13
For everything there is a season.
Ecclesiastes, yes, but I think first of The Byrds, “Turn Turn Turn.”
I think first of Quintana Roo sitting on the bare hardwood floors of the house on Franklin Avenue and the waxed terra-cotta tiles of the house in Malibu listening to The Byrds on eight-track.
The Byrds and The Mamas and the Papas, “Do You Wanna Dance?”
“I wanna dance,” she would croon back to the eight-track.
For everything there is a season. I’d miss having the seasons, people from New York like to say by way of indicating the extraordinary pride they take in not living in Southern California. In fact Southern California does have seasons (it has for example “fire season” or “the season when the fire comes,” and it also has “the season when the rain comes,” but such Southern California seasons, arriving as they do so theatrically as to seem strokes of random fate, do not inexorably suggest the passage of time. Those other seasons, the ones so prized on the East Coast, do. Seasons in Southern California suggest violence, but not necessarily death. Seasons in New York — the relentless dropping of the leaves, the steady darkening of the days, the blue nights themselves — suggest only death. For my having a child there was a season. That season passed. I have not yet located the season in which I do not hear her crooning back to the eight-track.
I still hear her crooning back to the eight-track.
I wanna dance.
The same way I still see the stephanotis in her braid, the plumeria tattoo through her veil.
Something else I still see from that wedding day at St. John the Divine: the bright red soles on her shoes.
She was wearing Christian Louboutin shoes, pale satin with bright red soles.
You saw the red soles when she kneeled at the altar.
14
Before she was born we had been planning a trip to Saigon.
We had assignments from magazines, we had credentials, we had everything we needed.
Including, suddenly, a baby.
That year, 1966, during which the American military presence in Vietnam would reach four hundred thousand and American B-52s had begun bombing the North, was not widely considered an ideal year to take an infant to Southeast Asia, yet it never occurred to me to abandon or even adjust the plan. I even went so far as to shop for what I imagined we would need: Donald Brooks pastel linen dresses for myself, a flowered Porthault parasol to shade the baby, as if she and I were about to board a Pan Am flight and disembark at Le Cercle Sportif.
In the end this trip to Saigon did not take place, although its cancellation was by no means based on what might have seemed the obvious reason — we canceled, it turned out, because John had to finish the book he had contracted to write about César Chávez and his National Farm Workers Association and the DiGiorgio grape strike in Delano — and I mention Saigon at all only by way of suggesting the extent of my misconceptions about what having a child, let alone adopting one, might actually entail.
How could I not have had misconceptions?
I had been handed this perfect baby, out of the blue, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. She could not have been more exactly the baby I wanted. In the first place she was beautiful. Hermosa, chula. Strangers stopped me on the street to tell me so. “I have a beautiful baby girl at St. John’s,” Blake Watson had said, and he did. Everyone sent dresses, an homage to the beautiful baby girl. There the dresses were in her closet, sixty of them (I counted them, again and again), immaculate little wisps of batiste and Liberty lawn on miniature wooden hangers. The miniature wooden hangers, too, were a gift to the beautiful baby girl, another homage from her instantly acquired relatives, besotted aunts and uncles and cousins in West Hartford (John’s family) and Sacramento (mine). I recall changing her dress four times on the afternoon the State of California social worker made her mandated visit to observe the candidate for adoption in the home environment.
We sat on the lawn.
The candidate for adoption played at our feet.
I did not mention to the social worker that Saigon had until recently figured in the candidate’s future.
Nor did I mention that current itineraries called for her to sojourn instead at the Starlight Motel in Delano.
Arcelia, who cleaned the house and laundered the wisps of batiste, busied herself watering, as anticipated.
“As anticipated” because I had prepped Arcelia for the visit.
The thought of an unstructured encounter between Arcelia and a State of California social worker had presented spectral concerns from the outset, imagined scenarios that kept me awake at four in the morning and only multiplied as the date of the visit approached: what if the social worker were to notice that Arcelia spoke only Spanish? What if the social worker were to happen into the question of Arcelia’s papers? What would the social worker put in her report if she divined that I was entrusting the perfect baby to an undocumented alien?
The social worker remarked, in English, on the fine weather.
I tensed, fearing a trap.
Arcelia smiled, beatific, and continued watering.
I relaxed.
At which point Arcelia, no longer beatific but dramatic, flung the hose across the lawn and snatched up Quintana, screaming “Víbora!”
The social worker lived in Los Angeles, she had to know what víbora meant, víbora in Los Angeles meant snake and snake in Los Angeles meant rattlesnake. I was relatively certain that the rattlesnake was a fantasy but I nonetheless guided Arcelia and Quintana inside, then turned to the social worker. It’s a game, I lied. Arcelia pretends she sees a snake. We all laugh. Because you can see. There is no snake.
There could be no snake in Quintana Roo’s garden.
Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.
She would never have faulted me for that.
She would have seen it as a logical response to my having been handed, out of the blue at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, the beautiful baby girl, herself. At the house after her christening at St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Brentwood we had watercress sandwiches and champagne and later, for anyone still around at dinner time, fried chicken. The house we were renting that spring belonged to Sara Mankiewicz, Herman Mankiewicz’s widow, who was traveling for six months, and although she had packed away the china she did not want used along with Herman Mankiewicz’s Academy Award for Citizen Kane (you’ll have friends over, she had said, they’ll get drunk, they’ll want to play with it) she had left out her Minton dinner plates, the same pattern as the Minton tiles that line the arcade south of Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, for me to use. I had not used the Minton dinner plates before the christening but I put them on a buffet table that night for the fried chicken. I remember Diana eating a chicken wing off one of them, a fleck of rosemary from the chicken the only blemish on her otherwise immaculate manicure. The perfect baby slept in one of her two long white christening dresses (she had two long white christening dresses because she had been given two long white christening dresses, one batiste, the other linen, another homage) in the Saks bassinette. John’s brother Nick took photographs. I look at those photographs now and am struck by how many of the women present were wearing Chanel suits and David Webb bracelets, and smoking cigarettes. It was a time of my life during which I actually believed that somewhere between frying the chicken to serve on Sara Mankiewicz’s Minton dinner plates and buying the Porthault parasol to shade the beautiful baby girl in Saigon I had covered the main “motherhood” points.