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

by Carson, Tom

  “You know I never liked him,” Esau whispered to my collarbone, not that Pam saw fit to say she hadn’t much either during our seven hours. “He never liked me. But he’d made up his mind not to by the first time we shook hands, and I’ve never understood people like that. I’ve hated many a man but I always had reasons. The other is a luxury I couldn’t afford.”

  Then he wept again on my shoulder and I sang to him in my aardvark voice the day Bobby Kennedy died.

  It won’t be a stylish marriage! I can’t afford a carriage…

  My one White House summons at night was on August 29, and by then I was more than sure enough of my man to overrule Cadwaller’s objections when the call came at dinner. In synch for once with the country at large, Hopsie and I were eating ours in front of the TV in the den of our Georgetown house. Google “1968 Democratic Convention, Chicago” and you’ll know why in a jiffy.

  Ignoring my advice back in March, Lyndon had had a TV set installed in the Lincoln Sitting Room. Ignoring our usual practice, we sat bolt upright and side by side on the couch to watch Hubert Humphrey’s acceptance speech. For once we were as much at a loss for words as the mad taxidermist’s two stuffed eagles.

  Then Lyndon rose to kill the set. “Do you know who else was on the short list to be my Vice President in ’64, Mrs. Cadwaller? Gene McCarthy.”

  “Come sit beside me a spell, Mr. President…”

  I think it was after I’d sung “A Bicycle Built for Two” to him that time that the muffled voice said, “I don’t really know anything about you at all, do I?”

  “What would you like to?”

  He turned his face to mine. “Hell, I don’t know. For instance, where’d you get that little scar over your left eyebrow?”

  “Dachau,” I said witlessly. His eyes and nose came up like tethered zeppelins.

  “Good God, ma’am! Do you know your English is damn near perfect? I had no idea. I told you your husband had a secret—”

  “No, no,” I said and explained I’d only been there for the day.

  “What was it like?” his remuffled voice asked. “I never much cared to know.”

  “Not in here, Mr. President. Not in here. There, there. There, there.”

  As I patted him and remembered “The Gates of Hell,” I realized with some bewilderment that I’d become a nurse at last. Also that my one experience of mothering tallied with my one experience of being successfully mothered: Daisy stroking a budding pudding’s hair on a Provincetown couch as the Lotus Eater hurled shoes around before making her escape. Anyhow, it sure beat Daisy inviting Pam to join her in the tub as a substitute for the runaway L.E., but we all improvise in emergencies and it had been a long time ago.

  My final summons by the White House switchboard came on November 6, 1968. Squeaking past squeaky Hubert and foiling foul George Wallace, Nixon had just been elected. When Felix Culpa showed me into the Lincoln Sitting Room, Lyndon was not only slippered but in dressing gown and pajamas, a first. It might’ve alarmed me if I hadn’t known my Esau so well by then.

  “Go home soon,” he explained, meaning not me but himself. “I might as well get used to this.”

  “Yes, Mr. President. Come sit beside me a spell…”

  …but you’ll look sweet—upon the seat—

  of a bicycle built for two!

  “Thank you,” he mumbled into my shoulder, as he always did. “Thank you, Mrs. Cadwaller. I don’t suppose we’ll see each other again.”

  “You won’t come back to Washington, Mr. President?”

  “No,” he mumbled. “I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

  4. Dottie from Kansas and Dolly from Gray Star

  Posted by: Pam

  After his retirement, Lyndon Johnson returned to his ranch in Texas with his patient Lady Bird. He not only went back to chain smoking but, in the single best joke of the Sixties, grew his hair long.

  Fortunately, if only from a selfish point of view—as Cadwaller said, there are limits—I bore no resemblance to Hannah Milhous Nixon. It’s still a matter of record that her son’s favorite White House lair was the Lincoln Sitting Room. Come Washington’s car-exhaust Augusts, he used to command his own Felix Culpa to turn the air conditioning up full blast so that he could enjoy a fire in the fireplace while listening to Richard Rodgers’s—sorry, Hopsie, it’s true—Victory at Sea.

  Once again fortunately, aside from the fact that we’re both in our eighties, I don’t look at all like Potus’s mother either. As I’ve mentioned, instead her son resembles my father—long dead Tom Buchanan, barely known to a budding pudding named Pammie at the very beginning of my way-back-when.

  The way-back-when! For people my age and even somewhat younger, it ended on August 9, 1974. In the real coda to my generation’s Clio Airways ride, that’s when Nixon resigned. All the push and bother since then strikes the likes of us as something else: either the past tense of the present or the present tense of the past.

  Nonetheless, l’équipe does realize some things may need glossing to make sense to Panama and her fellow bikini girls. Here you go, Gidget’s granddaughters:

  One. Robert Strange McNamara—yes, that was and as of 6/6/06 is his middle name—served as Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations from 1961 to 1968. He left once Vietnam became an undeniable disaster to head the World Bank. As I write, his successor there is a man named Paul Wolfowitz. During his own stint as Deputy Secretary of Defense, he rejoiced in the title of “Wolfowitz of Arabia,” but there were and are competitors.

  Two. Pam sometimes wondered if her Piétas with Esau Baines Johnson had been a delusion until she read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s descriptions in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream of LBJ huddling with her in bed for comfort. While I don’t know what my fellow historian’s singing voice is like, I did feel caught between relief that I hadn’t imagined it and annoyance I wasn’t the only one.

  Three. In case you’ve forgotten, the chant from the kids in Lafayette Square that Johnson hated so much he couldn’t bring himself to repeat it went like this: “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”

  Four. The most notorious commercial of the 1964 contest between Johnson and Senator Barry Goldwater was an LBJ ad so inflammatory it only aired once. It showed a girl not unlike a very young Kirsten Dunst pulling the petals off a flower and counting aloud. Then an announcer reversed her lisping “Six, seven, eight” with “Eight, seven, six” and so on, ending in a mushroom cloud. The implication was that LBJ would be far less likely than Goldwater to start a new-kew-lear, nucleah, or nuclear war. Nothing was said pro or con about escalating a conventional one, but the commercial has been known ever since as the Daisy spot.

  Five. Gene McCarthy, whose showing in the 1968 New Hampshire primary helped prompt LBJ’s decision not to seek another term, was an amateur poet. His best-known collection is called Other Things and the Aardvark.

  Six. At a considerably higher level of prosody, “Never, never, never, never, never!” is Lear’s most famous groan. By coincidence, in the same speech Lear also says “Please undo this button.”

  Seven. Unless Google lies, George P.A. Healy’s The Peacemakers hangs to this day in the White House Treaty Room. Since it’s a painting and not one more TV set permanently tuned to the Murphy Channel, I assume William T. Sherman is now and forever saying, “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.” Of course no one can hear him or ever will.

  Eight. While we’re on the Civil War, “Oh! Too bad. Oh! Too bad,” is Robert E. Lee’s recorded reaction after Pickett’s charge failed on the third day at Gettysburg. Don’t blame me for feeling just a bit flattered on the forty-seven-year-old Buchanan bod’s behalf.

  Nine. In pained hindsight, “All you need is love” is about the dumbest nostrum I’ve ever heard. The Beatles were carried away by the moment
. Imagine a moment that could carry them away.

  Ten. Apropos of nothing particular, Tim Cadwaller told me once that Sean Finn’s favorite childhood quotation was from The Jungle Book: “They have cast me out from the Man-Pack, Mother! But I come with the hide of Shere Khan.” His favorite line in The Longest Day was Brigadier Norman Cota’s farewell to the beach: “Run me up the hill, son.”

  Posted by: A Voyager

  And yes, Tim: I do see it now. Congratulations for outfoxing me. It never crossed my mind that you named my website daisysdaughter.com because mygeneration.com was taken.

  Think of my vanity, after all! Your Gramela is much too proud of her life’s peculiarity in the way-back-when to consider being representative of much as anything but a demotion. It’s ridiculous to imagine that everyone my age had a vaguely notorious, bewitchingly selfish Jazz Age mother—let alone one who ended up in dull, dumb, puzzled exile during the Depression before dying too young of lollipow. Yet perhaps we all did in one way or another.

  In one way or another, everyone my age got to hear “Happy Birthday” sung to us on D-Day. In one way or another, we all ended up trapped into crooning “Daisy, Daisy” to our broken last President—our last one, I mean, not the country’s—as choppers hovered, Cronkite mulched the ink and chalk he hoped to alchemize, the kids in the park chanted their baiting slogans, and B-52s turned Southeast Asia into the land of a thousand napalm suns.

  Dear, I suppose I’d better wrap this thing up. Aside from one or maybe two exceptions, though I’m only guessing about the one in 1920—an embryo with just seconds of pure happiness left, I was never told later whether my birth had been easy or difficult—this has been the longest goddam June 6 of my life. Now that the sky outside my window at the Rochambeau has turned Omaha indigo at last, I must admit I’m damned tired.

  I see I never quite got to India here on daisysdaughter.com. I’ve got some fairly distinguished nautical company on that score, and they say the land he reached instead was something to see in its salad days. May I take it upon myself to report back to Admiral Columbus that India was very nice? Hopsie was sixty when he presented his credentials to Mrs. Gandhi.

  Of course, half the reason he’d been appointed was that he’d rubbed Kissinger the wrong way a few too many times in Policy Planning once the Nixon crowd came in. It may say something about both Kissinger’s and Nixon’s priorities that India was their idea of the back burner, meant to leave Cadwaller feeling why-Henry’d. Half my husband’s happiness at the posting was that he knew career Ambassadors only get a fighting chance to do the diplomatic job they’re trained for in countries Washington isn’t obsessed with.

  Predictably, in that Kissingerian Et in Arcadia Ergo way of his, Henry—always the kind of cook who never tasted soup ’til it was burning—leapt in with glasses aglow the minute the ’71 India-Pakistan war began. Not only undoing all Cadwaller’s work during our first year but depriving the United States of a prize opportunity to improve our always persnickety relations with Delhi, he made it our policy to tilt in Pakistan’s favor. When I see Potus praising Musharraf, I don’t know whether to mutter “Plus ça change” or hum “A Bicycle Built for Two.”

  Hopsie’s cables explaining the stark idiocy of our choice of favorites may’ve been the hardest test of your great-grandfather’s adherence to one basic rule of decorum in diplomatic cables, namely that they include no cursing. He was later briefed that the tilt’s indirect value had been in helping to orchestrate Nixon’s opening to China, but that smugly invented bank shot was just more of Kissinger’s bullshit. Luckily, though, Henry’s eagle eye soon spotted even hairier bouillabaisses to stick a talon into—as Ned Finn used to sing in the corridors of our big aircraft carrier for paper planes, “I Wonder Where’s Kissinger Now?”—and that left Cadwaller free to try repairing the damage without too much interference.

  Also luckily, despite the fact that most human emotions were at best intermittently interesting hobbies to her rather than the point of much, Indira Gandhi liked him. While Hopsie couldn’t quite return the favor, the weak spot that always left my husband most tempted to explain away people’s faults was the pleasure he took in braininess, of which she obviously had a cartload. We were also gone before the Emergency, as she cleverly styled her suspension of civil liberties during the crackdown of ’75. From a distance, Cadwaller had no trouble conceding that intelligence shouldn’t be a leader’s only virtue.

  Albeit mostly enjoyably, India kept me terrifically busy myself. Since Nagon was my main point of comparison, the biggest adjustment was in scale. Paying lip service to India’s importance while vaunting our own, our sparkling sugar-cube Embassy was damn near the size of M’Lawa’s old Palais du Président. I was directing a large staff at the Residence—our entertainments were to scale too—and playing Mrs. Cadwaller on a much more high-stakes diplomatic circuit than Plon-Plon-Ville’s had been.

  There, my motley past proved surprisingly useful. The ashes of the Jazz Age as widowed Daisy’s luggage, a Midwestern adolescence in the Depression with an increasingly religious-minded Nick Carraway for a Scarecrow, New York’s pre–Pearl Harbor glitter and glow, World War Two, the voluptuous allure of Hollywood, and encounters with both Jack and Bobby Kennedy, among other things, should never be mistaken for the careening whole of American experience in what we had enough hubris to name the American century. They just made lively stations of the conversational cross when I’d be asked about the imaginary nation other countries love most in us and Pam could confirm or deny its points of contact with reality.

  As the Ambassador’s wife, I was also the frequent escort—hell, the local equivalent of a bateau-mouche Marianne—to junketeering Congressmen’s wives and other American dames of stature on their India splashdowns, not only giving them rides on Delhi’s touristic merry-go-round (I did love the Red Fort every time) but taking them to Jaipur, Agra, Calcutta, and the rest: destinations as inevitable in their way as Jazz Age, grands blés sanglotants, Omaha, Dachau, etc. I boned up on reincarnation so as to be able to explain that the quality of your next life depended on your actions in the previous one, which oddly or not neither Mrs. Cadwaller nor most Americans I explained it to had any trouble nodding at a bit wearily. Only the idea that we had to die to face the music was a sticking point.

  My favorite was always Bombay, where the erotic sculptures at Elephanta put a wry grin on a now considerably less uptight Ethel Kennedy’s face and the British Raj’s pomp was on its mightiest display in Ozymandian stone. Like Constantinople, Leningrad, West Berlin, and Plon-Plon-Ville, Bombay no longer exists, but I wouldn’t mind seeing Mumbai someday.

  Oh, yes: Ethel. I forget which year she showed up, and she didn’t return my sunglasses—the gesture of gestures that would’ve redefined us as a couple of merry Clio Airways stewardesses sans peur et sans reproche. On the contrary, I couldn’t tell if she’d forgotten our first meeting or was just hoping I wouldn’t bring it up. Since I had no idea how she played the compartmentalization game to keep “When Bobby was alive” at bay, I didn’t.

  Perhaps because this was India, where immunity to experience isn’t in the cards, she was much pleasanter company. I had a hard time of it all the same to keep from goggling when she started to talk eagerly about her oldest son’s Presidential prospects. Not only were we riding back to Delhi as roadside entertainers, hoping for a penny from the caravan, hiked dancing bears to their feet—the stick that gets them up on their hind legs is thrust through a ring in their noses—but I’d just recalled a day at Ouibomey when the Warren and Sawyer kids had been chasing each other around with toy six-guns, yelling “Pan, Pan.”

  I think it was after Ethel’s visit that Cadwaller looked up to see me drooping dramatically in the doorway of our private quarters at the Residence. Not Mrs. Kennedy’s fault, but it had been about my twentieth trip to Agra.

  “How’d it go, dear?”

  “Oh,
Hopsie,” I groaned. “When you’ve seen one Taj Mahal, you’ve seen ’em all.” Not having seen it as often as I had, he chuckled.

  To my disappointment, our tour didn’t overlap with that of Nan Finn, who came out to Delhi soon afterward in her hopeful, nervous new guise as a junior consular officer. After Ned’s too early death—proving what a crapshoot the whole thing is, neither cigarettes nor booze was to blame—Andy Pond had arranged to bring her into the Department, since the glorious girl had been part of our world too long for us to lose her. You’d better believe we took care of our own when we could.

  More peculiarly, by the time I reached India and saw the Pink City, my old champion Celia Brady—then White, then Singh—had just left Jaipur for good. Once things went sour with her maharajah, she’d married an eccentric DNA researcher and moved to Scotland. That turned out to be among the few places Hopsie and I never got to during your great-grandfather’s final State Department job, in some ways his true calling all along.

  In others, he was being put out to pasture and knew it. By then Kissinger was Secretary of State en titre as well as in influence, and Cadwaller spent a few months walking the halls—old-hand jargon for a senior officer without an assignment—before Henry punched his ticket: Director General of the Foreign Service. The Kissingerian diminution in that promotion was that he was cut out of policy, but Hopsie was the kind of man whose love of country, unlike his wife’s haywire version, was most fiercely projected through devotion to the one of its institutions that best expressed his idealism. The appointment was as popular within the Department as Kissinger himself wasn’t.