Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (4 page)

“How could I?” said Andy, flipping the meaning to play the chivalry card.

“Andy, I’m not sure about tonight,” I told him, making the pistol in my lap go do-si-do. Clearly, I miss pet ownership. Sit up! Wink, Cadwaller’s gun. “I don’t really feel up to it.”

“If you did, I’d ask who the new tenant was. We’re Methuselan, Pam. If we felt wonderful, what would we talk about? It’s like what they used to say about the weather, only now”—never one to look a bon mot in the mouth, Andy chuckled—“the weather is inside us.”

“That’s exactly right and nothing I can do about it. Some get rained out.”

“But you won’t have to do anything. I’m handling the cooking. I’ve already shopped,” he said, sounding caught between glee at having had a project and wistfulness it was behind him. “I’ve gotten the movies.”

“Oh, God. Which?”

“
The Gal I Left Behind Me
,
of course,” Andy said, either ignoring or delighting in my unstifled groan of horror. “And
Meet Pamela
, which I bet you’ve never seen.”

“No, but why would I want to? Didn’t it come out and flop ages
ago? Honestly, Andy. Since it’s my birthday, you could at least have asked yourself what I’d enjoy.”

“I did, but I can’t perform miracles and we’ve already seen every Kirsten there is. Except
Intervi
ew with th
e Vampire
,
but you never wanted to.”

“Of course not. She was too, she was only a child back then. Realizing she was one would just force me to acknowledge even Kirsten has feet of clay.” Less clay than veined pottery with toes, one of Pam’s nudged the Metro section wallward. “Well, no bother! You watch whichever one you like. I’ll probably just fall asleep and you can let yourself out.”

“Pam! It’s your birthday. Promise to stay awake through at least one.”

“Why?”

“Oh, to help me pretend it’s some sort of occasion,” Andy said. “I
always
let myself out.”

Posted by: Pam

If you’re getting ready to weep for the lonely old bag roosting on upper Connecticut Avenue, I wouldn’t blame you. I might laugh at you, though. Let me dash last year’s Christmas-card list in your face.

By 2005’s tally, Pam had one hundred and fifty-seven extant friends. I don’t mean near strangers to whom she feels an inexplicable need to suck up. I mean chronologically protean faces in snapshots stretching over decades, mutually misremembered anecdotes, e-mails from California or India about politics, books, upcoming trips, and recent losses in the club. The next time they came to Washington or I got to California or India, they’d’ve been as glad to see me as I them.

Those are the people I
sent
cards to. Another eighty or ninety jokers I’d just as soon forgot I’m alive burdened the postman with what neither they nor he knew was junk mail. The reaper’s gouges have whittled down both totals from their circa-1975 peak.

Closer to home are Nan Finn and Laurel Warren, with whom I can do the biddy bit at Martin’s or La
Chaumière
anytime. We knock waiters around like ninepins as they wait for the heftier bowling ball of their tip: “More wine!” Plus Carol Sawyer, also from Nagon days, not that I’d eat with her alone. Fond of my fingers.

Plus Callie Sherman, though Callie doesn’t get out much anymore. Ninety, blind, often turbaned (oh, please), occasionally dabbling in an unseen cigarette the way Tiberius in old age enjoyed the nips of little fish while swimming, she Receives.

Even so, I’ve got only one favorite endtable. One gent who not only willingly accompanies me to the Kennedy Center, Martin’s, La Chaumière, the Folger, and Arena Stage but puts up with the late-blooming crush I’d never admit to even my fellow movie addict Nan Finn. I’ve literally disturbed young girls with my knowledge of Kirsten Dunst’s career.

Mind, the day I see the closing credits of any of her pictures, even those Andy’s Netflixed or Nextflicked for me multiple times, will be when I realize I’ve died and there is
an afterlife. Then I’ll be too resentful about the nonsense I’ve been put through to pay attention to the happy ending. Yet Andy loyally sat through
Bring It On
to the end so he could tell me,
in detail
,
how Kirsten’s cheerleading team had fared after I dozed off during one green-pantied set of splits.

I sometimes wonder what I look like, schnozz buzzsawing at a Leaning Tower of Pisa angle and dentition gaping like I’m one of the freaks at Bomarzo—clearly, Italy figures somewhere in my idea of pleasant dreams—as Andy hangs in there in order to elucidate the last act’s plot turns for Pam’s sake. And to think he was our man at the Berlin Wall: the last, rotated home just before it came down for good. Maybe it taught him patience.

Posted by: Pam

In regular contact, if mostly in cyberspace and by phone since I gave up my visits to Amherst at Thanksgiving and New York anytime the latest ridiculous musical’s reviews fooled me into thinking it was worth snoring through, are three generations of Cadwaller’s progeny. The eldest is Hopsie’s son by his first marriage, and I marvel that the alert adolescent who took Pam’s hand as we strolled along the Seine is a grandfather. Even before his biological mother’s death, Chris taught his son and later grandchildren to call me Gramela, giving me all the fame and none of the responsibility.

As does Panama—for now—Chris’s son Tim adores me. Before he settled into his current job, he wanted to pitch a profile of Pam Buchanan, museum-quality war correspondent, to
Smithsonian
magazine.

The exhibit put the kibosh on that. “Absolutely not. I know you, young Mr. Cadwaller! I’ll just be an excuse to fill it with tommyrot. You’ll get moony over the liberation of Paris, and all I really remember is the horrible headache I got from all the diesel fumes.”

“Then why don’t you write it yourself? Not just the war, the whole thing.”

“But I have.
In
Nothing Like a Dame
,
and—”

“Gramela, you always say yourself that was twaddle,” Tim objected.

“Yes, and don’t you understand that anything I tried to write this late in life would be too? By now I can hardly remember the difference between what happened and what you wish had. That’s why I like your imagination better.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s uninformed. That’s what imagination should be. When nothing’s true, everything can be.”

“It’s not completely
uninformed,” grumbled the author of
You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two
.

“If you mean history books, no. But we didn’t have them.”

Soon afterward and what a mazurka I danced, Tim had a friend design the website I’m using now. It has lain fallow for two years. That’s why he and his fellow Cadwallers are less likely than random strangers who won’t care to stumble across these June 6 posts and try to stop me from carrying out my protest, since Tim and company gave up long ago on the idea I’d ever use it.

Among other things, I hated its name: daisysdaughter.com. My amateur psychoanalyst—see how I’m already contending with his projections?—is a sucker for not only the Jazz Age, something I don’t remember hearing it called at the time any more than we called Jack’s Administration Camelot, but the whole cavalcade from Depression to war to Ike to Jack to how many kids did you kill today. Around then Tim’s own juvenile presence in front of TV sets starts making his Gramela’s hoarded way-back-when less precious, less unique, less fucking magical. Not that reminiscing over Jimmy Carter’s epic Presidency strikes me as Shazam time either.

I felt dismayed by the website’s name for professional reasons as well. Since Tim’s one himself, he ought to’ve known which bauble of identity any writer guards most fiercely: his or her byline. His clever notion of reducing me to nakedness also disguises me from whatever handful of readers still recognize it, since anyone romantic or idle enough to Google Pamela Buchanan, most likely to confirm she’s dead, may not learn before scrolling gets tiresome that daisysdaughter.com is her blog.

I never cared in social life. I was Pamela Murphy when my divorce testimony knocked the latest Washington benefit performance by Winston Churchill’s one-man rep troupe off New York tabloids’ front pages in May of ’43, I was Pammie Gerson to other industry wives in the creamily ceramic Cinerama of Beverly Hills. I was Pam Cadwaller to not only the
Foreign Service Journal
but Lyndon Johnson’s White House operators. But all through my marital trolley transfers,
by Pamela Buchanan
was the war cry I exulted in.

For better or worse, I was Pamela Buchanan on the rollickingly corpse-free cover of
Nothing Like a Dame
, my eager-to-please account of the fun side of World War Two. Now long out of print and good riddance to all but Bill M.’s jacket art, whose affection for his Anzio Bobbsey twin glows painfully through my memories of the light-hearted hour I spent posing. Yet my silly first book did stay on the
NYT
’s bestseller list long enough to play ships in the night, Pam sinking to starboard as curly-haired Norman scrambled up portside, with
The Naked and the Dead
.

With pride that’s lasted to this day, Pamela Buchanan could’ve kissed every one of the enthusiasts for our nation’s birth pangs who bought
Glory Be
when it came out the year said nation was deciding for the second time whether it liked Ike or needed Adlai badly. One of the Paris footlocker’s prizes is a laminated telegram—
i’m just glad you aren’t a politician best wishes jack kennedy
—I got the week my sloop skimmed past his ghost-skippered PT boat in sales.

Intermittence may be my byline’s cross to bear. That’s not the same as discontinuity. My last foray into print was an op-ed in the
Los Angeles Times
dated 6/6/2004 in the clippings file and begging the ninnies who run the show out there to spare the Ambassador Hotel from the wrecker’s ball. You can see how they listened, too. It still meant something to me that the Pamela Buchanan who signed that piece could nod across a span of seventy years at Pamela Buchanan, the fourteen-year-old authoress—a term she then thought divine—of “
Chanson d’automne
.”

My first and only stab at verse, which politely reached for a cotton swab and moved on, its wretched dozen lines were printed in the Fall 1934 edition of
Pink Rosebuds
, the literary magazine of Purcey’s Girls Academy of St. Paul.
From its title on, to call the thing derivative would be an insult to plagiarists everywhere. Its one acute bit was a game of peekaboo with nonperpendicular pronouns, silly but not bad for a teenager.

Inanity wasn’t the reason “
Chanson d’automne
” shattered my brief spell as a poetess, an even yummier-sounding word to my young ears. Winning me Professor Hormel’s writhing plaudits along with my classmates’ far more decisive mockery, my poemess was written in French.

Back then, I couldn’t see what I’d done wrong. Collected by my new American guardian when the
Paris
docked in New York, I’d only recently been shipped back to my perplexing homeland. My mother’s Belgian second husband had advertised his reluctance to see more than the back of
la petite Pamelle
in the wake of his Day-
zee
’s surprise exit from the breathing business.

On a more practical, Brussels-sprouting sort of note, Georges Flagon didn’t care to keep paying my tuition at Mme Chignonne’s.
c’est la vie
, his cable sighed, and I doubt Tim Cadwaller realized the real pang of the name he’d picked out for my website. I never felt more like Daisy’s daughter than in the first few months after she’d left me as the only surviving Fay or Buchanan on the face of the globe.

Used as I was to her ways by then, I couldn’t help thinking she’d carried negligence a bullet too far. Hello, mother mine.

Posted by: Pammie

In my younger, less invulnerable years, I often wished my guardian hadn’t told me what Daisy was alleged by no less an authority than herself to have wished for me at birth. He had so few even fugitively Pamcentric anecdotes in stock that I can’t blame him for sharing that one when I kept whinging, and she didn’t get her stupid wish. Or, depending on how you count, her fairy-tale three wishes.

No, Mother: your daughter never did get to be beautiful. Nor even stay so little once I shot up to a hoop-hunting five foot ten in the Midwest the year after you died. And I wasn’t a fool. I made my way.

Early on, I learned or relearned how to be American, a skill you couldn’t have imagined was one. By the age of twenty-one, I was doing something you never did: earn my living. And as a writer too, just what I once heard you bragging to the Lotus Eater in Provincetown you’d be.

No need to pretend you’re jealous, though! We both know you’d have soon found a reason to be dismissive. Measuring my real career against your fantasized one, you’d’ve found Pammie’s clumsy imitation, with my big feet and my ugly hair and my stupid tugs at your beaded dress in East Egg, wanting.

I made my way.
Along the line, catching a bottle of shampoo—not champagne—from a woman gnarled as oak and naked as the truth outside Riceville, Tennessee, I fell in love with my country. Once again, we’re up against something you’d have found puzzling, since you always did treat the U.S.A. as the caterer and not the bridegroom.

In a dopey way—and pun intended, mother mine—you pined for France. Your daughter saw it in an overseas cap and GI shoes, saw Paris liberated. Dachau too? Dachau too.

In ways Gerson and I forbade ourselves to articulate, it bothered my second husband that his shiksa wife had been the witness he hadn’t to his fellow Jews’ destruction and survival. Vowing nobody would call his patriotism a mask for a more personal—
personal!—
grudge, he spent 1941–45 in Culver City, supervising training films on the dangers of loose talk, defeatism, booby traps, and finally fraternization.

Pam had seen GIs chatting up Bavarian dollies a week after Dachau. So I had to tell him batting .750 wasn’t so bad. Showing me around Metro, Gerson grinned: “Oh, we knew it was hopeless. But that actress got a contract faster than I could say
‘Arbeit macht frei.’
” I winced for a reason he didn’t learn for six months.

My first
husband, incidentally—like yours, mother mine—was an anti-Semite. A Communist anti-Semite, guaranteeing he and Stalin would’ve gotten on famously. Stalin a bit more famous, but trust Murphy to find a grudge. A few months into my marriage to Gerson, puttering among the breakfast bagels and bacon in Beverly Hills, it did cross my mind that somewhere Bran, in his Murphine way, was seething that I’d never stop betraying him. Well, of course not! He was Brannigan Murphy, making that the whole planet’s job. Stalin’s included.

Yes, mother mine: for a while, your daughter basked in the voluptuous allure of Hollywood. That phrase was the lone one retained by a then sixty-plus Pam after Tim Cadwaller, hoping I wouldn’t be too irked or bored, took me to a New York bar to hear a Texan songwriter he liked. The fellow’s fondness for our pliable American idiom charmed me even as the organizing principle of his musical shuffles eluded the newly, now decisively old lady.

Not that Gerson was a voluptuary, far from it. In a trait he shared with many another decent man,
how
far could exasperate him. Having to be Gerson, Gerson, Gerson all the time left him surrounded by doors he couldn’t be sure were locked from inside or out. I loved him for ignoring the invisible keys dancing all around the room.