Run River

by Joan Didion

  “I mean sometimes I wonder where old Joe would be today if Francie didn’t drink. I mean he absolutely trades on it, he’s made an absolute career of it.”

  She paused, watching Lily’s reflection in the mirror above the couch. “When really it’s just the other way around,” she added finally. “I mean I guess everybody on the river knows who puts up with who in that house. Who needs who. And it’s more than just her money. Her money’s only the half of it. Don’t you think.”

  “I don’t know,” Lily said.

  “Well think about it a minute.”

  “All right.”

  “Now. Think about it right now.”

  “I want to finish this letter before dinner.”

  Martha pulled the comforter back up to her neck and resettled the pillow. “Tell Everett we’re eating Joe Templeton’s sugar, why don’t you. Tell him you’re sleeping around to keep us in black-market sugar. That should bring him. Write Everett-baby that.”

  Lily put the letter down. China Mary had been impossible about the sugar coupons. Knight had been running a fever; Julie cutting a tooth. Martha and her father had fought at dinner every night for a week, and Joe had been worried about Francie, who had sprained her wrist in a fall from a horse while she was drunk. Even that sure and quiet comfort had evolved into the garrulous ambiguity of friendship, a change that was probably irreversible; when Joe had tried, a few minutes ago, to draw her into a prolonged and clumsy kiss in the darkness by the car, she had turned her face away in irritation that he should try to so deceive both her and himself. Once they had admitted sugar coupons and sprained wrists, it no longer worked. She was too tired even to be shocked by Martha, let alone angry at her.

  “Martha,” she said. “Please.”

  Martha had begun to cry, tears welling in her fevered eyes and splashing down her flushed cheeks.

  “Martha, baby.”

  “You’ve got no right to my brother,” Martha whispered, standing up unsteadily. “No right.”

  Lily was, then, less angry than frightened: harsh words between women seemed to her unthinkable, an irreparable rent in the social fabric. On those few occasions when she had quarreled with her mother, they had ended, both terrified of the consequences, weeping together. She thought now of the picture of Everett above Martha’s bed, the roses torn from the sash of the new robe, of Martha’s delight when she graduated summa cum laude in June (“Wait until Everett hears,” she had said. “He’ll be appalled”); thought of Martha at Julie’s christening, Sunday before last, whispering out loud please help her to choose right every day she lives. Martha had held Julie, and none of the omens were good: the sky was overcast with the peculiar yellow haze Edith Knight called earthquake weather, Everett’s father jammed on his Stetson and walked out of the church before the christening because the minister had a favorable word for Harold Ickes, and Martha cried. (She cried because Ryder Channing had not come to the christening; she would have cried had he come. “That girl will have shed enough tears by the end of the year 1944,” Mr. McClellan said before he left the church, “to drown the entire Jap army. She is what you call an untapped resource.”) Lily had worn the silly John Frederics hat with the black veiling that had cost her mother seventy-five dollars, and had known even as she smiled at Martha that Julie was already beyond choice. The tellers of fairy tales knew about choosing what Martha did not know. An uninvited guest brings a gold ring or a spray of rue to the christening party.

  “Martha,” she called now, wanting to make it all right, but Martha had run upstairs.

  Later, she arranged a tray for Martha with a roast-beef sandwich and an artichoke, soaked in olive oil as Martha liked artichokes best. (“Why can’t she come down?” Mr. McClellan demanded, ripping the leaves from his own artichoke and clearly regretting the lost opportunity for another few rounds at dinner. “Why doesn’t she just check into a hospital and stay there?”)

  She found Martha lying in bed in the dark, the blanket littered with damp shreds of Kleenex.

  “I didn’t mean what I said.” Martha’s eyes were closed. “I didn’t mean anything like that. You’re fine for Everett. Everett loves you.”

  “Don’t talk about it now.” Lily sat on the edge of the bed and turned on the light. The reconciliation made her quite as uncomfortable as the scene downstairs had; things said out loud had for her an aura of danger so volatile that it could be controlled only in that dark province inhabited by those who share beds. Although she could sometimes say things out loud to Everett, she did not know how to talk to Martha.

  “My eyes are red.” Martha turned off the light again. “Everett thinks the sun rises and sets with you. You should realize that.”

  “I realize it.”

  “I mean you should realize how really simple Everett is.”

  Martha sat up in bed and fumbled on the table for a package of cigarettes.

  “You better eat,” Lily said. “Everything’s getting cold.”

  “You mean that cold artichoke and that cold roast-beef sandwich and that cold glass of milk.” Martha lit a cigarette. “Just a minute. How really straight he is. I mean maybe Everett gets scared and has bad dreams like anybody else, I don’t know, but the difference is Everett wouldn’t ever explore it. All Everett wants is a little order.”

  “I guess that’s what everybody wants.”

  Martha lay down again. “Maybe everybody wants it. But most people don’t want it more than anything else in the world. The way Everett does. You might want it, I might want it. But when the opportunity to have it practically hits us over the head, we just about knock ourselves out getting out of the way.” She paused. “Take you for example.”

  Lily said nothing.

  “All right, don’t. Take me. What do I want. A nice ordered life right here on the river just like we’ve always had.”

  “Joe says the war is going to change everything.” Snatching at what had seemed for a moment a chance to steer the conversation away from the particular and into the realm of topics so impersonal and so unweighted that they could be safely talked about, Lily had forgotten that Joe was for the time being a name loaded with peril.

  “Never mind about Joe. He read it in U.S. News & World Report. Anyway. That’s what I want. But what do I do about getting it. I get messed up with Ryder, who not only doesn’t want to marry me, doesn’t understand any of the things I need, but is so unfitted to everything I want that I get so nervous I practically break into tears every time he’s in the same room with Daddy. That’s what I do about it.”

  Lily looked away. “I don’t know,” she said. She did not want Martha to tell her anything more about Ryder Channing. She had written Everett about how impossible Martha had been since she met him, had told him he had better come talk to Martha, and she did not know what else she could do.

  “I don’t even like Ryder,” Martha added, wadding up her baby pillow and holding it against her face with one hand, groping with the other for the shreds of Kleenex on the blanket.

  Lily took a tissue from her pocket and handed it to Martha. “I’ll get you some Luminal,” she said with relief. She did not like to see Martha cry but the conversation was at any rate closed.

  At twenty minutes to eleven, after Mr. McClellan had gone upstairs and left Lily to finish her letter to Everett (I wish you would please reconsider about coming for a few days because neither your father nor I can talk to her and I don’t believe she has passed one day without crying since she came home in June, and this man, although he is quite nice, does not seem good for her, Everett, baby, please), Ryder Channing arrived to see Martha.

  “Actually she’s asleep,” Lily said, straightening her skirt as she took his raincoat. “I guess you know she’s been sick.”

  “I thought she might feel better.”

  He did not sit down, and she noticed for the first time that he was about Everett’s height, about six feet. He would not have looked unlike Everett had there not been about his face both a hardness and a s
oftness absent in Everett’s, the look of someone who has been in some sense spoiled. She supposed he must be older than Everett by four or five years, must be twenty-nine or thirty.

  “I thought she might feel up to driving into town for a drink. I’m sorry.” He picked up a book from the hall table and opened it, pausing to read the inscription. “Maybe you’d like to go.”

  “I shouldn’t go out. Won’t you have a drink here.”

  “Sure. Sure I will.” He smiled. She had thought before that he must calculate the effect of his smile; its peculiar intimacy was a study in timing. It was something like the way John Wayne said “Hell-o there” when he first met the girl, on a train or in a construction camp or riding past on a horse. There was no mistaking John Wayne and there was, in a limited way, no mistaking Ryder Channing.

  “That’s real nice of you,” he added, smiling again, sitting down, and examining the envelope she had just addressed to Everett. Seeing that it was empty, he yawned, closed his eyes, and asked: “Where’s that drink?”

  It occurred to her, as she got the ice, that John Wayne had the jump on Ryder when it came to follow-through.

  They had, in all, three drinks. At first Lily sat very straight on the wooden rocker by the desk; after he had made a second drink she sat across from the couch, where he lay sprawled with one leg propped on the arm. He told her about Memphis, where his mother and sisters lived, and about Charlottesville, where he had gone to school. (“You’d like that, Lily. You’d really like that, Charlottesville, springtime, you’d eat it up,” he assured her in the Tennessee drawl that made everything he said seem a mild flirtation, made her feel that he had, in uncovering her previously unsuspected and more or less unprovable predilection for Charlottesville in the springtime, penetrated the very essence of her.) He praised Martha extravagantly (she had, he declared, one of the quickest minds he had ever encountered in a woman); asked to see a crayon drawing Knight had done; and announced that the three of them—he, Martha, and Lily—must have dinner at the Officers’ Club at Mather Field the following Sunday. Or some Sunday. They would keep it loose. Under his gentle prodding, Lily found herself telling him about the parties her mother used to give, about the time her grandfather had challenged a neighbor to a gunfight over a right of way which (it turned out) belonged to neither of them; even about her father. It was the first time she had spoken about her father except in passing since his death. Ryder seemed fascinated by the most minute details of life on the river: he wanted to know why she had been sent to Dominican rather than to the union high school as Martha had been; why they did not belong to the country club and whether anyone else on the river did; why Walter Knight would not have been likely to belong to a San Francisco club, say the Pacific Union or the Bohemian. “He just wouldn’t, that’s all,” Lily said, and it seemed to satisfy Ryder; he appeared to index it under Growers, Social Eccentricities of, and went on to explore whether Walter Knight had known anyone who voted for Culbert Olson for Governor in 1938.

  As they were finishing their third drink and Lily was trying to explain why she had not liked going to the San Francisco dances when she was at Dominican, Martha appeared on the stair landing, tying the roseless sash and smiling wanly.

  “I heard you all.” Whatever Martha’s malaise, it seemed to have so developed within the past few hours that she could not negotiate four steps without clutching the railing. “I’m sorry I didn’t wake up before.”

  Channing swung his long legs off the couch and stood up, holding out his arms to Martha.

  “You poor sick baby.” He bent to kiss her neck. “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”

  “I only wanted to say hello.”

  She stood there, neither sitting down nor taking Ryder’s hand.

  “Lily was telling me about the San Francisco Assembly,” Ryder said. “Did you go to those dances?”

  “No. I didn’t go to those dances.”

  “Martha went to school up here,” Lily said. “As you know.”

  “Listen,” Martha said. “I meant to tell you. Daddy said something real funny the other night at dinner.”

  “What?”

  “Well, see, he wanted to ask me something about you. But naturally he pretended not to remember your name. ‘That fellow from Mississippi,’ he said. ‘Ryder’s not from Mississippi,’ I said. ‘He’s from Tennessee.’ ‘Mississippi, Tennessee, what’s the difference,’ Daddy said. ‘It’s all Del Paso Heights to me.’ ”

  Lily laughed. Del Paso Heights was a district north of Sacramento noted for its large Negro population and its high incidence of minor social disorders.

  “That’s very funny,” Channing said. He seemed obscurely pleased by the story, another entry under Growers, Eccentricities of.

  “He really said it, didn’t he, Lily.”

  “He really did. I have to go up,” she added, kissing Martha on the cheek and taking Ryder’s hand. He smiled at her.

  As she walked upstairs she felt that Ryder was watching her, and kept her back straight. When she turned at the landing she saw that he was not watching her at all, but kissing Martha, pulling her very close, his hand at the small of her back. She wondered how Martha felt when Ryder smiled, and how much of the smile was calculated. Not that it mattered. Everyone had his own shell game, and if Ryder Channing had known tonight how to make her feel open and happy for an hour or so, they had, in the end, conned each other. He would probably understand that.

  It occurred to her later, after she had undressed and turned down the sheets on Everett’s and her bed, that Ryder Channing might have been someone to whom, under different circumstances, she could have said things out loud.

  13

  Everett was playing poker in the Officers’ Club at Fort Bliss when they telephoned him on that Saturday after Thanksgiving, 1944. Lily had already called twice that week, asking if he could please come home for Christmas because everything was falling apart without him. First the baby had been down with measles, then Knight had caught whooping cough; there had been nothing but sickness since summer. I need you, she said. He could simply not understand unless he came; he must come. In the first place there was Martha. If he wanted to help Martha he had better come. She was still intimating that she was about to run off with that Air Corps captain from Tennessee; the week before Thanksgiving she did not come home for two days. She told her father she was in San Francisco. Which for all Lily knew she might have been but there was one vital detail missing in the version she told her father. (Not that it wasn’t Martha’s own business, but she managed to make it everyone’s by making issues of everyone else’s faults. If she heard once more from Martha that Ryder Channing said she had “no conversation” she was going to start screaming, and if any of them heard once more from Martha that Ryder Channing thought the house looked like something out of Charles Addams, Lily simply could not be responsible for what Everett’s father might do. He objected to the way Ryder Channing wore his hat, without any stiffening, and referred to him always as “the fly-boy” or “the ninety-day wonder,” phrases he had picked up Lily didn’t know where since everything else about the war was more or less escaping him.) Anyway. Martha and her father fought every night at dinner until no one could eat, and then Martha would push her chair back and run upstairs. They could hear her crying at night and it upset everyone. She had in fact been behaving that way ever since she came home from school, so it did not in all fairness seem to have been brought on by Channing, but he was around all the time and when he was not around Martha was crying and it upset Everett’s father especially. Not that it took much to upset him these days. Everett could not realize. Someone had approached him about subdividing the ranch after the war, and the man may have been rather unattractive and may even have been as Everett’s father said an operator and a draft-dodger, but Everett’s father still had no call to say the things he said to that man. There you had it. The children were sick and Martha was crying and Everett’s father was losing his mind. If only Everett could com
e. You don’t know how I need you.

  Lily’s letters and telephone calls had been the only disturbance in Everett’s life that summer and fall; she seemed to have read none of the inspirational literature about building service morale, keeping the home fires burning, I’ll be home for Christmas but only in my dreams. He missed her and the babies, but not as much as he told her he did, and then only in an abstract way. They were safe, and his absence from them was more than blameless; it was blessed by all the Allied Powers. More than he could remember being since his first few weeks at Stanford, he was peculiarly contented within the ordered limitations of his life at Bliss. Desultorily, he played poker and struck up guarded friendships at the bar; later, every night, he lay in bed and made new plans for the ranch: exquisitely rational arrangements, unmarred by the sloppy actualities of plans in operation. Once, when he had a pass, he went up to Dallas with another lieutenant, one of the group with whom he sometimes played poker; the lieutenant called some girls he had known in college at Austin, and they all went dancing at the Adolphus Hotel. Although he could not later remember how, Everett ended up alone with a girl who had pale strawberry-blond hair and access to her father’s Cadillac. In the Cadillac they had driven out by a creek where they sat on the running board and drank bourbon out of paper cups and watched the sun come up, and the girl had made Everett feel her necklace (it liked to be touched, she told him, because it was made of real pearls from Neiman-Marcus) and had held his hand against her throat, but he had only kissed her gravely and driven her home. Later that morning, waiting for a transport he could hop back to El Paso, he tried to believe that it had been because she was a nice girl or at any rate because he was faithful to Lily, but he knew that he had left the girl alone for neither reason. He had left her alone because it was too much trouble; on a small scale she might have disturbed the even flow of his days at Bliss even as Lily did.

  It was not that he did not like the idea of having Lily on the ranch, waiting: he did. Lily completed the picture, gave him the sense of having settled things, the sense he had missed before they were married. It was necessary, however, that things stay settled. During the past few weeks he had begun to regard Lily’s messages as definite intrusions, to look upon life on the ranch as a bacchanalia of disorganization, peculiarly female disorder. No one, so far as Everett knew, cried all night in the Officers’ Club at Bliss.