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

by Carson, Tom

  The problem was that we were at war all over the world by the Sunday. Theatergoers couldn’t see much merit in being scolded for our ostrich neutrality when we were losing an island in the Pacific every time another barkeep snapped on a radio. Bran tried to rewrite Brendan’s least germane jeremiads to make room for Pearl Harbor, but they’d been the point and Pat Carpet, his contract for Washed Away (yes, they’d shortened the title) signed, was in California before Christmas. Only because Clock was “the new Brannigan Murphy” did it limp along for six weeks of half filled houses before closing after forty-nine performances.

  It didn’t win Viper Leigh fame, not even as a saboteur. From my steamed hubby’s viewpoint, his improvised slander came true in court. Still, her reign on the witness stand in late May ’43 only made her a star in the tabs.

  Hal Lime, of course, did go to Hollywood. Pat Carpet had already slipped him a sub rosa promise at Clock’s dress rehearsal of the second lead as Foyle, the hero’s light-hearted pal, as soon as Washed Away went in front of the cameras. Most likely that explains how come he only slapped instead of knifing me.

  All in all, it does seem unfair to Bran that the only person to benefit from A Clock with Twisted Hands was his wife. Ard knows, not because anyone ever gave me another acting job! Gerson only let Mrs. G. have a fleeting mute cameo in The Gal I Left Behind Me, and not only did he love me but that may’ve been proof. My stroke of luck was that Roy Charters was Floss Bicuspid’s nephew.

  Otherwise, the newly promoted editor of Regent’s magazine—defunct since 1966, it was on a par with Collier’s (and isn’t that a big help in placing it?) in its day—wouldn’t have been at Sardi’s when our tense mob turned up. Instantly lost in his tweeds and office-mussed hair among our clownish tuxes and gowns, the man who’d spring me from book reviewing to go cover the home front’s assembly-line Minervas and rosily riveting shipbuilders was so at home with being out of place that until he opened his mouth my first guess was he was a refugee.

  When I told him so later, Roy chuckled and said he’d known right away I was: “From what was the question. You sure gave me my pick.” I’m not sure he ever guessed all of them, despite being smarter than his aunt. Take it from me, Panama: if you ever worry about a man’s intelligence, sleep with him. He’ll never ask you another question that doesn’t seem faintly stupid.

  Posted by: Pamderer

  Don’t misunderstand. Roy and I didn’t make the beast with two left feet until midway through my divorce trial. With Viper’s Bran-blackening testimony still as fresh as her lipstick in my ears—must rethink that construction before I hit “Post,” Ard—I knew it was all over but the pouting.

  In one of his rare points in common with Murphy, Roy was twice my age. I still had fewer problems than he did recognizing that the real meaning of our blowsy, slack sex was its pointlessness. Divorce-demoralized himself, as his wife Cath—incidentally my agent after the war—had gotten a bit too overjoyed about pronouncing Manhattan “Menhattan” back in summer ’42, my editor was experimenting with being un-Roylike and failing. Which brought us full circle, considering my gaga Pamquivalent when we first met.

  To say the least, I haven’t been around theatrical people in a while. I don’t know if they still follow tradition by packing some Midtown restaurant to wait for the papers. After the kind of opening we’d had, a pack of eels spilled onto a fishing boat would’ve had a better chance of figuring out the right attitude. You can imagine how grateful I am Roy stayed determined to treat me as a squid netted by accident.

  As I think I’ve mentioned, Ard, I was pretty sozzled by the time he introduced himself. That didn’t make me stand out. Early on, all that had cut through the jumble of exhilarated anxiety was Floss Bicuspid trilling Ma Bell Époquishly to a nameless someone: “Wonderful! Such good news. Yes, of course I’ll tell them. Thank you.”

  Turning to a dozen eager faces—did she have an in at the Times? Old hand that she was, could she have been speaking directly to Santa?—she indignantly drew herself up to her full weight. “Honestly, all of you! I’m quite sure everyone will be glad to hear our Viper’s all right.” I wonder who else Hal Lime spoke for—and how accurately he’d pegged her motives, since actors are privy to all sorts of insights they never apply to themselves—when he called out, “Thanks, Floss. We all know how noble you are.”

  As for me, I’d half expected to be pelted with crudités when I slumped through the door. But in the frantic limbo we all occupied, I was just another spewed bit of Clock’s innards, too inept to catch on that the free pass I was getting meant they’d all known about Bran and Viper. Even Hans Caligar’s strenuously lively account of an avant-garde Midsummer Night’s Dream in Zurich—“I was playing Bottom, and I was the only one who wasn’t wearing a donkey’s head”—went by without me guessing he’d told it to console me.

  Two tables away (tables as obstructions, not locations; everyone was too keyed up to sit down), Bran was flashing his Time-cover grin and Murphying away about Prom in Madrid’s rough birth. Despite my breathless redisguise as the latest Mrs. Murphy, I’d done enough bloody acting for his sake tonight that I was damned if I’d go wifily Boswell-that-ends-well his monologue. A dozen conversations had turned into shrieks at masks by the time Floss said, “Here she is, Roy” and hurried to rejoin the pigeons peering out the window for news trucks: Sardi’s overdressed parody of urchins peering in.

  The middle-aged teddy bear who put out his hand clearly wasn’t a Great White Way denizen, since his manner wasn’t affected by the setting. It’s not that theater folk aren’t intelligent so much as that they’re in a constant panic over what it’s good for besides inventing demeanors, and the volatility gets fatiguing. If also, in the right wrong mood, infectious, which is why I give Roy points for patience.

  “This may not be the time, but I did want to tell you how much I liked your review of Rita Cavanagh’s last book,” he teddy-bore down on me through the din. Now you know why I remember that one. “What was it, Sable Coat?”

  “No, no! Sybil Choate,” I yowled back—strident as a trident, rum punch and cigarette held in an air curtsy. “But a pose by any other name. If you ask me, she should’ve stuck to poetry.”

  “They did ask you,” Roy reminded me. “Tell me, though. Do you write fiction yourself?”

  “Me? Oh, hell no. Look around, Mr. Man! I just live it.”

  “That’s reassuring,” he said, ignoring the intrusion of another sham Pam who didn’t concern him. “One thing I wondered about was whether you might have some competitive ax you were grinding.”

  “God, no! I just can’t abide all these Twenties relics coming out of the woodwork to go pietistic on us. I mean, look how well their first idea of what life was all about worked out.”

  “Oh, that’s right!” Roy told Sardi’s ceiling. “Forgive me. I’d forgotten who your mother was. But I’m sure that’s very unfair to you, so please ignore it.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I admitted to my own rum-punched surprise. Not to mention dead Daisy’s, since my mother had gotten pretty damned smug about her suicide’s status as the worst thing that would ever happen to me. My new candor told her an adjustment had been made.

  “I doubt it’ll always be,” he said handsomely, a word Roy restored to its original meaning. “I’ll tell you what got me curious, though: you one-upping poor Rita about Europe. Where’d all that come out of?”

  Is it any wonder I reacted like a desert somebody had discovered water in? Nobody’d asked for that vaudeville spiel in months. Along with the rest of my pre-Murphy c.v., reprises of Ram-Pam-Pam’s upbringing weren’t in demand at Sutton Place. Beyond that, I’d grasped at long last that this looming head was trying to talk to Pamela Buchanan. Her I knew how to play.

  How, yes. Why, no. Sick of the comedy I’d been miscast in since June, I was like-mother-like-daughterishly out to break the
camel’s back with the first straw I drew. My jalopy lingerie would’ve been hanging off one instep in Viper’s face—Bran’s too, of course—as soon as any plausible man showed interest. Ten Chignonned and mieux Hitler que Blum minutes later, when a newly confident Roy (I just didn’t realize in which of us his confidence had grown) asked for my phone number—and a Murphy plainly alerted by John Lavabo’s gurgle to the identity of Regent’s unprepossessing top dog came toward us festooned with bluster—I murmured as I passed it to him, “My husband works at home.”

  “I’m sorry?” honest Roy said, honestly confused.

  “Oh, nothing! Please do call.”

  Posted by: Pam

  I was surprised when he did on December 10th. I’d had other things on my mind: frying pans, fires. As my clot of a hubby moped over Clock’s lackluster business, oblivious to the succession of sad or silly Vipers simpering or whimpering in plain and fancy sight wherever he paced, I took refuge in the wampum of a Pam-pun: Je suis ébranlée. I had a review overdue for OC of a Sebastian Knight omnibus, newly published after the surprise success of his brother’s memoir—and then, from Sunday on, there was the war.

  “Hello?” I said as supine Dagwoods and Blondies, strangers to conflict on the East River’s gray carpet, oozed from setup to punchline past Sutton Place. Not that excitable people weren’t expecting fleets of German bombers to blacken the sky with chapter after chapter of Mein Kampf—translated by H.G. Wells, no doubt—over Manhattan any day.

  My future editor wasn’t among them. “Roy Charters here. I was wondering if you’d care to stop by my office tomorrow. Around ten?”

  Regent’s was two spiral-staircased floors of shirtsleeved clacking and skirted swooping for copy in a stack of ten more on West 50th Street. Tucked into a corner, Roy’s office was the usual editor’s haven: immaculately glassy view of the never immaculate Hudson, bookcases whose upper shelves were as dense with pristine bestsellers as their lower ones were leaky with manuscripts and the competition’s newsstand fodder. Its one defiance of decorum was a faded pennant from Case Western Reserve, no idle thumb at snobbery when the Ivy League was still such a password its teams actually dominated college sports coverage. Those were the days.

  My first daylit and rumless exposure to the oval Ohio tourist brochure between Roy’s overlarge ears—two lively small towns hoping their climbing visitors wouldn’t dawdle too long up at Widow’s Peak, a mouth whose considerable kindness was at once signaled and inhibited by its reluctance to give too much play to the bad uneven teeth in his smile’s creek bed—told me how deranged I’d been in Sardi’s. Not because he wasn’t my type, Panama: so far as men went, I never really had one. The only one of my three husbands you’d call conventionally good-looking was Murphy.

  I did like to think I had some sense of people’s personalities, though, and Roy’s was all traffic lights and posted speed limits. Then still as visibly married as the sky is blue, he was no more a candidate for a folie à deux than your Gramela would be for President. Tactful, too: as I took my seat in the office I’d get to know so well, the only tipoff he wasn’t sure we agreed on what I was doing here was his cautious greeting.

  “Thanks so much for coming, Mrs. Murphy. Now let me tell you what I’m—”

  “Oh, please! It’s Pam. Or Sam, I don’t care.”

  I’d just said, I’m a writer. Roy nodded: “Pam then. Do you know anything about the Free French mission here in town?”

  “I’ve met Raoul Aglion, yes. My God, hasn’t everyone?”

  Even with Tim for a father, I doubt you’ll know the name. Let daisysdaughter.com oblige yet again. Pam’s one encounter with de Gaulle’s New York emissary dated to the pre-Murphine spring, when he was still making do with a spare phone and desk at—World War Two was never short on mother-of-invention wonders, Panama—the Jean Patou perfume company’s Fifth Avenue headquarters. Wifeless and de-secretaried for the night, Alisteir Malcolm had brought me to a soiree at Ann Darrow Driscoll’s where Aglion, polite as a just-widowed bridegroom, was going along with everyone’s illusion that champagne and cake took care of his needs. Only his quick eyes were reminders of his Frankenstein brief to make his bride breathe.

  His presence disconcerted my horse’s ass of an escort even before the inevitable high-society “Marseillaise”—“Allongez, enfin, dans ma poitrine,” our smitten hostess seemed to be singing—in the foreign guest’s honor. At the time, fearful of making hard-line Stalinists Djugashlivid, the old Republic was pretending the Free French didn’t exist, a trick easier to play on phantasms an ocean away than a pleasant man in a slightly out-of-fashion dinner jacket extending his hand. So I’d shaken it instead, winning a droll look and five minutes of chat about our favorite scenes in La Chartreuse de Parme.

  Anyhow, Roy was pleased. “You have? Even better. Here’s the thing: all our readers know about them is ‘plucky little band,’ and that’s fine up to a point. But my confidential sources tell me it’s a lot more complicated behind the scenes. Here’s where we exchange a look of astonishment, if you don’t mind.”

  I beamed instead. “To be honest, I was working on puzzled. You wouldn’t be trying to tell me they’re still French.”

  “Absolutely! And it’s still politics. Prewar grudges I can’t follow to save my life, along with constant fighting over a very small pie and a lot of what sounds like the silliest rot if you don’t have a scorecard. Well, I don’t. Neither do most Americans. Can you guess why my next words might be ‘Uh-oh’?”

  “That could make them unpopular sooner or later.” (Do I give myself credit for catching on fast? Yes, I give myself credit for catching on fast.)

  “It could at that. That’s one reason too many people in Washington wish they’d all go away, which we don’t want and isn’t likely to happen. Obviously, Regent’s is all for them, but I’d still like to see a treatment that’s more sophisticated than what we’ve run so far. It might help. Are you interested?”

  “Of course. I’m sorry, though: what’s the book?”

  “You’ve misunderstood. I want you to go talk to them. I’m pretty sure you can handle the frame of reference, and you’ve got the language. They might be more willing to open up now that we’re in. Do you feel like taking a crack at that for me?”

  Did I? All I could think of was how different my life might be if he’d asked on June 21st. It took me a second to realize Roy was waiting for my voice to answer and not just my face.

  “Damn right I do.”

  “Good! And, oh—goodbye, Sam. See you in, I’d say, about a week.”

  Like a fool, I did it in four days. And had a wonderful time, racing out of Sutton Place past Bran’s darkening brow for heraldic coffee here and a timely square meal there opposite dive-bombing mustaches, hands playing bosun to invisible bosoms, and Gallic profiles too visibly down to sharing their last razor blade. They were marooned in Automats and argonauted by argot, and I hadn’t rattled on so much in French in seven years. Or written it since, dismal memory, “Chanson d’automne,” but now I was jotting down quotes.

  Unsurprisingly, they were leery of divulging the underground’s internal squabbles, those over the razor blade excluded. I made headway by patiently pierre-scissors-papiering the Buchanan gams, saying “Oh, keep the pack” and smilingly reasoning that their common cause now would be more impressive, not less, if the U.S. public understood they hadn’t all stayed blank slates politically until they leapt fully formed from de Gaulle’s kepied brow. Since one of their few luxuries was that they’d never heard of Brannigan Murphy, my interviewees were surprised at how Pam excelled at nagging them on their Communists. No-shows the Occupation’s first year—Kremlin spank—the PCF had since become the underground’s lions of Belfort.

  Then I’d come home forlorn with unconfessable envy. My brief from Regent’s was to unravel the motives underlying the plucky little band’s arrival a
t this point, yet the reraveled marvel was that they were at this point: it had clarity. Absurd as it was to see Pam’s confusions as an invidious contrast—and the Lotus Eater’s jellyfish leer, caught between an unidentifiable male head and a mighty wristwatch’s prominent flash on a muscled forearm, had maddened me regularly since opening night with its incoherent insistence that maybe now I’d have more compassion for her—I couldn’t help doing just that and indeed soon learned I shouldn’t. Such incongruous goads were often to give my Regent’s reporting more intensity.

  Even so, Roy’s face clouded as he turned the last page. “This is smart. But you don’t have anything here from our own people in Washington. No White House, no State Department—nothing. What gives?”

  “Well, of course not, Roy! They’re on the fence—not ready to cut the cord yet to Vichy, you know that. Anything they say will be evasive and dull.”

  “Yes, Pam, it will be. And that will be revealing,” Roy said, teaching me my job. “And Pam? While you’re in Washington—”

  “Pardon?”

  “When you run down to Washington, tomorrow, try to talk to the Free French mission there. Lots of friction with New York, I hear. And Pam? Vichy does still have an embassy. My confidential sources tell me the number’s probably in the book,” Roy said, teaching me my job some more.

  Posted by: Sam

  Sixty-five years ago, on my first visit to my final hometown, Union Station was all herds of brown, olive drab, Atlanticized blue, and Pacific vanilla muddling through a gigantic spittoon overlooked by dull statues gagging on nicotine. Attribution forgotten and context hazy, a random fragment of poetry in Pink Thing’s archives retrospectively captions the surprise poster I saw hailing our new Russian allies: To live it hurries and to feel it hastes.

  Scrambling into a cab, I caught sight of the Capitol—not banalized the way it was to you by TV long before you eyed it for real, Panama, but a genuine L. Frank Baum surprise to someone who’d never pictured it being part of something. Then I was off.