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

by Carson, Tom

  He deposited the groceries in my kitchen and put Meet Pamela and The Gal I Left Behind Me next to my TV. Then he rehefted the box, clearly the unadvertised pièce de résistance of the whole business, and presented it to me.

  It was the size of a child’s coffin. And the weight too, as I learned when he laid it across the arms of Pam’s wheelchair. “Andy, what is this?” I said.

  He glowed with self-pleasure. “Oh, how I planned it! I planned it for months. I first e-mailed Nenuphar back in November.”

  “Nenuphar?” Then I grew more incredulous: “Nenuphar has e-mail, for Lord’s sake? Some bloody monastery.”

  “I think they have to for the bread. You know, ‘Flour of the Lily.’ I’ve got a loaf of their sourdough in the groceries too. It’s said to be, well, heavenly.”

  “Then is this what I think it is?”

  “Brother Nicholas’s earthly possessions,” Andy confirmed. “They turn everything in when they enter the order. But what they want preserved after they’re gone gets put in a locker—like street clothes when you go swimming. This is all that your guardian asked them to keep, but no relative ever came forward to claim it.”

  “But how did you get it? You aren’t a relative.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” said Andy triumphantly. “Andrew Carraway Pond, at your service. Cadet branch of the family on my mother’s side.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me that?” I demanded, glancing up with some reluctance. All the mimsies wanted to do was stare stunned at what I’d never guessed might still exist: the Paris footlocker’s missing twin.

  “You never said ‘Carraway’ once until you mentioned his old agency last fall at the Kennedy Center. He doesn’t come up all that often, and when he does, it’s always been ‘Nick,’ ‘Uncle Nick,’ ‘Brother Nicholas,’ or just ‘my old guardian.’ That’s when I got curious and checked.”

  “And then never told me,” I protested.

  “I wanted it to be a surprise. Isn’t that what birthdays are for?”

  “Are they ever,” I grumbled through my dentition. Of course Andy knew nothing of Pam’s longest day.

  “Well!” he said, still beaming over his hat trick or tricks. “I know very well you can’t wait to look inside. But I also doubt you want an onlooker while you do, since it’s not really the same as cooing at the brand-new scarf Panama will probably give you. Why don’t I go absent myself in the kitchen and start prepping dinner? I’m no Dottie Crozdetti, but I hope I’ll do.”

  Posted by: A Ward

  Once I got the thing open, inhaling its twice cloistered smell of grands blés desséchés depuis longtemps, the mimsies were greeted by a framed photo I’d studied many a time in my adolescence. Nick, Daisy, and Father stood in summer whites on a dim dock whose white lightpole a budding pudding had often done her pudgy solo best to turn into a maypole soon after I learned to walk.

  Underneath it were a dozen or so unframed others in an envelope, including one that showed a surprisingly saturnine young Nick chatting with a Twenties dandy who had one white-shod foot balanced on the wide running board of an over-ornamented nouveau riche touring car. While I’d never laid eyes on him in the flesh that I knew of, I guessed his identity and instantly disliked him. The humorless self-love, the pompous narcissism of that superficially “sensitive,” not unhandsome face had the power to appall me over eighty years later. It was true the former James Gatz had died young and by violence, but still.

  Next came a manuscript carefully typed on an old typewriter, no doubt the same austere Olivetti I’d often seen parked on his desk’s side table in the back room of the Carraway Agency’s office. While I knew it could only be the memoir of my mother he’d claimed he’d destroyed, the title puzzled me. Beneath a crossed-out Trimalchio in West Egg, the top page advised that this was Under the Red, White, and Blue by Nicholas Carraway.

  I read the opening paragraph, smiled reminiscently. Nick, your younger and more vulnerable years? And just how did those differ from your later ones?

  I didn’t want to grow absorbed, as Daisy’s daughter and Nick’s ward was reasonably sure she might be, and then get interrupted. While my practiced riffling of pages told me the thing was probably under 50,000 words long—bad for its commercial prospects had he ever considered publishing it—that was still far too much to get through while Andy mimicked The Good Life with Dottie Crozdetti in my kitchen, making just enough noise to confirm his lack of proximity for my benefit.

  So I put Under the Red, White, and Blue aside and promptly regretted doing so more than I ever had not drinking the Great Unknown’s sun tea, which is saying something. The final item in the Nenupharcophagus was something I dreaded seeing.

  Unlike one of the contributors to it, the Fall 1934 edition of Pink Rosebuds hadn’t changed a great deal. Same inept drawing of a nude screened by flowers as she gazed at a unicorn on the duly pink cover, same dutiful if sneakily brutal dedication “To Miss Hormel, Our Onlie Begetter.” And above all, as the Rheumas turned now dully age-grayed pages the mimsies didn’t want turned, the same long mentally suppressed poemess: “Chanson d’automne,” by new girl Pamela Buchanan.

  One minute later, an aproned Andy rushed to my side with an octogenarian’s careful version of urgency. “Pam, my God, my God! What is it?”

  Wrapping my ribcage for protection, I was keeling and keening in my wheelchair. Jaw blindly agape and fat-lunetted mimsies groping like unfed mouths, I was begging somebody, something’s, anything’s mercy.

  Cast away violently, the Fall 1934 edition of the Literary Magazine of Purcey’s Girls’ Academy of St. Paul was a mess of pink and gray things on the rug.

  Posted by: Our Newest Pink Rosebud

  Even as five clawing Rheumas waved Andy away, the mimsies turned wild Civil War memorials on him. Desperate for concealment, what little was left of my unsplattered but still shipwrecked brain grabbed petit-navire-style at a straw. As I’d told a jumpy Georgetown faculty wife once long ago, it’s always the time for literary criticism.

  “Oh, my God, Andy! It was just, well, it’s just. It’s just, you see! I always thought my French was so good back then—and it wasn’t. Honestly, how could I—could I of all people!—have used ‘arrachent’ as an intransitive verb? At that age? That’s the sort of mistake Tim would make. He was out of that bloody country by the age of seven.”

  “Come on now, Pam. We know each other,” Andy gently reminded me. “Just try to regroup a bit first. I’ll wait.”

  “I’m perfectly all right. But Andy, the tense change! From the conditional! It’s so awful, so awful. My God, even you would know better! And Hormel—poor Hormel—poor Hormel didn’t. Her and her Bawdyleer! Oh, we were made for each other, that’s obvious. C’est le bal de la comtesse Hormel!”

  Delicately stooping in lunette-befogged triplicate, Andy collected Pink Rosebuds from the rug. “Forgive me, honey,” he said. “I’m just not going to be a lot of help if I don’t know what’s upset you.”

  “Go on, then! Go on. You’ll laugh ’til your sides split, I swear,” I cawed at him. “Christ, in all these years I never knew how lucky I was to be at stupid Purcey’s by then. At Chignonne’s, they’d have laughed at me more! Hated me, hated me, made fun of me more—and for better reasons, too. They can do without honor, but grammar’s the last line of defense.”

  Unlike his role in my life as Cadwaller’s proxy, Andy’s own French wasn’t Proustian. But it hardly had to be to decipher my mess of a poemess. As its sole virtue was brevity, he didn’t need long.

  And was unfooled. “Pam, I’m so sorry. I had no idea. What an awful mistake this was. I should have gone through the box first and then asked what you wanted to see.”

  “No, no. I’m honestly fine now,” I shakily said, reaching for Kleenex. Tried to smile: “My God, what came over me? Andy, forgive me. No excus
e at my age. It was seventy-two years ago.”

  For one minute it hadn’t been. For that one minute, flitting, mincing, and sauntering around me, Purcey’s Girls’ Academy had once again snared gawky boat-footed Pam in its corridors.

  The burlesque declamations of “Chanson d’automne” as I crept by to beg Hormel to let me drop French class. The jokes: “Guess we know now why Buchanan’s mom did it. God, Harmony, could you have stood that sniffling one more second?” (“May nawn, Sigourney,” Harmony Preston snickered.) And worse yet, since Daisy was at least dead but I wasn’t and didn’t know how to be, the lowing greeting that stopped me in doorways, sent me hastening down hallways, kept me blubbering in bathrooms: “Moo! …Moo, big Sandy, here comes Buchanan!…Moo!”

  “Sure you’re okay now?” Andy asked. “Glass of water?”

  “Scotch. A bloody great big one,” I said and wondered why I was quoting John le Carré. If anyone’d earned a drink at the end of the day, you must agree l’équipe here at daisysdaughter.com had.

  “Water and ice?”

  “Do I look like I’ve changed? And oh! Andy, of course get whatever you like for yourself. I should’ve said so earlier.”

  “Pam, I’m your cook! I did feel entitled to pour a glass of red wine in the kitchen.”

  “Then bring that too. At least it’s good for your heart,” I told his back as he went.

  “Oh? It is, really? Good news.”

  Posted by: A Blushing (I’ll Say) Bride

  After we’d let our drinks do the talking for a bit, Andy steepled his fingers. “As your birthday chef, I’m at your disposal. I’m also damned if I’m going to make another decision tonight without getting your input first. Would you rather eat now or watch one of your movies?”

  “Oh, eat, eat. I’m starving. Nothing but nibbles all day.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “It didn’t seem all that interesting.”

  “Sometimes I wonder why I put up with this crap,” Andy muttered. He’d already restowed Pink Rosebuds and Nick’s other mementos in the Nenupharcophagus, tactfully placing it in the foyer so that I could nudge it out into the hall with no trouble if that’s what I wanted. As he moved to clear my living room table, he looked puzzled at the battlements I’d stacked against my ruins: everything from Murphy’s Collected Plays and The Pilgrim Lands at Malibu to a picture of Noah Gerson exiting a jeep at the Wailing Wall and another of Hopsie in his topper and swim trunks.

  “Pam, what’ve you been up to?”

  “All that? Oh, nothing. Just a few things Tim Cadwaller—you know him, our Cadwaller’s grandson—asked me to sort for him. Something to do with a book, I believe. That’s why I got out his last one, see what I’d be in for.”

  Andy was holding Nan’s snapshot of Cadwaller. “I’ve always liked this one,” he said with Pondian fondness. “You know I regret missing out on Nagon.”

  “Someone had to hold the fort at the Department. You had Paris and none of the others did. But how do you know the photo?”

  “Pam, I’ve met Nan Finn once or twice in my life,” Andy said patiently. “She sent me one afterward too.”

  “I thought it was just me.” (I did feel a bit trespassed on.)

  “As I remember, there were fifty or sixty of us. Nan’s idea of a gesture is just quieter than yours. But ours were smaller.”

  As Andy restored You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two to its spot in the trophy bookcase, his eye fell on the hastily replaced and damnably protruding copy of by Pamela Buchanan’s second book above it. He’d known since Paris days what had nestled behind Glory Be throughout Hopsie’s and my marriage, and one push of the book’s spine told him it was again. Cadwaller’s gun was in his hand before I could protest.

  “Now I’m really getting curious,” he said. “I thought this had been exiled to the Paris footlocker with the other private souvenirs. What’s going on?”

  “Aren’t I allowed to make one sentimental gesture on my birthday?” I croaked. “Anyhow, it’s not loaded.”

  He looked so infuriatingly amused that I’d have shot him with it if it had been and I could’ve wheeled over to wrestle it from his grip. “How long ago did you find out?”

  “Some time ago. But the question, dear Andy, is how you know to begin with.”

  “Cadwaller asked me to do it before he went into Bethesda,” Andy explained, ejecting the empty ammo clip with an octogenarian’s careful version of cockiness. His mimicry of Hopsie was convincing mostly because it was affectionate: “‘Andy,’ said he, ‘I’m not a vain man. But I worry our Pam cares about me a good deal, and under the circumstances I can’t count on her intelligence to choose the best way of demonstrating it after I’m gone.’ So, yes—I’ve got the bullets.” He displayed their former home on his extended palm. “Which, yes, I’ve been sentimental enough to keep. In my Berlin footlocker.”

  So naturally, once the table was cleared and then set—oysters brought out on the half shell, then replaced by crab cakes, salad, and sourdough bread baked in Brother Nicholas Carraway’s old kiln as Andy’s red and my white wine (one Scotch had been more than enough to make an invisible Hardy Boys doctor gibber in distress) flowed—we talked about my and our Cadwaller. Then we talked about Nan and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the last play we’d attended with her at the Folger: a marvelous Oberon, a miscast but often delightful Titania.

  Then, as we always did, we turned to Potus and Potusville and the war and the rest of the mess he’d made of our now ancient lives. “Yes, and then they started calling French fries freedom fries,” Andy said, twinkling.

  When that didn’t provoke me to a fresh Pamamiad, he looked mildly quizzical. He knew nothing of Pam’s longest day. Nor had I told him of my White House phone call, since I knew I’d have to rehash it at length and it had turned out in the end to be so negligible.

  That wasn’t the only reason I was distracted. By the time Andy cleared our plates and went to get us our coffee, Pam’s awareness that she had one more chore to perform had the Rheumas twisting my napkin. He came back with two cups, set them down next to our respective medicinal Rubicon cubes.

  “Andy,” I said. “Not without some surprise, I’ve got to admit this has been really lovely. What I’ve got to say now is rotten thanks, but I’ve made up my mind. You need to know I can’t marry you.”

  The milk he was pouring didn’t even break stride. “Well! I’m glad that’s been settled,” he said cheerfully. “Of course I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Posted by: Meet Pamela

  “Andy Pond, you’ve got nerve! You’ve spent three or four years trying to talk me into moving in with you,” I accused him. “‘Why don’t we play out the string under the same roof? Wouldn’t it be easier to quit kidding ourselves?’ Yes, and then you even said, ‘Pam, you can’t cook and I can. Why don’t I do it for both of us every day? I’m not Dottie but I’ll do and so on and so forth.’” Speaking of cooking, I’m afraid Pam’s humble pie came straight from literature’s Automat: “Have you met someone else, for God’s sake?”

  “Yes, quite a while ago.” He’d gone from perplexed to concerned to affectionate as I spoke. “Pam, I’m sorry, but I wasn’t proposing. I was just being practical. You live alone, so do I, and we’re ancient.”

  “So a little rash senile groping in our old age might do us in and good riddance?”

  “No, not at all. I worry about you. So does Nan, for that matter. I can’t tell you how often we’ve talked about it.”

  “Oh boo fucking hoo,” I snapped at him. “If you two are my friends, I am not to be worried about. I forbid it. I’ll shoot you both.”

  “With what? I told you I’ve got the bullets. Pam, listen. You can’t walk half a block without needing your wheelchair. If those fat glasses of yours broke, you’d
be as lost as a mole at the Ice Capades. Apparently, looking out for you also runs in my family. What if there’s a fire in the Rochambeau, what if you break your hip in the shower? I’m not saying I’m robust. I’m just betting against you falling down in the bathtub at exactly the moment the kitchen stove blows up in my face.”

  “Oh, what horseshit. Alone we could die game. Who’s the somebody else?”

  “Pam, you’re joking.”

  “Often. Not right now. Who is she?”

  Andy sighed and then smiled. “I’ve been in love with Nan Finn since the week Breathless came out in Paris,” he said, and I did feel a bit slow on the uptake. “You and Hopsie didn’t know them yet then, but I did. They were over from Frankfurt and we saw the odd little movie everybody was talking about.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. And everything, at least for young Andy. Afterward we went to a café and Nan started prattling about how mean she thought Godard had been to poor Jean Seberg—you know, the same way she still does at her Christmas party. All of three sentences in I was praying my face wouldn’t give me away.”

  “Why not? I know Nan. She’d have been flattered.”

  “You knew Ned too. He was watching. He always did most men. Like a hawk, drunk or sober.”

  “Why didn’t you ever do anything about it? I mean once he was no longer with us. It has been a while.”

  “Love’s love,” Andy shrugged. “It’s an emotion, Pam, not a directive. Nothing in any law says you’ve got to do something about it. I didn’t, I haven’t. I was and am pretty sure Nan wouldn’t want me to.”

  “Does she know?”

  “Oh, I think so by now. That’s why I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want me to do something about it.”

  “But then—oh, for God’s sake, Andy. What about bloody me?”