The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty Page A

Lilly Daché hat as an enticement to return to the fold. It didn’t work, though it was one more lesson in luxury and taste, like the time she’d bestowed on the girl—when Didion was six and recovering from the mumps—some Elizabeth Arden perfume in a tiny crystal bottle wrapped with gold thread. Her house was another museum, lined with delicate seashells, coral, and seeds.
    Whatever spiritual awareness Didion developed seems to have come from Edna’s husband. Herman was the son of a forty-niner and a self-taught geologist whose livelihood depended on spotting the difference between serpentine and gold-bearing ores. In the language of geologic eras, in words such as igneous, cretaceous, and magma, Didion glimpsed the magnitude of time and its consequences for meaning and purpose. But these were abstractions, impossible to dwell on. Much more compelling was her awareness that her grandmother couldn’t be teased or she’d cry. Often, Didion pushed her to the brink of tears just to watch.
    Occasionally on the streets, Didion observed a weeping man or woman. By the late 1930s, more than fifteen thousand Sacramento citizens were unemployed. Many of them had worked in canning, which had all but collapsed. Hoovervilles appeared in parts of the city, spreading as winter freezes destroyed the valley’s citrus crops, adding to the economic disaster. On rainy spring nights, as townspeople shored up the levees, it was possible for a child to notice differences between men for whom hauling the sandbags was merely a civic duty and those, more anxious and ragged, whose lives depended on the work. When she was twelve or thirteen, Didion asked her mother what social class the Didions belonged to. Eduene replied that the family didn’t think in terms of class. “Class … is something that we, as Americans and particularly as Californians, were supposed to have passed beyond,” Didion learned. But the main reason “we” don’t think about class was implicit in Eduene’s answer: We don’t have to.
    The Didions and their extended families—Jerretts, Reeses—were prominent in town, and always had been: ranchers, bankers, saloon keepers, sheriffs. When Didion was a child, her grandfather was a local tax collector. His wife, Genevieve, would become president of the Board of Education; eventually, an elementary school would be named after her. Another Didion sat on the district court of appeals. “They were part of Sacramento’s landed gentry,” William Burg told me, “families who called themselves agriculturalists, farmers, ranchers, progressives, but they were the owners, not the ones who got their hands dirty.”
    For all its visibility and influence, the family felt prosaic, muted, sad to Didion, even as a girl. Clerks and administrators: hardly the heroes of old, surviving starvation and blizzards. Furthermore, the progressives’ hold on Sacramento’s fortunes had weakened in the Depression and with the restrictions of Prohibition—a real blow to the valley’s hops growers. The land was ripe for tragedy, or the perception of it. When Didion was eight, the grand Buffalo Brewery, just blocks from her house, closed for good. It had been a palace of beer since the late 1880s. During Prohibition, the brewery temporarily halted production, but reopened the year of Didion’s birth, following the law’s repeal. It marketed drinks in cans but could never recapture its lost sales. The progressives got nervous. The place’s shuttering was not just a business failure; it was the end of an era, a threat to a way of life. A whiff of decadence clung to the gentry. When the WPA approved loans for public works in Sacramento, prompting construction of the Tower Bridge across the Sacramento River, green-lighting forty-six new buildings (including the high school Didion would attend) as well as runways at local airports, the Didions