Quintana?s Story

As Didion tells it here, the story of Quintana?s adoption had a mythic element. At a party in 1966, the actress Diana Lynn said she knew a doctor who could help the couple adopt; soon afterward that doctor called them up to say, ?I have a beautiful baby girl at St. John?s.? The news came ?out of the blue,? Didion writes, yet the infant ?could not have been more exactly the baby I wanted.? The origin myth goes hand-in-hand with a portrait of parental confusion: Didion is unsparingly specific about the couple?s social milieu as Hollywood writers, and the ways in which she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, were not conventionally prepared to absorb into their lives the child who had been given to them. Drily, she notes that she ?had not considered the need for a bassinette? and describes the two of them celebrating with a baby Quintana in mob fixer Sidney Korshak?s booth at The Bistro on the day the adoption was made legal. Didion and Dunne planned to take the infant Quintana to Saigon, because they already had plans to go; Didion recounts shopping for ?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.? The couple assiduously build a vision of Quintana as ?the perfect child,? with John urging Didion to come watch their daughter??a towhead in that Malibu sun??descend the hill toward the glowingly blue Pacific on her way to school. ?How could I not have had misconceptions?? Didion writes now.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=d298b4644616c543c066850bcc6bcc42

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