by Carson, Tom
Poor old Regent’s. Already dinosaured by TV, it hadn’t been able to survive exposure as one of the too numerous magazines, foundations, and other institutions that spent the Fifties living the life of Sidney Reilly on the Central Intelligence Agency’s largesse. Adding insult to injury, the money’d stopped flowing several years before the story came out—soon after Jack Kennedy’s incredulous, “Jesus Christ, why? Are we going to send Castro an exploding subscription?”
Eager to get back in JFK’s graces after the whole Bay of Pigs flop, Langley turned off the spigot in mid-’61. Yet Roy had not only known about the payments, which had been Mortimer’s call. He’d agreed to let traveling spooks use assignments as cover and shaped foreign coverage to reflect Agency views. Though I didn’t have the heart to ask him if he’d played middleman in my case, that may well have included Pam’s smattering of Ike-era Regent’s pieces datelined Paris.
Was I indignant? Not really. I was a diplomat’s wife by then, familiar with worse things done in worse causes. Besides, I knew Roy too well. “A Cross with Many Roots” had been my first grazing contact with his inclination to see Regent’s as a helpful policy instrument in league with Washington’s shrewdest minds. Those jokes about his confidential sources were both revealing as jokes and telltale as preludes.
Besides, in the days of the war, it had made sense to see us as all being on the same team. Roy was too trusting to realize mores had changed. Of all the institutions he’d put his faith in, only the Carnegie Deli never let him down.
I hadn’t been up to New York in a while. Still knew I no longer needed to fret about running into the Lotus Eater, as I’d read her obit by then. Of course Carnegie Hall looked unchanged, but the Beatles had played there three years before. Their newly piratical, flowing-locked progeny swirled around Pam in a seizure of chic as I got out of the cab two blocks south. Still at his old table—as I’ve said, only the Carnegie Deli didn’t let him down—a Roy now as wrinkled and whitened as a sea cow’s proboscis looked up from a caravel of pastrami.
“My doctor would kill me if he knew,” he said once he’d stood up for an eight-eyed peck and, readjusting our respective specs, we’d sat down. “He’s trying to anyway, so what the hell. I’m not sure which of us gives the other more zooris.”
“Tsuris,” our waiter snapped as he slapped down my menu. “Ah, tourists. Welcome to New York City.”
My old editor beamed. “I’m sorry, young man. I meant grief.”
“How are you holding up, Roy? Thanks, I won’t need it. Just cheesecake for me.”
“Ah, Pam.” Roy glanced at the wall where his sketched portrait still hung. “All that really hurts is reading that I was a bad editor, because you know that’s not true. I was a good one. I was just a very bad Richelieu.”
Posted by: Pam
As you may’ve gathered, daisysdaughter.com readers, another reason “To the Ends of the Earth” has stayed memorable is that it was the story I came back from reporting to learn Bran was suing me for divorce. The grounds were desertion, which I couldn’t especially argue with. And adultery, which as it happened, Pam’s why-Henrying on Capitol Hill to the contrary, I could.
It might have been different if his lawyers hadn’t named Jake Cohnstein as co-respondent. But if you’ve damned near forgotten I was still Mrs. Murphy, I leave it to you whether to grouse at my inept storytelling or salute my blog’s positively Jamesian way with lacunae.
Oddly or not, it had never occurred to me to leave him in my Columbian year, since at one level I never quite grasped I could. At another, I’m afraid I’d come to rely on my marriage as an all-purpose preclusion. Imagining a Pam at liberty to get off in Baltimore for a folie à Corporal, invite any Detroiter I fancied to my room at the Tuller Hotel, or turn a stack of new parachutes back into wedding gowns before they got packed for the Airborne would probably have alarmed me right out of my skin.
All the same, his wife’s wartime blossoming from a little book reviewer into a gallivantingly slangy American broad most available at our local newsstand can’t have put many songs in Bran’s heart. Since everything I was doing felt gloriously natural, its improvised artifices not only included but exulted in, even I didn’t recognize the extent of Pam’s metamorphosis until I saw it in not my hubby’s face but Mr. Carraway’s. On the way back from Fort Des Moines, a switchyard snafu in Chicago left me at loose ends I knotted by going out to Oak Park to visit Dorothy Day’s former Scarecrow.
During what proved to be our last pre-Nenuphar reunion, we were as glad as ever to see each other. Nick tactfully avoided bringing up Murphy: in a Manhattan restaurant soon after my marriage, my ex-guardian’s and new hubby’s only meeting had left the future Brother Nicholas appalled even before Bran’s jovial, “Never got your hooks into old Daisy yourself, did you? Believe it or not, Nicky, I’ve got a couple of stories about the ones that got away from Murph. Say we wait until Snooks here goes to powder her nose.” Under Nick’s cherished out-of-place magnolia, as I stubbed out smoke after smoke, recrossed now adult gams, and waxed all Walt Whitwomanish about Sherman tanks, WACs, parachute factories, my favorite editor, and my favorite Congresswoman, I saw in midsentence I now bewildered him.
A moment later, his affectionate murmur of “Just give me a sec to empty that ashtray, will you?” told me he’d counted on Pam to bewilder him one day. Because he was Nick, bewilderment wasn’t worry’s synonym unless I was unhappy. At fifty, his age then, you’ve either harnessed the world or accepted that it gallops on. Now that he found me incomprehensibly whole and wholly incomprehensible—not only to himself but, so I dared hope, to her—his duty to Daisy was finally done.
Having known me since my toddlerhood and the U.S. of A. since his Penrodic own, Nick had always expected both Pam and times to change. Not so Bran, since fame was a game of musical chairs he’d won and the famous never think the music will start up again. It didn’t help that his own writing wasn’t going well; his final play, The Two-Faced War, wouldn’t reach footlights until after our divorce, and then in a miserable little theatrical club out in Brooklyn.
Unsurprisingly, I was the villainess. But I was in the ETO by then, so unmoored from my strange interlude as Mrs. Murphy that Addison’s delighted V-mail report seemed to not only describe but be addressed to a caricature.
I’d honestly thought I was doing my marriage a favor when I shifted my typewriter to Regent’s offices. That just left him alone to brood afternoons under Dolores Ibárurri’s coffee-stained portrait, glaring at volumes of press clippings now ominously labeled “1928,” “1929,” and so on. When I was putting up in Manhattan—I’d quite unconsciously stopped saying “home” by mid-’42—our arguments could have rocked the gulls pocking Dagwood and Blondie over the East River into peeling off for Brazil, then still noncombatant.
I should admit I welcomed those duels. They were my reprieve from the importunings of the Pam who’d start up her old golem writhings whenever, another trip under my belt, my train wound back into Grand Central. The Pam who gave as good as she got in our fights was soon another of my emergency wartime selves: I could’ve fashioned her lines from a coma ward. If I was brutal, remember I was quite young and battling for a new life I loved against a two-time if also two-timing Pulitzer winner. I knew nothing of middle age.
“Jesus Christ, Snooks!” Bran protested one day, bourgeois at last. “At least keep your voice down. You’re shrieking like a goddam fishwife.”
“Oh? Den say, den—why don’t youse write a play about me, Moiphy?” My next jab hit even lower, and thanks to uniforms on slow-chugging trains it wasn’t uninformed. “As if anybody ever goddam talked that way!”
Injuring him no less, my peripatetic e.e. comings and goings worsened Pam’s neglect of her domestic duties. The housewifely ones, I mean, though as I’ve said the undressed ones eventually devolved into looking to Flaubert’s productivity for inspiration as
to frequency and to the Eastern Front for pointers on intimacy. As murky windows and unwiped Deco lacquer deepened Bran’s gloom, I grew exasperated. What a woman he could be sometimes.
“For God’s sake, then! Hire somebody to clean the place. Never mind your fucking principles, think of her. She’s out there half naked, starving, nibbling a crust of bread from a garbage can, and wondering why noble Mr. Murphy believes in the proletariat too much to toss her a bone. Now I know why Stalin’s wife shot herself,” I said. It may tell you something about my assimilation of my marriage as pure theater that I could toss in a woman’s suicide by gun without an admonitory tingle from dead Daisy’s file in the archives.
My hubby winced for other reasons. “Not sure I could afford it, Snooks. No, damn it. I don’t mean we’re facing eviction. But I was really counting on Clock to run and run.”
Given what charwomen charged in those days, that was patently Bran experimenting with himself as the beleaguered hero of Sutton Place. He still had a great deal more money than I was earning from Regent’s. Then again, having it isn’t the same as making any, and the sad truth is that he did have to give up his East River view by ’45 or so. Thus began the downhill slalom that ended when Wife Five, who’d only come in looking for the butcher’s phone number, found him slumped like a deflated circus tent over the latest balloon filler—“Kill me then, you mad beast. There are thousands more like me”—for Seamus Shield, Agent of Fury.
Nonetheless, even a marriage both parties suspect is obsolete goes on making demands as a situation, and for whatever it’s worth I was more active in trying to solve them. Until my divorce summons, a good slice of my income went into paying the wages of Trinka Solynka, lately of Danzig, who came in twice a week to spend a few dreamy hours losing at tic-tac-toe to our furniture.
Trinka had piano legs but a bosom any concertinist would love. Raven-haired when the agency first sent her over, she startled us both when she went permed and platinum for New Year’s, proudly trotting out “hairtresser” as her first trisyllabic American word. Even though I couldn’t have presented Bran with someone more unlike myself if I’d spent a year hunting, I wasn’t remotely conscious of hiring a substitute for anything but menial chores.
He and I had never really had it out about Viper Leigh. Something in me balked at playing the betrayed young bride; I may’ve intuited our twenty-year age difference would let Bran intolerably act the adult as soon as I started mewling. Once I’d got over being ébranlée, I’d simply started treating his infidelity as a known fact between us, leaving Murphy guessing about any private little grave mound under Pam’s frost but handing him the role of overgrown boy instead.
That suited my hubby, since it gave him permission to go on acting like one. The more so as, reluctant to summon Viper too vividly by name, I’d pluralized her as “your chippies.” Once she recovered from miscarrying, he picked up with her where he’d left off: the dates on the bill for the room at the Peter Minuit dawdled on into mid-January, when Clock’s dismal run ended. Soon after that, I was away so often that Murphy didn’t require a love nest for their or any other dalliances.
As for that little grave mound, of course it was there. It had never happened to me before, except in the childhood petri dish of nonsensical loyalties where a budding pudding kept insisting that the Lotus Eater’s treachery with her beefy beach rutter—but for his Rolex, now more faceless than ever—should count. Yet it was always the metallic fact of having been cheated on that grabbed the headline in Pam’s mental tabloid. The gent responsible seemed fatuous, silly, a bit trivial: when I tried to picture it, no more than a pair of vague hands palping pale, now peeled, bare little pears.
That had felt like the wrong image to try lighting wifely anger’s torch with, and I’d soon learned to shut it off faster than the L.E. could say “That’s death.” Once I was launched on my Columbian year, I grew increasingly confident that squalid little Hormel’s belated dressing-room revenge had been a fluke. One thing I’d known since childhood about the Charybdis temptation was that it made people unhappy, and well! I wasn’t anymore.
Posted by: Jake Pamstein
As ludicrous as it was for my hubby’s divorce suit to name Jake Cohnstein, something Bran knew as well as any man Jake hadn’t actually gone to bed with, it had a vital geographic plausibility. Since April ’42 or so, still mourning the Mayflower’s bar but not the pinch on my cash flow—taking refuge in the trad magazine ploy of making no identifiable individual responsible for them, Regent’s was laggardly about reimbursing expenses—I’d been putting up on my Washington jaunts at Jake’s cramped new digs in Kalorama. Leaving even Addison at a rare loss for words, he’d gotten himself commissioned at forty-two, joining the Army’s Office of Public Affairs.
“You ought to meet the fellow I share a desk with,” he told me with amusement during my first stay with him, over a Wisconsin Avenue lunch I now recognize as an occasion comparable to Roy Charters’s discovery of the Carnegie Deli. Over Nan Finn’s or Laurel Warren’s shoulder, I sometimes still see two talkative ghosts in the truncated booth that’s tucked just behind Martin’s Tavern’s unchanged front door.
“Anytime, Jake. Say, these crab cakes are good.”
“They always will be even after I’m long dead, but listen. Heck is a good old boy from Somewheresville, South Carolina, and his favorite advice to me on any subject is ‘You ain’t in New York no more, Coan-Steen.’ But Pammie, I’m a hopeless civilian. I just can’t make myself say, ‘That’s Captain Hebe to you, Lieutenant Redneck.’ Strange times, don’t you think?”
“All around, though.”
“Exactly!” He was pleased I’d understood so quickly. “All around. Pam, I could swear I’m happy here.”
Having lived in Washington far longer than he did—and pace my old Capitol Hill fairy godmother, never having been bored once in peacetime—I wonder if Jake understood the difference between place and occasion. New York can trust its glamor to hold sway even when nothing special’s happening. To everybody but us lifers, the District’s allure is at the mercy of events. When it’s in default mode, outsiders are usually prepared to believe our so tellingly manufactured capital has consequence, yes. Excitement, no.
The exceptions are rare: the Kennedy years, the Watergate summers. In the mimsies’ experience, the war was the greatest exception of all. For forty-four months, Pam’s future city—overcrowded, inconvenient, the Mall visitors think of as so eternal clogged for the duration with temporary office buildings whose windows looked like a centipede’s legs—had the charisma of Babylon.
For Jake, its attractions were multiple. Instead of sniffing they weren’t all idealistic, today I’d rather say there are ideals and ideals. In recent years, whenever Andy Pond has driven a grumpily fat-lunetted Pam down Pennsylvania Avenue, I’ve never caught sight of the genuinely touching statue of the Lone Sailor at the Navy Memorial without seditiously picturing a tin casting of my old friend Jake Cohnstein standing nearby—hands in tin pockets, tin smile mildly askew, and nerving himself to offer to make the Lone Sailor less lone by buying him a tin drink. Which the Lone Sailor’s flesh-and-blood forebears quite often accepted, and not always naively.
He did try to be discreet during my stays, but war is hell and hotels were mobbed. I still remember how nonplussed Pam was the first time she awoke on Jake’s living room couch to see a young soldier emerging from the bathroom, reclad in yesterday’s uniform but with freshly showered hair. Either no fool or a huge one, he kept ostentatiously patting it before he left.
Fond as Jake and I were of each other, our breakfast—Sergeant Kowalski did not participate—was strained. In fact, I felt furiously resentful, with the extra ragged edge that comes of red clouds hiding unlooked-at bluebirds. I do remember the word I kept wanting to toss at him was selfish. It wasn’t only that he seemed to me to be taking advantage of the war in ways I’d felt maritally and profe
ssionally immunized from. Back in pre–Pearl Harbor days, I’d happily commiserated about his ushers and such without ever meeting one face to face.
In this case, not only was commiseration plainly uncalled for, but it was so clear no emotional attachment was in play—no tenderness, no smiles, no friendship or soft lingering poetry—that I felt enraged on my gender’s behalf. “My God, it’s true!” I snapped. “Men are all alike.”
“Hope springs eternal,” Jake yawned over toast.
“It’s always so easy for all of you, isn’t it? Just find ’em and fool ’em and so on and so forth until the bloody cows come home. Whether it’s wham, bam, thank you ma’am or wham, bam, thank you Stan.”
“I didn’t have to fool him, believe me. But maybe the grass is always greener on the other side of the hill.”
“Which means what?”
“Just that one cliche deserves another. Sorry, but Addison I’m not. How did it go? ‘We often wondered what had been squandered…’”
“Plundered.”
“I always did say he’s more sentimental than I am. Whatever became of that friend of yours on Bank Street, anyhow? I liked her that one time we met.”
“Oh, she’s married, I suppose.”
“You suppose. By the way, which of you got married first?”
“I couldn’t care less. Does it matter?”
“You tell me.”
“She did,” I fibbed. “I just didn’t like her husband.”
Posted by: Pam
As for the cuckolding of Brannigan Murphy, which I’d better make haste to describe in all its why-Henry’d, cuke-encumbered detail, the only thing Bran’s lawyers got right was the city it happened in. It could also scarcely be called Pam’s doing, since I just wanted a quick quote on shipyard absenteeism to stick into “Liberty Belles.” When I put my head in Edith’s door to ask her receptionist which Democrat on the Naval Affairs Committee would do, she gave me an appraising look after recommending a young Texas go-getter, still in his mid-thirties but already in his third full term. “Just make sure your ear is the only thing he talks off,” she said wryly.
