Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (2 page)

Eventually, Eddie and I had a confused fight about his stunt. It was over a dinner of
omelettes à la rations K
near Notre Dame, in a Paris forced to depend—oh, but it was enough—on its pure Parisness for wonder. On an ocean of cheers, de Gaulle had just strolled up the
Champs-Élysées
, and Eddie grinned at my naive belief our friendship made him human. Nonetheless, when it comes to memorable birthday serenades, Potus will have his work cut out for him to compete.

Posted by: Pam

“She was some sort of stewardess for something called Clio Airways, Mr. President,” they said. “She wrote some book called
Glory Be
and married some Ambassador. No, one of ours, not one of theirs. He’s long dead and she’s one of those old bags who roost on upper Connecticut Avenue like falcons. On the plus side, she used to be on some museum board with your mother.”

I was for fact, the pearly bitch. Even then, she looked as if she launched herself each morning by smartly cracking a perfume bottle over her own jaw. Recruiting Pam thirty years ago for whatever District cultural chore stood in urgent need of pointless discussion must’ve been one of Callie Sherman’s odder jokes, which if you know Callie is saying something.

“Just make the call, please, sir,” they said. “We know it won’t do much for your afflatus, Potus, but it’s only a blip in your day. No, sir—we can’t figure out why
he
cares either. It’s the first time he’s asked us a favor in forever.”

Dear Bob. I don’t really know my Senatorial benefactor well at all. Callie Sherman introduced me to him too, and later he surprised and touched me by adding Pam’s name to the honored-guest roster for the dedication of the World War Two Memorial on the Mall. I gather he’s forgiven me for what I brayed as that atrocity smacked my fat lunettes: “My God! Why didn’t they tell us the
Germans
won?”

Even so, he’s plainly never wrapped a brain with plenty of more bulging files in its cabinets around the fact that I’m a liberal Democrat. Or else he supposes the flattered senior citizen or
noblesse oblige
Washingtonian in me will make decorum win out. Oh, well, what the hell: his factotum
did
hang up without asking me what I think of this awful and unending war.

Bob doesn’t know my bitter current name for the city we both love is Potusville. When his office phoned yesterday to give me a heads-up about the treat he’d laid on, I felt mildly pleased he’d remembered me, much less my birthday. Also mildly amused by his faith I’d be honored to get even this President’s June 6 salutations and mildly annoyed at the prospect of having to take the damn call. Only when I let the Metro section of today’s
WashPost
settle rugward, skating-seagull style, did I gather a decision I hadn’t even known I was mulling had been made.

My only remorse is that Bob meant well and I’m fond of him. What I’m planning is a betrayal of his apparent, surprising affection for me. The White House won’t be panting for his
next
request to give some upper Connecticut Avenue crone a holler, put it that way. And too bad, because is Potus ever going to get an earful!

The gun in my lap was Cadwaller’s. It nestles near my most intimate memory of his cranium in younger, nuder days, during that expert diplomat’s preferred (he swore!) stage of our lovemaking. Like so much about Hopsie, the pistol seemed mildly absurd until the night a thief brazenly broke, with an annunciatory crash whose declarativeness would’ve pleased Beethoven, into the Residence in Delhi. Then my brisk third husband reached behind a certain book on our shelves and it jumped into his hand as obediently as a phone receiver, his customary daytime armament.

Which sound is the one with which Potus is most unfamiliar? Because I’m only human, I’ll laugh if you say “Beethoven,” but the answer is a shot fired in anger. If I can find the nerve to fire it, mine will be.

“She’s harmless enough, your brush-cutting majesty,” they said. “What can she do to you? Even if she’s a tiresome old bag and no Christian, she’s too old to be a terrorist.”

Hah. As I fetched the gun from the Paris footlocker, I began humming a tune I’d heard for the first time quite recently. Didn’t get far, since I’m eighty-six and have the singing voice of an aardvark. But I wanted to please Panama, Cadwaller’s unmet—by him, not me—great-granddaughter.

Posted by: Pam

Rightly or wrongly, I think I’ve got some standing as well as a stake in all this. That’s not just because
Glory Be
was edged out for the ’57 history Pulitzer only by Jack Kennedy’s
Profiles in Courage
. At least I’d written mine myself, not that Jack laughed when I told him so.

Or that Richard Anson “Hopsie” Cadwaller was one of the finest envoys this country ever produced. Or that the interior décor of my digs at the externally nondescript Rochambeau Apartments, a pile of slag in wolverine gray whose juts and recessed windows probably looked eloquent when Coolidge was in, is actually pretty goddam, well, descript.

Panama Cadwaller is now sixteen. Her pirouetting and earplugged visits to “Gramela” always seduce her into examining bric-a-brac whose oddity must strike her as belonging to a forgotten
ancien régime
somewhere on Mars. Yet to Pam’s fellow old District hands, my loot—
“Oh hé, oh hé, bibelot,”
goes the corsair song of the U.S. Foreign Service—is instantly decodable as the spoor of diplomatic postings in the way-back-when.

Once visitors dogleg from foyer to living room, they’re met by the African Adam and Eve, two whittled sentinels of mine whose unabashed dowsing rod (his) and genital pineapple (hers) vaunt fertility as a be-all and end-all. Also from the former Nagon is my small maquette of copper figurines pegged to a salver. Depicting a seated woman with arms outflung on a palanquin, it’s been known to three generations of Hopsie’s progeny as “The African Queen.”

On the wall above is a silkscreened Ganesh, Pam having adopted the elephant-headed god as her mascot during Cadwaller’s Ambassadorship to India. During her own time in Delhi, my dear friend Nan Finn was always a Hanuman gal instead. No other religion has gods that so invite affection and followers who don’t feel insulted when that’s all there is to it.

Signed by Hopsie, me, Andy Pond, Callie and Cy Sherman, and a couple of dimmer names, the framed menu is from Paris, where Cadwaller and I met in the Fifties. We’d been married two years by that La
Coupole
lunch, and I still remember how I dropped my oyster fork and the waitress crouched to retrieve and then replace it with a new one even though my dish was empty. Who knew whether the happy American lady would order another half dozen after she’d smiled her gratitude and wonder?

Beyond my Mac’s screen as I input with rheumatic fingers and lunetted mimsies by my living room window, where dawn’s cerise is already giving way to torched daffodils, Pam’s trophy bookcase looks eager to chip in. With
Glory Be
bookended by
Nothing Like a Dame
and
Lucky for the Sun
, my own trio of contributions to library sales crowns its top shelf.

Down at cat level, Brannigan Murphy’s
Collected Plays
—from a minor academic press, and remaindered when I picked it up in a fit of post-marital loyalty—looks sheepishly bullheaded. In between, among others, are Cadwaller’s photographer son Chris’s
May or Mayn’t
,
eighty or so images of Paris barricades, rock-throwing students, and cops wreathed in tear gas during the ’68 upheavals, and Chris’s son Tim’s
You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two
.

As the last of these is dedicated to me, I did my damndest. But culture criticism will never be this old bag’s bag. Though musings on faith aren’t either whether they’re Catholic or pagan, I can’t help being fonder of
The Mountain and the Stream
,
my onetime guardian’s collected letters from Nenuphar Monastery, and
The Pilgrim Lands at Malibu
,
by possibly my favorite minor poet. The half dozen cookbooks by Dottie Crozdetti have made Andy Pond chortle more than once, since he knows better than anyone that Pam in a kitchen is Nixon at a beach resort.

Nearby, my Anzio Bobbsey twin Bill M.’s book of war cartoons and Nachum ben Zion’s
Israel: One State, Two Nations
bicker in a friendly way over which one’s inscription to Pam is warmer. Another old friend is a slim volume called
The Producer’s Daughter
,
subject of a review by Pamela Buchanan that caused some controversy at the old
Republic
’s offices back in ’41. While I’ve never met or corresponded with its author, over the decades I’ve felt a sisterly affinity and gotten odd hints it’s reciprocated.

Hung in the bathroom and visible in reflection in my daily medicine-cabinet mug shot is a gift from Tim Cadwaller: a one-sheet for Metro’s 1949 flop
The Gal I Left Behind Me
.
Most prized today thanks to the young actress whose button nose and luscious eyes swim out from under an overseas cap between two doll-sized men atop her shoulders—however negligible otherwise, it was Eve’s first film—the poster is more cherished by Pam for less prominent reasons. Nestling in small type among its quartet of screenwriters, my name presciently nuzzles the “Gerson” in the credit underneath mine. Rotten movie, though, not that I’ve seen it since the first Glendale preview almost sixty years ago.

The most ancient and/or tattletale of my mementos, however, stay out of sight in Pam’s catless and Christ knows sexless bedroom. They’re in the footlocker with my mother’s effects that got sent two weeks too late to my old school in
Chaillot
. The damn thing sat for a decade in Chignonne’s attic before wisecracking Eddie Whitling and I pulled up in front of said school’s vined façade in a jeep late on August 25, 1944. Augmented by my own marital trophies, Cadwaller’s gun included since his death twenty years ago, the Paris footlocker’s contents may not only explain my sense of having some standing as well as a stake in all this but provide a reductively psychological explanation for the origin of my anti-Potus animus.

Posted by: Pam

My mother was Daisy Fay Buchanan. Unknown now except to Jazz Age specialists, she was one of the nudest pearls in that era’s champagne goblet until the scandal whose aftershocks, ultimately leading Mother and me to sail for Europe in confusion (hers and definitely mine), italicized my childhood.

As everyone knew once, she missed arrest or even grilling. Yet however indolent our moneyed neck of Long Island liked its police work to stay, three corpses had stunk up the joint. Plenty of rumors swirled around us, lapping even small Pammie’s chubby-kneed legs.

One held Daisy’d been behind the wheel (true), the other and nastier that she’d fired the gun (not). Until my divorce from Brannigan Murphy became a more urgent source of social jitters—no new acquaintance ever quoted Pam’s most notorious courtroom jape to my face, but dozens couldn’t help reciting it with their eyes—the conversations I was least likely to enjoy were those that brought out who my mother was.

That stayed true for a few years after the proper tense became
had been
.
Since dead Daisy’s exit had been unforeseen, abrupt, and noisy, the less usual bang following her more customary whimper as she lay alone in her Brussels bedroom one all too Belgian day in the winter of ’34, you’d think that might make strangers kinder but frequently it didn’t.

Unexpectedly, one who broke the mold was Mencken. The only time I met him was in the press gallery at the 1940 Republican convention: twenty-year-old Pam had tagged along to Philadelphia with a political writer for the old
Republic
who turned out to know him slightly. He told me the Scandal hadn’t been so
very
momentous back in the Twenties: “Really just a sort of anecdote.”

So too, perhaps, will be her daughter’s telephonic protest today. So too, no doubt, my life, my books. Its Amazon ranking “from these sellers” reliably roosting in seven figures, the long out-of-print
Glory Be
,
quite the treekiller for Random House in Eisenhower’s time, might as well be retitled
Glory Went
.

Despite the retitled movie version’s belated cult appeal,
Nothing Like a Dame
(Holt, 1947), Pam’s frothy account of knocking around as a gal war correspondent in the ETO—European Theater of Operations to you post-deluvians out there—isn’t about to get reissued. Until Tim Cadwaller looked up the date of
South Pacific
’s premiere, even he thought I’d gotten the title from Rodgers and Hammerstein. Not that I’m bitter, of course.

Short version? “You’re some dame,” said Richard Rodgers as we ate breakfast together in ’46. To which I replied, wearing nothing but his shirt at the time—I was one of that tireless adulterer’s more fleeting conquests—“I am nothing like a dame.” Then we looked at each other and I dashed back to my Brooklyn garret, stuffing his shirttails into my skirt, while he got poor blinkered Hammerstein on the phone. But I wrote a lot faster.

As for my third and final contribution to Gutenberg’s funeral pyre,
Lucky for the Sun
couldn’t have sunk faster back in ’68 if it’d had Jimmy Hoffa’s ankles chained to it. All in all, I’d rate myself about as minor as celebrities get. Even so, one reason my planned act of telephonic terrorism has already made me grin as I rattle away on my Mac—last year’s Yuletide medusa, brought here with bows on and tentacles trailing by Cadwaller’s son Chris—is the headache I’m sure to give the
WashPost
’s and
NYT
’s obit writers.

It’s not hubris to assume mine is long prepared, only partly thanks to Mother. That’s why I’ve just chuckled again through my
Popular Mechanics
dentition. Cause of death aside, most likely all my obit has left blank to plug in with a “TK”—trad newspaperese for “To come,” I’m only guessing still in use—is who survives me in the final graf.

I also guarantee that in my case “Survivors TK” is a formality. The only reproducing Pam’s done has been the result of anonymous paid sex with Xerox photocopying machines. Their genetic contribution to the bairns—my articles, of course—strikes me as unflattering but not decisive.

But a new opening graf or two or three, cobbled together in extremis? Even today, any family newspaper worth its endlessly passed salt won’t reprint the unexpurgated Pam-quote that helped make my first divorce New York’s most sensational of 1943. Figuring out a backflip from my obit’s startling new lead to Pam’s way-back-when will stump even those specialists in shovel-ready legerdemain. While I’ve seen it done and quite recently too, that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

At most or worst, the obit writers were prepared for one last marriage. Some groping union in my senescence, some phallic fallacy groggily probing my mess of dotage. Among other things, that’s what I intend to deny them.

Posted by: Pam

The problem’s that I know myself unreasonably well. Every brave act I’m said to have performed, marrying Murphy ever Manhattan’s Exhibit A in the way-back-when, has been Pam’s way of indulging a suspected greater cowardice.

You know, I couldn’t have invaded the Philippines. That’s despite the grumblings of
Regent’s
editor that all us literary stage-door-Johnnies lining up theaters of war were obnoxiously wild for our sainted Europe. Roy bemoaned our selfishness in letting those muddy bastards in the Pacific die minus chic prose’s unction.