by Carson, Tom
An audibly cubed crackle of sirens and shots was impregnating his room even before I knocked and pushed the door open. Too much to take in: he was still in a gown, but the polka dots looked silly. The TV screen was blaring flames. Bayonets in fiery silhouette: they’d called out the National Guard by then.
The remote lay on the floor. To an octogenarian with heart problems, it might as well’ve been in Illinois. He may not have known what it was, never having been exposed to TV. Bright with tears, the eyes he turned to me were gray yolks of disaster.
“Daisy! Bless you for coming,” he gasped. “What’s happened to our country? For the love of God, what’s happened to our country?”
Oh, did I give the nurses hell about it. They weren’t impressed: “We turn ’em all on mornings. Look, if I’m going to be digging impacted crap out of somebody’s rear, then yeah, I’m going to watch my soaps. Sorry if I forgot to turn it off after, but he had a remote. Anyway, I ain’t sure I forgot.”
That was later. Now was now, and the second I’d sorted out what greeted me, I grabbed the remote and made the screen die. “My Gawd, why are they running that crummy movie?” I yelled. “Nobody liked it. It didn’t even have a director! Did John Wayne show up yet?”
I wasn’t about to let a pause make me a liar. It would’ve the second our eyes remet. I was just hoping that if he was woozy enough, a lot of noisy Pamela-ing might make him think it had been a dream.
“Oh, good! So you got my flowers. Well, well! Davenport. Does it have suburbs named Cushion and Afghan?”
Not my best joke, but give me a break. By the time I stopped, I saw I’d at least succeeded in making myself more real to him than what he’d seen. Only then did I pull up a chair and take his hand.
It wasn’t my first deathbed, since my longtime editor at Regent’s had passed by then. I realized as we smiled at each other that this one was different. Now no one on the planet would ever have known me all my life.
“Hello, old-timer,” I said. “By now you could say the same to me.”
“No, never.” His voice was still feeble, but he was back on familiar Pam-ground. “I met you—before you could walk.”
“I’m still not sure I ever learned how! But you’ll be back on your feet any day.”
He didn’t shake his head so much as adjust its angle on the pillow. “No—let’s have none of that. I wish they’d let me stay at Nenuphar to die. But my abbot. Has such newfangled ideas. Pammie.”
Given what he’d called me as I entered, that last word was a relief. Not so the others, and I tried to remind myself that I was the unbeliever. He was a monk.
“Well, oh—I know that to you it’s only a translation. Is that the right word?”
I couldn’t believe I’d seen it, but that twinkle’s meaning was unmistakable. “Aw, Nick,” I complained. “You don’t mean—”
“I—tried,” he whispered, still amused. “But I just kept—asking myself. Why would God want all of us illiterate country relatives around up there—bickering, driving him crazy—for all eternity? He’d never get. Anything done. No, Pammie. Take it from—an old Chicago ad man. You’ve got to put something nice—in the window. But it’s for here. The Gospels—are for here.”
While I don’t think any of its smattering of reviewers spotted the disconnect, no wonder his abbot’s Introduction to The Mountain and the Stream is all about the afterlife. Something had to mask the fact that not a single letter mentions it.
“I had something I wanted to. Oh, yes. I liked the title. Of your new book,” he said. “Of course, I couldn’t. Keep it, but the sentiment. Sounded right. We are lucky. I promise, it’ll end up in a good. Public library in Iowa. Someplace.”
“Thank you. I just wanted you to see it, that’s all.”
“I think I’m going to sleep now,” he said. “Goodbye—Daisy’s little Pamela. Sorry—you came so far.”
“Not that far, Mr. Carraway.”
Posted by: Daisy’s Little Pamela
I’d called him that deliberately, hoping he’d know why. He did:
“‘No more of that—nonsense, young lady,’” he quoted himself with a reminiscent smile. “‘It’s Nick to you from—now on.’ Just like that first day off. The boat.”
“Yes.”
“Was it—the Normandie? I don’t remember.”
“No, the Paris. Where I’d come from, not where we landed. That’s one way to remember.”
“Did we?” he said. “Paris.” When I phoned the hospital that night he was gone.
I’ve never been much for tombstone visits, Panama. I’ve only been back to your great-grandfather’s grave in Rock Creek Cemetery two or three times, always because the descendants are in town. Preferring to let the Madeleine Lee memorial watch over him there, I remember Cadwaller instead when Andy drives me past the State Department’s big aircraft carrier for paper planes on C Street. But I did once go to see where my former guardian rests.
Subbing for Barbara Tuchman, since I doubt the forgotten author of Glory Be would’ve turned up on anybody’s card index except from desperation, I found myself in Iowa City on what turned out to be my last public appearance as an author. Our panel was, so help me, “History and Literature: Sibling Rivals or Weird Sisters?” My first deadpan words into p. buchanan’s microphone were, “When shall we three meet again? Don’t know where, don’t know when.”
Nobody got it. I’d meant to parody senescence: “We’ll Meet Again” was among the most beloved songs of World War Two, bikini girl. The upturned cabbages (what’s Denmark coming to?) my fellow panelists and I had agreed to call our audience couldn’t grasp that old people know they’re old—any more than they remembered that children, with far more fury, know they’re children. So I was pretty much a bust, and before the cab was halfway to Nenuphar my chambermaid had convinced me that she was a grandmother and had voted for Reagan twice. She’d never done any of those vile, debauched things and she never would.
Accepting that their monks have passed back into being people we knew as well, Nenuphar keeps its cemetery unrestricted. Though locked at night, its gate is separate. You can even wear slacks, and times of the month were no longer an issue for me.
I told the cab driver to wait, as I had when he was alive. Of course I recognized the quotation from the final letter in The Mountain and the Stream, written to “Father F.” just days before he went into the Davenport hospital.
BROTHER NICHOLAS
(Nick Carraway)
1892–1968
I wanted the world to be at a sort of moral attention forever.
There he lay, I hope at peace, under several hundred pounds of Iowa. I didn’t stay long and you can’t visit more than the cemetery unless you’re someone’s P.A., but Nenuphar still exists. It’s not far from Muscatine, dans les grands blés sanglotants.
Part Two
1. Murphy’s Law
Posted by: Pam
Brannigan Murphy crashed through the commode door at the Commodore, two Pulitzer Prizes to the wind. The diary I soon abandoned, which had already slumped from Goncourts to datebook and went white for good on our wedding day, tells me I first laid—ah, laid eyes on—my future husband on Sunday, June 22, 1941. That explains his bullnecked euphoria.
Germany’s leap across Russia’s border had begun history’s cruelest duel of nations. The devastation it unleashed was neither here nor there in New York. For American Stalinists, the Panzers’ race toward Leningrad and Moscow meant the end of the migraine clamping their brains since the Nazi-Soviet pact’s signing almost two years earlier.
It’s true the playwright I’d soon know as my Bran was never a Party member. Damned few were in his crowd or mine. Writing, discussing, insisting: that was left-wing Manhattan’s job. A CP card smelled like an invite to hawk The Daily Worker outside Brooklyn shipyards or Trenton
factories on cold dawns, not only a menace to our own typewriter labors but murder on a hangover. I include myself, though I was only a vague hot-to-Trotskyite. The world in flames that twenty-one-year-old Pamela Buchanan’s book reviews did their best to limn blazed around a magically fireproof cocktail shaker.
Hitler’s perfidy spelled professional relief for Murphy. Finished in summer ’39, his anti-Nazi play A Clock with Twisted Hands could finally be produced without his fellow devotees of the USSR’s new Jerusalem painting him as the Broadway Judas to Stalin’s mustachioed, oddly hand-rubbing Messiah. Fighting words that cuckoo were everybody’s meat and drink then, confusing us whenever we recollected we were all irreligious and might as well be talking about Tom and Jerry.
Anyhow, everyone in our New York knew the story of how Clock had been in rehearsal two Augusts earlier at the old Rosalie Gypsum Theater. Then Molotov and von Ribbentrop inked the deal to end all deals. Vast fuss in that converted burlesque house, home of the celebrated Popular Front and Center Troupe!
Leading lady Odette Clifford, angling for a Hollywood summons and needing those good notices, is all for going on. Born Karapet Parsamyan in Smyrna and darned proud of same when it suits him, director Pat Carpet—he did better on the West Coast than Odette, and here's why—wants to know what the front office thinks. The front office, in the person of John Outhouse Lavabo, professional Harvard refugee, mentions that shutting down will leave forty-eight people unemployed. His grandfather locked out eight thousand before the Pinkertons shot six, but old W.C. Lavabo was no aesthete.
The decisive voice was Murphy’s own. “How could I really look Shakespeare in the eye, Pat? Or Gorky? Damn it, Lavabo. Pull the plug.”
What can’t be denied is that his renunciation cost him. The only new work of his to be produced since had been a pretty bleak one-acter called Colum Firth. Title and only breathing character, a Macy’s stockroom worker trapped in a malfunctioning freight elevator after closing time with one of the mannequins from the lingerie department. As his speeches to her grew more lacerating, one slowly divined he was addressing his beloved, now dead wife. Hard today not to wince at the contrivance of naming her Cookie, letting the lunchbox-browsing widower lament “My cookie’s gone” and “Gee, I wish I had my cookie back” and so on before the audience caught on with a spinal thrill the word was uppercased.
Even if it did feature oodles of the tormented working-class argot Bran had pretty much invented from whole denim when I was a schoolgirl and there was a subplot about a shop steward the hero guessed was in cahoots with management, most reviewers thought Colum’s monologue wasn’t really Murphy in his best Murphine vein. Others saw a metaphor. The play culminated in a stymied—duh, as your Panamanic friends might say—sex act that was the most sensational thing yet seen on a New York stage; it might’ve gotten the production shut down if its victim hadn’t been plaster.
If you find this tedious, bikini girl, I’m sorry. It depresses even l’équipe at daisysdaughter.com that Murphy’s Wikipedia entry is a stub. Before A Clock with Twisted Hands finally heaved onto the Gypsum’s stage, his last full-length play had been 1937’s Prometheus in Madrid, a big enough hit to cover the alimony when his second wife divorced him in ’39.
Its hero, Parnell Mulligan, was a captain in the International Brigades who learns his commanding officer is a dangerous, quite possibly insane incompetent. With the playwright’s full approval, he covers up the fact to preserve Party discipline, and when John Ford’s Fort Apache came out a decade later, set among U.S. Cavalry officers but featuring a similar plot and message, Murphy considered suing.
Or so his fifth wife told me. She got to be the widow, even taking over the dialogue balloons in Seamus Shield, Agent of Fury, the comic strip he’d been scripting in his final years. Anyhow, the lawsuit went nowhere once Bran’s agent reminded him of Bonmarché’s nineteenth-century play about a priest’s heroic vow of silence under the Borgia popes, Wortsinall’s seventeenth-century one defending the divine right of kings in the face of a given example’s mediocrity, and so on all the way back to the good old Book of Job.
He’d married the second wife two years before he bagged his second Pulitzer, which came for 1934’s The Trampled Vintage. (Yes, yes. You don’t need to hear about Murphy’s grudge against Steinbeck, do you?) That was the one whose climax cemented his and Pat Carpet’s legends. After the lockout, the brewery workers starkly grouped around the body of Pinky O’Hare, the murdered labor organizer from New York, had just resigned themselves to staying non-unionized when young Russ—the illiterate apprentice Pinky took special care to inspire—started declaiming.
“No! No, listen, youse guys. Listen! I know da night is dark. But Pinky tole me—dat dead man dere tole me [“He has difficulty speaking,” was Murphy’s inspired direction at dat point] de moon is gonna rise. It’s stormy now—and da moon will be red. Dere! Dere it is! See da red moon, youse guys? See da red moon, youse guys?”
Scrambling to his feet [“Suddenly on fire,” Murphy directed, giving the stage manager a bad pause at the first table reading], the actor pointed over the audience’s heads to the auditorium’s back wall. As the stage went dark, a huge round scrim blazed scarlet between the exit signs. A couple of weeks into Vintage’s long run, the crowd in the Rosalie Gypsum’s balcony got their own red moon to file out under, despite Pat Carpet’s protests to John Lavabo that two moons killed the realism.
Bran had recouped just in time, since 1932’s The Mighty Tower hadn’t pleased anybody much. Unreconciled, he always claimed it was his homage to Ibsen, and from my one chat with an actress he’d dallied with between Wives Four and Five—they’d met while he was trying to sell a TV original under a pseudonym to DuMont’s old Roger Wilco Playhouse—I gathered Ayn Rand was a sore subject.
His protagonist, Padraic Titan, was a thunderously successful, prizewinning…architect, just back from the Soviet Union and magnetized by a vision of a Manhattan skyscraper designed as a workers’ paradise. In model form, it was prominently displayed onstage.
The sticking point for critics was titian-haired Ruby Thorp’s role as Asphodel, a.k.a. Mrs. Titan. Her Act Two discovery of her husband’s infidelities with Tatanyas and Sonyas who’d fallen for the rugged American visionary in one plink of a balalaika brought out her narrow-mindedness via a tearful threat to decamp. His eloquent sketches of the bliss they could share if she’d accept that genius has special needs as well as burdens fell on deaf ears, the reviewers’ included.
Asphodel Titan’s failure of imagination was supposed to mirror that of Padraic’s backers, who felled the architect with a heart attack in Act Three by turning his plans for the Mighty Tower into a luxury building for the idle rich. Murphy didn’t do himself any favors when he scoffed away real-life parallels by pointing out that, unlike his hero, he’d never been to the USSR. He wed the second Mrs. Murphy—none other than Ruby, who may’ve refused to start playing the second until she’d got done playing the first—a week after The Mighty Tower closed. Its major prop still dominated his Sutton Place digs in my day.
The first wife had been with him from the start, onstage as the corpse throughout Things Zarathustra Left Unspoken, his bad early play about the Leopold-Loeb case. Then she gave up acting to support her struggling playwright husband by working full time as a department-store mannequin dresser. (Gimbel’s, not Macy’s. Wikipedia, count your blessings.) Her monument was Murphy’s first Pulitzer, in ’28, for Lo! The Ships, the Ships—brawling Yank stokers on shore leave in Asuncion.
“Oops,” you could fairly say to that, as it isn’t a seaport. But otherwise, Murphy’s two college summers working as a shucker on a shrimp boat out of Pascagoula had stood him in good stead. Not until his lone biographer got to work was it cleared up that the only tramp steamer he’d ever swung his duffel bag aboard was Gabby Chatterton, a three-day affair dating to his one trip to Hollywood to raise money for the Loyalist ca
use.
The first Mrs. Murphy, who I never met—buying a train ticket with her first alimony check, she ran a native jewelry shop in Taos before dying, much too soon, in 1940—was the predecessor twenty-one-year-old Pam felt curious about when I took over the lease. It wasn’t because she’d been the same age as me when she married him; if you must know, we all were. I don’t complain about any of my husbands bumping into view when they did, since I was the right Pam for all three at the time. I still can’t help occasionally dottily wondering what it would’ve felt like to be somebody’s first wife.
Posted by:Pam
I’d only just sat down with some people in the Commodore’s bar when Murphy swarmed from the gents’, belatedly pausing to check his trousers before looking back up and plowing toward us with a renewal of the heftily charismatic grin that had molarized Time’s moralizing cover seven years earlier (“A Warning of Disaster: Playwright Brannigan Murphy”). Alisteir Malcolm, books editor at the old Republic and author of Printer’s Devil, Devil’s Printer, a memoir of his days running a small, Satanists-welcome press in the Twenties; Jake Cohnstein, then the theater critic for Rampages and years away from his public conversion to anti-Communism. Addison DeWitt, Jake’s colleague from Our Chains, then still in the politicized early phase his delightful autobiography, An Apple for My Eve, calls “Red Stars in My Eyes.” Besides reviewing plays for OC, he published tense, difficult poetry in Orlando magazine—at least until its Florida-based namesake, all real-estate plugs but nonetheless primus inter pares, threatened legal action for copyright infringement.
There were a few others I don’t remember, and so much for evaluating the reportorial quality as opposed to the bias of the first remark of Murphy’s to leave me poleaxed. Most likely some of them were Jewish, but maybe it only took one Jake Cohnstein to turn him Murphine once he and I were sharing a cab. What I’m sure of is that I was the only woman at that crowded back table, a situation Pam then reveled in.