Lily had stepped back and was staring at him.
“I mean you don’t have to whisper,” he said, brushing a mosquito from his face.
“I said did he have a gun.”
“What do you think? You think he had a gun? He wasn’t out here for the goddamn pheasant, was he?”
“He threatened you.”
Everett looked down the river. “No,” he said. “He did not have a gun and he did not exactly threaten me.”
“He might have, you see.” Lily spoke slowly and clearly, as if to the children when they were small. “He could have threatened you.”
Running for her life, Everett thought. He did not say anything.
“He’d been drinking and he might have come out here and tried to—” She broke off and looked away. “Tried to hurt me.”
“Sure thing,” Everett said. “That’s a nice one. You think the smartest Jew lawyer in California could find twelve friends and neighbors between here and Stockton who’d believe you hadn’t asked for it?”
“We could make the reasons.”
“Listen,” he said. “You listen to me now, this once, and mind what I say. It’s not as easy as that. There aren’t any reasons. I don’t want that.”
“It’s a little late for choosing.”
“You don’t see. I don’t want that.”
“What is it you want,” she said without inflection.
He looked down the river. What is it you want. He had wanted to go away with her, for one thing. The idea of going away had been weaving itself into the fabric of his daily life for months. He had not in the beginning (say in April) thought of it as a trip, a possibility, something which might easily be arranged by travel agents, steamship pursers, airline clerks; even by July, his desire had acquired neither the brilliantly attainable colorings of travel posters and Holiday magazine nor the subtler, more exotic pastels of Rand-McNally cartography. The want would strike him briefly, and at odd moments: while he talked price to the hop broker, or waited for someone to answer the telephone. Even before the idea took real shape, he had begun to count on it: when we’re gone, he would think without perceiving that he had thought it.
But a trip was not much to want. More than that, he had wanted this summer to do something with the children; he had not. In a few weeks Julie would be going back down to Dominican, and all he could remember of the summer was the heat. That was all he could make of it now: the heat, and Lily lying upstairs with the shutters closed against it, and Julie coming in jumpy from it, and how it had bothered Sarah when she came through in June, and how the coolest place was down in the dust among the hops. The house had seemed too small all summer. Three floors, seventeen large dark rooms, room enough for three generations of his family before him: the house had not seemed, this summer, big enough for the four of them. It had been the heat. (“I didn’t remember the heat this way,” Sarah had apologized breathlessly to her husband. “When you’ve lived where it’s green you forget how it is out here. You realize it hasn’t rained since April and it won’t until September? You realize that?” As disturbed still as he had been when Sarah first went away, Everett had said that if she wanted to see green, she had only to look out into the hops. Counting the new system they were spending maybe ten thousand dollars this summer keeping those hops green. “That’s exactly my point,” Sarah had said.)
It had been the heat, and Sarah, and the way the summer had begun. Everett had wanted to find some way to talk to Julie, to tell her that he would take care of her, that she need not be frightened of anything. He had not even found a way to tell her that she drove too fast. He had once seen her doing eighty in the Lincoln on the river road. And Knight would be going East, alone. It was not that Everett minded. Although Princeton had not been his idea he thought it a good idea; he even thought that he might have liked, himself, a year somewhere other than Stanford. But he knew that Knight considered the trip back East less an interlude than a beginning. No matter what Knight said, he was not thinking of coming home to the ranch. What is it you want. Whatever he had wanted, none of the rest of them did. Before his grandfather had died, he had told Everett’s father that the riverfront and the other ranches, some seven thousand acres in all, were to be divided equally among his three grandchildren: Sarah, Everett, Martha. Although they had sold off some here and picked up some there, they still had the riverfront and they still had about seven thousand acres, all controlled by the corporation, the McClellan Company. (There was even a corporate seal, although Julie had broken the stamp years ago, trying to make an imprint on a leather suitcase.) Since Martha’s death, Everett and Sarah had each owned half of the McClellan Company, and Everett had managed all of it. Knight would hold even more land than that. All the old Knight orchards would come to him through Lily, and he would probably have everything up for sale before the ink was dry on the papers. (It had been Knight who had first pointed out to Sarah that the piece immediately upriver from the ranch was a tract called Rancho Del Rio No. 1 and the piece immediately downriver, developed a year later, a tract called Rancho Del Rio No. 3. “They’re just biding their time,” Knight had laughed, “waiting it out for Rancho Del Rio No. 2.”)
What is it you want. He had said it to Martha (what do you want, baby, he had said, what did you want) the night she drowned off the dock where his gun now lay. He had wanted to say it to Sarah, every time she came home (only she did not now call it home). He had wanted to say it to Knight and he had wanted to say it to Julie. He looked at Lily again. She had the blank, frightened look that she had some nights when he woke her from bad dreams. She had always been afraid of the dark. Sweet Jesus, what had she wanted?
“I want to go up to the house,” he said.
3
We could make the reasons. Everett’s mind began to function now for the first time since he had left the Templeton house (it must have been about midnight, because someone had shouted “no dancing on Sundays,” and then Francie Templeton had gone to get him a drink he did not need, Joe Templeton had asked him where Lily was, and he had walked out of the house, across the lawn and down the graveled drive to the car; he had seen Knight kissing Francie’s niece from Santa Barbara down on the stone bench by the swimming pool, had discerned Francie’s laugh among the voices and music from the house, and had seen then that Lily’s car was gone); began to weigh the potentialities now as he stood on the levee waiting for the headlights to pass so that he and Lily could cross the road to the house. (Oh God remember how it was to drive the river road late on hot summer nights with Lily asleep, her head dropped on his shoulder, to hear the mosquitoes above the sound of the motor and to know that ahead was the cool white room, the walnut bed with the mosquito netting, Lily’s room and his, his grandfather’s before him. Lost in the night fields, his body, Lily’s body, the house ahead: all one, some indivisible trinity. But maybe it had never been that way except late at night, never except when Lily was asleep. He knew this road so well that he could drive it with his eyes closed, could have plotted every curve in his sleep, knew exactly when to expect the jolt where the roadbed changed at the county line. Remember how it was. Asleep, Lily was any way he willed her.)
“Don’t be afraid now,” Lily said, her voice harsh. She put her hand on his arm as if to pull him along.