by Carson, Tom
In that same tiny casket was the secret that, other than suicide, turning greedily, insanely, lickingly, ceiling-kickingly, joyously lesbian was the “Like mother, like daughter” I’d most feared and quaked at all my life. Only Dottie won out because she was Dottie, even if Celia Brady—assuming that comment too wasn’t a cybermasked joker’s—came awfully close one day at Malibu. My cruelty to Hormel was in taunting her after that poor woman’s sheer unattractiveness had made her too bloody easy to dismiss as a freak.
As for me, don’t you see I was too strange already? With both parents dead by inordinate means, the Scandal still fresh, my European schooling, my impoverished bust, and my five foot ten? Even between L.E. thighs, my mother’s gold head was at least pert and comely. She was Daisy Buchanan, lovely and rich enough to make her own rules. But her ungainly daughter? My God, bikini girl, I had to hope or pretend that something about me was normal—as we called it then.
I never told Andy Pond last night that Pam’s only other confessor had been the thirty-sixth President of the United States. Can’t remember which of my White House Piétas it was, but he looked up from my lap after I’d sung “A Bicycle Built for Two.”
“You’re a big ol’ dyke somewhere in there behind those eyes. Ain’t you, Mrs. Cadwaller?” he asked thoughtfully.
My head dipped. “Yes, Esau,” I said. “How did you know?”
“Oh, hell. I’ve been mighty used my whole life to women acting like they know something I don’t know. The ones who act like they know something I do know always kind of jump out at me.”
Yet the other “Like mother, like daughter”—suicide—was the one I had acted on. What may surprise you is that I’m not referring to pulling the trigger of Cadwaller’s (blessedly) unloaded gun yesterday. I mean my suicide in self-defense at the age of fourteen at Purcey’s Girls’ Academy after “Chanson d’automne” made me a laughingstock.
Surrounded by jokes at my dead mother’s expense and cries of “Moo! Moo!,” I’d not only sworn I’d never write another goddam poemess so long as I lived. I’d vowed I’d never again let the world see Pam’s unguarded heart.
I kept that vow seventy-two years. That was why hearing Dottie peal “Ah, love, let us be true to one another!” as she turned to me in our Bank Street apartment had panicked Pamique into bolting to Bran Murphy’s arms, hairy reputation and Murphine avoirdupois. The only other what next would have been to find out whether she meant it or was just cutting one of her dottily idyllic capers.
What if it turned out my naked roommate was not only goofing around but her pirouette’s golden prisoner and hadn’t especially meant to address Pam face to face at that moment? Then the only what next for me would’ve been to like-mother-like-daughter it right off the Brooklyn Bridge. Or if I had subway fare (only a nickel then!), off the top of the Empire State Building.
So tell me, tireless daisysdaughter.com readers: are you blubbering yet? Are you getting misty at the dismal old lady finally spilling the torments that warped, scarred, and blighted her life—the situation, incidentally, of Bran’s rotten-sounding unwritten play, The Other Eye of the Newt? Are you getting ready to gasp at the Miss Havisham wedding cake my dead Dottie baked for me in 1941 as I suddenly produce it from the Paris footlocker? (Shit, it’s not that big.) Are you waiting for the Fall 1934 edition of Pink Rosebuds to start charring in the Rochambeau’s incinerator as dark music swells? Are you, children? Are you? Are you?
Well, the hell with that noise.
Posted by: Pamerica
I daresay by now we’ve met a few times. The odd mermaid joke aside, does the voice of daisysdaughter.com strike you as Prufrockian? Is my vibe plaintive to you? Sorry, but I’m an old e.e. gal from way back on the beach.
You’ve read the tale of my life and you don’t know the half of it: countless glimmers of fun and moments of radiance from Washington, India, Hopsie’s and my later travels. A thousand jokes, four hundred friends, Istanbul and Jakarta. Our Culpeper getaway, where we two old hands at it made love dozens of times after his diagnosis.
I wrote three books, saw a war, rode an elephant through the Pink City. I got briskly why-Henry’d by Lyndon Johnson and gave him some comfort in belated return. I shared a few laughs with Jack Kennedy after he’d beaten me out for the Pulitzer. I fell in love with the best war cartoonist in American history in a villa at Anzio, got introduced to my third husband by Art Buchwald dressed as a Pilgrim. I lit a Lucky Strike on Dog Green at sunset of D-Day and answered a voice calling “Margaret Mitchell” in a concentration camp.
I had three marriages I wouldn’t give up for anything. Not even the first one, messy portage to the rest. After all, no Murphy and no Clock with Twisted Hands premiere, no by Pamela Buchanan in Regent’s. No Viv, Tess, Josie, and Babe in a Tennessee coal mine, no Lieutenant Connie Ostrica snapping off a salute, no Jessie Auster becoming a dot in the sky over Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas. And no ETO: no Anzio or Omaha, no Eddie Whitling or Bill M.
No Anzio, Omaha, Eddie Whitling, or Bill M., no Dame and no Gerson. No Dame and no Gerson, no voluptuous allure of Hollywood: Pam’s gams flashing sly lilac bloomers to tarmac and sportcoasts as I got into my studio car, Myrna Loy sipping tea amid bougainvillea and chatter about Truman’s chances. No Eve and Addison in their garden paradise in the hills above Malibu, where the Great Unknown might’ve gotten me not only sipping sun tea but sunbathing next to or even on top of her if she’d only told me she was—great Scott!—Celia Brady.
No Fran Kukla’s Hamlet and no Glory Be. No visit to Israel when it was still Panavision. No Nachum (and Sascha!) ben Zion.
Also no painful breakup with Gerson, true. But no breakup with Gerson, no retreat to Paris to paste it together. And no retreat to Paris to paste it together—here comes the big one, bikini girl—no U.S. Ambassador Richard Anson “Hopsie” Cadwaller. He was dressed as John Paul Jones, too.
Who cares if I still occasionally had dotty reveries of parting an idell’s emjambments as my Hopsie tongued me? If there’s a woman alive, closeted dyke or frustrated pétroleuse, who’d pass up the chance to spend twenty-eight years with that man, I wouldn’t stop running after him long enough to piss on her if she were on fire. What I would’ve gained had I stayed on my own and kept calling “Red rover,” I can’t say. But I know what I’d have lost. It’s no contest.
Recall what I said to Andy quite late last night: “If you two are my friends, I am not to be worried about. I’ll shoot you both.” So listen up, all my new friends in Lindberghized cyberspace. If you ever have the gall to shed a single tear in my case for what might’ve been, I’ll shoot you all. Dottie Idell or no Dottie Idell, Great Unknown or no Great Unknown, do I look that damned greedy to you?
Honestly, what’s wrong with you people? What is all this American gibbering about lost sleds and such? Or a green light that blinked from some future morphine junkie’s dock on Long Island? Oh boo fucking hoo. I know better than anyone what a sweet man and fine writer Nick Carraway was, but that boats-against-the-current hogwash of his just makes me upchuck. Something I did not do on the run-in to D-Day as German shells turned the ocean into gray pine trees.
So shove the Miss Havisham wedding cake that my Dottie—my Dottie, my Dottie, my Dottie Idell—never baked. For Christ’s sake, she might’ve moved out a month later. We only roomed together because neither one could afford a place of her own.
And yes, darling: I miss you anyway. I dab your nose back, my love, and I remember. But imagination makes up for a lot in Pam’s skyborne and vaulting view through a thick window. I’m a writer, you see.
Oh, I was no Mary McCarthy, Martha Gellhorn, Marguerite Higgins, Janet Flanner, Lillian Ross, Pauline Kael, Barbara Tuchman, or even Susan Mary Alsop. Just as my Dottie was not only no Kirsten Dunst but no Julia Child, whose kitchen is in the Smithsonian and should be. As should the Spirit of St. Louis, which preceded it there. On
my favorite imaginary airline—Clio Airways, of course—I was only a passenger and at best sometime stewardess. How we flew.
Posted by: Pan Am for Paname
I can’t help being smitten with the notion that Pam’s longest day gave dead Daisy something she never expected. Or wanted, since she’d have just felt old. She nonetheless deserved a grandchild from her ungainly dyke daughter, even if a misshapen one made only of words.
Maternity at my age is no bowl of cherries, so you’ll have to forgive me if I take it easy for the next day or so. Among other chores, I’ve got a trip to get ready for.
Where am I going? Why, Provincetown! Two visits eighty years apart hardly qualify as a return to the scene of the crime. Other than the Pilgrim Monument and possibly a shack or two, I doubt I’ll see a single thing there I’ve ever laid eyes on.
That’s unless I bump into Norman, a monument of a different color, out walking on his two canes. Then maybe, from my wheelchair—I’ve got a cane too, just don’t use it for much except poking people—I’ll tease him about borrowing a garbled phrase from “Dover Beach” for the title of The Armies of the Night. Or maybe not, since we all know how lesbians unnerve him. I’m a wicked lady now, Mr. Mailer, aren’t I?
And yes, Panama: of course I’ll see you. I’ll see your foxy grandpa too, along with his Renée. Plus your old dad and mom. How odd I’ve hardly mentioned Concepción! Tim married his Nicaraguan bride the year my Cadwaller died. You came along four years later, and so far as I can tell your parents are still very much in love. I’m sure Tim’s never looked at another woman since—not one available to him, anyhow.
I do feel a tad apprehensive about my first plane trip in two years. It’ll be my first with this damned wheelchair, which’ll look bloody silly at the end of a parachute if we have to bail out. But does it really matter?
Even here on the ground, I’m already riding. I’m already riding, riding. (Good lyric for Pink, bikini girl—yes, no?) I’m already riding Carole Lombard’s plane.
So are you, Panama. So are we all from the day of our birth. We could all smack into a mountain tomorrow, and so what? Crammed with people not too different than we were, other aircraft that took off the same morning will land safely. Whatever else we were that day, we were a minority.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve always liked it here on Carole Lombard’s plane. Good drinks, marvelous company, interesting chat about art and the news of the day as we ride. That glorious girl Nan Finn once made my favorite comment about death, perhaps understandable only to old District hands: “Of course, what I’m really going to hate is never knowing how all the politics came out.”
Music of our choice on the earphones. Pretty stewardesses I can imagine newly naked as Eve—as in Genesis or African, not Harrington—as they bend to retrieve a fork I’ve dropped and smilingly promise to bring me another. They’re used to that betingled look from their elderly passengers and we’re all wearing seatbelts anyhow, so no danger.
Nonetheless I feel reasonably sure I’ll get to Provincetown in one piece. The Cape can get windy: I know I’ll need a scarf. Can’t shake an idea one will be waiting for me when I get there, along with the helpmeet Chris said he’d hired to keep Gramela’s wheelchair and grumpy dentition in line.
I’ll ask Moesha Kendricks to park me on the dunes. Then I’ll give her the rest of the afternoon off, let her bulky but resourceful pink-swimsuited body challenge the up-and-down waves’ great unknowns just for the fun of it: something her ten thousand unknown Nagonese relatives never got to do in my day. The sea wasn’t for pleasure unless you were us.
I do so like her! She’s awfully enchanting, and I seem to amuse her when my odd tales falter in a mist of the mimsies’ fat-lunetted charmed gaze at her shrewd jokes in reply. Who knows, I may even ask Moesha if she’d be willing to undertake a move to Washington and a full-time job as Pam’s caregiver back at the old Rochambeau, since after all Andy’s right about my debility.
Then the African Adam and Eve will finally have someone to honor for a year or a few. Not only are Moesha’s hips a song that’s meant for better things than dirges, but she’s got the face of a Gauguin.
There I’ll watch you too, Panama. As you decide we’re being boring and scamper uphill, Tim will say, “Pam, I’m thinking of showing her Paris and vice versa next year. Do you think they’re ready for each other?”
And I’ll probably answer, “Tim, why not? I’d say it’s about time she met her real namesake.”
Then we’ll smile. Of course your old dad and I both know the ancient French slang for Paris—the city where good Americans get to go when they die—is Paname.
Turn and wave, bikini girl! Turn and wave at me once before you run on up the hill. Since I can’t follow, I’ll just sit here next to history’s ocean and watch. Scarf hugging my neck.
I shall be nothing like a dame. I shall feel lucky for the sun.
Glory, be.
In Memoriam
From the Owl Creek News, June 5, 2006
[Versions of Pam’s obit appeared in any number of print and online venues. This was the mildly peculiar one most likely to have been read by Dottie Idell Crozdetti at her vacation home in Colorado just before, clumping forth on her walker from her heretofore cheerful kitchen to call “Who’s there?,” she encountered a burglar and died game herself. Unless it was her cat’s name, no one has ever explained Dottie’s final remark to her murderer: “Thomasina Jefferson still lives. Buck, buck, buck!”]
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter Dies
Washington, D.C. (wire services) Pamela Buchanan, only child of legendary Jazz Age figure Daisy Fay Buchanan and her husband, polo player Tom Buchanan, died quietly in her sleep on Sunday, it has been learned. She was two days short of her 86th birthday.
In her own right, Ms. Bookman was best known as a writer. She wrote “Nothing Like the Sun,” a novel, and “Glory Be,” a history of the American Revolution. Her mother committed suicide in Brussels in 1934.
At different times, she was married to playwright Brannigan Murphy, Hollywood producer Noah Gerson, and U.S. diplomat Richard Anson Cadwaller. She had no known blood relatives.
Despite repeated threats to do so, she never wrote her autobiography. However, according to her literary executors—Tim Cadwaller, writer; Sean (pronounced “Seen”) Finn, artist—plans for a memorial volume are already underway.
A Very Partial Bibliography
Books by Pamela Buchanan
Nothing Like a Dame, Henry Holt, 1947.
Glory Be, Random House, 1956.
Lucky for the Sun, Simon & Schuster, 1968.
Selected Articles by Pamela Buchanan
“Spare the Ambassador,” Los Angeles Times, June 6, 2004.
“Omaha at Fifty,” Hemispheres [United Airlines in-flight magazine], June 1994.
“Remembering Jake Cohnstein,” contribution to Biquarterly, Fall 1986.
“Come Back to the Raft Again, Pauline, Honey” [review of Pauline Kael’s When the Lights Go Down], Washington Post Book World, April 20, 1986.
“Nagon, Dahomey, Upper Volta, Congo: So What’s in a Name? Lots,” Foreign Service Journal [as “Pamela B. Cadwaller”], October 1969.
“Marianne’s Shotgun Wedding to Charles de Gaulle,” Regent’s, June 11, 1958.
“Juliette Greco on the Left Bank: Allons, les Enfants du Paradise Lost,” Regent’s, August 28, 1957.
“It’s Called ‘Glory Be.’ Not Glory Me,” Vogue [interview], November 1956.
“Poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel: Gadzooks and Vaudeville Hooks,” Regent’s, March 16, 1949.
“The Gates of Hell,” Regent’s, May 17, 1945.
“Tiger! Tiger!” Regent’s, January 3, 1945.
“Allo, 2ième D.B.? Ici Paname. Our Gal Gets the First Interview with D
ronne, the Man Who Liberated Paris,” Regent’s, September 6, 1944.
“The Day the Tide Ran Red,” Regent’s, June 28, 1944.
“‘Dear God, Miss Buchanan! You’re Holding the Only Salami in London,’” Regent’s, May 24, 1944.
“Bacchanapoli,” Regent’s, April 12, 1944.
“A Thousand Words About Bill Mauldin,” Regent’s, March 30, 1944.
“The Angel of Anzio,” Regent’s, March 1, 1944.
“The View from Ward Three,” Regent’s, April 28, 1943.
“Finding Mr. Wright,” Regent’s, February 17, 1943.
“To the Ends of the Earth,” Regent’s, January 14, 1943.
“Every Woman Needs a Hobby” [profile of Oveta Culp Hobby], Regent’s, November 11, 1942.
“Liberty Belles,” Regent’s, October 21, 1942.
“The Mighty Flowers,” Regent’s, September 23, 1942.
“Gold Bars for a Redhead,” Regent’s, September 9, 1942.
“Adios, Adolf. Tojo Too? Tojo Too,” Regent’s, August 5, 1942.
“She-Worthy,” Regent’s, June 17, 1942.
“Brides without Grooms,” Regent’s, April 29, 1942.
“Skirting the Issue?,” Regent’s, February 18, 1942.
“Che Te Dice La Patria?,” Regent’s, January 21, 1942.