Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (15 page)

Primo, at going-on-fourteen—three months before the official handover, half that before I’d gambled I could start fibbing about it—one’s seven-year-old self is the idiot cousin: unwelcome company at the start of a new adventure. Second, we’d been going the other way. Third, the corpse in the starboard bunk—or had it been the portside one?, I wondered yet again on my return to the cabin once the French coast turned into soup, deciding my best chance at sleep on the return trip was to switch our places—had been alive, gabbling and Gablering about ship’s parties and the other Paris and asking Pammie, for the first time, how her fussed-with hair looked.

For my mother’s sake, I’ve sometimes tried to picture her as the Daisy she either thought or hoped she could be in Europe, discussing the first four episodes of
Ulysses
with Joyce as her own novel magically wrote itself in the next room.
The Gold-Hatted Lover
was its most frequent title, and its chaos of beginnings made for pitiful reading when I fished the pages out of the Paris footlocker many years later. The truth is I can’t imagine what would have become of us, especially after the Crash, if she hadn’t met the Belgian on our New York–Le Havre crossing in October of ’27, all of six weeks after we came back from Provincetown.

Name: Georges Flagon. Preferred sartorial color: Belgian brown, distinguished from French brown by a refusal to hint other options existed. Business: Flagon & Cie., Bruxelles-Leopoldville-Dakar, exporting windsocks, wheel chocks, and other safety equipment to small airports in out-of-the-way places. Major departure from a lifetime of never counting his chickens until plucked and beheaded, a bid for my mother’s hand before we passed Iceland.

Georges had taken ship to America hunting much bigger game. (Wonderful expression, “taking ship”! I miss saying it more than doing it.) The compatriot of ours he’d been hoping to woo was the most famous man in the world that autumn; other than Chaplin, anyhow, but that Charlie was familiar. Charles Lindbergh had been unknown to anyone until his plane bumped to a halt at Le Bourget in May, and when I used to take visitors to the Smithsonian and see the
Spirit of St. Louis
suspended overhead, I’d privately goggle—while holy relics aren’t my thing, there it
is
, you know—at its and its pilot’s indirect role in shifting Pam’s destiny.

Inept only as a person, Georges was an innovative businessman. Lucky Lindy’s endorsement of his line of goods would have been the equivalent of Jesus of Nazareth talking up your carpentry kit, and my future stepfather spared no pains to make my mother understand that Lindbergh had considered the proposal seriously before changing hotels. I don’t doubt it: the celebrated aviators of the Twenties and Thirties weren’t daredevils but propagandists. Eager to proselytize for the new church of air travel—mail, passengers, bombing, they couldn’t have cared less which miracle made converts—they’d have given any co-religionist a hearing.

Still, the promised second meeting never happened. Half the globe’s population wanted a bite out of Lindbergh’s day, and I gathered the head of Flagon & Cie. had been made to feel a bit Belgian about the whole thing. Once the
Paris
was bound for the Old World and all was definitely lost, the humiliation of retracing Lindbergh’s route by means wingless and sinkable may have maddened my future stepfather into a resolution to obtain
some
American’s endorsement of
something
Georges Flagon had to offer.

If not his company’s useful products, perhaps his life? His view of the rue Rémi in Brussels, his taste for crepes and veterans’ parades, his lonely post-prandial cigar. At age thirty-six, he could’ve even been handsome if he’d only known how. Sharing space in a shuttered mahogany cabinet with Papa’s colonial service revolver, a brown hand under glass commemorated his father’s administrative excellence in the Congo circa 1898. It was peculiarly counterpointed now by Georges’s own artificial foot, souvenir of the day hordes of spiked helmets flowed toward the spot to which newly mobilized Corporal Flagon had been rooted one day in 1914. Oh, hell, Panama—no
wonder
he felt incomplete.

“You mean we
aren’t
going to Paris to live?” I asked my mother dumbfoundedly. After proposing we two take a turn around the deck, she’d moved to the railing on a beeline. So much for our Pam-and-Daisy romp among the lifeboats, merrily singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”

“Not just yet.” The wind taught her hair to scribble in soft Cyrillic as she turned. “Not now, that’s all, big silly! I’m sure we’ll all move there eventually.”

If there’s a more meaningless word than
eventually
to a seven-year-old, it’s probably in Cyrillic too. To me, anything farther off than
soon
meant
never
, and right I was so far as my mother’s hallucinatory relocation of Georges Flagon to a salon off one of Paris’s
grands boulevards
was concerned. I wonder who lived there instead.

“But why not now?” I asked, wondering if that brown bit was the Isle of Wight, the Isle of Man, or giant seaweed.

“You know Mummy needs to write her book. That’s going to be the only proof I ever existed, darling!” she said, smiling down at me. “And, well! I think it’ll all just be much, much less trouble this way.”

“Can’t you write wherever?”

“Georges has a staff.” As if that statement’s starkness surprised even her, my mother went on, “And don’t you think he’s nice, in a sort of Belgian sort of way?”

“I couldn’t care less!” I shouted. “Nobody told me it would matter.”

“Well, it doesn’t,” she said, annoyed.

Posted by: Pam

The mystery was and is the extent of my mother’s self-knowledge. Which was the cage, which was the bird—that’s how you’d try to decode her decisions. Dubious any answer was final, you still felt confident the aviary was the right part of the zoo.

Panama, I’ll never know whether she’d deluded herself a well-off Belgian husband would be the blindfolded orchestra she needed for her fluttering, reckless “Hello, Jim—hello, Pablo!” Charleston toward immortality. Or whether even that early she had intimations that
The Gold-Hatted Lover
was a kazoo made of tinsel. What I refuse to believe is that she’d boarded the
Paris
planning to troll for a man, since she’d scanned the passenger list in vain for any women she knew who were sailing unaccompanied. What may not need saying is that your Gramela would go all pretzelly with laughter at any suggestion Day-
zee
Flagon married for love.

Not that I saw overmuch of the happy couple once I was enrolled at Mme Chignonne’s. My mother’s choice of school for me puts her state of self-knowledge in play again, since I do like to think that at some level she trundled Pam off to Paris as a sort of delegated Daisy. It gave her an excuse to visit—not me, except technically, but an imaginary version of herself. As the Daisy who
would
live in Paris grew more fragile, she eventually (I was nine by then) came to cling to one who
had
lived in Paris. It wasn’t her fault if people thought she’d been in Nassau County, Greenwich Village, Provincetown, or mid-Atlantic at the time.

The practical reason for scooting me out of the way was that my presence off the rue Rémi might’ve given Georges one reason too many to regret his marriage. His Day-
zee
’s lack of interest in producing another generation of Flagons was enough of a black tablecloth under the white one without a brindle-mopped daily reminder that she’d gotten docilely if not happily preggers—the post-1914 Georges Flagon wasn’t my pick to brood on that missing “happily”—by his unknowable but evidently two-footed American predecessor. Polo would’ve been the tipoff there.

Marriages that start well and go bad at least alert both parties to the change. Marriages that are dismal from the wedding on can have a terrifying normality that pretty much keeps both parties chloroformed. There are even marriages that seem to be undertaken as a sort of suicide that doesn’t actually kill you, a pretty wan definition of eating your cake and having it too but conceivably the reason I didn’t wind up having to write my abysmal “
Chanson d’automne
” six years early.

Anyhow, some combination of the latter two was the situation off the rue Rémi. Feeling baffled by other people’s obstinate denials of universal Flagonishness and nursing the lonely valor of the dull wasn’t different enough from his bachelor life to stir Georges to rebellion. Fatefully, my mother discovered that being sluggish and depressed in Belgium let her indulge the same character trait that had made Daisy Fay the belle of Louisville and Daisy Buchanan a champagne pearl to postwar male New York: utter obliviousness to anyone else’s desires. As for Pam, I blew any hope of a modus vivendi when I not only wandered into Georges’s temporarily vacant study (strike one), but opened the mahogany cabinet (two), then asked him where the withered African hand had come from (three and out).

“At your age I knew better than to poke around in there,” said my stepfather, massaging his knees. Of course that’s because his father had
told
him not to, but to his helplessly Flagonish mind that meant all children everywhere had been.

“Oh, Georges, what does it matter?” sighed my mother. “Pammie’s—eight, now? You can’t blame her for being curious.”

“
Pourquoi pas
, Day-
zee
? You aren’t.”

I suspect the bitterness there was on the convoluted side. Yet by no means was Georges a cruel man or even an unkind one. That his notions of kindness were entirely bound up with the way he thought people should treat
him
gets considerable backing from the New Testament. If only he hadn’t been so literal-minded in how he put it into practice!

Brother, did I eat a lot of crepes. Telling him I didn’t like them wouldn’t have made him call me ungrateful. Unwilling to see a child deprive herself from sheer perversity of his own main pleasure
à table
, he’d have gone on patiently feeding them to me every day until I finally understood that, like any normal person, I did.

Posted by:
P
eter Pan
A
m

As the ultimate example of his inability to grasp that other people didn’t share his predilections or biography—and therefore might have different reactions than his on exposure to them—let me describe one of our rare outings as a duo. Its being rare rather than inconceivable dates it to the summer of 1928. That was the year my mother spent six weeks in a Swiss sanatorium, from which we were soon to fetch her.

Yes, she’d entered her second marriage thinking she could go right on hitting the capital M key on her inner typewriter whenever the outer one’s tadpoles unnerved her. And no, Georges Flagon wasn’t about to let it continue. He’d largely resigned himself to the mania of strangers and people in news stories for playing carnival games that pretended they weren’t him. Drug addiction in a woman who was at least nominally a Flagon was carrying the whole preposterous if evidently bizarrely satisfying affectation of non-Flagonism too far.

I knew his cue had been the calendar. Gaze at it, gaze at me, recognition that it was the maid’s and the cook’s day off. Slap of table:
“Pamelle! On y va.”
Being Georges, he didn’t say where we were going, but not because he wanted to surprise me—which he did and then some, since I had nightmares for years. It just never crossed his mind I wouldn’t know.

Anyway, I always liked turning the corner onto the rue Rémi. Oh, maybe a more adult pair of eyes, demanding more
visible
bazaars, would’ve seen only monotony in each block’s humdrum if confidently regulated panel of largely ornament-free prewar architecture, broken only by a very occasional larger vista for contrast. In attributing Pam’s silent happiness to a child’s overactive imagination, the peculiar thing is that those eyes’ owners would’ve been patronizing rather than envying me.

Yet I didn’t have much that was solid in my eight-year-old life, and the very reliability of that march of panels somehow simplified the world enough to let me conjecture adventures underway within. Hunts for treasure, delegations from mysterious Balkan countries, plans for a moon rocket or—same difference to me by now—a visit to America. Though Georges’s hand in mine stayed earthbound, I was as diverted as Wendy in Peter Pan Am’ed flight.

Amid the tintinabulations of shop doorbells, a pleasant young man in a belted jacket would be out walking his snowy dog. As we passed a bar—or was it a fishmonger’s, smelling of marlins, pike, and haddock?—a black and blue duffel bag of a man blustered at the broken stem and bowl of his pipe. Distracted but for that reason friendlier than any teacher at Chignonne’s, the neighborhood savant fascinated Pam with the thinness of the bandy legs under his green coat.

Two bankers disguised as policemen—or was it the other way around?—raised their bowlers in tandem to a stripe-vested butler. A visiting Chinese student beamed a quick chen-chen. Her
gémissements
making the nearby pet store’s parrots squawk, for the rue Rémi’s major eccentricity was a fetish for exotic birds, a blade-nosed woman in a fur coat was upbraiding a foreign officer with a monocle. Her trilling voice turned her complaints into an aria from Gounod’s
Faust
.

Of course, the rue Rémi held no magic for Georges. He’d been born here.
“Alors! Vous êtes, euh, heureuse, Pamelle?
”
he asked, his voice creaking into conversation with Day-
zee
’s child as tentatively as, no doubt, his prosthetic foot had first eased into a shoe.
“Tu sais que tu reverras ta mère bientôt.”

While I’m sure he didn’t mean it to, that made me feel chastened. I hadn’t been thinking about my mother at all. If her three postcards from Switzerland had featured her face as opposed to mountain views—on one, with a flash of her old humor, a cross identifying “My Room” that decorated one window of a chalet was topped by another X on the white peak beyond it, marking “My Alp”—I might’ve been more convinced she was somewhere, not simply absent here. Our trip to retrieve her was a week away.

“Mais oui, bien sûr que je suis heureuse.”
In what connection my first year at Chignonne’s could’ve have familiarized me with the French for “happy,” I don’t know. Maybe I’d overheard some other girls discuss their attitude toward having locked me in a closet, but the confirmation squared Georges’s accounts with Day-
zee
.
Duty done, he relapsed into silence.

A newly pent one, however. I could sense his mood change as we turned off the rue Rémi and onto a side street whose terminus wasn’t the gabled mansion at the end of a drive I’d been subliminally expecting. A gray hospital stood there instead.

Since the only ill person I knew was my mother, I was mystified. Had the Switzerland postcards been a ruse, had she been ten minutes’ walk away all along? Or was it that this was where she
would
have been if I’d thought of her oftener?

After ascending steps the hue of terns, we passed into an unlit lobby smelling of chemicals and dark as burnt stew. Murmuring, Georges produced a much-folded letter. The brisk thumb and forefinger of his unwithdrawn hand indicated he’d refold it himself when the uniformed
intendant
made as if to do so before passing it back.

Seeing me there at waist level, the
intendant
considered saying something. Then he grew eloquently resigned. What he’d read had set no conditions.

Someone else escorted us to a drab room furnished with a table and chairs. Were we going to have lunch here? As we waited, Georges grew expectant. Given my mother’s refusal to uncork a squalling little demi-Flagon, the minutes we sat there were as close as I was ever to come to see him acting the maternity-ward papa-to-be.