Joan Didion: Run River

“Well,” Walter Knight said, taking off his hat. “Lily.”

She had meant to be upstairs before he came, and did not know what to say. “I’m sorry,” she said finally.

“No call to be sorry, no call for that at all. We’re in the era of the medicine men. We’re going to have snake oil every Thursday. Dr. Townsend is going to administer it personally, with an unwilling assist from Sheridan Downey.”

She could tell that he was a little drunk.

“Snake oil,” he repeated with satisfaction. “Right in your Ham and Eggs. According to Mr. Catlin, we are starting up a golden ladder into California’s great tomorrow.”

“I heard him.”

Humming “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” Walter Knight opened the liquor cupboard, took out a bottle, and then, without opening it, lay down on the couch and closed his eyes.

“Different world, Lily. Different rules. But we’ll beat them at their own game. You know why?” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Because you’ve got in your little finger more brains and more guts than all those Okies got put together.”

She tried to smile.

“Now, Lily. Lily-of-the-valley. Don’t do that. I’m going to have a lot more time to spend on the ranch. We’re going to do things together, read things, go places, do things. I don’t want to think you’re crying about that.”

“That’ll be nice,” she said finally, crushing the handkerchief he had given her and jamming it into the pocket of her jumper.

“You’re still my princess.”

She smiled.

“Princess of the whole goddamn world. Nobody can touch you.”

He opened the liquor cupboard again, replaced the bottle he had taken out, and picked up instead the squared, corked bottle which held the last of his father’s bourbon, clouded and darkened, no ordinary whiskey.

“This is to put you to sleep,” he said, handing her a glass. “Now. What you may not have realized is that Henry Catlin happens to be an agent of Divine Will, placed on earth expressly to deliver California from her native sons. He was conceived in order to usher in the New California. An angel came to Mr. Catlin’s mother. A Baptist angel, wearing a Mother Hubbard and a hair net.” He paused. “Or maybe it was Aimee Semple McPherson. I am not too clear about Scripture on this point.”

“He’s not at all a nice man,” Lily said firmly, encouraged by the bourbon.

“Everything changes, princess. Now you take that drink to bed.”

Everything changes, everything changed: summer evenings driving downriver to auctions, past the green hops in leaf, blackbirds flying up from the brush in the dry twilight air, red Christmas-tree balls glittering in the firelight, a rush of autumn Sundays, all gone, when you drove through the rain to visit the great-aunts. “Lily is to have the Spode, Edith, the Spode and the Canton platters Alec brought from the Orient, are you hearing me?” And although Aunt Laura dies neither that year nor the next, she does die one morning, fifteen years later: the call comes from the hospital while you sit at breakfast telling Julie that soft-boiled eggs will make her beautiful and good, and the Spode does pass to you, the Spode and the Canton platters Alec brought from the Orient. (You have seen only one yellowed snapshot of Alec, and that was much later, after he had lost his health and mind and all memory of the Orient. But imagine him a young man, a fine figure of a man or so they said, sailing out from San Francisco and Seattle in the waning days of the China trade, touching home once a year with Canton for his sisters and sailing out again.) Things change. Your father no longer tells you when to go to bed, no longer lulls you with his father’s bourbon, brought out for comfort at Christmas and funerals. Nobody chooses it but nothing can halt it, once underway: you now share not only that blood but that loss. A long time later you know or anyway decide what your father had been after all: a nice man who never wanted anything quite enough, an uneven success on the public record and a final failure on his own, a man who liked to think that he had lost a brilliant future, a man with the normal ratio of nobility to venality and perhaps an exceptional talent only for deceiving himself (but you never know about that, never know who remains deceived at four o’clock in the morning), a good man but maybe not good enough, often enough, to count for much in the long run. When you know that you know something about yourself, but you did not know it then .

“You might marry Everett,” Martha McClellan had suggested to Lily, once when they were both children, “if I decide not to.” “You aren’t allowed to marry your own brother,” Lily had said, quite sure of her ground until Martha smiled wisely and predicted, apparently interpreting the regulation as something else initiated during the first hundred days, “Roosevelt won’t be president forever, you know.”

It seemed in retrospect an amusing story, and Lily wondered, the June afternoon in 1940 when Everett and his father came to the house for a drink, whether or not she should tell it. She decided that she should not: his four years at Stanford and her one at Berkeley had made Everett seem almost a stranger. She could not remember even seeing him for a couple of years, except once that winter when she had gone down to Stanford for a party and had gotten sick on Mission Bell wine at the Deke house. (Everett had gotten her some cold coffee from the kitchen and had made her date stay in another room until she felt better; she had thought herself humiliated, and neither she nor Everett’s girl, a blond tennis player from Atherton, had much appreciated his gallantry.) He looked, now, taller than she remembered, and older. She wondered whether some small tragedy had befallen him and hardened his face, whether perhaps he had thought himself in love with and spurned by the tennis player. He would be, she thought, the type.

“I tell him he ought to go into the law,” John McClellan said, taking off his rimless glasses and polishing them on a corner of his jacket. “Into politics. We could use some growers in Sacramento.”

“Maybe I better get to be a grower first,” Everett said politely. He had been, Lily remembered, a precociously polite child. Her clearest recollections were of him assuming full responsibility for Martha’s social errors, gravely apologizing for the spilt strawberry punch, the uprooted azalea, the hysteria when someone other than Martha pinned the tail on the donkey.

“You tell him how they need us,” Mr. McClellan said. “You’re the one to tell him.”

Walter Knight picked up a pair of garden shears from the tiled terrace floor and pruned a branch from a dwarf lemon.

“I’m not sure they do,” he said finally, intent upon the lemon. “I’m not at all sure they need us. The San Joaquin still makes itself heard.”

“Hah,” Mr. McClellan said triumphantly. “The big boys. The corporation boys. There’s your point.”

Lily did not look at her father. When he spoke at last there was no inflection in his voice.

“This isn’t the San Joaquin. They don’t run ranches around here from offices in the Russ Building in San Francisco.”

“There’s your point,” Mr. McClellan repeated.

“Here’s my point,” Walter Knight said. “We’re expendable.”

Everett smiled at Lily. The sun was setting behind his chair and his blond hair, cut close, looked white in the sunset blaze. Lily extended one bare foot and contemplated it, not smiling back. Neither she nor her mother ever mentioned politics to her father any more: it had been tactless to speak of the Legislature.

Although Everett called her at six-thirty the next morning he did not wake her, because the heat had stayed all night and she had gotten up at five-thirty to lie on the terrace in her nightgown. By six o’clock the sun had been high enough to make the heat shimmer in the air again. Looking to the east and squinting to block out the sun, she could make out the Sierra Nevada swimming clear on the horizon.