by Carson, Tom
It’d taken him four phone calls to get me to agree to lunch. First I’d pleaded work. “Perhaps for the best. I’m fairly busy too,” he said, and the next day I read the latest on our sale of arms to newly independent Tunisia with an annoyed sense of having had insiderdom thrust on me.
Next I’d pleaded flu. “The French winter is nothing to sneeze at,” he said, leaving me dumbfounded by whether I’d just heard the worst joke of all time or was talking to a man too obtuse to realize he’d made one. Then I’d pleaded work again.
“Bad luck for me. But I obviously don’t want to intrude on your book,” Cadwaller said. When I wanted to know what made him think I was writing one, he politely inquired, “Don’t book-writers write books?”
That was cloddish even by his standards, I thought as I hung up and eyed my Smith-Corona’s twenty-six tadpoles. No longer Haroun Pam-Raschid’s wily vizier, it would soon resume its original guise as dead Daisy’s typewriter if I didn’t give it something to do with my hands soon.
As bad or worse, every phone call from Cadwaller was a reminder of my unpleasant discovery that Art B. thought ill enough of Pam to make fun of her. He was renowned as the least cruel of humorists. I couldn’t think of anything especially stupid or gross I’d done to bring out his unsuspected malicious streak.
So what if he’d spotted a prettier woman or more interesting man over the Madwoman’s wildly gowned shoulder? He could have just mimed his cigar was in need of an ashtray and I’d have been none the wiser. No need for the prank of pretending a dullard like Cadwaller was the closest I’d get to meeting a reincarnation of the persistent eighteenth-century men who’d voyaged back from the New World to ask for alliances, backing and fighting ships to command.
The only reason I’d decided beforehand to accept Cadwaller’s invite to lunch by the fourth time he called was that I badly needed some sense of myself as a working stiff. If I was stuck playing the poor man’s Janet Flanner for Regent’s, I could do worse than to cultivate the envoy in practical charge—of course there was some Ikean figurehead over him—of looking out for our interests on the diplomatic end of NATO. Even if it spoke a whole Britannica about diplomacy Dulles-style that someone like him had the job.
“Anytime I watch Paris fishermen, I’m distracted,” he said as we broke bread on a bistro’s glassed-in sidewalk on the Quai Voltaire. “Winter or summer, which is the means and which the end boggles me.”
“Speaking of ends and means, I’d sure love to know what de Gaulle is thinking right now. Do your Embassy people have an inkling?” I said. (Top that for a reportorial segue, Janet F. All right, so she could’ve in her cradle.)
Cadwaller’s eyes bid farewell to the fishermen. “Oh! Believe me, we’d like to. Still, even we know that’s the wrong question in a way. What de Gaulle is thinking and planning will be what historians poke at. What de Gaulle is feeling makes the rest Q.E.D. except for one mystery: his timetable. Entre nous, can you imagine what sort of mind it must take to harness emotions like his?”
God! He was even drearier than I remembered. Reconsidered the appeal of Flannerizing myself on the spot. “Entre nous,” for Christ’s sake! His accent hadn’t been too bad, but still.
“I’m learning what sort of mind it takes to be interested,” I said brightly, since rudeness might at least enliven things.
“I’m sorry. I hadn’t grasped it was my topic. You’re kind to point it out, but excuse me. You won’t want to hear this, Pamela. Please muffle your ears.”
Using and then tossing his napkin, he stood. I hadn’t even noticed the drunken American serviceman belaboring a waitress back near the zinc bar, but nothing was background to Cadwaller. Not if it involved his compatriots.
“Marine! Brace. You’re a God-damned sorry excuse for a God-damned disgrace, do you know that? Brace! Leave this poor God-damned woman alone. Is this your idea of how to behave when you’re wearing our country’s uniform on foreign soil? Brace, I said. Now put down a good tip and get out of everybody’s God-damned sight until you’re sober. You got that, Marine? Yeah, you got that.”
He came back to the table, abashed. “Sorry, Pamela. Forgive me, but I can still speak Navy when I have to. Even if it weren’t the job, I’m afraid that sort of behavior would just drive me up the wall.”
He looked up at our waiter. “Désolé de vous avoir fait attendre, monsieur. Pour madame, le poulet Chaillot sans orages—yes, Pam, you’re sure? Not the huîtres claire St. Claire you were looking at earlier? All right. Pour moi, le homard ensorcelé par les asperges blanches. Et une bouteille de—un moment, je vous prie.” He’d switched to the wine list. “Ah, voilà. Un château d’aube irait bien, qu’en pensez-vous? Ca ira? Merci bien.”
Handing over menu and wine list, he reached for his pipe and tobacco pouch. “Anyhow, Pam, I didn’t mean to bore you about de Gaulle. Professional weakness plus private fascination: what a deadly combination that can be at times. I’m sure I do go on. Now, what would you rather talk about? Have you read Dutourd’s wonderful new book Les taxis de la Marne? Of course I’m not literary. You’ll know better than me”—puff—“that’s why I’m curious.”
Oh, Panama! That was your great-grandfather. I married him.
I wouldn’t want to know the woman who didn’t.
Posted by: Pam
I also don’t mean to embarrass you, since we’re now describing a man whose blood started running thirty-two years later in your own untroubled, happy-to-be-here veins. So let me just get this out of the way. The first time Cadwaller and I hit the sack wasn’t looking too special until he demonstrated that solicitude wasn’t something he saved for restaurants. Understanding Pam as no other man had (I don’t mean they hadn’t done it, just that even thoughtful Noah Gerson hadn’t recognized any special understanding was in play; the gurgle far down in my throat stayed Sanskrit to him), your great-grandfather, the distinguished American diplomat, gave head to Daisy’s daughter as if it not only was going but had gone out of style, leaving him as the lone expert. At least until his long dying left him incapable, nudging him to go down on me was like asking Bach to hum something pretty.
So that said, daisysdaughter.com readers, can we move on? Trust me, and I believe you may on this score by now, people only natter about their sex lives when there’s a problem. If they’re bragging—definite problem. We never bragged, didn’t need to. Our never tamped contentment was as plain as the pipe on my Cadwaller’s face.
In my garrulous widowhood, inattentive to everything except prompting more talk, only decorum has stopped me from asking Andy Pond how it looked from the outside. Not decorum in the Emily Post-It Note sense: concern that some eddy of woe washing up from Andy’s mouth to his eyes might betray an old unhappiness at either his exclusion from our glow or having no comparable one of his own. Believe me, bikini girl, any concept of good manners that isn’t backed by real reluctance to cause pain is horseshit. The rest might as well be the rules of parcheesi.
Even so, Cadwaller and I didn’t hit the sack until a month later, proof he shared my concept of manners. He knew bloody well he could’ve had me kicking the ceiling from the moment I started gasping l’Américaine’s opinion that Les taxis de la Marne was a marvelous, fiercely controlled but passionate, oh!, splendid book, and Jean Dutourd her living French writer of choice ever since Une tête de chien. (Was and is: my age and still with us, he’s become an awful right-wing curmudgeon, atrocious as only an octogenarian French curmudgeon can be. But those sentences still run clear as brooks and forge ahead as muscular as bouncers.) In later years, my third husband looked amused when I’d hound him to confess whether he’d considered scooting me around the corner and up to the Hôtel de Lille’s fifth floor for a quickie before dessert.
Even if he did—and why wouldn’t you tell me, Hopsie?—he’d briefed himself enough on Pam Buchanan to worry about putting me at risk with too much casual
ness or impetuosity. Knew I was newly divorced, could deduce it hadn’t been my idea from the circumstances. (Yes, Mrs. Gerson’s solo return from Jerusalem had made the next-to-last gossip item in some columns, more curious then than now about book-writers’ doings.) Knew I’d been married at twenty-one to Brannigan Murphy.
Whatever else he’d learned or decided not to about my past, the whole scroll was clearly no testimonial to knowing what I wanted from life. Carrying tact to a fault, he didn’t demote his predecessor from “your husband” to “your ex” until after our own marriage, and by then he’d met Gerson and watched us together when Noah came to Paris to scout funding for his country’s infant film industry.
The one bit of homework Cadwaller saw fit to share didn’t come out until he was walking me back to the rue St. Sulpice. “I’ve read both your books,” he advised apropos of silence. Even twenty years later, that habit of treating his side of conversations as information for others to make of what they would, unmodified by any attempt to steer your reaction or even concede it should produce any, could still drive me crazy.
“Thank you. But the question is your timetable,” said Pam with my second-best mischievous smile. (Wrong profile, but he would insist on the gentleman’s place on the street side of the sidewalk.) And he wasn’t even looking at me, the dummkopf. Who cared about the traffic? Not me.
“The second three weeks and the first one ten days ago. It was the bonus of you turning me down so often, but I don’t see why I should be thanked. Haven’t told you what I thought of them yet.”
“That’s not what I was thanking you for,” I cooed.
Damn you, Cadwaller! Never mind the new swirls of snow or the frog-marching bicycles. My eyes are blue-gray weather that were once Civil War memorials in a budding pudding’s face. Now my mouth is so lipsticked (1958!) it looks like two crimson bananas visiting Arlington Cemetery. My smart winter Chanel suit—smart? It was brainy on my part, brilliant on Coco’s, and whoever invented January was a genius—conceals a paucity of bust I’m hoping won’t disappoint you in the sack.
Or in the summers.
Coming to a halt, he looked up instead at St. Sulpice, never the most highly regarded of Paris’s many heaps of ecclesiastical stone. That’s not only because it’s on the Left Bank, away from the smug medieval in-crowd on the Île and far from Sacré-Coeur’s white bombe glacée. The real reason is that it’s impressive without being especially graceful or inviting, just a couple of determined towers that don’t leap into the sky so much as announce that this is as far as they got and there’s no reason the sky should care.
“I did get it from your books that you aren’t pious, Pam, so I doubt this’ll offend you. Might bore you, but I’ll take my chances and it won’t be the first time. I sometimes ask myself why religion is the only human impulse that rates monuments this moving. Aren’t there other things we all know? Of course they tried during the Revolution, secularizing them into temples of nature or whatever, but it didn’t take. One thing I’ll say for churches is they’re damned good at not letting anyone mistake them for anything but what they are. This one got in just under the wire—eighteenth century.”
I’d wanted a flat in this neighborhood because I remembered what the Place St. Sulpice looked like full of roistering GIs and kissable Parisiennes. Now it had come down to one forty-seven-year-old man in a fedora and raincoat, looking up at St. Sulpice’s towers with his hands clasped to his back as snowflakes bothered his eyes without especially disturbing them. Below the raincoat, black suit pants and black shoes kept his black silk socks hidden.
But when he’d sat down to lunch, I’d idly noticed something I now realized he only expected to be detectable to someone interested—that is, European or female. What, Pamimbecile? Oh, of course! That meticulous pattern of miniature diamonds woven from ankle to cuffed shin.
“Cadwaller, I won’t rest until you tell me! Who’s your tailor?”
Looking over Pam’s way at last, he beamed at me curiously. “What a peculiar question! I don’t have one in Paris, just a haberdasher,” he said, and we knew.
Posted by: Goldilocks
If you wonder about the heading, daisysdaughter.com readers, that’s what Chris Cadwaller called me during the first completely cheerful conversation we brought off after his father’s death. I assume anyone who’s stuck with my blog through thick and thin gets his teasing gist. But if she hadn’t had it already, Callie Sherman would’ve earned Pam’s undying enmity for a remark she made one night in late 1967 or early 1968.
Not only alive, Cadwaller was in the room, albeit out of earshot. At the far end of our living room’s shoebox (Georgetown houses are narrow), he was chatting with an also still alive, thankfully not yet ostentatiously blotto Ned Finn.
Can’t recall the occasion. Were we welcoming the Finns back from Berlin, packing Andy Pond off to Lisbon, repaying the Shermans for putting us up in Hong Kong so soon after Cy had taken over there from still mourned (bum ticker) Stu Wiesenthal? It could’ve been any of those or a half dozen other twinings of the State Department magic carpet. Not too far from Pamela Harriman’s glossier pile, our place on O Street was the rug depot between Cadwaller’s two Ambassadorships, and Callie’s serene command of blueblood crassness always could give even Potus’s fabled mother a contest.
“Que voulez-vous, Pam? We all go back to our own kind sooner or later,” she said, lifting her hands to mime scales of injustice. So far as any of us could tell, some ancestor of Callie’s had ordered those scales of injustice from La Scala. Family heirloom now. Say what you will about Italians otherwise, fine craftsmen. Etc.
“The homing instinct,” Callie went on, now resignedly bearing an invisible orb and scepter. “Don’t we?”
That was after she’d worked both Murphy and Gerson into the conversation. No, no kids with either of them either, Callie. Thanks. Thought you knew that. Oh, just making sure? I see. Since you didn’t want to commit a faux pas. Lovely. Yes, Chris—whom you’ve just met, again, Callie, in his jeans jacket plus tie and his scruffy Sixties beard—is Cadwaller’s son from his first marriage. No, he isn’t an FSO or even Peace Corps, didn’t emulate his dad after all; he’s a photographer. For a living, not a hobby. The dark-haired little boy peeping up at us, stunned by most things but comforted by a firm paternal trouser leg on one side and a protective maternal skirt on the other, is Cadwaller’s young grandson Timmy.
“Oh, Callie! I don’t think I even have a kind,” I said warmly—warmly to the point of boiling, in fact. “Of course I weep alone sometimes to know I’ll never belong to yours. But hell, you can’t have everything.”
The one time I met Clare Boothe Luce was frosty and unmemorable, but all women my age are in her debt. “Quel accent de cirque, too!” I said, knowing I was safe on that count. The remnants of Callie’s Critchloft Academy French were catch-phrase jewelry, worn for effect. The language was a stranger to the interior of her brain.
Between us, Nan Finn’s face went out of synch—mouth swearing spontaneous fealty to Pam, which delighted me, even as her eyes brightened and hardened in her none too adept faux Callie. One reason the glorious girl never mastered either of our styles is that she’d have had to start by accepting they were two different ones. That would make one of us wrong, a model Nan Finn shouldn’t emulate. When we were together and she was captivated by both the Dame and the Duchess—cf. the White Rabbit: “The Duchess, the Duchess! Oh, won’t she be savage if I’ve kept her waiting!”—she was never more adorably herself than when she tried to mimic both of us at once.
Do I even need to mention that Callie and I were also great friends? Especially given how prominent in our small world both Cy Sherman and Hopsie were, the intra-American comme il faut of the old Foreign Service gang didn’t leave us much option. Luckily, we were also at the age when it’s possible to enjoy someone hugely without liking him or her at all.
“We all have one, I think, and I don’t see any point pretending it’s not a comfort. If I thought you honestly meant that, I’d have to feel sorry for you. The loneliness of the unique thing! So awful if genuine, so trite as a pose. ‘Oh, no, no one like me in the whole, whole world,’” Callie moaned witheringly. “You wouldn’t condemn Nan here to that, would you?”
“My God, I’d never condemn Nan to anything,” I yelped at flagship volume, abetted by the fact that on one side my warmth was now genuine. “But in fact I don’t think there’s anyone like her in the whole, whole world. Do you?”
By now, Nan’s eyes and mouth really didn’t know which side to take. Or rather, which of us was taking hers. Since she wasn’t a ninny (this isn’t about perceptiveness, bikini girl; it’s about susceptibility), you could see her mind make an intrigued little nest around the fact that Callie Sherman was the one advocating tribalism. Pretty rich from the most genuinely—that is, pointlessly—exotic woman I know: “The only White Russian princess born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania,” Cadwaller once called her in private.
Nan’s nose was charmed to find its owner under discussion. It tossed up and her laugh followed, faithfully as Christmas after Thanksgiving.
“Oh, of course I’d be thrilled to think I was unique! Right up to the first time it scared me. Maybe it’s all about mood,” she blurted triumphantly to coast out of the giggle, and now you know why I was fond of her.
However, Nan had refined one social skill to a subtlety that neither I nor, to my knowledge, Callie ever needed to acquire. That was an ability to carry on—merry, eager, and charming—while monitoring her husband’s liquor intake. Despite having known both Finns for years and seen Ned in the bag too often, I’d only noticed those flicked checkups and adjustments for the first time earlier tonight.
