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

by Carson, Tom

  Apparently, Rusk was impressed by Cadwaller’s appraisal. (Briefly: “You’re looking for a practical gain to him when there is none. This is about uniqueness, which is obviously crucial to his famous ‘certain idea of France.’ If and when he’s got to be practical about defense from a Soviet invasion, I’m sure he’ll do what needs to be done in an eyeblink. But not without reason, his concept of a real emergency is different from ours,” etc.) So when he needed to put in a new head of the Policy Planning Staff some months later, Cadwaller was one of the candidates whose file he asked for.

  Having seen him in action during the Fourth Republic’s long death throes, Pam herself was less bowled over, which pleased Hopsie no end. “Wait, wait! Twenty-two fucking years they’ve dealt with de Gaulle—and they still hear these as insights? Aw, Hopsie, you mean Rusk actually wondered, out loud, if the General was being impulsive? Don’t they know impulsive and peremptory are two different things? Did you explain about drama, and timetables, and—?”

  “Do you think there’s a chance you’ve been married to me too long?” your great-grandfather asked kindly.

  “Ask me in the next century,” I said, which we both found humorous. Remember, 2001 wasn’t even the name of a movie to us. In the way-back-when, the next century didn’t seem to be thirty-four years off; it seemed to be, well, a century off. That I’ve now seen six years of the stupid post-millennial business—and had a full twenty sans Cadwaller, not to mention two missing Kelquen—is the sort of Methuselan slapstick that can make an old bag’s mimsies gaze a beat too long at her own Rheumas’ bickering writhe in her lap.

  Posted by: Pam

  I don’t claim any of us grasped the full implications. But 1967 was when it all went bad for my generation. So long as they were under draft age or had college deferments, it went great for the kids: they had Sgt. Pepper. No more able to avoid being surrounded by the thing than we could extinguish that same June’s fireflies, we new-minted oldsters were beguiled by it too, perhaps for its strangely charming awareness of death.

  Try to remember that kind Sergeant Pepper. As we weren’t far from Georgetown University’s campus, “A Day in the Life” was playing from two separate houses and one passing VW the day I Smith-Coronated the closing words of Lucky for the Sun: “And of course, we were loved.” I hadn’t expected to end on a note that puzzled and mournful, but writers never know what they know. That’s what makes us different from scientists.

  As I’ve explained more than once, the book came out a year later. Too soon after King’s assassination and too soon before the murder in Los Angeles of the man who one hot day in West Africa had drilled me with eyes like a blue planet’s twin Arctics and said, “I know where I am, Mrs. Cadwaller.” We hadn’t enjoyed each other’s company much, but if you clip my name there may be worse last words.

  Amused as he was by “When I’m Sixty-Four,” particularly when sung by a quartet of English ragamuffins thirty years younger than he, Hopsie was immune to neiges d’antan melancholy. His passion was the art of the possible, mine for impossible art: that was our union, as sacred to us as the capitalized one was to Lincoln. But Policy Planning was hell on my husband, above all because he had a rare gift for it; as a very junior officer, he’d been trained by the section’s founding director. The world, life, and Washington didn’t and hadn’t, and Cadwaller was smart enough to know going in who would win.

  They’d asked him, though, and he persevered. “I think LBJ’s gotten a bit fond of me,” he drawled on the phone from C Street one night that year. Seldom used, even Cadwaller’s drawl was on the terse side.

  “Cadwaller!” I was perplexed by his tone. “Is that bad?”

  “Who can say? Problem is, it’s got nothing to do with affection as the rest of us know it. Combination of antagonism, yearning, craving for ownership, sense of loss we don’t understand and can’t share. Well, maybe that’s not so far from how the rest of us know it! But with him, it’s all on display.”

  “What are you going to do, Hopsie?”

  “Oh, my job.”

  Posted by: Sgt. Pam’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

  Halloween came a week early in the District that year. It wouldn’t really go away until Cadwaller’s fellow pipe-smoker Gerald Ford had bumbled and burbled his way through imitating Ike redux. Reassuring the hinterlands, Manhattan included, that life in our neck of the woods really was fairly dull and no cause for alarm.

  By fall ’67, of course we’d had the kids awhile. Our local Sgt. Peppers, trying to turn what bits they could of the District into sham San Franciscos. Because of the campus or under the impression it was our bohemian quarter, they congregated in Hopsie’s and my Georgetown. Wisconsin Avenue’s downhill amble past O Street acquired a head shop squeezed into a former blind alley, a proudly slovenly record store that didn’t stock Victory at Sea, The Music Man, or even Callie Sherman’s beloved Turandot, and a used-denim emporium across from Martin’s.

  All gone now sauf the good old neighborhood restaurant I’d first eaten in with Jake Cohnstein as the WashPost headlined Bataan and Corrigedor and ate in last with Andy Pond and Nan Finn only weeks ago. The District’s ability to quietly stay itself here and there—cf. Dixie Liquor; cf., for that matter, my falcon roost here at the good old Rochambeau—remained my city’s great talent even after its mutation into Potusville.

  Even so, Cadwaller and I had never seen what Washington could look like when a hundred thousand protesters crowded into it. We’d still been in Nagon when King gave his “I have a dream” speech; Hopsie and Ned Finn’d had to rely on Time, Newsweek, and the Department’s own obtuse official cable to brief the Palais du Président’s new occupant. They did a good enough job that N’Koda greeted his people next Independence Day—theirs, not ours—with “Moi aussi, j’ai un rêve.”

  Try to remember the kind of October. VWs with New Hampshire and Massachusetts plates trolling in vain for parking spaces under oranging and lemoning leaves. Buses whose banners boasted they’d rolled in all the way from Chicago and Ann Arbor to give LBJ what for about Vietnam. Sleeping bags tossed from highway-grimed vans up to blue-jeaned girls on front stoops. Under the old Riggs Bank’s gold dome at the corner of Wisconsin and M, an Uncle Sam on stilts walked around wearing a sandwich board: “I Want You to Burn Your Draft Card.”

  And yes, Tim: I know you’ve explained to me more than once that getting New Leftists and hippies mixed up is ahistorical. Hell, I’m not writing a book about them! I was a fifty-six-year-old American diplomat’s forty-seven-year-old wife, just trying without too much hassle to get down M Street to La Chaumière for lunch with Laurel Warren, the new co-proprietor of The Art of Nagon. The antiwar hoopla reminded me fondly of the liberation of Paris turned freakshow until I caught on with a start that they thought Hopsie and I were the Germans.

  Pam hadn’t yet started writing checks to Gene McCarthy’s Presidential campaign, since as yet there wasn’t a Gene McCarthy Presidential campaign to write checks to. But I’d turned against the war soon after Cadwaller changed jobs. Primarily conversationally and only among friends, since being married to Hopsie limited my options. He might’ve been more than a top hat in the margin of the WashPost’s news section if it came out that the impetuous wife of Policy Planning’s head had gotten herself arrested at a rally.

  Even over a decade after Glory Be, I wasn’t wholly anonymous in my own right. I fully expected the big demonstration all the out-of-towners were piling in for would be something I’d read about in the papers and watch on TV, and in literal terms that was the case. My bit part in what historians now know as the March on the Pentagon came two evenings earlier.

  Blame the District’s never overstocked pond of local parties who could pass for literary in visiting New Yorkers’ eyes for the frazzled phone call I got from a woman I barely knew. Some Georgetown prof’s wife, most likely met through the Warrens. Now that they were n
o longer in government, Rich and Laurel kept surprising us with the other crags and gullies of District life they found every bit as interesting as our eternal shop talk.

  “Pam, I’m sorry,” she said rapidly. “I don’t know where to turn. Do I remember you saying you know Dwight Macdonald?”

  “I’m not really sure if I do or just did. We haven’t bumped into each other for nigh on twenty years.” I saw no point in adding he’d given Glory Be its single most withering review: “It’s a mug’s game,” and so on.

  “Well! I don’t know how we got talked into it. You sign one little petition too many, and boom! All hell breaks loose. I mean, of course [husband’s name lost to Pink Thing’s archives] and I are against the war. We want to do what we can, but you don’t expect social pressure to be your pound of flesh. Is that a mixed metaphor?”

  “Not quite, but keep at it. What can I do to help?”

  “So help me, we’re hosting a party. I mean!, did Rosa Luxembourg have days like this? And all these Manhattan people are coming. Macdonald, and I think Robert Lowell.” Her voice trembled: “And Mailer.”

  “Sorry, I can’t stand Lowell’s poetry. Some men write with their penises, he writes with his nose.”

  “Pam, please! Now isn’t the time.”

  “For literary criticism? It’s always the time. I wouldn’t give a rap if he’s opposed the war in Vietnam since 1620.”

  “Can’t you at least stop by? You know how they’ll act! ‘Oh, it’s just a modest little Our Nation’s Capital with no breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.’ And then they aren’t, even. Amused, for God’s sake! Amused.” Then a fresh horror scuttled into her voice: “And Pam! What if one of them writes about it? About us, about me? And our place, and my food, and—”

  “Really, lassie! Calm down. I’m sure preservation in our literature is one thing you don’t need to worry about. It might be nice to see Norman, though.”

  “Oh! I didn’t know you knew him,” she squeaked, half relieved and half dubious.

  “We spent a few months in ’48 waving at each other across the bestseller list. Him on his way up, me on my way down. It’s social life of a sort.”

  Only as I hung up did I realize one oddity. Even if C Street’s aircraft carrier for paper planes hadn’t been detaining him deep past dark on most days, Hopsie obviously couldn’t come to a protesters’ buffet. Since my hostess knew that, I was being invited somewhere in Washington for the first time as Pamela Buchanan. It felt a bit like trying on a nine-year-old cocktail dress and seeing whether I could still scoot the zipper past that tricky sixth vertebra.

  In my hostess’s defense, I’ll swear on a stack of vintage Harper’s magazines that I’ve been to many parties worse than hers. It just didn’t matter; her dread was well founded. Even far grander District gals than she quail at hosting Manhattan’s self-impressed fire brigade.

  If we behave like Washingtonians and discuss what interests us, they’re incredulous at not being the center of attention—particularly when, say, Bob Dole’s maneuver in the Senate that day gets the nod over their luster. If we nervously slip into trying to please them by acting like would-be or exiled New Yorkers, they turn derisive at a fraud that can be authenticated only by skyscrapers outside the window. A few salient points in our favor—e.g., our city’s different purpose than theirs, its not colorless history (we saved the Union; they just had draft riots), its vastly greater access to new-kew-lear, nucleah, and nuclear weapons—don’t make much impression on their eggy noggins.

  Since her local crowd wasn’t mine either, I felt dismayed on confronting her ululant living room once my coat had been shed and she’d carried it off to mate it to some unknown bedspread. Saw our surrounded out-of-town ringers right off, of course, along with some girls I knew had to be imports. Neither flower chickies nor Vogue models, they were synthesizing the two in a way on which New York had all but the patent that year. Our local edition would’ve been either scragglier or more Republican.

  Then Dwight, as I think l’équipe has reported in some long-ago posting on Pam’s longest day, hurried over to greet me with the arms of a bear snuffing a forest fire. Understand, he wasn’t asking forgiveness for scorching Glory Be’s hash. I was being forgiven for sharing a name with the stranger whose book had provoked him.

  “PAM!” he explained. (Cribbed from Ring Lardner, and sorry.) “What was the last thing I saw you at? That sad Buñuel screening at MoMA?”

  “Yes, and my God, what a memory.”

  “He’s doing better these days. Have you seen Belle du Jour?”

  “No, and don’t torture me, monster. The last I heard, us poor Americans won’t get our chance for months. I damn near hopped over to Paris when I saw that pic of Deneuve in her bra.”

  Fortunately, Dwight never noticed confessions. I suspect Mrs. Macdonald could’ve remarked she’d just murdered a lover and gotten an hour’s cheery thoughts on Julien Sorel. Still, his next question did make me miss Manhattan: “You working on something these days?”

  “Little itsy-bitsy something.” Fair description in prepublication preview of Lucky for the Sun, mere plankton in the mouth of Dwight’s whale. “I know what you’ve been up to, though, and Dwight! I don’t see how you do it.”

  “Don’t see how I do what?” he asked with a conjuror’s combined pleasure and wariness.

  “Well, think how it looks from the outside. Here you spent the Forties trying rather heroically to keep us all reminded of radical politics. Now the revolution’s here, the barricades are going up as we speak—and you’re off in dark rooms reviewing movies for Esquire. I swear if you tried climbing Everest, you’d be on top of Mt. Kilimanjaro by sunset. Looking around in an interested way.”

  “Let the last part be my epitaph, then.” And it should be: Dwight Macdonald, 1906–1982, mountaineer. “Pam, do you know—sorry, wrong pecking order. Norman, do you know Pam Buchanan?”

  Wearing a three-piece pinstripe suit—not what I’d’ve picked to storm the Pentagon in, but I believe it’s the same one he has on in the photographs of his arrest two days later—he was nipping bourbon the way dogs only wish they could car tires. But his eyes were most blue and his handshake was pleasant: “No, I don’t think we’ve met.”

  “I do know a friend of yours, though.”

  “Oh, who?”

  “Doc Selzer.” He was the Holt editor who’d proposed placing the Webster’s definition of “incongruous” in front of “The Gates of Hell” in Nothing Like a Dame days. Then he’d moved on to Putnam’s, where I’d gotten some funny letters from him about watching a bleary Norman show up with more revisions of The Deer Park.

  “Oh, Doc! Of course. Wonderful guy. Really fabulous, super. How is he these days?”

  “I thought you’d know better than me,” I admitted. “But I heard the booze got him.”

  “Selzer’s an alkie? That’s not the destiny I’d have picked out for him.”

  I decided against saying that from an existentialist—Norman’s chapeau of choice when mounting a hobbyhorse—talk of people’s destinies is an oxymoron. Of course they don’t think twice about that when it’s someone else. Before I could find a new topic, his eyes—not at all Bobby Kennedy’s Arctics, more the color of bourbon if bourbon were blue and had interested ice floating in it—grew alert and then pleased with themselves.

  “Wait, wait. Pamela Buchanan, yes? Now I’ve got it. The Dame.”

  “Yup. The naked, dead dame, you could say.”

  He laughed. “Maybe I should’ve read it.”

  “Well, maybe I shouldn’t have read An American Dream. Honestly, Norman—I’ve got to ask, since I bet nobody else has the guts. What do you think your biographers’ll make of your mother being named Fanny?”

  The joke’s too long to explain to a bikini girl, but it won me a real look of eval
uation. I might be one of those ladies he loved to call “wicked”—not to mention “ladies”—and hence worthy of Normanic interest.

  Or I might be a Washington broad with more frenzy than manners, and my guess why I got bumped to the lesser pigeonhole was the old brindle mop, now all gray. A wicked lady would’ve dyed hers. Callie Sherman’s is jet black at ninety.

  “Oh, probably no more than they would’ve made of your mother being named whatever she was.” While there was no cruelty in the delivery, I knew I was being dismissed, and so what? There was always Vidal. But Dwight’s hand restrained me—or rather, since I hadn’t turned yet, vouched for me.

  “Now, Lyndon’s mother,” he said, and believe me the way people said “Lyndon” by then was the opposite of singing “Hello, Lyndon” back in 1964, “was or is named Rebekah. In the Old Testament, that would make him Esau, who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Norman, don’t you think ‘Esau Baines Johnson’ has a touch of dark majesty?”

  “Not for me. Maybe I just can’t picture him coming from any womb,” Norman said in a revving staccato. “Honestly, Dwight, I think it’s missing the boat to see a man like Johnson as altogether human. I think at some level he’s some kind of energumen, some frightening force glued together out of our darkest impulses in the shape of a President.”

  “Oh, Norman,” Dwight said, but stouter critics than he had failed to play brakeman to the Mailer locomotive.

  “Without any forethought! Be it said. Be it said,” he went on, free hand raised and voice now so far past staccato I swear Cagney would’ve sounded like NPR’s Diane Rehm next to it. “Try this, try this: the way you might idly mold bits of soap in the shower, mmm?” [Free hand twisting to demonstrate, bourbon glass in the other looking up sadly for Pop’s lost attention.] “We don’t want to step out, grab a towel, and hunt up a fresh bar. Too much bother, the hell with it. Gang, we’re in the shower already! Let’s make one.”