by Carson, Tom
“Norman, what you do in the shower and what I do in the shower—”
“Ah! Ah. But you play God with soap at your peril, Dwight. Don’t you see? As we lathered and hummed one fine morning, scrubbing off—what? Ah, of course: Dallas—you could say some dark need had just made us produce an avatar of the national beast at its most demented, when the rider and bronco are one.” As he lowered his soap hand and refound his bourbon glass, its blue twins in his eyes waited for the Nobel or the hook.
“Holy shit, Norman,” I brayed. “You talk that way, too?”
He grinned like one of Rafael Sabatini’s pirates, plainly having heard that one before from Mailer virgins. “It’s called value for money, Buchanan, and my father’s an accountant with gambling debts. Make of that what you will.”
“Well, just for the hell of it, you might try a leedle bit of compassion for the President of these Yew-nited States.” A Lyndomaniac no more, I still missed my two years of inner squealing at the Great Society. “Don’t you realize how many people—not me, but many—would call ‘the rider and bronco are one’ a description of you?”
It was the second time I’d interested him. “Oh, I like that,” he congratulated us both. “It’s not too often I hear a theory of me I haven’t already tested out and discarded. Oh, yes! That’s good, Dwight, don’t you think? Lyndon and Norman. Two riders fused with two horses, galloping at cross purposes in the American night. We’re each trying to warn our fellow citizens the other is coming.”
And I might’ve been forty-seven, but for a lively bourbon-blue moment only undyed gray hair spared my haggard plum from prospective service to American literature. It passed; our hostess hovered. Trying to locate not only podium but tone.
“Can I possibly talk you two literary giants into tasting some of my food?” she said, resting her hands in the air above Dwight’s and Norman’s forearms. “Oh! And Pam, you too of course.”
“I’m afraid we dwarves need to go. All that kneeling around the glass coffin is just hell on our short little legs. No, I’m teasing you, silly! I’ve had a lovely time, but I’ve got to get home. Cadwaller’s waiting.” (I’m not sure what prompted that fib.) “Just tell me where you put my coat.”
“Oh, the back bedroom. I’ll—”
“Not at all. This place can’t be so big I won’t find it,” I said, since she was clearly pained by the thought of leaving her two Manhattan sequoias to go help a pine tree glue on some needles. “Thataway?”
The Picasso Quixote was on inevitable display midway down the hall. The Ben Shahn was a bit out of date, though. Then I came to what must be the right door, pushed it open, and stopped. Even to oldsters like me, that sweet smell needed no introduction. And no by-your-leave either, given place and occasion.
On the bed heaped with coats, mine included, knelt two of the flowerized Vogue models or Vogue-ified flower chickies I’d seen in the living room earlier. The one with the joint pooching her lips and her knee on my coat was nude to the waist with her arms framing her head. The other, bent with hair canted in a Kirstenish spill—not that her semblable had even been born yet, but memory plays hopscotch sometimes—was painting a daisy’s petals around the first one’s left nipple, having already finished her right.
“Oh, hi!” said the done and budding daisies’ new owner, lazily smiling. “I’m Claire. Are you doing yours too? She’s good at this, trust me. She does bullseyes too, but heck, at a protest I think that’s just asking for it.”
First thought, appallingly bourgeois: my coat. A knee not mine held my coat pinned. With one done and one budding daisy eyeing me like two periscopes, I could no more have gone in to retrieve my usurped coat than I could’ve accepted an invitation to shoot up.
To stand in the doorway explaining and pointing would’ve been not only humiliating but an insult to two girls who were fellow guests and not maidservants. Besides, Claire as my coat’s pinner would no doubt be its fetcher, one done and one budding daisy miming a waltz as she moved her knee, dipped, straightened back up, skipped off the bed, and came toward me with my coat held out and the waltz not yet done, and thank you but no.
Mumbling a handy Goldwynism—“Oh, no. Include me out”—I backed instead until I found the doorknob and pulled. Had an unpleasant memory of the Lotus Eater leaving her clothes and suitcases as she fled Provincetown forty years earlier. Heard a syrupy gurgle of giggles before Kirsten and Claire began quietly singing, but I’m fairly sure they weren’t singing “All You Need Is Love” to me.
The proof poor Pam was now antediluvian was that it hadn’t been dramatic to them. No panic at all at what they evidently didn’t see—but how could they not?—as an even faintly sexualized, even mildly compromising situation. True, I was female, but their age combined and a stranger. Yet they’d just been happy with what they were doing, saw no need to explain it wasn’t what it looked like or even was what it looked like. Claire hadn’t shifted her knee and clapped on Pam’s coat, which would’ve been the coat’s former owner’s first instinct.
I’d liked that coat a lot. To my fleeting panic, so’d Hopsie, but I was calmed by one of the few ways my husband resembled most men. He’d be no more likely to ask what had become of it than I’d be to willingly dawdle in Georgetown Pipe and Tobacco, the one place in Washington where I was often reminded my Cadwaller’d told me that as a boy he’d loved train sets.
Knowing our hostess as slightly as I did, I’d have been reluctant to phone up next day with inquiries. My missing coat might have forced us to turn italicized friends. Since I couldn’t be there myself, something in me liked the idea of Claire going to the March on the Pentagon with one done and one budding daisy hidden in Pam Cadwaller’s hairy old coat. Rather liked the idea of swaying, enjambed, with arms framing my head as Kirsten gave me two bullseyes, too, but from anywhere but inside my mind it would’ve looked like farce and not neiges d’antan poetry.
Keen observer of humanity that he was, Norman made nothing of the fact that I’d vanished to retrieve a coat and reemerged coatless. Hell, he’d probably had to leave his shoes behind more than once. A fresh glass of bourbon nearby, he hailed me.
“Buchanan, you’re leaving us?” he called, handing off pen and a copy of that bum new novel of his to our hurt (she’d done the stuffed cream-cheese tomatoes herself) but bribable hostess. “Will you be marching on Saturday?”
This wasn’t the time, place, or man to explain about Cadwaller’s job. “I couldn’t for love or money.”
“Anyone can. LBJ could. Isn’t that the point of this insane country?”
“Once upon a time I would’ve. But these days for me it’s all Matthew Arnold.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Oh, Norman! You must know: ‘Now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar retreating.’ And so on and whatever.”
Even though I hadn’t planned to advertise myself on my way out, I’d interested him a third time. “What is that from?”
“Mr. Mailer, do you mean to say you’ve never read ‘Dover Beach’?”
“Maybe in college. You know what they say, we all had a first wife.”
“I didn’t. Not really.”
Posted by: Pam
When the Finns came back from Germany, I saw first that Sean-pronounced-Seen now wore glasses redoodling him as less spooky than spooked, next that Nell had grown gawky and uncomfortably pubescent. A Berlin-born wiggle named Stacy had eyes too young to grasp the perils of augmenting a family we’d all thought was complete. There were times when the State Department’s magic carpet seemed to get stuck in the revolving door of Nagon’s Palais du Président.
Nan hadn’t changed much, since the whole point of being the glorious girl was to see how much life she could leap at without changing much. But Ned was forty and hated it, rabbit-punched by a clerical error at odds with Ned Finn-ness. Nan told me tha
t when they last got invited to a costume party—waning custom in our crowd—he’d been eager to give himself Beatle bangs. Of course the Beatles themselves no longer had any.
“Oh, his work is still good. No doubt about that,” Cadwaller reported a month or so later. He didn’t have Ned in Policy Planning, but the Department wasn’t that huge. “But some cog’s getting stuck there. He’d still rather be promising: someone’s clever lieutenant. Not so happy when he’s where the buck stops on that part of the corridor.”
That winter on C Street, so many lights stayed on most nights that our big aircraft carrier for paper planes looked like the Titanic to Capitol Hill’s distant iceberg. Even on our way somewhere else, we’d all automatically check our husband’s floor. Night protests terrified Nan when she had to drive the Finns’ down-at-heels Fiat to collect hers, since even a few minutes’ delay might inspire restless, ruddy forty-year-old Ned to nip out for a drink.
Then a taxi the Finns couldn’t afford would lug the half burst suitcase he often resembled back from the District at some ungodly hour, and she had a hard time not blaming the caveman-haired wraiths in field jackets holding candlelight vigils when she was just trying to get across Memorial Bridge. Didn’t they know how all the bills scared her, didn’t they understand she hadn’t started this war? She told me long afterward that fighting down the impulse to honk sometimes drove her to tears.
As for me, it must’ve been soon after New Year’s that a call came I’d somehow expected since I laughed at Callie Sherman in Middleburg and said, “My guy won forty-four states.” Licking and sealing Pam’s first contribution to Gene McCarthy’s Presidential campaign, I picked up.
“I’m at the Mansion,” Cadwaller said a tad grimly. “You’re invited for dinner.”
“Hopsie, what are you talking about?” Not only were the formal White House events I’d gone to on his arm, seeing LBJ only in the receiving line, laid on months in advance, but there hadn’t been many of those in a while. “When?”
“Now. The meeting went late—three or four of us here from State and Defense. He wants company.”
“Can you talk? Are you trapped? Is it bad?”
“It could be,” he said with false casualness. “The First Lady’s in Texas, of course.”
“And that’s bad?”
He kept his voice light. “I’ve been told it can be very.”
Posted by: Pam
In spite of the protesters who by then scruffily gathered in Lafayette Square nearly at random to heckle its occupant, the Executive Mansion’s security was much less imposing in those days. Traffic flowed freely on Pennsylvania Avenue past a sidewalk as yet unridged by concrete dragon’s teeth to guard against truck bombs. Even so, to avoid inciting the demonstrators, I was told to park off the Ellipse and present myself at the South Gate instead.
Which I did, feeling uncomely. Hopsie hadn’t had time to give me advice on what I should wear, so I’d tried to approximate formality without ostentation in a high-collared blouse and long wool winter skirt. By good luck the gray brindle mop had recently been on a trip to the hairdresser’s—yes, I’d tagged along too—and looked decent enough in a back knot. All the same, I’d only been to the White House before in white gloves, a full evening gown, and a silk shawl I liked. Wearing wool gloves instead gave me pause, and in spite of the cold I tucked them into my purse before giving my name.
Escorted up the South Portico’s steps by a crisp Marine in dress blues—he was the one in white gloves tonight, and at least he wouldn’t die in Hué tonight—I got handed off to an usher in the icy blast that swerved around the large door as he opened it. He took me by elevator to the second floor of the East Wing, which I’d obviously never laid eyes on: never seen more than the big reception rooms downstairs. These were the family quarters, if not for too much of a family since Lynda and Luci both opted for matrimony. The First Lady’s in Texas, of course.
It looked almost ablaze, since they kept all the lights on in every room until the President retired for the night. I had no clue what to expect. This was Lyndon Baines Johnson, whom I’d once heard relieving himself noisily in a Congressional office’s washbasin. Hopsie had been in the Cabinet Room the day LBJ stunned a visitor by standing, unzipping, hefting, and bellowing, “Tell me, does Ho Chi Minh have anything like this?”
My usher led me to the small family room off the Truman Balcony. Yes, past the chappie no doubt well versed in American dialects whose lap braced the briefcase containing new-kew-lear, nucleah, and nuclear codes. Of the five men and two other stunned wives seated on the three uncomfortably close striped couches that boxed in one big armchair at the far end, of course for me there were only two faces at first.
Cadwaller’s looked strained. Johnson’s looked, well, amazingly like Lyndon Johnson’s, rather more so than it ever had in receiving lines. Tieless and jacketless, shirtcuffs turned back on his arms and shirt’s pale nether billows leaking all over his beltline—four sartorial details distinguishing him from the other men in the room—he set down his glass and looked up. Though his eyes were as incapable of widening as those of any man’s I’ve known, their dark-lidded cavelets showed more of a brightening chink than I’d have expected.
“Well, now! This must be Mrs. Hopsie. Isn’t that what they call you, Cadwaller?”
Hopsie gave a tired smile. “Well, some do, sir, yes.”
“Think I’ll appoint myself one of ’em. Mrs. Cadwaller, you come give your Hopsie a nice kiss on the cheek. You other folks introduce yourselves, will you?”
The only unwifed man present aside from the President didn’t need to. “Why, hello, Carl!” I said.
Nodding exhaustedly, Carl [Last Name Redacted] shifted farther down on the couch to give me more room on its stripes next to Cadwaller. Sitting, I squeezed Hopsie’s arm briefly. Completing the usual extent of our greetings in public, he patted my hand.
“Aw, hell. I said a kiss, didn’t I?” LBJ grunted. “Are you another of these women who’s plumb forgotten how to treat a good man, Mrs. Cadwaller? Your Hopsie’s been at it all day.”
I felt like a seal being trained and my lipstick was fresh, redaubed by yellow light in the car’s rearview mirror before I got out. Puckering up like Fran Kukla in Hamlet, I quickly smooched your great-grandfather’s cheek, atypically peppered since he’d shaved before dawn and it was past ten at night.
“Now that’s better,” LBJ said. “None of you knows just how hard your men work, but I do.”
I couldn’t help wondering if the other two couples had been put through the same performance, and as you may have noticed, we hadn’t obeyed LBJ’s other instruction. I never did learn their names. The Army bird colonel’s lady had streaked blonde hair and about eight or nine cheekbones before I quit counting: the Fort Bragg version of a fashion plate. Measuring everyone’s hemlines and then glancing down at her pumpkin knees, the Pentagon civilian’s wife was not only as chubby as Judy Agnew but shared her simpleton gift for beaming into the abyss with as much paralyzed joy as if it were a vanity mirror. You won’t know who that is and won’t ever need to, bikini girl, but for reference, the Second Lady of the as yet unborn Nixon Administration spent most of it looking like she’d missed her calling as some better carnival’s dunking clown.
Fumbling a bit, LBJ pressed a button. Kaboom? Clearly not, as here I sit inputting almost forty years later in a world more or less in one piece. The mess steward’s time matched any mushroom cloud’s, though.
“Felix,” said LBJ, “you can go tell the kitchen we’re about ready to eat.”
“Right away, Mr. President. What would you like to have?”
“God damn it! Do I have to make every puny decision in this damn mousetrap? I do not give a plug damn. Food! Just so long as it’s meat. Burgers, sirloin, buffalo for all I care. Cut Hubert’s leg off, you jackass. Oh, and find out what Mrs. Hopsie here mi
ght care to drink.”
“If I could just have a club soda with lemon, that’s fine,” I squeaked. Not Pam’s usual register or cocktail request, but there’s a first time for everything.
“No, no, no, no, no,” warned LBJ, a Presidential finger instantly waggling. “Both these other damozels tried that one too. My God, doesn’t anyone know how to unwind anymore? Scotch or bourbon?”
“Scotch. Water and ice,” I told Felix faintly. It came in under a minute.
“There now. That’s better,” LBJ told us. “You know, I always like spending time with young folks, I do. Ask my old Congressional staff. ’Course back then they more or less had to be young, considering what I could pay ’em and how hard I worked ’em.”
If a single one of us there wasn’t past forty, I don’t know wrinkles and creased necks from holes in the ground. And of course, thanks to the hour and their jobs, the men looked even older than they probably were: Cadwaller’s age in advance, you could say. By then all the real youngsters were in Lafayette Square, or holding teach-ins at Columbia or Berkeley, or being inducted, or dead.
“Mrs. Cadwaller, your husband plays it pretty close to the vest. I wasn’t sure I believed you even really existed and that is a fact. But now I can see why he’s kept you away from the White House.”
This wasn’t the moment to explain he’d met me four or five times at receptions—differently dressed, to be sure. With any President, there is no such thing as that moment. You take your lumps.
“Why, thank you, Mr. President,” I said, no doubt sounding perplexed. Even the Buchanan gams weren’t what they had been, one reason my hemline made Judy Agnew’s look like a miniskirt.
He leaned in like my confessor. I could smell his breath, which was loamy. I could practically smell his deodorant souring in its two crinkled Alamos. “So tell me,” he said. “What’s Cadwaller’s secret?”