As they were finishing their third drink and Lily was trying to explain why she had not liked going to the San Francisco dances when she was at Dominican, Martha appeared on the stair landing, tying the roseless sash and smiling wanly.
“I heard you all.” Whatever Martha’s malaise, it seemed to have so developed within the past few hours that she could not negotiate four steps without clutching the railing. “I’m sorry I didn’t wake up before.”
Channing swung his long legs off the couch and stood up, holding out his arms to Martha.
“You poor sick baby.” He bent to kiss her neck. “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”
“I only wanted to say hello.”
She stood there, neither sitting down nor taking Ryder’s hand.
“Lily was telling me about the San Francisco Assembly,” Ryder said. “Did you go to those dances?”
“No. I didn’t go to those dances.”
“Martha went to school up here,” Lily said. “As you know.”
“Listen,” Martha said. “I meant to tell you. Daddy said something real funny the other night at dinner.”
“What?”
“Well, see, he wanted to ask me something about you. But naturally he pretended not to remember your name. ‘That fellow from Mississippi,’ he said. ‘Ryder’s not from Mississippi,’ I said. ‘He’s from Tennessee.’ ‘Mississippi, Tennessee, what’s the difference,’ Daddy said. ‘It’s all Del Paso Heights to me.’ ”
Lily laughed. Del Paso Heights was a district north of Sacramento noted for its large Negro population and its high incidence of minor social disorders.
“That’s very funny,” Channing said. He seemed obscurely pleased by the story, another entry under Growers, Eccentricities of.
“He really said it, didn’t he, Lily.”
“He really did. I have to go up,” she added, kissing Martha on the cheek and taking Ryder’s hand. He smiled at her.
As she walked upstairs she felt that Ryder was watching her, and kept her back straight. When she turned at the landing she saw that he was not watching her at all, but kissing Martha, pulling her very close, his hand at the small of her back. She wondered how Martha felt when Ryder smiled, and how much of the smile was calculated. Not that it mattered. Everyone had his own shell game, and if Ryder Channing had known tonight how to make her feel open and happy for an hour or so, they had, in the end, conned each other. He would probably understand that.
It occurred to her later, after she had undressed and turned down the sheets on Everett’s and her bed, that Ryder Channing might have been someone to whom, under different circumstances, she could have said things out loud.
13
Everett was playing poker in the Officers’ Club at Fort Bliss when they telephoned him on that Saturday after Thanksgiving, 1944. Lily had already called twice that week, asking if he could please come home for Christmas because everything was falling apart without him. First the baby had been down with measles, then Knight had caught whooping cough; there had been nothing but sickness since summer. I need you, she said. He could simply not understand unless he came; he must come. In the first place there was Martha. If he wanted to help Martha he had better come. She was still intimating that she was about to run off with that Air Corps captain from Tennessee; the week before Thanksgiving she did not come home for two days. She told her father she was in San Francisco. Which for all Lily knew she might have been but there was one vital detail missing in the version she told her father. (Not that it wasn’t Martha’s own business, but she managed to make it everyone’s by making issues of everyone else’s faults. If she heard once more from Martha that Ryder Channing said she had “no conversation” she was going to start screaming, and if any of them heard once more from Martha that Ryder Channing thought the house looked like something out of Charles Addams, Lily simply could not be responsible for what Everett’s father might do. He objected to the way Ryder Channing wore his hat, without any stiffening, and referred to him always as “the fly-boy” or “the ninety-day wonder,” phrases he had picked up Lily didn’t know where since everything else about the war was more or less escaping him.) Anyway. Martha and her father fought every night at dinner until no one could eat, and then Martha would push her chair back and run upstairs. They could hear her crying at night and it upset everyone. She had in fact been behaving that way ever since she came home from school, so it did not in all fairness seem to have been brought on by Channing, but he was around all the time and when he was not around Martha was crying and it upset Everett’s father especially. Not that it took much to upset him these days. Everett could not realize. Someone had approached him about subdividing the ranch after the war, and the man may have been rather unattractive and may even have been as Everett’s father said an operator and a draft-dodger, but Everett’s father still had no call to say the things he said to that man. There you had it. The children were sick and Martha was crying and Everett’s father was losing his mind. If only Everett could come. You don’t know how I need you.
Lily’s letters and telephone calls had been the only disturbance in Everett’s life that summer and fall; she seemed to have read none of the inspirational literature about building service morale, keeping the home fires burning, I’ll be home for Christmas but only in my dreams. He missed her and the babies, but not as much as he told her he did, and then only in an abstract way. They were safe, and his absence from them was more than blameless; it was blessed by all the Allied Powers. More than he could remember being since his first few weeks at Stanford, he was peculiarly contented within the ordered limitations of his life at Bliss. Desultorily, he played poker and struck up guarded friendships at the bar; later, every night, he lay in bed and made new plans for the ranch: exquisitely rational arrangements, unmarred by the sloppy actualities of plans in operation. Once, when he had a pass, he went up to Dallas with another lieutenant, one of the group with whom he sometimes played poker; the lieutenant called some girls he had known in college at Austin, and they all went dancing at the Adolphus Hotel. Although he could not later remember how, Everett ended up alone with a girl who had pale strawberry-blond hair and access to her father’s Cadillac. In the Cadillac they had driven out by a creek where they sat on the running board and drank bourbon out of paper cups and watched the sun come up, and the girl had made Everett feel her necklace (it liked to be touched, she told him, because it was made of real pearls from Neiman-Marcus) and had held his hand against her throat, but he had only kissed her gravely and driven her home. Later that morning, waiting for a transport he could hop back to El Paso, he tried to believe that it had been because she was a nice girl or at any rate because he was faithful to Lily, but he knew that he had left the girl alone for neither reason. He had left her alone because it was too much trouble; on a small scale she might have disturbed the even flow of his days at Bliss even as Lily did.