by Carson, Tom
“Mrs. Murphy, according to your husband, you—ah—increasingly lost interest in the physical side of marriage even when you did put in an appearance at your home. Is that your recollection too?”
“My God, I don’t know what Bran’s talking about. No matter how tired I was, all he had to do was ask. Well, grunt.”
“Order in the court.”
“But in fact, your—ah—conjugal intimacies did occur considerably less often as time went on, didn’t they?”
“The way I saw it, that was really up to him.”
“Should we take that as meaning you had no interest on your own?”
“Well, I never turned him down. If you mean was I raring to go, though, then probably not.”
“Why was that, Mrs. Murphy?”
I looked at Bran. Bran looked at me. Oliver Watson looked alarmed. Dolores Ibárurri looked askance.
Viper stared from a stretcher. Trinka danked me for hiring her. Edith Bourne Nolan rubbed her desk’s bald spot. Connie Ostrica snapped a salute off her cunt cap. Viv’s possum face hawed.
Gloria Kamenica clinked a Rheingold. Mellie Branch had never seen the sea. Jessie Auster squinted skyward, and docile Joy Sterling had been angry, so angry—so incredibly angry behind that Gauguin mask as she snapped off the fuse.
Oh, fuck what the traffic would bear. “Hell, I don’t know,” I drawled. “But to tell you the truth, I just got tired of having to stick my finger up his ass every time.”
Posted by: Pam
In the rowdier tabs, the standard paraphrase was “I got tired of goosing him”: meaning identical, connotation desexualized enough to get by. The genteel equivalent was “I got tired of priming the pump,” which actually struck me as cruder—the way a too vivid imprecision will.
It didn’t matter. The authentic quote was all over New York by the cocktail hour. It landed with the first wave in Sicily that July. Until Nothing Like a Dame, it was the single thing strangers were most likely to know about me—the main upside being that Pam was dead Daisy’s daughter no more.
Since you were all of eight years old during the Presidential sexual imbroglio I call Billingsgate and you appear to’ve survived its linguistic acrobatics unscathed, you may be marveling that “I just got tired” and so on could make me notorious or Murphy publicly ridiculous. But over sixty years ago, women weren’t supposed to say such things. Not in courtrooms, anyhow, as opposed to coal mines or Detroit saloons or Toledo cafeterias or Albuquerque nursing schools.
As for Bran, he’d spent fifteen years as the cock of theatrical New York’s walk in an age when cuke-encumbered writers were proud of behaving as if they typed with their fists and read books with their teeth. To infantilize him in that Gillooleyan way struck at his literary virility. Had I been old enough to understand what bags of jellied nerves and impostures so many men are, I probably wouldn’t have done it—no matter how fed up I was with the stupidity of our marriage, and hearing our suddenly sad, puzzled sex life called “conjugal intimacies,” and Roy’s prim red-eared face three rows back.
Whether I regret it, I can’t say. The mystery is I’m not sure Murphy did. Except for the alimony, which I’d told Oliver Watson not to get too “Tallyho!” about—and it was the part he’d looked forward to, too—it was all over on June 4. When I saw Bran nearby on Lafayette as I peered for a taxi once we’d each been released from our knot of reporters, I half expected him to do something he’d never done while we were married, namely hit me. As he recognized his tall one-arming wife among the sailors, instead he looked abashed, relieved, and damned near grateful.
“Waiting for a cab?” I called, since we couldn’t go on eyeing each other uncertainly until they’d won the war.
Grinning, he shook his head. “On my way to the subway, Snooks. I might as well get used to it.”
“Oh, balls, Bran. You know I’m not going to take you the way Ruby took you. I’ve never cared.”
“Too bad. I thought it was my ace.”
Hands in his pockets, he was being buffeted by uniformed foot traffic out to learn for sure whether the Bronx was up and the Battery down. We’d both just caught on that this was goodbye, and he was Brannigan Murphy; he had to dominate it. After some facial fidgeting, he made up his mind: “Oh, well. ‘We’se did have good times onct. Didn’t we’se, Baby?’”
Spoken as the hero clutched a dismembered Macy’s limb, that wheezer was Colum Firth’s curtain line. What would have devastated Murphy if he’d known was that my speechless reaction came partly from uncertainty about what he was quoting.
“Oh, come on!” he ragged me. “Can’t you at least say, ‘Bran, I never knew. You were the Mighty Tower’?”
Asphodel Titan had been crouched over her husband’s corpse when Ruby Thorp spoke that line in 1932. At Murphy’s insistence, she’d begun unbuttoning her blouse as the lights dimmed. That baffled even young Addison’s quick thumb through Freud—and dear God, I thought. Does every literary marriage end this archly?
“Christ, Bran.” I was honestly angry all of a sudden. “All right, if it’ll make you happy. ‘Listen, it’s our fight too. And if need be, we’ll go to the ends of the earth.’”
“That’s not mine.” Then he looked hesitant, mentally flipping back through the scrapbooks to 1928: “Is it?”
“No, mine. Well, a woman I called Viv. I guess you never read it.”
“Was that Tennessee?”
“Yes,” I said bitterly.
Bran scowled. “Well, just so you’ll know, Snooks—I didn’t fuck Trinka that day. Or Viper either. It just wasn’t worth it getting back up on the stand to say so.”
“Oh, really? No boinky-boink for poor Mist-Murphy? Were you trying to write?”
“I was too worried.”
If it was a lie, he’d convinced himself of it. When two people realize they’ve never understood each other worth a damn, the least they can do is agree they’ve misunderstood each other more intimately than most: any breakup’s consolation prize.
“Oh, Bran,” I said. “Go to hell. Do you even remember my birthday’s on Sunday?”
Fishing out a handkerchief for me from his jacket’s breast pocket—his manliest act of the war had been to accept the restrictions on new tailoring in stoic silence—my now imminently former hubby took his best guess. “Twenty-two?”
“Twenty-three.” And I meant to be affectionate; it just didn’t come out that way. “Too old for you anyhow!”
His face darkened, then grew confused. “Bye, Snooks,” he said and blunderbussed my cheek. “Good luck.”
I wished his back the same. The M was for Murphy, the snotrag’s in the Paris footlocker. Whether or not the White House calls, whoever finds me here will find it there.
Posted by: Pamoha Beach
Sixty-two years ago today, as late as noon—as late as noon, Mr. Spielberg—they were still arguing over whether to evacuate Omaha. Write off the landing, bring away as many of those miserable upholstery tacks as they could and redirect the supporting troops to one of the beaches where the thing had gone better. On the command ships, they couldn’t see and weren’t in radio contact with the handfuls of soaked survivors who’d finally gotten to their feet and uttered their own equivalents of “Oh, fuck what the traffic will bear” before starting up the bluffs under fire.
Still far out to sea ourselves, Eddie Whitling and I couldn’t see them either. By noon, we’d gotten ourselves off the Maloy to hitch a ride in on an LCT packed with artillery that was scheduled to land in early afternoon. It wouldn’t; everywhere around us were slewing and bobbing landing craft of every type. They’d either tried to make the beach and been driven off by the obstacles that were supposed to have been blown by then or were being held back by new, contradictory, or out-of-date orders from either the command ships or the Coast Guard cutters slicing throu
gh the seaborne traffic jam to keep us megaphonically herded.
Nobody knew for sure what was happening anywhere. Everything between us and the smoke-shrouded beach itself looked like the most abominable mess. But everything behind us just looked stupidly safe.
On top of that, they’d told me as far back as Portsmouth I wouldn’t be allowed to disembark. Only Eddie had official license to, being cuke-encumbered and killable. Our LCT’s skipper had been told through a megaphone to only let Miss Buchanan of Regent’s observe from the bridge before I got sent back aboard the Maloy.
Aside from You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two, most books only mention one American woman correspondent who successfully waded through Omaha’s surf late on D-Day. My better-known rival Martha Gellhorn of Collier’s wasn’t supposed to get ashore either. Unbeknownst to each other, we used the same subterfuge, which put a smile on Tim Cadwaller’s face when he told me so.
Tim didn’t know where she got her corpsman’s Red Cross–marked helmet and brassarded jacket. I know where I got mine, though: Eddie. Our LCT had finally been cleared to start the run in when he beckoned me to one of the few spots aboard that wasn’t a bramble of legs, gear, and sea wash and puke. He had the stuff bundled inside a GI rain poncho he’d stuffed under the last jeep in line to be offloaded.
“Make up your mind, Pamita.” He had to shout in my ear above the engines and Coast Guard megaphones. “You’ve been bitching since England about what men can do. Are you game?”
“Why in hell didn’t you ask me before now?”
“Jesus Christ! And let you think about it? I’m not that kind of monster. Other kinds, sure, you bet. But you don’t mind those.”
Whoosh! A rocket barge had just loosed forty fuming spikes beachward over our heads. We’d both just discovered how nervous we were by stupidly ducking. “Where did you get it?” I bawled.
“What the fuck does that matter?”
“I can think of one way it could!”
“If you mean is he alive, of course he’s alive. Look around! We haven’t taken one casualty yet.”
“And what am I supposed to do if I’ve still got that crap on when we do? Say ‘There, there, soldier’—but I’ve got no morphine? Huh?”
“Don’t put it on now, you dumb twat. Wait ’til we beach and move fast. Then ditch the helmet, that’s what they look for.” (It was thoughtful of Eddie not to specify whether he meant our boys in need of a medic or snipers in search of a target.) “Are you coming?”
“Damn close.”
“That’s not what I meant. Are you coming ashore with me? I did this for you. It’s the only damn thing I, Eddie Whitling, will ever do for you. Yes or no!”
And yes I said yes I will yes, as they say, and here I am with a gun in my lap and my mind now made up. I suppose l’équipe has known all along there can be only one end to Pam’s second D-Day.
For once, Ard, the pleasure’s all mine. No Eddie to shove a Red-Crossed GI helmet at me, no Roy to charter me, no Edith Bourne Nolan to set me on fire. No longer a difference between squandered and plundered. And as of now—as of now; wasn’t that how I began?—no phone call from Potus to give this old bag her cue to settle this hash.
I’ll give him until sundown. Once the color of evening most closely approximates the indigo hue of the tracer-flicked sky over Omaha when I heard “Happy Birthday” sung to me at the Vierville sea wall by a dozen dazed relics of dawn, I’ll leave a mess of pink and gray things whether he’s listening or not.
There, now. It’s settled, or will be once I hit “Post.” Then I’ll be back in an LCT sloshing toward Omaha as the sea starts to grow cascading gray fir trees from the German artillery and we see that Martian alphabet of destructive contraptions that still haven’t been blown. As one boat to starboard becomes a black bathtub with a half dozen swimmers, the next one starts noodling to portside—and a Coast Guard megaphone barks through the explosions, “LCA Five-Two-Twelve, you are not a rescue boat. Stay on course for Dog Green.”
Ard, I’m nobody’s rescue boat, not even my own. All I can do is stay on course for Dog Green. Here we go.
Posted by: Pameleanor Rigby
Only because Murphy’s Collected Plays lives up to its title is The Two-Faced War even in my library. I’ve never read it and now never will. Yet Garth Vader’s Dat Dead Man Dere seconds Addison’s report from the aisle that lizard-blooded “Catherine Steptoe,” gadabout whoresspondent for Majesty magazine, was transparently Bran’s old Snooks turned Medusal.
My impotent yet homosexual lover, Solomon Roth, is some sort of spatula in FDR’s kitchen cabinet. We’re in cahoots to bleed the Red Army white by delaying the onset of the Second Front. That I was played by Viper Leigh, apparently willing to let courtroom snakes lie in exchange for lead billing, certainly rang my old plus ça change gong.
Enter a ghost from Catherine’s past: Fingal O’Flaherty, a one-legged, eyepatched—dear God, Bran—alum of Madrid. He very nearly derails our scheme. As the curtain falls, we’re congratulating each other on having made my shooting of Fingal (Addison claimed he woke up and clapped) look like suicide.
Even though Viper pointblank refused to be discovered in bed with Catherine’s mother—poor Floss Bicuspid! At least she dodged that bullet—Garth Vader does his Saskachewanful best to argue that Bran was exploring new themes. But his old bogeys took precedence, and his anti-Semitism had progressed from social bluster to typewriter. According to Addison, devious Sol Roth made Shylock look Methodist. Despite Garth’s pro-Murphyism, Dat Dead Man Dere adds the further damning detail that the psychiatrist Bran had started seeing in 1939 was also named Roth.
Anyway, you might think he’d learned his lesson about writing plays that could be overtaken by events. The Two-Faced War opened a week after Normandy. Dachau made headlines ten months later. If there was a single valid aperçu in Bran’s Murphine stew, even the most perceptive theatergoer couldn’t see it.
Once his back vanished and I was left with his stancher, I soon gave up finding a cab. It was a pleasant June evening, and the sailors’ on-the-town whites had started glowing like ice cream among the wheat of khaki and the chaff of fedoraed civvies. Besides, a taxi ride felt too personal in a way. You can turn queenly and tumbriled in a Checker’s back seat. I’d spent ten days in the tabloids: I walked.
I strolled up Lafayette a while before I started tacking randomly westward, as one can when walk and don’t walk are calling the shots and sunset’s fingers choose you like a recruiting poster. Unless I wanted to tramp until it was pitch dark, sooner or later I’d have to either cab it or play IRT ladybug to get back to Roy’s, the only bed in New York I had a key to. He’d left court early, giving me a glum feeling I’d walk in on his idea of a victory feast—some echt-Roy combination of champagne and potato salad.
It was just as well my editor was allergic to shellfish. Otherwise, he might’ve cracked the desperate game of code I’d played with my austers and ostricas and kamenicas and joysterlings and lamellibranchia, never quite admitting it to myself until one sunset finger showed me the Hudson and Pamique had to face that she wasn’t just ambling at random. I wondered who’d lapped up the dish I’d passed up when I bolted to the Commodore to meet Jake and Addison nearly two years ago.
I also didn’t know if Roy would be robed in pajamas, for months just his attire when he came to the study door to wish Pam goodnight but in recent days a quiet invitation. Yet my hunch was he too knew the jig was up on our sad-sack bid to behave like generic New Yorkers. Tonight would no doubt be understood by us both in advance as our valedictory try, the kind of sex—and there are many worse—that amounts to a friendly handshake without clothes. You get snagged on wondering why the other times weren’t like that and then the question answers itself. As frightened as I was of the new freedom plaguing my brain with Pams insisting they need no longer stay p
hantoms, I wasn’t such a fool as to think keeping things going with Roy was any solution.
Hell, at least Sharon Halevy Cohnstein could cook. Not that I’d find out in person until my birthday on Sunday, when she and Jake said they wouldn’t take no for an answer. Luckily, she kept kosher, forestalling any chance of a too painful parallel to Pam’s uneaten meal. If I’d been Jake, I’d have stayed snuggled up next to her in Williamsburg forever.
Back last December, it must’ve been at about this time of day—though dark and freezing—that I’d finally come up out of the mine. Fresh air, live air, air that moved without dynamite! Even though Viv, Tess, Josie, and Babe didn’t act as if they were in any hurry, the sudden leaps of their jokes hither and yon as we emerged told me a strain you get used to isn’t the same as a strain that’s gone away. Unless I was fooled by the novelty of hearing their voices in unconfined space.
Pam’s ultimate experience of belonging while being treated as exceptional was stolen from me all too soon by its converse. The only sentence in “To the Ends of the Earth” that alludes to it is mundane, thanks partly to my editor’s alert blue pencil: “The women have convinced management to build them a communal shower, its hastily nailed broads [“Pam, you did mean ‘boards,’ yes?” asked Roy] already water-warped and the unchinked gap between palisade and roof open to the biting winter cold.”
That doesn’t begin to convey my consternation when we ambled into the same rough structure, marked by a hand-painted Wymen Only, where I’d put on my loaned overalls ten hours earlier. That had been bad enough, but I hadn’t been outright naked and neither had they. Now hissing water through a door I hadn’t noticed this morning stilled Pam’s garrulity at being back from the ends of the earth.
A long way from Purcey’s, where even in the basketball team’s locker room nudity had been far more a matter of glimmers than striding—can you see better now why tormenting Hormel with ma plume was so unforgivable?—and even farther from Long Island, where a budding pudding in search of information as yet unsorted into categories had peeped at a fifty-year-old Scandinavian housekeeper in the buff, I wasn’t prepared for the matter-of-fact unpeeling that began as soon as the outer slat door was shut and hook-and-eyed. I was still twenty-two, and the wildcats were so—well, ungainly, the damning word (please note ambiguity as to damnation’s recipient) that popped into my mind. Josie’s Andean slopes, Babe’s Bazooka-pink breadth. Tess’s ropy back and wattled glutes. Since I’d known her the longest—three days—Viv’s cinder-crisped Van Dyke alarmed me most.