by Carson, Tom
In my younger, less invulnerable years, I often wished my guardian hadn’t told me what Daisy was alleged by no less an authority than herself to have wished for me at birth. He had so few even fugitively Pamcentric anecdotes in stock that I can’t blame him for sharing that one when I kept whinging, and she didn’t get her stupid wish. Or, depending on how you count, her fairy-tale three wishes.
No, Mother: your daughter never did get to be beautiful. Nor even stay so little once I shot up to a hoop-hunting five foot ten in the Midwest the year after you died. And I wasn’t a fool. I made my way.
Early on, I learned or relearned how to be American, a skill you couldn’t have imagined was one. By the age of twenty-one, I was doing something you never did: earn my living. And as a writer too, just what I once heard you bragging to the Lotus Eater in Provincetown you’d be.
No need to pretend you’re jealous, though! We both know you’d have soon found a reason to be dismissive. Measuring my real career against your fantasized one, you’d’ve found Pammie’s clumsy imitation, with my big feet and my ugly hair and my stupid tugs at your beaded dress in East Egg, wanting.
I made my way. Along the line, catching a bottle of shampoo—not champagne—from a woman gnarled as oak and naked as the truth outside Riceville, Tennessee, I fell in love with my country. Once again, we’re up against something you’d have found puzzling, since you always did treat the U.S.A. as the caterer and not the bridegroom.
In a dopey way—and pun intended, mother mine—you pined for France. Your daughter saw it in an overseas cap and GI shoes, saw Paris liberated. Dachau too? Dachau too.
In ways Gerson and I forbade ourselves to articulate, it bothered my second husband that his shiksa wife had been the witness he hadn’t to his fellow Jews’ destruction and survival. Vowing nobody would call his patriotism a mask for a more personal—personal!—grudge, he spent 1941–45 in Culver City, supervising training films on the dangers of loose talk, defeatism, booby traps, and finally fraternization.
Pam had seen GIs chatting up Bavarian dollies a week after Dachau. So I had to tell him batting .750 wasn’t so bad. Showing me around Metro, Gerson grinned: “Oh, we knew it was hopeless. But that actress got a contract faster than I could say ‘Arbeit macht frei.’” I winced for a reason he didn’t learn for six months.
My first husband, incidentally—like yours, mother mine—was an anti-Semite. A Communist anti-Semite, guaranteeing he and Stalin would’ve gotten on famously. Stalin a bit more famous, but trust Murphy to find a grudge. A few months into my marriage to Gerson, puttering among the breakfast bagels and bacon in Beverly Hills, it did cross my mind that somewhere Bran, in his Murphine way, was seething that I’d never stop betraying him. Well, of course not! He was Brannigan Murphy, making that the whole planet’s job. Stalin’s included.
Yes, mother mine: for a while, your daughter basked in the voluptuous allure of Hollywood. That phrase was the lone one retained by a then sixty-plus Pam after Tim Cadwaller, hoping I wouldn’t be too irked or bored, took me to a New York bar to hear a Texan songwriter he liked. The fellow’s fondness for our pliable American idiom charmed me even as the organizing principle of his musical shuffles eluded the newly, now decisively old lady.
Not that Gerson was a voluptuary, far from it. In a trait he shared with many another decent man, how far could exasperate him. Having to be Gerson, Gerson, Gerson all the time left him surrounded by doors he couldn’t be sure were locked from inside or out. I loved him for ignoring the invisible keys dancing all around the room.
Came Cadwaller, and you should know he and Gerson got on well from their first meeting. As dark date palms beyond the balcony gently mopped night’s parquet, we had a lovely introductory dinner in Jerusalem. If Pam was the transom for their mutual respect, don’t blame the old bag this website calls your daughter for thinking I can’t have been all bad.
Physically, you should know, I survived the 20th century unscathed. The only exception is or was a small scar over my left eyebrow. For almost half a century I used to focus on it in my medicine-cabinet mug shot, trying to decide if it looked more like part of an i or part of an r. Then it got lost in wrinkles like everything else except the mimsy borogoves, fat-lunetted but still mine.
Cadwaller last, all three of the major men in my life met their end long ago. As did all three of yours, mother mine, though I hope you’ll be pleased to hear my guardian made it to old age. I discount Georges Flagon, fate unknown.
All of Pam’s, even Murphy, left me with gifts of the type I value most: tools. Because seeing one’s own life as metaphor holds few attractions for me, I’ll leave it to others to find symbolism in Cadwaller, the upright envoy, having been the one to leave me with this gun.
Why am I pretending you can hear me, mother mine? That illusion got kicked away by the authoress of “Chanson d’automne” in Roosevelt’s first term. Soon after swearing she’d never write another goddam poemess again, she decided she didn’t give a rap if some invisible old fool whose beard could use barbering was looking down from more than Sistine ceilings. Perhaps it’s because I’m so near death myself, but to my incipiently Alzheimerish surprise—I knew they’d get me in the end—I pine for allies in the cyberspatial ether.
When the White House switchboard finds me, I need to be able to feel I speak for you. And—why not?—for Kirsten, too. Hell, she’ll never know, any more than you will.
When the phone rings, I’ll snatch up Cadwaller’s gun from my ancient snatch. As Potus starts burbling birthday congratulations to an old bag he’s never heard of, I’ll interrupt. Yes, I will!
With what, mother mine? A litany of what he’s done? By now he could’ve heard all that from millions. As countless readers of the Declaration of Independence have discovered with surprise and annoyance, particularized lists of offenses can get tiresome even in indictments written by Thomas Jefferson. Or else, mother mine, should I just say this?
“Yes, yes. I know who you are. Do you know who I am, Mr. President? I’m Daisy Buchanan’s daughter. Their only child, the last of them. These days I roost on upper Connecticut Avenue like a falcon, and believe me: I’ve seen ’em come and I’ve seen ’em go down at your end. Oh, hell, Potus! We both know you’re going to do whatever you like. I’m just an old lady without even a cat, and I can’t stop you. But before you get on with it, I’ve got one question. Do you expect me, me, me, me! Do you really expect me to put up with this shit?”
At which point, at least if all has gone well—can my hand raise Cadwaller’s gun in time? Will he have hung up by then?—I’ll give a screech of fury. That will be my wordless last word before, right in Potus’s ear, I blow the prettiest thing about me at fourteen—my attractively bejangled, hopeful brains—to goddam Clio come.
In this as in other things, you’re a poor example to follow, mother mine. Your daughter’s always feared she might mimic your big exit one day, though I now feel I’ve got no choice. Face it, an opportunity like this only comes once in a lifetime. It still makes me furious to know my emulation of your final act seventy-two years ago, nine months before “Chanson d’automne” appeared in Pink Rosebuds, will give Potusville’s hyenas the easy out of saying self-destruction was in our genes.
Like mother, like daughter, they’ll shrug. You bitch! You fat, drugged, forgotten, hopeless bitch.
As for my favorite young actress, no doubt they’ll say I was just trying to impress her.
2. The Lotus Eater
Posted by: Pam
I’d just turned five when, I’ve been told, I watched my father’s sudden death during a polo match on Long Island. Not the horse’s fault, but it got a bullet behind one twitching ear just the same.
That suspended play temporarily. Cherished for the high marks he gave insensitivity, Kipling wasn’t yet out of fashion in some circles. Yet the survivors’ flask-rescrewing cries of “Let�
�s win this one for Tom!” ended up inscribed only in mud. They’d all seen Father reaching across another rider’s mount for the hook when his mallet tangled in the reins.
Yes, daisysdaughter.com readers: my hatred of Potus is partly Freudian. His prototype’s contribution to the Paris footlocker is a scattering of snapshots whose scalloped edges date them as surely as Elizabethan ruffs. Here he is proudly carside, standing with balled fist in pocket at a garden party or chin out as he quizzes innocent but deadly horses.
Before pretzelhood, I also had the genetic custody of a gangly build I blessed for changing me from a Purcey’s exotic to the tall girl who played basketball. Plus a jowl of which I was less enamored, its hammock of misleading sullenness only lifting when I smiled or laughed. Though I still do plenty of both, now it’s just another county heard from in a face made of Clio Airways–carved newspaper crumples.
Then to mimsily borogoved now, my face’s best foot forward has been my eyes, balanced between blue and stormy gray like twin Civil War memorials. And just as well, since my functions as a child were purely ocular. My mother’s widowhood filled my retinas with a rich brocade, pattern mostly indecipherable, in which she figured mostly by omission.
She was a white back scampering in dresses that daringly exposed it from her helplessly disputative shoulderblades nearly to the spinal nub’s Appomattox. When she returned in another taxi next morning or next Monday, a hand as hasty and vague as a postcard from a Beaux Arts ball would caress my forehead as if for luck. Whose unknown.
My early hope was that she was trotting off to Manhattan to see Daddy, who was only dead in Nassau County. That didn’t outlast the night her cab led a convoy of peculiarly dressed people back from there and he wasn’t one of them. I got scooted up the stairs as glasses swayed in hands detached from any identifiable owner, prefiguring the minor Dali canvas Daisy would later tire Georges Flagon into buying for her in a final token of her stint as a free spirit.
That transfer of Dali Buchanan from Manhattan to East Egg was a onetime affair. At home, where I was looked after by a succession of mighty-aproned Scandinavians all prone to clucking at me as if I were not one but several chickens, my mother’s masterpiece was the Sleeping Daisy. At its pre-Raphaelite best, it was executed in daytime amid vomited dress shops and her sheets’ blue typhoon behind a muslin screen’s impersonation of blond twilight.
One hand would be curled as if guarding her soft breaths from monsters, a logical worry to me at six. The other was most often wrapped around an oblong velvet-covered pencase: a minor mystery, since no letters were ever mailed from our home. My mother’s later attempts at fiction began with the purchase of a Smith-Corona manual typewriter, its carriage rearing over the keyboard’s tadpoles as strictly as a nun’s cowl. Twenty years later I clattered through Nothing Like a Dame on it, secularizing things considerably.
Then she’d go away again to Manhattan, miraculously restored to the Daisy I knew best: a stranger twitching taxiward with marcelled coif, bright eyes, and sequins that bragged their good fortune at mincing on such enfevered shanks. That’s when I used to warble along to her anarchic bedroom and rifle her lace-leaking chiffonier for that pencase. At least when my latest nanny, peeled like a nippled onion field, was doing the Sleeping Scandinavian in her own unventilated quarters and I’d gotten tired of observing (and inhaling) the mysteries of Copenhagen.
I can’t say whether Pammie’s curiosity about my mother’s pencase meant I was already a budding scribbler or simply jealous of any thingummy whose proximity my mother so clearly preferred to mine. As if there’s any difference, writers everywhere will roar. I never found it, though, much less opened it up to gaze at its innards, and just as well. A pencase it wasn’t.
Posted by: Pam
In the frisky days of her young widowhood, my mother’s favorite saying was on the chilling side. “Beauty is as beauty does,” she’d coo into the phone or—at her worst—to the uncomprehending Scandinavian, justifying her newest achieved or anticipated act of Daisyesque frivolity with affected hurt followed by an unaffected giggle.
The adjectives traded places by 1928, and she quit saying “Beauty is as beauty does” at all once she’d lost her looks. In my mother’s mind, nothing that was or ever had been true of her could be a generality. By then, however, a little alarm bell was lodged in her daughter’s brain.
Only on movie screens has the bliss stayed unalloyed. Otherwise, I was never to confront true loveliness in women—I mean the kind that’s a painting that breathes, a Charles Ives concerto for face and voice, with lashes that dip as if tasting their own eyes’ forbidden fruit before showing it to you like a one-armed bandit’s jackpot—without intimations of terror at both what beauty had license to do and what the world apparently had license to do to it.
Once adolescent torments were done, I was relieved that my own case was no special cause for concern. By college I did have some assets, starting with my lanky frame’s long legs. If I’d been younger when Sixties fashion produced its masterpiece, a miniskirt would’ve been my Jolly Roger. Beyond the gams, the Buchanan bod had its drawbacks, including a bosom whose bulge would’ve looked like the most minor of Indian raids on a map. My favorite description of my physique in the nude was Cadwaller’s: “Friendly.”
One of the minor blessings of being my age is that you’ve by and large quit noticing—all right, assessing—other women’s looks too. So feeling the old fear and wonder creep into my bones whenever, either in person or her grandpa Chris’s photographs, I see Panama Cadwaller laughing and cavorting wounds me, stuns me, makes me want to protest at life’s reminder that the thing and the thing’s perils aren’t done.
Like her untamable hair and unlike the blue-gray whorls I’ve outed as the mimsy borogoves here on daisysdaughter.com, Hopsie’s great-granddaughter’s eyes are as dark as tributes to Goya. When I told her so, she batted them and teased me by pouting false ignorance: “Aw, Gramela! You mean the beans, right?” So far Panama’s eyes are famous only to her relatives, of which I am one by marital proxy and geezery prerogative. But since she occasionally chatters of trying acting, they may yet end up suspended on billboards over some carnival wasteland or another.
I’m fairly sure now they’re closed. It’s only a little after seven a.m. on June 6, my second D-Day—my, I’m certainly whizzing through these posts, aren’t I?—and her school in Manhattan’s already out for the summer. Luxuriously free from now ’til fall, she probably isn’t out of bed yet: her dark hair spangling a cool pillow like a messier sun turned black in the developing room, her hurled limbs turning sleep into one more athletic event where teenagers take the gold just by breathing.
June or no June, I’m astonished her dad lets her sleep in that outfit. What can you be thinking, Tim? Sleeveless ribbed undershirt hiked up nearly to ribcage by a restless fist. Innocent (well, let’s pray) plum in panties I wouldn’t have risked wearing on my wedding night to Abelard, let alone Murphy. In frontal view, the tiny red bow at waistband’s center would’ve alarmed me less if it’d just been a mite nearer—honestly, would another inch be such a sacrifice?—her belly button. Are you awake yet, Panama?
No matter. Even asleep, you know your name at birth was Pamela, a tribute to me you improved on by refusing to be anybody’s namesake. The mimsies were thrilled when I caught on it wasn’t just baby talk: “Panama!” you insisted at three when grandpa Chris tried to correct you. Used to it himself, he worried you’d hurt the elderly, dentition-mulling (yes, the teeth were shot back in my seventies) guest’s feelings.
Panama it has been since. That stubby act of defiance was what first let your Gramela imagine that—via some osmotic smearing of unguents, and spared the claptrap and forceps in between—I’d produced a great-granddaughter.
Your looks don’t unnerve only me. In spite of my mimsial whimsies that you’ve somehow inherited the Buchanan gams, I played no biological rol
e in creating them, and that your dad did baffles even Tim. Most people can’t repress a blink when they learn that Panama’s the spawn of his prosaic, too often ashily Dockered loins.
At forty-four, he’s presentable enough. But he’s tending to stoutness like his dad and showing signs of growing as sparse up on Mt. Noggin as his grandfather. Years of New York screening rooms, followed by computer sessions as he dredges up the deep thoughts about that month’s slew of cinematic shallowness of Qwert magazine’s “Man in the Dark,” have given him a molelike mien augmented by a certain incredulity that in real life people can hear and respond to what he’s saying. When he looks at you, Panama, his dilemma is that he often can’t think of a thing to say.
You left him poleaxed even as a baby. As you skidded into adolescence, poor Tim’s awe grew talons of paternal anxiety. When last you two came to Washington and he and I watched you scudding, hipboned and earplugged, around the FDR Memorial, he rolled only belatedly comical eyes my way: “For God’s sake, Gramela! Pam, help me. What on earth am I going to do?”
He and I have different apprehensions. Grounded in his own experience, Tim’s fear is that even on movie screens, let alone in Manhattan high schools, beauty like yours is an open invitation to the world to crash in, destructive and greedy. After all, if he can’t help reacting as he does, what sorts of sewers must be flooding the brains of those less fettered by paternity? My fear is that beauty is a drug that ends up craving other drugs for company.
Posted by: Pam
Did I blame my mother for turning hophead? In my teens, definitely. She was off the stuff by then, but that age’s vengeful motto is “Better late than never.” A child’s wishes are an adolescent’s accusations, persisting well into maturity nowadays if Oprah’s to be trusted. By middle age, they’ve reverted to wishes, now colored by sepia mournfulness rather than crimson (Oprah isn’t to be trusted) urgency. When you’ve made it to my reef of the surf, far out past the warranty’s three score and ten, even the wishes are the same weak shade of wash as everything else.
