Edith Knight spent the day after every party in her room, the shutters closed. Although the doctor had told her she had migraine headaches, she would not take the medicine he gave her: she did not believe in migraine headaches. What was wrong with her, she told Lily and Walter Knight every Sunday morning, was a touch of the flu complicated by overwork and she never should have taken two drinks; what was really wrong with her, she had decided by the end of May, was a touch of pernicious anemia complicated by the pollen and she needed a change of scene. She would take Lily abroad. She had always wanted to see Paris and London, and the way they were abroad, you could never tell. It was the ideal time to go.
A week later they left for Europe, and it occurred to Lily later that the highlight of the trip for her mother, who kept her watch all summer on Pacific Standard Time, had been neither Paris nor London but the night in New York, before they boarded the Normandie, when they met Rita Blanchard for dinner at Luchow’s. In New York for a week on her way home from Paris, Rita looked pale and tired; she dropped a napkin, knocked over a glass, apologized, stuttering, for having suggested Luchow’s: possibly Lily did not like German food. Lily loved German food, Edith Knight declared firmly, and it had been an excellent choice on Rita’s part. She for one did not hold with those who thought that patronizing German places meant you had pro-German sympathies, not at all; at any rate, anyone could see, from Rita’s difficulty with the menu, that Rita’s sympathies were simply not pro-German, and that was that. The night was warm and the air heavy with some exotic mildew — the weather was what Lily always remembered — and after dinner they walked down a street where the sidewalk was lined with fruit for sale. Rita noticed that some of the pears were from the Knight orchards; unwary in her delight, she drew both Lily and Edith Knight over to examine the boxes stamped “CAL-KNIGHT.” “Do tell Walter,” Edith Knight said to Rita in her dry voice. “Do make a point of ringing him up when you get home. He’ll so enjoy hearing.”
After Walter Knight left the Legislature that fall they did not have as many parties. Possibly due to his failure to comprehend that three speeches at dinners at the Sutter Club in Sacramento and a large picnic attended mainly by various branches of the candidate’s family did not in 1938 constitute an aggressive political campaign, he was defeated in the November general election by the Democratic candidate, a one-time postal clerk named Henry (“Hank”) Catlin. Henry Catlin made it clear that the “Gentleman Incumbent” was in the pay of Satan as well as of the Pope, a natural enough front populaire since the Vatican was in fact the workshop of the Devil. In neighborhoods of heavy Mexican penetration, however, Henry Catlin would abandon this suggestion in favor of another: that Walter Knight had been excommunicated for marrying out of the Church and other sins, and he could send his Protestant daughter to Catholic schools until hell froze over and it wouldn’t make a whit of difference. “I don’t know how you folks think a family man ought to behave,” he was frequently heard to remark at picnics and rallies. Quite aside from Walter Knight’s not inconsiderable personal liabilities, he was, as well, the representative of “the robber land barons” and the “sworn foe of the little fellow.” Henry Catlin, on the other hand, stood up for the little fellow and for his Human Right to a Place in the Sun, and if he failed to quote Progress and Poverty, it was only because he had not heard of Henry George.
On the night of the election, Lily and Edith Knight sat in the living room alone and listened to the returns on the radio. Although the shape of Walter Knight’s political future was clear by ten o’clock, Edith Knight waited until the last votes had been reported before she folded her needlepoint and stood up.
“Don’t cry,” she said to Lily. “It’s nothing for you to cry about.”
“I’m not.”
“I can see you are. It’s your age. You’re going through that mopey phase.”
“He can’t be Governor now. He couldn’t lose this election and ever get nominated.”
Edith Knight looked at Lily a long time.
“He never could have been,” she said finally. “Never in this world.”
From the stair landing, she added: “But don’t you dare pay any mind to what those Okies said about him. You hear?”
Lily nodded, staring intently at the red light on the radio dial.
She was still crying when Henry Catlin came on the radio to accept his sacred burden. He explained in his Midwestern accent how humbling it was to be the choice of the people — of all the people, you folks who really work the land, you folks who know the value of a dollar because you bleed for every one you get — to be the choice of the people to help lead them into California’s great tomorrow, the new California, Culbert Olson’s California, the California of jobs and benefits and milk and honey and 160 acres for everybody equably distributed, the California that was promised us yessir I mean in Scripture.
“Well,” Walter Knight said, taking off his hat. “Lily.”
She had meant to be upstairs before he came, and did not know what to say. “I’m sorry,” she said finally.
“No call to be sorry, no call for that at all. We’re in the era of the medicine men. We’re going to have snake oil every Thursday. Dr. Townsend is going to administer it personally, with an unwilling assist from Sheridan Downey.”
She could tell that he was a little drunk.
“Snake oil,” he repeated with satisfaction. “Right in your Ham and Eggs. According to Mr. Catlin, we are starting up a golden ladder into California’s great tomorrow.”
“I heard him.”
Humming “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” Walter Knight opened the liquor cupboard, took out a bottle, and then, without opening it, lay down on the couch and closed his eyes.
“Different world, Lily. Different rules. But we’ll beat them at their own game. You know why?” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Because you’ve got in your little finger more brains and more guts than all those Okies got put together.”
She tried to smile.
“Now, Lily. Lily-of-the-valley. Don’t do that. I’m going to have a lot more time to spend on the ranch. We’re going to do things together, read things, go places, do things. I don’t want to think you’re crying about that.”
“That’ll be nice,” she said finally, crushing the handkerchief he had given her and jamming it into the pocket of her jumper.
“You’re still my princess.”
She smiled.
“Princess of the whole goddamn world. Nobody can touch you.”
He opened the liquor cupboard again, replaced the bottle he had taken out, and picked up instead the squared, corked bottle which held the last of his father’s bourbon, clouded and darkened, no ordinary whiskey.
“This is to put you to sleep,” he said, handing her a glass. “Now. What you may not have realized is that Henry Catlin happens to be an agent of Divine Will, placed on earth expressly to deliver California from her native sons. He was conceived in order to usher in the New California. An angel came to Mr. Catlin’s mother. A Baptist angel, wearing a Mother Hubbard and a hair net.” He paused. “Or maybe it was Aimee Semple McPherson. I am not too clear about Scripture on this point.”
“He’s not at all a nice man,” Lily said firmly, encouraged by the bourbon.
“Everything changes, princess. Now you take that drink to bed.”