by Carson, Tom
Beyond my Mac’s screen as I input with rheumatic fingers and lunetted mimsies by my living room window, where dawn’s cerise is already giving way to torched daffodils, Pam’s trophy bookcase looks eager to chip in. With Glory Be bookended by Nothing Like a Dame and Lucky for the Sun, my own trio of contributions to library sales crowns its top shelf.
Down at cat level, Brannigan Murphy’s Collected Plays—from a minor academic press, and remaindered when I picked it up in a fit of post-marital loyalty—looks sheepishly bullheaded. In between, among others, are Cadwaller’s photographer son Chris’s May or Mayn’t, eighty or so images of Paris barricades, rock-throwing students, and cops wreathed in tear gas during the ’68 upheavals, and Chris’s son Tim’s You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two.
As the last of these is dedicated to me, I did my damndest. But culture criticism will never be this old bag’s bag. Though musings on faith aren’t either whether they’re Catholic or pagan, I can’t help being fonder of The Mountain and the Stream, my onetime guardian’s collected letters from Nenuphar Monastery, and The Pilgrim Lands at Malibu, by possibly my favorite minor poet. The half dozen cookbooks by Dottie Crozdetti have made Andy Pond chortle more than once, since he knows better than anyone that Pam in a kitchen is Nixon at a beach resort.
Nearby, my Anzio Bobbsey twin Bill M.’s book of war cartoons and Nachum ben Zion’s Israel: One State, Two Nations bicker in a friendly way over which one’s inscription to Pam is warmer. Another old friend is a slim volume called The Producer’s Daughter, subject of a review by Pamela Buchanan that caused some controversy at the old Republic’s offices back in ’41. While I’ve never met or corresponded with its author, over the decades I’ve felt a sisterly affinity and gotten odd hints it’s reciprocated.
Hung in the bathroom and visible in reflection in my daily medicine-cabinet mug shot is a gift from Tim Cadwaller: a one-sheet for Metro’s 1949 flop The Gal I Left Behind Me. Most prized today thanks to the young actress whose button nose and luscious eyes swim out from under an overseas cap between two doll-sized men atop her shoulders—however negligible otherwise, it was Eve’s first film—the poster is more cherished by Pam for less prominent reasons. Nestling in small type among its quartet of screenwriters, my name presciently nuzzles the “Gerson” in the credit underneath mine. Rotten movie, though, not that I’ve seen it since the first Glendale preview almost sixty years ago.
The most ancient and/or tattletale of my mementos, however, stay out of sight in Pam’s catless and Christ knows sexless bedroom. They’re in the footlocker with my mother’s effects that got sent two weeks too late to my old school in Chaillot. The damn thing sat for a decade in Chignonne’s attic before wisecracking Eddie Whitling and I pulled up in front of said school’s vined façade in a jeep late on August 25, 1944. Augmented by my own marital trophies, Cadwaller’s gun included since his death twenty years ago, the Paris footlocker’s contents may not only explain my sense of having some standing as well as a stake in all this but provide a reductively psychological explanation for the origin of my anti-Potus animus.
Posted by: Pam
My mother was Daisy Fay Buchanan. Unknown now except to Jazz Age specialists, she was one of the nudest pearls in that era’s champagne goblet until the scandal whose aftershocks, ultimately leading Mother and me to sail for Europe in confusion (hers and definitely mine), italicized my childhood.
As everyone knew once, she missed arrest or even grilling. Yet however indolent our moneyed neck of Long Island liked its police work to stay, three corpses had stunk up the joint. Plenty of rumors swirled around us, lapping even small Pammie’s chubby-kneed legs.
One held Daisy’d been behind the wheel (true), the other and nastier that she’d fired the gun (not). Until my divorce from Brannigan Murphy became a more urgent source of social jitters—no new acquaintance ever quoted Pam’s most notorious courtroom jape to my face, but dozens couldn’t help reciting it with their eyes—the conversations I was least likely to enjoy were those that brought out who my mother was.
That stayed true for a few years after the proper tense became had been. Since dead Daisy’s exit had been unforeseen, abrupt, and noisy, the less usual bang following her more customary whimper as she lay alone in her Brussels bedroom one all too Belgian day in the winter of ’34, you’d think that might make strangers kinder but frequently it didn’t.
Unexpectedly, one who broke the mold was Mencken. The only time I met him was in the press gallery at the 1940 Republican convention: twenty-year-old Pam had tagged along to Philadelphia with a political writer for the old Republic who turned out to know him slightly. He told me the Scandal hadn’t been so very momentous back in the Twenties: “Really just a sort of anecdote.”
So too, perhaps, will be her daughter’s telephonic protest today. So too, no doubt, my life, my books. Its Amazon ranking “from these sellers” reliably roosting in seven figures, the long out-of-print Glory Be, quite the treekiller for Random House in Eisenhower’s time, might as well be retitled Glory Went.
Despite the retitled movie version’s belated cult appeal, Nothing Like a Dame (Holt, 1947), Pam’s frothy account of knocking around as a gal war correspondent in the ETO—European Theater of Operations to you post-deluvians out there—isn’t about to get reissued. Until Tim Cadwaller looked up the date of South Pacific’s premiere, even he thought I’d gotten the title from Rodgers and Hammerstein. Not that I’m bitter, of course.
Short version? “You’re some dame,” said Richard Rodgers as we ate breakfast together in ’46. To which I replied, wearing nothing but his shirt at the time—I was one of that tireless adulterer’s more fleeting conquests—“I am nothing like a dame.” Then we looked at each other and I dashed back to my Brooklyn garret, stuffing his shirttails into my skirt, while he got poor blinkered Hammerstein on the phone. But I wrote a lot faster.
As for my third and final contribution to Gutenberg’s funeral pyre, Lucky for the Sun couldn’t have sunk faster back in ’68 if it’d had Jimmy Hoffa’s ankles chained to it. All in all, I’d rate myself about as minor as celebrities get. Even so, one reason my planned act of telephonic terrorism has already made me grin as I rattle away on my Mac—last year’s Yuletide medusa, brought here with bows on and tentacles trailing by Cadwaller’s son Chris—is the headache I’m sure to give the WashPost’s and NYT’s obit writers.
It’s not hubris to assume mine is long prepared, only partly thanks to Mother. That’s why I’ve just chuckled again through my Popular Mechanics dentition. Cause of death aside, most likely all my obit has left blank to plug in with a “TK”—trad newspaperese for “To come,” I’m only guessing still in use—is who survives me in the final graf.
I also guarantee that in my case “Survivors TK” is a formality. The only reproducing Pam’s done has been the result of anonymous paid sex with Xerox photocopying machines. Their genetic contribution to the bairns—my articles, of course—strikes me as unflattering but not decisive.
But a new opening graf or two or three, cobbled together in extremis? Even today, any family newspaper worth its endlessly passed salt won’t reprint the unexpurgated Pam-quote that helped make my first divorce New York’s most sensational of 1943. Figuring out a backflip from my obit’s startling new lead to Pam’s way-back-when will stump even those specialists in shovel-ready legerdemain. While I’ve seen it done and quite recently too, that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
At most or worst, the obit writers were prepared for one last marriage. Some groping union in my senescence, some phallic fallacy groggily probing my mess of dotage. Among other things, that’s what I intend to deny them.
Posted by: Pam
The problem’s that I know myself unreasonably well. Every brave act I’m said to have performed, marrying Murphy ever Manhattan’s Exhibit A in the way-back-when, has been Pam’s way of indulging a suspected greater
cowardice.
You know, I couldn’t have invaded the Philippines. That’s despite the grumblings of Regent’s editor that all us literary stage-door-Johnnies lining up theaters of war were obnoxiously wild for our sainted Europe. Roy bemoaned our selfishness in letting those muddy bastards in the Pacific die minus chic prose’s unction.
A true bill it was too, from Marseillaise-humming, gustatorially concupiscent Joe Liebling on down. I was three years out of Barnard and I couldn’t bring myself to buck my prejudices. Bugs, diseases, larvae, ordure, MacArthur: no cocktail shakers nearer than Sydney. Hell, I’d’ve swum to France.
Incidentally, my objection to Liebling, and I know having any puts me on the outs with settled taste, is that he wrote like a fat man. Nothing so disastrous to humanity that he couldn’t adjudicate it as a meal. Gerson, my second husband, loathed him. But no matter.
I was about to launch into a splendid discussion of my cowardice. Look! There’s the WashPost’s Metro section at my feet, done with its dotty brief imitation of a Chekhovian seagull. Considering I’ve just explained my intention to fire a gun whose bang will surely shock the shit, indeed we did and do talk that way, out of Potus—not that he’ll otherwise be its target or in harm’s way, since he’s a couple of miles from here and I’m visibly alone in this room, without even a cat—you may be forgiven for wondering just what I’m hoping to avoid thereby.
In the glow of my plan’s dawn thrill before I logged on, my answer would’ve been a heroic “Nothing!” Even though Pam’s one appearance onstage, subbing for ailing Viper Leigh in A Clock with Twisted Hands on its opening night in 1941, got me clouted with the accurate verdict “no-talent” by the playwright (Murphy), I do have an actress in me, as Cadwaller may have known best of all. The truth is that self-devised heroics, or vainglory in a drool cup if my charm as a telephonic terrorist is utterly lost on you, are never exempt from the bubble-bubble-stew of multiple agendas.
Even as I fetched Cadwaller’s gun and hummed Pam’s aardvarky “La, la, la—la, la,” I decided to suspect my own buried motive. I knew Andy Pond would and fat chance I’ll ever let him be smarter than I am. Nicer, not smarter, is the trophy I’ve never competed for against Cadwaller’s onetime Paris deputy. One proof Andy’s got a monopoly on nicer is that he never complains when I hurt his feelings.
Hurt his feelings, though, this will. I don’t know what kind of coverage my protest will get: my protest on behalf of bankrupt, never existed, but fondly remembered Clio Airways against this Administration’s splatter of diarrhea over everything we stood for—flawed, lumbering, but gallant—in the way-back-when. But even if my act is ridiculed, Andy knows me.
He’ll understand that to his old friend Pam, her idiosyncratic pistol shot had dignity. Unfortunately, as a trained analyst of mingled public and private motives—Hopsie always said Andy got it better than most—he’ll also intuit the corollary. To wit, that I must’ve decided that remarrying at my age—and in my shape, since now I look and usually feel like a pretzel someone gave up on midway through unbraiding—did not.
Andy, if you pass up the vaudeville cue to murmur “Pam, a simple ‘No’ would have done fine,” you’ll disappoint me.
Posted by: Pam
Even under duress, I’d never have blurted out my reaction when Andy’s hope of a December-January matchup first dangled its withered mistletoe. To wit, that it’d feel like marrying my favorite endtable, bought by the new Mrs. Cadwaller in Paris in ’58 and presently doing marble-topped mail-catching duty in my apartment’s foyer. I didn’t even think it was an insult: when you’ve moved house as often as I have, you’re fond of seeing the good old furniture turn up on the next continent. I can still see how he might not be delighted by the comparison.
Not that he’d take offense or anyway show it, since he’s a gentleman. He was awfully good during Cadwaller’s long dying. Then he made every practical decision—except for the site, my one fetish—about Hopsie’s burial in the diplomatic section of Rock Creek Cemetery.
In the District, where pigeons have their pick of gesturing admirals (“What the hell is that, Gridley? Land? Explain yourself, sir”), mounted generals (“I’ve put in two quarters, and this thing still isn’t moving”), and inquiring Founders (“This place is strange to me, Miss. Could you direct me to the Executive Mansion?”), that patch of moss near the Madeleine Lee memorial is the only monument to the “striped-pants boys,” as the way-back-when’s yahoos called them. There Cadwaller’s ashes have rested compactly since 1986, and only many years later did Andy start to press his quiet suit.
Eventually, he got into it, put the ironing board away, chose a tie, and came over here. Sorry, but Andy does bring out my Perelman side. In truth, it may’ve been a decade since I’ve seen him in a tie. After his last posting in East Berlin, he adopted retirement’s male uniform of old sports jacket, gray slacks, open-collared white shirts under V-necked red sweater—when the sweater is the splash of color, a man has calmly accepted aging—and ancient but lovingly tended loafers. In some leafy and unevenly sidewalked residential neighborhoods of the District, that outfit says retired Foreign Service officer the way antic frogging under coronation headgear would lead you to expect a chorus of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
My junior by two birthdays, Andy has the fine head of a minor jurisprudential figure in a Siena mural, teeth from nature’s catalogue rather than the Popular Mechanics manual my teenaged dentist uses—“And which Hardy Boy might you be?” I asked unkindly when he first examined my X-rays, and of course he’d never heard of them—and elegant long fingers he’s fond of flexing and steepling. When a man’s last surviving pride is his cuticles, he’s no longer thinking of the world’s approval but his coffin’s.
Andy’s also a lifelong bachelor, and as he’s awfully easy on the eyes, that used to raise knowing eyebrows in our crowd. Then those brows’ owners would learn better, in my case from Cadwaller. “He’s had a girl at every post I’ve known about,” my final husband set me—and you might say Andy—straight soon after I’d met his Paris No. 2. “He just likes women who won’t complicate the rest of his life.”
“And nothing ever comes of it?”
“I gather what I’ve just said didn’t cover that for you,” said Hopsie. “The Foreign Service is full of bores who’ve mistaken themselves for enigmas. Andy’s the reverse.”
True, since something about him so pleasantly forbids inquiry that half a century later I still don’t know what Andrew C. Pond’s middle initial stands for. He’s a “Yes, and” conversationalist: “Yes, and then Rummy called it old Europe,” he’ll say to my latest Pamamiad over lunch with Nan Finn in Georgetown at Martin’s or La Chaumière. “Yes, and did you see what Peggy Kristhammer wrote yesterday?” he’ll chirp as he drives Pam to the Kennedy Center for another stinko production of lousy La Traviata.
Of course his “Yes, ands” always jump-start me. “Considering the intelligence of the average NRA member, I think they’re doing the world a favor by leaving lots of loaded guns around for their children, don’t you?” I’ll say, craning my neck a bit awkwardly as he loads my despised wheelchair—“Just in case”—into his car’s back seat before we set out on the long drive to another geezers’ waltz past Bethesda Naval Hospital toward Maryland or past Arlington Cemetery into Virginia. And Andy will close the rear door and then mine, open the one on the driver’s side, get in, smile, and say, “Yes, and don’t forget little Mack McCork saying reconstruction will pay for itself. Rakh, rakh, rakh.”
He’s never outright proposed. At our age, getting down on one knee has its perils. Forcing Cadwaller’s old ring past my rheumatic knuckle to slip on a new one would require passing up the minister so we can hire a surgeon. In recent months, though, the oblique equivalent—“Did I really just nearly sideswipe that messenger? Pam, I’m definitely not the driver I used to be. Wouldn’t it be much easier if we were
under the same roof?,” etc.—has cropped up more and more often.
I do loathe this wheelchair, or perhaps I mean that I loathe being seen getting trundled along in it in public when Andy insists on sparing my shaky pins. If I’m sitting in it now as I rattle away on my Mac, that isn’t because Pam’s too dilapidated to manage the distances inside this apartment from the table beside my living room window to the bathroom, the bookcases ranged along the interior wall next to the foyer, the bathroom behind my right shoulder, or the Paris footlocker in the catless and sexless bedroom behind my left. I’m sitting in it because sitting in it means I don’t have to look at it.
Posted by: Pam
One reason I know Andy has marriage and not shacking up in mind is that he was so close to Cadwaller. While marrying Hopsie’s widow would earn him nothing but congratulations from Hopsie’s ghost, shacking up would put Andy at perennial risk of watching my third husband tug his ear and mutter something mild but devastating about seemliness. We’ve also been friends since Dick Nixon was in Vice-Presidential short pants, and after half a century with chumhood as our Pondian bond, we both know we’d need to formalize the transition.
No less familiar with the actuarial tables than I, Andy must realize I’d spend precious few years as Mrs. Pond. Yet no doubt he figures I’d spend that or fewer as what I am now, and it’s true we get along. He has the quiet humor of acceptance; I have the brash humor of assertion. His hints never wander into our bedroom arrangements, and I’ve got no idea whether he can or still wants to, as they say, perform.
