by Carson, Tom
“What about you? You’re the wife of the man I admired more than any I’ve known. You’re my dearest old friend. I’ve never regretted a moment I’ve spent with you no matter how hard you tried. But romance? No, never. That’s the whole story.”
“Romance, my ass,” I reproached him. “I’m just being practical too. You could’ve at least groped me a few times before we got senile. As I recall, I was still up for boinky-boink as late as Clinton’s reelection. Hell, I’d’ve let you call me Nan if you wanted. Or needed to, Andy. So there.”
Instead of fading, Andy’s smile took an odd turn. “Pam, let’s be honest. Don’t you think that shoe might belong on the other foot?” he asked mildly.
“And what does that mean?”
“Oh, Pam, please.”
“Oh Pam please what?”
“Oh Pam please,” said Andy as if to a child, “we knew even in Paris that you were a lesbian.”
Such a long day I’d had. Would it ever end?
“Well, Mr. Pond. You do have the bullets,” I told him.
“That’s not how I thought of it.”
“God, how I do loathe that word,” I said, an aversion daisysdaughter.com readers have presumably noticed by now. “The only word in the language I hate more is ‘orphan.’”
“Pam, I’m sorry.”
Then my head jerked back up. “‘We’? Who in hell is this ‘we,’ may I ask? Oh do tell,” I drawled.
But that only tickled him. “To be honest, my hunch is a fair number of people. But I was mainly thinking of Cadwaller.”
5. Carole Lombard’s Plane
Posted by: Pamus
Sorry, daisysdaughter.com readers. Which I now know I do have, however scattered or odd or disguised or perverse. I didn’t mean to leave you hanging.
If you must know I passed out at midnight. Then I dragged the old pretzel I live in to bed with no recollection of what I’d been doing at my computer. May I remind you I turned eighty-six yesterday.
It’s now afternoon on June 7. D Plus One, as we called it in Normandy. What the D might stand for here is of course up to you.
Nonetheless, I’m a believer in courtesy where courtesy’s due. That’s why the first thing I did this morning was to pick up the telephone—no longer the elephone; that was yesterday too—and call dear Bob’s office. “This is Pamela Cadwaller. Is the Senator in?”
True, he’s been out of the Senate since ’96. His wife’s now the one whose office is on Capitol Hill. But beside the Potomac, your last title’s permanent. Hopsie was “Mr. Ambassador” even in the ICU.
“I’m sorry, no, Mrs. Cadwaller. Would you like to leave a message?”
“Yes. I just wanted to thank him for arranging my birthday call yesterday. It made for an interesting day and I do so like those. Don’t you?”
“I’m sorry, I’m new. Will the Senator know what you’re talking about?”
“Oh, yes, dear, I think so. But if not, he’ll know how to fake it. We’re old.”
I left my number in case. Then out of the blue I plucked the likely significance of my Oval Office interlocutor’s most peculiar remark: “He came down here, showing everyone his gun.” Must’ve meant Bob did a little reminding he’s got a bit of standing as a World War Two vet—as also, by attachment, do I.
The second thing I did was to open the Nenupharcophagus and retrieve Nicholas Carraway’s Under the Red, White, and Blue. Spent a couple of hours with the only eyewitness account of the Scandal and could see why he’d fibbed to Pammie about burning the typescript. Almost involuntarily, he’d kept painting my mother in hues less than lovely.
Nick’s ridiculous infatuation with her pigheaded Narcissus of a bootlegger suitor had me more than once rolling the mimsies behind my fat lunettes. When I got to some guff about the fellow’s “Platonic ideal of himself,” I snorted “Forty-nine cents for cabbage? Cripes! What’s Denmark coming to?” But I must say that in every gesture and sneer, Father lives and breathes like a lab rat under cold light. As for the budding pudding who was to become me, she only trots in and out once or twice, a child of no particular interest or importance except as a refraction of Daisy’s mentality.
Was I hurt? Oh, hell no. Children that young don’t interest me either. What charmed and engrossed me was the discovery that my diffident guardian, the modest Chicago ad man who’d coined “we keep you clean in muscatine,” was an astonishing writer. His perceptions of romance remain immature: picture Daisy’s dim life at forty with her bootlegger suitor and you’ll see what a crock the whole thing is. Yet the verbal music, knit of detail, and compact choice of incident were all breathtaking. As you may’ve noticed, achieving compactness has not been daisysdaughter.com’s best event.
I honestly think that if Under the Red, White, and Blue had been published as fiction—perhaps under some better, more compact title in an alternative funhouse America I sometimes like to imagine—it’d be seen today as some sort of small classic. Knowing my compatriots, of course they’d swoon at the drivel instead of admiring the prose and planning.
Then just for the fuck of it I watched The Gal I Left Behind Me for the first time since Glendale, and guess what? Tim was right. Now that Bill M.’s long gone, I can better appreciate Hal Lime’s skill at miming chipper but unreliable callowness. Eve is yummy, and of course there’s no pretense that she’s playing me. As for Pam’s own mute cameo—as “Peg Kimball” enters what I think is supposed to be Claridge’s in her bouncy new war-reporter togs to taunt Eddie “Harting,” I come out the revolving door’s other side, dressed as a nurse—it’s fairly funny if you’re in the know. They cut away just as I start to glance behind me.
Those two seconds of film are also the only photographic record of Pam as she was then in motion. Gerson and I took no home movies, that being too much of a busman’s holiday for my second husband. I admit to reprogramming that DVD chapter more than once.
After I’d watched myself exit a soundstage revolving door multiple times, the next thing I did was to retrieve yesterday’s Metro section from its June 6 seagull skate under my table. Smoothed it out and reread the story the mimsies had read at a quarter past six the morning of my longest day. That was mere minutes before I fetched Cadwaller’s gun and daisysdaughter.com first Lindberghized cyberspace: “As of now, my name is” and so on and on.
What was it? Why, Dottie Idell’s obituary, of course. I did keep saying “recently,” didn’t I?
Posted by: I’ll Be Pammed
Sorry again, daisysdaughter.com readers. I’ve just realized I never did get around to wrapping up my conversation with Andy Pond about me being a lesbian. No doubt you could script Pam’s next line yourself:
“Cadwaller?” I repeated with some consternation.
“Oh, sure,” Andy said. “Some days in Paris, he’d come into my office if you were meeting him, pop his pipe out, and say, ‘Where’s that big dyke wife of mine gotten to? Do you know, Andy?’ with the happiest grin on his face. But never in front of someone who might take it the wrong way, of course.”
“Then he was joking.”
“Oh, Pam! I don’t know how many times when we three were out somewhere we’d both catch you eyeing the girls through the window or getting all flustered if the waitress was pretty. He’d look at me, I’d look at him, and we’d smile. He wasn’t a winker, though—hated that kind of redundancy and knew the difference between affection and insult. So did I.”
“But then why,” I stammered idiotically, wringing Pam’s third and last wedding band on my left Rheuma Three, “if Hopsie thought so all along—”
“He was Cadwaller. A man who’d spent his career counseling people against thinking in categories,” Andy reminded me. “You could say he had ‘a certain idea of Pam.’ He loved you and he knew you adored him. He knew all that was a longing, not an imperative. He kn
ew you’d never do anything about it.”
“And I didn’t.”
“I know, but come on. At some level you must’ve realized he was tolerant instead of oblivious. The day you dropped your oyster fork at La Coupole, the look on your face when our little Brigitte knelt down was so lovely that we both had to fight not to start laughing like two Yuletide revelers.”
“He never once hinted he knew,” I marveled. “Even in private, when we talked about everything. Not once in twenty-eight years.”
“Of course not,” said Andy. “You’d have been devastated, and then—what next? Not Cadwaller’s way, Pam. He liked having a what next well in hand.”
“Yes, he did,” I said and we looked at his bulletless gun. Then a fresh panic welled, cued by I knew not what: “Andy, you said lots of people! Does Nan—”
“Dear Lord, no,” he laughed. “You know our glorious girl. I guarantee she’d never wonder or guess in a century,” which relieved me immensely. I couldn’t have faced her next Christmas party otherwise.
“Listen, this is so wonderful,” Andy went on. “You know Nan’s been crazy for Sondheim for years. But I swear just last month she suddenly blurted, ‘And what’s funny is I don’t know anything about his personal life. Andy, do you? Marriages, children, divorces?’ We’re just lucky she did visas, not Army recruitment centers.”
“Or unlucky.” My sharp tone was only a baby step, Panama. But mine own.
“Or unlucky,” he agreed. Then his face took on the look of compassion I’d found unforgivable when I saw it on Gerson’s, but up to then Noah had been a husband and not an old friend. “Pam, if you don’t mind me asking—did you ever do anything about it? Not during Cadwaller. Even once in your whole blessed life?”
“If you must know, just once. A very long time ago. And I can’t say I did, only that I was there. She was braver. And now if you don’t mind, Andy, can you let yourself out? You’ve been very kind, but I’ve had a rough day. Didn’t sleep much at all.”
Posted by: Alfred J. Pamfrock
She was Dorothy Idell on our Bank Street lease, Dottie Crozdetti to fans of her roistering laugh and way with a chicken on The Good Life… many years later. She was, uneuphoniously, “Dottie I. Crozdetti” in the headline of yesterday’s obit, suggesting some excessive minding of p’s and q’s. But in my arms, she was always—oh, good God, what am I quoting? While I rue Pam’s cowardice, which I’ve broadcast quite some time ago was splendid, I hardly think I in any way was Dottie’s monster.
She may’ve been the love of my life. Or perhaps I mean could’ve been, but what I won’t say is was. Not only do I mistrust love of my life as a category—how can we be positive until we’ve laid eyes on the last stranger we’ll meet?—but I don’t see how it has much meaning when it’s not acted on. And obviously, Panama, if anyone does fit the bill in the life I did have, it was your great-grandfather.
But for a few precious months of 1940 and ’41, in our little nook of West Village bliss, she was so lovely and I loved her so: my Dottie, my Dottie, my Dottie Idell. And I loved her dotties and I loved her idell. Lovers’ talk, dating to when few people knew where Pearl Harbor was! No doubt she didn’t mean to be prescient when with a grin, elbow to saucily nippled pillow and bare hip a crescent of down playing dawn, she laid a finger on my nose and named me Pamique.
I made just one contribution to The Good Life with Dottie Crozdetti. In Bank Street days, as I’ve mentioned, she was still caught between cooking and acting, a choice no one could’ve guessed she’d solve by combining them in a medium then embryonic. As I think I’ve also mentioned, she loved giving burlesque poetry recitals in our apartment, and one sweet afternoon (how I lived to win my Dottie’s glee, when she’d flash her small teeth with delight and toss up her sunset-colored hair!) I taught her Sinclair St. Clair’s old Provincetown jingle. When I watched her recite it in triumph on television half a century later—it was her farewell show, meaning she’d saved it up—I burst into tears. Except for a beaming “You heard me. Now good luck to you all!,” the last words spoken by Dottie Crozdetti on her old TV show were ones daisysdaughter.com readers well know:
To eat an oyster
You crack it foister.
This part is moister!
Oh, drat—I loyst her.
And it was a poem that ended it; it was a poem that triggered Pam’s fear. Oh, Dottie! We could’ve had weeks, months, a whole Bank Street year more together. Why did you have to turn on one heel in my oversized shoe, arms raised, and gloriously starkers with our windowed June at your back, just as you hit that point of “Dover Beach”—the first line and a half of its final stanza, if anyone out there is reaching for Bartlett’s—and your eyes and your dotties and your lovely blonde idell all stared in Pamique’s just-turned-twenty-one face? That evening was when Brannigan Murphy crashed through the commode door at the Commodore, two Pulitzer Prizes to the wind.
And oh. Are you out there, Miss Dunst? If so, please forgive me. I don’t know if the comment from “Crazy/Beautiful” came from you or some cybermasked prankster, but I do hope you were charmed.
I do think you’re a wonderful actress, Miss Dunst. But dear God, oh, God—the resemblance! Face, voice, manner, and all. Everything, everything, unless loving me counts. When I first blinked at you, never once having heard of you—not in one of your movies, but on TV red-carpeting it at some awards show—I thought I’d gone out of my mind and then that I wished so. Wept, stroked puzzled Kelquen an hour. Then Andy Pond, who I now realize had more than an inkling we weren’t just movie fans but still can’t have guessed the whole truth, became my tolerant escort at film after film where we were sixty or seventy years older than most.
If you care, the one in which you most resemble her is, of course, Bring It On. Fans of The Good Life with… don’t suspect not only because Dottie’s show had been off the air for some years before you began acting but because Dottie was past fifty, hearty, and as big as a barrel by the time it premiered.
Miss Dunst, perhaps now you can see why the prospect of seeing you as Marie Antoinette first bewitched and then terrorized me yesterday. For the gallant girl who so closely resembles my Dottie—my Dottie, my Dottie, my Dottie Idell—to play the queen I most equate with Daisy Buchanan was too much crossed circuitry for one old bag to bear. Now that I think of it, daisysdaughter.com may owe Lady Antonia Fraser a mild apology too.
Dottie was three years my senior, which I agree ought to’ve made seeing her WashPost obituary painful but highly unremarkable. At my age, so many contemporaries have shuffled off to that big Buffalo in the sky that even the dearest don’t rate much more than a twinge of affection for our days flying Clio together. Even Bill M.’s adios didn’t tempt me to say the hell with it and end the whole shebang, and my District was Potusville by then. It may strike you as preposterous that even my old Bank Street lover’s obit could drive me to Lindberghize cyberspace with Cadwaller’s gun in my lap.
True. But what I couldn’t understand was why someone would murder her: my Dottie, my Dottie, my Dottie Idell. I couldn’t imagine a housebreaker vicious or panicked enough to shoot a woman that old as she and her walker shuffled out of her kitchen—my Dottie, my Dottie, my Dottie Idell.
The obituary was in the Metro section, but the box was on Page A1: “Host Slain.” When I lifted the gun out of the Paris footlocker, what overcame seven decades of dread that I’d end up making a “Like mother, like daughter” exit was Pam’s thought that my Dottie and I would at least both die by violence.
Anyhow, once I’d got done rereading the obit today—not much on Crozdetti except that he’d been a French-born banker, unless that “n” was a typo, and had long predeceased her, giving me a pang I soon stifled at our lost merry widowhood in a small house in Provence or Providence—I slid out the full page (four in all, really: newsprint seagull-wings fluttered) of the Metro section that
included it to refold and then place in the Paris footlocker. Then I opened the footlocker and set Dottie Idell next to Cadwaller’s gun.
Before I closed the lid, though, I realized I had two more mementos I ought to make amends or just understanding’s belated concession to. Fishing past Dottie’s obit and Hopsie’s last gift to me—life—the Rheumas found and withdrew two old velvet cases. For the first time in six decades (Paris, 1944, briefly), I opened them and took out the two syringes inside.
Gold and silver, silver and gold! You can get Daisy Buchanan addicted to morphine, but you can’t make her stop being Daisy Buchanan. The gold one a gift from her to the Lotus Eater, coyly inscribed Give me your answer do by some patient, devoted, bribable jeweler.
From her to the Lotus Eater? Oh, hell yes. One thing a child’s photographing eyes very seldom get wrong is colors, particularly those featured in fairy tales. Roseately glowing, the gold one had been in the L.E.’s soft paw when that fabled bathroom door creaked open in Provincetown. Knowing my mother, swapping works wouldn’t have been Daisy’s thing. Too inelegant.
In a tiny casket I’d dropped deep down a well and made haste to cover with all manner of rubbish, I’d always secreted the knowledge that my mother had been wooer, not prey. On the beach that night in 1927, she’d gaily said “Lech” in order to sexualize the instantly sulky L.E.’s quite mild comment about the actress in the movie we’d seen. The L.E. had fled Provincetown the next day because Daisy was getting as obsessively proprietary as her own bootlegger suitor had been in the year of the Scandal. If you thought my narration was, as they say, reliable, congratulations: you got fooled by a traumatized seven-year-old.
My guess is the Lotus Eater was only in it for the morphine. When I came upon her having sex behind a dune with the wristwatched man Pink Thing needed many years to concede was probably the young Brannigan Murphy—Jesus, you did get that, didn’t you?—her eyes were hoping that what Pammie knew would provoke a rupture. But I’ll never know whether my mother’s passion in widowhood to get her dazzling gold Daisy-head between the L.E.’s thighs was an individual case, as Cadwaller would put it, or the lifelong and generic yearning it had been for her daughter. Certainly in Belgium she hadn’t shown tendencies. Just got fat, moody, depressed, and then suicidal, despite the best efforts of a Swiss sanatorium.
