Run River
JOAN DIDION
Run River
Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California. She has written four novels and is a current contributor to
The New York Review of Books
and
The New Yorker
.
Books by
JOAN DIDION
After Henry
Miami
Democracy
Salvador
The White Album
A Book of Common Prayer
Play It As It Lays
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Run River
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 1994
Copyright
©
1963 by Joan Didion
Copyright renewed 1991 by Joan Didion
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Ivan Obolensky, Inc., New York, in 1963.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Didion, Joan.
Run River / Joan Didion.—1st Vintage International ed.
p. cm.
Previously published: New York: I. Obolensky, © 1963.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78775-0
I. Title.
PS3554.I33R86 1994
813′.54—dc20 93-45274
Author photograph © Quintana Roo Dunne
v3.1
for my family and for N
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
| TEA FOR TWO | Copyright 1924 by Harms, Inc. |
| | Copyright Renewed |
| | Reprinted by Permission |
| OF THEE I SING | Copyright 1931 by New World Music Corporation |
| | Copyright Renewed |
| | Reprinted by Permission |
| BLUE ROOM | Copyright 1926 by Harms, Inc. |
| | Copyright Renewed |
| | Reprinted by Permission |
| DON’T FENCE ME IN | Copyright 1944 by Harms, Inc. |
| | Reprinted by Permission |
| “TEMPTATION” | Lyric by Arthur Freed. |
| | Melody by Nacio Herb Brown |
| | © |
The quotation from the poem “Man and Wife” from LIFE STUDIES by Robert Lowell, is reprinted by permission of the publisher, Farrar, Strauss & Company, Inc. Copyright
©
1956, 1959 by Robert Lowell.
Contents
“All night I’ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive …”
—R
OBERT
L
OWELL
“… the real Eldorado is still further on.”
—Peck’s 1837 New Guide to the West
August 1959
1
Lily heard the shot at seventeen minutes to one. She knew the time precisely because, without looking out the window into the dark where the shot reverberated, she continued fastening the clasp on the diamond wrist watch Everett had given her two years before on their seventeenth anniversary, looked at it on her wrist for a long time, and then, sitting on the edge of the bed, began winding it.
When she could wind the watch no further she stood up, still barefoot from the shower, picked up from her dressing table a bottle of
Joy
, splashed a large amount of it onto her hand, and reached down the neckline of her dress to spread it, a kind of amulet, across her small bare breasts: on the untroubled pages of those magazines where
Joy
was periodically proclaimed The Costliest Perfume in the World, nobody sat in her bedroom and heard shots on her dock.
Her eyes fixed not on the windows but upon the framed snapshots of the children which hung above her dressing table (Knight at eight, standing very straight in a Cub Scout uniform; Julie at seven, the same summer), Lily held her hand inside her dress until all the
Joy
had evaporated and there was nothing left to do but open the drawer where the .38 had been since the day Everett killed the rattlesnake on the lawn: the drawer in the table by their bed where the .38 should be still and where it was not. She had known it would not be.
Nine hours before, at four o’clock that afternoon, Lily had decided that she would not go at all to the Templetons’ party. It was entirely too hot. She had been upstairs all afternoon, lying on the bed in her slip, the shutters closed and the electric fan on. Everett was out in the hops, showing the new irrigation system to a grower from down the river; Knight had driven into town; Julie, she supposed, was somewhere with one of the Templeton twins. She did not really know.
The afternoons always settled down this way. Late in June, after all the trouble, she had begun insisting that everyone lie down after lunch. Although on three afternoons everyone had gone upstairs, on the fourth she had heard Julie talking on the telephone downstairs (“You couldn’t
mean
it. He swore they broke up
months
ago”), and on the fifth she was, as usual, alone in the house. Everett and the children had been, nonetheless, extravagantly agreeable about the plan: if there was one word to describe what everyone had been about everything since June, that word was agreeable. It had been all summer as if a single difference among them might tear it apart again; as if one unpremeditated word could bring the house down around them for good.
She got up and opened a shutter. The heat still shimmered in the air, so concentrated as to seem incendiary. After dinner she would take another shower and throw the windows open and read one of Knight’s books. The floor of his room was stacked with books. It seemed to her that Knight had spent the entire summer packing, unpacking, arranging and rearranging the things he planned to take East to Princeton: he had already packed so many books to ship East that Everett had finally asked if he had reason to believe the Princeton library off-limits to freshmen. “Why leave them here,” Knight had shrugged, and for a few seconds Lily had hated him, had read malice into his bland voice as she watched Everett’s face take on that look of elaborate unconcern.
At any rate, she would try to read tonight, although she found concentration increasingly difficult; lately she had been able to read only books about Chicago gangsters or by oceanographers. The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre and the Mindanao Deep seemed, in their equidistance from her, equally absorbing. She had asked Knight, last week when he was driving to Berkeley, to pick up some new books in one of the paperback bookstores along Telegraph Avenue. The books could no doubt be found, Knight had informed her, right downtown in Sacramento. She did not seem to realize that there were now paperback bookstores in Sacramento. She and his father would never seem to get it through their heads that things were changing in Sacramento, that Aerojet General and Douglas Aircraft and even the State College were bringing in a whole new class of people, people who had lived back East, people who read things. She and his father were going to be pretty surprised if and when they ever woke up to the fact that nobody in Sacramento any more had even heard of the McClellans. Or the Knights. Not that he thought they ever would wake up. They’d just go right along dedicating their grubby goddamn camellia trees in Capitol Park to the memory of their grubby goddamn pioneers.