He did not know. He had thought of the St. Francis only because it was her favorite hotel in San Francisco: It makes me feel like violets, baby, violets and silver dollars from the Comstock Lode. All that tacky marble.
“I mean I assumed she was staying with Mrs. Ives,” Martha added. “I didn’t really think. She said she might call tonight or tomorrow.”
Charlotte Ives was Lily’s great-aunt, a widow who lived out in the Marina. Lily might be at the St. Francis and she might not, but she would almost certainly not be with Mrs. Ives. She said she might call tonight or tomorrow. Wherever she was, he would not be able to reach her. That was all that meant. He knew now that he should have expected her to do this, knew that he would pay all of his life for letting her spend this one hour in some nameless doctor’s office. If that was what she was doing, and he did not know what else she could be doing. She must have been ready to do it before she told him. She had tried him at last and found no help. It occurred to him suddenly that something could go wrong, that everything could go all wrong and they would never let him know.
“What’s going to happen to Knight and Julie?” He heard too late the uneven rise in his voice.
Martha looked at Channing, who shrugged, stood up, and walked over to the window.
“Now, Everett,” Martha said finally. “Knight and Julie are at this moment asleep. China Mary has fed them and I have twice recounted for them the story of the little engine that could. Ryder has obtained at Knight’s request three glasses of water, and perhaps you might — when you feel up to it — make certain that Julie has not misplaced her stuffed raccoon, which seems to do for Julie what Luminal does for Julie’s Mommy. Now I would assume that we could carry on in this vein until Mommy’s return.”
Everett saw that Channing was watching him, and forced himself to smile. He was irritated, as he frequently was now, by Martha’s tone: he was sure that if she could hear herself she would stop it, but did not know how to tell her that.
“We got the last of the hops down today,” he said finally.
“Ah,” Martha said to Channing. “We celebrate the harvest, chez McClellan.”
“Some harvest festival.” Channing smiled. “When the harvester won’t have a drink.”
“We call him the grim reaper.” Martha blew Everett a kiss.
“You’re wearing too much lipstick.” He could at least tell her that. But as he watched her turn away, trying to bite the color off her lips, he was sorry that he had said anything.
He picked up his drink. There was nothing to do now but wait for Lily to call or come home, get through the next day or so without letting Martha see that something was wrong, that everything had gone all wrong. She should have waited. He would have helped her. He swore to himself that he would have helped her had she waited. It might even have been his, and it would not have mattered much finally if it had not been. What real difference would it have made: it would have been Lily’s, and Lily was his, and as far as that went Joe Templeton was a distant cousin of his, distant enough for Everett to seldom remember it but close enough to think about now. They went to the same weddings and funerals, which was what mattered.
“You should have gone down with Lily,” Channing said now to Marth, filling his glass from the pitcher. “You look like hell.”
“The heat bothers Martha.” Everett wondered how much longer Channing would be at Mather Field now that the war was over.
“It sure doesn’t bother that Lily-maid,” Channing said. “She hasn’t looked so good all year.”
“She’s tired,” Everett said. “I don’t care how she looks to you, she’s tired and she needs a rest.”
“She’s your bride, Coop.”
It was a great little thing with Channing, the Gary Cooper routine with Everett and especially the “that Lily-maid” business with Lily. When they had gone, the four of them, to Lake Tahoe three weeks before, he had kept it up all weekend, needling Lily unobtrusively at first but at last so constantly that it had begun not only to set Everett on edge but to humiliate Martha: Everett had watched her trying to divert Channing’s attention from Lily, the strain on her face more and more visible as she began talking, too loudly, about things neither Channing nor Lily could know about, deliberately excluding them from recollections of how Sarah had behaved before her first dance, how China Mary had feared a Great Dane they had kept for three weeks a long time ago. But aren’t we happy, Lily had said, and despite Channing and despite Martha they had been: he had not been away with Lily since before he left for Fort Lewis, and they drove to all the places they had gone so often during the first year of their marriage: Reno, Carson, down into Glenwood. In the shining clarity of that afternoon in the mountains, the air so clear and sharp and the horizons clean and distant, it had seemed to Everett for a while that they could have again what he had wanted them to have, could lie in bed and laugh, neither accusing the other of anything. Their betrayal of each other (for had he not betrayed her in his mind, wished to stay away, wanted no trouble, you don’t seem to realize there’s a war going on) seemed for a few hours that Saturday afternoon and evening a simple dislocation of war, a disturbance no more lasting than the wash from a stone thrown in the river. They had stayed Saturday night in a house which belonged to one of Lily’s cousins, a brown-shingled place on the north shore of the lake, and they had gambled on the Nevada line until about two o’clock in the morning. Although Lily would not play (“Women don’t ever win, Everett, can’t you see. Because winners have to believe they can affect the dice”), she stayed close to the table, watching over his shoulder, reaching now and then into his pocket for a cigarette or change for a drink, playing idly with a stack of silver dollars he had given her but never taking her eyes from the play on the table. He had tried once again to explain the odds to her, but she claimed to understand nothing at all about the game: she liked only to watch the movement on the table, the chips and the silver and the dice and the rakes the dealers used. Let the little lady roll, the dealer said gallantly (it was a slow table), and Everett remembered now how she had leaned over the table and closed her eyes and thrown with one hand, come seven baby, while she clutched his arm with the other, delighted to be playing with the grownups; she put two dollars on the line and her yellow sweater fell to the floor and she had been his child bride all over again. All that evening he had pretended with her, had played her game because that was the way he wanted it too, and later they swam in the lake, the water so clear that with only the moonlight and the handful of lights strung out on the dock he could make out rocks thirty feet below the surface, so cold that swimming was like grappling with dry ice. Lily had turned white with cold, her pale tan fading at the first burning touch of water; long after they came up from the lake she sat shivering on the stone hearth, wrapped in a towel. He had found it absurdly endearing that she should warm her nightgown in front of the fire before she put it on. Keep me warm, baby, she had cried out later in bed, and he had forced her head sideways and her mouth into the pillow as she moved in his arms because he did not want Channing, in the next room, to hear her. Keep me baby please keep me. Well, he had not. He had lost her, and now she was in some San Francisco hotel room by herself and maybe it had happened already and maybe it had gone all wrong and she was dying there by herself (women died from abortions, you saw it in the paper every so often, you heard about it, and whether the odds were with her or not she would be afraid of it) and he was here drinking with Martha and Ryder Channing as if it did not matter what happened to Lily. It was all right for Martha to sit here. Martha could not know; had she known, she would have kept Lily from going. But he had known all along, and he sat here now with Ryder Channing, and it was all mixed up in some way with the war, and Sarah’s not being home, and people like Ryder Channing. Not that it was Channing’s fault.