The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  The rooms of the U Street house were filled with old muslin appliqués. There was a quilt stitched by Didion’s great-great-grandmother during a plains crossing shortly after she’d buried a child on the trail. Photographs lined the rooms: a stone marker by the side of Nancy Hardin Cornwall’s Umpqua cabin; Nancy’s great-granddaughter, Edna Magee Jerrett, standing boldly on a bare Sierra outcrop. The house was mote-dizzy, dim, the curtains usually drawn: a museum stillness, a concession to Frank’s “dread,” which needed gentling, as well as a reverential nod to the relics. The silverware was tarnished, the wallpaper faded, the flowers in vases brittle and dry. For Didion, it was not quite like living with Miss Havisham, coming upon cobwebby cakes in the kitchen with spiders for icing, but she did breathe the dust her mother would not disperse, did live in the dark, did eat corn bread and relish from recipes hauled over mountain passes by people who, with one or two missteps, might have eaten one another. Didion’s keen awareness of family ghosts and her home’s tilt toward neglect caused her to envy her ancestors’ heroics and to burn with shame that she could not match their examples.

  Church did not ease her inadequacy. Eduene christened her daughter at the Trinity Episcopal Pro-Cathedral on M Street (where Eduene and Frank had married), and took her children to worship there each Sunday. Didion adored the elm trees dropping yellow leaves in front of the church, and perked up, smirking, whenever the priest compared Sacramento’s agricultural riches to those of the Holy Land, but otherwise she took little from services beyond the beauty of the music and language.

  Once she turned eleven, she announced she was done with church. Her mother’s mother, Edna, educated in an Episcopal convent school, gave Didion an expensive Lilly Daché hat as an enticement to return to the fold. It didn’t work, though it was one more lesson in luxury and taste, like the time she’d bestowed on the girl—when Didion was six and recovering from the mumps—some Elizabeth Arden perfume in a tiny crystal bottle wrapped with gold thread. Her house was another museum, lined with delicate seashells, coral, and seeds.

  Whatever spiritual awareness Didion developed seems to have come from Edna’s husband. Herman was the son of a forty-niner and a self-taught geologist whose livelihood depended on spotting the difference between serpentine and gold-bearing ores. In the language of geologic eras, in words such as igneous, cretaceous, and magma, Didion glimpsed the magnitude of time and its consequences for meaning and purpose. But these were abstractions, impossible to dwell on. Much more compelling was her awareness that her grandmother couldn’t be teased or she’d cry. Often, Didion pushed her to the brink of tears just to watch.

  Occasionally on the streets, Didion observed a weeping man or woman. By the late 1930s, more than fifteen thousand Sacramento citizens were unemployed. Many of them had worked in canning, which had all but collapsed. Hoovervilles appeared in parts of the city, spreading as winter freezes destroyed the valley’s citrus crops, adding to the economic disaster. On rainy spring nights, as townspeople shored up the levees, it was possible for a child to notice differences between men for whom hauling the sandbags was merely a civic duty and those, more anxious and ragged, whose lives depended on the work. When she was twelve or thirteen, Didion asked her mother what social class the Didions belonged to. Eduene replied that the family didn’t think in terms of class. “Class … is something that we, as Americans and particularly as Californians, were supposed to have passed beyond,” Didion learned. But the main reason “we” don’t think about class was implicit in Eduene’s answer: We don’t have to.

  The Didions and their extended families—Jerretts, Reeses—were prominent in town, and always had been: ranchers, bankers, saloon keepers, sheriffs. When Didion was a child, her grandfather was a local tax collector. His wife, Genevieve, would become president of the Board of Education; eventually, an elementary school would be named after her. Another Didion sat on the district court of appeals. “They were part of Sacramento’s landed gentry,” William Burg told me, “families who called themselves agriculturalists, farmers, ranchers, progressives, but they were the owners, not the ones who got their hands dirty.”

  For all its visibility and influence, the family felt prosaic, muted, sad to Didion, even as a girl. Clerks and administrators: hardly the heroes of old, surviving starvation and blizzards. Furthermore, the progressives’ hold on Sacramento’s fortunes had weakened in the Depression and with the restrictions of Prohibition—a real blow to the valley’s hops growers. The land was ripe for tragedy, or the perception of it. When Didion was eight, the grand Buffalo Brewery, just blocks from her house, closed for good. It had been a palace of beer since the late 1880s. During Prohibition, the brewery temporarily halted production, but reopened the year of Didion’s birth, following the law’s repeal. It marketed drinks in cans but could never recapture its lost sales. The progressives got nervous. The place’s shuttering was not just a business failure; it was the end of an era, a threat to a way of life. A whiff of decadence clung to the gentry. When the WPA approved loans for public works in Sacramento, prompting construction of the Tower Bridge across the Sacramento River, green-lighting forty-six new buildings (including the high school Didion would attend) as well as runways at local airports, the Didions benefited from the uptick in business, but they would never acknowledge the federal government’s role in the changes. To admit the influence of outsiders, Easterners, government men, would suggest limits to one’s proud independence. In 1936, construction began on McClellan Air Force Base (then called McClellan Field). Mather, another local airfield, reopened after a dormant period. These developments were good news economically, but they brought an influx of workers from afar, began to change the city’s look and feel, and gave the Didions one more reason to cherish their glorious past and embrace whatever seemed inviolable about the present.

  The Sunday aunts did their best to keep the past rolling. Miss Pearl Didion was busy with the Saturday Club, founded in 1893 to sustain classical music in Sacramento. Genevieve Didion was a powerful engine propelling the Camellia Society and eventually created a Camellia Grove in a park across the street from the state capitol, in honor of the valley’s pioneers. Her efforts were part of the progressives’ attempts to boost their own spirits by revising history—among other things, recasting the city’s founder, John Sutter, not as the economic opportunist he was, but as an agricultural dreamer.

  In addition to music and flower clubs, Sacramento had a literary society, but no Didions seem to have joined it.

  * * *

  For a time, Didion’s literary activities stayed in her bedroom. Soon after becoming obsessed with tales of the Donner Party, she set a framed picture of Donner Pass on her dresser. In Run River, she writes of a woman “whose favorite game as a child” was “‘Donner Party,’ a ritual drama in which she, as its originator, always played Tamsen Donner and was left, day after day, to perish by the side of the husband whose foolish miscalculations had brought them all to grief.” We’re invited to wonder if the Donner Party game occurred to Didion much earlier in life than during the writing of her first novel.

  Theatricality and drama appealed to her as much as writing—playacting was fun and seemed to suggest something true about people, in a family whose emotions were often masked (Didion said her mother gave a “successful impersonation of a non-depressed person,” a magnificent performance).

  “I wanted to be an actress,” Didion said. “I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse [as writing]. It’s make-believe.… The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone.”

  Declarations, evasions, confessions lay at the heart of drama. Didion’s desire to capture accurate dialogue led her to leave her bedroom clutching her notebook. She’d go skulking in hallways, behind half-closed doors, eavesdropping on adults, recording their remarks. On the whole, the Didion family disappointed her in this unwitting project. For example, Didion’s grandfather, her father’s dad, “didn’t talk,” she recalled. “I don’t think my grandfathe
r knew my or my brother’s names, he would always address us as ‘hey you.’” And the conversations were rarely dramatic. “If you were born in Sacramento and bragged about the place, you were ‘puttin’ on airs,’” William Burg told me. “If you were a little uncomfortable about the city, it was easier to sell it to outsiders. A slightly disdainful aspect was an appropriate class attitude.” In Didion’s earliest essays on Sacramento, her disdain is apparent, but the attitude was not useful in her initial dialogue exercises. Still, she liked secretly gathering details. “There used to be a comic strip when I was little called Invisible Scarlet O’Neil,” she recalled. “Invisible Scarlet O’Neil was a reporter. She would press a band on her wrist, become invisible and cover the story invisibly. And everybody would be amazed that she had gotten the story.” And so Didion, gripping her notebook, would run and hide behind a tree, stalking the big folk.

  In moments when she was all too visible—forced to go to church or attend a tea or other family gathering—her mother dressed her in “muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black,” she wrote. She inherited her great-grandmother’s black lace mantilla. If Didion’s memory is correct, her mother seems to have planted the idea in her daughter’s mind that she was too delicate and sensitive for her own good, in the manner of all the family women. She had a sad and anxious personality—“my mother says”—from the day she got home from Mercy General Hospital with all its hovering nuns. She was said to have her dead grandmother Ethel’s eyes, “eyes that reddened and watered at the first premonition of sun or primroses or raised voices, and I was also said to have some of her ‘difference,’ her way of being less than easy at that moment when the dancing starts…” It’s true she didn’t eat much as a child. Her mother fashioned a ritual to try to induce her to swallow her food—the “clean plate club,” she called it, prompting Frank to yell one night, “She’s not a human garbage can.” In fact, Didion’s meager appetite may have been an act of rebellion rather than a result of her frailty, a form of eating disorder (Didion later thought so). She admitted Eduene found her willful and difficult—so much so that if Eduene could have done it all over again, she might have stuck her daughter in a boarding school. This suggests steeliness beneath the quiet delicacy. Eduene had given her daughter a notebook to stop her “whining,” but the notebook tugged her toward an inner life, a private world brewing storms beyond her mother’s control. The myth of the weak one, the one who would have been left on the plains, was a way of convincing the girl she needed dark rooms, silent afternoons, the fussing of Sunday aunts. In truth, it was Eduene who needed the assurance of family rituals (“My mother ‘gave teas’ the way other mothers breathed,” Didion wrote). With carte blanche in the adult sections of the library, with gifts of expensive perfume and fancy hats whenever she had an illness or required persuading, Didion, it appears, was more pampered than impaired.

  She had a cousin named Brenda, a year and a half younger, the daughter of her mother’s sister Gloria. Her favorite game with Brenda was “going page by page through an issue of Vogue and choosing what to ‘buy,’” she once wrote. “Brenda could buy whatever she wanted from the left-hand pages; I was limited to the right. The point was to see which of us could assemble, given the options only as they turned up, the most desirable wardrobe.” It thrilled Didion to imagine herself a woman wearing expensive clothing. She also liked controlling her cousin. If Brenda chose an item Didion didn’t want her to have, she would reject it on a pretext, claiming it was unfair to use an editorial page, say. “I was the older cousin. We would therefore do it my way,” Didion said. What Brenda preferred “never, not ever, not once … crossed my mind.” She loved to scare Brenda by scripting scenarios for the two of them in which they were about to step into an elevator bound for perdition.

  Perhaps Didion wanted to punish her cousin: Brenda adhered to the family rules enforcing decorous meals and the need to make a “perfect white sauce”; she was more willing to accept the “delicacy” myth, going to bed promptly at six-thirty each night; she agreed to play the Snow Princess by the Christmas tree each year, to the delight of all the parents. Or perhaps Didion was trying to enlist her cousin in precocious rebellion (a stance repeated many years later with Quintana: forcing a child to embrace adulthood before she was fully prepared for it). Didion was ready to take her place in the world. No yellow vegetables for her. No cookies and milk. She wanted a cocktail. Observing her father’s tendencies, she’d take a leaf of iceberg lettuce, mix it with crushed ice in a stemmed glass, and pretend to drink like a grown-up.

  Didion made other friends in town, notably Nancy Kennedy, whom she’d met when they were both five and starting ballet classes at Miss Marion Hall’s Dancing School. Nancy was the sister of Anthony Kennedy, who would eventually become a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Since there wasn’t a gap in their ages, Didion was less inclined to control the relationship with Nancy, though its pleasures suited her to a tee. The girls liked dressing up in their ballet costumes (especially for their performance in Les Petites) and enjoyed trying on clothes. Together, they once modeled outfits in a charity fashion show. Didion joined a Girl Scout troop. She recalled being pressed to sing to shut-ins in an asylum just outside Sacramento. The songs included such lyrics as “lilies of the valley line your garden walk” and “that will happen only when the angels sing.” One of her troop mates told me that Didion was probably thinking of a medical facility called Weimar, north of the city, which treated tuberculosis patients. The place revealed to Didion the possible dangers of becoming an adult, but she still longed for the finish line of her childhood.

  Twenty-four, her mother told her when Didion asked what was the best age to be. Eduene was twenty-four when she married, twenty-four when she gave birth to Joan. Twenty-four, she said, was her “lucky number” (for her, as for her husband, life was a floating casino). Grown-up talk was one thing Didion could share with her mother. Eduene would drag dusty boxes out of closets and show her daughter the red velvet cape with the white fur collar she wore at her wedding reception, as well as her older tea dresses.

  From these glimpses of her mother’s fashionable past, and from magazine pictures, Didion concocted romantic daydreams. These were not about princesses or magical coaches, but of paparazzi chasing her through some exotic locale, maybe Argentina (a place she had seen in Vogue), while she, in a sable coat and dark glasses, pursued a divorce from her wealthy husband. Her great-grandmother’s black lace mantilla seemed to materialize out of these dramas and suggest their immanence.

  She constructed literary fantasies, too. “I kept playing around with writing and imagining being a writer, which usually involved having a quote-unquote Manhattan penthouse,” she said. “That was my image of being a writer.”

  3

  San Francisco was not Manhattan—parts of it looked like Sacramento, only bigger—but the romance of the place was palpable, especially in the Paul Elder display windows and flower stands across from Union Square, home of jewelry shops and stores that sold books, art supplies, furniture, apparel, and sweets. On one family trip to the bayside city, Grandmother Edna bought violets for Didion and Brenda and ordered Dungeness crab Louie at El Prado. Eduene and Gloria wondered if the girls were getting so spoiled that they’d have nothing to look forward to in life. Said Edna, “Let that be the greatest of your worries.”

  Though more than seventy thousand dockworkers had lost their jobs, and men had died in labor strikes (roughly half the city’s population belonged to unions), the visitors from the valley saw no trouble—Didions didn’t think about class—gawking instead at seagulls in the fog, Bauhaus and Beaux-Arts buildings, banana boats anchored just west of the Third Street Bridge and freighters under footlights. They breathed the odors of rotting timbers, roasting coffee, raw sugar; marveled at the brand-new Golden Gate Bridge. Begun in 1928, Grace Cathedral (later under the unconventional leadership of the Right Reverend James Albert Pike, whom Didion would one day write about
as a true California eccentric) remained unfinished, its spire a rusty rib cage. Always, Eduene left a contribution for its completion in the mite box.

  In the 1920s, as a slender ingénue, Eduene had attended afternoon tea dances in the Garden Court of the Palace Hotel, sipping wine tea, nibbling handmade scones with Devonshire cream, and flirting with suitors. Her daughter’s view of the city was awash in splendor. Didion felt she’d missed a magical world; in her mind’s eye, department stores and hotels became the towers and ramparts of a castle in the clouds.

  She’d stand at the water’s edge, trying to imagine the bottom of the bay. Maybe, when she grew up, she wouldn’t be a writer in New York. Maybe, instead, she’d study the oceans. She dreamed of leaving for Hawaii on the steamship Lurline, a voyage every woman of breeding and taste made at least once. With its palm trees, sweet drinks, and flowered necklaces, Hawaii was an even better place than Argentina to divorce a rich husband.

  As she gazed out to sea, she wondered what had happened to Amelia Earhart. The headline in the San Francisco Chronicle read LONELY OCEAN STILL HOLDS SECRET OF AMELIA’S FATE. Like the pioneers of old, she had set out romantically in her fragile contraption, never knowing if she’d make her destination.

  * * *

  When they weren’t visiting the city, the Didions made frequent trips into the parched Central Valley. There, the family owned land. In the scant shade of fruit trees, watching dark-skinned men in straw hats pick crops beside white women, men, and children, Didion recognized links between California and more southerly climes. A heat-shimmery harshness infested the place. Everything was close to the bone. This was the real California.

  Didion knew its legacies through her grandfather Herman. He had become a civil engineer and an attorney after leaving the Sierra mining camps, and he had also become a writer, composing technical treatises such as The Theory of Real Property Valuation as well as writing local histories. His accounts included brief mention of migrant workers lynched in insular towns.