Blue Nights

15

There was a reason why I told you about Arcelia and the sixty dresses.

I was not unaware as I did so that a certain number of readers (more than some of you might think, fewer than the less charitable among you will think) would interpret this apparently casual information (she dressed her baby in clothes that needed washing and ironing, she had help in the house to do this washing and ironing) as evidence that Quintana did not have an “ordinary” childhood, that she was “privileged.”

I wanted to lay this on the table.

“Ordinary” childhoods in Los Angeles very often involve someone speaking Spanish, but I will not make that argument.

Nor will I even argue that she had an “ordinary” childhood, although I remain unsure about exactly who does.

“Privilege” is something else.

“Privilege” is a judgment.

“Privilege” is an opinion.

“Privilege” is an accusation.

“Privilege” remains an area to which — when I think of what she endured, when I consider what came later — I will not easily cop.

I look again at the photographs Nick took at the christening.

In fact the afternoon these photographs were taken, the afternoon at St. Martin of Tours and Sara Mankiewicz’s house, the afternoon when Quintana wore the two christening dresses and I wore one of the pastel linen Donald Brooks dresses I had bought under the misunderstanding that they would be needed in Saigon, was never what I considered her “real” christening. (One question: would you have called buying pastel linen dresses for Saigon a mark of “privilege”? Or would you have called it more a mark of bone stupidity?) Her “real” christening had taken place in a tiled sink at the house in Portuguese Bend, a few days after we brought her home from the nursery at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. John had christened her himself, and told me only after the fact.

I recall a certain defensiveness on this issue. What he said when he told me was not exactly along the lines of “I thought we might christen the baby, what do you think.”

What he said when he told me was more along the lines of “I just christened the baby, take it or leave it.”

It seemed that he had worried because the date I had arranged at St. Martin of Tours was two months away.

It seemed that he had not wanted to risk consigning our not yet christened baby to limbo.

I knew why he had not told me this before the fact.

He had not told me this before the fact because I was not a Catholic, and he had imagined objection.

Of the two of us, however, it was I who thought of that day in the tiled sink as the “real” christening.

The other christening, the christening at which the photographs were taken, was the “dress-up” christening.

Certain faces spring out at me from the photographs.

Connie Wald, wearing one of the several Chanel suits in evidence that afternoon, in her case one of blue-and-cream tweed lined in cyclamen-pink silk. It was Connie who gave Quintana one of the two long white dresses she wore at the church and after. Until Connie was in her nineties, when she developed a neuropathy, she still swam every day of her life. She cut back on the regimen of daily laps and stopped driving herself around Beverly Hills in an aged Rolls-Royce but otherwise continued exactly as before. She still wore the Claire McCardell dresses she had been given when she was a McCardell model in the 1940s. She still gave two or three dinner parties a week, cooked herself, mixed young and old in a way that flattered everyone present, lit huge fires in her library and filled the tables with salted almonds and fat pitchers of nasturtiums and the roses she still grew herself. Connie had been married to the producer Jerry Wald, who was said to have been Budd Schulberg’s model for Sammy Glick in What Makes Sammy Run and who had died a few years before I met her. She once told me about the six weeks she spent in Nevada establishing the residency she needed to divorce her previous husband and marry Jerry Wald. She did not spend the six weeks in Las Vegas, because Las Vegas as we later knew it did not yet exactly exist. She spent the six weeks twenty miles from Las Vegas, in Boulder City, which had been built by the Bureau of Reclamation as the construction camp for Hoover Dam and in which both gambling and union membership were prohibited by law. I asked her what she had found to do for six weeks in Boulder City. She said that Jerry had given her a dog, which she walked, every day, through the identical streets lined with matching government bungalows that constituted Boulder City and on across the dam. I recall this striking me as the most intrepid story I ever heard about how someone did or did not stay in Las Vegas, a topic not entirely deficient in intrepid stories.

Diana.

Diana Lynn, Diana Hall.

Hers is another face that springs out from the photographs taken that day.

In this photograph she is holding a champagne flute and smoking a cigarette. It occurs to me as I look at her photograph that it was Diana who had made that day possible. It was Diana who had drawn me into the conversation about adoption over the New Year’s weekend on Morty’s boat. It was Diana who had talked to Blake Watson, it was Diana who had intuited how deeply I needed Quintana. It was Diana who had changed my life.