Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (9 page)

In my day and certainly in my circles, we weren’t as benighted or obtuse as you and yours may think. I did successively attend Mme Chignonne’s
École des Filles
in Paris, Purcey’s Girls’ Academy of St. Paul, and Barnard. While none of those XX-chromosomed environments was the triple-X smorgasbordello beloved of pornographers, one certainly knew with which instructors or headmistresses a private conference might take on a never verbalized undertow of Charybdis.

Despite a pretty intractable aversion in my own case, I can even remember several bathetic pre–Pearl Harbor fumblings after I quit college with my Bank Street roommate, now dead. They led absolutely nowhere in my case, and in hers bore no more post–Pearl Harbor fruit than did her giggly ambitions for a Hollywood career. Thus was I vindicated in a
veni, vidi, vade retro
sort of way.

It must’ve been something in Manhattan’s air or water. Years before I reached the scene, Murphy was embittered when
The Other Eye of the Newt
,
his play about a spinster who couldn’t admit why she’d stayed one—not an altogether easy work to defend, especially when your first word had to be “Comrades”—got blown to smithereens at the notes-and-sketches stage by Lillian Hellman’s
The Children’s Hour
.
Lillian and Bran were violent rivals anyway, as the dilemma for Stalinists was that, not unlike their favorite ism’s eponym, they all wanted to be the only one.

As for Hollywood in the Fifties, I well recall Gerson’s chuffed return from a Rock Hudson script conference whose date Hudson had misremembered. My husband had to wield his producer’s pencil poolside amid male bathing beauties clad in swim trunks barely masking the foliaged union of their muscular legs’ barkless tree trunks. “And he’s so dull in his movies,” Gerson marveled. “Well, maybe that’s why. Not much left over.”

In all these years, Potus has succeeded in disarming me—what an entertaining phrase that is to input with Cadwaller’s gun weighting my crotch!—in disarming me just twice. The first “Gotcha, Pam” was a no doubt easily Google-able photograph of the future Potus holding his twins right after their birth. For once, his amazement at life’s unruliness looks awed, not disgruntled. He’s a few million dazed new fathers compressed into one representative face: proof that democracy as truth predated democracy as system.

The other time is more relevant here. Three Junes ago, his Yale reunion was held at the White House. In that all-XY crowd, since there wouldn’t be XX-chromosomal Elis—Ellies?—until years after the Class of ’68’s most prominent grad said goodbye to all that elitism, a patently female classmate approaches. Why do I want her hair to be a one-eyed blonde waterfall, like Veronica Lake’s? Why do I see her sylphlike and radiant at fifty-plus, in long white gloves and a shimmering off-the-shoulder gown—in daytime, yet? Oh, just because. I’m so fucking old, indulge me.

“You knew me as Peter,” says Veronica Yale.

“And now you’ve come back as yourself,” says Potus, extending his hand.

Maybe they didn’t read that in Alabama. I sure did in the
WashPost
’s Style section, and gaped so wide I nearly had to shove my
Popular Mechanics
dentition back in. I mean, my onetime acquaintance Jack Kennedy—met at a Waldorf-Astoria luncheon when we were rivals for the Pulitzer, he was grinning as if each tooth was one more of Dad’s bank accounts even as his cool eyes demoted them to his stake at billiards—couldn’t have done it better. And wouldn’t, not with Bobby’s bleak gaze keeping tabs on
how
considerate Jack was thinking of getting. As for Ike or LBJ, both of whom I also knew—Eisenhower only in the round at wartime press sessions, but Lyndon one on one—you can’t picture them inhabiting a universe where such encounters were possible.

Oddly, Dick Nixon, who going by my reception-line encounters before Kissinger had Hopsie posted to India certainly knew what it was like to know yourself as Richard, might’ve managed it. But would have bungled the line reading and flashed that sickly smile, hoping to broker an agreement that while we all try, no one’s exempt from the world’s little treacheries.

Anyhow, it’s the only occasion I can recall of Potus embracing a value I hold dear, which you could call emotional elegance and I define as generosity combined with aplomb. If I hadn’t known it before, Cadwaller showed me that kindness is often a form of quick-wittedness. I’ve met farm boys in foxholes who did it instinctively.

The
WashPost
didn’t speculate on who’d kidnapped Potus and replaced him with somebody civilized, gracious, pleasant, and thoughtful that afternoon, but I say there’s a mystery there. Maybe only I wondered: in the name of all that’s fucked in heaven, why doesn’t he want to
always
be that way?

Posted by: Pam

Some of my thus far hypothetical readers here on tireless little daisysdaughter.com may be thinking I’ve lost the drift. Maundering, addled old harridan, etc. But before you consider patronizing me, may I remind you Pam’s packing heat?

Anyhow, others, I trust, have got it. Years before the Holmesian glow of Hopsie’s briar advertised his urbane best hunch, maybe even before the Paris footlocker gave up its secrets, I’d divined that the unpleasant young woman you know as the Lotus Eater must’ve had what society called Sapphic tendencies in coyer days and I’ve always privately labeled the Charybdis temptation.

Even with the L.E.’s genius for thwartedness—I mean the kind that goes on feeling thwarted from pure habit even after the desire has faded—I couldn’t help but feel compassionate at the thought of her yen to rub four Charybdean nipples together centering on my mother. Daisy Fay, the belle of Louisville to half the khaki with officer’s buttons stationed there in ’17 and ’18? Daisy
Buchanan
,
the hypotenuse of Long Island’s best-known recent XY-XX-XY love triangle? Even in Gramercy Park, site of the L.E.’s robber-baronial family townhouse, they must’ve heard about the Scandal.

My mother’s brand of sophistication was essentially a way of keeping her innocence at liberty. Supposing her mind was even able to accommodate the notion that any such Charybdean lust was in play, she must’ve opted to put up with those occasional burning looks and odd tilts of the Lotus Eater’s jaw for the sake of the companionship she craved not only in her heart but, more urgently, her veins. I still imagine it must’ve been touch and go for her during the week we spent in Provincetown: the only time that, with the budding pudding that was Pam exiled to a small brown vacationer-scarred ottoman in the front and only other room, she and the L.E. had no choice but to share a bed.

Posted by: Pam

The peculiar thing was that the L.E. had vanished from our orbit just days earlier, seemingly for good. So I gathered from my mother’s hysterical return in the Dreiser—she’d
driven
it!—from one of their Manhattan jaunts with neither a Quint nor a Quintess. The Scandinavian took charge of trundling every last gloomy chapter of that endless car out of our driveway and back to Gramercy Park.

Came a precious intermission, which I spent as the baffled apple of my mother’s uncertain eye. Just what Pammie had always wished would happen, only in my version she hadn’t been red-nosed, constantly stanching or yielding to sudden tears, and gabbling nonsense I couldn’t understand along with the silly kind she remembered I liked. Even so, I glowed to hear myself called “Darling,” an endearment with only one addressee since the L.E.’s East Egg debut in June.

Though I still never got to see it open, she even fetched the pencase—no longer a stereopticon since the L.E.’s departure, the object inside it was once again vaguely a pen in my mind—down from her room, keeping it near her as a sort of amulet. Or potential Pamulet, even if my blood does run colder than its tepidly pretzeled norm when I think of the solution to her new loneliness that must’ve flitted once or twice through my mother’s panicked mind.

As she clutched at straws she didn’t fully grasp were her little daughter’s arms, her problem was that her beauty was dependent on her selfishness. To have seen anyone other than herself as fully human would’ve told her she was losing her looks. Still, who else was there she could have considered getting hooked to keep her company, the Scandinavian? My mother may have been half out of her skull, but you could count on her to balk at the grotesque. At least I belonged to the same social class she did, making that crazed option more palatable.

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.