The Last Love Song (35 page)

In 1951, Lynn had starred with Ronald Reagan in the film
Bedtime for Bonzo.
Reagan played a professor determined to prove that good morals, emotional stability, and a solid upbringing trump genetics in the well-being of a child. His proof was a chimpanzee, raised with the help of Lynn as a surrogate mother. Lynn entertained Didion with stories of how much more personable the monkey was than Reagan.

On the boat that weekend, the couples were always “having or thinking about having or making or thinking about making a drink,” Didion wrote in
Blue Nights.
Adoption came up. Lynn had been adopted as a child. The Erskines had adopted a baby. Didion's pregnancy frustrations prompted Lynn to suggest she consult Blake H. Watson, a pediatrician at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica.

“[T]he next week I was meeting Blake Watson,” Didion wrote, eliding much of the narrative. “When he called us from the hospital and asked if we wanted the beautiful baby girl there had been no hesitation: we wanted her.”

Whether or not she'd suffered a miscarriage the previous spring, she and Dunne wondered if a physiological problem prevented them from conceiving. In
Vegas,
in possibly the worst prose he ever wrote, Dunne describes a sperm test he took. He places the scene, chronologically, years after it actually occurred, but the logistical details—getting to the doctor by driving east “on Palos Verdes Drive. South on 26th Street in San Pedro. Onto the Harbor Freeway”—establish the time frame.

In a medical clinic on Wilshire Boulevard, he “sat in a stall trying to coax some heft into [his] flaccid member,” he wrote. The doctor pronounced him perfectly healthy.

In a letter to Mary Bancroft, dated March 30, 1966, Didion mentions a recent hospital stay. She was getting final tests, she says, to settle the question of adoption. (As a contingency, the couple had already started adoption proceedings, according to a January 8 letter from Dunne to Carl Brandt.) In 2005, Didion would tell journalist Susanna Rustin that she and Dunne had been “[u]nable to have children of their own.” There may be doubt, or at least some confusion, about when this condition was confirmed and whether it was
always
the case. Like Didion's fiction, Dunne's novels make several references to miscarriages, abortions, uteruses “not strong enough … to hold a child to term,” or “incompetent” cervixes. At any rate, in the early months of 1966, the couple decided adoption was their best alternative.

On March 3, 1966, the baby they would adopt with “no hesitation” was born.

Didion told Bancroft she was exceedingly happy getting tests in the hospital. While there, she reread William Burroughs's
Naked Lunch
and picked up his latest novel,
The Soft Machine. The Soft Machine
had the effect of “a migraine attack, after pain and nausea and unwanted images have battered the nerve synapses until all connections are lost.” The book's voice roved back and forth across centuries between modern Mexico and Panama and the Mayan empire, reminding Didion of the Pedro Ramírez Vázquez building, the giant Olmec head. She lay in her room envisioning banana rafts and hyacinths, overgrown jungles, strange albino creatures blinking in the sun. Burroughs's tropical imagery took her “not only back but ahead in time, to what seems to be the end of the world.” She was reminded of T. S. Eliot's
Four Quartets
: “In my beginning is my end” and “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.” More than ever, the name Quintana Roo, a lush openness, an unclocked mystery, seemed right.

3

“L'adoptada … M'ija.”

One way to limit and control a narrative is through legal systems.

Tyrants know this (possibly saints do, as well). Writers know this. So do adopted children and their parents.

California Family Code, Section 8700–8720 states that “[e]ither birth parent may relinquish a child to the department, county adoption agency, or licensed adoption agency for adoption by a written statement signed before two subscribing witnesses and acknowledged by an authorized official.” Section 9200 (a) ensures that this arrangement “is not open to inspection by any person other than the parties to the proceeding and their attorney and the department, except upon the written authority of the judge of the supreme court.”

Accordingly, Quintana Roo Dunne's adoption, facilitated by Blake H. Watson, was private. Names and details were sealed according to California law and they remain sealed, though a caseworker's error at the time allowed the Dunnes to learn the birth mother's name and vice versa.

In
Blue Nights,
Didion speaks disparagingly of Quintana's birth family. Her nephew Griffin has called them, publicly, a “troubled lot.” Since neither Didion nor Griffin Dunne has offered much in the way of detail, I felt obligated to try to locate the birth family to see if their story illuminated anything about Didion. Two separate private investigators, working on my behalf, concluded there was no legal path around California Family Code. No records of the birth family existed in the L.A. County civil index. Bad news for my book but soothing to me as a citizen, just as stories broke about the National Security Agency's invasions of privacy and Barack Obama began to resemble an aggrieved Richard Nixon.

In the case of California adoptions, who would blame
any
family wishing to limit the narrative? That word:
relinquish.
Right there in Section 8700–8720. Eventually, it would haunt Quintana—and the grieving mother of
Blue Nights.

A “written statement signed”: like executing a book contract.

4

In the mid-1960s, the preferred narrative was
We chose you.

Positive. Proactive. A comfort to the child.

What the narrative didn't address—a howling silence no boy or girl failed to perceive—was that if
we
chose you,
someone else
chose to make you available to us.

To relinquish you.

Family law.

Blake Watson understood the narrative, and he understood how to arrange matters around it so that nothing interfered with the story. He was not just any pediatrician. In his lifetime, he would deliver more than thirteen thousand babies (“I have never gotten over it—that flicker of life,” he'd say). His patients included Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Carol Burnett, and Ethel Kennedy. He was in the intensive care unit with Robert Kennedy the night Kennedy got shot; Ethel was four months pregnant with her eleventh child. Watson gave her a sedative. He overheard Jackie say to her, “I think you should feel as much of the pain and misery now as you can stand. Better now than later.”

On March 3, 1966, in the late afternoon, Blake Watson phoned the house at Portuguese Bend. Didion was taking a shower. Dunne took the call. “I have a beautiful baby girl at St. John's,” he said. “I need to know if you want her.” Dunne rapped on the bathroom door. Didion sobbed at the news.

The baby's mother, eighteen and unmarried, lived in Tucson, but she had been staying with relatives in California. The Dunnes didn't meet her. They received solid assurances that the woman's health was good.

Despite the likelihood that Didion's parents did not fully approve of the adoption—one of Dunne's novels includes a colonel-like figure who “did not trust the uncertainties of unknown blood. He believed in a continuum of heirlooms and family silver”—Watson arranged all the paperwork. An hour after his phone call, Didion stood at the nursery window in St. John's Hospital staring at “an infant with fierce dark hair and rosebud features,” she said. The baby was seventeen hours old. She was tucked into the arms of a nurse wearing a surgical mask. A pink ribbon curled across the infant's pale head. A band around her wrist told her story: “N. I.” No Information, the hospital's standard ID for babies being adopted.

Didion had the start of another story: a name, Quintana Roo. Once upon a time.

We chose you.

“Once she was born I was never not afraid,” she would write.

To the child through the nursery's glass partition, she whispered, “You're safe.”

*   *   *

When Quintana was five or six years old, she asked Dunne again and again to tell her the story of the nursery. It was after visiting hours, he'd say. Your mother and I went to the hospital and we were offered the choice of any baby in the place. No, not that baby, we said. Not that baby, not that baby …
That
baby! The one with the ribbon!

“Quintana!” Quintana would shout.

And then she asked him to tell it again, to do “
That
baby,” the baby with the ribbon.

In 1977, in an essay called “Quintana,” Dunne used the word
fierce
to describe the initial impression the baby made on him. In 2011, in
Blue Nights,
Didion wrote “fierce” to convey the baby's immediate impact on her. Together, the Dunnes locked in a family story. Presumably, they intended the word to be positive, suggesting a fighter struggling into the world under tough circumstances, an indomitable spirit. But the word is ambiguous. Saint. Little tyrant.

A “singularly blessed and accepting child,” Didion wrote within months of Quintana's birth.

“[W]atching her journey from infancy has always been like watching Sandy Koufax pitch … There is the same casual arrogance, the implicit sense that no one has ever done it any better,” Dunne wrote a few years later. He said she had “panache.”

These lines also entered the accepted narrative. What windy silences Quintana may have heard in them, we'll never know.

*   *   *

On the evening of March 3, after saying good-bye through the glass to their fierce new companion, the Dunnes stopped in Beverly Hills to tell Nick and Lenny the news. The child's family had roots in Arizona—maybe a good omen. Lenny loved Arizona. Perhaps Lenny could take a dress to the hospital from the Colleagues for the child's unwed mother. She pulled ice from a crystal bucket and offered to make drinks. “Making celebratory drinks was what we did in our family to mark any unusual, or for that matter, any usual, occasion,” Didion wrote. “In retrospect we all drank more than we needed to drink.”

In our family.

We all drank.

We were always “having or thinking about having or making or thinking about making a drink.”

And we chose
you.

The silences in
Blue Nights,
noticed on repeated readings especially in the passages on Quintana's entry into the family, ring louder and louder: “In my beginning is my end.”

Lenny dropped more ice in Didion's drink and said she'd go with her to Saks to buy a layette: “Saks because if you spend eighty dollars they throw in the bassinette.”

It hadn't occurred to Didion that she would need a layette, or a bassinette.

For three nights, Quintana remained in the nursery at St. John's Hospital. Didion writes of waking in the early mornings to chills, listening to the surf on the rocks beneath the house at Portuguese Bend. She dreamed and she imagined she'd left her baby behind, asleep or hungry in a drawer, while she'd gone off for dinner or a movie: “And worse yet, worse by far, so much worse as to be unthinkable, except I did think it, everyone who has ever waited to bring a baby home thinks it:
what if I fail to love this baby?
”

She couldn't believe she was about to be given this bundle—babies were what you
lost
on the trail, the weak ones you left in the weeds, not what you gained.

Dunne imagined Quintana's mother everywhere, bereft and ghostly, lurking, peering through fences or the leaves of trees. He imagined bad genes burbling in the baby's DNA.
The Dictionary of Literary Biography
cheered him: In it, he found “Quintana, Manuel José. Spanish poet, patriot, and Liberal, 18
th
century.” A good association. Another fine omen.

He told Mary Bancroft that Didion was stunning those first three days, preparing for Quintana's arrival at Portuguese Bend. She got on the phone and was like a gambler calling in IOUs, he said, lining up bassinettes, thermal blankets, weighing scales, and playpens. Now they had about five of everything. They could barely move in the house.

Often paralyzed and depressed on an ordinary day, Didion was energetic, focused, and frighteningly efficient in an emergency.

The peacocks cried the day Quintana came from the hospital, warm in a silk-lined cashmere wrapper. “
What if you hadn't been home when Dr. Watson called?
” Quintana asked her mother years later. “
What would happen to me then?
”

Below the house, skirting rocks, waves crashed, a hollow roar, in the cave on the point.

“Do the peacocks,”
Quintana would beg, or
“do the apple trees.”

She meant “read to me.” Almost from that very first night, Didion recited poetry to get the baby to sleep. Wallace Stevens's “Domination of Black” (“I heard them cry—the peacocks”) or T. S. Eliot's “Landscapes” (“Swing up into the apple tree”).

In the evenings, Didion set Quintana in her bassinette next to the wisteria in the box garden and sterilized bottles for the baby's formula.

At night, with the child asleep or not asleep, the ocean was alternately wild and calm—its power evoking for Didion a favorite passage in the explorer John Lloyd Stephens's account of his discovery of the Mayan city of Copán: “It lay before us like a shattered bark in the midst of the ocean, her masts gone, her name effaced, her crew perished, and none to tell whence she came, to whom she belonged, how long on her voyage, or what caused her destruction.”

*   *   *

One night, in secret, Dunne bounced Quintana carefully in his hands. He carried her to a tiled sink inside the house, held her under a trickle of water, and gave her a personal christening. He didn't want to chance her dying before a formal ceremony, and awaking, terrified, in limbo.