At ten minutes past one Ryder Channing called and asked for Martha.
“She’s not here. She died last night.”
Channing did not say anything.
“She drowned in the river,” Lily added in an expressionless voice, the only one she could master. “She took the boat out and drowned.”
“I saw her last night. I saw her at Cassie Waugh’s.”
“It was later. It was after the party. I didn’t see her but it was after that. She drove up in front of the house and Everett went out and she was down at the boat. I don’t know what happened.”
“I saw her. I didn’t talk to her but I saw her.”
“Well,” Lily said, “I didn’t see her but she’s dead.”
“Where is she.”
“She’s dead.”
“I mean her body.”
She had known what he meant. “We buried her this morning,” she said finally.
“Where?”
“Here on the ranch.”
Channing said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” Lily said before she hung up. “I’m sorry we didn’t let you know.”
I’m sorry. She was. No matter what she or Everett or even Martha had thought about Ryder Channing, none of it had been his doing. November 18 1947: In bed all day, told E and L with flu. Ryder sent lilies of the valley, meant no doubt for L. Found field mouse in bathroom closet. Do not tell E because L will make him kill it. April 27 1948: Dinner at R’s, things to remember about: (1) making me bring gin (2) sleeping while I fixed dinner (3) asking if I intended to eat dinner in my slip (4) calling me slatternly (5) asking if I had forgotten how to cook spare ribs along with everything else (6) pretending to read while I finished my dinner and his too (7) difficulty of eating spare ribs and artichokes with someone watching (8) getting sick and telling him he was impotent and knowing it reached him because he hit me. July 4 1948: Told R at picnic he was a redneck, white trash, not fit to eat off E’s plates. I am reaching him all the time at last. The ways to do it were always transparently clear but I was too much on the defensive to see them. Now he is on the defensive and thrashing blindly: called me “you Okie bitch.” February 20 1949: E could fall down dead in front of me and I would think it was nice he didn’t live to be old. I am so far away from them all it is incredible when you consider.
At three o’clock the doorbell rang. It was Joe Templeton, the rain running off his bare head and down his rubber poncho. He had been working on the levees with Ed McGrath. He wanted to say he was sorry about Martha. He had seen Everett about noon but Everett had said nothing.
“Come in for a minute.” She did not want to talk to him but could think of nothing else to say. “I’m upstairs sewing.”
He followed her upstairs to the sitting room and stood by the window behind her chair. She had not seen him in three weeks and had been trying all winter to avoid seeing him alone.
“Put another stick on the fire,” she said. “Everything’s too wet to burn.”
“I thought you’d have your mother here.”
“She took the children this morning. Everett told me to send them to school but they were too upset. I tried to keep them away but Julie saw them carrying her in and started screaming and screaming and finally I gave her some warm milk with bourbon in it and she quieted down.”
“I remember I saw them downtown a couple of weeks ago, Julie hanging onto Martha’s hand, they looked like mother and daughter. They looked a lot alike.”
“Not so much, actually.” Lily knew that she was talking too much and too fast but could not seem to stop: she had been unable to talk to Everett. “Martha took her places, played games with her. Anyway Julie kept screaming ‘my Martha, my Martha’ and Knight was trying not to let his father see him cry but anyway.” She trailed off and finished lamely: “They both loved her.”
“We saw her last night.”
Lily looked at her hands for a long while. “How did she seem,” she said finally.
“She looked pretty. She had on a pretty dress.”
“Yes.”
“We asked her to come to dinner with us. She said she would and then we all had another drink and she turned on Francie. She said Francie was drunk and I was getting drunk and she didn’t want to sit around at dinner with a pair of lushes.”
He paused, as if demanding an explanation.
“Well,” Lily said. “I guess she didn’t.”
“She was very rude.”
“Well, then. It served her right, didn’t it. Sweet Christ.”
Joe said nothing. Instead he walked across the room and began examining the framed photographs above the fireplace: Martha the night she took all the jumping firsts at the State Fair horse show; Everett at sixteen in an American Legion baseball uniform; Walter Knight, Lily in his lap, in the driver’s seat of the Hispano-Suiza he had bought when she was very small.
She got up to close the door to the bedroom. She did not want Joe looking at her unmade bed, the sheets and blankets and her nightgown and Everett’s sneakers tumbled together at its foot.
“How are Francie and the twins.” She sat down again.
“Francie still wants the divorce,” he said after a while. “She was talking about it again last night.”
“She was drunk. You said she was drunk.”
“I said Martha said she was drunk. What about it. She brings it up cold sober.”
“I told you. I don’t want to talk about it.”
It had been a month since Joe first told her that Francie had again decided to divorce him. Unless he filed a cross-complaint for custody of the twins she would not name Lily. She would simply say mental cruelty if he would keep his hands off the twins. Although she had made this latest decision in the Islands and in order to tell Joe immediately had flown home instead of waiting for the Lurline, she still had taken no action. She never did. Francie had been divorcing Joe off and on for fifteen years that Lily knew of; it was their way, although neither seemed to realize it, of periodically reviving interest in each other.
“I told you,” Lily added. “If Francie files for divorce you file for custody if you want it. It wouldn’t bother me.”
“It wouldn’t?”
“I said it wouldn’t.” It was a question so academic as to be absurd.
Joe poked at the fire. “Would you leave him and marry me if Francie goes through with it?”
Lily stood up without saying anything.
“I don’t believe you’ll ever leave him,” Joe said.
“What would you give if I would? I mean if Francie goes through with it.”
“What do you mean, what would I give?”
“Would you cut off your right arm?”
“Yes. I’d cut off my right arm. What’s the matter with you.”
“That’s right. You’d cut off your right arm.” Lily paused. “You all would. Listen. You get out now but listen to me first: you think you’ve got some claim on me? You think it was some special thing that made any difference to me? Listen to me. Nothing we did matters to me. Nothing touched Everett and nothing touched me.”
She followed Joe downstairs and closed the door behind him, and by the time Everett came home she had straightened the bedrooms, talked twice to Ed McGrath (Well, it’s done. All I can tell you is it’s done. We’ll try to make it all right later), and made soup from potatoes and onions and cream, a kind that had comforted her as a child, but before she gave it to Everett she took him to bed and held him against the night and the rain and Martha lying outside the house. When she finally went downstairs in the dark, barefooted, to get the soup, the telephone was ringing.