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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.”)
    About seven o’clock, when the house was full of the faint sweet smell of wax and the almost palpable substance of Edith Knight’s anticipation, Lily, dressed in the pale blue crêpe de Chine her mother thought most set off her hair, would take a glass of champagne up to the third floor and sit by a front window, watching the cars swing off the bridge and up the road to the ranch. Everyone came to those parties: river people, town people, and, when the Legislature was in session, people from Red Bluff, Stockton, Placerville, Sonora, Salinas, everywhere. Even the people from down South came, proof to the doubtful that Walter Knight was more interested in California than in water rights, than in small disagreements, than in a bill he had once introduced proposing the establishment of two distinct states, the border to fall somewhere in the Tehachapi. “I’ll tell the world,” a lobbyist from down South once said to Lily, “L.A. is God’s own little orchard.” His wife echoed him: God’s own little orchard. Neither was actually from California; he had met the little lady in a band contest, an all-state high-school competition held in the Iowa State football stadium. His