by Carson, Tom
Not that I saw overmuch of the happy couple once I was enrolled at Mme Chignonne’s. My mother’s choice of school for me puts her state of self-knowledge in play again, since I do like to think that at some level she trundled Pam off to Paris as a sort of delegated Daisy. It gave her an excuse to visit—not me, except technically, but an imaginary version of herself. As the Daisy who would live in Paris grew more fragile, she eventually (I was nine by then) came to cling to one who had lived in Paris. It wasn’t her fault if people thought she’d been in Nassau County, Greenwich Village, Provincetown, or mid-Atlantic at the time.
The practical reason for scooting me out of the way was that my presence off the rue Rémi might’ve given Georges one reason too many to regret his marriage. His Day-zee’s lack of interest in producing another generation of Flagons was enough of a black tablecloth under the white one without a brindle-mopped daily reminder that she’d gotten docilely if not happily preggers—the post-1914 Georges Flagon wasn’t my pick to brood on that missing “happily”—by his unknowable but evidently two-footed American predecessor. Polo would’ve been the tipoff there.
Marriages that start well and go bad at least alert both parties to the change. Marriages that are dismal from the wedding on can have a terrifying normality that pretty much keeps both parties chloroformed. There are even marriages that seem to be undertaken as a sort of suicide that doesn’t actually kill you, a pretty wan definition of eating your cake and having it too but conceivably the reason I didn’t wind up having to write my abysmal “Chanson d’automne” six years early.
Anyhow, some combination of the latter two was the situation off the rue Rémi. Feeling baffled by other people’s obstinate denials of universal Flagonishness and nursing the lonely valor of the dull wasn’t different enough from his bachelor life to stir Georges to rebellion. Fatefully, my mother discovered that being sluggish and depressed in Belgium let her indulge the same character trait that had made Daisy Fay the belle of Louisville and Daisy Buchanan a champagne pearl to postwar male New York: utter obliviousness to anyone else’s desires. As for Pam, I blew any hope of a modus vivendi when I not only wandered into Georges’s temporarily vacant study (strike one), but opened the mahogany cabinet (two), then asked him where the withered African hand had come from (three and out).
“At your age I knew better than to poke around in there,” said my stepfather, massaging his knees. Of course that’s because his father had told him not to, but to his helplessly Flagonish mind that meant all children everywhere had been.
“Oh, Georges, what does it matter?” sighed my mother. “Pammie’s—eight, now? You can’t blame her for being curious.”
“Pourquoi pas, Day-zee? You aren’t.”
I suspect the bitterness there was on the convoluted side. Yet by no means was Georges a cruel man or even an unkind one. That his notions of kindness were entirely bound up with the way he thought people should treat him gets considerable backing from the New Testament. If only he hadn’t been so literal-minded in how he put it into practice!
Brother, did I eat a lot of crepes. Telling him I didn’t like them wouldn’t have made him call me ungrateful. Unwilling to see a child deprive herself from sheer perversity of his own main pleasure à table, he’d have gone on patiently feeding them to me every day until I finally understood that, like any normal person, I did.
Posted by: Peter Pan Am
As the ultimate example of his inability to grasp that other people didn’t share his predilections or biography—and therefore might have different reactions than his on exposure to them—let me describe one of our rare outings as a duo. Its being rare rather than inconceivable dates it to the summer of 1928. That was the year my mother spent six weeks in a Swiss sanatorium, from which we were soon to fetch her.
Yes, she’d entered her second marriage thinking she could go right on hitting the capital M key on her inner typewriter whenever the outer one’s tadpoles unnerved her. And no, Georges Flagon wasn’t about to let it continue. He’d largely resigned himself to the mania of strangers and people in news stories for playing carnival games that pretended they weren’t him. Drug addiction in a woman who was at least nominally a Flagon was carrying the whole preposterous if evidently bizarrely satisfying affectation of non-Flagonism too far.
I knew his cue had been the calendar. Gaze at it, gaze at me, recognition that it was the maid’s and the cook’s day off. Slap of table: “Pamelle! On y va.” Being Georges, he didn’t say where we were going, but not because he wanted to surprise me—which he did and then some, since I had nightmares for years. It just never crossed his mind I wouldn’t know.
Anyway, I always liked turning the corner onto the rue Rémi. Oh, maybe a more adult pair of eyes, demanding more visible bazaars, would’ve seen only monotony in each block’s humdrum if confidently regulated panel of largely ornament-free prewar architecture, broken only by a very occasional larger vista for contrast. In attributing Pam’s silent happiness to a child’s overactive imagination, the peculiar thing is that those eyes’ owners would’ve been patronizing rather than envying me.
Yet I didn’t have much that was solid in my eight-year-old life, and the very reliability of that march of panels somehow simplified the world enough to let me conjecture adventures underway within. Hunts for treasure, delegations from mysterious Balkan countries, plans for a moon rocket or—same difference to me by now—a visit to America. Though Georges’s hand in mine stayed earthbound, I was as diverted as Wendy in Peter Pan Am’ed flight.
Amid the tintinabulations of shop doorbells, a pleasant young man in a belted jacket would be out walking his snowy dog. As we passed a bar—or was it a fishmonger’s, smelling of marlins, pike, and haddock?—a black and blue duffel bag of a man blustered at the broken stem and bowl of his pipe. Distracted but for that reason friendlier than any teacher at Chignonne’s, the neighborhood savant fascinated Pam with the thinness of the bandy legs under his green coat.
Two bankers disguised as policemen—or was it the other way around?—raised their bowlers in tandem to a stripe-vested butler. A visiting Chinese student beamed a quick chen-chen. Her gémissements making the nearby pet store’s parrots squawk, for the rue Rémi’s major eccentricity was a fetish for exotic birds, a blade-nosed woman in a fur coat was upbraiding a foreign officer with a monocle. Her trilling voice turned her complaints into an aria from Gounod’s Faust.
Of course, the rue Rémi held no magic for Georges. He’d been born here. “Alors! Vous êtes, euh, heureuse, Pamelle?” he asked, his voice creaking into conversation with Day-zee’s child as tentatively as, no doubt, his prosthetic foot had first eased into a shoe. “Tu sais que tu reverras ta mère bientôt.”
While I’m sure he didn’t mean it to, that made me feel chastened. I hadn’t been thinking about my mother at all. If her three postcards from Switzerland had featured her face as opposed to mountain views—on one, with a flash of her old humor, a cross identifying “My Room” that decorated one window of a chalet was topped by another X on the white peak beyond it, marking “My Alp”—I might’ve been more convinced she was somewhere, not simply absent here. Our trip to retrieve her was a week away.
“Mais oui, bien sûr que je suis heureuse.” In what connection my first year at Chignonne’s could’ve have familiarized me with the French for “happy,” I don’t know. Maybe I’d overheard some other girls discuss their attitude toward having locked me in a closet, but the confirmation squared Georges’s accounts with Day-zee. Duty done, he relapsed into silence.
A newly pent one, however. I could sense his mood change as we turned off the rue Rémi and onto a side street whose terminus wasn’t the gabled mansion at the end of a drive I’d been subliminally expecting. A gray hospital stood there instead.
Since the only ill person I knew was my mother, I was mystified. Had the Switzerland postcards been a ruse, had she been ten
minutes’ walk away all along? Or was it that this was where she would have been if I’d thought of her oftener?
After ascending steps the hue of terns, we passed into an unlit lobby smelling of chemicals and dark as burnt stew. Murmuring, Georges produced a much-folded letter. The brisk thumb and forefinger of his unwithdrawn hand indicated he’d refold it himself when the uniformed intendant made as if to do so before passing it back.
Seeing me there at waist level, the intendant considered saying something. Then he grew eloquently resigned. What he’d read had set no conditions.
Someone else escorted us to a drab room furnished with a table and chairs. Were we going to have lunch here? As we waited, Georges grew expectant. Given my mother’s refusal to uncork a squalling little demi-Flagon, the minutes we sat there were as close as I was ever to come to see him acting the maternity-ward papa-to-be.
The door opened, how I couldn’t guess. Not unless the thing’s bearer had had the stomach to one-arm the thing as he turned the knob. Two beefy hands set down a jar in which something boomerangy and mushily toenailed floated. A faded handwritten label (oh, yes, Pam, let’s please read the label; the label deserves our exclusive attention) read d’un obus. Liège. 5 août 1914, along with a catalogue number.
“Tu sais ce que c’est, Pamelle?” His hands folded in front of it, Georges was unperturbed. So help me, I’m fairly sure he was smiling. His chin lifted as if pleased to introduce one business acquaintance to another: “Eh bien, ça, c’est mon pied!”
Understand, the urgency of denying my eyes’ report that it was a foot had strained my concentration to its limit. So Georges’s confession that it was his foot went straight from my unprepared ears to unprotected brain, where it’s stayed in Pink Thing’s archives to this day: a recording labeled Bruxelles. 5 août 1928. I was eight. She was in Switzerland.
Even though Pam was present, I can’t really write “we.” I’m not sure there’s a pronoun that covers the situation. Even though various factors—e.g., my refusal to exist—made my timekeeping iffy, I don’t think the séance lasted over ten minutes. In more than one sense, Georges wasn’t looking at anything he hadn’t seen before. His hands never unclasped, nor did he speak again. Too tunelessly for me to guess the song if any, I think he hummed once or twice.
Finally, he glanced up past the jar. “C’est bien,” he said with satisfaction. “Vous pouvez l’emporter.”
The beefy hands hadn’t unclasped either. This was a specimen, Georges was known to them only as a veteran with a dispensation allowing him to visit his own foot. They couldn’t take the chance that, left alone with his foot, he might smash the jar and try to reattach it. Now the beefy hands came forward and lifted the thing. Luckily, my memory is blessedly blank as it was seized and rose on scream-inducing details about bobbing, corns, state of pedicure, illusory soccer kick at my eyes’ goalpost, and the like.
The like? I saw worse in the ETO. But except by cold during the Bulge, it hadn’t been preserved, and certainly not for longer than I’d been alive. I’m grateful to this day the beefy hands made the jar disappear to parts unknown before we got up to leave. Otherwise, I’d’ve had to walk around it with my eyes glued to the thing, not knowing what it would do. That might’ve put me off ballet for life.
“C’était aux premiers jours de la guerre,” he told me as a miraculously unchanged outer world bowed with its granite tulle skirts. It was his lone comment before we regained the rue Rémi, whose characteristic duns and powder blues, toyshops, displayed diving suit, bright exotic birds, small Inca statuette, and white balloons—somehow somehow more voluble than the red ones I was used to in Paris—the war had left so poignantly immaculate.
He may’ve thought he needed to account even to Day-zee’s daughter for what in retrospect must have seemed to medical students the absurdity of preserving a sample of what Krupp’s new shells could do. During what historians call the Battle of the Frontiers, the medicos couldn’t have guessed the Western Front would provide them with literally millions of such artifacts, all but interchangeable. Well, to everyone but Georges.
Yet he may have felt he creakily marched in veterans’ parades as a fraud. With his ridiculously early maiming, he was a relic of when the Belgian infantry had gone to war in peaked caps. He’d known nothing of helmets, gas masks, barbed wire, mitrailleuses, trenches, and the rest of the apparatus that now defines World War One.
Invalided out to a French hospital, for there was only a coastal widget of Belgium left by that September, it may even have been as a volunteer that he and his artificial foot returned to limited duty. He helped to wheel out Spads and Nieuports on rustic airfields. Pilots needed to be able to run for them.
Posted by: Pam
That was in 1917, Panama. French troops took to baa-ing as they marched to the front. Mutinies flickered like grassfires, though there was no longer any grass, and trees, like farm animals, were only a memory. Like all wartime ground crews, Georges must’ve stayed out under the sky even in cold weather once the planes he’d been responsible for wheeling out were aloft. He was unwilling to be warmed by a stove or go back to the card game until his Spads and Nieuports tipped out of sight toward a dogfight.
At least among Barnard’s livelier sophomores, nobody was less surprised than Pam when the Belgians and French crumpled in the face of the Hitler blitzkrieg. Nor could I force myself (I tried) to feel too reproachful when I learned, as I did somewhere—I never saw Georges again after he saw me off at the Brussels train station in 1934—that he’d been a collabo. He put Flagon & Cie.’s stocks at the Luftwaffe’s disposal and its contacts abroad at the Abwehr’s.
His compatriots probably didn’t blame him. Business owners were in a special bind. Their only option would’ve been to shutter their companies and the Germans might not have permitted even that. I’m not endorsing his behavior by a long shot. Still, however you may judge Georges yourself, I can’t accept that keeping the rue Rémi intact was an unworthy goal.
Naturally, my opinions are as anachronistic as your Gramela’s childhood in what our dry, unhearing SecDef dismisses as old Europe. I don’t suppose, Panama, that either he or Potus has ever watched a not especially interesting or likable man gaze at his own foot in formaldehyde fourteen years after losing it. But the reason Europeans know something I wish we could learn without finding out the way they did is that they don’t go away to war.
Posted by: Pamelle
During the Occupation, Mme Chignonne’s École des Filles was taken over by the Gestapo. I’ve won laughs with that line from L.A. to brightest Africa, but I was taken aback the first time Gerson and Gene Kelly chortled. I hadn’t thought of it as a punchline. I was just noting my old school’s most recent function as of August 25, 1944, the day Pam Buchanan scrambled out of a jeep to revisit.
Since the Geheime Staatspolizei had had its pick and those screams would’ve been screamed anyway, my main regret is that it was such a nice old building. All covered with vines, as they say, off a cul-de-sac in Chaillot called the rue Plan de Trochu. Since the Trocadéro as we know it didn’t exist, that relic of the Exhibition of ’37 was to baffle a certain gal in a jeep—one heard all too recently braying she knew this arrondissement blindfolded—as I gave our driver directions and Eddie flicked the flowers thrust at us near the Place de la Madeleine at random bits of Paris and Parisians.
Until recently, though—that damned Tour Montparnasse!—the genius of Paris was to know which temporary things to make permanent. And which not, like the flag Cassandre herself, more stooped but as vulpine, was bundling as I reached past our driver’s shoulder to honk.
I wasn’t sure if she’d recognize me. Should have known better, as I’d left only ten years ago under memorable circumstances. “Madame!” she called to Chignonne. “C’est l’Américaine.”
“Ah, enfin! Elle est venue reprendre son colis” my old headmistress a
nswered. She gave me the most fleeting of nods before a terrifyingly familiar jerk of her head produced a brisk summons. “Venez!”
“I can see why you wanted to come back, Pamita,” Eddie told me. “Love like theirs doesn’t bloom every day.”
“Ta gueule,” I said automatically. Eddie didn’t know Cassandre and Chignonne. I’d never seen either one express affection for anyone or anything.
Nor did I feel any tenderness toward them, except possibly dating to the night I left school. Dealing with my situation had put them in peril of acting unlike themselves, which made me even more relieved to see them back to normal. You don’t want to look up and catch one of Notre Dame’s gargoyles practicing its golf swing.
I also had no idea what they were talking about. I’d taken my trunk with me to the Gare du Nord in February ’34 and you’ve already glimpsed it being heaved up by a New York porter on daisysdaughter.com. What they meant was the Paris footlocker, which I hadn’t known existed.
Reaching the rue Plan de Trochu from Brussels after I’d reached the States, it had stayed in a corner of the dorm’s attic for a decade. Uninspected even by the Gestapo and just as well, since they might have thought my mother’s pages of The Gold-Hatted Lover were in code. They’d have arrested Cassandre and Chignonne for harboring a spy.
As we climbed, I kept annoying Cassandre, who was groaning in French up ahead—and Eddie, moaning in American behind—by pausing on every landing. Yet I couldn’t help it. Not only had I spent seven years here as a boarder, but this was a first for Pink Thing and Gray Thing alike. Starting with Provincetown, I’d never been back anywhere.
Recalled nearest the attic, the first year was the grimmest. Untutored in French, the budding pudding that was Pam had soon learned the language’s ability to departicularize her by personalizing her nationality. It was especially stinging in the feminine case.