Free The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty

much DNA with the proletarian writing of the Great Depression as it did with the celebrity showstopping pieces of Mailer, Wolfe, and Thompson.

 
    Chapter Three
    1
    When Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, Sacramento mobilized. By two P.M. , McClellan Field was scrambling hundreds of Curtiss P-40s and B-26 Marauders for flights to Alaska, where they would be prepped for battle. Thomas Monk, the city’s mayor, ordered security details to guard the levees in case the mainland was attacked. On December 8, the mayor mandated citywide blackouts. Three days earlier, Didion turned seven. The festive atmosphere surrounding her birthday celebration soured quickly and then the world went dark. In the past, in San Francisco or on Stinson Beach, Didion, staring out over the waves, had mentally navigated Hawaii’s shores. The place loomed large in the minds of well-to-do Californians: a paradise within easy cruising distance. But now it was a smudged spot in the atlas. A territory called “War.”
    After the attack on Hawaii, Didion’s father was assigned by the U.S. Army Air Corps to travel from Fort Lewis in Washington State to Durham, North Carolina, and finally to Peterson Field in Colorado. He would take his family with him, fragmenting Didion’s formal schooling from the end of first grade until the fourth. Military records indicate that Frank Didion joined the National Guard in 1939. His family had a long history with the Guard; his uncle Edward Reese served with distinction in the Guard’s hospital corps in San Francisco following that city’s massive earthquake and fire in 1906. It did not escape the Didions that military enlistment was often a conduit to business opportunities. Frank would remain in the military much of his life, working for the Selective Service as a procurement officer in Sacramento, becoming a major in the Air Corps, and finally retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel in August 1965.
    In his early thirties when the United States entered World War II, Frank stayed stateside, helping the army settle financial affairs. Specifically, he wrapped up outstanding World War I–era contracts, clearing the path for new business.
    What this meant for Didion was saying good-bye to her friends. From now on, she’d experience reading not as something you did in school, but something you did on your own wherever you were: a secret pleasure. “I tended to perceive the world in terms of things read about it,” she said. “I [had] a literary idea of experience, and I still don’t know where all the lies are.”
    In Tacoma, Washington, housing on base and even in town was overcrowded because of the sudden arrival of so many soldiers. Eduene scrambled to find accommodations for her family, going every morning to the army housing office to try to claim a room somewhere. Didion remembered seeing her mother cry for the first time one day outside the housing office. “Meanwhile, we were living in a hotel with a shared bathroom,” Didion recalled. “It was in sort of a nice part of town. I don’t think it was a bad hotel, but it was a period in American life when hotel rooms didn’t necessarily come with bathrooms. So my mother, I remember her emptying an entire bottle of pine-scented disinfectant into the bathtub every time she gave us a bath.” Eventually, the Didions found a single room to rent in a nearby guesthouse. “It’s an adventure,” Eduene told her daughter, trying to be cheerful. “It’s wartime, it’s history, you children will be thankful you got to see all this.”
    Soon, Frank was transferred to North Carolina to sort through army records at Duke University. He traveled ahead. Eduene followed sometime later with the children. They took a train to Union Station in Los Angeles and from there caught the Southern Pacific’s Sunset Limited, stopping once in New Orleans, spending a night at the St.