by Carson, Tom
“My shoes,” I moaned in vain. Pat swept me into the wings as Murphy shouldered his way back through the curtain to a patter of, all in all (I didn’t yet know what he’d said about Viper), amazingly tactful applause.
“Good luck, Snooks,” he barked, not knowing yet what I now knew about Viper. A Time-cover grin and a cheap paperback’s wild eyes—once a budding pudding’s twin Civil War memorials, the mimsy borogoves today, just then two orbs of everything in nowhere—passed in the night.
Pat hustled me into position opposite Hans Caligar, who clearly hadn’t been notified of Viper’s replacement. I’d never known he liked me until I saw his perplexity give way to a compassionate smile.
“Mein arme Kind,” he had just time to say. “I share with you what Reinhardt said once: ‘One way the theater resembles life is that it will be over sooner than we think.’”
The curtains parted. Dazzling lights blazed apocalypse. Shouting “The Führer was right! The strong only shame themselves when they negotiate with the weak,” Hans—now Count von Deutrifau—hurled himself at me.
“Aaieee!” I screamed.
Posted by: Pam
Fun fact, Panama: I’d never noticed Hans Caligar had false teeth. Once he got done rather considerately mauling me between clacking hisses about the master race and Brendan Leary barged in with “You Hun reptile. That’s strike three,” which I’m afraid did get some laughs, Vickie Patricia Lucy’s main job for four pages was to sit where von Deutrifau had hurled me—Wimbledon-eyed, disheveled, and in my case trying to ignore the ambulance’s fading wail—as Hal Lime and Hans raged at each other. Not either actor’s finest hour, but I did try to turn each page discreetly before I looked up aghast and conquerable again.
After Hans made his deeply relieved final exit, Addisonishly snarling, “In the theater of war, you will close on Saturday night—and our play will run forever,” we got to the part I was dreading. Murphy did have some stagecraft; he knew convincing (still, just barely) virginal Vickie Patricia Lucy that Nazism’s twisted clock ticked doomsday had to be Brendan’s final task. The Murphine touch was that it took him eight pages.
As Hal Lime helped me to my feet, his face was glowing with greasepain at the shambles of his Broadway debut. Unlike Hans, however, he’d converted it into rage at his amateur costar: the difference between an old actor and a young one, I suppose.
“Oh, Brendan!” I duly gasped, turning a page. “Is it really over?” I’m afraid that drew some tittering too.
“No, Vickie Patricia Lucy,” Hal Lime snapped, irritably deflecting my lifted script from his face. “It hasn’t even begun.” Godspeeded by scattered groans, we were into the climactic Murphine maelstrom.
All that saved us for a while was that his speeches were longer. Even so, I did have to jump in here and there, peddling Murphy’s idea of the case for isolationism—the white-picketed garden of delights we could share if my fiancé only gave up his hobby of fighting Fascists—and not only had I never been onstage in my life, but that life had just exploded into a riot of confusions that reeled and yawed as I struggled to read Vickie Patricia Lucy’s lines.
They kept colliding in a persistent impression that I’d been on the verge of lifting Viper to her feet to unzip the skirt I was wearing now, two brassiered pears rubbing at my suddenly pounding chest, when my Pam-hands got forestalled not by Floss’s but Murphy’s. With five pages to go, my diaphragm could’ve taught frogmen a trick or two.
“My God, you poor kid!” Hal Lime erupted. “ You don’t even know that you’ve been living in a dream world. The whole crazy madrigal’s over! It’s a nest of vipers out there, can’t you see?”
“You’re wrong, Brendan. I did know,” I read. “But I loved it there. We were so happy. Can’t we just stay in it a little longer? It’s not our fight—not yet.”
“No, by God. There’s only one place to stop these bastards—and it isn’t a fancy-pants living room in Connecticut,” Hal said, glaring at the two seedy armchairs and lone floor lamp in sight. “It’s the Maginot Line Narvik harbor the sky over London right outside the gates of Moscow. Men, real men, are dying there right now. I can’t stay out. Wherever they’re fighting, that’s where I want to be.” (Murphy and John Steinbeck could now officially reckon themselves even.)
I turned the page. “You never were going to take the TWA job, were you?” After puzzling over the problem that Clock’s delayed production gave the play a hero who’d been living off his future in-laws for over two and a half years since the fall of Madrid, Murphy’d opted to distract the audience by introducing a Faustian temptation.
“I couldn’t have. Brendan Leary wasn’t born to lick anyone’s boots. And honey, however much I love you, I won’t kiss those fancy—Bloomingdale’s—shoes—of yours, either…”
We were both staring at my stockinged feet. “These old things?” I read. “You, you, yuh, you’d never—need to, sweetheart. On our wedding night—mmmf!—I, I, I won’t—be wearing any, silly boy! Oh, Brenda—nah, nah, nah—if you only—aaah, ah—promise you won’t do something—kuh, kuh, kuh—crazy like running away to join the—phlphphlph!!—RAF—tomorrow, that night could staaaaaaart! Now! Oh, God!”
Posted by: Pam
That was when Hal Lime, at wit’s end, did two things not in the script. The first was to slap me quite hard in the face. The more misjudged of his emergency surgeries was to skip two pages of script and go straight into Brendan Leary’s final speech—three hundred exalted words welcoming his moneyed fiancée to the fight before berating the rest of America for not doing the same. Their only drawback was how they began: “Oh, Vickie Patricia Lucy! Honey, you just can’t know what it means to me that you’ve finally seen what I’ve been driving at like a piledriver…”
Under the circumstances, the reviews were forgiving: even Addison’s, though not Jake Cohnstein’s. Everyone realized things hadn’t gone as intended, and only one cloddish critic wondered why Brendan Leary had gone on to denounce isolationism right after apparently declaring that his own program was to stay parked in Connecticut, torpedoing Vickie Patricia Lucy’s heavenly fluff every night and twice on Sundays. As for Pam, her contribution got passed over in silence except for Addison’s reference—“forgiving” isn’t the same as “laudatory,” you know—to “an anonymous newcomer, perhaps better suited to explicitly comedic veins.”
You’d better believe Bran noticed that “explicitly” when we spread the reviews out at Sardi’s, the print still damp—lovely smell—on the early morning editions. I couldn’t make head or tail of them myself, since as soon as we came in I’d begun downing rum like a bomb victim. Among other things, that was to make my debut conversation with Roy Charters, my future editor at Regent’s, a bit loopy and squawky. Then Bran took me home to a dawn-grayed Sutton Place, where to my woozy bewilderment he insisted on his marital rights.
I don’t know whether it was a stubborn vote of confidence in himself or his fury at my ineptitude had taken a sexualized turn. He may even have been aroused by seeing me in Viper’s stage clothes, as if he’d finally demoted me to just another actress and proved I was worse than she was. Anyhow, he didn’t need his usual encouragement to colum firth; if you must know, Pam’s poor plum, startlingly parted and plumbed, was the object of conjugal conjugation instead. Not an experience I’ve ever cared to repeat—I’m not saying I haven’t, only that I’ve never cared to—but it didn’t last long.
For one obvious reason, not that I’d’ve wished it on her otherwise, he’d have been better off sticking to that with Viper. Chalky and tottering, she reappeared at the Rosalie Gypsum on Saturday, insisting she was well enough to perform. Since she’d been in worse pain than I was and it didn’t really seem all this had been her fault, I toddled along to the dressing room to look in on her, but the door was closed and I didn’t open it. From inside, I’d just heard Bran’s voice: “Good riddance. S
orry, cupcake, but you weren’t the first one to try it.”
3. The Most Sensational Divorce of 1943
Posted by: R.I. Pam
Unless this desiccated tummy of mine decides it’s got a craving for more pharmacology or perhaps only celery before I vamoose, it’s peculiar to think I’ve just had my last meal. Nothing too Borgia: tuna on white, glass of milk, pill dessert. The absurdity, Panama, is that I might not’ve bothered to gulp lunch at all if half my prescriptions didn’t require being taken with food. Only after I’d ingested the midday triad did I recall blood pressure, etc., are irrelevant now.
The pills were from habit, the tuna’s from Sutton’s. How Andy Pond moaned when his last glance in my fridge told him boredom at mayonnaising a can of Starkist now comes under the heading of cooking to me, meaning I willingly pay to have it delivered to the Rochambeau from a gourmet shop he no doubt thinks has better things to do. If he saw the Martin’s and La Chaumière doggie bags in the freezer, slowly frosting from nourishment to my snowblind equivalent of Nan Finn’s scrapbooks, he kept that inburst of Pondian woe mute.
Fortunately, even in retirement, Andy’s the type to shave before retrieving each morning’s WashPost and NYT from his modest lawn. When they shove a briar patch of microphones at him tomorrow, he’ll look reasonably spruce for a stunned old duffer. Yet I doubt he’ll manage to avoid making his chum Pam sound eccentric. That didn’t bother me much until I realized his briar-patched natterings might be all there was.
Are you with me, Chad Diebold? Well, l’équipe here is onto your nasty new game. I should’ve guessed hours ago there might be more to daisysdaughter.com’s failure to nab even one confessed reader than its stunted graphic delights and my octogenarian confusion about how to link.
Have I guessed right, Chad? Is everyone seeing “The page cannot be found” as I input like crazy? Once your sweepers zeroed in, you only needed a mouseclick: “Please try your request later. The page cannot be found.”
He can’t? Well, he’s probably off being rogered by some Congressman, isn’t he? Split like a butterfly ballot! But I filibuster.
Chad, if I know you—and I think I do—you’ve already got some flunky diddling my long goodbye so I’ll sound like a madwoman. I can see that doctored Pamicature from here. As the biographer in miniature of, among others, Anne Bradstreet—Chapter 8 of Glory Be, “A Poem”—I know as well as anyone how a bygone life can be billiard-balled to drop snugly into prearranged pockets.
Or in the event my online suicide note blindsides the White House once the media discover it and come pelting, will you and the Murphy Channel try to pretend I never existed? Pointing to the sheer impossibility of anyone, much less a fat-lunetted old bag with rheumatic fingers whose plumbing necessitates frequent bathroom breaks and the like, spewing words by the demented thousand, will you call my blog a forgery cooked up by some outraged committee or nostalgia fiend—Panama’s dad, Nan Finn’s strange son? Tim Cadwaller’s name on You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two certainly fits him for the part of Pamtomimer. His hand in setting up this website most likely hasn’t escaped your notice.
Short of a crash diet, he can’t help the stout part. Yet I’m sure Qwert’s Man in the Dark will stoutly deny pseudauthorship. That’s unless you’ve bought him off too, something that’s started to strike me as no more than improbable. Don’t think it’s eluded me, Tim, that the Cadwaller clan is being awfully slow about its ritual group call to your lonely old Gramela. I don’t give a shit if she’s on vacation! At the very least my Panama must be showering by now, as you puff over your column and try harder than hell not to imagine what your daughter must look like wearing only soap.
From where I sit, Chad, Tim’s your best bet to fob the thing off on. As his grandfather once said of Andy Pond when we left Andy holding the diplomatic pouch to skip out and get married at l’Église Américaine, “He’s fobbable.”
Posted by: Pam
Still, Chad, here’s the question of questions from your Internet Pam-pal. If you are reading my blog, you devil, you’ve been more than forewarned of what I plan to do. Have you or haven’t you canceled my White House birthday greetings?
I’m just mulling which is more like you. If it suited this slow-news Tuesday’s gyre and gimble, I don’t think you’d sweat a drop, much less shed a tear (he’s not crying, folks; that’s just ocular saliva), before you let my call go through. Yes, despite knowing how I plan to wrap up my part of the conversation. As for Potus, he’s obviously free to keep talking until my nonresponsiveness annoys him or he runs out of light-bulb jokes.
You just may have decided it’s more Abu Ghraib to keep Pam hunched in front of dead Daisy’s typewriter—Mac, Mac. Sorry—as my fingers get rheuma-julienned inputting things nobody will read in this or any other world and I wait for a surcease you’ve made sure won’t come. In that case, Andy Pond gets to stoop unharassed for tomorrow’s WashPost and NYT. Assuming, of course, he’s not too upset to face the twice-a-week moped of MoDo’s mood op-ed after learning tonight I won’t marry him.
As I picture our dinner, in prospect again if the phone never rings—my wan birthday meal and Rochambeauvine snooze in front of Meet Pamela or The Gal I Left Behind Me—I’m mortified. That’s not because of Andy’s cooking, which I’m sure will be fine as food goes. Nor his eyes’ readjustment to their placid Pond norm, deft as an editor fixing a typo—that’s “suave,” Pam, not “slave”—once they’ve blinked when he learns his quiet suit is being taken to the cleaners’.
What I can’t stand is the reverse shot: a still alive Pam, anticlimactically present. Just an upper-Connecticut crone mulching cuisine as she paws her brain’s dark for a quip she’s misplaced (“Forlorn is forearmed”). Cadwaller’s gun shrunk in my crotch—you senile, disgusting Cinderella!—to the familiar vieux jeu of my daily medicinal Rubicon cube. And the blog Clio Airways Lindberghized cyberspace with now a humiliating fantasy whose exhumation by friend, press, or stranger I’d quake at.
All because I was Pamfool enough to trust a White House promise, Hopsie! Not to mention Hollywoodized or secretly unnerved enough to make my protest depend on a call that may’ve been scratched from Potus’s schedule after these indiscreet previews of the earful he’d get.
Can you blame me for quailing when I picture surviving this blog? Even if I shut down now and go read my favorite poem—“Minds crabwise interlock” and so on—from The Pilgrim Lands at Malibu, I’ve got no control over whether my readership stays hypothetical. Not after hitting “Post” scores of times since the WashPost’s seagull skate rugward when the windows were pale.
Bikini girl, suppose your unimaginable daughter finds my pistol-proud boasts—then learns from Wiki their tiresome author lived to a bedridden, pill-popping, marooned ninety-one? If anything, I should have died two days ago. Hoist by my own petard, I am, and here I was thinking I’d outlived my last pet. Hello, Ard! Welcome to l’équipe.
Ard, I don’t think I can go through it again: not another “Chanson d’automne.” Call or no call, I’m not sure I can face tucking Cadwaller’s gun back into the Paris footlocker unfired. Even sans Potus lending an ear, my damned blog will posthumously document—won’t it?—that my mess of pink and gray things was a protest against this awful and unending war.
But Ard, I’m so terrified of doing it on my own. And when, my pet? How long do we give the White House switchboard before saying “Oh, fuck this” and redecorating without a designer? It’d be one dismal irony if the phone rings ten seconds after we’ve made kablooie. Giving Gerson, who hated those fadeouts, two reasons to shudder.
Oh, Panama! I’ve never been so enisled and wassailed by this many decisions, not even in World War Two. The truth is, your Gramela was always no champ at making them. That’s why I cast Potus as my final prompter. Ard, wouldn’t Pavlov be proud?
I may seem brave, I don’t know. Omah
a, Dachau, whatever. If my own two cents count, not that your dad acted too interested when I was helping him with his book, the day of Pam’s war that left me most pleased to have stood the gaff happened Stateside. But I was surrounded by women—great huge ones, with names like Viv, Tess, Babe, and Josie—and my silly pride melted once I remembered that every last one of them in our laughing, wet circle went down into the mine every day.
Feel free to look up “To the Ends of the Earth,” published in Regent’s on January 14, 1943. Yes, dear: that’s your Gramela’s byline. No, I didn’t pose for the dumb illustration, which should’ve been group and by Fernando Botero.
All the same, Ard, even that journey felt like finding the trap in contraption. No more than Pam’s series of contingent responses—in the crunch, saying “Deal” after Viv’s “You go down with us, you’ll have to stay down all day. Think you can handle that?”—to circumstances undevised by me.
Panama, Panama! This manner you dote on is my plea for a smoke as I glare at the firing squad. Whatever I made of it later, not much has ever felt like my idea from the start, my divorce from Murphy included.
Posted by: Pam
If you haven’t put “December” and “1941” together, bikini girl—and why should you, born in 1990?—what turned A Clock with Twisted Hands into his first flop in almost a decade wasn’t just its lunatic opening night. Even Bran’s claim in his emergency mud-on-troubled-waters speech that Viper was in Fascist pay didn’t attract too much ridicule, as it certainly should’ve once the hireling shakily rejoined the cast for the rest of the run. “Forgiving of him, wasn’t it?” Addison reminisced in Topanga years later. “I imagine she came to him with the usual sob story about Goebbels’s check bouncing and the rent being due.”
