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

by Carson, Tom

  The problem was that others were mental cases. Nothing distinguished one pair of pajamas from another in the way that, say, Disneyland keeps Fantasyland and Tomorrowland’s workers recognizably garbed. Surprised, Panama? Don’t be: Gerson and I were guests at Anaheim on opening day. But as you may well have learned in Disneyland itself, an eight-year-old’s control over what or whom she deals with is limited.

  I was frightened when a woman with chopped hair, her mouth like San Simeon’s letter slot after an earthquake, taloned my wrist in a braceleting grip. Her strange hawk’s eyes roving, she insisted I was her Scottie—and after what I’d been through vis-à-vis SooSoo in the Summer of the Lotus Eater, being confused with someone’s dog again was no joy. Her warder was all rushed politeness: “Madame, madame! Please, you know you don’t belong here. What would your husband say to all this?”

  Another woman was so pretty—San Simeon’s letter slot before the earthquake, more or less—that I wondered what past, or whose, she could be expiating. She looked as if she belonged on the Riviera, not here. It turned out she was married to the one American doctor on staff, a weak charmer whose cheek was warmer than a medical man’s probably should’ve been.

  “Are you really all right, though?” an anxious Pam asked the first time my mother and I were alone. It must’ve been the afternoon Georges took the Belgian chocolates he’d chauvinistically brought from the rue Rémi and his favorite travel brochures to the sanatorium’s small ward of grands mutilés.

  “No,” she cooed serenely, alarming me into a quick scan for white coats with large Swiss ears attached. Not yet Ram-Pam-Pam, I wanted her to come back with us—Georges handling Christmas brought on nightmares.

  A breeze was teaching Daisy’s hair to scribble in soft Etruscan. “Oh, no, darling, no, not at all! I’m just, all grown up—and that’s better. ‘All right, all right!’ Why, that’s just a silly thing to say about yourself, like claiming you can fly. Unless you’ve seen the whole world, why, you’re just one, rabbit-hole, away! Georges wants so many things he’s learned to do without, you know; he knows he doesn’t have the right personality for them. I couldn’t, couldn’t be his rabbit-hole! Not when he’s paying for everything, the doctors said. Oh, Pammie! I don’t know why I bothered with—anything.”

  Posted by: Pam

  I hate to say it, bikini girl, but she was probably right. The most American thing about my mother was a hopeless inability to match the mirror’s shards with the map’s winks.

  Only in East Egg could Tom Buchanan’s widow fancy herself a budding writer and uninhabited, I mean hibited, free spirit, seizing on pockets of Manhattan and Cape Cod that simulated Europe’s freedom in manageable—if you had money—miniature. She hadn’t even set foot on the Continent when, out of some atavism of terror or habit or suspected inadequacy, she agreed to marry an unimaginative businessman. She might as well have stayed in New York.

  She might have done better to stay in Louisville, ignorant of everything except all that had been so cautiously prepared there for her to know, more charming and less unnerved at being outdone by moneyed out-of-town visitors than most of the hatted le tout Lou’vul dames in the top tier of Churchill Downs on Derby day. Oh, Panama! Imagine being led in the ritual singing of “My Old Kentucky Home” by middle-aged, still frisky Daisy Ibsenhower, her lower lip mischievously drooping on one line to mimic the hilarious new singer named Elvis all three of her sons like. At their one meeting, a bit of a flustered and handbaggy thing in ’59 when both their flights got delayed at O’Hare, she and Jacqueline Bouvier Nixon would’ve gotten on immensely well.

  She might’ve died at seventy or so in one of those beatifically calm houses whose golden innards start to glow between nicely mussed trees at twilight, soon after watching the first moon landing and feeling wistfully pleased that somebody had done it. I’d never have existed, but you can’t have everything.

  Anyhow, within their brief, those Swiss doctors did what they said they’d do. So far as I know, my mother never shot M again with either a silver syringe or the gold one whose miniature inscription proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that it had been given to her by the Lotus Eater.

  She drank her fair bit, true, ate enough for two or three Daisys, but that was all. She never said anything memorable to me after her remark on the sanatorium’s breeze-blown plaza that “all right” means nothing until you know the whole world.

  We spent her last few Augusts at the beach. Bray-Dunes, outside Dunkirk; Tati-sur-Mer, near Dieppe. I’ve sometimes thought the reason France made the Côte d’Azur its postcard for postwar seaside frolics was that the Channel coast’s old e.e. cummings catalogue of names doglegging it down to Le Havre was too battered by history’s linotype to successfully spell vacances.

  Wearing a scarf to make her face less obese, my mother died not knowing Dunkirk would be the site of a famous evacuation. No Daisy appeared among those queues of Tommies, shyly asking if there was room for one more. Seated on a beach chair whose mint stripes vanished at her hips, tried to reassert themselves above her shoulders, and crushed the already shapeless back of her bell hat, she didn’t know Dieppe would be the site of a famous failed commando raid. No Daisy stumbled off to stalag, wearing an all but shapeless overcoat, after her confused brief fight upon landing.

  “Oh, no. Auw, nawn, Pamelle!” she calls. “Georges, tell her not to get on that sailboat. She doesn’t even know the boy!”

  “Why bother, Day-zee? There’ll only be another in a minute.” At the beach, Georges (socks and shoes the whole time, of course) is peculiarly confident, in his favorite proxy element at one remove. Kites, Blériot, the Wright Brothers. Its shadow passing over the future location of his hopefully craned face, the Spirit of St. Louis may’ve flown over this bit of coast.

  Looking back at them at just-turned-thirteen, already in up to my waist, I’m surprised. I don’t care about the boy; I care about the sailboat. For human company, I miss my friends at Chignonne’s. But boys aren’t human! They’re part of nature.

  “Alors, on y va?” Whoever he is (I could not care less; he had a scar), he’s getting impatient.

  “Ouais, ouais. On y va.” As I shimmy aboard, wet keester alerted to unsettlingly lopsided elastic by left knee’s wild lunge and unwetted non-mandarines going squeak on the hot shininess like two comedy mice, I’m thinking ouais, ouais sounds like waves. As we push off, the striped tents on the beach—a dozen docile circus elephants, doing their one trick—begin to pad toward my mother and Georges’s new seesaw. Leave her in sunlight if nothing else.

  Posted by: Pambulance

  It was a police camion in the form of weather: that black, that unlikely to find itself being quarreled with, sounding its klaxon of shrieking February cold. Pulled from her flashlit bed (Gestapo!), Pamela Bou-qu’un-un was hastened down a hall (Gestapo, Gestapo) by a bathrobe-caravelled Cassandre.

  Behind the desk in Chignonne’s sanctum, the headmistress was folding and refolding her glasses as if they were a letter in a language she suddenly disdained. As Cassandre brought me in, she put them on, needing some badge of office. Her black dress had been burned by the mob that threw that crocheted shawl around her. Her careful daytime bun had gone the way of Stavisky’s bonds.

  “Pam’la! Ce que j’ai à vous dire n’est pas facile.” I still wish she’d tried to make it easier, but soft soap wasn’t her strong suit. “Votre mère est morte.”

  Dead? I found my mouth, which had gone flying toward the window before discovering it was still attached to my face.

  In French, “Comment?”—even gasped—can mean “how” as well as “what.” Ever practical, Chignonne assumed I meant the first.

  “Je n’en sais rien. Et tu ne doit pas penser à cela, mon enfant.”

  In her lone symptom of distress aside from dropping her formally consolatory vous for the tu of everyday reprimands to her studen
ts’ backtalk, she patted her desk for her ledger, which was locked up at night. Even Cassandre, on whose sharp face exhaustion cringed like unwelcome nudity, couldn’t think of everything.

  I already knew, though. (Clearly, so did they.) I didn’t get to say goodbye even to Gigi, much less Chaillot’s balloon salesmen or the Zéro de conduite boys on the rue Almereyda, and I can’t guess what Ram-Pam-Pam’s fellow Chignonne mignonnes were told the next day to explain my absence. If they learned the truth, I doubt they stood around scrubbing an eye with their fist as they all blubbered to Cassandre, “Bou-hou-hou! Nous, on veut tous que notre mère se tue avec une balle dans la tête, too.”

  As a taxi was summoned to rush Pam and her hastily packed trunk, its contents as ill assembled and bonkers as The Gold-Hatted Lover’s multiple Chapter Ones, to the Gare du Nord—my God, how they wanted me out of there!—I knew. As the driver nosed through rioters lurching back from the Place de la Concorde, all welts, bent fedoras, dark-mawed overcoats, headlit pale faces, and clutched bloody handkerchiefs around the cab’s prow—Daladier’s government quit the next day—I knew they’d tell me different, but I knew. As the night train to Brussels got underway, chuffing out of a Paris whose bone-cold cobblestones were in contention—for no one believed the official claim that one Serge Alexandre Stavisky, a swindler with highly compromisable friends in high places, had killed himself before he could be taken into custody—Pam knew she was heading to that deceit’s minor mirror reverse in Belgium.

  I knew why the coffin had to be closed. I knew it hadn’t been gout. I knew why Georges’s glares until he finally packed me off to America were rimmed with rage as well as suffering, as I was now the world’s most unwelcome living reminder that, in Georges’s view, his Day-zee had refused to Flagonize herself. Above all, I knew a withered brown hand from the Belgian Congo hadn’t been the only object I’d seen in the mahogany cabinet that day.

  It had taken a staggeringly unsuperstitious man to place his father’s colonial service revolver next to that desiccated claw. They wouldn’t let me into my mother’s old room, but I could still smell the cordite.

  Posted by: Pomme

  What I don’t know is who found her, Panama. Remember, Georges had a staff. Since February 6, 1934, was a weekday—a Tuesday, if you’re curious: we had Music on Tuesday in quatrième that year. By assignment, not choice, Pam played flute—he was probably at Flagon & Cie.

  Knowing my mother as I do, I’m sure she didn’t think of or care who came through the door. And I’m perversely grateful for that farewell fillip of obliviousness, since it’s my best chance to avoid making Like mother, like daughter come true in every detail. But I still haven’t solved the Andy problem.

  Every time I mentally rehearse his entrance, he still comes into view (my God, Pamidiot! Whose?) from the foyer, toting a bag of groceries he’s quite pleased with and DVDs from Netflix or Nextflick of The Gal I Left Behind Me and Meet Pamela. Every time, he sees a mess of pink and gray things on the rug. Even disregarding thoughtfulness, which I can’t—after all, in a sense I’ll still be his hostess, and old habits die hard—his ticker is no more what it used to be than mine.

  Call him back, tell him to stay home? If you read my early-morning postings here on daisysdaughter.com, you remember how well attempting to cancel my little birthday dinner worked the first time. Besides, Andy’s told me more than once that anytime my phone doesn’t answer, he’ll rush over in an octogenarian’s careful version of a flash. He’d still be the first even if he showed up tomorrow or Thursday.

  The confession that may and indeed should appall any unknown readers I’ve acquired, especially if you work for Domino’s, is that I thought of one horrid way to ensure my discoverer would be anonymous. Said brainstorm bit the dust fast, done in first by logistics: I couldn’t put Potus on hold while I quickly phoned up for a medium pizza with—no, don’t like mushrooms, maybe anchovies? Anchovies. Yes, I’ll leave the door unlocked. Then: “Hello, Potus? Sorry for the delay, but not for this.” Bang.

  It was done in next, I hope not unreasonably late, by recognizing the callousness my worry about Andy had tricked me into. Irreligious as I am, I do try to remember the words lettered on the storefront window of the first Catholic Worker house I laid eyes on during the Depression: “Whatever ye do unto the least of these my brethren, ye do unto Me.” If a delivery boy doesn’t qualify as the least of these my brethren on upper Connecticut Avenue, bikini girl, I don’t know who would.

  So l’équipe here at daisysdaughter.com is still mulling over that one, even as I wonder if I’ve left myself open in this latest batch of posts for Potusville’s favorite way of demonizing any citizen who dissents from this awful and unending war. All those comings and goings in old Europe, all that untranslated French! Never mind that those times were ended by the former Daisy Buchanan’s suicide. The vital news the folks out in Des Moines, Terre Haute, Eau Claire, French Lick, and Baton Rouge had better be alerted to is that her daughter’s something fishily or froggily less than fully American.

  Oh, really? Hey, cut it out. In an old house in Paris all covered with vines, Ram-Pam-Pam learned something about being American most Americans will never need to. I learned how strange it is to be one. It may be even stranger than it is lucky, which is saying something. L’Américaine, c’est moi.

  It took some reacclimatizing, I grant that. So did my guardian, in a letter he may’ve never finished or mailed. No, I didn’t go rooting around in his study: Georges Flagon’s mahogany cabinet had cured me of that, and any thirteen-year-old’s primary object of curiosity is herself. It just turned out that his home in Oak Park had a walled side garden, overhung not by an oak but an unexpected magnolia—a tree unknown in France, and none too damned common in Illinois either—which was his favorite place to read and write. And meditate, not to augur his future with a blunt auger on the magnolia.

  On the first halfway balmy day of April, pliably two-sweatered but delighted by the sun’s promise to be, if not a California orange, at least a pleasantly peeled Midwestern onion after its long winter as a chilly coin, he left me in the library. Where I stayed, at once floundering (there are only three Penrod books), baffled (Flaubert in translation is Garbo in burlap), and reassured.

  Whatever else this was or was going to be about, I could see his prematurely gray head and sweatered cottage of shoulder through the leaded window, oh! any time I wanted. Magnifique, l’Amérique.

  Even so, what makes April famously cruel—and really, of all people to indulge the pathetic fallacy, Mr. Eliot, right there in the first line too—is how quickly its sun’s promising onion can be retransformed into a chilly coin. After a telephone call summoned him back inside, my guardian didn’t return to his garden, and in fairness to Pam, I was asked to please fetch him his reading glasses.

  In fairness to me, they were looking up from a page where my name appeared. Among the books on the table, my search for a substitute paperweight stumped me anew: what was epistemology, who was Virgil Michel? Cluelessly, I also guessed that Hope must’ve been among Lily’s schoolmates. But no matter. Here’s what I read:

  or even had word from her in years, but her will gave me the guardianship of her daughter Pamela. Said daughter is now on the premises, looking wide-eyed and furtive at once. She’s off soon to Purcey’s Girls’ Academy in St. Paul, which I—you know my vast experience in these matters!—have deemed the best of a bad lot.

  You’ll recall our old friend Lily Highlow, of the house of mirth, who went there and to my (decorous) knowledge has never been arrested. Well, except for that odd Hope Diamond business, but we were all young once.

  If you remember Daisy at all, the daughter is honestly a bit spooky. Speaks perfect (as if I’d know) froggy, doesn’t resemble mother in the least except a bit in the old peepers and some of the archaic Twenties lingo, doesn’t know Al Smith ran for President or who Dorothy is. All in all, a perfec
t little Paree-sienne, and I ask myself: how will I keep her down on the farm? But in time

  5. Scenes from American Life, Not All Mine

  Posted by: Pam

  Just in case I’ve lured a few helplessly creaming NRA members to daisysdaughter.com by slyly mentioning that incredible organization in one of my dawn posts, glad to oblige. The gun in my lap’s an automatic. A 9mm Beretta, I believe, but Pink Thing’s unclear tape recording of Hopsie’s long-ago identification as he tucked it behind its traditional marker on our bookshelf in no way reflects expertise or experience of my own with this crap. Yes, I could Google to check, but as snappy excuses go, “Life’s too short” has grown on me this a.m.

  Its lightness gratifies an old bag whose forearm muscles are rubber bands made of tapioca that wrap balsa. The only other time I’ve handled Cadwaller’s compact little gun was when I exiled it to the Paris footlocker twenty years ago, and I’ll have to snatch it up from my ancient snatch in one hell of a dotty hurry when the phone rings. It’s certainly a far more manageable firearm than the heavy Browning, a ring soldered to its butt for the leather lanyard beloved of colonial administrators, my mother played lollipow with seventy-two years ago. Then again, she was recumbent and only in her thirties, and I’m an octogenarian in a wheelchair—mitigating, admittedly only to my own satisfaction, all the Like mother, like daughter Shinola in tomorrow’s screaming headlines.

  And yes, NRA: the safety’s off. I may not remember much more of Cadwaller’s one try at indoctrinating me about our family ordnance than I do of Tim’s e-mail explaining how to manage my website, but I did look for and flip that little doohickey. I’m not about to risk the comedy of juggling phone, gun, fat lunettes, and burlesque dentition in panic as a certain voice starts wishing Mrs. Cadwaller a happy birthday. The fewer actions this old bag needs to perform at H Hour, the better.