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

by Carson, Tom

  “Six are on their way.” My guardian looked pleased.

  “Six? They’re sleeping in the bathtubs! A whole factory closes, and you found me six beds? And smile? What are we here for?”

  “To have lunch before your train goes.” He said it so gently I wondered if she genuinely needed the reminder. “Six beds is six more, and let’s face it, I’m not you. I can’t perform miracles, Dorothy.”

  “I don’t. But nothing in the Gospels says we aren’t allowed to try.”

  Was I awed to be in her presence? While I’d love to say yes, the truth is the whole torrent of words had left me on the riverbank. At loose ends, I was wondering if I should tell my guardian what I’d discovered about the new draftsman at his agency on my last visit there that summer.

  “What can I say? You’ve always known I don’t have the stuff,” he cheerfully told Miss Day. “It’s been the same ever since Yale. I only got into religion in a failed bid to make myself popular.”

  “Hah! Did I tell you about one wonderful letter I got last year? Oh, it was sublime. Its author prayed God would give him the patience to endure my what was it, ‘lunacy,’ until the police shut us down for encouraging loafers, traitors, and—oh, yes!—‘publicity-seeking psychotics.’ My hunch is that last fine phrase was lobbed in my direction unless he meant Maurin. It was written by a priest.”

  Surprised—I shouldn’t have been—I laughed. That obliged Miss Day to absorb my inclusion at the table: the white gloves, a frilled blouse I quite liked in real life, tulip skirt. Thrillingly grown-up stockings too, but I’m not going to indulge any male daisysdaughter.com readers I may have. For God’s sake, back then we all wore garter belts! Under the impression they were practical.

  “What sort of work do you do for us?” she asked as if she’d missed shaking hands with me among the volunteers at the Worker house.

  “I’m in school,” I said, stumped.

  “I’ve been trying to introduce you, Dorothy. This is my ward, Pamela Buchanan. Daisy’s daughter. Let up on her, will you, she’s not even—”

  “Catholic?” Miss Day guessed. [Wrongly, I think: my guess is Nick was about to say “sixteen.”] “Yes, yes, I know: the excuses for doing nothing are endless. I do realize it’s not your fault. I met your mother once or twice.” With a swift smile, she tossed her face ceilingward: “Well, that certainly came out wrong! Oh, they’re going to love me in St. Cloud tonight, Nick. At this rate?”

  Pam was shy about asking, but in those days I read the way otters swim and I’d been mad for The Emperor Jones. “Miss Day, excuse me. Did you really know Eugene O’Neill?”

  Message from a future edition of Pamela to a prior one: for Christ’s sake, act on any curiosity you’ve got about O’Neill now. Once you’ve married Murphy, you’ll learn he can’t abide the name. One of several major differences between them is that O’Neill will have no idea they’re rivals.

  In the meantime, the detectable narrowing of Miss Day’s eyes had mystified me. I didn’t know she disliked being reminded of her free-and-easy bohemian youth—concerned, so she said, that young people would assail their parents with “If Dorothy Day did it, why can’t I?” Then she decided to concede I was fifteen and therefore asking about a Great Man, not the one she’d drunk under the table in Village saloons.

  “Oh, I knew all sorts of people then,” she said not unkindly. “Gene was struggling for God in his own way, I think. Black Irish, you know—they always do it by insulting Him.” I don’t normally capitalize that H, Panama, but believe me, she did. “Why, does writing interest you?”

  “She writes poetry,” my guardian said proudly. After the effort he’d put into deciphering “Chanson d’automne” a year earlier, he wasn’t about to admit he needn’t have bothered. I shudder to think the copy of Pink Rosebuds the poetess fulsomely inscribed to him may still exist somewhere.

  “Then you should talk your uncle into writing for the Worker,” she told me. That not only promoted him with such certainty that he and I eyed each other as if we might as well enjoy our new connection but proved Dorothy Day was Dorothy Day without letup. “I was hectoring him to try half the way from Chicago. I think he’d have a gift.”

  “Oh, no,” my guardian said. “One year, I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News. The relief when we parted was mutual. Besides, I’ve been writing ads too long. Stringing together above eight words at a time would feel unnatural.”

  I knew that wasn’t strictly true, since he’d once told me a bit awkwardly that he’d tried to set down his memories of my mother for my benefit after her death. Yet he didn’t feel he’d captured her, so he said—my own hunch is the portrait came out more unsympathetic than was fit for her daughter to read—and ended up burning the thing.

  If he was fibbing about destroying the manuscript, I’ll never know. Nenuphar kept his effects when he died, and there can’t have been many of those. As I’m not blood kin or in contact with Nick’s surviving relatives, if any, I’ve got no access to them.

  “Stuff and nonsense,” Miss Day told him. “Or quite possibly vanity. Where do you think I’m going to write Monday’s column? On the train to St. Cloud. Will it be artful? Of course not. Will it say things worth saying? All we can do is hope.”

  “Can I ask the subject?”

  “Oh, Nick! Don’t look at me that way. Or do, since I couldn’t care less and it seems to give you a peculiar sort of agonized pleasure. Yes, I’m going to be writing about the tenant farmers’ strike again. And yes, I’m going to tell the Worker’s readers to send every penny they can spare to the union. They’ve got nothing, nothing! Isn’t it bad enough I have to listen to Peter about this?”

  “I think Maurin’s right,” my guardian said stubbornly. “I don’t think we should be taking stands in these labor disputes. People are only too happy to lump us in with the Communists as is, and it gets the movement involved with, well, ‘Caesar’s things.’ That’s not personalism to me. And more important”—and if you want proof he was no revolutionary, here it is; pay close attention, Panama—“my feeling is that we have to think carefully about where we want to be standing, and with whom, when this current economic crisis ends. Because it will.”

  I’m told Dorothy very seldom reverted to the loose talk of her Village days, making my most cherished viva voce quote from the saint more precious. If any reader cares to pass it on to the Vatican’s canonization crew, be my guest.

  “Oh, balls, Nick,” she said. “Now is now.”

  Despite an avuncular glance my way—unsure of her best move, Pam tried to make her face simultaneously communicate that I heard people say “Balls” all the time and didn’t have a clue what it meant—my guardian smiled. “And ‘sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.’ Is that it?”

  “That’s all she wrote!” Dorothy agreed. “Well, actually, I hope not. That’s death.”

  “Pam, what is it?” my guardian asked.

  “Oh! I’m sorry,” I said. “I just used to know someone who said that all the time.”

  “Oh who?”

  They must both have realized what a neglected third party I was. It was an improvised interest, as when you collar the dullard about to go neck with God-knows-whom by announcing that you must know where she got that dress. Pam was fifteen, didn’t know the better part of valor is vagueness. Soon to do my college share of necking with God-knows-whom and then some, smoothing my undeterred hips and mumbling “Saks, Saks,” I found myself lamely describing the woman you know as the Lotus Eater. Without going into the syringe bit or the Charybdean bent, of course.

  “Why, I know that name,” Dorothy astonished me by saying. “Isn’t that odd? Nick, I was in prison with her mother.”

  “Which time?”

  “Occoquan, during the suffrage days. I regret it now—misdirected energy.” Then she grin
ned like a toothy iguana. “But you’re always sentimental about your first time in jail.”

  Posted by: Pam

  “Do you like her, though?” I asked my guardian on my next trip to Chicago, all tangled knees and feeling my way at the concept of admiration independent of affection.

  He smiled. “Oh, Pam! Nobody likes her. She won’t allow it: too mundane. Of course plenty of us adore her, but that’s our lookout. I think she’s reasonably fond of herself, but I guarantee it’s completely impersonal.”

  By then, I’d decided I wasn’t going to say anything about the illicit drawings the new draftsman at his agency made on the side. I know it sounds as if Pam did more snooping than Nancy Drew, so please remember I’m leaving out all sorts of days when I didn’t nose around like a ferret. That Sunday back in sluggish, glazed, Chicagooey August, my guardian and I had been on our way to the zoo.

  Driving past his agency’s building, he remembers a portfolio he needs. Once he flicks it open on the desk in his back office, a recollected deadline dictates a phone call: “No more than ten minutes, I swear.” In the outer room, its three drafting tables and two copywriters’ desks deadened by weekend sunlight’s optical version of a drone, Pam gets drugged on one of adolescence’s most perishable moods, never felt by anyone over sixteen: mild spookiness combined with utter boredom.

  Through the partly opened door, I can see the right-hand edge of an old placard, white lettering on a blue background: ou, then the much larger an of “clean,” then back to smaller type for the tine of “muscatine.” Brief game of eye Scrabble gets nowhere: no I, a tune. Bits of guardian’s strangely artificial phone voice (when he talks on a long-distance line, I’m usually on the other end in St. Paul), half droll and half exasperated: “Well, how did he get the idea it’s in the Midwest? Can someone explain that to me?”

  Hum, hum. Flies hum, I hum. They can’t carry a tune. No, I can’t. On the new man’s drafting table, a rough for an illustration to good old Vern Jewel’s copy for the upcoming zeppelin show attracts Pam’s admiring but untrained eye. What else is he working on? Heave up the pad’s page, big as a skirt.

  As I recall, the respective dimensions of that cock and the puny man wielding it were those of the Washington Monument and a hairless chimpanzee. At least in Pink Thing’s salvage job, though, his partner is drawn in a detail lascivious enough to arouse Sean Finn’s envy: not just a black button on each white cupcake, but twin worms of paler dark to promontorize the nipples. Each curl of adult femininity’s parachute emblem is as caressed and embossed as the more famous hairdo up top. Overlarge in the same style as more legit Thirties cartoons, the head would’ve been recognizable even if the first panel hadn’t provided a title: Gabby Chatterton in ‘Who’re You Callin’ a Dyke, You Whore?’

  Have you ever heard of Tijuana bibles, Panama? I’m sure Tim has, but can see how they might not be the stuff of father-daughter moments. Contraband more lurid than heroin, they featured famous people—either figures of real-world renown or barely disguised fictional characters like Little Morphine Annie, though I’m not sure any smut-stained wretch ever went to the extreme of fusing the two—in situations whose appeal combined crazed lust with simmering resentment. Making its way to Purcey’s, one that starred Cary Grant had been squawked at by a bouquet of damn near purple rosebuds until Flora Olney of Mt. Carmel, Illinois, our most dogged reader of the actual Bible, leapt up wreathed in wrath to seize the thing and chuck it in the incinerator. So she said.

  And Gabby Chatterton? Oh, she was another Thirties screwball comedienne. Her name could as easily have been Claudette Harlow or Myrna Alloy. I admit that when I met her in Hollywood a dozen years later, I felt gunshy about shaking hands.

  Her own legs locked together—I might as well have had a tourniquet around both knees, from which you shouldn’t infer any literal equivalent whatsoever—Pam keeps feeling like she needs to whiz but knows she doesn’t. She can’t figure out if what’s left of her brain is screaming at her guardian to get off the phone or screaming at him to realize he needs more privacy and close his office door. Hearing his tone shift to the staccato preliminaries of goodbye, I let the pad’s top page fall back down, half expecting my face to go with it in the optical effect known in old Hollywood as a vertical wipe.

  Out came my guardian, who I knew had never done anything like that—much less that!—in his life. “So!” he said, scratching his head. “Off to the zoo now, yes? I’m sorry to’ve kept you dawdling. But I’ve only known one man in my life who didn’t know where San Francisco was, and he’s long dead.”

  Quoth Pam, “Could we please go to the movies instead? Wings in the Dark is at the Roxy.”

  Posted by: St. Pam

  Crazed with self-important hysteria—no tune, just I and more I—and eager to erase, no, crush its cause, I spent weeks tempted to tell him his new draftsman moonlighted as a pornographer. By the time he brought me back to Purcey’s after our lunch with Dorothy Day, I’d decided I wouldn’t, and I didn’t.

  My guardian would’ve had to fire him. Not even for the offense so much as my exposure, tarnishing his honor as the man dead Daisy had chosen to look after her daughter. This was the mid-Thirties and the new man was everyone’s junior. Plenty of people had trouble making ends meet, though I’m sure Nick paid the best wages he could.

  Not that you could’ve convinced me then, but there are worse things in this world than illustrating Tijuana bibles, too. In that category, I’d include some people’s ideas of how to illustrate the New Testament.

  You see, Panama? I didn’t want his unemployment on my conscience: rote concept since Chignonne’s, now internalized. My silence helped keep one unspeakably filthy-minded man afloat in the Depression. It wasn’t quite feeding the hungry, and definitely a far cry from clothing the naked, but I did my part.

  Perhaps to my guardian’s unvoiced regret (he wouldn’t have voiced it to save his life), I was never tempted to convert to Catholicism. That’s despite occasionally thinking I’d’ve made a sensational nun. Nor was I ever a pacifist, and Andy Pond among others can tell you I’m no ascetic. I honored Dorothy Day in my own way.

  If the Church does canonize her, I’m glad I won’t be here to see it. What, a “publicity-seeking psychotic”? (Yes, that letter was real.) It could be the most hypocritical thing the Vatican’s done since they glued Joan of Arc’s charred remnants back together after burning her. Unless drinking Eugene O’Neill under the table counts, it would also be nonsense to pretend they’ve turned up even one miracle—the minimum cover charge, I’m told, for admission to the club.

  The tribute I’d like to see, and fat chance too, is a WPA-style mural in the Capitol. The Minneapolis Chippewas, Chicago Negroes, Mott Street bums, and Los Angeles Okies should be shuffling toward a storefront whose window proclaims, Whatever ye do unto the least of these my brethren, ye do unto Me. Front and center, her Scarecrow beside her, is that perfect pain in the hoo-ha: St. Dorothy of the Depression.

  If the artist’s any good, and I know who I’d hire if perchance The Unknown Draftsman’s still alive, lip readers will be able to guess what she’s saying: “Oh, balls. Now is now.” Someone waves a union sign. In a corner, one man’s contentedly flipping through a Tijuana bible.

  He’s their Savior, Panama, not mine. The only vital role Christianity has played in my life was its responsibility for the construction of the church of St. Sulpice in Paris. That was because I fell in love with your great-grandfather when he and his pipe were mulling other things while standing in front of it.

  Even so, I’d like to know how come they treat their Good Book as if it came from Tijuana. They ransack it for the dirty parts—e.g., “The poor you shall always have with you”—that let them work off their most brutal aggressions and resentments. Why do they masturbate to the Word of God? Why is the only part of the thing they can’t and won’t take literally the Sermon on th
e Mount? How has Chad Diebold made it all Aramaic to them?

  Posted by: Pam

  Kuala tea: that was the pun. “Oh, no, Sir! The kuala tea of Mercy is not strained.” A nonsensical joke, Panama, but you were seven. Still in the habit of threshing the uncountable, endlessly shuckable fingers of one hand with the other. Round (it was then) face crammed with the forthcoming giggle. Your Gramela’s laugh at the silly capper came mostly from pleasure that, like your pretzelly ex-namesake, you were drawn to the circus tricks of words.

  Yet the mouths of babes do their best work when they burst out laughing and divulge a wet secret. As I applauded with rheumatic fingers, it occurred to me that unlike intellect or even humor—if I know myself, I’d go on bawling jokes on a desert island, naked as the first day I was bored and awaiting only my gal Friday—mercy, whether strained or not, can only exist in relation to someone else.

  I’ve tried to brew Andy some kuala tea. Opening a fresh document and setting the font size to 72-point type, I’ve just clacked this out in boldface: andy—don’t come in. call the police. pam.

  My printer purred at its rare, too brief treat. Exiled to the table, Cadwaller’s gun looked anxious: did it have a rival? (Flatterer! Don’t worry, Pam’ll be back soon.) Then I tottered out to take my best try at mercy to the foyer. If 72-point boldface type on the endtable where my mail piles up can stop Andy in time, he’ll be spared the sight of my mess of pink and gray things on the rug.

  There was nothing to weight it with but Kelquen’s collar. Full name, Ilya Kelquen, derived from Andy’s announcement—“Il y a quelqu’un dans la maison”—as he deposited a live bundle of tortie fur in this same foyer not long after I moved here from Georgetown in ’87. The unmistakable femininity her trotting tail soon displayed was another reminder that Andy’s French is a joke. A good one, though, since he treats speaking it as intrinsically humorous. (“American diplomats don’t have skills, they have hobbies”—Cadwaller.)