by Carson, Tom
That’s when our greatest travels together took place. In Leningrad, not yet restored to its identity as St. Petersburg, I laid eyes at last on Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great, the surreally active protagonist of Pushkin’s great “The Bronze Horseman.” In Moscow, I surprised our guide—and given our official status, mildly nettled Cadwaller—by choking up at John Reed’s burial spot in the Kremlin’s wall.
I didn’t think he’d been anything but deluded. I’d still known a number of his co-delusionists, and it seemed right that one of them had made it to Churchill Downs. Bran was gone by then, but otherwise I might’ve broken our long silence by sending him a not wholly unaffectionate postcard.
I sent Jake Cohnstein one instead, but it wasn’t quite the same. I’m still glad we were in touch right up until Jake’s death just months before Hopsie’s; he was the same age I am now. The last time we saw each other, he introduced me to the much younger man who lived with him—a first.
We saw Asia, though naturally not Vietnam (drat!). Saw Central and South America, though naturally not Cuba (double drat). Saw Africa, though not the former Nagon: it was the time of la Terreur P’Kapa, and Hopsie himself had given the order to withdraw all but our most essential personnel. So we never revisited the beach where he’d worn swim trunks and a top hat, but his favorite picture of me in later years was taken in Sydney, Australia. By a fluke of the breeze, the big bonnet I’m clutching to my gray mop simultaneously mimics and quarrels with the swoop of the opera house behind me.
Determined to be as hands-on as he could—monitoring resources and morale, reassuring himself that every Ambassador who was a political appointee had a good career DCM, learning where CIA or the Pentagon was playing hardball in the endless turf wars, taking care to meet every junior officer who’d been described as a thorn in people’s sides and often coming away as his advocate—Hopsie wanted to see every U.S. Embassy and mission worldwide. We didn’t fall far short of it. Some of our dearest friends during his too short retirement were people we’d met in Cairo or Manila for a week.
Trailing a step or two behind him and getting my first whiff of whatever the local climate’s cinders had just sparked, I watched my husband step forward at airport after airport, the remaining close-cropped hair around his ears now snow white and his pipe lit on landing, hand outthrust as he said “Cadwaller” to the young FSO sent to collect us. It was at those moments I most often decided he’d been too modest, no great surprise there, in front of St. Sulpice.
Panama, it isn’t only that other human impulses beside religion deserve commemorating in architecture more poetic than C Street aircraft carriers for paper planes. Nobody proved better than your great-grandfather—who’d have crinkled his eyes in amused dismay had I ever teased him with the notion—that other vocations earn the right to be called priesthoods. Especially dogged ones to which the world pays little heed unless you’re bad at them, something he never was. Of course he’d have said that the American St. Sulpice wasn’t C Street but a few pieces of faded eighteenth-century paper under glass in the Archives.
Hopsie’s retirement bash at the DACOR Bacon House on F Street would’ve been the greatest night of Nan Finn’s shutterbug career if the glorious girl hadn’t been interviewing visa applicants in New Delhi. Kennan only sent a telegram from Princeton, but Cadwaller’s earliest Department mentor was too well on in years to travel much by then and everyone else came: Nick Veliotes and his wonderful Pat, Brandon Grove. Even McIlvaine and his wife, and I was as happy as always to see her: Alice and I were the two tallest women in the world of the Foreign Service. Because Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, is a long way from Washington, Cadwaller himself was most touched when John Burns put in an appearance. Names unknown to you, known to too few, unmentioned until now even on daisysdaughter.com. But they were the best of the best in our lot’s glory days.
We had a few good years then, entertaining other District geezers for whom the State Department’s magic carpet now stood framed in bits and pieces on their walls. That’s when we got our weekend place outside Culpeper, Virginia, first seen by Pam in the Nine-teen Fif-ties when I was hoping to surprise Martha Shelton’s pregnant ghost around a corner of “Saltsbury.” Then Cadwaller’s long dying began.
He was diagnosed in late October of ’83. Both when alone and out in public, always our marriage’s version of mens sano in corpore sano, we kept up not what you children call appearances but our life’s staunchest, most valued realities for another year or so. My husband’s Vietnam-era stint as head of Policy Planning had made him more expert than I’d ever be at finding real pleasure and intellectual stimulation in objective considerations of a situation for which no good outcome existed.
Even by 1985, however, he was too sick for me to ask if he wanted to come downstairs to watch Reagan’s State of the Union Speech. In former times, so much as imagining skipping it would have struck us as absurd no matter who was President. As it was, Pam felt selfish and guilty when she devoured the WashPost’s transcript of his callous niaiseries the next morning while Cadwaller still dozed after a restless night.
Your great-grandfather went into the ICU in early October of ’86, deliriously muttering about the idiocy of people who took rabbit’s feet on airplane trips. By mid-November, his pain was so awful that I realized at his bedside I’d only make it worse by chatting about the news, normally as nourishing to Hopsie as the glucose dripping from an IV into his now Cape Codified arm. He died late in the evening of November 25, 1986, and Andy Pond drove me home from Bethesda Naval Hospital for the last time soon before he left himself to take up his final post in Berlin.
Today my deepest regret, bikini girl, is that your great-grandfather never knew you. Because Cadwaller understood the difference between values and priggishness—the latter consisting entirely of the belief that anything you wouldn’t do is something no one else should do either—I think he’d have enjoyed your grandpa Chris’s picture of you last summer on the dunes near Provincetown’s Pilgrim Monument. As you stand with bare legs planted in surf and Goya-dark hair tumbling, a Spandex oyster footnotes your black T-shirt’s defiant and eternal new york fuckin’ city.
That’s about all I can manage for now. Though the bookshelves, neighborhood, and millennium are new, Cadwaller’s gun has been tucked not back into the Paris footlocker but its old post of honor behind Glory Be. Andy is due any minute, bearing his dubious gifts on DVD of The Gal I Left Behind Me and—what was the other?—Meet Pamela, a forgotten Franco-American romp chosen solely for its title. Those are always such fun to actually sit through, but I’m rather hoping that’s the one he chooses. I’ll have a better excuse to start snoring early.
Oh! If you’re wondering what’s going on, I should probably explain I’m now convinced Potus won’t call. In fact, I guarantee it.
That’s because he did around seven-fifteen. Oh, yes, the elephone rang. We spoke.
7:15 p.m., June 6, 2006: around when the first trucks went lumbering up the bluffs beyond Omaha. Around when that lone Spandau stopped hammering, probably done in by a grenade. Around when those dazed boys barnacled to the Vierville sea wall got done singing “Happy birthday, Miss Buchanan—happy birthday to you.” That’s when Eddie and I knew we had to say goodbye to this bloody beach and go inland.
Dear me, what sloppy habits I’ve gotten into on daisysdaughter.com! And me a writer, too. I should probably have mentioned Potus’s call earlier, shouldn’t I?
Posted by: A Caddy
“Mrs. Cadwaller? This is the White House calling,” said a decorous but understandably brisk female voice. “Please hold for the President.”
I seized Cadwaller’s gun. “I’m here,” I pointlessly told limbo.
“Hello?” he said when he came on the line. “Caddy?”
“This is Mrs. Pamela Cadwaller, yes.”
“Don’t they call you Caddy?” he asked pleasant
ly. “They ought to.”
“Whatever you say, Mr. President.” It was out before I knew it; I’d spent too many years as a diplomat’s wife. No, not enough of them, Hopsie!
“You know I asked my mom about you,” he confided. “Want to know what she said? ‘Why, George. I don’t recall you calling me on my last birthday.’ Heh, heh. I had to say, ‘Well, Mom, I had the Turkish Prime Minister in here and I had Tony Blair the day before. I had to work.’”
“Yes, I remember Mr. Blair’s visit.”
“Well, we get along. I like to tease him, you know: ‘How can you call yourself an Oxford man? You’re wearing a pink shirt.’ But once a Mom always a Mom, what I say. Isn’t that so, Caddy?”
“I guess so, Mr. President.” In my lap, the Rheumas curled around my ordnance.
“No guessing allowed! That’s our rule in this White House. You’ve got to be a mother yourself, I imagine.”
“I’m afraid not, Mr. President. Only a writer.”
“That’s right and I want to tell you, Caddy. The First Lady is a big admirer of, uh”—check your notes, Potus—“The Gory Bee.”
He may have thought I wrote children’s books. “Well, I know it’s no The Pet Goat, Mr. Pres—”
But he hadn’t stopped talking. “I know you had one, though.” He meant mother. “They tell me she was somebody, too.”
“Everyone is, sir,” I said, which may have been the closest I came to succeeding at elephonic terrorism.
“Sorry, what’s that you say, Caddy?”
“Nothing, Mr. President. Just clearing my throat. Please excuse me.”
“Well, I’m glad we got this chance to talk. You know the Senator”—that would be dear Bob, of course—“must think awful highly of you. He came down here, showing everyone his gun.”
I had no idea what that meant. Don’t blame me if I felt stuck inside, immobile, with the Potus blues again.
“Mr. President,” I said and suddenly didn’t know what to accuse him of. Where would you have begun?
“Anyhow, Caddy. You keep well, you hear? Be careful blowing out those”—did he use index cards or a PC?—“eighty-six candles. We want you with us for a good long while yet. Well, good—”
“agh!” I screamed. Shakily hoisting Cadwaller’s gun and putting its barrel to my temple, I pulled the trigger.
Posted by: A Failure
Mission accomplished? Plainly no. What’s Denmark coming to?
In Pam’s defense, my “agh!”—though no pistol shot at a concert—did rattle Potus somewhat. “Hey, Caddy! You all right there?” he said. (“I think she’s having a heart attack,” I heard him murmur swiftly to someone in the pause.)
“Oh, my! Dear me. Oh, sorry, Mr. President. Just a cat jumping in my lap. Kelquen, how you startled me.”
“You ought to try it with daughters,” he advised. “Anyhow, happy birthday again, old Caddy. Keep well. Anything at all we can do for you down here, just let us know.”
“Well, Mr. President, for Bob’s and my sake, you could try attending at least one soldier’s funer—” But he was already gone.
Once the line went dead and I realized Pam wasn’t, I gazed in a Lex Luthor stupor at Cadwaller’s gun, now relowered to my ancient snatch. Hopsie, what—?
Your dandy little gun, so handleable and light even in your eighty-six-year-old widow’s uncertain grip. Your nifty nickel-plated pistol, so near to weightless every time I’d hefted it since dawn. Your damned unloaded gun whose ammo clip Pam Buchanan, onetime ETO war correspondent, had never thought to check once I’d fetched it from the Paris footlocker.
I knew it was always loaded in your lifetime and I hadn’t touched it since. So who—? And when? And why?
“Heck of a job, Pammie,” I muttered, staring at a rug obstinately unspattered by pink and gray things. “Heck of a job.”
Then my fat-lunetted mimsies wandered to my Mac’s screen and the Rheumas feebly homepaged as I wondered if I could possibly eradicate daisysdaughter.com’s flood of posts from human memory. But my God! That little dialogue box I’d given up on must have been glowing for hours as my Mac docilely updated the numbers.
You have 18 comments pending, it read. When I tremblingly clicked on it, I saw that the first was a mildly sick joke. But I won’t deny it came from a shrewd reader.
Posted by: Dottie from Kansas
Hello, Pamique! What’s cooking? It was a lovely oyster stew, too. Adieu, lover, adieu.
P.S. Toto says woof!
Posted by: Maisie
I really liked what you wrote about that summer in Provincetown! I’ve never been there, but now I feel like I have been.
Posted by: Scout from Milledgeville
I think you have a very firm sense of Right and Wrong. My question is, Where did it come from? Mine came from my Father. This doesn’t seem to be your situation.
Posted by: Madeline
Ram-Pam-Pam, so you and pauvre petite Gigi didn’t like me? Boo hoo. Having my appendix out wasn’t my idea. Saying “je t’emmerde” to you is.
Posted by: DOOM
Dear Mrs. Cadwaller, I run an online support group for daughters of oblivious mothers. Would you care to join? Please let me know. Topsy Diver, Laura Wingfield, and Caddy Compson are already on board.
Best wishes,
Pearl Prynne Dimmesdale, founder of DOOM
Posted by: Bonnie Blue Butler
Sorry, I can’t link to DOOM. Can anyone out there help me?
Posted by: Eve in Topanga
Pam, don’t you know the kids love The Gal nowadays? You should come to my next filmcon—last time I signed autographs for two hours. Or maybe you shouldn’t, since you know what I’m like. It’s always been all about me.
Posted by: Sabra in Passaic
Thank you so much for writing about my late husband. Nachum and myself as well greatly enjoyed our times with you on your and Ambassador Cadwaller’s visits to Jerusalem. And yes, I’m afraid what’s happened to Israel today is depressing.
Best always,
Sascha ben Zion (had you forgotten my name? I didn’t forget yours.)
Posted by: A Psychiatrist
Dear Mrs. Cadwaller, I believe you would benefit from a consultation and I am a professional. My rates are quite low.
Yours,
Lucy Schroeder, Las Vegas
Posted by: Diva in Brussels
Ah! Je ris de me voir si belle en ce miroir.
Meilleurs souhaits,
Bianca Castafiore-Hergé, rue Rémi
Posted by: Une Dame Parisienne
Je n’avais que sept ans le 25 août 1944, mais je me souviens très bien de vous agitant votre “cunt cap” pour amuser une petite fille ahurie qui vous regardait d’un balcon alors que vous rouliez vers la place Saint-Sulpice dans votre “jeep” avec M. Whitling. Je n’aurais pas su comment vous répondre mais je serais enchantée d’enfin faire votre connaissance. J’habite toujours le même immeuble.
Fifi Rol-Tanguy
Posted by: Prof in Birmingham, AL
Pam, I can’t believe I’m inheriting “The African Queen”! But I don’t want to for years and years yet. Many happy returns,
Professor Helen F. Eichler, University of Alabama
Posted by: The Mermaids
Hi, Pam! And we were singing to you. So there.
Love, love, love
Claire and Emily (a “Kirsten” to you)
Posted by: Ernest Warning, Esq.
Ms. Buchanan, please cease and desist or we’ll be forced to take action. You may be an old lady without even a cat, but a stalker’s a stalker and we can’t be too careful these days.
Yours,
Ernest Warning (attorney for Ms. Kirsten Dunst)
&nb
sp; Posted by: Crazy/Beautiful
Oh, come off it, Mac. I’m charmed. And Pam, I really am awfully good in Interview with the Vampire. Tom and Brad, not so much, but go figure. I knew what I was doing and they didn’t.
Posted by: C
Pam, you honestly didn’t know it was me at the beach house that day in 1951? Oh, well. Honi soit qui Malibu, as Dad used to say. If you aren’t going to shoot yourself, why don’t you come visit Edinburgh? J.K. Rowling lives nearby.
Your warm admirer,
Celia Brady (White, Singh, O’Grady)
Posted by: FSF
lol
Posted by: Dolly from Gray Star
i am alive i did not die i am a grandmother today in gray star alaska
lolita
Dolores Haze Schiller
Posted by: A Friend of Andy Pond’s
I’d just gotten through mumbling “Well, hello, Dolly” when I heard a key in my door at the Rochambeau and clicked my Mac’s screen off. “Pam, what on earth does this mean?” Andy called, half amused but half worried.
As he stepped into my living room past the African Adam and Eve, he was holding Kelquen’s collar and a sheet of paper warning him in 72-point boldface type: andy—don’t come in. call the police. (Had you forgotten? So had l’équipe. That was well before noon on Pam’s longest day.)
“Oh, Andy! I’m so sorry to scare you. But my hair was just a wreck, and—oh, I don’t know what I was thinking. Give it here.”
He did and I crumpled the message. Laid Kelquen’s collar next to my Mac before closing it down. With an octogenarian’s careful if whistling (in truth, carefully whistling—we geezers are awfully brittle even as flutes) version of litheness, Andy returned to the foyer to collect the other burdens he’d set down: a grocery bag loaded with my birthday dinner’s makings and two DVDs, along with a desiccated cardboard box whose inexplicability alarmed me.