by Carson, Tom
Until Clio Airways first Lindberghized cyberspace, that was also the most recent addition on my blog, unknown to the blogista herself until my dawn logon. Posted by: Tim C., it must’ve been your dad’s last try at getting me interested before he realized I wasn’t into his damned website.
Your Christmas ornaments were just a couple of new Easter bunnies then, under the impression my dowager’s hump was lettuce. Your bray of glee wetted my ear. Finishing up You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two, he’d brought you along to see the FDR Memorial.
“Hell, I’m the unofficial one,” I said. “Don’t I rate lunch?” We went to Martin’s.
Still, maybe it’s just as well I can’t do images. With the whole online lollapalooza at my disposal, I might start introducing every post with a different picture of Kirsten Dunst in Bring It On. Which would be entertaining but ridiculous, since of course everyone knows who she looks like.
What, rather. As for me, I’ve never owned a camera. Never wanted to interrupt or arrange life even that long when I was enjoying it, never saw the point in recording it when I wasn’t. With a shelf of albums in her den that marches back in time nearly to Harry Truman’s election, Nan Finn is the shutterbug in our gang of Foreign Service relics.
Andy and I last ate with Nan at Martin’s in April. At least visually, may I point out with some dryness, the occasion was all but identical to the previous fifty, excepting Andy’s bold charcoal-gray sweater and a few added bits of desiccation all around. She’d already waved a ninepin waiter over to snap the traditional facial triad when her familiar grope in her purse came up missing a camera.
The glorious girl looked as dismayed as Potus without a speechwriter, albeit more adorable. As I protected her with a cover story I found agreeable—“More wine!”—Andy smilingly squeezed her hand.
“I know it’s a shame, Nan,” he said with Pondian fondness. “I guess you’ll just have to remember this one.”
“I’ll try, but how?” she laughed. “My God, at my age?” She still seems very young to me.
No matter, no matter! Should it turn out daisysdaughter.com hasn’t snared a single reader, I’ll never know. Even as I prepare to turn myself into a mess of pink and gray things on the rug in protest against this awful and unending war, I’m finding it exhilarating to be Pam in a medium new to me. If there’s one thing I’ve had practice at, it’s change.
To you, Panama, my fellow author or “author” Jack Kennedy is as remote as—my God, Cleveland!—was to me. Yet nobody was better at making fulsomeness sound jaunty. I liked his explanation when John Glenn became the first American to orbit in space: “This is a new ocean, and I believe America must sail upon it.”
Cadwaller, look! Here’s Pamela’s sail.
Posted by: Pam
As I strain to match the Manhattan skyline you know today with the one I saw approaching on a blustery day in March of 1934, the major resemblance is obviously the lack of a World Trade Center. Wind is ramming clouds toward Illinois and Minnesota. In a buttoned blue coat from Mme Chignonne’s, round-brimmed yellow hat, strap shoes, and, I swear, frilled socks, I’m straining at the bit to turn fourteen.
The magnetic prow of the Paris, pride of the French Line, is pulling the filaments of New York City into view for my deracinated inspection. The hat is multiply bobby-pinned to my hair, caught between a gingery brindle mop whose basic relation to headgear is puzzlement and a Circe breeze that wants to lure my chapeau to its doom.
In front of my forbidden—to me, too—and mysteriously macramé-ing crotch, a toy handbag (no money) is dutifully clasped in prayer-book position. What a sight I must’ve been.
Mark of my generation, bikini girl: for decades, we went on dressing for airplane trips. That was the thing to do, and well!, we were the ones doing it. One day in 1970—“April first or Halloween?” Andy Pond proposed, in full agreement about the year—we realized we were the only ones doing it. Footnote to history: Pamela Buchanan bought her first pair of adult sneakers at the age of fifty-one.
Under normal circumstances, I’d never’ve been allowed to cross the Atlantic unescorted, but normal circumstances these weren’t. The Paris’s purser did draft an old biddy from Saratoga, luckless enough to have the cabin opposite mine and a real-life niece along for credentials, to pretend to be my duenna as she snored through gin rummy. My guardian had cabled Brussels that he could get to New York from the Midwest in time, but Europe was impossible. We’d just have to take the chance, and in the event, I was safer than a football at a tennis match. No jewel thieves on that crossing. Turned down the niece’s offer of a cigarette behind the second funnel.
Soon to be outdone in fame by its French Line kid sister ship, the Normandie, to me the Paris had boasted every luxury I could expect from an ocean voyage except a mother. Still youthful enough to think it was my ship, designed to transport Pam and purposeless otherwise—it was practically true, since the great wedding-cake Atlantic tubs sailed barely one-third full in those Depression years—I cried in 1939 when I heard it had burned. And I admit it, thought of Agamemnon.
Customs, that perfectly named transition. “Madam Was-elle, pass-a-port, plea—oh, you’re American?”
“Oui!” Pam brags. “Um, yes.”
As a huge porter in blue serge heaved my trunk onto his skyscraped and skyscraping back, I unthinkingly jabbered, “Mais que faites-vous? Que faites-vous?,” undone above all by the recognition that, unlike Paris’s ebony colonials, an American Negro wasn’t exotic. Unlike a thirteen-year-old in a tilting blue coat, turning her jonquil-hatted head like a spinning top as I looked around in desperation for my guardian. I didn’t have anything for the porter’s pourboire.
He came up in the nick of time, gray-suited and gray-templed. “Pamela! I’m sorry. Wrong dock, red light, long story. I’d hardly have known you.”
“How did you?” I blurted, since he seemed familiar with the way things worked here and I was eager to learn my native land’s tricks.
“Fear and excitement. No, really, there just weren’t that many unaccompanied girls the right age milling around. Taxi, please. Thank you—that’s for you.”
In the cab, he explained we had just a couple of hours before we took the long trip on the long train to Chicago. A bit elaborately, he envied me both Paris and the Paris: “I never did get over to Europe. And now it’s—oh, too European, I suppose.”
He told me we were passing the new Empire State Building. I peered with interest at all three of its glimpsable stories. As more yellow side streets flashed by like masonry learning to tell time, a sort of considerate second mouth that had been mulling its moment inside his visible one came forward.
“Pamela, I’m so terribly sorry. Your mother was…just lovely. That’s all.”
“I know she was.” Nobody in the United States needed to hear how many pounds she’d packed on in Europe. They hadn’t been pounds but kilos. It’d been Belgian weight—gloomy, rainy Brussels weight: not the Daisy they’d known’s weight at all. Anyhow, it was off me.
My guardian was now worried—et pour cause, given Pam’s hokey-pokey, still experimental, never-to-be-Daisylike form—that he’d slighted the daughter by praising the mother. “That’s a very pretty coat you’ve got on, by the way.”
“It’s a uniform,” I explained in surprise.
That reunited his outer and inner mouths, whose main point of contact had been thoughtfulness. They grinned at me as his eyes crinkled. Only my being female had been getting in the way of his remembering what it’s like to be thirteen.
“Yep, I just keep making those mistakes,” he said. “Of course, I ought to’ve saluted.” I was devoted to him until the day he died.
Posted by: Pamrod
Call it bachelor awkwardness. In his shoes, one wouldn’t, simply wouldn’t, ever, pull back the curtains on a pubescent
girl in a Pullman car’s sleeping berth, no matter how awful her sobs. So my guardian couldn’t give me much direct comfort when the strangeness of everything about being Pam and here overcame me on our journey.
Indirect comfort was another story. Like a black marketeer’s, a hand offered a tepid but welcome glass of water, a hankie, a green apple, and—oh, serendipity!—one of Booth Tarkington’s Penrod books. Wrong gender for me, but a dandy guide for any going-on-fourteen newcomer.
“All out of fashion, of course,” he confided over a dining-car breakfast the next morning as overburdened black men in white coats came down the aisle as if shooting the train’s rapids and the still reddish early sunlight made our cutlery flash taunts to vanished Injuns. “And maybe it wasn’t like that in my real boyhood—I honestly can’t remember now. Reading them reminds me of how I used to at least think things were, before all the craziness between the war and the Crash.”
“Mme Cassandre—at the school I, was, in—says there’s going to be another war.” Proud to be springing this European news on chugging, stubbly, inattentive Indiana (?), I picked up my butter knife. “‘Méfiez-vous de Hitler!’ she says, shaking her ruler like this. ‘La prochaine fois, Napoléon sera de par là-bas.’ Of course, she’s a fanatic anti-Bonapartist, but—”
“‘Eet-lair’? Oh, Hitler. Well, who knows?”
“Cassandre! And ‘la rue des Rosiers.’ That’s what we call, called Rose Bauer. And—” But his mind was still on the Twenties.
“Listen, Pammie,” he said, calling me that for the first time unless he had the summer of the Scandal. “Anytime you start thinking everyone’s flush and it’s all hunky-dory? Try to look past the crowd you’re in. Things are pretty awful now, but at least even stupid people can’t pretend they don’t know.”
“I’m sorry, Mr.—sorry. Nick,” I said, flustered. I’d never been instructed to call an adult by first name, and in France for a girl my age to do so would’ve been no joke. I’d have been indicating he was a servant. “What don’t we, they, don’t know what?”
My guardian had forgotten I was under twenty-four hours off the boat and we’d mostly been passing through farm country. Not much in the unself-conscious landscape had been shrieking “Depression.”
“There’s always misery. If we’d remembered that during the Boom, maybe there’d be less of it today.” Catching himself, he grew wry: “Said the Chicago ad man, polishing off his steak and eggs. Well, I’ll have to leave our boy a whopping tip, that’s all. Do you remember which he was?” And wryer still: “Is?”
Posted by: Pam
Some weeks of one’s life wear seven-league boots. I still think it’s preposterous that according to the calendar—they always testify for the police, prohibiting our memories from hopping getaway cars at will—only eight days had gone by since Pam, boarding at Le Havre, had grown undecided whether an empty starboard berth or an empty one portside was more likely to grow a corpse the second my eyes shut. So I’d gone back up on deck and watched the French coast turn into a soup bowl’s rim, then soup.
Back when the Paris had parted ways with the dock, for there’s always a thunderclap moment when both seem to be moving, the only Pamfetti to loose its streamers had been the scraps of a life I’d thought would have the grace to last until I understood it. Thanks to that, I’d had several reasons to decide I’d never been on an ocean liner—indeed, this one—before.
Primo, at going-on-fourteen—three months before the official handover, half that before I’d gambled I could start fibbing about it—one’s seven-year-old self is the idiot cousin: unwelcome company at the start of a new adventure. Second, we’d been going the other way. Third, the corpse in the starboard bunk—or had it been the portside one?, I wondered yet again on my return to the cabin once the French coast turned into soup, deciding my best chance at sleep on the return trip was to switch our places—had been alive, gabbling and Gablering about ship’s parties and the other Paris and asking Pammie, for the first time, how her fussed-with hair looked.
For my mother’s sake, I’ve sometimes tried to picture her as the Daisy she either thought or hoped she could be in Europe, discussing the first four episodes of Ulysses with Joyce as her own novel magically wrote itself in the next room. The Gold-Hatted Lover was its most frequent title, and its chaos of beginnings made for pitiful reading when I fished the pages out of the Paris footlocker many years later. The truth is I can’t imagine what would have become of us, especially after the Crash, if she hadn’t met the Belgian on our New York–Le Havre crossing in October of ’27, all of six weeks after we came back from Provincetown.
Name: Georges Flagon. Preferred sartorial color: Belgian brown, distinguished from French brown by a refusal to hint other options existed. Business: Flagon & Cie., Bruxelles-Leopoldville-Dakar, exporting windsocks, wheel chocks, and other safety equipment to small airports in out-of-the-way places. Major departure from a lifetime of never counting his chickens until plucked and beheaded, a bid for my mother’s hand before we passed Iceland.
Georges had taken ship to America hunting much bigger game. (Wonderful expression, “taking ship”! I miss saying it more than doing it.) The compatriot of ours he’d been hoping to woo was the most famous man in the world that autumn; other than Chaplin, anyhow, but that Charlie was familiar. Charles Lindbergh had been unknown to anyone until his plane bumped to a halt at Le Bourget in May, and when I used to take visitors to the Smithsonian and see the Spirit of St. Louis suspended overhead, I’d privately goggle—while holy relics aren’t my thing, there it is, you know—at its and its pilot’s indirect role in shifting Pam’s destiny.
Inept only as a person, Georges was an innovative businessman. Lucky Lindy’s endorsement of his line of goods would have been the equivalent of Jesus of Nazareth talking up your carpentry kit, and my future stepfather spared no pains to make my mother understand that Lindbergh had considered the proposal seriously before changing hotels. I don’t doubt it: the celebrated aviators of the Twenties and Thirties weren’t daredevils but propagandists. Eager to proselytize for the new church of air travel—mail, passengers, bombing, they couldn’t have cared less which miracle made converts—they’d have given any co-religionist a hearing.
Still, the promised second meeting never happened. Half the globe’s population wanted a bite out of Lindbergh’s day, and I gathered the head of Flagon & Cie. had been made to feel a bit Belgian about the whole thing. Once the Paris was bound for the Old World and all was definitely lost, the humiliation of retracing Lindbergh’s route by means wingless and sinkable may have maddened my future stepfather into a resolution to obtain some American’s endorsement of something Georges Flagon had to offer.
If not his company’s useful products, perhaps his life? His view of the rue Rémi in Brussels, his taste for crepes and veterans’ parades, his lonely post-prandial cigar. At age thirty-six, he could’ve even been handsome if he’d only known how. Sharing space in a shuttered mahogany cabinet with Papa’s colonial service revolver, a brown hand under glass commemorated his father’s administrative excellence in the Congo circa 1898. It was peculiarly counterpointed now by Georges’s own artificial foot, souvenir of the day hordes of spiked helmets flowed toward the spot to which newly mobilized Corporal Flagon had been rooted one day in 1914. Oh, hell, Panama—no wonder he felt incomplete.
“You mean we aren’t going to Paris to live?” I asked my mother dumbfoundedly. After proposing we two take a turn around the deck, she’d moved to the railing on a beeline. So much for our Pam-and-Daisy romp among the lifeboats, merrily singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”
“Not just yet.” The wind taught her hair to scribble in soft Cyrillic as she turned. “Not now, that’s all, big silly! I’m sure we’ll all move there eventually.”
If there’s a more meaningless word than eventually to a seven-year-old, it’s probably in Cyrillic too. To me, anything
farther off than soon meant never, and right I was so far as my mother’s hallucinatory relocation of Georges Flagon to a salon off one of Paris’s grands boulevards was concerned. I wonder who lived there instead.
“But why not now?” I asked, wondering if that brown bit was the Isle of Wight, the Isle of Man, or giant seaweed.
“You know Mummy needs to write her book. That’s going to be the only proof I ever existed, darling!” she said, smiling down at me. “And, well! I think it’ll all just be much, much less trouble this way.”
“Can’t you write wherever?”
“Georges has a staff.” As if that statement’s starkness surprised even her, my mother went on, “And don’t you think he’s nice, in a sort of Belgian sort of way?”
“I couldn’t care less!” I shouted. “Nobody told me it would matter.”
“Well, it doesn’t,” she said, annoyed.
Posted by: Pam
The mystery was and is the extent of my mother’s self-knowledge. Which was the cage, which was the bird—that’s how you’d try to decode her decisions. Dubious any answer was final, you still felt confident the aviary was the right part of the zoo.
Panama, I’ll never know whether she’d deluded herself a well-off Belgian husband would be the blindfolded orchestra she needed for her fluttering, reckless “Hello, Jim—hello, Pablo!” Charleston toward immortality. Or whether even that early she had intimations that The Gold-Hatted Lover was a kazoo made of tinsel. What I refuse to believe is that she’d boarded the Paris planning to troll for a man, since she’d scanned the passenger list in vain for any women she knew who were sailing unaccompanied. What may not need saying is that your Gramela would go all pretzelly with laughter at any suggestion Day-zee Flagon married for love.