by Carson, Tom
At that age, I could count on eagerness and a gift of gab to take care of my sex appeal. Along with the Buchanan gams, on good display in a skirt suit from Saks at my carefully chosen outer seat of the booth and hopefully drawing eyes away from the ridiculous miniature hat, pinned atop my brindle mop like a powder-blue pedestal whose feather resembled the display for “Comma” in a punctuation-themed fashion revue, which 1941’s daffy idea of éclat compelled me to wear. I was only outdone the minute someone treating prettiness as her talent was induced to sit down.
Then I was forced to behave like one more suitor if I wanted to stay part of the conversation. Not that I minded much, since my brain and my cigarette were as good at playing one of the boys as my lipstick, legs, and that stupid hat were at announcing I was one of les biches. But you don’t want to get carried away.
The Commodore wasn’t one of our usual spots, since the prices were stiffer and the drinks less so than everyone’s wallets and gullets favored. Alisteir Malcolm had just gotten his Guggenheim, our crowd’s equivalent of knighthood. We were seeing him off in an hour at Grand Central to spend a Vermont summer starting his admonitory novel about Benedict Arnold.
Since Arnold had a) been guilty and b) wasn’t executed, the case didn’t add up to a patch on your average Moscow show trial. Still, American Stalinists were ardent about sticking any Yankee Doodley wig they could on the Russian Revolution’s growing pains and Alisteir’s diabolically unclever essay in the old Republic about Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War had backfired. Even in left-wing circles, the romance of the Confederacy was still in flower, and gluing Jeb Stuart’s face onto Trotsky’s did not have the desired effect.
Oh, Panama! The intellectual life was such a Donnybrook Farm back then. If that devil Chad Diebold thought he had me on Pam’s French upbringing, her flirtation with the Communist call in the last couple of years before Pearl Harbor ought to make tomorrow’s news coverage of my act of telephonic terrorism write itself.
Posted by: Pam the Red Menace
It would be fun and not inaccurate to remind Chad I was barely out of my teens and excited by Manhattan’s high-speed amoeba dance. I just refuse to trivialize things that way.
Unlike Bran, I was never a defender of the Soviet Union under Stalin. That may’ve been a symptom of temperament rather than belief: like all defeated factions, the Trotskyites made better jokes. Even so, my main later disagreement with Jake Cohnstein—we did some colloquium in the late Seventies, Pam subbing for a too busy Mary McCarthy—was and is my inability to see why rejecting Communism’s travesty of the ideals we’d thought we were furthering should require Communism’s apostates to scorn the ideals themselves, justice to the disenfranchised and an end to privilege and so on.
Jake said something into his microphone about once bitten, twice shy. I said something into mine about babies and bathwater. Then we baffled our audience (Bowdoin?) by succumbing to a case of the chuckles in our dilapidated way. Not having seen each other above half a dozen times since he’d turned down Gerson’s offer of a job at Rik-Kuk Productions in 1954, we’d had quite the boozy, reminiscent lunch beforehand, and the polysyllables just weren’t coming like they used to.
Alisteir Malcolm never got in any trouble. His slowness spared the old drayhorse from swimming against the tide when his novel Refreshed with Blood (the quote is Jefferson’s) finally appeared in ’47—and was taken as a prescient endorsement of our HUAC, not an out-of-step paean to the NKVD. To my knowledge, Alisteir never complained about the misperception, which by publication day he may have shared. Despite the officiousness he affected when assigning me book reviews—“See here, young lady” coming out at the drop of a comma, and isn’t pomposity as a way of making oneself colorful pomposity at its most forlorn?—he was basically a wistful dullard, eager to participate in The Literary Life in whatever shape it took. As I recall, his final piece in the old Republic was a 1972 defense of black humor as the coming vogue.
Truth to tell, we’d all started glancing around fairly frantically for a waiter as soon as we sat down, knowing we’d need a lot of oiling to get through an hour when Alisteir could claim our undivided attention as his Guggenheimerized due. By the time our drinks came, the back of Addison’s head was eloquently tipped to the wall at my shoulder. I could smell his hair ointment: “It’s all right, I spell it poum-ade,” he’d muttered as his nape came to rest.
Murphy had pretty clearly been tanked since noon, but his liquor held him well. I will grant him virility, which in my senescence amounts to granting him Baja California as empires go. Since I was twenty-one, it was partly the virility of fame.
Fists in the pockets of a jacket impressively tailored to organize but not mitigate the Murphine bulk’s aggressiveness—fond of good clothes as a mark of authority, he’d answered the letter congratulating him on Prometheus in Madrid from Robert Jordan Baker, the hero’s real-life model, by inquiring if the International Brigades had a regimental tie—he made his feet’s mild uncertainties at the nature of the communications they were receiving from the Murphine brain look like a boxer’s ominous reflexes as his Time-cover grin led a one-man parade. When he reached us, the sweep of his muscled forearm exposed a Rolex so ostentatiously complicated it looked less like a Soviet fighter pilot’s timepiece than his plane’s engine.
“Sitting out the war on the home front, I see. Why aren’t you defending Brest-Litovsk?” he said, immunized from his own challenge by virtue of the simple fact that he was standing up. You know, prepared to go, the moment the Kremlin’s overlord said, “Comrades, I can do no more. Summon Brannigan Murphy.”
“But I did. Just last month, at a party at Rose Dawson’s,” protested Alisteir, genuinely confused. “Oh, why—I misunderstood.”
“Don’t worry, Bran,” said Addison without lifting his head. “We know the Red Army will knock ’em back. That’s why we’re doing the same.” He dandled his glass.
(Oh, Christ. You’ll need a glossary, won’t you? Let l’équipe oblige. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended newly Bolshevized Russia’s participation in World War One; I can’t imagine under what circumstances Alisteir could’ve felt summoned to defend it in May of 1941, especially on Rose Butaker Dawson’s Cunard Heights balcony. The POUM was a Trotskyite faction whose militia ended up crushed by Spain’s government to Stalin’s glee if not on his orders. If you don’t know what the Red Army was, screw this.)
Murphy’s eyes had been prowling as if they were two lions and our table was the Colosseum. Now they found me: “Well, hello. I haven’t seen you before, have I? Come on, Addison, who’s the, your—”
“I do believe ‘skirt’ is the windmill word you’re tilting at. And she ain’t mine, you mug,” Addison said. “Pamela Buchanan”—his flourished hand glided from under my nose to Murphy’s general direction—“a party unknown.”
“Didn’t Mike Gold use that as a title last year?” Alisteir asked. “I might like to if he didn’t. Does anyone remember?”
He knew he’d been demoted. Up against two Pulitzers, one Guggenheim was defenseless. He was pretending he could still manage the conversation even if his promised treat of getting to dominate it was history.
“Watch out for this one, Murph,” Jake Cohnstein told him, meaning me: Murphy’s appraising grin had been no more deflected by Alisteir’s question than a locomotive by a gopher. “We haven’t lured her all the way out of hiding yet, but in her cups she can sound awfully fond of that old man in Mexico who so mysteriously did himself in with a pickax last year.”
“Oh, come on!” said Murphy, flaring up. “Christ’s sake, Cohnstein. Even we don’t say it was suicide.”
As Jake’s calm smirk advertised his joy in that phrasing, my future hubby grew restless. Decided Jake had only been translating for me and done an unfairly well-equipped job.
“Well, then. Little Miss You.” His grin had br
oadened with belligerence’s idea of easier game. “What did we see in Trotsky, back at Vassar? I can’t wait to hear your expert reasons for defending a traitor to me.”
Believe me, Panama, in the past eighteen months or so I’d seen that look more than once. Not on the face of anyone this famous, but some bulls you grab by the horns.
“Aw, becaw he wah so kew,” I bawled, seizing the fat end of Addison’s tie to hold it to one ear as I tilted my face and put my thumb to my lips. After frowning over it, I batted my eyes—Pam’s best facial feature, remember—at Murphy like Baby Snooks.
Unlike my second and third husbands, my first was humorless. He’d learned his way around humor’s shoals in the same way that in other crowds, at other bars, his gaze would sort the customers into who he could and couldn’t take in a fistfight. “I think I owe you a drink,” he told me.
“Another round, barkeep,” Addison said. “Murph, did you mean just this room?”
“I’ve got one, thanks,” I said.
He shook his head. “Not here. The hell with the Commodore. I’ve got some people I’m supposed to meet downtown. They’ll like you.”
“As she stepped into the Black Maria, Pammie heard a soft murmur of—why, could that be Russian?” Addison said. “And then, those coats.”
“Brannigan, my train’s in forty minutes. Do you mind?”
“Oh, come off it, Alisteir,” said Jake Cohnstein. “If he’d asked you, we’d be sitting here coughing up your dust by now.”
“And if I’d asked you?”
That was Murphy not only seizing his victory but being pretty brutal about it. Jake took the punch well, though.
“You’d have to put a pickax in my skull first. And I stand by everything I wrote about Colum Firth. ‘See da yellow feather waving, youse guys? Does youse?’”
“Too bad. I always did wonder if I’d like it. Do you have a wrap you need to fetch?” Murphy asked me.
“Oh, look, Pammie’s drink is gone,” Addison said. He’d just reached over and drained it. “What will poor Pammie do now?”
Posted by: Pam
Is “hooking up” what your generation calls it, bikini girl? You’ve got nothing on the Forties. Mine, anyway.
In fact, to hell with calendars. In Pink Thing’s malleable archives, it became the Forties at the instant I shook my head to Murphy’s coatroom question and reminded everyone the Buchanan gams weren’t just decorative. Unless I’d grabbed a pair of Dottie’s frillies by mistake, my underwear was fresh from our Bank Street fridge—old single-gal trick in pre-A/C days—and as usual for safety’s sake on social evenings, my little pessary and tube of Nonoxynol were snug in their case in my bag.
Understand, those men were genuinely my friends. They’d never have stood for seeing Pam stumble off into the night with a writer less illustrious than they were. But those two Pulitzers were clanking like Murphy’s third and fourth testicles and even Jake Cohnstein couldn’t say he’d got them from Stalin.
The chance to figuratively cuckold him in advance is another reason I wish Pink Thing could serve up the full cast list of men perusing their cigarettes’ glow in that combatively reflective Forties way and adjusting their specs or raking their hair around that table as they prepared to Algonquinize my hookup before they went back to giving Alisteir Malcolm his Guggen-Heimlich maneuver. No luck among those I remember, not that I’ve got any special regrets. Alisteir had both a wife in the East Thirties (“I wouldn’t mind if Esther didn’t understand me. I mean, why bother?” he once accurately moaned. “But she doesn’t understand ‘the revolution in one country,’ either”) and a wide-hipped, savagely cleavaged secretary at the old Republic’s office who, in the way of these things, had turned out to be the more demanding of the two. In one pursuit he shared with Bran, Addison was addicted to actresses; he was chasing young Terry Randall that summer. As for Jake, he’d spent all spring besotted with a pimply Paramount usher, by which I do not mean usherette.
Let me guess. You’d pegged Addison, hadn’t you? Wrong, wrong. Panama, there was a time when men could be both witty and heterosexual—I am the woman, I was there, I laughed. Slept with a couple, too. Never Addison, but his thirty years of wedded bliss once he finally tied the knot easily outlasted my first and second marriages put together. Jake, on the other hand, bore up under the paradoxical asceticism of a man who woke up every morning juggling Trotskyism, dramaturgy, the Old Testament, and reveries of Tahitian lads in flyspeck loincloths. My future hubby had clearly known which of those—not the old man in Mexico, but the boy in Midtown—invited the lowest blow.
Unblessed by longevity, Jake’s dingy chases after subliterates whose smiles were as rare as Loyalist victories left him pained and haggard. By way of reprieve, a couple of nights a week he’d tersely decline a third round and explain he was going out to Brooklyn to stay with his family, leaving us peculiarly touched that a man of forty as cosmopolitan as he was could still be comforted by Pop and Mama Cohnstein’s Williamsburg hearth. Daisy’s daughter needed some getting used to the idea that, in certain circumstances, parental obliviousness can be soothing.
As I got up, Murphy beamed in frank appreciation at the sight of Pam and gams unfolding like a whooping crane. “Buck up, Alisteir,” he said to my editor, who was still befuddled by how his bon voyage had turned into mine. “It’s not as if we’re packing you off to Siberia. She’ll be here in September!” Indeed the new Mrs. Murphy was.
Peculiarly, that seemed to prompt poor Alisteir to list Siberia’s ingredients. “Ice, tar—”
“And so will Russia. Like it or not, gents,” Murphy cut him off to advise the room at large, making up for the round of drinks he hadn’t bought by offering the contents of his own skull around Odin-style. “Ready, Snooks?”
“I started out as a pacifist,” Alisteir’s successful Polonius groan detained us. (It was true; compensating for not having been a veteran of the Great War by establishing himself as a veteran of the peace, his dreary poems about mass dismemberment and disarmament had been collected as A Chorister’s Song in Parlous Times in long-gone 1919.) “Can anyone tell me why does war always make everything easier? Damn it to hell. Last night I banged Esther for the first time in three months. I don’t know—she just looked good.”
“Careful, Alisteir. The walls have secretaries,” Addison said. “But I never gave a hydroelectric dam for ‘revolution in one country’ myself. Full fathom five thy Trotsky lies, so let’s just hope they win. Confess it, Bran: haven’t you missed hating Hitler?”
“He doesn’t know what he’s let himself in for,” said Murphy bluffly, already picturing how A Clock with Twisted Hands would let a chastened Führer know he’d just awakened Sutton Place’s sleeping giant. “Come on, kid. Let’s go.” And we went.
The cabs on 42nd Street were sweeping along on now obscure wheels like low-flying birds in the dark. When the weather’s good, what stepping into night does for Manhattan’s noises and purposes is to temporarily generalize them. It creates a blissful, blued illusion of energetically flowing tranquility.
Murphy had steered me out of the Commodore and across the street by one elbow. In the cab, he offered a Murphine shoulder as a bulwark. I opted instead for Pamlatticed coquetting on my side of the banquette, my still fresh proximity to Addison’s POUM-ade making me gingerly about accepting another set of male smells so soon. I didn’t want to be olfactorily promiscuous.
“What were you doing with that bunch of sheenies, anyway?” my future hubby asked comfortably. “And with a good name like Buchanan, too.”
“Oh! Well, of course it was Pam Slivovitz before I changed it,” I drawled. “And incidentally: it was Barnard, not Vassar. I stress was.”
Posted by: Pam
I do realize, Panama, that these last few posts have zoomed past Pam Buchanan: The Barnard Years. One reason I didn’t graduate is that I
was raring to get on, so why act differently now? I’ve spent enough time posing in dorms on daisysdaughter.com—modeling quaint schoolgirl fashions, exposing my strawberry pancakes and honey to bait Hormel. Overseeing the development of a body that, while never the curviest, ended up rangy and maneuverable in a number of ways I was told were pleasing.
One reason I regret pretzelhood is that those two or three inches of extra height were my social calling card in new places for decades; it takes a real lust for shyness to keep it up at five ten. One reason I won’t regret making my big exit when the White House finally calls is that I just don’t make entrances like I used to. With any luck, I’ll be one pretzel Potus will choke on.
Far from losing my nerve, I’ve twice considered calling dear Bob’s office to see if they can light a fire under the White House. But to someone ignorant of my plan, my impatience would be sure to sound like an old bag’s pathetic eagerness for attention. Maybe I’ll be dead in hours, but I’d like to go out clean, an ambition I’m sure my Senatorial benefactor will understand. He is less than three years younger than I am, and he served in World War Two.
Unlike me, however, he finished college first. Pleased as my guardian was that I’d gotten into Barnard—except in French, my grades hadn’t been spectacular—its main flaw as an establishment of higher education had started to glare at me inside seventy-two hours. It had New York for competition.
To my eyes, Manhattan on subway maps resembled a lean but many-branched Christmas tree whose presents were heaped near the bottom: around Union and Washington Squares. It took me under half my first semester to winkle out where the excitement was, and the Columbia boys who were my first guides to New York radicalism should’ve taken vows of silence at graduation. They’d used up their share and then some of polemical oxygen.