In fact I was not even crying for the saxophone.
I was crying for the tiles, the Minton tiles in the arcade south of Bethesda Fountain, Sara Mankiewicz’s pattern, Quintana’s christening. I was crying for Connie Wald walking her dog through Boulder City and across Hoover Dam. I was crying for Diana holding the champagne flute and smoking the cigarette in Sara Mankiewicz’s living room. I was crying for Diana who had talked to Blake Watson so that I could bring the beautiful baby girl he had delivered home from the nursery at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.
Diana who would die in the ICU at Cedars in Los Angeles.
Dominique who would die in the ICU at Cedars in Los Angeles.
The beautiful baby girl who would die in the ICU in the Greenberg Pavilion at New York Cornell.
You notice we’re doing hand compression.
Because the patient can no longer get enough oxygen through the vent.
For at least an hour now.
Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it.
30
Six weeks after she died we had a service for her, at the Dominican Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on Lexington Avenue. Gregorian chant was sung. A movement from Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat was played. Her cousin Griffin read a few paragraphs John had written about her in Quintana & Friends: “Quintana will be eleven this week. She approaches adolescence with what I can only describe as panache, but then watching her journey from infancy has always been like watching Sandy Koufax pitch or Bill Russell play basketball.” Her cousin Kelley read a poem she had written as a child in Malibu about the Santa Ana winds:
Gardens are dead
Animals not fed
Flowers don’t smell
Dry is the well
People’s careers slide right down
Brain in the pan turns around
People mumble as leaves crumble
Fire ashes tumble.
Susan Traylor, her best friend since they met at nursery school in Malibu, read a letter from her. Calvin Trillin spoke about her. Gerry read a Galway Kinnell poem that she had liked, Patti Smith sang her a lullaby that she had written for her own son. I read the poems by Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot, “Domination of Black” and “New Hampshire,” with which I had put her to sleep when she was a baby. “Do the peacocks,” she would say once she could talk. “Do the peacocks,” or “do the apple trees.”
“Domination of Black” had peacocks in it.
“New Hampshire” had apple trees in it.
I think of “Domination of Black” every time I see the peacocks at St. John the Divine.
I did the peacocks that day at St. Vincent Ferrer.
I did the apple trees.
The following day her husband and my brother and his family and Griffin and his father and I went up to St. John the Divine and placed her ashes in a marble wall in St. Ansgar’s Chapel along with those of my mother and John.
My mother’s name was already on the marble wall at St. John the Divine.
EDUENE JERRETT DIDION
MAY 30 1910—MAY 15 2001
John’s name was already on it.
JOHN GREGORY DUNNE
MAY 25 1932—DECEMBER 30 2003
There had been two spaces remaining, the names not yet engraved.
Now there was one.
During the month or so after placing first my mother’s and then John’s ashes in the wall at St. John the Divine I had the same dream, repeated again and again. In the dream it was always six in the afternoon, the hour at which the evensong bells are rung and the cathedral doors are closed and locked.
In the dream I hear the six o’clock bells.
In the dream I see the cathedral darkening, the doors locking.
You can imagine the dream from there.
When I left the cathedral after placing her ashes in the marble wall I avoided thinking about the dream.
I promised myself that I would maintain momentum.
“Maintain momentum” was the imperative that echoed all the way downtown.
In fact I had no idea what would happen if I lost it.
In fact I had no idea what it was.
I assumed, incorrectly, that it had something to do with movement, traveling, checking in and out of hotels, going to and from the airport.
I tried this.
A week after placing the ashes in the wall at St. John the Divine, I flew to Boston and back to New York and then to Dallas and back to New York and then to Minneapolis and back to New York, doing promotion for The Year of Magical Thinking. The following week, again doing promotion and still under the misapprehension that momentum was about traveling, I flew to Washington and back and then to San Francisco and Los Angeles and Denver and Seattle and Chicago and Toronto and finally to Palm Springs, where I was to spend Thanksgiving with my brother and his family. From various points on this itinerary, over the course of which I began to grasp that just going to and from the airport might be insufficient, that some further effort might be required, I spoke by telephone to Scott Rudin, and agreed that I should write and he should produce and David Hare should direct a one-character play, intended for Broadway, based on The Year of Magical Thinking.
The three of us, Scott, David, and I, met for the first time on this project a month after Christmas.
A week before Easter, in a tiny theater on West Forty-second Street, we watched the first readings of the play.
A year later it opened, starring Vanessa Redgrave in its single role, at the Booth Theater on West Forty-fifth Street.
As ways of maintaining momentum go this one turned out to be better than most: I remember liking the entire process a good deal. I liked the quiet afternoons backstage with the stage managers and electricians, I liked the way the ushers gathered for instructions downstairs just before the half-hour call. I liked the presence of Shubert security outside, I liked the weight of the stage door as I opened it against the wind through Shubert Alley, I liked the secret passages to and from the stage. I liked that Amanda, who ran the stage door at night, kept on her desk a tin of the cookies she baked. I liked that Lauri, who managed the Booth for the Shubert Organization and was doing graduate work in medieval literature, became our ultimate authority on a few lines in the play that involved Gawain. I liked the fried chicken and cornbread and potato salad and greens we brought in from Piece o’ Chicken, a kitchen storefront near Ninth Avenue. I liked the matzo-ball soup we brought in from the Hotel Edison coffee shop. I liked the place to sit we set up backstage, the little improvised table with the checked tablecloth and the electrified candle and the menu that read “Café Didion.”
I liked watching the performance from a balcony above the lights.
I liked being up there alone with the lights and the play.
I liked it all, but most of all I liked the fact that although the play was entirely focused on Quintana there were, five evenings and two afternoons a week, these ninety full minutes, the run time of the play, during which she did not need to be dead.
During which the question remained open.
During which the denouement had yet to play out.
During which the last scene played did not necessarily need to be played in the ICU overlooking the East River.
During which the bells would not necessarily sound and the doors would not necessarily be locked at six.
During which the last dialogue heard did not necessarily need to concern the vent.