by Carson, Tom
As promised, the central prop from his play about Padraic Titan stood before the center window in the large living room. Unfortunately, its shaft was dwarfed by the great leap into the dark of the Queensboro Bridge, no bogus architect’s model and already venerable. Beyond the river’s flowing coffin—odd image, but its belustered black had handles to my eyes—were Astoria, the unrevisited Long Island of Pam’s childhood, the Atlantic.
We had a drink; we chatted. The unnerving haste with which he’d picked me up or I’d let myself be picked up demanded a pause to civilize us. He told me where the idea for Colum Firth’s rape of the mannequin had originated: not as a symbol of political frustration—“Jake Cohnstein was full of hooey”—but after watching a religious procession in Little Italy go by. He predicted the Red Army would put Moscow to the torch before letting a single invader set foot there. “Just like in 1812,” my future hubby boasted, proving his grasp of pre-Bolshevik Russian history wasn’t all it might be.
Not that I saw much percentage in being pedantic then or indeed want to be pedantic now. Yet Bonaparte did view the fire’s troubling beginnings from inside the Kremlin. He’d had a wonderful time there for a while. That’s why “Moscowa” is among the names of his great victories inlaid in gold in the onyx base that girdles his tomb at the Invalides, even though it proved short-lived and ended in a disastrous retreat. He later said he wished he’d died the day he entered in triumph, which even Cassandre conceded was plutôt beau as our jonquil-hatted troop peered down at the love-cheated little clown’s enormous coffin and remains the only comment of his I ever found touching. I generally dislike him. As before, l’équipe here at daisysdaughter.com thanks you for your attention to this utterly irrelevant matter.
Then, taking up my handbag as unobtrusively as possible—but why in hell be unobtrusive? I could’ve kicked furniture and yelled “I don’t want to get pregnant,” and that wouldn’t have made it any more obvious—Pam asked to be aimed at the bathroom. I don’t know if you’re on the Pill or need to be, Panama, something I doubt your dad likes to dwell on even if he’s in the loop. If so, lucky you for just getting to pop your birth control like a Tic Tac. Those crouching, squirted Forties preparations amid admonitory tile and porcelain were no fun at all.
On the other hand, as Dottie had more than once reminded me, they weren’t optional on dates with men, unlike the answer to a question I always disliked—namely, how to make my theoretically seductive reappearance. Unless you were a hell of a lot racier than I was, it just wasn’t done to skip back out in the old birthday suit. Even Dottie, far more uninhibited than I, admitted she couldn’t face that combination of road to Damascus and drama critic in male eyes.
Besides, the Buchanan bod, however friendly—thanks again, Hopsie!—didn’t exactly conform to the Forties’ ideal of pulchritude, with an upper endowment that didn’t rival even Dottie’s own petite dotties despite Pam’s extra three inches of height and slightly equine hips that made it easy to tell when I’d grabbed a pair of my roommate’s undies from fridge, floor, or Dover by mistake. She only ever envied me my legs—or emjambments, as we called them, amusing ourselves once again with our shared private passion for poetry.
Even though the tucked-towel look did the most for the Buchanan gams while minimizing Pam’s upper inadequacies, it had just reminded me of poor Hormel. After some hesitation, I took the royal Murphine dressing gown off its hook and wrapped that around me instead, but I must’ve lingered in there longer than I’d realized. As I crossed the long, now empty living room from prop tower to real but inaccessible bridge, Murphy loomed up in the bedroom’s darkened doorway, his torso comically Roman in a half wound sheet. “I was wondering where that was,” said he, honestly disgruntled before he remembered that this was a seduction scene, not a bad day at the Lost and Found.
Posted by: Pam
Once we’d retired to the royal chamber, the old buck and wing went well enough at first. He was famous and soused, I was twenty-one and tipsy; the lamp was off, and the Mighty Tower, if thankfully not comparable to the ad, was okay. For a couple of minutes, anyhow, after which the Buchanan bod started to feel like a pummeled stairwell as stubborn furniture movers plugged away. Bump, bump, bump, not getting anywhere, Bannister. Without previous bouts of Murphine buck and wing to guide me, I couldn’t tell if this was his pleasure or evidenced his lack of it.
Of course, he was as wordless as a bulldozer, and I wasn’t about to ask. Even at that untutored age, querying a dieseling male face with an anxious “Is something wrong?” wasn’t my idea of a great moment in intimacy. Yet while it hadn’t been that warm a night, the room was growing stifling. The smacks of the burly Murphine poitrine on Pam’s strawberry pancakes might as well have been the soundtrack to a scaremongering documentary about the Everglades.
He’d had a lot to drink, but I had no way of knowing if that was Murphy’s Achilles heel or his motivation. As the minutes kept landing soggy, overheated punches, I realized my eyes were now so well adjusted to the dark that I could’ve written my next book review on the ceiling. Visualizing Alisteir Malcolm’s face, as I helplessly did, was no great way to put paid to Pam’s worry that she was on the receiving end of the two-backed version of writer’s block.
Did he think he was building the goddam Moscow subway? Just too loyal to Comrade Stalin to protest the non-arrival of a train. A five-year plan, a five-year plan, a five…? Dear God, I’d be twenty-six when he came! My youth gone, my clothes out of fashion. Crazed with hunger to boot.
I may have actually sobbed, which didn’t throw the switch either. Bran could be brutal, but a sadist he wasn’t. I was honestly wondering if there was a pistol in reach when an unmistakably appreciative tail-wag in response to Pam’s limp caress made me realize how the future might work.
By then, I’d’ve tried anything to make this gulag stint end in laggardly goo. I’d never done it before, but my hunch and hope both were that expertise wasn’t a requirement. Soaking a forefinger in hard-won saliva, I did my dubious, où est la plume de ma debutante-ish best to stick it where red moons don’t shine.
Murphy columned firth like a spout. All of ten seconds later, as I lay thinking that the always awkward transition back to one’s conversational self might be a bit stickier than usual, I heard a snore.
Posted by: Pam
I was up first the next morning. Showered long, then—still heaped on the bathroom floor, my clothes looked singularly morbid—rewrapped myself in the royal dressing gown. Can’t say if I wanted to provoke him, be declarative in some unformulated way, or just didn’t think about it or give a fuck. Thank God, my handbag still held half a pack of smokes.
I made my own coffee, amazed by a kitchen I both could and had to walk around in. Then I sat down to figure out what I’d call myself if I weren’t me. Truth to tell, this kind of instant coupling was unprecedented in Pam’s not really that extravagant experience. Up to then, my occasional innings, however unromantic, had been with men I’d at least palled around with some first.
While I hadn’t managed to stay friends afterward with all of them, two out of three seemed pretty civilized. I might’ve even managed a grand slam if I hadn’t stopped having any reason to run into my elevator deflowerer once I’d dropped out of Barnard and moved to the Village.
As for the other two, I’m still sure one if not both of their faces was bobbing among the supernumerary blobs around the Commodore bar’s back table at Alisteir’s sendoff. If how much of a mark either beau left on Pink Thing’s archives is measured by your Gramela’s inability to positively fit so much as hornrims on one or confidently light a cigarette for the other, the situation nonetheless makes it obvious we could be sociable just ten and eleven months later with no strain.
I hadn’t been planning on going out at all. After we got up, Dottie Idell, still on her seafood kick, had spent the rest of Sunday afternoon dreamily inventing an oyste
r stew to end all oyster stews. When the phone call came from Addison, I’d practically bolted to the Commodore, to my roommate’s hurt surprise.
She’d just cracked ’em foister, and all she had left to do was drop them in. I might’ve wavered if she hadn’t gone into another of her farce poetry declamations—burbling “The sea is calm tonight” for the second time that day, my God. The first recital of “Dover Beach” had been triggered by hearing the news of Hitler’s attack on Russia on the radio, but only an unfeeling ninny would reprise it.
If Murphy hadn’t shown up, I don’t know who the hell I’d have gone home with. Bless fate for at least rigging the schedule to ensure Alisteir Malcolm had a train to catch.
Anyhow, in fairness to myself, Murphy didn’t really fit the bill of complete stranger. Meaning, of course, that his fame had imbued Pam’s first-ever sight of him with a magnetic familiarity, creating an illusion this wasn’t our first encounter. My companions’ chaffing as soon as he swept his Rolex at us had no doubt helped. I got used to the double-exposure effect in my Hollywood years.
Early on, I was constantly treating people I’d only known in two dimensions as if they were people I’d known in three. They were clearly too used to it to gainsay me, even though for better or worse none of them took the advantage of that confusion that Bran unmistakably did. Since I was older and less susceptible by then, I’d have also been a hell of lot more likely to say “Hey, hang on a minute.” There is a Washington version of the phenomenon, but during most Administrations the magnetic aura around a famous face seen in 3-D is more likely to be repellent than beguiling.
Posted by: Pam
Reasoning with cigaretted help that I’d sort of known Murphy before Sunday night was about as far as Monday-morning Pam had gotten when the man himself came bounding in, bathed and fully dressed. Apparently, a fresh shirt and slacks made the dressing-gown issue moot. It hadn’t been possessiveness per se, just Bran’s easily nettled sense of his own most appropriate costume.
“Hello, Snooks.” Turning my head to chuck me under the chin, he grinned his Time-cover grin. Then he turned fatherly, not that I’d know from experience: “Listen, kid. If we’re going to be an item, one thing you should know. What happened last night is never to be repeated, understand?”
“You mean you didn’t want me to do it?”
“I didn’t exactly say that. But it can’t ever be spoken of.” A Murphine finger wigwagged from his chest to mine. “Not even between you and I.”
“Me,” I said automatically. “But between you and me, we seem to be talking about it now.”
He frowned. “I won’t need help every time,” he said, which turned out to be true. Even so, the single exception that proved him right isn’t my fondest memory. “And I know it’s got nothing to do with who Brannigan Murphy is. This headshrinker I’ve been seeing—”
“Wait. You go to a psychiatrist?” Call the Forties unenlightened, Panama. Picturing a man like Murphy on the couch was tantamount to learning that the Himalayas were made of construction paper and pie topping.
He looked derisive. “Of course! For research. He doesn’t know I’m analyzing him. I’m out to paint the big picture of my times, Snooks. Like Pushkin or Gogol. I’ve got a play sketched that’s going to knock the stuffing out of that quack, bourgeois profession, and he’s one stupid bastard. I’m using an alias, and he doesn’t even recognize me.”
“I think you mean Balzac or Zola, Bran,” I said. (Wifely of me, don’t you think? I spared him repeating it in print.) “Tell me, how long have you been doing this, research?”
“Two years, give or take a month or two. I’m about ready to wrap it up. I told you, kid, he’s a stupid bastard. That’s just why he’s perfect for me. Anyhow, he thinks my nursemaid back in Pittsburgh—”
“Wait. You had a nursemaid?” In every interview, Murphy claimed he’d gone to sea to escape the bitter poverty of his upbringing. Not until long after his death did his lone biographer check the enrollment records for Andover’s Class of 1917.
“Really just a good Irish woman from the neighborhood. My parents were kidding themselves, Snooks. Poor bastards, with their delusional middle-class pretensions! Anyhow, it was before the Crash.”
“Well, of course it was before the Crash, Bran,” I said. “You were thirty years old when the market crashed. And living here. My God, is Mrs. Gillooley about?”
You’d be wrong to think his courtship of me that July was fueled by anxiety that Pam had the goods on him. The right word would be excitement, and for all I know that’s how it worked with the other wives too. While I’m not by any means complaining, he never showed the faintest interest in getting the goods on me. After I’d turned thumbs down on Cape Cod, unmoved by my new husband’s muscular memories of working on Lo! The Ships, the Ships there during what I thought of as the Summer of the Lotus Eater, we honeymooned instead on Maine’s coast in August, Murphy often remarking that the landscape reminded him of his seagoing days.
2. A Husband with Three Heads
Posted by: Pam
Why don’t they call us, Cadwaller’s gun? It’s not as if they’re so bloody busy taking care of the planet’s prospects. I was no good at science in my abbreviated schooldays, but I can read a thermometer.
If the summer that’s coming is the furnace the last one was, the instructions I’ve just printed out for disposing of Pam could end up making me the envy of the sweltering folk left behind. Compared to the bog they’ll be reeling around in, my trip into the incinerator at Gawler’s could sound as refreshing as Dottie Idell’s old Bank Street tradition—dear God, sixty-five years ago!—of opening the icebox door to let its frost breathe on our skins: “We’ve earned it,” she’d say. “Oh, just a couple of minutes. Then August can do what it wants.”
At least you’ve got the body for it, Panama. When the Lycra clutching your newly theatrical globes and molding your oyster become fit attire for a New York December, you’ll have less reason than your portly dad to shudder at doing your Christmas shopping in the near nude. How I pity those soggy Macy’s Santas.
Of course, in July’s 140-degree broil, even that much clothing will have to come off, bikini girl! Let poor harried Tim go crosseyed, I want you to be comfortable. Pity you won’t be visiting Provincetown anymore unless you’ve got scuba gear. Maybe the very tip of the Pilgrim Monument will still be above water, qualifying as landfall now only to Chekhovian seagulls.
Shan’t see it, but Potus might. I picture him spending his declining years in a Texas the size and shape of Delaware. Glancing down, he spots a moldy piece of ancient string knotted around one formerly Potusian finger: “Oh, darn,” he mutters sheepishly.
Unlike him, I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything important. Checks to the cleaning lady and Gawler’s; one last sentimental check each to Alley Cat Allies and the good old ACLU. Disposition of the African Adam and Eve, Ganesh, the signed La Coupole menu and the copper maquette you Cadwallers named The African Queen. People can take from the Paris footlocker what they like except for my mother’s chaotic pages of The Gold-Hatted Lover, which Andy’s been told to burn. I don’t want dead Daisy met that way by people who never knew her.
Tucking checks and to-do list into an envelope marked “Andy” felt puzzlingly familiar until I realized how closely my chore mimicked the detailed instructions for Kelquen’s care I used to leave for him when I traveled. A few years in, he gently swore he knew the drill.
One other thing I’ve done since my last daisysdaughter.com post struck even me as eccentric. Though I haven’t autographed a book in decades, I clumped over to the trophy bookcase and took down my copies of Nothing Like a Dame, Glory Be, and Lucky for the Sun. Turning to the title page, not flyleaf—author’s prerogative, you know—I signed all three. Dedication: “To whom it may concern.”
Posted by: Pam Slivovitz
&nbs
p; You never can tell. Murphy, whose pearly-white choppers once dentifriced Time’s cover, was a forgotten man writing ballooned dialogue for Seamus Shield, Agent of Fury when he died in Moscow, Idaho—ah, the Murphy touch—in 1964. His Collected Plays (Hofstra, 1981) could probably’ve been printed upside down without anyone discovering the mistake. The lone biography—Dat Dead Man Dere, by a nice but not too talented Canadian named Garth Vader—didn’t even get Garth tenure at the University of Saskatchewan.
Sadder still, as Bran’s theatrical reputation winks out, Seamus Shield has been rediscovered by the sort of overgrown lads whose Adam’s apples seem to tug their faces along behind them like skittish kites. I gather it’s mostly for the artwork, but even Pam gets an occasional e-inquiry. I always write back explaining that the hero’s prosthetic steel arm and curvaceous, loyal assistant, Nadya—who doesn’t become Mrs. Shield until a convenient villain has torn her tongue out, arousing Seamus’s pity—long postdate my trip through the marital tollbooth.
Yet for a couple of unwitting million TV viewers who dote on his vital essence, Brannigan Murphy lives. When Andy Pond calls or stops by in the evenings, he’s usually horrified by which cable-news channel the mimsies are glued to, but what can I do, Panama? Am I supposed to ignore a television network apparently designed for no other purpose than to remind me of my first husband?
The saying that leopards can’t change their spots will no doubt outlive the last four-footed example, giving the species a conversational hold on life for a couple more brow-mopping decades before the proverb fades like the Cheshire Cat’s grin. Watching the spots switch leopards is one of the grimmer fascinations of my old age. Needless to say, what Pink Thing snickeringly calls the Murphy Channel has no idea it’s channeling Murphy.