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

by Carson, Tom

  For a change, I’d restrained myself from joining any group Nan was in right away. Brightly anecdotalizing Berlin to Andy Pond and some other people, she seemed as oblivious as a hummingbird to the third cocktail Ned was hoisting across the room. Then came the outflung arm—oh, it was gorgeous; Nan Finn at that moment would’ve been Balanchine’s envy—that let her pivot on Cy Sherman’s shoulder, almost weeping with laughter at her ineptitude in letting the Vopos take her passport the first time she went through Checkpoint Charlie, to block someone’s view of Ned’s too ruddy face.

  Whose view? Not just anyone’s view. The view of her husband’s new overlord at the Department. That self-important ignoramus was holding forth about LBJ’s South American policy (sic, I must say) in yet a third conversational cluster over Nan’s shoulder. And to think Cadwaller and I had once discussed whether I should find a way to ask her if she realized Ned didn’t hold his liquor well at parties.

  Note the phrasing, Panama! God knows my generation drank like Cossacks raiding an Indian reservation. Plenty of us drank like Cossacks raiding an Indian reservation in Dublin on New Year’s Eve. In those days, the issue and only litmus test was conduct, not intake. I’m still not so sure we were wrong.

  I doubt Callie Sherman ever appreciated Nan Finn’s furtive artistry. Still, she and Cy obviously knew about Ned, since they’d had the Finns in Frankfurt when Cy was Consul General and Ned was a junior officer on his shakedown consular tour. We’d only gotten them when he came as Cadwaller’s No. 2 to West Africa, a chronological disadvantage that nonetheless made me gratifyingly sure Nan was ultimately more mine than Callie’s. We’d never have been evenly matched rivals for the glorious girl’s allegiance if warmer feelings for Mrs. Cadwaller hadn’t offset the droit de duchesse of Callie’s first dibs.

  Incidentally, I assure you I’m describing social life exclusively. Nan was guileless, Callie had no interest in people as human beings, and I was—well, I’ll take refuge in saying you’ve met me. But I was about to glimpse the pathos of Nan Finn’s furtive artistry, which was that too often it was art for art’s sake. No matter how good she was at deflecting attention from either Ned’s condition or her own anxious tabs on it, sooner or later he had a way of announcing it himself.

  Late 1967, early ’68? Then he’d had three foreign postings: Frankfurt, West Africa with us, West Berlin. One stint in Washington before this one. Two-thirds of the people in that room knew the signs! Could instantly read the newly silly grin, loud voice, and reddened face, the newly boastful and either unwittingly or indifferently private humor. “Jesus Christ,” he’d just bawled too happily at Cadwaller. “Jesus Christ.”

  Please, I thought: for Nan’s sake, not the later blubbering. The rubbish about his adolescence in the Navy. Then I recounted the room and saw that worry was misplaced. With the tactical sense—not quite intelligence, is it?—of drunks, Ned Finn only wept at more intimate gatherings.

  “Jesus Christ,” he guffawed, now blatantly crimson. “Of course we pretend to put up with it. But so long as we’re the ones keeping them safe, hell, Ambassador! We all know we don’t need to give a shit what the West Germans think of Vietnam. So do they, nosy bastards. Jesus Christ.”

  Then came the fatally lopsided rictus of inward amusement. It followed the first obscenity as faithfully as Waterloo followed Elba.

  Above Cadwaller’s imperturbable smile, I saw his eyes give Ned the mute Georgetown-shoebox version of “Brace.” Though Hopsie’d wrestled his conscience, his fondness for Ned had kept him from mentioning the drinking in his DCM’s fitness evaluation even in our last year in Nagon. He knew after that he’d no longer be able to protect him directly.

  Like most of us, I was fond of Ned too. He was a good, wry man when sober, and a merry one after one drink. Just never learned how to pace himself, but Callie’s eyes savored her victory anyway. That Ned had been Cy’s made her opportunism—or was it real, deep contempt?—even crueler.

  Not our kind, Pam. Why don’t you just admit it? Cadwaller meanwhile was exerting authority by answering Ned at dull length in a voice hard as brick, brooking no interruption so as to keep him braced. Yet he’d have had to go on for an hour to stop Ned’s grin from sloping and slopping around like his face’s pet puppy. It was getting impatient for the next chance to say “Shit” too loudly in a Georgetown shoebox whose human eyelets included a new boss Ned clearly dreaded and loathed, and Hopsie couldn’t have kept it up for an hour: he was the host. As for the hostess, I’d just seen Nan’s face ready itself for its lonely pilgrimage.

  Unless the shoebox’s contents got rejumbled fast, she had no choice at all. Cross that room on her own, pretend there was something silly and fetchingly Nanlike she’d realized she wanted Cadwaller’s thoughts on. Ambassador, should I take up a pipe? So tempted by meerschaum. Be still, Ned. Be still.

  We’d all know anyway, though. Callie Sherman would know most of all. My Nan!

  “cadwaller!” I roared like a lioness, making small Timmy Cadwaller stare. Young Sean Finn, too. “charades! That was the plan, Hopsie, wasn’t it? I’m tired of waiting! Isn’t everyone else?”

  “Frankly, no,” murmured the Duchess. “Cy and I must be going, in fact.” But the Dame had just won the look on the glorious girl’s face, and you never won that look, Callie. Not once.

  She was fifteen and drooping with gratitude now that she’d gotten help with the prom float. If it wasn’t such a hardy snowball in hell, even your heart would’ve melted. Then Nan’s eyes Morsed a worry; I gestured a quicksilver reply. Yes, we’d manage things so Ned would only guess, not perform. Sit close and do what you can to keep him from rising or shouting. Coffee for all, not just him.

  I saw Nan most recently in April, I think. So hard to believe she’s about to turn eighty! Seemed and was younger than her age back then, seems and is younger today. What was once a necessity is now a gift, as Andy Pond said of her ingenious ingenuousness. Yet it’s as unaware as ever of its hard-won uniqueness.

  Every once in a while, through her own face’s latter-day skein of vintage Clio Airways routes, that nose lifts. Christmas still follows Thanksgiving.

  “Oh, Pam!” she said as we sat at La Chaumière without Laurel Warren for once. “When I think of Ned, I swear I just don’t know. He might have gone the same way as a history professor. That was the first dream, some college in Oregon. Then he took the Foreign Service exam for the hell of it. Sometimes I think it was too confusing for both of us. When we were posted abroad, we had everything rich people do except money. When we got back home, we had everything middle-class people do but experience.”

  Posted by: Pam

  Quite, quite late that night—Mmmmmmmmmmm!—when I told Cadwaller what Callie had said, he chuckled in pity. “I don’t envy foreigners who have to learn English,” he mused and, being Cadwaller, seemed quite prepared to leave it at that.

  “Hopsie, come back! Setting the bloody alarm clock can wait. Why?”

  “Take ‘kind,’” he explained, setting it anyway. “A very simple word whose meaning when it’s an adjective is nearly the opposite of its effect as a noun. Callie’s the noun and you’re often the adjective, but they can’t print your pictures in dictionaries.”

  “Mmmm. Not looking like this, that’s for sure.”

  “I’d buy it,” he pleasantly said. “My English could use brushing up.”

  I doubt even Callie would’ve made her remark in front of him. He had a great trick of affecting just enough ignorance of female chat’s flashing cutlery to obliviously drop a plate on the floor and stand waiting.

  My third husband gave advice to four Presidents in spite of knowing three wouldn’t take it and the fourth (Gerald Ford) wouldn’t understand it. One Cadwaller ancestor had played a minor role at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, but smallpox did in that vote against the three-fifths of a man clause. Nothing would h
ave disgusted my Hopsie like a suggestion that some family portrait of a fellow whose nose looked like a persimmon gave him any special say in the matter.

  That said, the Dame can’t pretend the Duchess was completely off base. We all do have our limits at experimenting with universality and that’s all there is to it. I’ve sometimes wondered if it says something vile about me that Pam could never picture falling in love with someone who wasn’t American.

  Of the three men I married, Noah Gerson’s grave in Jerusalem is the proof of all proofs that he was as American as could be. Never either Noah’s or my favorite writer, Melville did have that one moment of clarity. The Declaration of Independence does make a difference and there are no restrictions on how.

  As for Brannigan Murphy, not only was he as made-in-U.S.A. as Custer, Velveeta, or Wrong-Way Corrigan, but I suspect that as much as fame was what drew me. He’d been on the cover of Time, but I doubt I’d have cared had it been Paris Match. He undid the last of Chignonne’s bun, for which I thank him.

  As for your great-grandfather, Panama, I’ve made one rotten job of it here on still loving, still mourning daisysdaughter.com if you don’t see that the Cadwaller who clapped a pipe in his mouth and took on the job of steering a fighting ship named the Bonne Femme Pamela from midlife to old age didn’t need an ancestor’s portrait to broadcast his place of origin. Character did the job by being sure enough of its own inner resources to put me on notice from Day One that the only way I’d ever disappoint him was by dying.

  To say he let Pam “be herself at last,” as you children might be nitwit enough to not only say but find deep, is preposterous. I always had been, you always will be, and once you’ve seen India it’s hard to call that an accomplishment. There’s just a big difference between doing it helplessly and doing it without qualms, sure of the marital steadiness bracing you as you meet the waves. If the sight of Nan Finn disrobing to change into the glorious girl’s swimsuit in the improvised shelters of Nagon’s fairly casual idea of beach privacy, soundtracked by a orchestra of surf, did more than once give me paws—see Fran Kukla’s Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1—I’d still refuse to label it thwarted longing. It felt more like nostalgia.

  When my romantic patriotism worried me—and it is a form of bigotry, no question—I discovered the farthest my imagination could strain was to sketch a Pam who’d married a Frenchman. If a gal wants to feel truly American from breakfast to armpits, in my observation that’s the shortcut of shortcuts. Even Celia Brady’s marriage to a maharajah wouldn’t touch it, since those generous Indians delight in surprises. Unlike the French, they know surprises change nothing.

  So imagining Mme Pamela had its Yankee Doodley attractions. Even so, the moment I had us mentally installed in the Faubourg St. Germain—him Tour de Francing Le Monde, why was he a stockbroker?, me scrambling my eggs and translating all of Dutourd into English for some American publisher—his face would warp into that of Hy Lector, born Hippolyte Lecteur. An accordion wheezed, my hair was now a crazed orange. I dove overboard (why were we in a lifeboat?) and never looked back.

  When Chris Cadwaller phoned one day in early 1961 to tell us he’d just gotten married to a nice girl from Rouen, even a man as urbane as his dad was briefly nonplussed. Not that he’d have allowed himself to show it had anyone other than his wife been watching. We felt taken aback for another reason besides Hopsie’s son having married so young—nineteen!—or his springing the news as a fact on the ground. A French daughter-in-law felt like an intrusion of Cadwaller’s job into our personal life, as if Chris would soon show up hauling not a plump, bright student wife but a briefcase bristling with Quai d’Orsay memoranda. After doing it all day at work, at home Hopsie didn’t want to negotiate.

  As you know, Chris, I adored your bride on sight and do still. As for your dad, he wasn’t the adoring type. The single exception flattered me beyond measure and was on public display only as a beaming given, never once a performance. He’d still grown very fond of Renée by midway through dinner. Two virtues you fast learn to prize in a Frenchwoman are practicality, apparently doled out at birth to all XX-chromosomed customers—and placidity, no more common in Paris than statues lionizing Napoleon III. To find them united was like meeting Rapunzel.

  Even at twenty, from round eyes to round hips, a then brunette Renée announced herself physically as a pleasing arrangement of circles and spheres, a yé-yé-banged and chubby female Olympics logo whose gold, silver, and bronze Chris had won all at once. At nineteen, he was still tense and wiry. I knew already in which direction I’d bet on that Jack Sprat contrast to resolve itself.

  Chris, I did make sure first your head was turned at an angle that made it unlikely you’d spot my smile and guess—and you would’ve—what prompted it. Did you think of it too and hide your grin from me? I couldn’t help but be bemused that just three years had gone by since the new Mrs. Cadwaller, still all wet as a stepmother, had come in search of aspirin into our never too lockable bathroom. That was how I’d embarrassed an even wirier, just then much tenser Chris in the grip of solo Brigitte Bardotlatry, which at least on some grounds had turned out to be prescient.

  Posted by: Pam

  That happened much too soon after I’d first met Hopsie’s son in the summer of ’58, when Cadwaller’s ex relented and sent Chris to Europe to visit his dad before Exeter reclaimed him. Cadwaller hadn’t asked her until we were married, his way of protecting me.

  He wasn’t going to let sixteen-year-old Chris indulge any illusions his verdict on Pam was of practical consequence. Nor would he permit the first Mrs. Cadwaller to canter her yes or no around our upcoming nuptials. By then she was back in the marital saddle herself as Eileen Downslow, arbiter of the horsy set in Middleburg, Va., and whoever coined the happy phrase “Sugar wouldn’t melt in her pocket” has my fondest salute.

  Of course, the night we met Renée three years later, it didn’t take Cadwaller long to figure out Chris’s refusal to alert us beforehand. “Payback!” he boomed, for him downright lustily, and leaned back in his chair. “I am getting slow. You didn’t meet Pam until she was Mrs. Cadwaller either.”

  “Yes!” a Chris who’d also surprised us with his first scraggly beard crowed from the floor, enjoying his reward. “I had to for form’s sake—you understand, Dad. Now we’re even.” He might’ve done well in his father’s profession, but he was already fondling a Leica.

  “Chris, assez!” said Renée. “Tu as déjà un tas de photos de moi.” Panama, if your grandmother thought he’d taken lots of her then, she must rue her youthful innocence now.

  As for my own wedding to Hopsie, it had been a fairly bundled-in affair in the crunch. The Qua-tree-ème Hooray-Pooh-bleak’s deathwatch had gone into overdrive that spring, keeping Cadwaller burning midnight oil and Andy Pond yawning at the Assemblée Nationale; I think one day in late May was the only time I saw Andy unshaven. I was stuck with a wrapup on the political situation for Roy I kept having to update, then scrap.

  By then just about everyone this side of Sartre had accepted that de Gaulle had to come back and take over. Now that he’d waited them out, he was making conditions. Allies he’d bully without anyone’s by-your-leave. Only the French had to ask first.

  It did drag on, though. As June loomed, we realized we could be living in sin until de Gaulle, France, or even we just keeled over. “Something degrading about needing the General’s permission,” Cadwaller muttered and pulled strings to book us a nooner at l’Église Américaine. It was handy to not only our Embassy but the Palais-Bourbon, where it was all happening.

  We came out to find Andy Pond tapdancing next to an Embassy Chrysler.

  “It’s over, boss! De Gaulle is Premier with emergency powers. He does know them, doesn’t he? He won.”

  “Oh, Hopsie!” I yowled. “We got it all wrong! We weren’t waiting on him. He was waiting on us.”

  Very few people
who worked with my husband would have called him romantic, but they didn’t know him or understand us. He looked mildly amused, and I defy Hollywood at its swooniest to match the one word he said quietly: “Timetable.” Cleared his throat, spoke more loudly: “Andy, how long? The emergency powers.”

  “Six months.”

  Cadwaller nodded, impressed. “He is good. Any shorter, why bother? Any longer—well, well! And maybe my, my down the road. Well, Pam, I’ve obviously got to get on this. Mr. Pond, you’re not quite off duty. Can you give Mrs. Cadwaller some sort of honeymoon? Not that one.”

  At least outside a bedroom or with others present, that was the closest to lewd I think he ever came. But it was his wedding day. And it was to me.

  Did the new bride pout and complain, kick at the church or the car tires? Did my new husband pat my hand, have to tell me in public how much he loved me? What bilge. Risking it though we weren’t alone, as Hopsie got in the car we exchanged one grand look of naked pride—and you can have your fat photo albums, your West Point swords, and your Mendelssohn. I wouldn’t swap my third wedding for anyone’s.

  Romantic is as romantic does. All three of us and then quite soon (honk!) two of us knew Cadwaller was adding to his burdens by delegating Andy to look after me. His logical place was at Hopsie’s side, something neither Andy nor I would have dreamed of acknowledging either before or after the car pulled away.

  To do so would point out that Cadwaller had just told me in public how much he loved me. That faintly Micawberish “Mr. Pond” had been a shout of it if you knew him well. We both knew him well.