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 candidates 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 Arcelias 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. Its 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 Roos 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. Johns 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 Mankiewiczs widow, who was traveling for six months, and although she had packed away the china she did not want used along with Herman Mankiewiczs Academy Award for Citizen Kane (youll have friends over, she had said, theyll get drunk, theyll 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. Johns 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 Mankiewiczs Minton dinner plates and buying the Porthault parasol to shade the beautiful baby girl in Saigon I had covered the main motherhood points.
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 Mankiewiczs 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. Johns 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 Schulbergs 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 Years weekend on Mortys 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.
16
Some of us feel this overpowering need for a child and some of us dont. It had come over me quite suddenly, in my mid-twenties, when I was working for Vogue, a tidal surge. Once this surge hit I saw babies wherever I went. I followed their carriages on the street. I cut their pictures from magazines and tacked them on the wall next to my bed. I put myself to sleep by imagining them: imagining holding them, imagining the down on their heads, imagining the soft spots at their temples, imagining the way their eyes dilated when you looked at them.
Until then pregnancy had been only a fear, an accident to be avoided at any cost.
Until then I had felt nothing but relief at the moment each month when I started to bleed. If that moment was delayed by even a day I would leave my office at Vogue and, looking for instant reassurance that I was not pregnant, go see my doctor, a Columbia Presbyterian internist who had come to be known, because his mother-in-law had been editor in chief of Vogue and his office was always open to fretful staff members, as the Vogue doctor. I recall sitting in his examining room on East Sixty-seventh Street one morning waiting for the results of the most recent rabbit test I had implored him to do. He came into the room whistling, and began misting the plants on the window sill.
The test, I prompted.
He continued misting the plants.
I needed to know the results, I said, because I was leaving to spend Christmas in California. I had the ticket in my bag. I opened the bag. I showed him.
You might not need a ticket to California, he said. You might need a ticket to Havana.