by Carson, Tom
If only I still had the luxury, bikini girl, of exclusively imagining your great-grandfather’s gun barking its single report in Potus’s telephonic hearing to spray my mess of pink and gray things on the rug! I’m afraid your old Gramela doesn’t perform too well in the other images now shoving in to compete.
Where will they be coming from, I wonder? Have two or three SUVs with indigo windows already burst from the White House’s South Gate, so often quietly entered and exited by Mrs. Cadwaller in Lyndon Johnson’s day, to boil up Connecticut Avenue? Just in time, they’re alerted to avoid Farragut Square by its statue’s warning shout—“Gridlock!”—and encouraging cry in their red-eyed and fishtailing aftermath: “Don’t fire until you see the mimsies of her borogoves.” Or will they leap from NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, racing down through Maryland on the 295 until they smash into Rock Creek Park to come at me from the north?
Panama, Panama! What have I done? Pamidiot, Pamcretin, Pamfool. Call me old-fashioned, call me—all right, even I’ve got to clear my throat for this one—too modest. I thought I might win a few random readers piqued by either my plan or the prequels I hope illuminate it, and I don’t mind tweaking the NRA’s nose with one cyberspatial hand as I naughtily milk their cyberspatial dingus with the other. (Nobody tops an ancient widow for putting the lay back in Rabelaisian, boys. I once considered writing a somewhat Sebastian Knightly book called The Lewd Pretzel.) Why didn’t I realize until now that spilling the beans on daisysdaughter.com could bring agents from half a dozen acronyms barreling, screeching, and locking and loading to the Rochambeau any second?
Posted by: A harmless old lady (without even a cat)
Should these turn out to be the final words I input, I’d like it recognized that at no point have I threatened physical harm to anyone but myself. Not a bit! I’m contemplating a technically illegal act in Potus’s auditory presence. The mess of pink and gray things when I’m done will belong to no one but Pam.
As an American, I’m revolted by anyone—anyone!—who fantasizes cocktail-party style about assassinations of actual political figures. Yet I suspect the distinction won’t matter. Now that our government’s the master of all it surveils, any website where the terms Potus, gun, and terrorist keep cropping up near the phrase this awful and unending war is a cinch to get me and my gat in dutch with the feds P.D.Q.
Remember, those are the movies of my youth. Since he’s Qwert magazine’s Man in the Dark, let’s ask Panama’s dad: Tim, shall I Cagney it out? Christ, if anyone deserves to buy the farm screaming “Top of the world, Ma!,” you’re reading her blog right now.
Pam’s own hearing isn’t good enough for me to count on hearing the SUVs snarl into a more ominous indigo-windowed pretzel down below. Thudding non-Andy footsteps in the hall will be my first warning, moments before a fist slams and the door shears. Here they are!
No, they won’t surprise me: I won’t be dottily shuffling myself and my walker out of my kitchen with a friendly smile as those heavily armed gents break in. When they do, I’ll have had just enough time to pivot my damned chair to face the foyer.
Bring it on. Clapping left hand over weaker mimsy to steady my lunettes’ right lens, I raise a forearm whose muscles are tapioca rubber bands wrapping balsa to aim Cadwaller’s gun. Then I start firing, but my shots go wild—splintering the heads of the nude fertility statuettes I call the African Adam and Eve, giving silkscreened Ganesh a see-through new third eye, shattering the framed and signed menu from La Coupole, and wounding Tim Cadwaller’s authorial feelings with a stray bullet’s opinion of You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two.
That’s my worst-case guess of how many times I’ll have to pull the trigger before I’m pulp in a wheelchair that’s gone spokes over Pamkettle. Gun chucked from my feeble grip like AARP’s answer to the Loyalist soldier in Capa’s famous photo, lunettes shattered to Potemkin come, slippered feet sticking up like they’re auditioning for Who Killed Cock Robin? Not much in between those extremities except eighty-six varieties of Heinz, and l’équipe should probably explain that, unlike some sites, daisysdaughter.com doesn’t take money for product placements. We do it for love and glory here.
Oh, Panama! You didn’t think I was aiming at them, did you? For one thing, if I’d been trying to shoot it out for real, I sure as shit would’ve been keeping my wheelchair in motion as I fired, not only having learned a bit from our tanks’ tactics once we finally got out of the bocage but maximizing Pam Cadwaller’s superior knowledge of her living room’s terrain. I was only shooting to make sure I’d be eighty-six varieties of Heinz in seconds.
Do you know what, though? I don’t think I can do it. They’re fellow Americans, performing what they think is their duty. I can’t bear the thought of wounding or killing one by mistake. No, I’ll toss Cadwaller’s gun bedroomward as the door hits the floor. Then I’ll shuffle obediently down the Rochambeau’s dowdy hall.
You know, black isn’t really my color, Captain Lyndie. Can I have a red hood instead? Sorry to keep repeating myself, but it’s hard to make myself heard when I have this black one over my head. Also my vocabulary’s obsolete and my dentition’s back in the elevator. You remember.
Waterskiing? I loved waterskiing. Lake Tahoe. My second husband, fifth anniversary. We were across the lake from that noisy Corleone thing. Did I hear you wrong again, Captain Lyndie?
Oh, boarding! Yes, I’ve been to boarding school, Captain Lyndie. In an old house in Paris all covered with veins. I mean vines. Why do you ask? Where’s that red hood you promised me?
You know I really hate this black one on me or anybody else. It’s just not becoming.
Do you really want to see hooded, naked eighty-six-year-old me in that pyramid, Lyndie? If they belong there, so do I. Do you? Do you, do you, do you, do you, do you? Light a cigarette. Thumbs up!
Discounting my first marriage, where I think we all get some leeway, only once in my life have I felt capable of killing or trying to kill anyone. If anyone had handed your Gramela a weapon the day we liberated Dachau, I’d have shot, and shot, and shot until there wasn’t a fucking guard left alive. That Holocaust deniers still try to make a scandal out of the fact that some of our boys did machine-gun a few dozen—Google “45th Infantry Division” and “Dachau” if you don’t believe me—makes me want to quote none other than you, Panama: “Oh boo fucking hoo.”
You never knew I’d heard you, commaless one. It was the last time I was up in Manhattan, and I was frankly getting a little bored with your dad’s complaints about his book troubles; his ace copy editor and he were tussling over a Dirty Dozen interlude that struck her as overkill. So I excused myself on the pretext of seeing if anyone needed help in the kitchen—it speaks half a dozen volumes about Tim’s acuteness outside screening rooms that he didn’t realize this was equivalent to Custer asking for Sitting Bull’s address—and there you were on the phone.
“Oh boo fucking hoo,” you said with that special peering look people get when they can’t see what’s right in front of them. (It wasn’t me: I was behind you, an old lady trapped between light and dark.) “So what if you think she’s a dyke? So what if she is a dyke? So what if you are, or I am, or anybody else is? Who put you in charge of the salad bar?””
No, Panama: I don’t really think they’ll hood me. As I’ll be visibly elderly, defenseless, and not Muslim, whichever agency gets the job of hauling Pam to the hoosegow or the nut ward is reasonably likely to play by some semblance of the old rules. That’s why the Porlockian intruder whose interruption I’m most fearing is Chad Diebold.
Don’t know who he is, you say? That’s what you think. Chad is a spirit abroad in the land. The reason you don’t know him is that he resorts to pseudonyms and disguises. He thinks he’s Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel. He thinks the likes of me are Easter Island heads. He knows a few sheets of scrap paper in the Archives, preserv
ed not far from twenty-four-year-old Pamela Buchanan’s faint voice on school-group earphones, have faded to near illegibility.
Chad is the architect of Potusville. (Pierre L’Enfant, move over.) He thinks he’s in charge of the salad bar, too. Not least because I know he’ll outlast Potus’s own term, I fear him more than I ever could Lyndie Gump. Given Chad’s druthers, he’ll send the memory of all of us stubborn Clio Airways frequent flyers right from Archives to Holocaust, and call the bonfire Old Glory in fireworks.
Posted by: Pam
Cadwaller said once that if Americans had invented the Olympics, leaping to conclusions would be the climactic event. In a very real sense, he thought of remarks like that as a form of bitching about his boss, but I forget which extraordinary popular delusion had wearied him. Was it the outcry over John Lennon’s quip that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus?
Your grandpa if not you, Panama, will recall we didn’t only take that as a mortal (sic) insult to the man from Galilee, though he seems to have recovered with his usual buoyancy. In a way only our compatriots could either devise or understand, it was an attack on our patriotism, which we peculiarly expected a Briton to share. Normally, I doubt unmusical Cadwaller would’ve given a damn: in one of his rare traits shared with Dick Nixon, Hopsie liked Richard Rodgers’s Victory at Sea, or thought he should. But he had a meeting with Kim Hastings over at the Brits’ brick heap on Mass Ave the same morning photos of Beatles LPs topping bonfires begrimed the WashPost’s front page. Among foreign friends, back in the days when we had ’em, what American diplomats dreaded most was the teasing.
Anyhow, I suspect one name in the letter from my guardian I quoted a few posts back is susceptible of a wildly wrong guess from my readers if any. My guardian wasn’t amused by my ignorance of L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy, with whom I was perfectly intimate even at half my young lifetime’s remove from Pam’s childhood library. If anything, having just passed by train through Midwestern farmlands to Chicago after seven years in Paris, I was newly conscious that Baum had made the whole Kansas-to-Oz transition, emotionally speaking, a mite easy.
To those of us reared on the Denslow and John R. Neill illustrations, accepting that she’ll never again pry off the blubbery mask of Judy Garland hasn’t been managed without a goodbye pang. Too old for such stuff by the time it came out—hell, I was too chic for Gone with the Wind—I never even saw the damn movie until the Fifties, on a set whose salt-and-pepper graininess made the ta-dah of Munchkinland fairly lame. But my guardian meant a different sort of voyager.
Even Andy Pond had trouble placing her over a pre-matinee lunch in the Kennedy Center’s rooftop restaurant last fall. He’d looked keener and more knowledgeable when I’d mentioned Nick’s eponymous ad agency, but one skill every diplomat acquires is an ability to quickly sort names he can tell he’s expected to recognize from those he can feel confident he isn’t. Spoken with the special timbre we reserve for names with an aura, “Dorothy Day” had him fumbling.
Automatically, he hummed a few bars of “Que Sera, Sera.” Then stopped: “No, of course not. That’s Doris. The evangelist, Los Angeles? Wasn’t she always on the radio? Why on earth are we talking about her?”
“My God, Andy,” I complained. “What is the use of you being nearly as old as I am if you can’t remember anything? You’re right! I should get a new cat. That was Aimee Simple—oh, hell—Semple McPherson. Say ‘meow’ now. Go on!”
Andy let his eyes glaze instead with distinctly secular happiness. “Do you know Chaplin boinked her once? That haunts me.”
“It ought to’ve haunted him. He did get less funny, though.”
“No, no. Think of the spawn, Pam! Charlie Semple McPherson. He’d have been President at six. We did dodge a few bullets back then, you know.”
Spearing an asparagus, he hummed a bar or two of “Once in Love with Amy.” We had tickets for Christine Baranski in Mame that afternoon, and musicals always put Andy in a generically musical mood.
“Where’s Charley indeed,” I said to shut him up. “But I, Andy, was speaking of Dorothy Day. A woman a million miles more obnoxious than I could ever hope to be.”
Napkining, Andy held up his free hand. “Wait, wait, I’ve got it. The Catholic Worker, pacifism. Houses for vagrants and bums. Wasn’t she still getting herself arrested in the Sixties? Wasn’t she a nut?”
“If you were most Catholics, you’d have called her worse than that. She was the one who decided the Sermon on the Mount made Marxism redundant, and spent the next fifty years being a perfect pain in the hoo-ha about it. Thank Christ I wasn’t churchy, I’d have wanted to strangle her.”
“But you weren’t and you aren’t. I do know you, Pam, and you have no queen but Kirsten. Please tell me this isn’t Talleyrand taking unction on his deathbed.”
“No chance of that,” I said, “but I did meet her once. Not Kirsten. Dorothy.”
Posted by: Pam
It may sound bemusing that a man should have begun his withdrawal from the world by founding a small Chicago ad agency. Still, this was an older America and my guardian followed his own path.
In my pre-Scandal infancy, he’d tried out for a part as one of Wall Street’s many real-life Harold Lloyds, though he hung off no clocks and later told me with a smile that the secret of the memorability of that image in Safety Last was that it was the Boom’s unwitting version of Christ crucified. True, Harold just swung up into his sweetie’s arms, but that was a very Twenties idea of heaven.
My guardian’s own brief marriage had ended in disaster. Off she flew and down he stayed, as publicly as an avocado left on a doily. No one will ever know if his decision to quit New York was a moral decision disguised as a social one or the other way around, and to me—in a joke I hope he’d have liked—elucidating that is like firing a gun at angels’ feet to make them dance faster on the head of a pin.
As for the ad agency, however incongruous it may look on the future Brother Nicholas’s c.v., my hunch is that it was the bungled and therefore true beginning of his never finished journey to the priesthood. Men of the cloth are, after all, facilitators. Nobody blames them for inventing what the OT has to say about concubinage or oxen. Before the Crash darkened his penciled deprecations of the business world’s heedlessness into swatches of van Gogh crows all over his world view, my guardian may’ve been groping toward a similar relationship to capitalism. Envisaging himself, let’s say, as the sort of conscientious objector who’d perform clerical or transport duties, but balked at being a rifleman.
Anyhow, it was a good enough little agency, thanks to a scrupulousness that predated any notion of professions or vocations and the mild but steadfast humor he was never to lose, not even in a rope belt and sandals at Nenuphar. On the wall of his office, which he showed Pam soon after my arrival—“It’s the old story of the seven blind men and the elephant, I suppose, but this is a bit of America”—a prosaic placard featured the first slogan he’d ever been hired to think up. It was for a laundry somewhere in Iowa: we keep you clean in muscatine.
As the published volume of his letters bears out, he’d begun even then to read the Christian apologists. But Chesterton didn’t do it for him and neither did Lewis. He wanted a view that would accommodate the tectonic instabilities of the American earthquake.
He’d also started to correspond with fellow doubters who shared his concern that a chicken in every pot might turn out to be a parrot in every kettle. Which my guardian, no revolutionary, mistrusted only because parrots are inedible. He didn’t want to see a bird that could both fly and talk mistaken for one that could do neither but could feed a family, his metaphor in Letter 13.
To my regret, The Mountain and the Stream (Vaughn Trapp and Co., 1971, a publisher primarily of hymnals; it’s so out of print it makes my Glory Be look like The Da Vinci Ultimatum) includes no missive announcing a perfect little Paree-sienne’
s arrival in his one-man midst. For one thing, I might’ve found out to whom it was addressed: perhaps the “Father Francis,” spoken of by him but never met by me, who was eventually his conduct to Nenuphar. Few letters that predate his entry into the monastery are included, however, and I believe his abbot edited the heck out of them.
By the time I showed up, the bread lines in Chicago streets stretched like a breathing stamp collection. Roosevelt was trying whatever he could, and my guardian was practicing tithing. “You’re not seeing us at our best,” he told me as we drove out to Oak Park past splotches of the unemployed, soup kitchens, Hoovervilles, movie palaces playing Myrna Loy in When Ladies Meet, and news vendors shrieking up Capone. “Well, maybe with some exceptions. Who knows?”
His agency had kept a firm grip on the ledge, making up for the lost business from failing department stores, granaries, and abattoirs with commissions from shoddy amusement parks, circuses, and dance marathons. While I don’t know what they teach you in school, Panama, you shouldn’t picture middle-class life simply evaporating during the Depression, then springing back just in time to welcome the boys home from Tarawa with every calico tablecloth and beaming, secretly murderous Beulah in place. I did go to a private school, and my guardian was no millionaire: just a man who went on respecting gentility’s social values after he’d started rejecting its spiritual ones. By and large, the bourgeoisie to which I’ve never quite managed to stop belonging held its roost, just on a tree stripped of its leaves and frailer branches by a hurricane. Unofficial motto: “Whatever you do, don’t look down.”