight repeated with satisfaction. “Of course he would have.”
Lily did not say anything. Her mother began to hum tunelessly, tapping one knitting needle against the arm of her chair. Her eyes were closed.
“Francie may have been outside in the car,” Lily said. “Actually he only stayed a few minutes.”
“Oh no.” Edith Knight opened her eyes and started to work with fresh vigor on the face mask, intended for use whenever there was danger of frostbite. “I wouldn’t think so. He was no doubt quite alone.”
Lily did not know what she could say that might not in some way corroborate her mother’s fairly opaque conclusions. She rather wished that she had never mentioned Joe Templeton, and
tried to think of some way to turn the conversation back a decade or two.
“Didn’t Francie Templeton have a sister who wasn’t quite bright?” she asked finally.
“That’s right,” Edith Knight said without interest. “She’s been dead seventeen years next month.” She continued knitting in silence.
“It’s Francie again,” she added at last, abandoning the hope of being prodded. “Helen Randall went up there one afternoon—Francie had invited her up, specifically invited her for that afternoon—and Francie didn’t even come downstairs. Joe made excuses for her. She starts in the morning with vermouth.”
“Vermouth, is it.” Lily laughed. So often had she heard her mother say of someone who drank that he or she started in the morning with vermouth that she could not drink vermouth without a pleasant sense of discreet raciness; thanks to Edith Knight, vermouth was for Lily one of the small adventures that frequently made her day. Lily’s day could also be made by ordering stockings by the dozen rather than by the pair; wearing expensive perfume around the ranch in the mornings; and, among other things, focusing for a fraction of a minute on some stranger’s eyes and making him look back just until, say, the traffic light changed.
“I don’t know what’s going to become of those twins,” Edith Knight said, ignoring Lily. “They will no doubt grow up to be zoot-suiters. Look and see if there’s any sherry left.”
Lily picked up the decanter and filled her mother’s glass.
“On the other hand,” Edith Knight added, “there’s no need to pity Joe. He’s been quick enough to find comfort in the past.”
Lily sat down again without saying anything.
“If you understand what I mean. About Joe.”
“Yes.” Lily picked up her knitting again. “I understand you all right.”
“Not that she hasn’t been a cross. Lord no. But Joe doesn’t exactly wear himself out carrying it, either. If you see.”
“I understand,” Lily repeated.
She had understood well enough. As had Joe. That had required no roman de la rose. Once the speculative glances and the accidental meetings were out of the way (the procedure, she saw, was a way of doing rather than anything done; first the miraculous awareness of the possibility, then the almost inaudible overture, the response so subtle as to be uncertain), they met in the late afternoons of that winter and in the long spring twilights, met in cars parked off the levee, bars frequented by Mexicans, and in an empty shack on the piece downriver which belonged to Francie Templeton’s mother. They did not talk much, and she was never certain that either derived from the other much pleasure, as that word is commonly defined. She knew only that they continued to interest each other. A tacit complicity between them cut that interest away from everything going on in other places and at other times; Lily discovered that she could see Joe later any evening, or perhaps the next day in town, and not only behave as she would have behaved before but think of him as she had thought of him before. She had always thought him rather a likable fool; she still did. She did not for the time being find it necessary to make frequent connections between Joe and Everett, whose letters came from Georgia now, and Francie lived in Everett’s country. It concerned, she thought, neither Everett nor Francie; it did not even seem, in any real way, to concern her.
When the nights grew warm, come May of that year, they occasionally met late at night. The wind blew off the river through the shack, its windows broken long ago by children or transients, and they lay on a torn mattress and listened to the current. Once in a while she asked him something about the war, and he explained to her about Tunisia; once in a while she told him about something which had happened a long time before, a dance she had gone to or a slight she had imagined, but mostly they simply lay there in the dark in the bare room littered with dead wisteria, blown through the windows during a wind in April, and listened to the water. I love you, Joe said once, Lily Knight, and she turned away from him.
“I mean now,” he said. “I meant I love you now.”
“I know.” She twisted her shoulder free from his hand. “I knew what you meant. That’s all right.”
“Lily Knight,” he repeated, drawing the sheet she had brought up over her shoulders.
She sat up, pulling the sheet around her. “My name’s not Lily Knight. If you recall. I’m married to Everett McClellan and he loves me very very much and nothing I do can change it.”
Joe did not answer, and when he pulled her down again she said I’m sorry, baby it’s all right, and it was all right, possibly sharper and better and more interesting than it had ever been before.
12
In the beginning the afternoon was no more than a question of sugar, or the lack of it. China Mary had baked four cakes and given them as prizes in a parish raffle; when Lily asked her what they were going to use for sugar during the rest of October—during the entire rest of 1944, for that matter, since China Mary had traded some of their November stamps to her sister for extra sugar—China Mary shrugged and continued whistling “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer.” Good works, Lily wanted her to know, would cut no ice down at the OPA. It was one thing for China Mary to go around ingratiating herself with Father Ford; it was quite another to do it with the whole family’s sugar stamps.
There were some women in this world, announced China Mary, untying her apron and throwing it at Lily’s feet, a great many women in this world—for example that saint (God rest her) who had been Everett’s and Martha’s and Sarah’s mother—who would count God more important than a little bitty sugar. Thirty years she had worked on this ranch and no McClellan, not one, had ever tried to tell her how to run her kitchen, and there were some spoiled young ladies who were going to be punished by God if they didn’t start thinking about their Church once in a while. “It’s not my Church,” Lily had snapped, aware that she was beaten: her error, as Martha observed immediately, had been the mention of Father Ford, who had personally brought about China Mary’s conversion and secured a place high on her personal hagiology by assuring her that Dennis Kearney, who with several hundred exclusionist followers had set fire to a San Francisco laundry operated by China Mary’s grandfather in 1877, had probably been a bad Catholic if indeed he had been a Catholic at all. As Martha pointed out, Lily would never learn how to get around China Mary if she couldn’t get it through her head not to mention Father Ford.
That was at two o’clock. At three Joe Templeton called, and at five-thirty he arrived with twenty pounds of sugar. Although Martha had been sick for two days, she came downstairs in a new pale pink robe for which she had paid sixty dollars a few weeks after she had met Ryder Channing at the Mather Field Officers’ Club that summer; she had torn the white silk roses from the sash, and Lily knew, from that, from the grateful satisfaction Martha was taking in a low-grade fever, and from the way she talked to Joe about Channing (“Captain Channing,” she kept saying, and referring to his slight limp as “something he allegedly got over Normandy”), that the affair must be running cool. Martha talked animatedly, laughed extravagantly at Joe’s mild jokes (“Joe, you’re too funny, you ought to be on radio, don’t you think Joe should be on radio, Lily? Giving imitations of canaries and people? I mean he couldn’t have sounded more like Harry Hopkins”), and urged him to stay for dinner. It would be, she explained, a kind of cook-it-yourself operation, catch-as-catch-can, because China Mary was off brooding, but it would be scads of fun, she promised, and one thing they would have plenty of was sugar, one thing they definitely would not run short on, thanks to Lily’s foresight and Joe’s mysterious resources, was sugar. As a matter of fact it was providential that China Mary had used up all their sugar and inspired Lily to call upon Joe, because they had nowhere near twenty pounds to begin with. That was the old silver lining for you, all right. With interest. Joe must stay.
Joe could not. Joe was taking Francie and her mother out to dinner.
Which was, Martha said, very shrewd of Joe. Taking Francie’s mother out to dinner. Making
sure the bread stayed buttered, and all that.
Anyway, she added, picking up a bowl of camellias and starting for the kitchen, it was no wonder Joe didn’t want to stay for dinner, the way this house was kept. Nothing but dead flowers in tasteless bowls, anywhere.
“It was a bowl of my mother’s,” Lily explained as she walked Joe out to his car, but the incident seemed to have eluded him. “What was?” he asked without interest, and then added immediately: “I met this Channing character.” “He’s quite a good friend of Martha’s,” Lily interrupted, annoyed at Joe’s denseness about the bowl of camellias.
When she came back to the house Martha was lying on the couch, her face buried in a pillow. Lily pulled a comforter over Martha’s back, and sat down to finish the letter to Everett she had begun before Joe came.
“You writing Everett?” Martha sat up, throwing the comforter off.
Lily nodded without looking up. “I want to see if he can’t come home for a few days. You keep warm.” She had asked Everett, in almost every letter since his transfer to Fort Bliss in July, if he could not come home for a few days. In the back of her mind she was uneasily convinced that he could have gotten home, had he wanted to, between the time he had left Georgia and the time he had been due in Texas.
Martha lay down again. “Some days I certainly can’t abide Joe Templeton.”
“Some days you certainly are rude.”