The Last Love Song (6 page)

The 1940 and 1941 city directories list the Didions' residence as 2211 U Street, a two-story 1908 Craftsman bungalow in Poverty Ridge, the former squatters' camp and flood haven. In the late nineteenth century, it had turned into a posh neighborhood of Queen Anne, Stick, and Colonial Revival foursquares. The Poverty Ridge house is the one Didion considered her true childhood home. It was near the Ella K. McClatchy branch of the public library—a children's library at the time—where Didion loved to read under towering, sunny windows.

In general, the neighborhood was still nice in the 1940s, but it was beginning to decline, as the suburbs drew many middle-class and wealthy families out of the city's center. The migration made for good housing prices in town, and the Didions, now with a second child, Jim, born in December 1939, almost doubled their square footage with the move, and got a five-space garage in the bargain.

“My father, when I was first born, he was selling insurance, but nobody was buying anything, so he'd play poker,” Didion said. Gambling may have been lucrative for Frank Didion, but he continued to sell insurance through the Travelers Group well into the 1940s, even though his life in Sacramento was interrupted by the war and he had to leave town and return. City directories list a suburban address for his office. Frank Didion was a mediocre, or perhaps just a distracted, salesman; his real passion was risk. The place's speculative fever filled him. He loved not just poker but anything on which a sum could be wagered, a claim staked. He seems to have really hit pay dirt after World War II, cleaning up at a government auction, acquiring dozens of Royal manual typewriters, which he later sold at a profit, along with property—a fire tower, a few old mess halls, sitting on valuable lots now—and a military jeep, in which he would teach his daughter to drive. After the auction, he settled into the boom-and-bust rhythm of real-estate speculation, moving money from one account to another.
Dabble
was a word Didion associated with his professional activities. He was “fuzzy” about finances, she said. The family seemed to have plenty—the house was spacious, the kids never wanted for ice-cream cones, trips to San Francisco or Stinson Beach—but a feeling lingered that their privileges were wispy: myths and illusions, like the family's storied past. Frank was quiet and depressed—a good-looking man, though Eduene's family thought he had a weak mouth. He was quick to fix a drink to quell the smallest anxieties. Didion remembers him as “full of dread.” She said that even at family parties, when he'd seem to enjoy himself playing ragtime piano, his bearing conveyed such tension, she'd run to her room and close the door. Frank's mother had died when he was young, in the 1918 influenza epidemic, and his father had married a dynamic woman named Genevieve, who spent more time on local politics than on raising her stepchildren. Frank's younger brother, Robert, lost an eye one summer in a fireworks accident in which Frank's carelessness seems to have played a part. Didion thinks he suffered guilt about this for the rest of his life. As an adolescent, restless, hunting distractions, he always hoped to work at the California State Fair but never measured up to the job. His greatest discipline was reserved for sports. He lettered in basketball in 1928 at Sacramento City College. But then, as an adult, his discipline dissipated; he was always seeking something for nothing. He'd go from the high-flown Sutter Club (he was not a member) to the seediest gambling joints. Late at night, he'd drive to the Nevada border to shoot craps. Until 1940, the riverboat
Delta King
offered floating card games and strong drink on the Sacramento River. Prohibition had only recently ended, and odd cocktails prompted by the liquor ban were popular. Since the quality of outlawed alcohol was suspect, creative bartenders had added flavorings, sweeteners, and leafy sprinklings to their furtive whiskeys. Now, while laying down his bets, Frank Didion happily imbibed whatever buddies set in front of him: gin slings, old-fashioneds, manhattans, and aviations. Lady Luck rode the river swells up and down, up and down, and Frank never tired of chasing her, as someone of romantic temperament might have put it. And why not? Family lore suggested the name Didion was a derivative of the French Didier, a variation of
desiderium
: “unfulfilled longing.” In previous centuries, this longing had usually been spiritual in nature, though it often referred to a woman's yearning for a child.

*   *   *

Frank spent his childhood a few blocks from an eccentric white house at Sixteenth and H Streets, built in 1877 and featuring cupolas shaped like pastries, Victorian Gothic detail, gingerbread trim, and intricate door moldings. The house had once belonged to the Steffens family. As a boy, Frank befriended Jane Hollister, niece of the poet Lincoln Steffens, and was later a classmate of hers at Berkeley.

In 1903, the old Steffens house had become the Governor's Mansion. From that point on, every governor of the state of California lived in the house until Ronald Reagan in the 1970s. Like her father, Didion fell in love with this icon of nineteenth-century bohemianism, and like her father, she was always haunted by the conviction that its elegance meant the past was a lovely lost domain and the present a fallen state, dominated by petty, classless folk.

*   *   *

Eduene Didion preserved the genteel rituals of the past, holding ladies' teas for her friends and many relatives—endless Sunday aunts, Didion recalled. One of them, her great-aunt Nell, habitually twisted the splendid rings on her fingers, snuffed cigarettes in a thick quartz ashtray, and told Didion that her grandmother was “nervous,” “different.” When Didion asked what this meant, Aunt Nell said it meant she couldn't be teased. Eduene, wearing an ankle-length red lace dress, passed around trays of butter cookies, slices of lemon on Wedgwood plates, and cream cheese and watercress sandwiches.

“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies”: Didion had memorized this line from an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem and she thought of it, at tea, whenever one of the tottery ladies lamented the death of an old friend. To her, the notion of being alone, unattended, everyone close to you gone, was liberating and exciting, especially on these slow Sundays when the aunts came shuffling near, bathed in cloying perfume.

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).