Even if Lily had been able to think what to say it would have been too late: Martha was already running up the walk, her hands over her face, running and stumbling on the lace hem of the pale blue nightgown, last year’s Christmas present from Everett, picked out by Lily, extravagantly expensive, handmade at Maison Mendessolle in the St. Francis Hotel.
“We saw Martha this morning,” Lily said to Mr. McClellan at dinner. Although she had intended to stop by her mother’s on the way back from Davis, she had driven instead directly to the ranch, and had spent the rest of the day upstairs, aimlessly taking things from drawers and putting them in other drawers, sleeplessly lying on her back in their bed, still unmade, the sprigged lawn spread her great-grandmother had quilted thrown down on the floor along with Everett’s worn sneakers, the November Fortune, and the bottle of bourbon they had almost finished the night before. Not until five o’clock did she go downstairs to see China Mary and the babies; then she kissed Knight absently and carried Julie upstairs in order to feed her in the bedroom. Finishing the bottle of bourbon as she spooned Julie’s puréed carrots, she avoided Mr. McClellan for as long as she could and then felt guilty about even that: there she was, pointlessly depriving him of a small pleasure, the opportunity to watch Julie eating, one of the few activities on her schedule animated enough to interest him.
“I said we saw Martha,” she repeated. “She came to the station.”
Mr. McClellan did not answer.
They were alone in the dining room, absurdly cavernous, oppressively lined with glassed cabinets of crystal and china; the shelves held two complete services of Limoges, each for forty-eight, although in two generations the McClellans had not, to the best of Lily’s knowledge, entertained more than three guests at dinner on any given evening.
Mr. McClellan had not spoken since the fruit cup, during which Lily had said that she did not agree that the International Workers of the World were the principal threat facing the United States in 1942. Apparently because he had seen mention of Tom Mooney’s name in an unprecedentedly thorough reading of the San Francisco Chronicle, Mr. McClellan had been brooding all day upon causes and effects. He guessed Miss Lily Knight, since she was so smart, knew every detail behind the 1916 Preparedness Day Parade bombing in San Francisco. No, of course not. Well here it was: ten people in their graves, thanks to anarchists and Wobblies. He guessed Miss Lily Knight knew all about the 1913 Wheatland Riot, three thousand hop pickers running amok, a tragedy so close to home it might as well have taken place on the kitchen stoop. No, of course not. Possibly Miss Lily Knight still had a few things to learn about Wobblies. He, on the other hand, knew the details behind such events, and was therefore in a position to know that wherever you found trouble in California today you had those boys to thank for it. Cherchez le Wobbly, Lily had suggested, and Mr. McClellan had withdrawn into injured silence, broken only when he was moved to place his knife and fork side by side on his plate, wipe his mouth with his napkin, slap both hands palms down on the table and demand loudly: “What are laws for?”
Lily raised her voice now. “I said Martha came to the station. She’s upset about Everett.”
Mr. McClellan cocked his head to one side, apparently to get a different light on the picture which hung on the wall opposite him, a large oil painting of a cornucopia.
“What about Everett?” he said finally.
“His going away.”
“She’s not a gold-star sister yet,” Mr. McClellan said, his voice flat.
11
Their communication did not improve noticeably during evenings to come, that winter when the rain fell for what seemed weeks on end. Quite often Mr. McClellan would not speak at all, not out of any hostility but simply because the capacity for random conversation seemed to him less a grace than the certain expression of a weak mind; other nights he would become quite voluble, usually on the subject of the county supervisor (who was, he had come to believe, a paid agent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt), and then he would settle down after dinner with a copy of the California Penal Code, pouncing with intense delight upon certain loopholes and inconsistencies. He had first hit upon this diversion some years before, not long after Mildred McClellan’s death, and had regretted ever since, he told Lily, that he had not read for the law. Aside from the evenings when he read aloud from the Penal Code, their liveliest times together were spent playing hearts, for small amounts of money which Mr. McClellan almost inflexibly won. If, after querying China Mary and checking the pockets of all the coats in all the closets, they could still find no change in the house, they played for toothpicks, redeemable no later than the next evening in cash.
Nonetheless, they had between them a curious companionableness, a real, if not exactly infectious, rapport, most apparent to Lily on the occasional evenings when Martha came over from school and upset it. It did not seem to matter if Martha were calm or nervous, buoyant or depressed (although in practice she seemed to come home only in states of aimless crisis): she invariably shattered the balance of reserve and aggressiveness which existed in the house when Mr. McClellan and Lily were alone with the children. Lily did not know what it was about Martha. She thought probably it was that neither she nor Mr. McClellan were what her father would have called “good company,” and that possibly Martha was.
But in spite of the unexpected comfort Lily took in Everett’s father, it was still the sad season: Everett gone from the McClellan house, her father gone from her own house. All that month before Christmas the house was cold and dark, and Knight could not play outside. In the afternoons Lily wrapped the children up and drove through the rain, past the eroded gullies where muddy run-off swirled along the ranch road, to see her mother; in the evenings, no matter if dinner had been silent or combative or comparatively festive with the promise of hearts or the Penal Code, Mr. McClellan went to his room at ten-thirty, and Lily sat on downstairs alone, listening to the rain and night noises. At first she had tried turning on the radio, and had learned the lyrics to a great many songs including one called “I Spoke to Jefferson at Guadalcanal,” but after a while the radio seemed only to intensify, with its impenetrable cheerfulness, whatever was ominous in the noises outside.
Again during those first few weeks after Everett went away, she began to think of little but her father’s death. During the five months since it had happened, she had been distracted first by Julie’s birth, then by Everett’s desertion; now, it was with her every night. Sitting downstairs alone after Mr. McClellan had gone to bed she would take first her father’s point of view, then her mother’s; then, more and more often, once Rita had been revealed to her in the rôle of victim, Rita Blanchard’s. It was not that there had not been something about Rita Blanchard from the beginning, some inability, some failure in her eyes, that marked her for Walter Knight. It was only that if he had wanted to love all of them and been capable of loving none of them, only Rita had really been deceived. Only Rita had put all her chips on that board.
Although Lily wrote to Everett at Fort Lewis every night, there was little to say. She could not write to him about Rita Blanchard; she had never even talked to him about Rita Blanchard. The babies and I miss you: that was what she could write to Everett. China Mary sings Knight a song about how you’re off to get a rabbit skin to wrap your baby bunny in, which delights him no end. Julie has a cold from the rain. You must please write your father to do something about the furnace. I do not mind eating breakfast in two sweaters but it is the last straw when he declares the cold is good for the children because look what it does for a collie dog’s coat. Last night we played hearts and I won for the first time, although as it turned out I was sorry. The thing is we played with toothpicks again, and because I won thirty-three cents I ended up with thirty-three toothpicks. Well. Tonight before dinner he appeared with a quarter and eight pennies and demanded the toothpicks. I couldn’t think what I’d done with them and he said in that case he could hardly be expected to turn over the thirty-three cents. I said all right, don’t, we’d forget it, but he held up dinner an hour and fifteen minutes while we enlisted China Mary in a search for the toothpicks. Finally she found them in my apron pocket, but unfortunately there only seemed to be twenty-eight left. He finally gave me the full thirty-three cents in exchange for the twenty-eight toothpicks, but said he was setting a bad example and lectured me all through dinner on the importance of property rights and keeping one’s accounts in order. It was, he said, the American way and we could not begin too soon setting an example for Knight and Julie. It seems funny now that I tell you about it but it was nerve-racking at the time. I love you and miss you especially at night.