Run River Read Online Free PDF Page B

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,”