by Carson, Tom
Even with Regent’s name and Roy’s list of contacts, I was a nobody in a District that had been at war just over a week. Doubtless that’s why Harry Hopkins never got back to me: my ur-encounter with a White House switchboard whose laziness or worse your Gramela’s been cursing since dawn on her second D-Day. I had better luck over at State, where Bob Murphy, just back from overplaying our indispensable man in North Africa—no relation to Bran, he was nonetheless a bit of a showboat by Cadwaller’s verdict—gave me a superbly noncommittal quarter hour. That same night, the price paid for admiring my hairdo by the nipper beside me in the Mayflower’s bar was a swamping quiz once she turned out to be someone’s gal Monday on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I met and liked Adrien Tixier, Raoul Aglion’s Washington opposite number. Met and disliked (call me impetuous, but Pam was an instant Gaullist—just add Lourdes water) Alexis Leger, later better known and no more beloved by me as St. John Perse. My stop-in at the French Embassy—i.e., Vichy—got me a three-minute denunciation of adventurers and traitors from its press attaché. It was followed by a furtive phone call to my room at the Mayflower that led to an equally furtive stroll in a bare-branched but leaf-hieroglyphed Rock Creek Park.
Not far into it, I divined what the nervous cluck beside me hoped I’d guess and forget: he was slipping info to the underground on the sly. Self-impressionable as I was, and it was your Gramela’s first cluck-and-dagger moment, I wasn’t Pamidiot enough to hint at his existence in the two thousand words I pecked out in the Sutton Place living room, rather mourning the Mayflower’s bar—my hairdo, really? I could get to like Washington—and took to Roy on the first day of winter.
He chopped them to fourteen hundred tighter ones and ran it in Regent’s ten days later. Obsolete Christmas trees sledded around me as I ran to the 57th Street newsstand to buy a few thousand copies. Too elated to augment the pile with the OC containing the last book review (“Silent Knight, Lonely Knight”) I was to write for some years.
He hadn’t flagged my piece on the cover; that wouldn’t happen until the next summer. Flipping spilling pages on a chill chalk-swept sidewalk, I panicked. Had Roy changed his mind? No. Illustrated by a graphic of the Cross of Lorraine growing out of victimized France’s swastikaed soil, there was—and is, if only on microfilm in Luddite libraries—my story: “A Cross with Many Roots,” by Pamela Buchanan. And I was twenty-one years old.
Bran, you should know, was enraged by that title. I hadn’t picked it or been consulted, and Roy later swore the do-si-don’t of “A Cross with Many Roots” and A Clock with Twisted Hands had been too subconscious to register. Anyhow, aside from cleaning the stain left on Dolores Ibárurri’s noble nose by Murphy’s lashing of cold coffee, I couldn’t have cared less what Roy called it. Mine eyes—the future mimsies—dazzled at that byline.
I’d seen it hopping a freight atop dinky book reviews, but that by Pamela Buchanan was different. Not that I had a glimmering of the La Bayadère procession of future Pams it was to transpose from ballet’s mists to fact and now memory. They were giving each others’ tushies pats in rehearsal all the same.
The Pam loudly laughing at a bawdy gal welder’s joke about idle hands (“Well, I know that, Rev. This one, anyhow”) in Toledo. The one entranced to be led by a WAVE along the halls of a Pentagon so new its still damp cement made it smell like the locker room of a football team going for its first championship; we’d all learned from the great Katharine H. how over-the-shoulder prattle simulated an off-the-shoulder gown, but I’d never mastered the gambit and was clearly impressed. The tense one following helmet-lamp beams I kept having to tell myself were Viv, Tess, Josie, and Babe to the ends of the earth; the one who heard “Happy Birthday” sung to her on Omaha.
Or my sentimental favorite, however reframed in nettles by the painful outcome: the one being sketched by Bill M., my Anzio Bobbsey twin, while I read a letter from Nick Carraway in the correspondents’ villa at Nettuno. Or the one in the scene I still grin at despite its less comic Vietnam-era sequel: the Pam being bent back over a Capitol Hill desk in October ’42 by the rangy Texan who first put horns on Brannigan Murphy.
That by Pamela Buchanan gave me those Pams and more. That by Pamela Buchanan hoisted my flag for World War Two.
Which Murphy, you may not be surprised to hear, sat out on Sutton Place in a perfect sulk. Not only can a flop do terrible things to a playwright, but I suspect he was a bit of a coward.
Posted by: Pam
As regards our soon to be vestigial home life, nobody could have been wronger than the Girl Scout who provoked him by wishing us peace rather than victory in 1942. Bran and I were at loggerheads from the moment he said, tossing Regent’s aside, “You’re really so much better at those little book reviews. Stick to your last, Snooks.” Then he rose from the sofa and lumbered off to berate John Lavabo by phone for shrinking Clock’s ads to the size of “Help Wanted” ones as the next-to-last play of his to ever see footlights slumped toward its demise.
Title and all, Murphy might—I emphasize might—have forgiven “A Cross with Many Roots” had it turned out to be a busman’s holiday from those little book reviews. Roy Charters had other ideas, and Pam had just one. That was to grab any assignment he offered.
In the usual sophomore jinx, my second try, about Italian anti-Fascist groups and titled, no skin off Bran’s nose this time, “Che Te Dice La Patria?,” was a dud. I didn’t have the language, our government’s open backing made the subject much flabbier, and I never got to interview Count Sforza—which was writing up Barnum and Bailey the night the star elephant had a cold. As my editor and I postmortemed and pre-Mortimered the drab results, I despaired of getting another Regent’s byline ever again. Then Mortimer himself—Regent’s publisher—ambled into the office to tell us with a club man’s pointless chuckle that Edith Bourne Nolan’s long-nursed bill to create a Women’s Army Corps had just hit another snag in the House, and Roy eyed me.
I eyed him. We both smiled. I eye-eyed him. “See you in a week,” said Roy. The exile beat behind me, I had found my boulot.
To think Murphy had groused I didn’t have any hen friends—and what a delightful way of putting it, too. First was Edith herself: sixty, plump, gray, unfailingly gardenia’ed, and a Congresswoman since Charles Nolan’s widow had won her husband’s seat after his sudden death in the Twenties. In a bonus Roy hadn’t foreseen, we grew enchanted with each other as soon as she matched and, to be honest, raised Chignonne’s with Madame Julien’s, her own pre–World War One finishing school in Neuilly.
When that coincidence gave my hubby a pretext for the classic accusation about our affinity, I smacked his chest while sober: a first. Besides being old enough to be my mother’s aunt, Edith was one of those enviable people whose faces announce that their youthful program was to sail for Olympus, unimpressed by mere swimmers’ splashes in the straits of Messina. After “Skirting the Issue?” came out in mid-February, earning a wince from me for Roy’s cutesy title but launching my giddy rebirth as Regent’s rover-gal chronicler of my gender’s war, I went back to her again and again, never leaving without a useful crisp quote or more guidance to Washington’s wicketry of acronymic bureaucracies. She probably never realized how often my knocks at her nameplated door were for the sake of her quick crinkle of dignified pleasure at my latest news of her daughters’ metamorphoses from virgins to dynamos.
At that age, every writer’s ideal marriage is to his or her ideal subject—even if those too can end in a messy divorce. We get the offspring, though: articles, books. Unread in over sixty years by anyone but Tim Cadwaller, who dug up the whole slew for You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two, my progress reports on the cuke-unencumbered half of the citizenry’s new prowesses in bandannas, overalls, and finally khaki have an iridescence in Pink Thing’s archives I’ve never cared to spoil by revisiting the originals. Not until five or six assi
gnments into my spree did Roy, watching Mortimer detain a file-burdened office filly outside a flashing elevator, see fit to mention in passing that his mom had been Dayton’s first woman doctor.
That didn’t stop him from blue-penciling my most ardent Pamegyrics to the all-female night shift at a parachute factory converted from turning out wedding gowns in Scranton, PA: “Brides without Grooms,” April 1942. Or to the dawn-fingered Rosies filing into a shipyard to build the landing craft that figuratively and for all I know literally brought the gal who wrote “She-Worthy”—blessing, as did Roy, the dawn-fingered Rosie who’d earnestly told me, “They don’t just have to be seaworthy, ma’am”—ashore at Omaha many months later. Or to the matriculators in the Army Air Force’s first nimble Women’s Flying Training Detachments, hailed by a reluctantly grounded Pam (rationed on fuel, they wouldn’t let the kibitzer break the surly bonds herself) in “Finding Mr. Wright” the next February. As that last title may tell you, Roy knew one secret of being a good editor is to be a good smuggler.
In her own way, so was Edith Bourne Nolan. Yet my Capitol Hill fairy godmother—and how puzzled Edith would’ve been to learn I thought of her as one—had no way of guessing that the Pam who doted on feeling in league with her was someone neither of us had met before. When I first interviewed Rep. Nolan (D-Ma.), her chin-cupped reprise of her bill’s setbacks as she stroked her desk’s bald spot had turned me into a previously unmet Pam who was raring to enroll in her cosmos. Flummoxed when standing up proved we still shared a dress size, I’d heard my mesurper downright gushily thank the Congresswoman for her time.
In this millennium, Andy Pond can testify to Pam’s love of Talleyrand’s motto as Foreign Minister: “Above all, no zeal,” as useful an island of good sense in Napoleon’s day as it would be in Potusville. He also knows my allergy to identification with my species at large, let alone its cuke-unencumbered half. He’d have laughed in astonishment at the 1942 Pam’s passion as I reviewed my notes—“soldier” or “solider”? Oh, “solder”!—in twice-drafty rail terminals, their pews snoring with uniforms in front of the schedule board’s clacking chapter and verse, or restlessly scouted my next piece’s lead sentence (“She’s only a dot in the sky now”) in Gulf Coast hotel rooms too stickily dingy for the chiffonier to be hiding a phone book, my version of Gideon in that part of the country. Until I got Roy to give me the use of a cubby at Regent’s, Murphy’s newly dressing-gowned pacings as my typewriter tapped were those of a turnkey while I trafficked in contraband.
Trust me, bikini girl. If your private life’s ever one thousand and one nights at the opera, nothing will make you feel sane like turning fanatic. I’d’ve been outraged back then by any suggestion something more brackish might be in the shrubbery; now I’m not sure I care if there was. Those stories got written and your Gramela’s motives are dust.
As I try to reconstruct my euphoric honeymoon for one, it seems to me I both knew and refused to know why the distaff side of the war effort had grown out of a gardenia to set me afire. An awkwardness lurking since Purcey’s days when I was in women’s company was dissolved by the membership Roy’s assignment file [soon labeled “buchanan = ♀♀”] and Edith Bourne Nolan’s blessing had granted me in the joyous conspiracy that was female solidarity in wartime.
Besides—and whether we’re distaff or dat staff—we all have to discover America sooner or later. Despite my chagrin when I reflect how little my country knows what it once was when it had to be or how much it went right on being its same old hairy, wide-open self in the bargain, I’ve always felt lucky 1942 was my 1492: my Columbian year.
Posted by: Pamericana
Even with Dorothy Day and Nick Carraway helping me out—Murphy too? Yes, yes, I suppose, Murphy too—my pieces of the big jigsaw puzzle had stayed dainty. A girls’ school in St. Paul and a few years in the Hamlet-crowded hamlet that is intellectual New York do not a brimming U.S. atlas make. Now I was flipping through notebooks to find the blank page after the ring left around my Pam-scrawl by a misbalanced coffee cup in Little Rock, a drained beer glass in Barstow, a pensive Pepsi in Pensacola, or a wet ashtray in Shreveport. Making me feel older for the first time than men who wanted to lay me, Army, Navy, and Marine recruits whose looks were still waiting for someone to shake off the developing fluid kept striking up shy or rowdy conversations in their twangs and drawls and strange urban patois as we were tugged past exhibits of rugged Appalachian carpet, girdered Great Lakes factory towns, or the Southwest’s blazed ochres and evaporated lemonade.
“You wouldn’t happen to be getting off here in Baltimore, would you? I’ve got three days. Ma’am, it’d be a privilege to show you my hometown…”
“Sorry, Corporal. Wilmington this trip for me.” And I’ve forgotten nearly all of their faces. Not his, though: pie chin, hopeful blue eyes, smile a collection of dandy white toys his mouth had outgrown but didn’t want to give up under that shock of wheat hair and slightly skewed nose. Now I knew it wouldn’t cost me anything to add brightly, “Too bad, huh?”
“Too bad,” he agreed, showing me grateful toys before he stood up with unexpected masculine vim to swing down the duffel bag next to my old Purcey’s suitcase. Three days I could’ve spent kissing those eyes and just missing that nose before he went back to Louisiana or wherever he was stationed.
In mimsied retrospect, Panama, 1942’s carnal throb leaves the Sixties looking like amateur hour. In ways we octogenarians have kept tenderly veiled from our generation’s Brokawing hymnalists, the home-front war was our Woodstock: an orgiastic engine we gave ourselves over to, from U.S. Steel blasting smokestack lightning to Detroit’s purple haze and Eleanor Roosevelt Rigby fluting away. By the time we got to D-Day, we were golden. Fulfilling a national fantasy we hadn’t known was one until Yamomoto’s planes turned Mamala Bay into blue acid, we were all part of the same galvanizing, mud-bathed movie.
That’s why I feel riled in my dotage when Pink Thing’s archives remind me that what I often recalled to Kelquen as the most libidinal year of Pam’s life was the chastest in practice, a few Murphine interruptions and one other aside. Not counting trips to the devil’s playground, but I often had a terrible time getting to sleep in those days. Yes, that old excuse.
At the time, I’d never have called myself frustrated, Ard. Far from it! Even as my byline matured in Regent’s, I was in my second adolescence and first happy one, cuckoo with bliss at what I got to do. When I got propositioned on my travels, I doubt there was more than a time or two, my lickety-split mental ravishing of my peculiarly memorable Baltimore corporal from torso’s dots to knees’ dimples somehow out of category, when I might’ve felt tempted. Curious what it might be like to stoop to banality but knowing I’d be disappointed, I always fended off my Lothario Grande or Mr. Issippi, whether he was young and in khaki—the usual train and Greyhound version—or middle-aged and in a hand-painted tie (hotels).
The increasingly rare nights on my Sutton Place stopovers when Murphy sought to add some Stalingrad to our Siberia before playing the heroic Red Army casualty on top of me mostly filled Pam with wonder that familiarity could breed not contempt so much as a sense of utter anonymity. As you’ll learn even if Tim wishes otherwise, bikini girl, at least strangers are individuated in bed by novelty.
Which ought to tell you that if my forbearance makes you snort, things got a good bit gamier in the good old ETO. Of course I was divorced by then, also out of my trance. If you want to get down and dirty, honey, my Columbian year teemed with more opportunities than I cared to perceive. Yet I was in such a goonily oblivious state of fulfillment, so smitten with the new excitements cramming my life in ways that reduced the poor old beast with two left feet to a pesky chihuahua, that I once left Roy stupefied by announcing the best thing about sex was the way women talked about it.
He’d just bowdlerized my favorite quote from the parachute factory’s night-shift forewoman in “Brides without
Grooms”: “Y’ know, it’s just like making condoms. They darn well better work, but they only need to the once.” (He lamely substituted “wedding gowns,” unaware that by then busty little Cath Charters was busy pulling the ripcord on hers.) That may not sound salty to you; it was a new American music to your Gramela. So was “Why, Henry”—the immortal, to me, grunt of a bulky Lockheed worker when her lug wrench slipped and got romantic, not that I even tried to include that one in August ’42’s “Adios, Adolf. Tojo Too? Tojo Too.”
So were a thousand other things I heard in my Columbian year. Except for one long-gone Scandinavian whose showpiece in a foreign tongue was “Chen-chen,” I’d never known women like these. Galleon-hipped broads waved me into showers of sparks, then clinked Rheingold next to a Wurlitzer dotted with polkas and started in bellowing about the coxswain in the Azores or the sergeant in Australia. A sludge-voiced and slow-eyed freckled blonde in exile from coal country looked up from pounding Liberty ships together for Louisiana’s wondrously named Delta Shipbuilding Co. to muse she’d still never seen the sea. Tousled farmers’ daughters squinted skyward and allowed they’d figured they could fly a plane if they could drive a tractor. And they were all everywhere, roaring on city buses and reveling in cafeterias and shouldering in cuke-unencumbered droves through factory gates and past training-camp sentries.
If it was the most feminocentric year of my life, remember that my main encounters with the cuke-encumbered mob in the margin were idle flirtations on slow-chugging trains, quick Washington quizfests with pols, bureaucrats, and emerald generals, and Sutton Place Pintercourse with Brannigan Murphy. Compared to my reportorial prey, I was a more feckless sort of war worker at best. And at worst a fraud, gamely pretending I knew or cared what kept airplanes up as still wingless P-51s clanked on a conveyor belt behind a sweatily spit-curled, casually arm-grabbing, rosily riveting shout of indoctrination. But from coal mine to California—and like their more familiar office counterparts, looking up with unsinkably loose-lipped smiles to offer the leggy Regent’s visitor coffee as I waited for Senator Bavard or torpedo-toggling, WAVE-antipathetic Admiral Canute—the broads and the slow blondes and the farmers’ daughters did something so foreign to Pam’s past I’d never noticed the ellipsis. It was to welcome me.