Free The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty Page B

field’s new name, and she remembered how “pilots kept spiraling down through the high thin Colorado air. The way you knew was that you heard the crash wagons.” Hard work, sacrifice, and terror: the rhythm of conflict. Uncertainty ruled the days. Though the bungalow was nice enough, Eduene refused to unpack the family’s belongings. What difference did it make? she wondered. “Orders” could arrive at any moment, sending them packing. What were these “orders”? Did someone knock at the door with them? Whatever they were, they kept life tense, and they flattened Didion’s mother. In certain blue hours, Eduene roused herself. At base barbecues, she wore flowers in her hair. She made her daughter give a soldier apple-blossom soap as a going-away present the day he got transferred. She gave her daughter a copy of Emily Post’s book of etiquette and taught her how to accept and decline formal invitations. She told her daughter that after the war the family would move to Paris, where Frank would study architecture at the Sorbonne.
    At Peterson Field, Didion encountered John Wayne. It was in a Quonset hut, and it was midafternoon. Outside, the wind was hot, stirring the yellow columbine. The B-24s were rumbling. It was the summer of 1943. The movie was War of the Wildcats, and it was love at first sight. His gestures, his voice, his deference toward women, his slow stoicism … together, if all this didn’t add up to “orders,” it’s what “orders” should have been. In an unsettled time, Wayne’s firm presence was just what the world needed. He was more confident than the men she had known, but he had that familiar, easy pioneer spirit. When he told the girl in the movie he would buy her a house at the bend in the bright river, Didion knew right where she belonged.
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    In essays, memoirs, and interviews, Didion has always underplayed her family’s itinerant period as a factor in her development as a writer, but we should not dismiss it so casually. A number of experiences, working with and against her memories of Sacramento, coincided then to seed her future style.
    In Colorado Springs, the bungalow’s garden backed up to a psychiatric hospital. Didion used to take her notebook to the hospital grounds to record snippets of anguished dialogue. Discussing her memories of these episodes in Blue Nights, she ended with a flourish stylistically pleasing, but frustrating in its refusal to examine the emotional impact of sneaking around listening to people in pain: “I did not at the time think this an unreasonable alternative to staying in Sacramento and going to school.” This sentence, a neat rhetorical feint, was reminiscent of The White Album, written over thirty years earlier, when she elided her own psychiatric evaluation. In the title essay, she said her alienated condition did “not now seem … an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”
    The Blue Nights account reinforces the image of the lonely writer obsessed with loss first seen in “On Keeping a Notebook.” Just as, in the essay, she distinguished her discontented self from the more reasonable, better-adjusted people around her—her mother, her daughter—she said in Blue Nights that her four-year-old brother “scouted the neighborhood, and made friends” in Colorado while she brooded alone over dark doings in a scary place and dreamed up stories. No doubt the frequent moves isolated her, made her an outsider, and deepened her natural reserve (a schoolmate told her she was “military trash”). But more profound changes were afoot.
    For one thing, her little brother wasn’t the only one meeting new people. On the grounds of the psychiatric hospital, Didion wasn’t always alone. Several afternoons, the daughter of a resident doctor accompanied her on her eavesdropping missions. This girl also carried a notebook and captured