Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (34 page)

Trust me, bikini girl. If your private life’s ever one thousand and one nights at the opera, nothing will make you feel sane like turning fanatic. I’d’ve been outraged back then by any suggestion something more brackish might be in the shrubbery; now I’m not sure I care if there was. Those stories got written and your Gramela’s motives are dust.

As I try to reconstruct my euphoric honeymoon for one, it seems to me I both knew and refused to know why the distaff side of the war effort had grown out of a gardenia to set me afire. An awkwardness lurking since Purcey’s days when I was in women’s company was dissolved by the membership Roy’s assignment file [soon labeled
“buchanan =
♀♀
”
] and Edith Bourne Nolan’s blessing had granted me in the joyous conspiracy that was female solidarity in wartime.

Besides—and whether we’re distaff or dat staff—we all have to discover America sooner or later. Despite my chagrin when I reflect how little my country knows what it once was when it had to be or how much it went right on being its same old hairy, wide-open self in the bargain, I’ve always felt lucky 1942 was my 1492: my Columbian year.

Posted by: Pamericana

Even with Dorothy Day and Nick Carraway helping me out—Murphy too? Yes, yes, I suppose, Murphy too—my pieces of the big jigsaw puzzle had stayed dainty. A girls’ school in St. Paul and a few years in the Hamlet-crowded hamlet that is intellectual New York do not a brimming U.S. atlas make. Now I was flipping through notebooks to find the blank page after the ring left around my Pam-scrawl by a misbalanced coffee cup in Little Rock, a drained beer glass in Barstow, a pensive Pepsi in
Pensacola,
or a wet ashtray in Shreveport. Making me feel older for the first time than men who wanted to lay me, Army, Navy, and Marine recruits whose looks were still waiting for someone to shake off the developing fluid kept striking up shy or rowdy conversations in their twangs and drawls and strange urban patois as we were tugged past exhibits of rugged Appalachian carpet, girdered Great Lakes factory towns, or the Southwest’s blazed ochres and evaporated lemonade.

“You wouldn’t happen to be getting off here in Baltimore, would you? I’ve got three days. Ma’am, it’d be a privilege to show you my hometown…”

“Sorry, Corporal. Wilmington this trip for me.” And I’ve forgotten nearly all of their faces. Not his, though: pie chin, hopeful blue eyes, smile a collection of dandy white toys his mouth had outgrown but didn’t want to give up under that shock of wheat hair and slightly skewed nose. Now I knew it wouldn’t cost me anything to add brightly, “Too bad, huh?”

“Too bad,” he agreed, showing me grateful toys before he stood up with unexpected masculine vim to swing down the duffel bag next to my old Purcey’s suitcase. Three days I could’ve spent kissing those eyes and just missing that nose before he went back to Louisiana or wherever he was stationed.

In mimsied retrospect, Panama, 1942’s carnal throb leaves the Sixties looking like amateur hour. In ways we octogenarians have kept tenderly veiled from our generation’s Brokawing hymnalists, the home-front war was our Woodstock: an orgiastic engine we gave ourselves over to, from U.S. Steel blasting smokestack lightning to Detroit’s purple haze and Eleanor Roosevelt Rigby fluting away. By the time we got to D-Day, we were golden. Fulfilling a national fantasy we hadn’t known was one until Yamomoto’s planes turned Mamala Bay into blue acid, we were all part of the same galvanizing, mud-bathed movie.

That’s why I feel riled in my dotage when Pink Thing’s archives remind me that what I often recalled to Kelquen as the most libidinal year of Pam’s life was the chastest in practice, a few Murphine interruptions and one other aside. Not counting trips to the devil’s playground, but I often had a terrible time getting to sleep in those days. Yes, that old excuse.

At the time, I’d never have called myself frustrated, Ard. Far from it! Even as my byline matured in
Regent’s
, I was in my second adolescence and first happy one, cuckoo with bliss at what I got to do. When I got propositioned on my travels, I doubt there was more than a time or two, my lickety-split mental ravishing of my peculiarly memorable Baltimore corporal from torso’s dots to knees’ dimples somehow out of category, when I might’ve felt tempted. Curious what it might be like to stoop to banality but knowing I’d be disappointed, I always fended off my Lothario Grande or Mr. Issippi, whether he was young and in khaki—the usual train and Greyhound version—or middle-aged and in a hand-painted tie (hotels).

The increasingly rare nights on my Sutton Place stopovers when Murphy sought to add some Stalingrad to our Siberia before playing the heroic Red Army casualty on top of me mostly filled Pam with wonder that familiarity could breed not contempt so much as a sense of utter anonymity. As you’ll learn even if Tim wishes otherwise, bikini girl, at least strangers are individuated in bed by novelty.

Which ought to tell you that if my forbearance makes you snort, things got a good bit gamier in the good old ETO. Of course I was divorced by then, also out of my trance. If you want to get down and dirty, honey, my Columbian year teemed with more opportunities than I cared to perceive. Yet I was in such a goonily oblivious state of fulfillment, so smitten with the new excitements cramming my life in ways that reduced the poor old beast with two left feet to a pesky chihuahua, that I once left Roy stupefied by announcing the best thing about sex was the way women talked about it.

He’d just bowdlerized my favorite quote from the parachute factory’s night-shift forewoman in “Brides without Grooms”: “Y’ know, it’s just like making condoms. They darn well better work, but they only need to the once.” (He lamely substituted “wedding gowns,” unaware that by then busty little Cath Charters was busy pulling the ripcord on hers.) That may not sound salty to you; it was a new American music to your Gramela. So was “Why,
Henry
”—the immortal, to me, grunt of a bulky Lockheed worker when her lug wrench slipped and got romantic, not that I even tried to include that one in August ’42’s “Adios, Adolf. Tojo Too? Tojo Too.”

So were a thousand other things I heard in my Columbian year. Except for one long-gone Scandinavian whose showpiece in a foreign tongue was “Chen-chen,” I’d never known women like these. Galleon-hipped broads waved me into showers of sparks, then clinked Rheingold next to a Wurlitzer dotted with polkas and started in bellowing about the coxswain in the Azores or the sergeant in Australia. A sludge-voiced and slow-eyed freckled blonde in exile from coal country looked up from pounding Liberty ships together for Louisiana’s wondrously named Delta Shipbuilding Co. to muse she’d
still
never seen the sea. Tousled farmers’ daughters squinted skyward and allowed they’d figured they could fly a plane if they could drive a tractor. And they were all everywhere, roaring on city buses and reveling in cafeterias and shouldering in cuke-unencumbered droves through factory gates and past training-camp sentries.

If it was the most feminocentric year of my life, remember that my main encounters with the cuke-encumbered mob in the margin were idle flirtations on slow-chugging trains, quick Washington quizfests with pols, bureaucrats, and emerald generals, and Sutton Place Pintercourse with Brannigan Murphy. Compared to my reportorial prey, I was a more feckless sort of war worker at best. And at worst a fraud, gamely pretending I knew or cared what kept airplanes up as still wingless P-51s clanked on a conveyor belt behind a sweatily spit-curled, casually arm-grabbing, rosily riveting shout of indoctrination. But from coal mine to California—and like their more familiar office counterparts, looking up with unsinkably loose-lipped smiles to offer the leggy
Regent’s
visitor coffee as I waited for Senator Bavard or torpedo-toggling, WAVE-antipathetic Admiral Canute—the broads and the slow blondes and the farmers’ daughters did something so foreign to Pam’s past I’d never noticed the ellipsis. It was to welcome me.

Posted by: Pam

Or welcome someone with my gams, frizzy hair, and byline who, like them, had a job to do, and like them was learning by trial and error how to be the woman who did it. Our adult self is always someone we start out impersonating, and a lot of your Gramela’s later act was first put together in that Columbian year. Since my victims were unaware I was thieving, I’d swipe a roguish inflection I’d liked in Scranton to earn a grin in Ohio or a sashay from St. Louis as I went
en pointe
to peer into a fuselage in Inglewood. As I stretched my arms Samothrace-style to own the vast office sofa where I was lounging attendance on Senator Bavard, only I knew I’d seen the same pose transform farm girls into pilots in briefing rooms fifteen hundred miles south.

My need for an outer personality whose specifics I could never anticipate was so urgent that anything fatuous or tentative in my inner one got resmelted or junked on the spot. It was the psychological equivalent of a war economy, and one on which, like the country, I throve. Even when I made a total Pamidiot of myself, I’d only have gone unforgiven had I failed to spot the erratum slip. And since I’d never experienced belonging before, it was hard for me to grasp that all this was contingent—not to mention only one element in a bigger picture.

As far as I was concerned, I was reporting on a revolution, not a war. That only proves I knew nothing about either. Despite Roy’s trust in my aptitude, such political sophistication as I had came from two years of Pammie-see-Pammie-do radicalism in Manhattan’s kaffeeklatsches in putsch’s clothing. I’d imbibed and regurgitated millenarian talk without ever considering whether I had a stake in Utopia or trying to imagine what any self-fashioned version might look like outside my Bank Street apartment. Then had come Sutton Place. You bet I was kerosene missing only a match and a wick to keep me burning.

I credit the wick for intuiting that my lack of perspective was the perspective that let me
champion my home-front heroines as they deserved to be championed. After all, Roy could see
by Pamela Buchanan
as something I didn’t—an ingredient in the mix. My Capitol Hill fairy godmother, by contrast, was still a Congresswoman. She could get fairly snippy about talking me down from the tree where she’d just caught me putting the feminocentric cart before the horse again.

“Pam, please,” Edith would sigh over her specs. “Believe me, I do understand. Or remember. I know better than you ever will these steps are long overdue. I still think you’d do well to include a few choice reminders in your next article”—she never said “piece”—“that the point of it all is to defeat Japan and Germany.”

“That’s so damned corny,” I’d protest. “It’s what—”

“I’m sorry! Germany and Japan. Germany first is our policy,” said Edith with Congressional humor. “Dear me, but I could be taken to the woodshed for getting that wrong. You were saying?”

“It’s what everyone already knows is going on. It’s like mentioning Sir Isaac Newton every time you eat an apple.”

“Pam, here’s an apple. You can’t tell people something they don’t know until you’ve convinced them you know what they do know. You can’t get people to feel differently about one thing without showing them first that you feel just as they do about everything else. Columbus could only say the world was round because he wasn’t claiming it was on top of an ice cream cone.”

“Um, I don’t think he could have. Did ice cream exist yet?”

“There you are! Neither did America. If he’d wanted to sell ice cream, he’d have called the world flat, I assure you. That’s why I’m sitting here and you live in New York.”

“Well, I’m thinking of moving,” I said a good two decades
avant la lettre
.
“So there.”

“What, and see less of me? You’d be quite bored in peacetime.”

“Why, are you?”

“No, dear. To be delightfully candid, people like you keep showing up. Oh, there’s the floor bell. You must excuse me.”

“What’s the vote?”

“Goodness knows! But I’ll be
such
an expert by the time I get over there. Walking slowly and nodding. Why, would you care to come with?”

“I’d like nothing better, but I’ve got a train to watch. I mean catch,” said I as I lowered my wrist.

“Then God speed you. I met your mother once, you know. I often wondered what she’d be like if she had a cause.”

“You wouldn’t recognize her,” I said sulkily.

“But I do,” Edith said—even though, in my most ardent private substitutions of a gardenia for a wilted daisy, the shoe was on the other foot.

Posted by:
P
amet

It’s not only because I was still learning my craft that I’ve long avoided rereading my Columbian-year
Regent’s
effusions. By my age, one’s early work is a murder mystery starring the corpse of our might-have-been selves; we know the solution but have forgotten the clues. I don’t want some ripe simile or unduly athletic description to disclose a long buried Pam in the reportorial nude, peering out at the mimsies from a cuke-unencumbered version of
Le déjeu
ner sur l’herbe
under the impression she’s fully clad.

That’s the genius of Manet, of course. He shows his female viewers women who don’t know they’re undressed and his male ones women who don’t care that they are, making the consternation general but its provocation gender-
Rorschached
. Which doesn’t change the fact that I was—and fairly humiliatingly, Ard, so chirps my youthful vanity—
wrong
.

Goddam near everything went back to men’s idea of normal a week after VJ-Day. Disillusionment left me not only alienated from those I’d adored, now docilely restored to manicures and mattress-testing, but wondering how I could have misguessed the roots of our shared exultation by so wide a mark. Yes, yes: by all means let’s do note the comfort of my postwar opinion that they’d let
me
down when I’d spent my Columbian year struggling not to do the reverse. Didn’t I opt for Vichy myself when I turned my ETO tales into
Nothing Like a Dame
,
whose inscribed copy to Edith incidentally got no response?

Not that I know for individual fact what became of my home-front pinup gallery. Since my original ’42–’43 notebooks are long lost—I didn’t make much of a habit of saving such stuff until the Paris footlocker said it liked midnight snacks—I’ve also got no way of learning, and the reason’s as mournable as it is metaphorically apt. Founded in the 1890s,
Regent’s
had its house idiosyncrasies. The one you’ll chortle at was its prim and, by 1942, notorious principle that people who weren’t public figures had a right to privacy.

Thanks to that rule, which didn’t get junked until the end of the war, Edith Bourne Nolan was one of the few to appear in my stories under her real name. Even in my stories from the ETO, anyone under the rank of major rated an alias. Since every war correspondent from Ernie Pyle down knew nothing tickled the home folks like Lieutenant Nephew’s or Pfc. Soninlaw’s mention in print, Eddie Whitling used to scoff at my scrambles to think up false monickers. But Roy liked the tradition—because it was eccentric and archaic, because it was our version of Eustace Tilley’s butterfly-examining monocle in
The New Yorker—
and warned me only against excessive whimsy. No Oglesby in a brassiere factory, no dentist from Tuscaloosa.

Along with the magazine’s other arthritic stricture—the first photograph printed in
Regent’s
showed the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima—that shibboleth helped “To the Ends of the Earth,” which got me a sweetened paycheck from Roy for hazardous duty and a breakfast call from the Office of Production Management’s harried press flack. “For God’s sake, Pam!” spouted a certain future historian for whose work my Gerson, gaga for Grant and Lee’s baseball teams, turned out to be a hopeless sucker.