by Carson, Tom
Since it never crossed my mind there could be two of them, the mystery that didn’t get explained until I first opened the Paris footlocker in August ’44 was why the pencase’s velvet was now midnight blue rather than the black I remembered. But I hadn’t seen it since its contents had mutated into a stereopticon at the beginning of summer, the span of the Pleistocene Era at my budding-pudding age, and my mother didn’t quite resemble herself either. I’d gotten more used than I’d realized to the Daisy whose behavior varied according to her proximity to the Lotus Eater, making it reliable in a way.
Posted by: Pam
Despite its confusions, don’t blame me if I reveled in that intermission. It was a return to not only the months right after my father’s death when it had been just her and me, but more magically to the by now half imaginary time when I’d been a toddler, Daddy was alive, and I remembered her paying much more attention to Pammie. At least when Tom Buchanan was in the house, attending to me was her only irreproachable task that didn’t require his say-so and even he couldn’t sulk about.
And yes, Panama: I’ve made that best-of-both-worlds crack many times. While my mother would never have voiced the thought, I’m not sure she didn’t share it. At least when she wasn’t preoccupied by the Lotus Eater’s nonpresence (and please: however dislikable Daisy’s morphine crony was, whatever quarrel over a man or even intrusion of the L.E.’s Charybdean tendencies had caused the break, have enough pity for my mother to grasp how frightened she’d have been at having to go back to shooting up alone), she seemed as happy as I was to revisit the lost days of my infancy. If the L.E. hadn’t shown up on our doorstep under a week later, I think Daisy might’ve tried to take me all the way back into her womb.
“Pammie, darling!” she said one oven of an afternoon. No air conditioning even for richies back then, Panama. We sweltered democratically, privilege’s perks confined to rising breezes from the Sound.
Brushing her eyes, she put aside the pencase, which she’d been clutching as she sniffled. My newest hypothesis was that it held some sort of miniature Daddy, which pleased me. Make what you will of the fact that I had no desire to open it.
“Yes?”
“Do you remember when you were a very little girl, and you and Mummy used to bathe together? Lovely, long, cool baths? Wouldn’t that be perfect now?”
I pondered. “Should I tell Nanna to run one?”
“Oh, no! I’m sure she’s napping. I think we can manage by ourselves, don’t you?”
I did feel shy about it. For one thing, I didn’t remember, not really. Plausible and pleasant was the closest my memory could come. For another, I was acutely conscious of my doughily pale small Pamcorpus: so unlike my mother’s, somehow neither plausible nor pleasant, and unseen by anyone since the dawn of time. The Scandinavian, who normally bathed me, didn’t count. Frequency aside, there was no difference between the red-elbowed way she scrubbed me and the way she washed our dog.
I stood in my summer frock, pudgy knees (you’d better believe they felt like an item of clothing), and strap shoes and watched the tub fill. Then my mother reappeared in a green silk wrap and bent to turn off the tap in the first domestic or practical gesture I suspect I’d ever seen her perform.
“Why, Pammie! Why aren’t you in yet?”
That confused me. Insofar as my memory had managed to make infancy’s prequels to our joint bath plausible and pleasant, it had sworn up and down that I’d been too young to dress or undress myself. Even now, the Scandinavian took charge of disrobing me, impatient with my illusion that I was a girl and not a package from the dry cleaners’. So far as I could and can recall, I’d never taken off my own clothes in front of anyone, and it had an unwelcome element of decision. So I hesitated.
“Oh, honestly, darling!” said my mother. “Did I really raise you?” [Short answer to that one, mother mine: no.] “For God’s sake, it’s just Daisy.”
If nothing else, her scorn took away the unwelcome element of decision. All that was left was the familiar element—though not in this context—of clumsiness, of inadequacy, of wondering why nobody had ever seen fit to tell me the lousy rules of anything. Keep in mind, my mother had clavicles as delicate and in many contexts as expressive as wood creatures’ eyes.
Not that more than the ends nearest her throat of those very odd bones was on display just now. It was evident she wasn’t going to join me in the nude until I’d plunged my seven-year-old Pamcorpus into the tub.
So I shed strap shoes, Pamunderwear (odd priority, you may say, but I was most used to—and still, at seven, proudest of—pushing them down when tinkling), summer dress, and chemise (chemise? Mais bien sûr. I was a rich girl, not a farm girl, and in August I counted those bitches lucky). Then I turned to the tub as if it were my porcelain and all but woofing St. Bernard.
After all, the bathroom’s wall tiles were white as Alps. And as somehow professional, not that I’d seen one yet, as Swiss sanatoriums. Yet I must’ve hesitated again, briefly but fatally, over which leg to fork over the damn thing as she watched.
“Oh, no, dear!” Daisy said. “Your hair.”
On behalf of any number of hard-working hairdressers in Manhattan, Hollywood, Paris, the District, and even New Delhi, I’d love to tell you I put hands to hips, faced her with seven-year-old brashness exposed from China to Peru, and said, “Yeah, you fucking junkie. What about my hair?” But that Pam—the one who’s carried on a fair number of interesting conversations in the altogether over the years, the one with hips to put hands to, the one who drawls “fucking” the way Pepys writes “But I digress,” the one who knew my mother was addicted to morphine—that Pam was a long way from existing.
“I’m sorry,” I said instead in panic. Couldn’t wait to learn what I’d apologized for (it’s all information at that age). Though it was August, forgive me for remembering I was shivering.
“Can’t let it get wet! That’s death.”
I cringed for two reasons. One was that “death” as an all-purpose comparison was an L.E.-ism and I’d thought we were shut of her. The other was that, as she tugged a ruffled and honey-colored bathing cap down over naked, hopping Pam’s head, my mother—and until you follow this logic, you’ll never understand Daisy Buchanan—said, “My! You are a bit roly-poly, aren’t you?”
“But what about your hair, Mommie?” (Oh, please! Can I get in the tub now?)
“Oh, what I do I care?” she said. “What does anyone?”
After all that, the actual bath was a relief. Water was better to wear than nothing, and our tub, of course, was huge. Before the polo horse did its bit, Daddy’d been pretty doggone wealthy, and we were two years away from the Crash.
As for what Daisy Buchanan looked like when she slipped off her silk bath wrap and slid into the far end of the tub, I’m sorry. She was my mother and I’m not a pornographer. She had Those Things (had I suckled them? No information, but I must’ve drained both). She had That Thing, which I thought was too pretty and small for me to’ve come out of it. Briefly and discreetly, she’d had its hind twin’s scything when she joined me in the tub.
She still had the smile that had made the Fay house in Louisville swarm with khaki and officer’s buttons. She had Rorschach-blotty purple and yellow splashes of bruises from shooting up morphine all over her arms and legs.
She pushed a duck at me and giggled. She let me take off the honey-colored bathing cap and soak my head when I complained for the third time about how gunky it felt. She asked her daughter to look away when she stood up with water cascading and reached for her robe, and I did even though I regret it.
She called me “Pammie,” not “darling,” during most of the bath.
She never mentioned the Lotus Eater. She never touched me, not once, not even when we were both toweled. I’d never done towel turban before. She helped. That was as close as she came.
Not once. Other than that, for once I don’t care about history. You bastards! Do you expect me to tell you what her snatch looked like? She was my mother.
Posted by: Pam
Foreshortened into troglodytism by the downcast view from my third-floor playroom, the Lotus Eater got out from behind the wheel of her Dreiser, and that was that. Intermission accomplished. She looked as ratty in her white dress of surrender as a Popsicle wrapper glued back onto the stick after the Popsicle’s gone, but that couldn’t have mattered less to my mother. Going by the murmurs that rose once I’d crept down to the second-floor landing—my mother’s bright “All you want, darling! Whatever you want,” the L.E.’s forlornly merry “Quid pro quo vadis, Daisy. Isn’t that in Dante somewhere?”—I gathered all was forgiven. By whom and for what, I’ll never know.
The L.E. drove away only an hour or two later, after a reconciled parting at the front door I’m sure Pam didn’t witness. I have a vivid memory of toycotting it instead in the playroom, mauling two of my dollies’ heads together as if I were trying to force them to swap faces and making disgusting “Shmek, shmek” noises which I must’ve been mimicking from the Scandinavian’s mutters when at some point she shoved a third doll into the room. A stupid one I’d always hated, too close to me in size to be good for much; that was why I’d abandoned it on our pointlessly boatless wharf.
My memories of that night and the next morning are more muddled. I’m positive I remember an exhilarated Daisy prattling about what wonderful fun the Scandinavian, SooSoo the dog, and I were going to have during the whole week bothersome, bossy, blissfully flickering Mummy was away. Yet when I came down to breakfast, she was anticipating her Belgian second husband’s line of business—Georges Flagon peddled safety equipment to small airports—by waving two squares of burnt toast around an otherwise vacant kitchen.
The toot of a hired car outside made her wildly eye me and then the now odorless, Scandinavian-less servant’s quarters behind her. Then a cupboard, as if wondering how long she could responsibly trust Pamela to survive on a diet of dishcloths, dog food, or whatever it contained. Ironing board, Mother.
A second toot unlocked her feet and hurried me upstairs, where my mother began to toss random Pam-garb into a suitcase she’d rejected while slowly feeding her own wardrobe, Smee-style, to three much wider sets of crocodile jaws the night before. Her haste was complicated by her dashes to the window to semaphore our progress to a—what do you know, Miss Jessup?—gray-coated, jackbooted, quintessential (he was male, albeit Asian) chauffeur.
“We’re going to the most wonderful place on Cape Cod,” she told me as clothes flew. “You’re going to meet all Mummy’s bestest, most special friends! Oh, here’s a lovely sort of little Russian blouse. Is it mine?”
“It’s the sun dress I had on yesterday, Mother, and it’s dirty. And too small.” Taking it back from her dazed hands, I thought the Scandinavian might use it to wipe furniture or finally blow her great big nose in if we still had a Scandinavian. “How do you know where we’re going is wonderful?”
“Because I’ve decided it will be! For everybody, and I’m always right. Yes, always! Wasn’t I smart enough to pick you out from all those other little jellybeans when Daddy and I went to that great big expensive candy store on Fifth Avenue?”
“Is she coming?” No need to identify who she was, much as I might wish my mother hadn’t unconsciously agreed.
“Why, of course! She’s going to help me take care of you. Won’t that be fun?”
“Then I don’t want to go. I hate her,” said the budding pudding that was Pam, with twin Civil War memorials for eyes. “She’s a witch.”
“Oh, sweetie, don’t be silly. You’re too young—don’t know enough about anyone yet to really and truly hate them. And she isn’t a witch! She doesn’t look like one, does she? Isn’t she pretty? Well, now, doesn’t that just show you? She, oh, she just gets put under a spell sometimes—by her father, who’s an awful, wicked, mysterious ogre in the mountains—and that makes her act like one. But she doesn’t want to! That’s the important thing. Please remember that, Pammie. Watch out for the people who want to. Won’t you? For me?”
My mother’s failure to become a writer was a failure of discipline, not imagination. Either on the page or in person, I’ve never been able to improvise like that. Not without a single nugget of reality to wrap my words around.
My face scraped a crushed Daisy-bosom’s blossoms in surprise as she lifted me, apparently forgetful that I’d been three the last time she’d tried and was more of a handful now. Unable to maintain a rib grip, her hands scooted up under my armpits as the suitcase staggered toward my unexpectedly defrocked rump. I thought she was going to pack me in it and spare the Lotus Eater the sight of Pam until we got to Provincetown, but it turned out she only wanted me to sit on its lid.
Posted by: Pam
Of course it’s peculiar to be getting ready to describe Provincetown to you, Panama. You know it better than your Gramela. You weren’t born yet when a cousin of Cadwaller’s with no children deeded her place on the Cape to your grandpa Chris and his wife Renée not long after Hopsie died.
I still wonder sometimes if that unmet Cadwaller relative was the mournful adolescent watching Daisy, the L.E., and Pammie wander through Provincetown from her chair on a now ruddily mobbed, bikini-throbbing, and thong-thronged porch that nonetheless looks familiar in your grandpa’s photographs. That porch and the house behind it have featured in every summer of what you always amuse me by calling your whole life.
You’re the age your grandfather was when I met him. In my memory, he goes in an eyeblink from a wiry sixteen-year-old I’m leading onto a bateau-mouche to a newly bearded nineteen-year-old snapping cross-legged pictures of his equally new French bride—today your placid, rotund grandmother—from the rug that then lay in our Paris living room, home now only to the Metro section and Pam’s feet.
Chris was still an Agence France-Presse stringer when he first grew the scraggly fuzz that left us unsure at first if he was trying to look older or younger. Once May or Mayn’t, his photographic documentation of the ’68 Paris upheavals, got Amherst interested in putting him on the faculty—Hopsie and I both bemused by his impersonation of an academic, not to mention Amherst’s of swinging with the times—he gradually added the belly, wire-rimmed glasses, and cheerfully glottal middle-aged voice that to this day makes it sound as if the piece of paper stuck in his throat has the most wonderful joke written on it. His zest for zany adult masks went on tickling us until we realized they connoted him. Before Cadwaller died, at least he got to see his son complete.
Even down here in Potusville, I’m aware Provincetown has evolved too, not only since my five-day visit in 1927 but over the decade and a half you’ve been alive to join your parents’ jolly, sunburnt two weeks with Chris and Renée there every summer. I’ve certainly seen lots of pictures, supplemented lately by your Panamanic Margaret Meadisms on the phone about the local boys’ club celebrating its XY-seeking-XY summer festival—though no girls’ club celebrating an XX-seeking-XX one, I gather, at least from your long-distance descriptions—in that gay mecca, as I believe it’s called. It must be a comfort to Tim to know you could saunter around starkers without being an object of more than ornithological curiosity to all but a few of the XY’s in sight.
Then Chris comes on the line to report on his latest sighting of my onetime trapeze partner—hi, Norman! Bye, Norman—on the 1948 NYT bestseller list. In the near sixty years since Nothing Like a Dame was going down on one side of the gutter as The Naked and the Dead scooted up the other, he’s certainly outdone your Gramela at productivity of every sort. Now a full-time Provincetonian, my fellow author gets around these days on two gnarled canes, so Chris told me last year. To which I retorted, “Thirty-odd books, nine children! What, only two canes?”
I never met him in ’48
and surely won’t remeet him now. Every year, you all (no, not Norman) pile on the phone to beg me to come to Provincetown, and every year I refuse. I steadfastly did so even back when I still got up to Amherst every turkey day and to Manhattan half a dozen times a year—so often that sometimes I’d come and go without seeing you. “Next time,” we’d agree and usually make good on it.
No such thing now. No next time for anything I’ve done or haven’t done, with the exasperatingly likely exception of having to hit “Save” once, twice, or three or four more times to heave Pam’s lap and the rest of her up for the tiresome process that is peeing at my age—a chore whose one interesting novelty today is that each time I’ve had to set aside Cadwaller’s gun, telling it not to worry and I’ll be back soon. Trust me, Panama: you’ve got no idea how boring one’s own ablutions get. You’ll look back with wonder on the ballerina days when you just yanked ’em down, yanked ’em up, flushed in a flash, and raced back to the party.
Even if I weren’t getting ready to knock myself off when the White House calls, I’m afraid I’d still have to decline your clan’s invite to come up to Provincetown this year. Doesn’t my Mac have oodles of downloads of Chris’s pictures from previous Cadwaller-fests? Wasn’t I there for five days in 1927? Aren’t I reasonably observant? And isn’t the rest just architecture?
My God! Pam, you senile imbecile. Maybe Dr. Johnson was right that the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully, but what he left out is that the thing being concentrated on is the prospect of hanging. When do you all traditionally implore me to come to Provincetown, Panama?
On your unfailing group call to Gramela on my birthday. Oh, bloody hell.
