Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane

by Carson, Tom

  “Got away with what, pray?”

  “How in hell would I know or care what I mean, Pam? He’s Give-’em-Hell Harry and Jack is Saint Jack, but me? There’s a goddam play running Off Broadway right now about how I murdered Jack to make myself President, you know that? The woman who wrote it says she don’t really believe I did, but it would have been, quote, ‘the least of my crimes.’”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Did you see it?”

  “I’d never,” I said, for some loyalties outlast the end of a love affair. Not that Lyndon knew the only real one we’d had dated to 1965, when I’d watched on TV as he quoted “We Shall Overcome” in a speech to Congress urging passage of the Civil Rights Act and made ’em like it. So help me, I’d thought of my old Regent’s colleague Jim Bond nattily quoting “Face of a Gauguin” back at me in 1943 and felt the mimsies go from half empty to half full. While Hopsie was no weeper, which is putting it mildly, he’d stuffed his pipe very slowly and said, “Pam, we don’t often talk this way. But my favorite ancestor commanded a colored regiment in the Civil War, and I’ve always been fairly pleased I was named for him.”

  I digress, though. “Bless you,” Lyndon muttered.

  Posted by: Pam

  My guardian in Midwestern days—the future Brother Nicholas, dans les grand blés sanglotants—was fond of insisting that you can’t repeat the past. I agree that it’s stupid to try to on purpose, and I hope daisysdaughter.com proves I’m not prone to the fallacy. That’s why it drives me bughouse when the past has its own ideas on that score. We now come to the second time I heard Lyndon Johnson make water.

  “I’ll just be a minute,” he said as we stepped into a startlingly futuristic bathroom. Actually only contemporary, but a shock after our progress through Jackieland’s facsimilized Lincolnisms. In a symptom of drunkenness or just Lyndonian prerogative, he was already fumbling with the front of his pants through his shirttails.

  “You go on in the sitting room,” he added over his shoulder, nodding toward another chamber off to my right. “But leave the door open so I can talk.”

  Note choice of pronoun. Note that Lyndon even deep in the bag, unlike his successor (oh, Nixon, Panama! Honestly, bikini girl), was no believer in soliloquizing just to fixtures or paintings.

  Stepping into the doorway as per instructions, I found myself transomed between contradictions. In the smallest room I’d yet seen, its only seating a couch underneath a tall window, I was once more in Jackieland, the work of an eighteenth-century temperament recreating the nineteenth midway through the twentieth. Yet the President’s voice came to me from white light and tiled glare.

  “You’re in the old White House telegraph room,” he called over a stream of Johnsonian puissance. “Lincoln spent the whole war having to walk over to the damn War Department when he wanted news from the battlefields. Sure as shit not my problem, and sometimes I envy him. Never crossed anyone’s mind to put a telegraph here until ’65.”

  “Eighteen- or nineteen?” I asked the doorway’s tiled glare. At which point it loomed large with Lyndon in disarrayed silhouette.

  “Eighteen, Mrs. Cadwaller. As if you didn’t know.”

  “I honestly didn’t,” I gasped. Then his arms curled around me.

  A quarter century after the first time, here we bloody went again. But President Johnson didn’t know what he wanted as surely as Congressman Johnson had.

  “Please, ma’am, I’m your President. Hold me,” he moaned brokenly. “Hold me, that’s all I ask. Please just come sit and hold me a spell.”

  By then, we’d already launched a bear’s waltz—hopping, ungainly, and in my case blind—toward the couch under the window. As my wool-covered calves got backed into it, my eyes clawed for directions, fell on a side cabinet crowned by a few family photographs. But I got plastered to the settee by Johnsonian bulk before I’d more than glimpsed the most striking, boldly lit by the wedge of glare from the bathroom.

  “Hold me,” he begged again.

  “You’re holding me, Mr. President. There’s not much I can do about it.”

  “I know that feeling,” he muttered thickly. “And you know I know. That’s all I was trying to tell them back there. It was not my idea. Never, never, never, never, never! By God, I wanted to finish what Franklin Roosevelt started. No more kids with hungry bellies. No more Negroes and Mexicans in shacks they’d never own. And I could have done it, and I was so close—and then this. I don’t know how in hell I got in this mess. Please undo this button.”

  “Jesus Christ! I don’t know how I got in it either,” I muttered thinly right back, pushing my fist between squirreling fingers and my blouse’s top pearl. Cadwaller! Insanely, I wondered if they’d finished eating. Or started.

  “Ma’am, all I’m asking is a little sympathy. A little sympathy for the only President you’ve got. Courtesy and taste can go hang. I thought I saw some sympathy in your eyes in the Treaty Room.”

  “You’ve got it,” I swore, meanwhile shifting my hand to brawl for my hemline. “Just not with its skirts up. Lyndon, one or the other! Not both.”

  He drew his head back above me. Two wet scoops showed in his berry-dark eyes.

  “Why the hell,” he asked, “why the hell has every last mother one of you been telling me that since the day I was born?”

  Until he drew back, I hadn’t seen what his other hand was up to. Hadn’t heard a zipper’s tattletale noise either, but most likely he just hadn’t bothered to do it back up. Yet his other hand’s labors had all been for nothing. Far from becoming a python or even a cottonmouth, what his grip was attacking was a pale small uncooperative dove.

  He toppled onto me sobbing. “Oh, damn! Oh, damn. Damn you, Ho Chi Minh. Damn you to hell, Jack. Oh! Too bad. Oh! Too bad.”

  Posted by: A Mother

  Not long after I mailed my second check to Gene McCarthy’s campaign—as I’d been planning to do, children; do you really think my feelings were hurt or that would’ve mattered?—that eremite Mighty Mouse made headlines and then some by getting forty-two percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary. A day later came a call from the White House switchboard asking Pam Cadwaller to visit the President that same afternoon. Alone.

  Cadwaller nearly had apoplexy along with his eggs. Given my wrenched clothes and Flying Dutchmanized back knot, only Pam’s urgent headshake had stopped him from rising and socking his President’s jaw when LBJ and I returned to the family dining room in the East Wing.

  “Yes, Pam, I know,” he told his breakfast in a rare fury. “A man who’s in torment, a man who’s in agony. No arguments there. A man who’s confused because he’s all he ever aimed to be and now it’s aimed at him. Granted. More discussion of that will cause me no pain. But there are limits. Sorry to sound incoherent, but I think you’ll forgive me if I’m only human.”

  “Forgive you? I love it and you both,” I told him. “But trust me. This time it’ll be all right.”

  “How can you know?” Hopsie cried.

  “I just do,” I said, since it would take too long to explain and my husband’s gifts stopped short of being female. “If I’m wrong, you’ve got my blessing to use that dandy little gun of yours we keep behind Glory Be.”

  Yes, daisysdaughter.com readers: the same one I’ve got in my lap now. Behind Glory Be was its home at every house throughout my third marriage. I doubt I need to go into my reasons to move it somewhere less impulsively convenient after Cadwaller’s death.

  “That’s appalling to say under any circumstances. Even these,” Cadwaller told me. “Anyhow, they’d never let me bring it into the White House.”

  “I meant on me, Hopsie, not him.”

  Was I sure? Pretty nearly. I chose my wardrobe with care. When I was shown into the Lincoln Sitting Room, LBJ stood. Full suit and tie now, but slippers. His shoes stood n
earby.

  “Ma’am, it’s good to see you again.”

  “I can’t quite call it a pleasure, Mr. President. But if ever a man needed comfort, it’s you. What on earth are these?”

  On the side cabinet where the family photos had been were a pair of stuffed eagles on stands. Their wild eyes, hiked wings, and every-which-way feathers left one unclear whether they were meant to look demented or the taxidermist was.

  “From an admirer somewhere out West. They tell me I’ve got a few left here and there. Damn, but I wish even I didn’t think they were kooks. If these are somebody’s idea of a joke, at least I’ll never know. The Secret Service can check this crap for bombs but not humor.”

  “What became of the picture?”

  “Oh, it’s here on the couch. I was holding it.”

  “May I?” I asked, reaching out. “I didn’t get much of a look.”

  “Of course.” As we shared it, he murmured, “You do look a fair amount like her, Mrs. Cadwaller.”

  “Mr. President, I don’t want to insult her memory. But fashions have changed and I hope you’ll tell me that at least my arms are much slimmer. I’m pretty sure I smile lots more often than it looks like she ever did, too.”

  “Most likely. Now I’ll never know,” he said dolefully and also inaccurately. “I didn’t give you too many reasons to smile that other night.”

  “No, sir, not many. But some.”

  In 1917, when the picture was taken, Rebekah Baines Johnson was younger but more used by life than was Pam half a century later. And don’t misunderstand: it was just a resemblance, not a Hollywoodish miracle on a par with Kirsten Dunst looking breathtakingly like Kirsten Dunst’s long-lost twin sister. Luckily for me, not to mention 1956 readers of book features in Vogue, my jaw though no prize was far less problematic. It was mostly the eyes, the nose to an extent, the high forehead, along with the hair in a back knot and the clothes I’d happened to wear on my previous visit here.

  “You do understand, though,” said LBJ with some awkwardness.

  “Yes, Mr. President, I think so. Would you like to come sit on the couch with me for a spell?”

  When I sat with arm crooked for company, he huddled into my collarbone. His slippered feet were up on the couch right away. Once I’d squeezed his shoulder, though, I felt at sea. Not only wasn’t I his mother, I’d never been anyone’s—something I’m not sure Lyndon knew. He had his reasons not to inquire about Pam’s real children if any.

  “Mr. President, can I tell you a story?”

  “Yes, do.”

  “It’s really a scene from a play about Danton. He quotes the New Testament: ‘It must needs be that offenses come! But—’”

  “‘Woe to him by whom the offense cometh,’” said a muffled voice in my shoulder. “Matthew Eighteen: Seven.”

  Though he favored Isaiah when speaking to Congress, a Texan raised Baptist like Lyndon naturally knew both Testaments backward and forward. If I hadn’t liked Georg Büchner, most likely secular Pam would’ve thought Mr. Lincoln had just made the italicized bits of the Second Inaugural up.

  “Yes, exactly. And then Danton says with a terrible cry, ‘That must was mine.’”

  “Thank you,” he muttered. Then I think he fell asleep for a while.

  Just as my arm started cramping like the blazes, a voice said, “Did you have a mother?”

  “Of course I did, sil—oh, sorry. Mr. President.”

  “Silly’s all right. Silly sure beats ‘Hey, hey.’ Tell me what she was like.”

  “Well, her name was Daisy Buchanan,” I said and waited. But they clearly hadn’t spent much time following moneyed Long Island love triangles in the Hill Country in the Nine-teen Twen-ties.

  “Daisy,” his voice said. “That’s a nice old name. You know, I wish to hell everyone hadn’t called that ad of mine that. I always did like that song.”

  My turn to flinch, since it may go without saying I didn’t. Its lyric’s first line after “Daisy, Daisy” would always appear in my mind engraved on a gold syringe that lay next to a silver one in the Paris footlocker. Something I’d quietly accepted on some faraway beach didn’t really make that less painful.

  “Could you sing it for me?” the muffled voice said.

  “Mr. President, I’ve got the singing voice of an aardvark.”

  “Hell, I never even sang ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ into a microphone unless I had a big hat to wave and a goddam big crowd singing with me. But who cares? Please. I think we’re alone now, Mrs. Cadwaller. Except Felix Culpa and the kids in the park, there doesn’t seem to be anyone around.”

  I hadn’t sung it since I was a child. I’d sung it a lot during the interlude when my father was gone and it’d been just my mother and me until the Lotus Eater showed up. Clearing a throat blocked by difficulties he needn’t know about, I falteringly sang “A Bicycle Built for Two” to Lyndon Johnson the day after the 1968 New Hampshire primary.

  Daisy, Daisy—give me your answer, do…

  Posted by: Pam

  That’s how my White House Piétas began. As best I remember, I was summoned back to the Mansion some six or eight times during the final months of LBJ’s Presidency. I strained your great-grandfather’s patience—though not, I’m proud to say, his credulity—with my remonstrations that a) I couldn’t really explain what went on but b) no hanky-panky was involved.

  Since I never asked him or saw her, I don’t know if Lady Bird heard similar explanations or was kept in the dark. Because Lyndon told me, I do know my visits aren’t in the logs, the reason even Lyndon Baines Johnson’s most obsessive biographer has no idea they occurred. Of course he’ll be welcome to read and reread daisysdaughter.com with tweezers, but there are things that were said between Lyndon and me I’ll never repeat even here.

  I do recall the dates of some of my Piétas quite well. The switchboard’s call on the morning of March 31 was the biggest surprise, since the whole country knew he was set to deliver a speech on Vietnam that night. Hopsie and Ned Finn had burnt two a.m. oil preparing Policy Planning and Secretariat’s comments on its early drafts, and Lyndon was scanning the latest one when Felix Culpa escorted me into the Lincoln Sitting Room.

  “Mr. President,” I said once the door closed, “it’s not up to me what you do. But if I can make one suggestion, don’t bring work here.”

  He rubbed a gray death mask: his own. “In this house, it’s everywhere. Sometimes I wonder if the telegraph operators’ desks faced the window or the wall.”

  “Come sit beside me a spell, Mr. President…”

  “Ma’am, all things considered, you could call me Lyndon,” he told my skirted lap some minutes later.

  I had once in extremis; no doubt he didn’t remember. “No, sir, I couldn’t,” I said, stroking his hair.

  He still had those huge ears a young Pam Buchanan once seen swimmingly hung to either side of his oncoming nose like an elephant hunter’s trophies. As for me, it’s lucky I was still five foot ten and hadn’t yet turned pretzel. Even in approximate repose, the wrinkled sixty-year-old leader of the free world who curled his slippered feet to nestle against my collarbone or lap had the frame of a lapsed Texas oil derrick. Cologne and hair cream never stood a chance against his Johnsonian pungency, which addled them into a redolence my nostrils could only call Presidential. Long after his death, I could smell him when someone was burning leaves outside as I stepped from the shower.

  “Then I dare you to call me by one name nobody’s ever called me to my face,” the muffled voice said.

  “I don’t see your face a whole lot, Mr. President.”

  “Even so. Even better. Just try, Rebekah”—a first and only, if you’re curious. “Just try.”

  “Mr. President, should I call you Esau?”

  “I do,” he said and wept. Of
course that was the night he finished his speech on Vietnam in the Oval Office and then nodded to Lady Bird off camera before his announcement: “I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” One of the banners the kids in the park held up afterward read “thanks lbj,” the zinger being that eyes that had long gone hungry for any such message might well grasp at it gratefully before their owner deduced he was still being given the finger.

  No, he didn’t tell me he was contemplating it. Any confidences between us—and yes, they were mutual—were of another sort. But the speech lay scattered around us, and by then I knew how to soothe Esau Baines Johnson.

  I’m half crazy, all for the love of you…

  It wasn’t all “Daisy, Daisy.” Once when my aardvark voice had already sung it to him, he asked for another, and call me unimaginative: my brain seized the only other I knew whose lyric had the word “carriage” in it. But I thought it might make him laugh and it did.

  bee-cause I would not stop for death,

  He kindly stopped for meee!

  The carriage held but just ourselves

  And immor-tal-li-tee…

  Maybe unsurprisingly, Lyndon loved that one. Though the tune was familiar to him and then some, I doubt he knew its lyric’s unexpected provenance, and I didn’t want to burden him by explaining it. Once he’d learned the words, we used to sing it together, and he was as right about his voice as I’d been about mine. One time we even danced as we sang, him shuffling in his slippered feet.

  He hooked my elbow for a do-si-do and I flourished my long skirt in the best mimicry Daisy Buchanan’s daughter could manage of a hoedown. Lord knows what Felix Culpa thought if he heard us performing Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Would Not Stop for Death” to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” through the Lincoln Sitting Room’s closed door.

  As should go without saying, he didn’t request and I didn’t perform it when the switchboard summoned me on my forty-eighth birthday. By then, Nan Finn, Laurel Warren, and I had already agreed by phone to cancel Pam’s celebratory lunch at La Chaumière, which would’ve somewhat awkwardly doubled as our de facto wake for Fiddle. Trying to be the first U.S. Embassy secretary to summit Everest, she’d been killed by an avalanche back in April.