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

by Carson, Tom

  It was loneliest in the mornings. Until midday, the two of them stayed hidden like nesting dolls inside the columned bulge of East Egg grandeur where were tucked Pammie’s increasingly fictional memories of having had a father. Still pointlessly braced to attention by summer’s commanding officer, it now felt like my home only when they were gone and I was waiting for Quint.

  Along around noon, the Scandinavian would start preparing lunch, grumblingly aware it might end up scrapped by the clock hands’ Alphonse-Gaston routine, my mother’s capricious palate, or a rush back to Manhattan. When our houseguests, must correct that plural, finally emerged, both Daisy and the L.E. often looked distinctly the worse for good weather.

  On afternoons when serious recuperation was called for, they’d rest on our white lawn furniture. Vaguely clad, their bodies lolled on iron scrollwork like faked photographs of ectomorphs trying to rise skyward from skeletons. The Scandinavian’s offerings of deviled eggs or mutually surprising—to the food too—tongue sandwiches took care of keeping body and soul in the identical bind.

  “Why, Daisy! I think this one’s yours,” the L.E. exclaimed one day, peeping between two slices of bread. That alarmed me until my mother’s horribly affectionate answer—“Share and share alike, darling”—proved her powers of speech were unimpaired.

  My mother would often be frowning or trying to at a book, sometimes guessing right about posterity’s opinion of the new. Even so, a vanished bookmark’s tombstone of pallor on an otherwise yellowed page tells me she never got to the fifth episode of Ulysses. (How you talk, Pam! You’re mired to this day in the ninth.) Her struggles to prove she could stay in the modernist swim from aboard her morphine raft left the Lotus Eater, no reader aside from speedometers and price tags, staring not through but into her own sunglasses, occasionally reaching out for a champagne glass that would startle her when it had fur and barked. Only then would Daisy’s daughter be drafted as her interlocutor by default.

  “Why, oh, there—Pamela. What is that racket—dear?” I remember her calling, her mouth seemingly attempting flight from the black warders covering her eyes by twisting itself into the incognito of a smile. As my mother decided the sun had dried that page and turned it, a dull thunk from my area had caught the L.E.’s restless ear. “Are you practicing polo?”

  “It’s a mallet, not a racket. And it’s for croquet, not polo.” Along with a weathered ball, I’d found it in—not on—our unmown lawn some days earlier. No need for wickets: the hunt after each whack kept me busy even when the dog got bored.

  “Croquet’s dull as death,” that mouth lamented as the lenses flashed, twenty feet away. It was the pot calling the kettle tiresome, but she could hardly be expected to see the joke—not with all those fascinating thoughts about herself twisting and worming around inside her cranium’s narcissistic seraglio. “You should play polo! Now there’s a game. Gallop along, gallop along!”

  Unnoticed by the Lotus Eater, my mother’d stopped reading. “I don’t like horses,” I said, unwilling to use the word scared in front of my rival.

  As the L.E.’s long gone, I can admit on daisysdaughter.com that the flinch lasted well into adulthood. I wasn’t to ride until Gerson and I went to Tahoe for our fifth anniversary. Even on mounts as tranquil as the slow-motion clouds overhead, we made unlikely cowpokes; Gerson looked as if he feared arrest for impersonating a Cossack. As for me, every pine was measuring the strictly provisional demise of a phobia I was sure a trot or even a loud snort or mane toss would bring back at gale force. We were both giddy when we got back to our cabin, knowing we’d make love.

  Back to 1927. “Try it with the dog!” the L.E. shrieked with now unfeigned hilarity, the ever busy seraglio having worked its way out to her writhing lips. It was absurd, since SooSoo—what do you know, Mnemosyne?—stood barely higher than my knee. “Doggy polo, there’s your sport. It’s settled. One day you’ll thank me, little—Pamela…”

  My mother’s swiveled stare by then was proof of just how calmly Hamlet takes to hefting Yorick’s skull. Since reproach was impermissible—oh, no! Not with her dear Lotus Eater—she only looked disbelieving.

  “Do you mind?” she finally said. And in my memory’s most hateful, unforgivable footage of that summer, made amends for her strained tone with a conciliatory smile.

  “Oh! Well, Daisy. I forgot,” the Lotus Eater stammered, genuinely nonplussed. “And well—it is a game, you know, and scads of people play it. All the time. And well—you never liked him. You told me so. That’s why I didn’t think of—bother!—anything, really. Anything at all.”

  Couldn’t stand either of them, suddenly. “Can I go back to my game now?”

  Posted by: Pam-Chen

  It must’ve been going on August when my mother decided to force us to be friends. The Scandinavian included, since you need four for mah-jongg. It tickles me that I spent years convinced “Pong!,” “Chow!,” “Chen-chen!,” and “Mah-jongg!” were the only words my childhood nanny knew how to speak…of English.

  We played in the kitchen, the best way to secure her participation. Wood-backed ivory tiles went click under a lamp meant to light meat or ice cream. The Lotus Eater’s gin flask stood at her elbow like a prompter. Even with two cushions, Pamela had to stand on her chair’s lower rung to crane for the far wall—the game’s, not the kitchen’s—when the Scandinavian was dealer. That made the collection of my initial thirteen tiles a stretch once the dice had told her where to break the fortress.

  Naturally, I was delighted when the dice or multiple games appointed me dealer. Only long afterward did I realize my mother and the L.E. would never’ve been able to stay so calm during those long mah-jongg nights if the stock of morphine upstairs hadn’t been lavish enough to hold them well into tomorrow, making a Dreisered dash into Manhattan to see their other dealer unnecessary.

  Even so, I won’t deny—and why should you, Pam, almost eighty years later?—that mah-jongg in our kitchen, with the clicking of the pencase or stereopticon’s hasp held at bay by chen-chen, chow, and pong, is my happiest memory of that summer. It may be this old bag’s happiest memory of the whole damned Nineteen-Twenties.

  Yes, the tiles included dragons: red, white, green. But the black one—night—was barricaded by the kitchen’s windows. They held off the giant squid’s inky sieges even when, far out past our lawn, mute heat lighting, meteorology’s answer to silent movies, flashed in the Sound.

  You see, my mother’s plan did work up to a point. Some games expose and inflame people’s personalities; my playwright first husband always claimed poker nights in college (the Merchant Marine to interviewers) taught him how to dramatize character. The rules of others act to suspend temperament, again up to a point.

  My mother, for instance, couldn’t stop trying for all primes, all concealed, or some other overly strategized bonus, only to be forestalled time and again when one of the rest of us called “Mah-jongg!” at the first workaday combo of any old four triplets or chows and one pair. Even so, those Chinese women knew what they were doing. In steerage, in doss houses, and in Gold Rush brothels, they’d needed a pastime whose strictness would foster intimacy independent of liking.

  War has the same effect. In 1944–45, it wasn’t so much that Pamita didn’t notice what a prick Eddie Whitling was as that the observation didn’t strike her as relevant. His way with an MP or a map, his nose for indiscretion, and his ability to crack the first joke after a shell plowed into the next ridge or orchard were all more to the point. What I mean is that I used to honestly forget the woman saying “Pong!” and “Chen-chen!” to my left was the Lotus Eater.

  It awes me to consider that sometimes she did too. With atypical foresight, my mother’d arranged things so that the L.E.’s usual kitchen seat meant I chowed from her. You can’t help but make jokes when your rival’s discards end up as the linchpins of the visible part of your hand.


  “Oh, Pamela!” the mahj-disguised Lotus Eater used to wail, for once with no audible unease before she called me anything at all, when I’d chirp “Chow!” and reach for the Three Bamboo or One Dot she’d just called and laid down. “Why do I bother to keep the rest hidden? Here, here, why don’t you have a look at my secrets? Just take from me whatever you need? I’ll save you lots of time. Go on, go on!”

  Levitating her tile rack for a surprisingly funny, two-fingered balancing act (she never handled the dog that well), she’d make the same odd forward-and-back motion she’d performed with her breakfast plate in June. Only now, as I suppose she may’ve meant it to the first time, it only made me—made us, even the Scandinavian—laugh.

  Then I’d ponder my own tiles, discard a dragon, and my mother’s lithe fingers would flash out like forest sprites: “That’s mine. Pong! Why, Pammie, thank you.”

  “Oh, darn.”

  “Such a good little girl,” Daisy would laugh as she set out her triplet and flashed her eyes at the L.E., her white throat sweetly bubbling with its old Dom Perignon from my pre-Scandal infancy. “I must’ve done something right—don’t you think, darling?”

  Panama, at that age I could’ve given myself over to mah-jongg the way Duchamp did to chess. I just wouldn’t have had the inspiration to draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa first. Yet nothing, neither my yelps nor the Scandinavian’s greasily crumbly potato pancakes—nor even the Lotus Eater’s gin flask, which I’d gone from resenting as a silvery kibitzer to welcoming as an ally in keeping us all around that kitchen table forever—nothing could stop the newly exclusive slyness that’d steal over two of our four faces as the kitchen clock’s hands neared convergence at the peak of their circular Alp. For half of our quartet, their arrows’ function had gone from chronological to directional.

  It’s no fun for children to discover that the companionship of adults is always in some sense an imposture. Why don’t they always want to be this way, you wonder? Even after, like all adults, I’d learned the myriad answers to that one, I did my best to feather the transitions.

  I only had to learn how when Chris Cadwaller, sixteen and wary, visited Paris soon after I’d married his father. I was in my late thirties by then. That may’ve been my advantage over the L.E. and Daisy, since smart Chris and I were agreed there’d be no illusions Pam was still youthful herself.

  Maybe it’s just as well that your future Gramela never did talk him or the rest of you, or for that matter Hopsie, into trying mah-jongg. All that three generations of Cadwallers have taken from it is “Chen-chen!,” the cry to the dealer to draw two final tiles and begin the next game. First Chris, then Tim—and now you, Panama—use it for everything from ending a phone call to changing the subject after an argument to starting a meal once everyone’s served.

  Chen-chen! If that’s my Cadwaller legacy, I’m not complaining. You all treat it as hopeful. It’s never “Goodbye,” much less “Go to hell,” but “Let’s start the next game now.” If it sounds ornerier as your Gramela mutters it, that’s because my next game’s my last. Having drawn Pam’s thirteen and arranged them to suit my best chances of mahj-ing, I’m waiting on the White House switchboard to lay down its fourteenth.

  “Chen-chen,” I’ve just told the phone, your great-grandfather’s gun in my lap. My determined dentition feels like a mouthful of dead Daisy’s long lost wood and ivory (they weren’t in the Paris footlocker, to my regret) mah-jongg tiles. “Chen-chen, petit Potus. Chen-chen.”

  Posted by: Pam-Pam

  1927: Heat lightning, boiled smell of Copenhagen. Alphonse and Gaston climbing up their round Alp. “Last one?” said the Lotus Eater, tattooing her underlip with avid teeth. “Last one, agreed?”

  Unable to predict their own impatience, she and my mother would never call the last hand until it was well underway. Pam was always denied the fool’s reward of cherishing it from start to finish. It was rude of the L.E. in another way too, since she’d just konged—added a fourth matching tile to a triplet, forcing her to draw now from the dead wall—and that set her up for a high score if she won.

  “Yes, darling. Of course. It will be. Pam-Pam’s tired.”

  Like hell I was, Mother. But I didn’t have much to work with. One chow, a potential triplet, and a bunch of tiles otherwise with less in common than bus passengers.

  I drew an East Wind and hummed in dismay, knowing I had to keep it. No help to me, it was a risky discard when none of its three matching tiles was in sight. Choosing another from my rack and setting it down, I grumbled “Polly”—our private mahj name for One Bamboo. Unlike the other tiles in its suit, it showed not count-’em-and-weep bamboo poles but a bird of paradise.

  My mother’s hand was all concealed, a virtual scream she was angling for one of her would-be high-scoring masterpieces. She barely glanced at her new tile before she discarded it. “Polly want a Five Crack?” she said.

  With two chows and two triplets in plain view, the Scandinavian had only one tap-tapping tile unexposed, so we knew she was just waiting on her pair. The North Wind she drew and gruntingly flipped for our benefit was no use to her. Or the rest of us, as she could see for herself: the other three North Winds were already face up in the discard rows that had lengthened until they nearly formed the square of a single-tiered fort inside the vanishing two-tiered one’s outline.

  Then the Lotus Eater drew. As if her new inability to concentrate—not with that morphine stereopticon calling to her and Daisy from its pencase upstairs—left her no choice but to mimic the Scandinavian’s gesture, she put the tile down face up right away: “Six Dot,” she said restlessly.

  Once she heard herself call it, though, some hophead circuitry substituted the sound of her own voice for plain sight. Her hand fluttered: “Oh, no! I need it. Can…? Um, chow!” said the L.E. nonsensically. Making as if to retrieve her own discard, she gave the nitwit giggle—and nothing’s more likely to offend a child—of someone who’d stopped taking the rules seriously.

  Offended, my ass. I was appalled. “You can’t chow yourself! And it’s too late. We’ve all seen it. And anyway—pong.” I reached out.

  A boiled red hand superseded us both: “Mah-yongg.” But she never knew I’d seen her naked, crouching with hands gripping white bedstead bars in her tumid room as she napped. That same red hand that had just seized the tile was at rest next to scrub brush whose crevasse hid Bering Sea herring. The last thing that would’ve occurred to me was that I had one too.

  “Oh, dear. Look at this,” said my mother, crestfallen enough to commit the mahj solecism—to Pam the stickler’s eyes, at least—of displaying a losing combination. “I had all the dragons, hidden! And my own wind. I only needed the pair.”

  Except for the L.E., who was fidgeting now that she’d spilled the tiles back off her rack onto the table—but then, unlike me, she wouldn’t be saying goodnight to my mother just yet, but “chen-chen”—our commiserations were genuine. It was a nearly miraculous hand. Or would’ve been if my prosaic Scandinavian nanny hadn’t barged to victory with a common, low-scoring, practical two chows, two triplets, and pair.

  Her only reward was to rebox the tiles. We never knew what became of her after she quit near the end of the summer, but I don’t doubt that, unlike her employer, she lived to be a hundred.

  Posted by: Pam

  My recollection is that the scene that ended any chance of chowed or unchowed companionability between me and the L.E. took place the next morning. Be warned I spent eight years in Hollywood and a day and a half there will teach you glib dramaturgy if you’re susceptible.

  Whatever morning it was, I’m sure it was one of mid-August’s drowsiest. My mother came downstairs just before midday, dressed for Manhattan but less soignée than usual. That meant she looked like a lesser Modigliani for a change.

  She grew more jittery as a whole hour of August dithered by wi
thout the L.E. appearing. Then finally crazed enough to kiss my head out of nowhere, her delicate hands caging Pammie’s stunned ears like white spiders, and act as if we did that all the time.

  What I intuit in hindsight is that they’d used up the last of their M the night before. My mother was frantic to get back to Manhattan and score before the cravings grew strong enough to make madness look like an appealing alternative. And for that, she needed the L.E., not having driven a car since the Scandal.

  She finally scooted me upstairs—a first—to wake her chauffeur. Another turn of the screw, and why hadn’t I seen it sooner? Not Quint, whom I’d plainly imagined: Quintess. No jackboots or uniform, that was how I’d been fooled. The scariest phantasms are those in plain sight. Right then, I’d’ve sooner climbed onto a pony.

  “Why can’t you?” I complained. “She’s your lousy friend.” If that sounds comical, Panama, I’d better explain that back then people still knew lousy meant infested with lice. I might as well have said fucking.

  Daisy was too nervous to rebuke me. “Because little girls are sweeter,” she said, a non sequitur if I ever heard one. “Besides, you know [though I didn’t] she doesn’t like me walking in on her. I’m, oh!, much too noisy, you see. With my great big feet. Clump, clump!, like your father’s,” she improvised, using her hands to demonstrate. “I must’ve gotten them from him, I don’t know. Oh, Pammie, please.”