“Martha,” she said. “Please.”
Martha had begun to cry, tears welling in her fevered eyes and splashing down her flushed cheeks.
“Martha, baby.”
“You’ve got no right to my brother,” Martha whispered, standing up unsteadily. “No right.”
Lily was, then, less angry than frightened: harsh words between women seemed to her unthinkable, an irreparable rent in the social fabric. On those few occasions when she had quarreled with her mother, they had ended, both terrified of the consequences, weeping together. She thought now of the picture of Everett above Martha’s bed, the roses torn from the sash of the new robe, of Martha’s delight when she graduated summa cum laude in June (“Wait until Everett hears,” she had said. “He’ll be appalled”); thought of Martha at Julie’s christening, Sunday before last, whispering out loud please help her to choose right every day she lives. Martha had held Julie, and none of the omens were good: the sky was overcast with the peculiar yellow haze Edith Knight called earthquake weather, Everett’s father jammed on his Stetson and walked out of the church before the christening because the minister had a favorable word for Harold Ickes, and Martha cried. (She cried because Ryder Channing had not come to the christening; she would have cried had he come. “That girl will have shed enough tears by the end of the year 1944,” Mr. McClellan said before he left the church, “to drown the entire Jap army. She is what you call an untapped resource.”) Lily had worn the silly John Frederics hat with the black veiling that had cost her mother seventy-five dollars, and had known even as she smiled at Martha that Julie was already beyond choice. The tellers of fairy tales knew about choosing what Martha did not know. An uninvited guest brings a gold ring or a spray of rue to the christening party.
“Martha,” she called now, wanting to make it all right, but Martha had run upstairs.
Later, she arranged a tray for Martha with a roast-beef sandwich and an artichoke, soaked in olive oil as Martha liked artichokes best. (“Why can’t she come down?” Mr. McClellan demanded, ripping the leaves from his own artichoke and clearly regretting the lost opportunity for another few rounds at dinner. “Why doesn’t she just check into a hospital and stay there?”)
She found Martha lying in bed in the dark, the blanket littered with damp shreds of Kleenex.
“I didn’t mean what I said.” Martha’s eyes were closed. “I didn’t mean anything like that. You’re fine for Everett. Everett loves you.”
“Don’t talk about it now.” Lily sat on the edge of the bed and turned on the light. The reconciliation made her quite as uncomfortable as the scene downstairs had; things said out loud had for her an aura of danger so volatile that it could be controlled only in that dark province inhabited by those who share beds. Although she could sometimes say things out loud to Everett, she did not know how to talk to Martha.
“My eyes are red.” Martha turned off the light again. “Everett thinks the sun rises and sets with you. You should realize that.”
“I realize it.”
“I mean you should realize how really simple Everett is.”
Martha sat up in bed and fumbled on the table for a package of cigarettes.
“You better eat,” Lily said. “Everything’s getting cold.”
“You mean that cold artichoke and that cold roast-beef sandwich and that cold glass of milk.” Martha lit a cigarette. “Just a minute. How really straight he is. I mean maybe Everett gets scared and has bad dreams like anybody else, I don’t know, but the difference is Everett wouldn’t ever explore it. All Everett wants is a little order.”
“I guess that’s what everybody wants.”
Martha lay down again. “Maybe everybody wants it. But most people don’t want it more than anything else in the world. The way Everett does. You might want it, I might want it. But when the opportunity to have it practically hits us over the head, we just about knock ourselves out getting out of the way.” She paused. “Take you for example.”
Lily said nothing.
“All right, don’t. Take me. What do I want. A nice ordered life right here on the river just like we’ve always had.”
“Joe says the war is going to change everything.” Snatching at what had seemed for a moment a chance to steer the conversation away from the particular and into the realm of topics so impersonal and so unweighted that they could be safely talked about, Lily had forgotten that Joe was for the time being a name loaded with peril.
“Never mind about Joe. He read it in U.S. News & World Report. Anyway. That’s what I want. But what do I do about getting it. I get messed up with Ryder, who not only doesn’t want to marry me, doesn’t understand any of the things I need, but is so unfitted to everything I want that I get so nervous I practically break into tears every time he’s in the same room with Daddy. That’s what I do about it.”
Lily looked away. “I don’t know,” she said. She did not want Martha to tell her anything more about Ryder Channing. She had written Everett about how impossible Martha had been since she met him, had told him he had better come talk to Martha, and she did not know what else she could do.
“I don’t even like Ryder,” Martha added, wadding up her baby pillow and holding it against her face with one hand, groping with the other for the shreds of Kleenex on the blanket.
Lily took a tissue from her pocket and handed it to Martha. “I’ll get you some Luminal,” she said with relief. She did not like to see Martha cry but the conversation was at any rate closed.
At twenty minutes to eleven, after Mr. McClellan had gone upstairs and left Lily to finish her letter to Everett (I wish you would please reconsider about coming for a few days because neither your father nor I can talk to her and I don’t believe she has passed one day without crying since she came home in June, and this man, although he is quite nice, does not seem good for her, Everett, baby, please), Ryder Channing arrived to see Martha.
“Actually she’s asleep,” Lily said, straightening her skirt as she took his raincoat. “I guess you know she’s been sick.”
“I thought she might feel better.”
He did not sit down, and she noticed for the first time that he was about Everett’s height, about six feet. He would not have looked unlike Everett had there not been about his face both a hardness and a softness absent in Everett’s, the look of someone who has been in some sense spoiled. She supposed he must be older than Everett by four or five years, must be twenty-nine or thirty.
“I thought she might feel up to driving into town for a drink. I’m sorry.” He picked up a book from the hall table and opened it, pausing to read the inscription. “Maybe you’d like to go.”
“I shouldn’t go out. Won’t you have a drink here.”
“Sure. Sure I will.” He smiled. She had thought before that he must calculate the effect of his smile; its peculiar intimacy was a study in timing. It was something like the way John Wayne said “Hell-o there” when he first met the girl, on a train or in a construction camp or riding past on a horse. There was no mistaking John Wayne and there was, in a limited way, no mistaking Ryder Channing.
“That’s real nice of you,” he added, smiling again, sitting down, and examining the envelope she had just addressed to Everett. Seeing that it was empty, he yawned, closed his eyes, and asked: “Where’s that drink?”
It occurred to her, as she got the ice, that John Wayne had the jump on Ryder when it came to follow-through.
They had, in all, three drinks. At first Lily sat very straight on the wooden rocker by the desk; after he had made a second drink she sat across from the couch, where he lay sprawled with one leg propped on the arm. He told her about Memphis, where his mother and sisters lived, and about Charlottesville, where he had gone to school. (“You’d like that, Lily. You’d really like that, Charlottesville, springtime, you’d eat it up,” he assured her in the Tennessee drawl that made everything he said seem a mild flirtation, made her feel that he had, in uncovering her previously unsuspected and more or less unprovable predilection for Charlottesville in the springtime, penetrated the very essence of her.) He praised Martha extravagantly (she had, he declared, one of the quickest minds he had ever encountered in a woman); asked to see a crayon drawing Knight had done; and announced that the three of them — he, Martha, and Lily — must have dinner at the Officers’ Club at Mather Field the following Sunday. Or some Sunday. They would keep it loose. Under his gentle prodding, Lily found herself telling him about the parties her mother used to give, about the time her grandfather had challenged a neighbor to a gunfight over a right of way which (it turned out) belonged to neither of them; even about her father. It was the first time she had spoken about her father except in passing since his death. Ryder seemed fascinated by the most minute details of life on the river: he wanted to know why she had been sent to Dominican rather than to the union high school as Martha had been; why they did not belong to the country club and whether anyone else on the river did; why Walter Knight would not have been likely to belong to a San Francisco club, say the Pacific Union or the Bohemian. “He just wouldn’t, that’s all,” Lily said, and it seemed to satisfy Ryder; he appeared to index it under Growers, Social Eccentricities of, and went on to explore whether Walter Knight had known anyone who voted for Culbert Olson for Governor in 1938.