Joan Didion - Run River

When Everett took Lily home a week after their marriage, Edith Knight presented him with a kiss on each cheek and Lily with a list of two hundred people who had been invited to the reception. A practiced saver of situations, she had already begun a scrapbook pasted with clippings from the Sacramento and San Francisco papers. Each showed Lily in a white middy blouse, her Dominican graduation picture. There was even one clipping from the Los Angeles Times , headlined “Former Solon’s Daughter Wed in Nevada.”

Everett seemed bemused not only by the clippings but by the prospect of the reception: he took the list from Lily and studied it, asked about a few of the names on it, seemed to forget, and asked again. “This is quite a large party,” he said finally.

“You were the one so crazy to get it institutionalized,” Lily whispered absently, touching the back of his neck with her fingers. It had just occurred to her that in all the years she had known the McClellans, they had never, except for Sarah’s wedding, four years before, given a party. Even Sarah’s wedding, or as much of it as Lily could remember, had seemed oddly improvised, an affair which included all the accouterments of other weddings but remained, in some vital way, not entirely a party.

“I just wanted to marry you,” Everett whispered.

“Well, you did.” Lily raised her voice. “Where’s Daddy?”

“It’s such an off season,” Edith Knight fretted. “It can’t be a garden party and it can’t be a holiday party. If you’d waited six weeks we could have used Christmas trees. Something festive.”

“The bride,” Lily said, “is generally considered attraction enough. I said where’s Daddy.”

Edith Knight shrugged. “In his office, I suppose. I don’t believe he’s left the house in five days. He’s been no help with the arrangements. No help whatsoever.”

Lily stood outside her father’s office, then opened the door without knocking. He was sitting behind his desk, looking out the window toward the island bridge. Everett’s Ford was clearly visible in the driveway; her father had known she was home.

“Well Lily,” he said, turning away from the window. “The child bride.”

“I see we got a good press.”

“Lily McClellan.” He gave the dry laugh Lily recognized as forced. “How does that sound?”

The words seemed to hang unnaturally between them. Lily averted her eyes.

Laughing again, Walter Knight walked around the desk and put his hand out, tentatively. “Well,” he said.

Although it did not seem likely that he had intended shaking hands with her, his hand was there, and so Lily shook it. He did not seem to know what to do then, and patted her shoulder gingerly.

“Good to have you back,” he said finally, as if she had been a long time in a far place, and then, apparently relieved to have hit upon the phrase, he repeated it.

“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 .

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.