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

by Carson, Tom

  Posted by: Pam

  Or welcome someone with my gams, frizzy hair, and byline who, like them, had a job to do, and like them was learning by trial and error how to be the woman who did it. Our adult self is always someone we start out impersonating, and a lot of your Gramela’s later act was first put together in that Columbian year. Since my victims were unaware I was thieving, I’d swipe a roguish inflection I’d liked in Scranton to earn a grin in Ohio or a sashay from St. Louis as I went en pointe to peer into a fuselage in Inglewood. As I stretched my arms Samothrace-style to own the vast office sofa where I was lounging attendance on Senator Bavard, only I knew I’d seen the same pose transform farm girls into pilots in briefing rooms fifteen hundred miles south.

  My need for an outer personality whose specifics I could never anticipate was so urgent that anything fatuous or tentative in my inner one got resmelted or junked on the spot. It was the psychological equivalent of a war economy, and one on which, like the country, I throve. Even when I made a total Pamidiot of myself, I’d only have gone unforgiven had I failed to spot the erratum slip. And since I’d never experienced belonging before, it was hard for me to grasp that all this was contingent—not to mention only one element in a bigger picture.

  As far as I was concerned, I was reporting on a revolution, not a war. That only proves I knew nothing about either. Despite Roy’s trust in my aptitude, such political sophistication as I had came from two years of Pammie-see-Pammie-do radicalism in Manhattan’s kaffeeklatsches in putsch’s clothing. I’d imbibed and regurgitated millenarian talk without ever considering whether I had a stake in Utopia or trying to imagine what any self-fashioned version might look like outside my Bank Street apartment. Then had come Sutton Place. You bet I was kerosene missing only a match and a wick to keep me burning.

  I credit the wick for intuiting that my lack of perspective was the perspective that let me champion my home-front heroines as they deserved to be championed. After all, Roy could see by Pamela Buchanan as something I didn’t—an ingredient in the mix. My Capitol Hill fairy godmother, by contrast, was still a Congresswoman. She could get fairly snippy about talking me down from the tree where she’d just caught me putting the feminocentric cart before the horse again.

  “Pam, please,” Edith would sigh over her specs. “Believe me, I do understand. Or remember. I know better than you ever will these steps are long overdue. I still think you’d do well to include a few choice reminders in your next article”—she never said “piece”—“that the point of it all is to defeat Japan and Germany.”

  “That’s so damned corny,” I’d protest. “It’s what—”

  “I’m sorry! Germany and Japan. Germany first is our policy,” said Edith with Congressional humor. “Dear me, but I could be taken to the woodshed for getting that wrong. You were saying?”

  “It’s what everyone already knows is going on. It’s like mentioning Sir Isaac Newton every time you eat an apple.”

  “Pam, here’s an apple. You can’t tell people something they don’t know until you’ve convinced them you know what they do know. You can’t get people to feel differently about one thing without showing them first that you feel just as they do about everything else. Columbus could only say the world was round because he wasn’t claiming it was on top of an ice cream cone.”

  “Um, I don’t think he could have. Did ice cream exist yet?”

  “There you are! Neither did America. If he’d wanted to sell ice cream, he’d have called the world flat, I assure you. That’s why I’m sitting here and you live in New York.”

  “Well, I’m thinking of moving,” I said a good two decades avant la lettre. “So there.”

  “What, and see less of me? You’d be quite bored in peacetime.”

  “Why, are you?”

  “No, dear. To be delightfully candid, people like you keep showing up. Oh, there’s the floor bell. You must excuse me.”

  “What’s the vote?”

  “Goodness knows! But I’ll be such an expert by the time I get over there. Walking slowly and nodding. Why, would you care to come with?”

  “I’d like nothing better, but I’ve got a train to watch. I mean catch,” said I as I lowered my wrist.

  “Then God speed you. I met your mother once, you know. I often wondered what she’d be like if she had a cause.”

  “You wouldn’t recognize her,” I said sulkily.

  “But I do,” Edith said—even though, in my most ardent private substitutions of a gardenia for a wilted daisy, the shoe was on the other foot.

  Posted by: Pamet

  It’s not only because I was still learning my craft that I’ve long avoided rereading my Columbian-year Regent’s effusions. By my age, one’s early work is a murder mystery starring the corpse of our might-have-been selves; we know the solution but have forgotten the clues. I don’t want some ripe simile or unduly athletic description to disclose a long buried Pam in the reportorial nude, peering out at the mimsies from a cuke-unencumbered version of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe under the impression she’s fully clad.

  That’s the genius of Manet, of course. He shows his female viewers women who don’t know they’re undressed and his male ones women who don’t care that they are, making the consternation general but its provocation gender-Rorschached. Which doesn’t change the fact that I was—and fairly humiliatingly, Ard, so chirps my youthful vanity—wrong.

  Goddam near everything went back to men’s idea of normal a week after VJ-Day. Disillusionment left me not only alienated from those I’d adored, now docilely restored to manicures and mattress-testing, but wondering how I could have misguessed the roots of our shared exultation by so wide a mark. Yes, yes: by all means let’s do note the comfort of my postwar opinion that they’d let me down when I’d spent my Columbian year struggling not to do the reverse. Didn’t I opt for Vichy myself when I turned my ETO tales into Nothing Like a Dame, whose inscribed copy to Edith incidentally got no response?

  Not that I know for individual fact what became of my home-front pinup gallery. Since my original ’42–’43 notebooks are long lost—I didn’t make much of a habit of saving such stuff until the Paris footlocker said it liked midnight snacks—I’ve also got no way of learning, and the reason’s as mournable as it is metaphorically apt. Founded in the 1890s, Regent’s had its house idiosyncrasies. The one you’ll chortle at was its prim and, by 1942, notorious principle that people who weren’t public figures had a right to privacy.

  Thanks to that rule, which didn’t get junked until the end of the war, Edith Bourne Nolan was one of the few to appear in my stories under her real name. Even in my stories from the ETO, anyone under the rank of major rated an alias. Since every war correspondent from Ernie Pyle down knew nothing tickled the home folks like Lieutenant Nephew’s or Pfc. Soninlaw’s mention in print, Eddie Whitling used to scoff at my scrambles to think up false monickers. But Roy liked the tradition—because it was eccentric and archaic, because it was our version of Eustace Tilley’s butterfly-examining monocle in The New Yorker—and warned me only against excessive whimsy. No Oglesby in a brassiere factory, no dentist from Tuscaloosa.

  Along with the magazine’s other arthritic stricture—the first photograph printed in Regent’s showed the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima—that shibboleth helped “To the Ends of the Earth,” which got me a sweetened paycheck from Roy for hazardous duty and a breakfast call from the Office of Production Management’s harried press flack. “For God’s sake, Pam!” spouted a certain future historian for whose work my Gerson, gaga for Grant and Lee’s baseball teams, turned out to be a hopeless sucker.

  “Why, hello, Mr. Catton. Thank you, I’m well.” (Yes, daisysdaughter.com readers—’twas he. He was doing his bit like everyone else, and half the fun of belonging to my generation is that we all first bumped into each other at a Hitler-staged bal masqué. That was
often to make our civilian careers seem like the costume, not the restored identity.)

  “Pam, for God’s sake, don’t you know it’s illegal for those women to be working the mines? Yes, we know about them. Yes, we know they’re only doing it to free up their men to go get shot at in Tunisia for the duration. And yes, that’s why we’re doing our best to turn a blind eye. It’s not going to give me an easy week now that you’ve gone poking around with a flashlight.”

  “Poor man. Try drinking! Say, I’ve got an idea much neater than whiskey. Why not make it legal?”

  I believe the current term is venting. Legalizing mine work for women wasn’t something I’d been rash enough to advocate in print. I’d learned a bit from Edith by then about what the traffic would bear. A measure of which was his answering groan: “Are you joking or crazy?”

  Since the women coal miners of Riceville, Tennessee—the wildcats, as they called themselves—are the most lost to history, they’re the ones whose noms de guerre in Regent’s I regret most. As I do the nonpreservation on film, other than soon to be extinguished Pamavision, of their imposing waddles and big-gloved hands unexpectedly bared for quick tasks by a tug of too few teeth and then regloved the same way. Shins that Hogarth had drawn with babies curled around them now braced to absorb a pneumatic drill’s recoil. Or the lack of any audio record, unlike Pam’s faint D-Day “Thank you” at the National Archives, of their voices’ gnarled grain and lewd laughter.

  Someone not lost at all, on the other hand—like Edith Bourne Nolan’s, his Congressional title let me use his true name in Regent’s: I quoted him on shipyard absenteeism in “Liberty Belles,” October 21, 1942—is Murphy’s first cuckolder. He was also the last unless you count Roy. Then and later, my main reaction—unless you count dentitioned chuckles—was bewilderment. Didn’t he know there was a war on?

  My hunch is his answer would’ve been “Yes, indeedy.” That form of wisdom was beyond the why-Henry’d, ungamahuched Pam who realigned her newly delingamed gams with my purse as a guide and rode home on the bus sans underwear, wondering if his pleasant receptionist collected or labeled the ripped panties she found in his office wastebasket. I suppose l’équipe here at daisysdaughter.com owes him anyway for the chance to parade some proof I wasn’t a complete wallflower at the orgy. Otherwise, Murphine Stalingrads aside, I’d be telling the depressingly sexless story of a ninny who spent her Columbian year in drydock.

  Enough, though! Ard, enough. The phone may still ring and I’ve got to make up my mind, my pet, about keeping my date with Cadwaller’s gun if it turns out not to. The thought that all too many of you may never read anything else about the women who helped win World War Two has just curled this close-cropped hair of mine.

  What does it matter if the Fifties re-encased them in Eisenhowerite Lucite? They did what they did and I saw it. Not to drive your dad nuts or awaken Manet’s competitive ghost, Panama, but I doubt even you in the Christmas-ornamented altogether would be a vision as thrilling as the first pilot I saw jogging in a baggy flying outfit to hoist herself into a cockpit and trundle down a muggy runway as tough grass grayed and bent at Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas—the place names are real—one morning in February 1943.

  At least in Regent’s, her name was Jessica Auster of Coos Bay, Ore., and she was the dot in the sky in the opening sentence of my Houston-datelined rhapsody—with a detour to Delaware, where Nancy Harkness Love was training her own batch of flyers—to the Guinea Pigs, as the women in Jackie Cochran’s 319th WFTD were known. Google Nancy Love and Jackie Cochran for pictures that ought to hang in every college girl’s dorm; each noncombat mission their outfits flew freed up a male pilot for a combat one. They flew thousands.

  I’d be embarrassed to tell you how often these fat-lunetted mimsies of mine have gone over every image available of Avenger Field with a magnifying glass held to my Mac’s screen. As I look in vain for Jessie’s tight locket face and maybe even a caption that would restore her true identity and unmollusked hometown, I think I might know her even in dorsal view; she had a way of slumping her weight to one hip and bracing the other with her far elbow out. No luck so far, none. But if she’s alive and reads this blog, perhaps she’ll recognize herself and comment in time.

  “Edith!” I complained when I stopped back in Washington to fill out the picture with my usual dose of brass-hat imbecilisms and cuke-encumbered legislative rhubarb. “Do you know they don’t even get military benefits? They’re going to be flying bombers to England, for God’s sake. Does that sound like ‘Civil Service’ to you?”

  “No, dear. It sounds like ‘flying bombers to England’ to me. Do you know how many the Eighth Air Force lost over St. Nazaire last week?”

  “Not that many. Seven.”

  “You do live high on the hog.”

  “Well, I’ve seen the factories.”

  “They’re certainly doing good work. You might try the graveyards. Or let’s hope POW camps. What on earth do you think we need night shifts making parachutes for?”

  “The airborne.”

  “With luck, yes. Maybe by summer, but I didn’t say that. As for the benefits, do you think I haven’t had Jackie and Nancy both on the phone? May I say I called them with pro forma apologies. They know we have to think about what—”

  “The traffic will bear. Yes, I’ve heard.”

  “Pam, I haven’t been interrupted since my second term.”

  “Sorry,” I gulped. “Not pro forma, either.”

  Edith beamed. “Nonsense. There’s no other kind of apology at your age. Feel free to pretend differently if you can make it amusing. And brief. I’m afraid I’ve got a committee meeting.”

  Taking advantage of an acolyte’s permission to burn incense by getting incensed, I’d gotten into the habit of bickering with my Capitol Hill fairy godmother on our first long train trip. It was to Iowa—les grand blés still, no longer sanglotants—to see the first WACs graduate from officers’ training school at Fort Des Moines: “Gold Bars for a Redhead,” Regent’s, September 9, 1942. Four hundred sixty-six women marched past the podium in broiling heat, their heads swiveling at “Eyes right” to snap Congresswoman Nolan and Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby a mass salute under their trim overseas caps. But when Edith prodded me, I couldn’t, couldn’t tell her why I’d snorted before my eyes resparkled with newly moist awe.

  That distinguished woman had spent a lot less time than I did riding in talkative wartime rail coaches instead of gardenia-friendly compartments. She’d almost certainly never heard the universal service nickname for the khaki envelopes perched atop those determined coifs: cunt caps, if you must know. Decades later, as we watched the usual surprise horde of out-of-town laddybucks with strange marsupial accoutrements spill past our red light on Constitution Avenue, chanting “We’re here, we’re queer” and so forth, on what we District ancients always forget is Gay Pride Day—perhaps luckily, Bruce Catton was years in his grave—Nan Finn voiced her fuddlement: “Can someone please explain to me why they want that word back? Pam, do you have a clue?”

  In spite of having a good deal more than one, I decided on reflection against telling the glorious girl my Fort Des Moines story. Dear Nan can garble a meaning the way Mozart could dash off a concerto, and often to as charming but chancy effect.

  Once I got my own cunt cap in the ETO, I refused to ever call it anything else, embarrassing even Eddie Whitling sometimes. It had looked awfully stylish on the redhead of my story’s title: Lieutenant Connie Ostrica of New Haven, Conn., at least after Roy asked, “Where’s New Heaven?” She’d been as articulate as her distant lips’ switch from frictioned dismay to electric amusement had promised when, sizing up my best bet, I’d accosted her in the barracks with my usual explanation that I needed a viewpoint character. Or tailor’s dummy, in intra-office Regent’s parlance.

  While I don’t think that figure of speech influenced m
y choice, there’s always a chance it did. If she wasn’t among the one in every thousand WACs who became casualties, Connie could’ve had her choice of lives. Mrs. Gerson used to half expect to run into her in Hollywood, in some scenarios after marquee proof she’d taken the name I’d invented for her in Regent’s. The probability is she just got Eisenhowerized into a baby factory for some executive.

  Those unshrinking-violet eyes of hers made me sure he’d have money. He’d travel a lot too, keeping him serenely ignorant of her half waking languors as by Pamela Buchanan got tucked discreetly below the pulsatingly pulpy title (Connie’s Secret) of one of those lurid Fifties paperbacks on whose covers I’d occasionally spot her lookalikes gazing back at me in airport book racks before I grimly returned to reading Cotton Mather’s sermons or Washington’s report from Fort Necessity for Glory Be. Anyhow, Connie should know—if she’s just Googled “Ostrica” for old times’ sake, if she’s come across daisysdaughter.com’s SOS from Potusville, if she’s tempted to give me a reason to re-footlocker Cadwaller’s gun—that it was for her sake I took up the cudgels with my Capitol Hill fairy godmother on our ride back from Iowa.