Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun

by Carson, Tom

  If he’s merrily stocking up on Viagra, would even I have the right to disappoint him? So far as flying solo goes, you could call me Amelia, but Pam’s last session with a partner occurred the night of Clinton’s first State of the Union and was even less memorable. The C Street grognard in question had been Cadwaller’s inept replacement heading up the Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and bluff Homer MacWhite turned out to be worse at imitating Hopsie in the sack. Thirteen years later, the thought of Andy’s and my wattled flesh attempting to commingle makes my pretzel-shaped half of it creep.

  Better the pistol. My rendezvous isn’t in Tenleytown but by phone past the end of Connecticut. Past proud Dupont Circle—nobody’s ever been sure what it’s proud of, but imprecision that stout-hearted has its Washingtonian pleasures—and the Mayflower Hotel. Past Farragut Square (“Damn it, Gridley! Have you gone deaf?”) and the Army-Navy Club’s amber heap.

  Past Lafayette Square, where forty years ago we watched scattered out-of-town picketers swell over the seasons into crowds calling, “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” The man they were taunting so hated that chant he could never bear to repeat it in full, and I should know: these mimsy borogoves once watched him try and fail in Shakespearean closeup. While I don’t mean to bore you by sounding like a cranky, neiges d’antan sort of old lady, back then the White House switchboard had a lot more hop-to-it-iveness about getting Mrs. Cadwaller on the line.

  Oh, yes, Potus: as Huck Finn would say, I been here before. And I wish your fucking switchboard would hop to it. What they don’t seem to understand (and listen to me treating understanding as an operative value in Potusville; what a Yankee Doodley true believer I must be even today) is that forming and then hanging onto this resolve wasn’t all that easy. I mean, glamor of the thing or no glamor of the thing. Yet all Bob’s secretary could tell me was that the call would come sometime between now and sundown, whenever a window of opportunity beckoned in Potus’s seething schedule.

  And it’s hard work. We have that apparently not self-evident truth from his own mouth, whose itchy lips, take it from the convive of plenty of hard drinkers, haven’t stopped wondering what became of all that lovely bourbon. A nicer old bag than Pam would be flat on her withered ass with gratitude that he’s promised to find time today to congratulate her on living long enough to see these atrocious sights.

  Granted, my own side of the aisle is no Tennyson poem. Maybe our man last go-round looked good on paper, but that stuff’s foldable and he was pretty much origami by Halloween. At least a few of us geezers saw the writing on the wall at Nan Finn’s Christmas party the winter before.

  Ever “the glorious girl” in Pam’s shesaurus, Nan’s someone I’ve known since her husband Ned was Cadwaller’s DCM in Nagon. Half the decrepit Foreign Service retirees in the District shuffle up her Woodley Park front steps to attend Nan’s annual “Deck the Halls with Frank Sinatra” Yuletide wingding, as her son once called it. Hard to believe the strange lad I used to hear yelping “Geronimo” as he repetitiously reparachuted off a chair or a log in West Africa is now a fifty-year-old graphic artist whose bizarre comic books about what he calls the superpower diaspora have, from my limited sampling, a streak of obscenity.

  His mother does her best to keep the median age south of eighty by including a few other relative youngsters besides her son. We generally congregate around them like moths around a crayon we’ve mistaken for a candle, including that year’s charmer: a Snapple-cheeked, BlackBerry-checking female lobbyist who’d met our limberly deboned white knight and gotten an invite to sign on with his Presidential campaign. When her work and prospects got apologetically divulged—after all, she knew we had neither—someone asked how she’d sized him up at her job interview.

  She gave a wrinkle-free frown, that miracle of under-forty skin. “He’s less telegenic in person,” said she, sounding troubled.

  So were we. Luckily, our faces are trained as well as wizened, so we managed to nod without looking noticeably more grotesque than we do anyway. Once she’d traded in our Dubuffet of duffers for our hostess’s hors d’oeuvres, I put up my hand as if leading a tottering school group from Archives to Holocaust.

  “Hell, I’m done,” I drawled. “Anyone else need a ride to the glue factory?” Frail as a fork but sharp as its tines, Laurel Warren gave a two-fingered salute.

  Forgive me, Andy. I don’t really believe Potus will even be nonplussed by Pam’s protest. Why should he be? I’m eighty-six and eminently 86’able. What’s left of our dapper, boozy, questing, and imperfect generation is just marking time in the Clio Airways lounge as we wait to hear our separate boarding calls for Carole Lombard’s plane. He’s probably never heard of that lovely lost star either, but some parting gesture has to be made.

  Posted by: Pam

  When you’re waiting for a phone call of the unnatural nature I’m waiting for and plan to end it the unnatural way I’m hoping to, said phone’s actual ring is no ordinary event. Baggy heart lurching into bridgework, feet moaning “Haven’t we suffered enough?” from outdated habit as they smacked the rug, I seized Cadwaller’s gun: “Yes! Hello. This is Pamela Cadwaller.”

  “Believe me, I know,” a tickled voice said. “Pam, are you expecting another call?”

  Gun lowered, heart leakily loping back to business at the old stand. Feet in mild pain, rug’s feelings unknown and frankly unconsidered, I tamed my fat lunettes: “Oh, Andy. It’s you.”

  “I know that too.” He’s always peppier than I at this hour. “But if you’re expecting another call, I can—”

  “No, no! Just snoozing over the paper. Honestly, does anyone think David Broder’s funny? He’s the worst humor columnist I’ve ever read. Andy! How are you?”

  “Oh, fine. More important, how are you? I realize we’re seeing each other tonight, but I thought I’d check on the old birthday girl.”

  “Mf,” I sniffed skeptically. At my age, you come to appreciate how written Hebrew has no vowels. “You didn’t have anything better to do either, huh?”

  “How could I?” said Andy, flipping the meaning to play the chivalry card.

  “Andy, I’m not sure about tonight,” I told him, making the pistol in my lap go do-si-do. Clearly, I miss pet ownership. Sit up! Wink, Cadwaller’s gun. “I don’t really feel up to it.”

  “If you did, I’d ask who the new tenant was. We’re Methuselan, Pam. If we felt wonderful, what would we talk about? It’s like what they used to say about the weather, only now”—never one to look a bon mot in the mouth, Andy chuckled—“the weather is inside us.”

  “That’s exactly right and nothing I can do about it. Some get rained out.”

  “But you won’t have to do anything. I’m handling the cooking. I’ve already shopped,” he said, sounding caught between glee at having had a project and wistfulness it was behind him. “I’ve gotten the movies.”

  “Oh, God. Which?”

  “The Gal I Left Behind Me, of course,” Andy said, either ignoring or delighting in my unstifled groan of horror. “And Meet Pamela, which I bet you’ve never seen.”

  “No, but why would I want to? Didn’t it come out and flop ages ago? Honestly, Andy. Since it’s my birthday, you could at least have asked yourself what I’d enjoy.”

  “I did, but I can’t perform miracles and we’ve already seen every Kirsten there is. Except Interview with the Vampire, but you never wanted to.”

  “Of course not. She was too, she was only a child back then. Realizing she was one would just force me to acknowledge even Kirsten has feet of clay.” Less clay than veined pottery with toes, one of Pam’s nudged the Metro section wallward. “Well, no bother! You watch whichever one you like. I’ll probably just fall asleep and you can let yourself out.”

  “Pam! It’s your birthday. Promise to stay awake through at least one.”

  “Why?
”

  “Oh, to help me pretend it’s some sort of occasion,” Andy said. “I always let myself out.”

  Posted by: Pam

  If you’re getting ready to weep for the lonely old bag roosting on upper Connecticut Avenue, I wouldn’t blame you. I might laugh at you, though. Let me dash last year’s Christmas-card list in your face.

  By 2005’s tally, Pam had one hundred and fifty-seven extant friends. I don’t mean near strangers to whom she feels an inexplicable need to suck up. I mean chronologically protean faces in snapshots stretching over decades, mutually misremembered anecdotes, e-mails from California or India about politics, books, upcoming trips, and recent losses in the club. The next time they came to Washington or I got to California or India, they’d’ve been as glad to see me as I them.

  Those are the people I sent cards to. Another eighty or ninety jokers I’d just as soon forgot I’m alive burdened the postman with what neither they nor he knew was junk mail. The reaper’s gouges have whittled down both totals from their circa-1975 peak.

  Closer to home are Nan Finn and Laurel Warren, with whom I can do the biddy bit at Martin’s or La Chaumière anytime. We knock waiters around like ninepins as they wait for the heftier bowling ball of their tip: “More wine!” Plus Carol Sawyer, also from Nagon days, not that I’d eat with her alone. Fond of my fingers.

  Plus Callie Sherman, though Callie doesn’t get out much anymore. Ninety, blind, often turbaned (oh, please), occasionally dabbling in an unseen cigarette the way Tiberius in old age enjoyed the nips of little fish while swimming, she Receives.

  Even so, I’ve got only one favorite endtable. One gent who not only willingly accompanies me to the Kennedy Center, Martin’s, La Chaumière, the Folger, and Arena Stage but puts up with the late-blooming crush I’d never admit to even my fellow movie addict Nan Finn. I’ve literally disturbed young girls with my knowledge of Kirsten Dunst’s career.

  Mind, the day I see the closing credits of any of her pictures, even those Andy’s Netflixed or Nextflicked for me multiple times, will be when I realize I’ve died and there is an afterlife. Then I’ll be too resentful about the nonsense I’ve been put through to pay attention to the happy ending. Yet Andy loyally sat through Bring It On to the end so he could tell me, in detail, how Kirsten’s cheerleading team had fared after I dozed off during one green-pantied set of splits.

  I sometimes wonder what I look like, schnozz buzzsawing at a Leaning Tower of Pisa angle and dentition gaping like I’m one of the freaks at Bomarzo—clearly, Italy figures somewhere in my idea of pleasant dreams—as Andy hangs in there in order to elucidate the last act’s plot turns for Pam’s sake. And to think he was our man at the Berlin Wall: the last, rotated home just before it came down for good. Maybe it taught him patience.

  Posted by: Pam

  In regular contact, if mostly in cyberspace and by phone since I gave up my visits to Amherst at Thanksgiving and New York anytime the latest ridiculous musical’s reviews fooled me into thinking it was worth snoring through, are three generations of Cadwaller’s progeny. The eldest is Hopsie’s son by his first marriage, and I marvel that the alert adolescent who took Pam’s hand as we strolled along the Seine is a grandfather. Even before his biological mother’s death, Chris taught his son and later grandchildren to call me Gramela, giving me all the fame and none of the responsibility.

  As does Panama—for now—Chris’s son Tim adores me. Before he settled into his current job, he wanted to pitch a profile of Pam Buchanan, museum-quality war correspondent, to Smithsonian magazine.

  The exhibit put the kibosh on that. “Absolutely not. I know you, young Mr. Cadwaller! I’ll just be an excuse to fill it with tommyrot. You’ll get moony over the liberation of Paris, and all I really remember is the horrible headache I got from all the diesel fumes.”

  “Then why don’t you write it yourself? Not just the war, the whole thing.”

  “But I have. In Nothing Like a Dame, and—”

  “Gramela, you always say yourself that was twaddle,” Tim objected.

  “Yes, and don’t you understand that anything I tried to write this late in life would be too? By now I can hardly remember the difference between what happened and what you wish had. That’s why I like your imagination better.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s uninformed. That’s what imagination should be. When nothing’s true, everything can be.”

  “It’s not completely uninformed,” grumbled the author of You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two.

  “If you mean history books, no. But we didn’t have them.”

  Soon afterward and what a mazurka I danced, Tim had a friend design the website I’m using now. It has lain fallow for two years. That’s why he and his fellow Cadwallers are less likely than random strangers who won’t care to stumble across these June 6 posts and try to stop me from carrying out my protest, since Tim and company gave up long ago on the idea I’d ever use it.

  Among other things, I hated its name: daisysdaughter.com. My amateur psychoanalyst—see how I’m already contending with his projections?—is a sucker for not only the Jazz Age, something I don’t remember hearing it called at the time any more than we called Jack’s Administration Camelot, but the whole cavalcade from Depression to war to Ike to Jack to how many kids did you kill today. Around then Tim’s own juvenile presence in front of TV sets starts making his Gramela’s hoarded way-back-when less precious, less unique, less fucking magical. Not that reminiscing over Jimmy Carter’s epic Presidency strikes me as Shazam time either.

  I felt dismayed by the website’s name for professional reasons as well. Since Tim’s one himself, he ought to’ve known which bauble of identity any writer guards most fiercely: his or her byline. His clever notion of reducing me to nakedness also disguises me from whatever handful of readers still recognize it, since anyone romantic or idle enough to Google Pamela Buchanan, most likely to confirm she’s dead, may not learn before scrolling gets tiresome that daisysdaughter.com is her blog.

  I never cared in social life. I was Pamela Murphy when my divorce testimony knocked the latest Washington benefit performance by Winston Churchill’s one-man rep troupe off New York tabloids’ front pages in May of ’43, I was Pammie Gerson to other industry wives in the creamily ceramic Cinerama of Beverly Hills. I was Pam Cadwaller to not only the Foreign Service Journal but Lyndon Johnson’s White House operators. But all through my marital trolley transfers, by Pamela Buchanan was the war cry I exulted in.

  For better or worse, I was Pamela Buchanan on the rollickingly corpse-free cover of Nothing Like a Dame, my eager-to-please account of the fun side of World War Two. Now long out of print and good riddance to all but Bill M.’s jacket art, whose affection for his Anzio Bobbsey twin glows painfully through my memories of the light-hearted hour I spent posing. Yet my silly first book did stay on the NYT’s bestseller list long enough to play ships in the night, Pam sinking to starboard as curly-haired Norman scrambled up portside, with The Naked and the Dead.

  With pride that’s lasted to this day, Pamela Buchanan could’ve kissed every one of the enthusiasts for our nation’s birth pangs who bought Glory Be when it came out the year said nation was deciding for the second time whether it liked Ike or needed Adlai badly. One of the Paris footlocker’s prizes is a laminated telegram—i’m just glad you aren’t a politician best wishes jack kennedy—I got the week my sloop skimmed past his ghost-skippered PT boat in sales.

  Intermittence may be my byline’s cross to bear. That’s not the same as discontinuity. My last foray into print was an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times dated 6/6/2004 in the clippings file and begging the ninnies who run the show out there to spare the Ambassador Hotel from the wrecker’s ball. You can see how they listened, too. It still meant something to me that the Pamela Buchanan who signed that piece could nod across a spa
n of seventy years at Pamela Buchanan, the fourteen-year-old authoress—a term she then thought divine—of “Chanson d’automne.”

  My first and only stab at verse, which politely reached for a cotton swab and moved on, its wretched dozen lines were printed in the Fall 1934 edition of Pink Rosebuds, the literary magazine of Purcey’s Girls Academy of St. Paul. From its title on, to call the thing derivative would be an insult to plagiarists everywhere. Its one acute bit was a game of peekaboo with nonperpendicular pronouns, silly but not bad for a teenager.

  Inanity wasn’t the reason “Chanson d’automne” shattered my brief spell as a poetess, an even yummier-sounding word to my young ears. Winning me Professor Hormel’s writhing plaudits along with my classmates’ far more decisive mockery, my poemess was written in French.

  Back then, I couldn’t see what I’d done wrong. Collected by my new American guardian when the Paris docked in New York, I’d only recently been shipped back to my perplexing homeland. My mother’s Belgian second husband had advertised his reluctance to see more than the back of la petite Pamelle in the wake of his Day-zee’s surprise exit from the breathing business.

  On a more practical, Brussels-sprouting sort of note, Georges Flagon didn’t care to keep paying my tuition at Mme Chignonne’s. c’est la vie, his cable sighed, and I doubt Tim Cadwaller realized the real pang of the name he’d picked out for my website. I never felt more like Daisy’s daughter than in the first few months after she’d left me as the only surviving Fay or Buchanan on the face of the globe.

  Used as I was to her ways by then, I couldn’t help thinking she’d carried negligence a bullet too far. Hello, mother mine.

  Posted by: Pammie