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

by Carson, Tom

  As Marie Antoinette had been l’Autrichienne to eighteenth-century Paris and the Empress Eugénie l’Espagnole in Second Empire salons, so Daisy’s daughter—definitely the tin can in that progression—was l’Américaine to Mme Chignonne’s. You could say I got off easy if you’ve ever heard a French epiglottis try to pin “Buchanan” two counts for three. Since the day of my enrollment I never had even once.

  At that age you get your bearings through mimicry, leaving me out of luck as well as out of place. The only other Anglo name frisking around Chignonne’s belonged to Molly Flanders-Fields, indecorous offspring—born August 1919, and let your fingers play calendar—of Marshal Foch’s housekeeper and some Irish brass hat on Haig’s Intelligence and Planning staff. Now there was a man with time on his hands.

  But Molly was two forms ahead of me, raised in France and known as neither l’Anglaise nor even l’Irlandaise. Too engaging and quick with retorts and her nails for that. Her dorm monicker was la Belle alliance.

  L’Américaine, on the other hand, was a figure of fun. A bumbling pudding in my blue, yellow-tabbed school frock, I clambered up the stairs and down the stairs, hiking the most of them on my shortest legs. We roomed by year, and one of the upper forms’ perks was fewer flights to climb.

  Since I’m in a hurry and “Chanson d’automne” looms, I won’t avail myself of the chance to reprise my travails in detail. Let’s just say imitations of me were miles more popular than I was. Greeted with laughter that stripped paint all the way to the attic when they realized I was a witness—one whose stunned stare usually proved two out of three details right, I’m afraid—the basic elements were wide eyes in a gibbering face, an open textbook imbecilically clutched upside down.

  I wasted an hour and my pillowcase’s most recent laundering trying to sort out what a wailed and batting “Oeil! Coude et doigt, coude et doigt” could mean syntactically. Joke about my clumsiness, some sort of plan for a group attack? Finally deduced it was “Hey! Cut it out”—my regression to English one helpless day.

  The worst sensation wasn’t loneliness or bewilderment, Panama. The novelty was to learn I was a cretin. Shouldn’t I either have been advised of that or protected from knowing it at my birth?

  Back in my lost world, I’d been precocious intellectually. Had even had a few hints it might be my ace in the hole. Now the silliest girl at Chignonne’s outranked me and I couldn’t call it injustice. She did know more than I did. What I knew that she didn’t couldn’t have been more irrelevant to us both if I’d been Iroquois.

  Adding to the confusion, the religious instruction at Chignonne’s was, of course, Catholic. Our daily catechism was overseen by Chignonne herself, who as an advocate of Christian mercy was on a par with a cook specializing in fish made of barbed wire. Mass each Sunday was the only time when our full blue-coated, jonquil-hatted regiment got marched all at once in the same direction to the same place, no gainsaying allowed from either Rose Bauer or a nominally Protestant l’Américaine.

  To remind Chignonne or Cassandre I’d been baptized a Presbyterian, something I scarcely knew I knew anyhow, would’ve been like announcing my determination to attend class wearing nothing but a Stetson. As for Rose—school nickname, the vicious la rue des Rosiers, often shortened to la rue—she had her hands full protesting that her family didn’t even know Léon Blum.

  Google away, Panama. With a little persistence, you’ll turn up that charming slogan of the French right in the Thirties: “Better Hitler than Blum.” The rue des Rosiers was and is the heart of Paris’s Jewish quarter.

  If my mother’s death included any sort of reprieve, it was that it happened the year Pamelle would’ve been confirmed. That might have roused even Daisy to catch on she’d had her hand off the steering wheel awhile.

  You probably don’t need me to tell you my religious education didn’t take. At Chignonne’s, it wasn’t supposed to take. It was supposed to be, irrespective of what any of us made of it. To be raised in France, even as abortively as Pam was, is to experience Catholicism simply as a table society has laid: no leeway about the menu, no pretense that this has a blessed thing to do with one’s own hunger pangs. If Jesus had been French, paintings of the Last Supper would isolate Judas by showing him using the wrong fork.

  Anyhow, nobody gets away scot-free. My hunch is that Pink Thing and Gray Thing owe their birth in part to uncomfortable benches, incense, and droned but potent Latin ensnaring our bent heads in a lesser, undistinguished Chaillot church. Its crabbed walls nonetheless ascended to a ceiling whose soot had been there under, or rather over, the Sun King.

  Even in ’44, dressed in fatigues and GI shoes, I didn’t risk sauntering back in. Kept expecting a long arm in a surplice to reach out with a cry of “Got you at last.”

  Posted by: Ram-Pam-Pam

  The vine-covered old house off the rue Plan de Trochu was only where we dormed. What Mme Chignonne’s taught best was urban topography. Mass wasn’t our only expedition.

  Each form’s schedule took it to petrified classrooms in converted but still dusty ossuaries. They ranged from the rue Cognacq-Jay, where Pam would trudge past a church to be exited by Mrs. Cadwaller, with a peregrin, one day in 1958, to the Place Vendôme. One dwarfy double file of us often passed a more senior form’s taller troop of blue topped by jonquils on that douzaine’s bobbing return—only twelve to a year at Mme Chignonne’s—from the one we were headed to. No doubt our little parades through the Place de la Madeleine had charm in a watercolory, prewar sort of way.

  Our teachers were all male if safely gelded by senescence and encased in the olfactory sarcophagus of the tobacco stench that seemed to have clung to their clothing since Gauloises was a term identifying living women. They materialize in Pink Thing’s archives as sheepdogs whose masters were briefcases. Last new trick learned, a wait-and-see attitude toward the Commune.

  I still recall some of their names. Fougasse, natural sciences; Hebdomadère, mathematics. Michelin-Michelet, geography and history; Rodolphe Charbovari, French language and literature. Whispered data exchange from Fro to To on the rue Cognacq-Jay: “Attention! Hebdo est saoûl. Faites gaffe à vos culs, les septième!”

  Don’t picture individual desks, Panama. Long benches at inclined tables with shallow slots along the top to rest our pens in, next to the inkpots we began each class by extracting from our cartables and noisily banging into scarred inkwells. Once we sat down, we weren’t allowed to leave for any reason, ever. To have asked permission would’ve been to announce one was from Mars or worse. Two or three times a year, a face crowded and red as a crabapple quietly gasped, then turned eyeless and chasm-mouthed from shame as a pale puddle grew around her shoes.

  Whoever she might be, her harshest punishment would be the instructor’s refusal to acknowledge anything had happened. She just had to sit there, making her frog twitch for Fougasse or whispering “Je crois. Tu crois. Il croit. Nous croyons. Vous croyez. Ils croient” for Charbovari. Meanwhile, the rest of us waited to see which continent the puddle would resemble in its final form.

  The sense of sanctioned public degradation was so powerful that, in the ultimate girls’-school tribute, those episodes were never mocked or reported to the other forms, no matter how hated the stinking one might be. It’s a wonder we didn’t all become urinary erotomanes.

  Did it ever happen to me? Oh, Panama, please! Let’s not go into it. Wasn’t it bad enough that I was l’Américaine? Anyhow, it usually looked more like Australia.

  Our form’s left-handed girl, forced to write with her right, used to weep quietly every time her clumsy grip smeared her calligraphy’s wet ink. Bad marks for penmanship canceled out good ones for grammar or spelling. Our pens had wooden nibs whose paint had a meditative taste, a meal that turned unpleasant in a hurry when an unguarded chomp got a paint-flecked splinter wedged between two teeth. When their metal styluses got too scratchy, we’d c
onsecrate the bishop, in Chignonne slang, by fitting a fresh one to the waiting circlet of tin at the nib’s plumper end. Not that non-Catholic Pam knew it her first year, but they did look like tiny metal miters.

  Hearing the expression, Michelin-Michelet set us a composition on “Great French Churchmen.” Our choices were Richelieu, Mazarin, and Talleyrand. French citizenship would’ve been useless then without hostility to something, and ’Lin-’Let was anticlerical.

  Politically, all that Pink Thing’s archives can add to newsreels of the late Twenties and early Thirties is that mine are in color. We were little girls and fairly pampered ones. When our mini-défilés got held up by massed coats and slogans, we accepted it as drivers do the sight of numbered strangers running a marathon.

  Our douzaines of jonquil-hatted blue were certainly less trouble to our own supervisors, much less the authorities, than the gang at the boys’ school just a block from our vine-covered dorm. That’s where the rue Plan de Trochu became the rue Almereyda. Even Chignonne, who’d seen everything, was stunned into a violent “Ah, non! Ah, non” when she found a troop of us goggling through the dorm refectory’s tall windows at their latest rebellion. One of the upper-form boys was climbing the steeply angled roof to plant a black flag at its peak.

  To Chignonne, it was no joke at all: that was the Anarchist banner. At least to her, it wasn’t so very long since they’d been chucking bombs at heads of state for real. She was in such a hurry to phone the police that she didn’t dismiss us first.

  She could’ve spared herself the trouble, though. A couple of flics in kepis and capes came into view almost instantly. Scrambling up the slate in their hobnailed boots, they each grabbed an arm and slitheringly led him down again after chucking his flag and its improvised pole to the roof’s gutter.

  As it teetered there, my friend Giselle Girondin squealed, “Ooh, Pomme, regarde!” Rising miraculously above the trees, a child’s balloon had gotten its string entangled with the flag, and we watched in suspense as it tugged. Which would win?

  To our disappointment, they parted ways and were soon both out of sight. One rose skyward, the other tipped streetward. Daringly, Giselle mimicked our headmistress.

  “Zéro de conduite pour le ballon rouge!” she snapped, neck hoisted like a glare on stilts as she tapped one stiff palm against an open one. And got the same mark herself soon, since Chignonne had finished her phone call and was a black-clad guillotine with eyes right behind us.

  If you’ve just coughed, my daisysdaughter.com readers if any, I believe I know why. My friend Giselle Girondin? Oh, yes. This was ’32 or ’33. The social calculus at any school is wanton cruelty mitigated by jadedness.

  My translation into just another Chignonne’s fixture was far more inevitable than Pam could’ve guessed the afternoon she realized the closet really was locked, and next that I wasn’t yet certain of the French for “Help.” By my third year, I was no longer “the Americaness,” my favorite title as a Barnard freshman for my autobiography. However much my classmates’ tone mimicked wet percussion, I was Pamme, Pamelle, or even, to Giselle Girondin, Pomme.

  For part of ’32 and all of ’33, I was also Ram-Pam-Pam. For that I can thank a far more famous, infinitely less shy Americaness, not that we ever saw her shows or were supposed to play her records. But the many gifts to Paris from Josephine Baker’s undulant hips and abundant smile included rechristening me. As in:

  “Ram-Pam-Pam! What is it, all the fracas up there?”

  “Oh and then. The littles of the Seventh saw a flic pursuing a thief in the Vendôme Place. They all pulled the tongue.”

  “Hold! That’s truly efficient. Eh! But to the thief? Or to the flic?”

  “Without doubt that depended of their politics. But what do you have? You have the air of a someoness one has slapped.”

  “Oh then shit. The Wastebasket Alliance [Molly Flanders-Fields wasn’t universally popular] said to The Break-face [i.e., Le casse-gueule: Chignonnese for Cassandre] that it was me who put herself to laughing at the moment that Great Mutilated One [not school slang: grands mutilés was the official term for disfigured war veterans] with the crutches slipped at the Invalids. It wasn’t me, it was the little Bemelmuh-muh-muh-muh [horrid simper].”

  “I surmised that of myself. She becomes truly disgusting since the stupid appendicitis.”

  “Ah, ah! But you know very well that the Madam [not having a nickname was the most frightening certificate of Chignonne’s authority] will not that believe of me! Even if I tell it her. Ah, no! No. Never in the world her little darling.”

  “We would have well done to simply let Mister the Tiger eat her.”

  “Agreed. But that’s not all. Regard me this, Apple! What horror. I am commencing to push out some breasts! You know very well the uncle of whom I’ve to you spoken. He makes always some dirty cunteries, it him amuses. My God! Easter! It will be a torment.”

  “As is habitual, me, I remain here…But shut your shirt, finally, Gigi! I don’t want to look at your tangerines, finally!”

  Posted by: Pam

  Skip the occasional reek of nubile piss in winter wool, impatience with Giselle’s proudly displayed new mandarines (did you really think she’d been complaining?), or belatedly recognized literary rivalry. The proof of Pam’s integration—I’m still tickled I picked Talleyrand, that genius of adaptivity—is that I stopped yearning for my mother to rescue me and then even to come visit.

  She and Georges would train down from Brussels two or three times per year. That was just often enough to give her ever cloudier Paris a meteorological correlative in every season except summer, though Day-zee’s eyes increasingly seemed to be at sea to me—lingering somewhere in mid-Atlantic, unlike Pam’s now propellerized blue-gray Lindbergh-Blériot twins. Still, the precious side of any rencontre we had in Europe was a reminder that here there were a few things only she and I knew. Not until I turned twelve did Ram-Pam-Pam start trying to tug her away from Mme Chignonne’s as quickly as I could.

  So far as any practical reason for her to hang around went, that was no problem. French schools followed the sausage-making principle by treating education as no sensible parent’s business. To Cassandre and Chignonne, the meddling that goes on now would be as bizarre as a mother following her newly drafted son to boot camp.

  Unaware that here I was Pomme and Ram-Pam-Pam, my mother would look uncertainly around two facing rows of metal beds. An intruder, she at least understood her opinion was moot.

  Amateur archeologist of Daisy Fay that I am—is that a search known to all daughters, or only those with mothers as lovely as mine’d been called by fifty uniformed beaux in the balmy days before her first engagement?—I should probably’ve been mesmerized by how her puffy face brought out tricks of vivacity she hadn’t had to summon up since Louisville. Showing lively interest without having opinions of anything had been the lure for swarms of khaki with officer’s buttons. Instead, I twitched through those vague inspections. Ram-Pam-Pam dreaded what would happen if any of my schoolmates wandered in.

  Nor was I much better when I got her past those vine-covered walls and out to the gate where Georges Flagon waited. My mother’s idea of a celebratory treat was always a meal in a well-known restaurant. I’d try to get her out instead to the relative safety of the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, or—best of all—her and Georges’s hotel room. Anywhere the odds of her making a fool of herself were reduced.

  It wasn’t that she behaved badly, Panama. As the years went on, her helpless presence in my life seemed to have less and less to do with any kind of behavior at all. Nor was I upset by the onetime sylph’s Brussels-induced expansion into ever more capacious, less contoured coats, along with the low heels her porcine calves and swollen ankles now pleaded for. My mother had so much beauty to drown that for a long time gaining weight just seemed like her Belgian hobby, even if by the
end—her hair dyed brown too—she did look like a stricken match girl peering out of a too large, fleshy Daisy mask.

  Among other things, it was pleasant to reflect that now the Lotus Eater wouldn’t recognize her. Besides, if forty kilos of flab paid the ransom for no trip back to Switzerland, it was worth every quiche. But I was mortified to stupefaction by—and on at least one occasion I don’t think I’ll share on daisysdaughter.com, actively cruel about—my mother’s faltering, inept, gauche French.

  Posted by: Pam

  Switzerland was a spurious country, invented solely to give my mother’s face placid backdrops. It was an enormous broken wine bottle, the upper shards streaked with snow. Their only job was to supply an open-air arena for the air you whooped down in big gulps. You were glad if somewhat terrified to be guzzling the pure elixir after nothing but shoddy imitations.

  Pleased to be quasi-airborne once our toy train from Geneva had clambered up to the sanatorium, Georges even made an exceedingly rare joke, and about a generally taboo subject at that. As we climbed to the gate, he grunted that he found it agreeable to be someplace where both his ankles creaked. Yet with the as yet unnamed Pink Thing and Gray Thing’s memories of his surviving foot’s shell-blasted twin still so new and jarringly unique, as the fond ex-owner’s weren’t, I was too stunned to answer. No doubt my muteness inadvertently advised that pained man to give it another decade or two before his next try at humanizing himself with a wisecrack.

  We stayed there just three crisply soaring, sharded white-on-blue days, waiting for my mother’s final discharge. It seemed very Swiss to get us here first and judge her cured second; maybe they make good psychiatrists because the banking impulse runs deep. Pam was warned not to engage with any other patients, only some of whom were, like my mother, there for addiction. Plenty were lungers, as we used to call them when TB was still common enough to rate its own slang.