Joan Didion - Where I Was From

You could win that, she said. When the time comes. You could win that and live in Paris. Or New York. Wherever you wanted. But definitely you could win it.

A dozen-plus years later, my senior year at Berkeley, I did win it, and drove to Sacramento with the telegram from Vogue in my bag. I had found the yellow envelope with the glassine window slipped under my apartment door when I got back from a class that afternoon. We are delighted to inform you , the little strips of yellow tape read. Miss Jessica Daves, Editor-in-Chief, Vogue. When I showed the telegram to my mother I reminded her that it had been her idea in the first place.

“Really?” she said, doubtful.

This calls for a drink, my father said, his solution, as hanging up was my mother’s solution, to any moment when emotion seemed likely to surface.

Colorado Springs, I said, prompting her. When we were snowbound.

“Imagine your remembering,” she said.

I see now that World War Two was our own Big Sandy, Little Sandy, Humboldt Sink.

Imagine your remembering.

Something else I remembered: I remembered her telling me that when the war was over we would all go to live in Paris. Toute la famille. Paris had not yet been liberated but she already had a plan: my father was to reinvent himself as an architect, study architecture at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill. To this end she tried to teach me the French she had learned at Lowell High School in San Francisco.

Pourquoi did we never go to live in Paris?

Je ne sais pas.

A few years after the war ended, when we were again living in Sacramento, I asked this question. My mother said that we had never gone to live in Paris because my father felt an obligation to his family to remain in Sacramento. I recall wondering how much of the plan she had actually discussed with him, since I had never been able to quite bring the picture of my father dropping everything and starting over in Paris into clear focus. The problem in the picture was not that he was risk-averse. Risk was in fact our bread and butter, risk was what put the lamb chops on the table. He had supported my mother and me during the Depression by playing poker with older and more settled acquaintances at the Sutter Club, a men’s club in Sacramento to which he did not belong. Right now, after the war, he was supporting my mother and brother and me by buying houses and pieces of property with no money to speak of, then leveraging them, and buying some more. His idea of a relaxing way to make a payment was to drive to Nevada and shoot craps all night.

No.

“Risk” he definitely would have gone for.

The problem in the picture was “Paris.”

One of the few perfectly clear points in his belief system (there was much that remained opaque) was the conviction that France, where he had never been, was a worthless country peopled exclusively by the devious, the corrupt, the frivolous, and the collaborating. The name “Didion,” he insisted, was not French but German, the name of an ancestor who, although German, “happened to live in Alsace after the French took it over.” The first time I went to Paris I sent him a page from a telephone book on which many apparently French Parisians named “Didion” were listed, but he never mentioned it.

One element in my mother’s version of the chimerical Paris adventure did hold up: it was true that my father felt an obligation to his family to remain in Sacramento. The reason he felt this obligation had been distilled, within the family and over the years, into a plausible sequence of events, a story so reasonable that it seemed unconvincing, a kind of cartoon. Here was the story: when his mother was dying of influenza in 1918 she had told him to take care of his younger brother, and when his brother lost an eye in a fireworks accident my father thought he had failed. In fact whatever unfulfilled and unfulfillable obligation he felt was less identifiable than that. There was about him a sadness so pervasive that it colored even those many moments when he seemed to be having a good time. He had many friends. He played golf, he played tennis, he played poker, he seemed to enjoy parties. Yet he could be in the middle of a party at our own house, sitting at the piano — playing “Darktown Strutter’s Ball,” say, or “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” a bourbon highball always within reach — and the tension he transmitted would seem so great that I would have to leave, run to my room and close the door.

It was during my first year at Berkeley when the physical manifestations of this tension became sufficiently troubling that he was referred to Letterman Hospital, at the Presidio in San Francisco, to undergo a series of tests. I am unsure how long he spent at Letterman, but it was a period covering some weeks or months. My mother would drive down from Sacramento on the weekends, either Saturday or Sunday, and pick me up at the Tri Delt house in Berkeley. We would cross the Bay Bridge and go out to the Presidio and pick up my father for lunch. I remember that all he would eat that year were oysters, raw. I remember that after the oysters we would spend the rest of the afternoon driving — not back into the city, because he did not like San Francisco, but through Golden Gate Park, down the beach, over into Marin County, anywhere he was likely to see a pickup baseball game he could stop and watch. I remember that at the end of the afternoon he would instruct my mother to drop him not at the Presidio but at the southwesternmost end of Golden Gate Park, so that he could walk back to the hospital along the beach. Sometimes during the week he would walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, visit a cousin at his Sausalito office, and walk back. Once I walked across the bridge with him. I remember that it swayed. In his letters to my mother he dismissed the Letterman psychiatrists as “the mind guys,” or sometimes “the mind-over-matter guys,” but a year or so before he died, in his eighties, he told me that there had been “this woman doctor” at Letterman who had been “actually very helpful” to him. “We talked about my mother,” he said. It was several years after he died before I was able to fully articulate what could not have escaped either my or my mother’s fixedly narrowed attention on those weekend afternoons in 1953: those were bad walks for someone under observation for depression.

It occurs to me how brave he must have been, to make those walks and come back.

It also occurs to me how brave my mother must have been, to drive back alone to Sacramento while he made those walks.

My father died in December of 1992. A few months later, in March, I happened to drive my mother from Monterey to Berkeley, where we were to spend a few nights at the Claremont Hotel and I was to speak at a University of California Charter Day ceremony.

“Are we on the right road,” my mother had asked again and again as we drove up 101.

I had repeatedly assured her that we were, at last pointing out an overhead sign: 101 North.

“Then where did it all go,” she had asked.

She meant where did Gilroy go, where was the Milias Hotel, where could my father eat short ribs now. She meant where did San Juan Bautista go, why was it no longer so sweetly remote as it had been on the day of my wedding there in 1964. She meant where had San Benito and Santa Clara Counties gone as she remembered them, the coastal hills north of Salinas, the cattle grazing, the familiar open vista that had been relentlessly replaced (during the year, two years, three, the blink of the eye during which she had been caring for my father) by mile after mile of pastel subdivisions and labyrinthine exits and entrances to freeways that had not previously existed.