Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane

by Carson, Tom

  Taken in fall ’43 by the troops climbing the boot from the heel up, the word for Napoli by the time I first saw it was requisitioned. Requisitioned hotels, requisitioned apartments, requisitioned bottles glug-a-glug with requisitioned wine. Requisitioned women, girls, and boys with toothpick legs in wide short pants easily shed, getting by however they could in the khaki, jeep-revving, saluting and placarded, occasionally kilted (Highlanders), kepied (French officers), or even turbaned (the Moroccan goums) carnival of the Allied rear echelon. In Naples, distinctions between “liberated” and “conquered,” like those between “requisitioned” and “pillaged,” had never been more than semantic.

  Skirts up for food! Kneeling, gobbling, and swallowing for a promise of medicine. Bent over a jeep, oil drum, or desk for a vague guarantee of a job scrubbing pans. Brisk trade in C rations, cigarettes, jump boots, chewing gum, jerricans, typewriters, watches, gasoline, blankets, daughters, and penicillin. Dogs mostly were spared, at least boys don’t get pregnant and I didn’t know half of it. The Army censors and Roy only let me print a tenth: “Bacchanapoli,” Regent’s, April 12, 1944.

  On my five or six jaunts there, Pam the good girl (well, I was, Panama! An Anzio Bobbsey twin, as deficient in Italian as I’d been when I was trying to interview Count Sforza, I never sold so much as a pair of black-market stockings. Never walked even once down a rot-smeary, rat-scrabbled, rut-perfumed street fondling a virginal pack of Lucky Strikes, flushed with disquieting awareness that the one with big eyes or the one with small children would do anything at all if I could only explain it. Hell, no. Your Gramela had ’em, she smoked ’em) mostly knew the classy end of the Napoli bacchanal. Those were the parties thrown by Naples’s scuttling mobs of Army and Navy PRO’s for visiting firemen from brass hats and editors to Congressional junketeers and USO stars. They had real Stateside brand liquor and something hotter and fresher than “O Sole Mio” on a working gramophone.

  Got away mostly unscathed, twisted and no doubt unsatisfyingly unhillocked nipples aside, and never went until I was sure work, tap, tap, tap, was done for the day. While I never saw Bill at those, his absence proves nothing. I couldn’t be everywhere and there were usually several of them going on.

  But the Second Front was my story, had been Roy’s goal for Pam all along. Once I’d finished “Bacchanapoli,” I knew I’d better get a move on if I wanted a prayer of seeing D-Day from a landing craft’s prow. Hadn’t once thought of scheming to get ashore, that was Eddie Whitling’s improvised gift. What I did know was Bill wouldn’t be going, since Italy’s guys were his guys.

  He only got to France when they did in the second landing in August. Once I knew we shared a country again, I passed up opportunities to bump into him. By then I had a cynical, talkative, quip-prone, and humiliating reason to avoid him.

  His sendoff at Anzio had been fond but unsatisfactory. “I’ll see you, Pammie. Who knows, maybe even in New York. I’ll find out who’s in Grant’s Tomb if it kills me.” We didn’t even hug. You’ll have a hard time believing this, bikini girl, but back then people only embraced in public if they were Italian, related—which we had been, but weren’t now—or lovers.

  In Naples, I sued a general who’d twisted my nipples to let me fly as cargo on a C-47 hop to Gibraltar. Saw the Rock for the first and last time. Adios, Bill.

  England was barrage balloons over Parliament, “Ma’am” in pubs and every other street’s still smashed eyeglasses from the Blitz staring in a daze at my long gams and cunt cap. It was Ike pacing the Southwick House lawn in our reportorial circle, chain smoking, realizing I was the one correspondent he didn’t know. “Regent’s, huh? Where you from, Miss Buchanan?”

  “That’s a hell of a long story, sir. But I digress. So, the Free French…” He cracked up damn near gratefully. Knowing what his burdens were, I’ve boasted since that I once made him laugh.

  England was also almost instantly Eddie, who bragged he’d do better when he wasn’t knackered by liquor and did. I was in that overwrought condition where it seems like a miracle that anyone at all wants to sleep with you. Yet there had been those nipple-twisting Napoli generals, not to mention Floyd Young, and I knew my real willingness—how well life prepared me for life as a Foreign Service wife, all in all—was geographic. I needed a new country to be fuckable again.

  We sailed for the invasion aboard the Maloy. A DE or destroyer escort, not much interesting about it except it was the 29th’s floating headquarters and one of its bridge signalmen was eighteen-year-old Ned Finn, years later the cigaretted, alcoholic DCM to my Cadwaller in Nagon. (Deputy Chief of Mission, Panama. Honestly, bikini girl! Respect your great-grandfather and whatever you do, don’t end up hungry in Naples in wartime. I don’t and I can’t want to see you that way.) Shaking hands on Plon-Plon-Ville’s long jetty before he brushed dear Nan and then their children forward, we knew better than to pretend we’d had the remotest cognizance of each other on invasion day. Like Cadwaller, Ned and I both knew how huge, clankingly scary, and monstrously impersonal it had been.

  Twisted this way and that by the waves, bumped by the planet’s indifference against that Martian alphabet of German obstacles, a few dozen of morning’s waterlogged dead were still being prepped for eternity’s surgery when I—I, Daisy Buchanan’s daughter, I, Ram-Pam-Pam; I, Pomme—waded past them on that one and only day. Not wanting to make every step a slogging flounce, but you know how it is with surf. Your choice is Columbus or an anonymous corpse. Then I ditched my misleadingly Red-Crossed helmet before anyone could feebly or urgently call, and Eddie and I each got to work chasing up somebody who still had the power of speech to tell us about it.

  One thing about an invasion beach is that for the life of you you can’t tell where all the junk came from. Look at one of the most often reproduced photographs of our men going ashore, snapped from the landing craft they’ve just left, and your eye is caught by a mystifying tangle of white on the ramp. Toilet paper, bandage roll? No, Panama: kung pao. By the time I reached Omaha there was junk everywhere. Gear that had burst its stuffings, bloodied French phrase books, even a typewriter from some clerical unit clearly sent in too soon. Armed Forces edition of a pulp paperback called The Dark Deadline. It was as if we’d hurled our attics at the Germans, not our army.

  The clutch of first-wave survivors Eddie induced to sing “Happy Birthday” to me was on the shale near a trackless bulldozer. Some were still wearing their waist-cinching life preservers, those odd cummerbunds of D-Day that, more than any other single detail, bring back Pam’s twenty-fourth birthday when I spot them in photographs. But they were all so bewildered that, incredibly, not one wanted to smoke.

  The few who reached the sea wall had stayed huddled there in a trance of fear, taking more casualties but uncommanded, scattered, mostly weaponless, and at a loss for any behavior except waiting dully for themselves or someone else to get hit, like children in a brutal orphanage, as one hour piled onto the next and wreckage piled onto wreckage. Eventually, once the Navy’s destroyers started chancing destruction themselves by steaming dangerously inshore to pelt the bluffs with five-inch shells (Cadwaller’s corvette’s popgun played its part), Norman Cota, the 29th’s assistant commander, had pried some Rangers, engineers, and gamer infantrymen to their feet to take and clear the beach exit. These boys hadn’t been among them, though. Since six-thirty a.m., they hadn’t been among anyone.

  Mr. Spielberg? That was Omaha. Not your hardy Ranger outfit, with its forty-two-year-old (!) Captain Tom, that somehow recovers from being annihilated at the waterline to get up the bluffs and start wiping out Jerries in twenty-five intrepid minutes. At low tide the real Omaha, unlike yours, forced them to cross at least a hundred yards before they got to dry sand, much less shelter.

  Anyhow, companies that have just been annihilated don’t slaughter anybody. They aren’t in the mood and the 29th, unlike the Big Red One, had never seen action. I will n
ever understand why that massively planned invasion’s planners pitched an unblooded unit at Omaha, unless they knew that whoever landed first was going to get massacred and the choice of the virgin 29th was sacrificial.

  And oh, Mr. Spielberg! Indulge me, I’m elderly and I shan’t be around too much longer. Where did those paratroopers come from? Paratroopers—behind Omaha? They landed on the Cotentin side and any patrol sent out to rescue your private would’ve started from Utah. With Carentan still in dispute, Eddie and I couldn’t even get over there until June 13 or so. But Utah Beach wasn’t gory enough for you, was it?, so you cheated. You cheated for the exciting sake of your bloodbath.

  Don’t misunderstand, daisysdaughter.com readers. My fight is with thrills disguised as kung pao, not D-Day’s enshrinement alongside Bunker Hill and Gettysburg. No doubt you’d believe your Gramela if I said I’d witnessed all three.

  It took us dull weeks and weeks to nudge the Germans out of Normandy’s hedgerows. The Battle of the Bocage was Brad under apple trees beside his command trailer, bareheaded unless Bernard Law Montgomery was due to visit. With its Aussie and tanker badges, Monty’s beret required a helmeted Brad so that our wispy-haired general wouldn’t look like an American Gothic farmer in newsreels. It was a luckless, fuckless Eddie and a luckless, fuckless Pam scouring narrow, tree-Gothicked, hotly jammed roads as we looked for a story that wouldn’t just be the same one with altered coordinates and a different unit and more dead cows.

  We said the hell with it one day in July, flagged down a truck headed beachward to flag down a supply ship returning to England. Spent two nights making naked kung pao in a Plymouth hotel before Pam, safety-pinning her otiose bra’s broken strap, retreated to London to tap out “The Stalemate.” It never saw print: when we got back to France, Operation COBRA had started. The bocage gave way at Falaise.

  Paris was a mezzotint kermess, possibly the only one those urbanites have ever yielded to without restraint. Paris was a mass: de Gaulle’s. Paris was flowers, Mme Chignonne’s and the Paris footlocker’s poisoned, therefore preauthenticated kung pao, from dead Daisy’s typewriter on top of The Gold-Hatted Lover’s amok drafts to two velvet cases holding one engraved gold syringe—beyond a glint of doubt, my mother’s, its minuscule Give me your answer do identifying it unimpeachably as the Lotus Eater’s Charybdean gift—and one unengraved silver one. Q.E.D., the L.E.’s own, despite Pam’s fallibly colored memory of the one time a budding pudding had seen its roseate gleam in the L.E.’s soft paw.

  Put both syringes back and snapped both cases shut, haven’t looked at them since. But I know they’re still down there, trapped like women miners in snapshots and rubbish. All I ever rescued was dead Daisy’s typewriter, determined to make “Like mother, like daughter” come true only in the arena where I had a track record—by Pamela Buchanan—and knew she had failed.

  What you won’t see on the footlocker’s lid, much less in the kung pao–challenged (Glenn Ford! Kirk Douglas!) Is Paris Burning?, are two palmprints: Pam’s own. Months late, Eddie’d just read “Bacchanapoli,” and I’d rather not consider that he might’ve been imagining my long gams as toothpicks and my bloomers as shorts. Yet Paris addled me too, and we spent a week in a swim of notional identities and light-hearted transformational games (“Pretend you’re nice today, Eddie. All day,” I commanded. He said “Okay”: did a crackerjack job) before we woke up one afternoon and remembered somebody’d told us Patton was on the Meuse. By the time we got to it ourselves, his columns had stopped: no more gas.

  I had even less use for Patton than Bill did, from his high-pitched squeaky voice to his humps with the Red Cross girl we all knew was his niece: two bits of kung pao Patton left out. Of course the whole thing is just a big musical, with the hard-working (on film) Spanish army as both the Sharks and the Jets in its lavish production numbers. The niece killed herself, by the way.

  Worsening weather, rain in our bones where the marrow had been, forests so dark and grim breadcrumbs would’ve been useless: that was the Huertgen. Navigation skills boxed and outfoxed by too many trees, we kept getting lost, which was scary. We’d orient ourselves by which way the beat-up stretcher bearers were jogging, shamed—at least I was—that spotting them was a relief.

  Division after division got put in and chewed up there, to this day no one knows why. For the first time I felt disgusted around combat generals, not just rear-echelon ones. So we said the hell with it again, headed back to now dripping and pigeon-gray Paris to fuck-booze-munch-ablute some more. But played no light-hearted transformational games, our tribute I suppose to knowing the war had gone bad.

  You know what falling snow means in this story, don’t you, bikini girl? If you don’t, your dad’s been remiss. The Ardennes was where outfits bled white in the Huertgen and the grass-green new 106th got sent for either a reprieve from or a mild smattering foretaste of combat. Ten Panzer divisions hit the thinly held line.

  On the mend after Holland, one debacle Pam neither witnessed nor wrote, the 101st Airborne got pulled out of its rest camps, shuttled up to hold onto Bastogne. In swirls of icy confetti not far from Neufchateau, I watched the trucks rolling by and heard a shout I still cherish.

  “Hey, Regent’s—hey, red! Miss Buchanan! Remember me? Carentan! Hey, what the hell is new since?”

  “Beats me, soldier! Everything!” I was walking in icy confetti and mud alongside. “Where you headed?”

  “Some shithole!”

  “Well, I know that, sonny! Some help…”

  His tailgated face had vroomed on before “…you are!” Identical but for his shout, other trucks came bumbling and lumbering through icy confetti. They didn’t even have winter overcoats, Panama. Like most of our army in Europe, they didn’t have a lot of practice defending much either, but they turned out to be good at it. More determined, in fact—and you might as well know what Ike, Brad, and Patton all knew—than our reluctant GIs ever were when attacking. That’s why the Germans only broke when the weather did and our fighter-bombers could hit them.

  That was the Bulge. But not The Battle of the Bulge, a largely snowless—and mudless, witless, characterless, pointless, indeed everything but deathless—affair that may have the least kung pao of any movie I’ve seen. I can only imagine management’s mixed feelings at District movie houses when they saw Mrs. Cadwaller march up in the Sixties and Seventies for the latest World War Two epic. They knew I’d yell rude things and hoot before walking out early, but without me they’d have been screening the matinees for mice and cockroaches, from Rome Dead Ahead—with that callow idiot Chuck Troy impersonating the GI I was sure he’d never been in real life—to The Bridge at Remagen. Seen on Tim Cadwaller’s recommendation when I’d about given up (of course all these movies litter the index of You Must Remember This), only The Big Red One had what makes kung pao irrelevant: the right poetry.

  As the war’s way-back-when grew more distant, what frustrated me most was even the costliest epic’s inadequacy at conveying even a pitiful facsimile of the size of the thing. It didn’t take place in bespoke bits of landscape churned up in all too visibly limited ways that wouldn’t annoy the banks, TV aerials, and Volkswageny flows of vacation traffic just off camera. It was our everything and Europe’s everywhere.

  The few vestigial bits of what you’re pleased to call ordinary life—whose return inside a decade to West Berlin, even, no one who’d seen it as rubble and big masonry eyes would ever stop finding preposterous—were what seemed pointlessly contrived and stupid. Even in exhilaration, we Americans were mundane to ourselves, of course, but amazing to everyone else. In the real town of Remagen, when I saw a woman the age I am now clucking endearments as she fed her cat an unbelievably precious sardine, I almost jumped out of our jeep to go smack the demented old hag. Yet I’d have done the same for Kelquen.

  Never saw Schindler’s List, Mr. Spielberg, and sorry. A man who can’t get Tinkerbell rig
ht isn’t my idea of a good guide to Auschwitz and by then I was seventy-three. But my Dachau you know: “I’m Nachum Unger—Nachum Unger, the poet. We are colleagues. Here I am.” And you know its kung pao, which I’ve never recorded until a soon-to-be-gone-with-the-wind Pam did: “Hey, fuck you, Maggie! I got here first.” If he heard me, Nachum might’ve had a thing or two to say about that.

  As for Pam’s own failure, well. Withered as they are by now, the Glendale memories in Pink Thing’s archives say I’d find Peg Kimball’s kung pao–less antics with Chet Dooley and Eddie Harting in The Gal I Left Behind Me excruciating. That one started with me and so I bear the blame. Hearing Andy Pond tell me he’d rented the damn thing for my birthday would’ve been reason enough to seize Cadwaller’s gun even if I’d been feeling merry up to then.

  Yet over the years, I’ve also told myself that for Peg Kimball’s 1948–49 to do justice to Pam’s 1944–45, The Gal would’ve had to last sixteen hours, be unwatchable, cost half the country’s GNP, and require its audience not to bathe for a week as part of the price of admission. Breaking new ground in kung pao, Eddie Whitling’s Flynn would appear as itself—and if I knew it and its owner, demand top billing too.

  I didn’t write The Naked and the Dead or even The Young Lions, let alone The Gallery. I wrote Nothing Like a Dame instead. Pam may just lack a novelist’s urge to transmute haywire events into concentrated truths, alchemizing how-it-was into a raftered here-I-am. Much less, with wretched “Chanson d’automne” at once the exception and the proof, a poet’s: “Minds crabwise interlock, with luck, and scuttle/Then it’s done.”

  That’s from Addison’s “To My Wife on Some Anniversary,” if you’re wondering. It’s in The Pilgrim Lands at Malibu and too few anthologies. When I was actually at work on Dame, yanking each day’s final page from the roller so I could shimmy into Manhattan via pumpkining taxicab, I never felt I was recording. I felt I was living, suiting my priorities.