Joan Didion: Run River

Gomez ran the ranch, even bargained with the fruit buyers, while Walter Knight sat in the familiar gloom of the Senator Hotel bar and called at the white frame house on Thirty-eighth Street where Miss Rita Blanchard lived. (Miss Rita Blanchard was, as he so often said, his closest friend in town, a good friend, a loyal friend, a friend whose name could be mentioned in the Senator Hotel bar in the presence of Walter Knight only by Walter Knight.) Gomez was the most dolorous of men; one might have thought him intent only upon disproving the notion that our neighbors from south of the border were so muy simpatico . Patiently, he illustrated Walter Knight’s contention that honesty could be expected only of native northern Californians. “I pay that bastard more than any Mexican in the Valley gets paid,” Walter Knight would say periodically. “Yet he cheats me, finds it necessary to steal me blind. Add that one up if you will. Rationalize that one for me.” The challenge, although rhetorical, was calculated to lend everyone present a pleasant sense of noblesse oblige; as Walter Knight was the first to say, he had never hired a Mexican foreman expecting that they would operate under the Stanford Honor Code. Once Edith Knight had taken up the challenge, but the rationale she offered had little to do with Gomez. “Maybe that wouldn’t happen,” she said one night at dinner, her hands flat on the heavy white linen cloth and her eyes focused at some point away from her husband and daughter, “just possibly that wouldn’t happen if you were to spend, say, one-half the time on this ranch that you spend on Thirty-eighth Street.”

Walter Knight demanded that Lily observe the delicacy of the asparagus, grown, despite an extraordinarily poor season for asparagus growers in the southern part of the state, not three miles away on the Pierson place.

“Walter,” Edith Knight whispered finally, flushed and rigid with regret as if with fever. Without looking at her, Walter Knight reached across the table and touched her hand. “Sarcasm,” he said, “has never been your forté.” Edith Knight stiffened her shoulders and picked up her water goblet. “The word is forte , Walter,” she said after a moment, entirely herself again. “Quite unaccented.”

Such lapses were rare for Edith Knight: a change for the better was among the prime tenets of her faith. That was the year, Lily’s sixteenth, when she tried parties. Through the holidays and late into spring, she entertained as no one on the river had entertained in years, confident that the next party would reveal to her the just-around-the-corner country where the green grass grew. I thought of floating camellias in the silver bowls , she would write to Lily at Dominican, or do you think all violets, masses and masses of violets? p.s. bring someone home if you want but don’t come if it’s an Assembly weekend, you’ll miss meeting a great many nice people if you keep on missing those dances . Because Lily would have gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid an Assembly (the sight of the inexorable square envelopes in her mail slot at school turned her faint, chilled her with a vision of herself stranded on a gilt chair at the St. Francis Hotel, her organdy dress wilting and her hands wet in kid gloves), she always came home for her mother’s parties.

She would arrive on the Saturday morning train, and Gomez would meet her in Sacramento. (“Como esta usted, Señor Gomez?” she called one morning as she stepped off the train. “I don’t get you,” he said, picking up her two bags and handing her the heavier one.) Although Gomez would sometimes agree to stop at a place in the West End where she could eat tacos with her fingers, he never spoke on those occasions unless Crystal was along. Crystal was his common-law wife by virtue of mutual endurance, and if Gomez brought her into town on Saturday morning it was only to confront her with the scenes of her Friday-night defections. In a moment of misdirected intimacy, Crystal once told Lily that she had worked the whole goddamn Valley in season before Gomez latched on to her in Fresno. “I don’t mean picking, honey, you get that,” she added, producing as evidence her white hands, each nail filed to a point and lacquered jade green. Ignoring Lily, Gomez would vent his monotonous fury in Spanish, which Crystal pretended not to understand. “You’re a nutsy son of a bitch,” she would drawl from time to time by way of reply, nudging Lily hilariously and inspecting the dark roots of her Jean Harlow hair in a pocket mirror. (Although Crystal had lived with Gomez three months before Walter Knight noticed her presence on the ranch, she had become, the moment he did notice her, one of his favorite figures, referred to alternately as “Iseult the Fair” and “that sweetheart.”)

About seven o’clock, when the house was full of the faint sweet smell of wax and the almost palpable substance of Edith Knight’s anticipation, Lily, dressed in the pale blue crêpe de Chine her mother thought most set off her hair, would take a glass of champagne up to the third floor and sit by a front window, watching the cars swing off the bridge and up the road to the ranch. Everyone came to those parties: river people, town people, and, when the Legislature was in session, people from Red Bluff, Stockton, Placerville, Sonora, Salinas, everywhere. Even the people from down South came, proof to the doubtful that Walter Knight was more interested in California than in water rights, than in small disagreements, than in a bill he had once introduced proposing the establishment of two distinct states, the border to fall somewhere in the Tehachapi. “I’ll tell the world,” a lobbyist from down South once said to Lily, “L.A. is God’s own little orchard.” His wife echoed him: God’s own little orchard. Neither was actually from California; he had met the little lady in a band contest, an all-state high-school competition held in the Iowa State football stadium. His band won first prize, her band won third; and the three winning bands were awarded all-expenses-paid trips to the Palmer House in Chicago, where he and the little lady had decided, he said, to make it legal. “Came to L.A. with a bride on my arm and a dime in my pocket,” he added, “but baby won’t you look at us now. God’s own orchard.” “I’ve got a few of your compatriots in my orchard,” Walter Knight said; the Okies were still pitching tents at the far end of the ranch, near the main highway south. Although he said it pleasantly enough, Edith Knight looked at him, reproof in her eyes. That wasn’t the way to the green grass.

No matter who else came, Rita Blanchard always came. As if she had lain in a dark room for days, conserving all of her animation for this one evening, she smiled constantly, watching Edith and Walter Knight even as she talked to someone else. Her apologetic inattention was part of her face to the world, vital to that air of being irrevocably miscast, fatally unfitted, the kind of woman who appears for dinner a day before or a day after the day appointed, who inevitably arrives dressed for tennis when the game underway is bridge. Her mooring in the world seemed so tenuous that every spring when she went away (to Carmel for the month of April, abroad for the month of May), there were those who said that she had in truth been committed. In spite of what she knew, Lily felt a guilty love for Rita Blanchard: even at thirty-five, Rita seemed always to be sitting on those gilt chairs at the St. Francis. Although she must have known that she was considered something of a beauty in the Valley, the very way she walked into a room belied that knowledge, announced her certain faith in her inability to please. She dropped her head forward, brushing her long hair back from her face with nervous fingers; should someone startle her by speaking suddenly, she would begin to stutter. Each tale in the folklore of spinster-hood had at one time or another been suggested in explanation of her official celibacy: the secret demonic marriage and subsequent annulment; the dead lover, struck down on the eve of their public betrothal; the father who would allow no suitor close enough. Not even the fact that Rita’s father, the gentlest of men when alive, had been dead since Rita’s twelfth birthday could abate the popularity of the last theory. The truth was simply that Walter Knight had kept her company for twelve years, and if Rita had once expected something else, her diffidence and Walter Knight’s lack of it had combined to dispel those shadows. Although it was rumored that there was not the money there had once been, enough remained of the Blanchard estate to enable Rita to give Lily expensive presents every Christmas (“You be sure now you thank poor Rita,” Edith Knight always ordered — the adjective “poor” was for her a part of Rita’s Christian name—“but French perfume is not what I would call a suitable gift for a jeune fille”) , to bring home all her clothes from Jean Patou in Paris, and to ask favors of no one but Walter Knight.