Free The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty Page A

Charles Hotel, a much finer establishment than they had known in Tacoma. The train was jammed with military personnel. Often Eduene and the kids were forced to stand in the couplings between cars, inhaling smoke and the smell of grease. One day, while the train was stopped on its way through the Southwest, a young sailor got off, bought a bottle of Coke for Eduene and a Navajo bracelet for Didion. Eduene thanked him graciously. Even in wearying circumstances, she was determined to keep up a respectable appearance, wearing a plaid seersucker suit, spectator pumps, and sometimes, when she could get them—as in New Orleans—white gardenias in her hair. She dressed her daughter in cardigans and pleated skirts. Her usual “non-depressed” performance slipped into sternness on the road, stiffened by the effort not to be humiliated. As for Didion, in the midst of confusion, her love of drama got plenty of nutrition. Her mother was right: This was an adventure. The sailor said he had survived the downing of the USS Wasp.
    In Durham, the Didions again lived in one room, this one in a house owned by a Baptist preacher and his family. In the evenings, Didion would sit on the house’s wide wooden porch, listening to cicadas, sipping a Grapette or eating peach ice cream straight out of quart cartons with the preacher’s hulking daughters, hoping to play with their Gone With the Wind paper dolls. They never let her.
    In sweltering midafternoons, other children on the block slithered under back stoops to eat dirt rich with clay, using a piece of raw potato as a spoon. Eduene told Didion the kids did this because of a physical condition called pica. “Poor children do it,” she said. The clay satisfied some craving untouched by their regular diet. “You never would have learned that in Sacramento,” Eduene said with a doubtful sense of accomplishment.
    Sometimes during this uprooted period, Didion attended local schools; other times she didn’t (she skipped second grade altogether). Later, she would say she missed absorbing certain fundamental skills, such as subtraction, which she never mastered. She did learn, by rote, the poem “In Flanders Fields” for Armistice Day commemorations, wearing a stiff red poppy to class, pinned to her dress, but making little connection between the heroics of World War I, viewed on scratchy film strips in visual-aids rooms, and the military regulations her father endured on each new base he visited.
    One day, near the end of the family’s stay in North Carolina, Eduene noticed her baby boy, Jim, reaching for something through the bars of his playpen: a copperhead, making its way through the room, eventually leaving, possibly to cool itself in the shade of a back stoop where the neighborhood children cradled their raw potatoes.
    At Peterson Field in Colorado Springs, Didion first saw war. Though the family found decent housing here—a four-room bungalow—and Didion’s routine was steadier, with regular classes at Columbia School and a Brownie troop, the base was spartan, its movements paced to the grim precision of emergency measures. The field was still being developed; many of its landing strips were temporary, lanes of dust kicked up by razor winds in eye-piercing gusts. Tar-paper barracks lined the perimeter, along with a small Officers’ Club. Inside the club, in the late afternoons, Didion would sit, mesmerized by a display of fake blue rain behind the bar. About the time the Didions arrived, the field was named after 1st Lt. Edward J. Peterson, who had crashed here when the left engine of his twin-engine F-4 failed. He had been pulled alive from the flaming wreckage but later died of his burns. Didion heard stories about him, hushed and incomplete and in passing, and probably thought of him each time a noisy B-24 Liberator landed, rattling the house’s windows. She recalled writing a letter to her grandmother about the