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 (“ Cap tain 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.”
“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.
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