Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun

by Carson, Tom

  Just like her hands, my mother’s feet, if you can’t guess, were elfin. Mine were the boats, and genuinely my father’s chromosomes having a laugh: one reason my growth spurt in teenhood was a relief. But her plea wasn’t one I could’ve refused. Other than mah-jongg, this was the most important I’d been since my birthday in June, and I clumped up the stairs.

  Across the hall from mine, the Lotus Eater’s door was closed. My soft knock got me silence, my bad-dolly one did too. When I pushed, I was mildly surprised (but why?) that she didn’t lock it. She was asleep in a grotto of shadows, one stalactite stocking hanging down from her bed’s canopy.

  From the sheet tugged around her slender frame to its unmistakably pent youthfulness even in exhaustion, she made the mountainous Scandinavian look like a member of a different gender altogether. Petite with more hips than bust, made to order for Twenties couture: thank God I was her age in the boxy, Rosalind Russellized, row-row-row-your-shoulders-girls Nineteen-Forties instead. Her back was to me as I came around her bed.

  She was sucking her thumb. Its tip was nestled in her parted lips as if it had either lost hope upon finding teeth there or been reassured by their existence. On her bare other arm, flung out past the pillow, I could see a few of the same violet stains that blemished my mother’s arms at the rare times they were exposed. That didn’t surprise or upset me, since I knew they gave each other bites with the stereopticon.

  What did surprise me was that her face, seen now for the first time without her jerkily wired mind’s pulleys playing puppetmaster, seemed kind. Kind only to herself, I grant, but we’ve all got to start somewhere and she didn’t know I was present. Anyhow, the revelation to Pam’s puzzled eyes was that acting pleased with herself, which was how I saw the L.E., didn’t necessarily mean she was being kind to herself.

  Or that anyone else was, but I was here on a mission and unsure how to accomplish it. “Hello,” I told the sleeping L.E. “Mommy says it’s time to wake up.”

  Nothing. Breathing. Nothing. “You have to wake up,” I explained to her. “Hey, it’s time for school!”

  I thought that might make her laugh the nice way she did during mah-jongg, not the nasty one when nobody joined her. She didn’t stir, and they must’ve shot up enough M to take care of a wounded platoon. So the adult Pam is in a position to estimate, having seen those syrettes stuck in enough dead men’s blasted bodies as Eddie Whitling and I barreled on in our jeep toward Falaise or Bastogne.

  I’m not sure I can explain what prompted me to do what I did next. A girl of seven’s most attracted to what she misses most in herself. That chestnut bob’s lustrous gloss and svelte motion had become the tangible representation to Pammie of everything I wasn’t and couldn’t be in either my mother’s eyes or my own. For young girls, destiny’s earliest prefiguration of giving birth to an idiot child is having hair nobody can do anything with.

  Not your problem, Panama! You never do anything with yours either and no one would want you to. Even in adulthood, during most of which time I could afford to try driving any coiffeur to drink I cared to, mine stayed a gingery brindle mop, courtesy of the Buchanan side and resistant to gentling.

  One of old age’s few perks is that, cut short, it’s turned unremarkable. The best even Hopsie could do was “Harvest moon, misty night in October,” and at the time your great-grandfather was playing 20th-century Song of Solomon, gallantly lyricizing each part of me. All of them, and you shouldn’t blush. I want you to know what the world can be like at its best, too.

  Anyhow, I started stroking the Lotus Eater’s hair. Played gliding Niagara with its silky fall, mussed and rechoreographed those docile bangs. “Wake up, wake up,” I crooned in my mother’s old singsong, not heard by me since I was a toddler.

  Eventually, she woke up. She screamed as if I were a hairbrush on fire.

  3. Provincetown

  Posted by: Pam

  After eighty-six years as a frequent flyer and sometime stewardess on Clio, I know how often bits of the way-back-when have vanished by the time searchers find Carole Lombard’s plane’s black box. No, Panama: don’t go all Wiki in the knees. It didn’t have one. On a tour to sell war bonds, that infectious actress got smacked into a mountain with twenty-two other people in 1942. I had a posthumous connection to one of her fellow passengers, which I’ll explain on daisysdaughter.com if Cadwaller’s gun hasn’t been fired by then.

  No competent social history of the Twenties omits the mah-jongg craze. Some tenured Tom Swift’s mention that there was one won’t bring back the slither between my fingers of wood-backed ivory as Pam chose to discard a white dragon, the gradients thermometerizing my nanny’s arms, or the Lotus Eater’s habit of keeping us waiting by applying full makeup before—chestnut-bobbed, kohl-eyed, and green-mouthed—she sat down to play in our monstrously boxy East Egg kitchen. For that you need Gramela: the mimsy borogoves’ retinal photographs, the autentico prattle of Long Island Shakespeare eighty-odd years ago. Just invaluable, aren’t I?

  Even if I weren’t licking these withered lips at the prospect of doing myself in with a shriek and a bang right after I hear “White House calling for Mrs. Cadwaller,” I’ll obviously never read a social history of the year we’re living in now. Still, listen, Swift; your ancestor Jonathan would’ve. I don’t want you to neglect the mimsies’ most jarring sight of our national insanity in the jangled third spring of this awful and unending war.

  For months now, a pack of tatterdemalion loons has been turning up outside Arlington Cemetery for military funerals. Jeering and catcalling, they hold up repulsively gloating signs as the thunderstruck mourners enter and exit.

  I’d seen this on the local news. Then with greater disbelief I watched it crawl by in three dimensions as Andy Pond drove me to some geezers’ waltz on the Virginia side of the river.

  “My Gawd, Andy!” I squawked once I’d gotten mimsies, fat lunettes, and dentition back inside some sort of rational corral. “I’m so sorry. Can we turn around and go back to the District? You know what a forgetful old lady I am.”

  Turning us south toward Lyndon Johnson Memorial Grove, Andy simpered. “Oh, Pam! Did you leave your ACLU card at home again?”

  “Yes, but how did you know?”

  “I’ve heard that joke before.”

  “Andy, so what? Haven’t you heard all of them?”

  “Well, I hope not,” Andy said.

  Famous last words, don’t you think? “You’d better,” I told him as we swept past the now repaired Pentagon. “I’ve heard all of yours.”

  Posted by: Pam

  Pam’s consolation was that it was Memorial Day weekend. Only a week ago! That meant the Rolling Thunder boys were in town.

  So long as they’ve got hairily aging Vietnam vets straddling them, I’ll never let blatting motorbikes annoy me. By now their annual rumble, filling our streets with Steve McQueen’s sons, is as Washingtonian as the Tidal Basin cherry blossoms that precede them. No doubt the cherry trees’ unbottled messages to Thomas Jefferson will outlive Rolling Thunder’s Chincoteaguean roar.

  Is that sad or not? Can’t decide, doesn’t matter. It’s no skin off my nose, as the leper said to the headwaiter. Unless dear Bob’s pull with the White House is nil, I’ll be dead as Dickens’s doornail by sundown.

  By my own hand, I think with a thrill the authoress of “Chanson d’automne” would have shared and may well have prompted. Then I ask myself: left or right? I usually pick up the phone with my right. Must try playing with Cadwaller’s gun with my sinister.

  Anyhow, some of the vets had made a cordon between the picketers and the cemetery’s entrance. It won’t be on audio at the Archives, but I’d like Pam’s octogenarian voice to go on record here on daisysdaughter.com as saying, “Thank you, boys. Good luck to you tomorrow, boys.”

  Who were these protesters, you ask? Some callous pa
ck of peacenik crazies, venting their hatred of this awful and unending war by scoffing at its dead? Oh, heavens, no, Professor Swift. They’re demented homophobes. They show up at funerals to brag—the right word—that the coffins being shipped back home are fit punishment for America’s tolerance of homosexuals.

  “Oh, Jesus fucking Christ,” I said to Andy once we’d seen those loonies in action. “Cripes! What’s Denmark coming to?”

  Posted by: Pam

  From what I gather, Panama, your generation could not care less where love is found or which two sticks (or not) two people rub together to make fire. I just hope there’s a recognizable U.S.A. around by the time you’re in a position to call the shots, because the anti-fag outrage you and yours so merrily see as quaint is our other national pastime’s final inning.

  Not that I’m urging you to try experimenting with homosexuality’s cunning, titillating, enjambed, and netherworldly distaff version, certainly not at your age. Your father may read this and I do want Tim to stay fond of me after I’m gone. Even without Cadwaller’s gun in my lap, I know I won’t live to see the end of the long haul that began on April 19, 1775. Decades before your birth, that was the date chosen by your Gramela to cap the final chapter of her now forgotten Glory Be.

  I’m sure that looks like a shameless bid to boost my “Used and Collectible” sales on Amazon. Most likely that’s because it is one, and I must say I wish I’d discovered the egocentric pleasures of having my own blog a bit sooner. But my point is that once you and yours are done, at least until the Martians or Venusians land and give us all new six-eyed, twenty-bellied scapegoats, there won’t be anyone left in this country whom it’s permissible to hate.

  In my day and certainly in my circles, we weren’t as benighted or obtuse as you and yours may think. I did successively attend Mme Chignonne’s École des Filles in Paris, Purcey’s Girls’ Academy of St. Paul, and Barnard. While none of those XX-chromosomed environments was the triple-X smorgasbordello beloved of pornographers, one certainly knew with which instructors or headmistresses a private conference might take on a never verbalized undertow of Charybdis.

  Despite a pretty intractable aversion in my own case, I can even remember several bathetic pre–Pearl Harbor fumblings after I quit college with my Bank Street roommate, now dead. They led absolutely nowhere in my case, and in hers bore no more post–Pearl Harbor fruit than did her giggly ambitions for a Hollywood career. Thus was I vindicated in a veni, vidi, vade retro sort of way.

  It must’ve been something in Manhattan’s air or water. Years before I reached the scene, Murphy was embittered when The Other Eye of the Newt, his play about a spinster who couldn’t admit why she’d stayed one—not an altogether easy work to defend, especially when your first word had to be “Comrades”—got blown to smithereens at the notes-and-sketches stage by Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. Lillian and Bran were violent rivals anyway, as the dilemma for Stalinists was that, not unlike their favorite ism’s eponym, they all wanted to be the only one.

  As for Hollywood in the Fifties, I well recall Gerson’s chuffed return from a Rock Hudson script conference whose date Hudson had misremembered. My husband had to wield his producer’s pencil poolside amid male bathing beauties clad in swim trunks barely masking the foliaged union of their muscular legs’ barkless tree trunks. “And he’s so dull in his movies,” Gerson marveled. “Well, maybe that’s why. Not much left over.”

  In all these years, Potus has succeeded in disarming me—what an entertaining phrase that is to input with Cadwaller’s gun weighting my crotch!—in disarming me just twice. The first “Gotcha, Pam” was a no doubt easily Google-able photograph of the future Potus holding his twins right after their birth. For once, his amazement at life’s unruliness looks awed, not disgruntled. He’s a few million dazed new fathers compressed into one representative face: proof that democracy as truth predated democracy as system.

  The other time is more relevant here. Three Junes ago, his Yale reunion was held at the White House. In that all-XY crowd, since there wouldn’t be XX-chromosomal Elis—Ellies?—until years after the Class of ’68’s most prominent grad said goodbye to all that elitism, a patently female classmate approaches. Why do I want her hair to be a one-eyed blonde waterfall, like Veronica Lake’s? Why do I see her sylphlike and radiant at fifty-plus, in long white gloves and a shimmering off-the-shoulder gown—in daytime, yet? Oh, just because. I’m so fucking old, indulge me.

  “You knew me as Peter,” says Veronica Yale.

  “And now you’ve come back as yourself,” says Potus, extending his hand.

  Maybe they didn’t read that in Alabama. I sure did in the WashPost’s Style section, and gaped so wide I nearly had to shove my Popular Mechanics dentition back in. I mean, my onetime acquaintance Jack Kennedy—met at a Waldorf-Astoria luncheon when we were rivals for the Pulitzer, he was grinning as if each tooth was one more of Dad’s bank accounts even as his cool eyes demoted them to his stake at billiards—couldn’t have done it better. And wouldn’t, not with Bobby’s bleak gaze keeping tabs on how considerate Jack was thinking of getting. As for Ike or LBJ, both of whom I also knew—Eisenhower only in the round at wartime press sessions, but Lyndon one on one—you can’t picture them inhabiting a universe where such encounters were possible.

  Oddly, Dick Nixon, who going by my reception-line encounters before Kissinger had Hopsie posted to India certainly knew what it was like to know yourself as Richard, might’ve managed it. But would have bungled the line reading and flashed that sickly smile, hoping to broker an agreement that while we all try, no one’s exempt from the world’s little treacheries.

  Anyhow, it’s the only occasion I can recall of Potus embracing a value I hold dear, which you could call emotional elegance and I define as generosity combined with aplomb. If I hadn’t known it before, Cadwaller showed me that kindness is often a form of quick-wittedness. I’ve met farm boys in foxholes who did it instinctively.

  The WashPost didn’t speculate on who’d kidnapped Potus and replaced him with somebody civilized, gracious, pleasant, and thoughtful that afternoon, but I say there’s a mystery there. Maybe only I wondered: in the name of all that’s fucked in heaven, why doesn’t he want to always be that way?

  Posted by: Pam

  Some of my thus far hypothetical readers here on tireless little daisysdaughter.com may be thinking I’ve lost the drift. Maundering, addled old harridan, etc. But before you consider patronizing me, may I remind you Pam’s packing heat?

  Anyhow, others, I trust, have got it. Years before the Holmesian glow of Hopsie’s briar advertised his urbane best hunch, maybe even before the Paris footlocker gave up its secrets, I’d divined that the unpleasant young woman you know as the Lotus Eater must’ve had what society called Sapphic tendencies in coyer days and I’ve always privately labeled the Charybdis temptation.

  Even with the L.E.’s genius for thwartedness—I mean the kind that goes on feeling thwarted from pure habit even after the desire has faded—I couldn’t help but feel compassionate at the thought of her yen to rub four Charybdean nipples together centering on my mother. Daisy Fay, the belle of Louisville to half the khaki with officer’s buttons stationed there in ’17 and ’18? Daisy Buchanan, the hypotenuse of Long Island’s best-known recent XY-XX-XY love triangle? Even in Gramercy Park, site of the L.E.’s robber-baronial family townhouse, they must’ve heard about the Scandal.

  My mother’s brand of sophistication was essentially a way of keeping her innocence at liberty. Supposing her mind was even able to accommodate the notion that any such Charybdean lust was in play, she must’ve opted to put up with those occasional burning looks and odd tilts of the Lotus Eater’s jaw for the sake of the companionship she craved not only in her heart but, more urgently, her veins. I still imagine it must’ve been touch and go for her during the week we spent in Provincetown: the only time that, with the bu
dding pudding that was Pam exiled to a small brown vacationer-scarred ottoman in the front and only other room, she and the L.E. had no choice but to share a bed.

  Posted by: Pam

  The peculiar thing was that the L.E. had vanished from our orbit just days earlier, seemingly for good. So I gathered from my mother’s hysterical return in the Dreiser—she’d driven it!—from one of their Manhattan jaunts with neither a Quint nor a Quintess. The Scandinavian took charge of trundling every last gloomy chapter of that endless car out of our driveway and back to Gramercy Park.

  Came a precious intermission, which I spent as the baffled apple of my mother’s uncertain eye. Just what Pammie had always wished would happen, only in my version she hadn’t been red-nosed, constantly stanching or yielding to sudden tears, and gabbling nonsense I couldn’t understand along with the silly kind she remembered I liked. Even so, I glowed to hear myself called “Darling,” an endearment with only one addressee since the L.E.’s East Egg debut in June.

  Though I still never got to see it open, she even fetched the pencase—no longer a stereopticon since the L.E.’s departure, the object inside it was once again vaguely a pen in my mind—down from her room, keeping it near her as a sort of amulet. Or potential Pamulet, even if my blood does run colder than its tepidly pretzeled norm when I think of the solution to her new loneliness that must’ve flitted once or twice through my mother’s panicked mind.

  As she clutched at straws she didn’t fully grasp were her little daughter’s arms, her problem was that her beauty was dependent on her selfishness. To have seen anyone other than herself as fully human would’ve told her she was losing her looks. Still, who else was there she could have considered getting hooked to keep her company, the Scandinavian? My mother may have been half out of her skull, but you could count on her to balk at the grotesque. At least I belonged to the same social class she did, making that crazed option more palatable.