1938–1959
4
A little late for choosing, she had said to Everett, quite as if it hadn’t always been. Was there ever in anyone’s life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum of all the choices gone before? A little late for choosing: her father had known it, even as he denied it. But deny it he had. You say what you want and strike out for it, he told Lily on the morning of her sixteenth birthday: it was one of their rare attempts to grope through a conversation with each other, deafened as always by the roar of the blood between them. (Neither Walter Knight nor his only child ever forgot that blood: dumbly, they exchanged deliberate commonplaces, phrases perhaps dry and hard enough to carry the weight of something for which there was no phrase at all. Take care of yourself. Do you need any money. Write.) You say what you want and then go after it, and if you decide to be the prettiest and the smartest and the happiest, you can be.
“Just you remember that everybody gets what he asks for in this world,” Walter Knight repeated, making two stacks of the sixteen silver dollars he had dropped on her bed.
“Maybe that’s not such a prize,” she said. “Getting what you ask for.”
She was aware that the attainment of her own most inadmissable wish, to be asked to play Scarlett O’Hara in the movie version of Gone With the Wind, was not only outside the range of probability but not, over the long stretch, in her best interests. It would not, per se, build character. On the other hand her father was not talking about her character, which was one of the things that distinguished him from other people’s fathers. Another was that he was good-looking enough, despite what was called in her mother’s family “a weak mouth,” to play Rhett Butler.
“I didn’t say it was any prize.” Walter Knight took a fruit knife from his pocket and began cutting up the apple he had brought for Lily’s breakfast. “I didn’t say that at all. I said it’s nobody’s fault but your own. My own. Anybody’s own.”
He paused, dropping the core of the apple in a waste-basket. “Eat this apple and we’ll get some waffles. You’re too thin. I said you play the game, you make the rules. I said if a lot of people a long time back hadn’t said what they wanted and struck out for it you wouldn’t have been born in California. You’d have been born in Missouri maybe. Or Kentucky. Or Virginia.”
“Or abroad,” Lily suggested.
Walter Knight paused. To have been born abroad was not, even within the range of his own rhetoric, quite conceivable.
“Or abroad,” he conceded finally, seeing that the point was his own. “What I mean is you come from people who’ve wanted things and got them. Don’t forget it.”
“Maybe I don’t know what I want. Sometimes I worry about it.”
“I’ll do the worrying,” Walter Knight said. “You know that.”
With a faith that troubled Walter Knight even as he encouraged it, Lily believed at sixteen, as firmly as she believed that it was America’s mission to make manifest to the world the wishes of an Episcopal God, that her father would one day be Governor of California. It was only a matter of time before he could be rightfully installed in Sacramento in the white Victorian house he still called, in an excess of nonchalance (it had been since 1903 the Governor’s Mansion), “the old Gallatin place.” Any time Walter Knight spent in town could be explained in view of this end, and he spent, the year Lily was sixteen, a great deal of time in town: more time than he would ever spend again, for 1938 was to be, although they did not then know it, his last year in the Legislature.
Gomez ran the ranch, even bargained with the fruit buyers, while Walter Knight sat in the familiar gloom of the Senator Hotel bar and called at the white frame house on Thirty-eighth Street where Miss Rita Blanchard lived. (Miss Rita Blanchard was, as he so often said, his closest friend in town, a good friend, a loyal friend, a friend whose name could be mentioned in the Senator Hotel bar in the presence of Walter Knight only by Walter Knight.) Gomez was the most dolorous of men; one might have thought him intent only upon disproving the notion that our neighbors from south of the border were so muy simpatico. Patiently, he illustrated Walter Knight’s contention that honesty could be expected only of native northern Californians. “I pay that bastard more than any Mexican in the Valley gets paid,” Walter Knight would say periodically. “Yet he cheats me, finds it necessary to steal me blind. Add that one up if you will. Rationalize that one for me.” The challenge, although rhetorical, was calculated to lend everyone present a pleasant sense of noblesse oblige; as Walter Knight was the first to say, he had never hired a Mexican foreman expecting that they would operate under the Stanford Honor Code. Once Edith Knight had taken up the challenge, but the rationale she offered had little to do with Gomez. “Maybe that wouldn’t happen,” she said one night at dinner, her hands flat on the heavy white linen cloth and her eyes focused at some point away from her husband and daughter, “just possibly that wouldn’t happen if you were to spend, say, one-half the time on this ranch that you spend on Thirty-eighth Street.”
Walter Knight demanded that Lily observe the delicacy of the asparagus, grown, despite an extraordinarily poor season for asparagus growers in the southern part of the state, not three miles away on the Pierson place.
“Walter,” Edith Knight whispered finally, flushed and rigid with regret as if with fever. Without looking at her, Walter Knight reached across the table and touched her hand. “Sarcasm,” he said, “has never been your forté.” Edith Knight stiffened her shoulders and picked up her water goblet. “The word is forte, Walter,” she said after a moment, entirely herself again. “Quite unaccented.”
Such lapses were rare for Edith Knight: a change for the better was among the prime tenets of her faith. That was the year, Lily’s sixteenth, when she tried parties. Through the holidays and late into spring, she entertained as no one on the river had entertained in years, confident that the next party would reveal to her the just-around-the-corner country where the green grass grew. I thought of floating camellias in the silver bowls, she would write to Lily at Dominican, or do you think all violets, masses and masses of violets? p.s. bring someone home if you want but don’t come if it’s an Assembly weekend, you’ll miss meeting a great many nice people if you keep on missing those dances. Because Lily would have gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid an Assembly (the sight of the inexorable square envelopes in her mail slot at school turned her faint, chilled her with a vision of herself stranded on a gilt chair at the St. Francis Hotel, her organdy dress wilting and her hands wet in kid gloves), she always came home for her mother’s parties.
She would arrive on the Saturday morning train, and Gomez would meet her in Sacramento. (“Como esta usted, Señor Gomez?” she called one morning as she stepped off the train. “I don’t get you,” he said, picking up her two bags and handing her the heavier one.) Although Gomez would sometimes agree to stop at a place in the West End where she could eat tacos with her fingers, he never spoke on those occasions unless Crystal was along. Crystal was his common-law wife by virtue of mutual endurance, and if Gomez brought her into town on Saturday morning it was only to confront her with the scenes of her Friday-night defections. In a moment of misdirected intimacy, Crystal once told Lily that she had worked the whole goddamn Valley in season before Gomez latched on to her in Fresno. “I don’t mean picking, honey, you get that,” she added, producing as evidence her white hands, each nail filed to a point and lacquered jade green. Ignoring Lily, Gomez would vent his monotonous fury in Spanish, which Crystal pretended not to understand. “You’re a nutsy son of a bitch,” she would drawl from time to time by way of reply, nudging Lily hilariously and inspecting the dark roots of her Jean Harlow hair in a pocket mirror. (Although Crystal had lived with Gomez three months before Walter Knight noticed her presence on the ranch, she had become, the moment he did notice her, one of his favorite figures, referred to alternately as “Iseult the Fair” and “that sweetheart.”)