The first week in January, there was at least some news: Joe Templeton came by after dinner and spoke to your father about buying the Braden place at Auburn. He’ll write you but your father hopes you won’t sell.
“Joe Templeton wants the Braden place,” she said to her mother the next afternoon. Their afternoons together had taken on an unvaried pattern: after Lily had put the children down, she and her mother would knit; Lily for Everett, her mother for the Episcopal Guild bazaar. While they knitted, Edith Knight would resume a monologue about things which had happened some years before; the details, for example, of how the Blanchards lost their river place on a note to a man named C.T. Godey in 1927, or an analysis of a rumor, current in 1931, that one of Lily’s second cousins (once removed) had been carrying on with a clarinet player in the orchestra at the St. Francis Hotel. (It was an untruth, according to Edith Knight, although it was no surprise it got started because Elizabeth was practically mental about jazz musicians and had once stood up in a speakeasy on Sutter Street with everybody on the river looking on and sung “Big Noise Blew in from Winnetka” with her arm around a colored drummer.) Once she had become familiar with the names and the chronology, Lily found these accounts generally interesting; she had never felt so close to her mother.
Edith Knight put down the Peruvian face mask she was knitting for the bazaar. “You saw poor Joe?”
“He came by last night. He didn’t realize the piece was in Everett’s name.”
“If the McClellans have the sense God gave them they’ll hang on to the Braden place. I used to go on picnics there.” Edith Knight paused. “Francie wasn’t with Joe?”
“No. He came alone.”
“Alone,” Edith Knight repeated with satisfaction. “Of course he would have.”
Lily did not say anything. Her mother began to hum tunelessly, tapping one knitting needle against the arm of her chair. Her eyes were closed.
“Francie may have been outside in the car,” Lily said. “Actually he only stayed a few minutes.”
“Oh no.” Edith Knight opened her eyes and started to work with fresh vigor on the face mask, intended for use whenever there was danger of frostbite. “I wouldn’t think so. He was no doubt quite alone.”
Lily did not know what she could say that might not in some way corroborate her mother’s fairly opaque conclusions. She rather wished that she had never mentioned Joe Templeton, and tried to think of some way to turn the conversation back a decade or two.
“Didn’t Francie Templeton have a sister who wasn’t quite bright?” she asked finally.
“That’s right,” Edith Knight said without interest. “She’s been dead seventeen years next month.” She continued knitting in silence.
“It’s Francie again,” she added at last, abandoning the hope of being prodded. “Helen Randall went up there one afternoon — Francie had invited her up, specifically invited her for that afternoon — and Francie didn’t even come downstairs. Joe made excuses for her. She starts in the morning with vermouth.”
“Vermouth, is it.” Lily laughed. So often had she heard her mother say of someone who drank that he or she started in the morning with vermouth that she could not drink vermouth without a pleasant sense of discreet raciness; thanks to Edith Knight, vermouth was for Lily one of the small adventures that frequently made her day. Lily’s day could also be made by ordering stockings by the dozen rather than by the pair; wearing expensive perfume around the ranch in the mornings; and, among other things, focusing for a fraction of a minute on some stranger’s eyes and making him look back just until, say, the traffic light changed.
“I don’t know what’s going to become of those twins,” Edith Knight said, ignoring Lily. “They will no doubt grow up to be zoot-suiters. Look and see if there’s any sherry left.”
Lily picked up the decanter and filled her mother’s glass.
“On the other hand,” Edith Knight added, “there’s no need to pity Joe. He’s been quick enough to find comfort in the past.”
Lily sat down again without saying anything.
“If you understand what I mean. About Joe.”
“Yes.” Lily picked up her knitting again. “I understand you all right.”
“Not that she hasn’t been a cross. Lord no. But Joe doesn’t exactly wear himself out carrying it, either. If you see.”
“I understand,” Lily repeated.
She had understood well enough. As had Joe. That had required no roman de la rose. Once the speculative glances and the accidental meetings were out of the way (the procedure, she saw, was a way of doing rather than anything done; first the miraculous awareness of the possibility, then the almost inaudible overture, the response so subtle as to be uncertain), they met in the late afternoons of that winter and in the long spring twilights, met in cars parked off the levee, bars frequented by Mexicans, and in an empty shack on the piece downriver which belonged to Francie Templeton’s mother. They did not talk much, and she was never certain that either derived from the other much pleasure, as that word is commonly defined. She knew only that they continued to interest each other. A tacit complicity between them cut that interest away from everything going on in other places and at other times; Lily discovered that she could see Joe later any evening, or perhaps the next day in town, and not only behave as she would have behaved before but think of him as she had thought of him before. She had always thought him rather a likable fool; she still did. She did not for the time being find it necessary to make frequent connections between Joe and Everett, whose letters came from Georgia now, and Francie lived in Everett’s country. It concerned, she thought, neither Everett nor Francie; it did not even seem, in any real way, to concern her.
When the nights grew warm, come May of that year, they occasionally met late at night. The wind blew off the river through the shack, its windows broken long ago by children or transients, and they lay on a torn mattress and listened to the current. Once in a while she asked him something about the war, and he explained to her about Tunisia; once in a while she told him about something which had happened a long time before, a dance she had gone to or a slight she had imagined, but mostly they simply lay there in the dark in the bare room littered with dead wisteria, blown through the windows during a wind in April, and listened to the water. I love you, Joe said once, Lily Knight, and she turned away from him.