I should have taken the Holy Ghost not Everett, she had thought when she woke this morning, and she had snapped at the nun who was trying to take her temperature. A pillow over her head, she had lain still all morning, lifting the pillow only to watch the rain outside. She should sit up and comb her hair, wash her face, put on the silk bed-jacket her mother had brought. Everett would come again this morning, and she did not want to see him. She was not sure that it would be all right even if they could go back to that morning on the river and start over again; because she could not put her finger on what was wrong it would only go wrong a second time. She wanted now only to see her father, to go back to that country in time where no one made mistakes. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. She had memorized those words at the time of her father’s death, had repeated them as she walked down streets and brushed her hair, as she lay in bed and as she drove the river road, and she repeated them now against Everett’s arrival.
10
“You’ll get along fine,” Everett said, the morning he left for Fort Lewis. “You’re a big girl now. You wait. You’ll be all right here. Wait and see.”
He spoke very low; both Knight and Julie were asleep in the next room.
“You didn’t have to go,” Lily repeated. She could not view Everett’s enlistment as anything other than personal and possibly deserved retribution. Bataan might fall, Corregidor might fall, and the Japanese might occupy Attu and Kiska, but Everett could not have gone had she not failed him somewhere. “You have a son. You have a two-month-old daughter. Your father needs you.”
Everett sat up on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. Although light now filtered through the shutters, they had not slept. After Mr. McClellan went to bed they had, between them, drunk most of a bottle of bourbon, and then Lily had cried (partly the bourbon) and they had lain in the dark awake, oppressed less by the parting than by some uneasy apprehension of how the parting should be affecting them.
“Lily,” he said. “You keep saying the same things. I want to go.”
“I don’t see why.”
“I waited a year. Almost a year. Now I have to go.”
“You don’t have to. You want to. You said you wanted to.”
“All right. I want to. I don’t see any difference.”
Lily lay without moving, her head aching dully.
“I believe you want to die,” she said after a while.
“All right. I want to die. Now I have to get up.”
While Everett shaved she finished packing his bag, trying dutifully to memorize the way his shorts felt to the touch, the particular color and translucency of his toothbrush. They seemed things that she might want, at some future point, to remember. Although she considered putting on the same plaid skirt and paint-stained sweater she wore most mornings, she thought then of ships going out under the Golden Gate in fog, of Wake Island, of that hot golden summer before they were married, and pulled on instead the white cashmere sweater that Everett had given her on her nineteenth birthday.
He was to take the Shasta Daylight from Davis station at seven o’clock. It would take them close to an hour to drive there. Although Lily wished now that someone would drive over with them, all the goodbyes had been said already: Martha had come over from Davis for dinner, and had driven back before midnight to study for a midterm. (“Daddy is of the opinion I’m meeting all kinds of rich citrus growers from down South,” she had said at dinner. “When all I’m doing is taking midterms and lending my clothes to rich citrus growers’ daughters so they can go out with rich citrus growers’ sons.” Everett had seemed puzzled. “What do you want to run around with people from down South for?” he had wanted to know. “Oh you know me, Everett,” Martha had said. “An old One-Worlder.”)
The house was perfectly still, and cold from the November night. Chilled through, Lily stood in the hallway and ran her fingers along the grain of the stair railing. When she heard Everett on the stairs she began, nervously, straightening some letters left on the hall table.
“Now listen,” he said. “I’ll write you tomorrow. Then will you please write me and tell me how you’re getting along?”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes fixed on the fireplace in the living room. The house downstairs had the same curious appearance it always had in the early morning, the look of a house abandoned in an emergency years before. It was hard to believe there were not really dusty sheets thrown over the faded slipcovers, impossible to think that the magazines thrown on the tables were actually dated 1942. “I’ll write you,” she added. “Every day.”
“And try to get my father to slow down.”
“Yes.”
“And see people and get some sleep. Gain some weight.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll knit you some khaki socks.”
“Well.” He held out her coat. “The home front.”
“That’s right,” she said. “The home front.”
She drove to Davis; they scarcely spoke. She watched the road and he stared out the window. A light fog hung low on the river and the knotted, broken strings fluttered among the fields of bare hop poles. There had been frost in the night; it would warm toward noon.
Although the train was due in fifteen minutes, there were only a few other cars at the station. They sat in the station wagon, the heater on and the windows steamed, and Everett put his arm around her shoulders. She said that the sweater made her feel pretty; he said that she was pretty, pretty hair, pretty eyes, pretty arms. Be quiet, she said, pressing his arm. There was little now that she wanted to say, and in the end she did not say anything, because Martha came to the station. They saw her running down the platform, clutching a book and a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums, a dirty poplin raincoat over her nightgown.
“You look like a goddamn refugee,” Everett said, opening the door of the station wagon.
“I was afraid I’d miss you if I stopped to get dressed. So I just came.”
“Lucky you didn’t run across any rich citrus growers,” Everett said.
Martha pushed the book and the chrysanthemums into Everett’s arms. Embarrassed then, she stood outside the car, looking off toward the station, her hands shoved down into the pockets of her raincoat.
Everett opened the book and looked up at Martha.
“It’s my copy,” she said. “I knew you didn’t have one.”
“What is it?” Lily asked.
Martha did not look at her. “A family book.”
“The McClellan Journal,” Everett read. “An Account of An Overland Journey to California in the Year 1848.”
“Privately printed,” Martha added.
“Imagine,” Lily said.
Everett and Martha, she thought. Forward into battle with the Cross before. She remembered her surprise at finding on the walls of Martha’s room, when they had been children and she had been sent to play at the McClellan place, neither Degas ballet dancers nor scenes from Alice in Wonderland but a framed deed signed by John Sutter in 1847, a matted list of the provisions carried on an obscure crossing in 1852, a detailed relief map of the Humboldt Sink, and a large lithograph of Donner Pass on which Martha had printed, in two neat columns, the names of the casualties and the survivors of the Donner-Reed crossing. Martha’s favorite game as a child had in fact been “Donner Party,” a ritual drama in which she, as its originator, always played Tamsen Donner and was left, day after day, to perish by the side of the husband whose foolish miscalculations had brought them all to grief. (In Martha’s re-enactments, the Winning of the West invariably took on this unobtrusively feminist slant; in another game, “Central Pacific,” the power behind the transcontinental railroad turned out to be not Collis Potter Huntington at all, but Leland Stanford’s wife Jane, and Lily grew up with the distinct impression, planted by Martha and uncorrected for years, that the éminence grise behind the California Republic had been Jessie Benton Frémont.) It seemed to have been an ineradicable mote in Martha’s eye that everyone from whom she was descended had, unlike Tamsen Donner, gotten through, and when Lily told her that someone in her father’s family had traveled with the Donner-Reed Party as far as the Applegate Cut-off, Martha had been despondent for several days. As a matter of fact she had mentioned it querulously only a few weeks before.