The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty

usually been spiritual in nature, though it often referred to a woman’s yearning for a child.
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    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.
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    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.
    â€œChildhood 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