The end of this story

My mother had a birthday recently, and though we have a pact not to exchange gifts, a few months ago I found her the pefect one, and bought it. Of course this perfect gift was a book: Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne. The edition was used, at Pegasus, with a forward by Calvin Trillin.

I held the book a few weeks, waiting until my mother's birthday to mail it. In the interim she emailed me announcing she'd made the most wondrous find. I wrote back wryly, mailing her the book anyway. She returned her (new) copy, suggesting we both read it.

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Our love of Joan Didion's work arose independently but is equally passionate. My mother keeps a special shelf to house Didion's books; we each bought The Year of Magical Thinking the day it came out. When notices of the play began running, we fantasized a trip to New York.

My mother also likes Dominick Dunne, whose Hollywood gossip puts me off, and has, I think, read some John Gregory Dunne. A few years ago I found a hardback copy of Quintana and Friends in a hospital charity shop. I sent it to her.

Until today I had read no John Gregory Dunne. I don't know why, really. Just never got around to it. But in paging though the table of contents, I found the essay "Quintana," which is about her equanimity regarding her adopted status.

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The Didion Dunne family was royalty to us; they were our personal Kennedys. Perhaps the Didion Dunnes were not as beautiful, but they were brilliant. They were the best thing in the world there was to be: writers. Great writers. And their family! Dominick, another writer. His daughter Dominique, an actress. Griffin, another actor. And Quintana, who grew up to be the next best thing to a writer: a photographer.

Quintana Roo Dunne was a year older than I. Her work appeared in the shelter magazines I read in my twenties: Elle Decor, Metropolitan Home. Read the byline on Joan Didion's author photos: Quintana. The photo of John Gregory Dunne on the cover of Regards: Quintana.

Quintana's devastated health plays a large role in The Year of Magical Thinking, but one is left with the hopeful impression of recovery, which never came: she died on August 26th, 2005. She was thirty-nine years old. The age I am now.

I remember arriving at work on August 26th, 2005, the first real business day of the academic year, the real new year in my world. I logged on the computer, and as I do every morning, checked the New York Times online, where I found Quintana's obituary. I remember my dismay as, near tears, I emailed my husband and my mother. Nobody in my office had heard of Joan Didion, much less her daughter.

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There are people whose lives somehow intersect with ours without ever really doing so. That is, we are interested in them for some reason or other. For most this means reading articles or looking at the photos or watching them on tv as they age alongside us, parallel, never meeting. In rare cases interest grows into obsession and the Quintanas of the world are stalked. But I was not a stalker. Just an interested observer. What was it like to grow up with two of the finest writers alive? To take for granted that Mommy is with Otto Preminger, who has no hair? That Mommy will take you to see Georgia O'Keefe's Sky Above Clouds at the Chicago Art Institute? That you will be surrounded by famous writers and actors as a matter of course? That you will appear in People magazine with your parents on a Malibu deck?

Oh, that photograph. It's on the back of Magical Thinking now. Joan holds a cigarette; her drink, which looks like a vodka tonic, rests alongside her on the deck's wooden railng. She is looking away from the camera at John and Quintana. She wears a long dress and a half smile and it's the only photograph I've ever seen of her looking truly happy. John is looking at the camera, his own drink cradled in his hands, his body bent over Quintana, who is blonde, beautiful, and looks into the camera with a knowing expression beyond her ten years. The California coastline stretches behind this impossibly glamorous family, a line of earth meeting water, the edge of America.

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At the time of John Gregory Dunne's death, Quintana was unconscious. Various things had gone horribly wrong--things that never should in an otherwise healthy young woman--and Quintana did not recover. She left her new husband and notoriously fragile mother behind. Also relatives, friends, and strangers like me.

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In Dunne's essay, he writes admiringly of Quintana's aplomb. Faced with a group of twenty chattering little girls at her eighth birthday party, she imperiously announced her adopted status, rendering it something enviable. She did not, it seems, ever develop qualms about her birth mother or inquire about her unknown birth father. Instead she asked her parents the occasional question, leaving Didion and Dunne to endure the idiotic remarks and patronizing literature of adoption. Dunne readily acknowledges his daughter may decide to search for her birth mother, and knowing her name, is likely to find her. But, he writes:

"All parents realize, or should realize, that children are not possessions, but are only lent to us, angel boarders, as it were. Adoptive parents realize this earlier and perhaps more poignantly than others. I do not know the end of this story." (331)

We do.