Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (41 page)

Once Viper swept her boobies back off the witness stand, I probably shouldn’t have been taken aback at how anatomically—I mean automatically—she joined our circle outside the courtroom. Doing their best to form a coral reef of friendship inside a surf of reporters, Roy Charters, Addison, Jake, and (this was heroic; I loved her for it) Sharon Halevy Cohnstein weren’t expecting it either. I’d just yowled that I needed a drink when there Viper was, reaching out: “Pam! I’m so glad it’s over [
sic
]. I just hope I helped.”

Actresses, honestly! The latest role is the only one. It doesn’t matter to them how vivid your memories are of their late-1941 performance in
I’m Fucking Your Husband
or their polka-dotted turn in Spring 1943’s discovery hit
And I’m Going to Lie My Cute Can Off About It, Too
.
Not to mention a part that Viper, then delirious, had been unaware of playing: her feverish skin and pears’ contribution to
Miss Hormel’s Revenge
, a chamber piece I didn’t want revived. As she grabbed my arm and I inhaled her perfume, thrust upsettingly back to the last time we’d been in physical contact, all I could do was stare into her breathily bright-lipsticked face.

“I hope
you
write a play one of these days,” she told me. “Wouldn’t that show him? And I’d like to be in it if I could.”

At which I must’ve stared twice over. Even in his Topanga garden, Addison was delighted by the memory. “Isn’t the power of the unconscious splendid?” he mused. “She can’t have realized what she was implying.”

“Oh, not a chance of it.” Then I hesitated. But I was older and a long way from that dressing room, and Gerson was nowhere in sight. “Even so, I swear I got worried the first words I typed when I got back to Roy’s were going to be ‘Act One.’”

He didn’t bat an eye. “She
was
pretty. Dumb as cornstarch, but pretty,” he said fondly, and never brought her up again.

Posted by: Pam

Up until Viper’s testimony, my four months on the sofa in Roy Charters’s study had been as unstained by carnality as the New York edition of Henry James that loomed over me. But that night, not without a certain grim inner mutter of
plus ça change
on Pam’s part, my editor and I had our first fumbling go at the old buck and wing. Volcanic it wasn’t, and when I finally met the woman whose bra cups Roy may have been hoping I’d fill—bustling Cath Charters was no more than a name to me then—I saw how the Buchanan bod might’ve started out looking like a bit of a stretch and ended up seeming like a bit of a letdown.

On my end, once I’d quit counting the Marquands between (Sinclair) Lewis and (Walter van Tilburg) Clark, I spent most of the ten minutes it took feeling mystified that anyone as brainy as Roy could think sex as a
deed
was a cure for loneliness. As opposed to tender confirmation it had been defeated, my own lost ideal. That notion must be more afoot in the land than I’d gathered, and so on.

Once Viper’s stint on the stand was done, so I learned from Garth Vader’s
Dat Dead Man Dere
, Bran’s lawyers begged him to let them barter for the best alimony deal they could. Yet my hubby was the same Murphy who’d taken
A Clock with
Twisted Hands
on his back and staggered a few more blind steps up the mountain before letting the opening-night audience leave, and by that time he didn’t care about the money either. He wanted self-justification. To get it, he was depending on the oldest unofficial rule of American jurisprudence: you can’t wrong someone hateful.

In the good old tennis court of public opinion, I can’t say he failed. Not going by the jolly men in later years who’d react to being introduced to Pam by playing the asinine trick of snatching their bee-stung hand away and chuckling as their upheld palm implored my mercy. Making a joke of it, yes, and swinging back in for the grip. Still putting me on notice they knew I had a shiv in my purse.

In a suit brown as autumn, Bran had testified much earlier. Consulting his own interlocked Pulitzer-winning hands, he’d won a few stunned looks from his soon-to-be ex as he described how he’d encouraged my writing. Did he mean “You’re really so much better at those little book reviews”? Had he known it was going to be my excuse to abandon him, he wouldn’t have lied about thinking Pam had talent: “I wasn’t under oath then, Your Honor” (
Time-
cover grin). A loyal husband will do these things to protect his home’s harmony.

I’d been furious, but Oliver hadn’t been able to damage Murphy much. Neither Trinka’s boinky-boinks nor Viper’s Peter Minuit minuet had come out at that point, and my fussbudget lawyer was no match for Bran at charm or stagecraft. By my own turn, my hubby’s case was in much worse shape, and Oliver was concentrating on refuting the desertion charge. His purpose in walking me through my
Regent’s
assignments wasn’t only to remind everyone that I hadn’t been rowdying around the country for fun, something Roy Charters’s testimony had already confirmed.

What Oliver hoped would sink in was an ultimately patriotic contrast: Pam singing democracy’s arsenal while Bran sat on his. Pam watching Sherman tanks roll out as
Colum Firth
’s author played mannequin games with Viper Leigh; Pam freezing her pants off in a Tennessee coal mine as on Sutton Place Trinka gave demonstrations of how to play the accordion lying down. Was my lawyer glad Viv and the others had taken me down the shaft on a Tuesday.

“And as you watched them plant the dynamite that afternoon, Mrs. Murphy, did you have any inkling that at the same moment, in New York…”

“No, of course not,” I said, thinking all this might sound very different if Bran and Trinka’s boinky-boink hour had come at the end of the day. Except for one anodyne sentence, however, my happiest and then most disconcerting Riceville memory had stayed unmentioned in print.

I hadn’t expected Bran’s lawyers to take me through the same itinerary. Soon I understood what they were listening for: a fractional hesitation, a small but fatal shift in tone. “Mrs. Murphy, did you ever commit adultery in Tennessee?”

“No.”

“Did you ever commit adultery in Michigan?”

“No.”

“Did you ever commit adultery in Texas?”

“No”—and suddenly I was terrified they’d ask about Washington, D.C. But Jake had immunized me there; it never crossed their minds.

There was one other state I had to brace myself for. Its tourist brochure was looking at me and we’d made the beast with two left feet that morning. I only kept my poise by remembering that adultery
with
Ohio wasn’t adultery
in
Ohio, something I thought Roy would laugh at that night but he oddly didn’t.

“Mrs. Murphy, according to your husband, you—ah—increasingly lost interest in the physical side of marriage even when you did put in an appearance at your home. Is that your recollection too?”

“My God, I don’t know what Bran’s talking about. No matter how tired I was, all he had to do was ask. Well, grunt.”

“Order in the court.”

“But in fact, your—ah—conjugal intimacies did occur considerably less often as time went on, didn’t they?”

“The way I saw it, that was really up to him.”

“Should we take that as meaning you had no interest on your own?”

“Well, I never turned him down.
If you mean was I raring to go, though, then probably not.”

“Why was that, Mrs. Murphy?”

I looked at Bran. Bran looked at me. Oliver Watson looked alarmed. Dolores Ibárurri looked askance.

Viper stared from a stretcher. Trinka danked me for hiring her. Edith Bourne Nolan rubbed her desk’s bald spot. Connie Ostrica snapped a salute off her cunt cap. Viv’s possum face hawed.

Gloria Kamenica clinked a Rheingold. Mellie Branch had never seen the sea. Jessie Auster squinted skyward, and docile Joy Sterling had been angry, so angry—so incredibly angry behind that Gauguin mask as she snapped off the fuse.

Oh, fuck what the traffic would bear. “Hell, I don’t know,” I drawled. “But to tell you the truth, I just got tired of having to stick my finger up his ass every time.”

Posted by: Pam

In the rowdier tabs, the standard paraphrase was “I got tired of goosing him”: meaning identical, connotation desexualized enough to get by. The genteel equivalent was “I got tired of priming the pump,” which actually struck me as cruder—the way a too vivid imprecision will.

It didn’t matter. The authentic quote was all over New York by the cocktail hour. It landed with the first wave in Sicily that July. Until
Nothing Like a Dame
, it was the single thing strangers were most likely to know about me—the main upside being that Pam was dead Daisy’s daughter no more.

Since you were all of eight years old during the Presidential sexual imbroglio I call Billingsgate and you appear to’ve survived its linguistic acrobatics unscathed, you may be marveling that “I just got tired” and so on could make me notorious or Murphy publicly ridiculous. But over sixty years ago, women weren’t supposed to say such things. Not in courtrooms, anyhow, as opposed to coal mines or Detroit saloons or Toledo cafeterias or Albuquerque nursing schools.

As for Bran, he’d spent fifteen years as the cock of theatrical New York’s walk in an age when cuke-encumbered writers were proud of behaving as if they typed with their fists and read books with their teeth. To infantilize him in that Gillooleyan way struck at his
literary
virility. Had I been old enough to understand what bags of jellied nerves and impostures so many men are, I probably wouldn’t have done it—no matter how fed up I was with the stupidity of our marriage, and hearing our suddenly sad, puzzled sex life called “conjugal intimacies,” and Roy’s prim red-eared face three rows back.

Whether I
regret
it, I can’t say. The mystery is I’m not sure Murphy did. Except for the alimony, which I’d told Oliver Watson not to get too “Tallyho!” about—and it was the part he’d looked forward to, too—it was all over on June 4. When I saw Bran nearby on Lafayette as I peered for a taxi once we’d each been released from our knot of reporters, I half expected him to do something he’d never done while we were married, namely hit me. As he recognized his tall one-arming wife among the sailors, instead he looked abashed, relieved, and damned near grateful.

“Waiting for a cab?” I called, since we couldn’t go on eyeing each other uncertainly until they’d won the war.

Grinning, he shook his head. “On my way to the subway, Snooks. I might as well get used to it.”

“Oh, balls, Bran. You know I’m not going to take you the way Ruby took you. I’ve never cared.”

“Too bad. I thought it was my ace.”

Hands in his pockets, he was being buffeted by uniformed foot traffic out to learn for sure whether the Bronx was up and the Battery down. We’d both just caught on that this was goodbye, and he was Brannigan Murphy; he had to dominate it. After some facial fidgeting, he made up his mind: “Oh, well. ‘We’se did have good times onct. Didn’t we’se, Baby?’”

Spoken as the hero clutched a dismembered Macy’s limb, that wheezer was
Colum Firth
’s curtain line.
What would have devastated Murphy if he’d known was that my speechless reaction came partly from uncertainty about what he was quoting.

“Oh, come on!” he ragged me. “Can’t you at least say, ‘Bran, I never knew.
You
were the Mighty Tower’?”

Asphodel Titan had been crouched over her husband’s corpse when Ruby Thorp spoke that line in 1932. At Murphy’s insistence, she’d begun unbuttoning her blouse as the lights dimmed. That baffled even young Addison’s quick thumb through Freud—and dear God, I thought. Does every literary marriage end this archly?

“Christ, Bran.” I was honestly angry all of a sudden. “All right, if it’ll make you happy. ‘Listen, it’s our fight too. And if need be, we’ll go to the ends of the earth.’”

“That’s not mine.” Then he looked hesitant, mentally flipping back through the scrapbooks to 1928: “Is it?”

“No, mine. Well, a woman I called Viv. I guess you never read it.”

“Was that Tennessee?”

“Yes,” I said bitterly.

Bran scowled. “Well, just so you’ll know, Snooks—I didn’t fuck Trinka that day. Or Viper either. It just wasn’t worth it getting back up on the stand to say so.”

“Oh, really? No boinky-boink for poor Mist-Murphy? Were you trying to
write?
”

“I was too worried.”

If it was a lie, he’d convinced himself of it. When two people realize they’ve never understood each other worth a damn, the least they can do is agree they’ve misunderstood each other more intimately than most: any breakup’s consolation prize.

“Oh, Bran,” I said. “Go to hell. Do you even remember my birthday’s on Sunday?”

Fishing out a handkerchief for me from his jacket’s breast pocket—his manliest act of the war had been to accept the restrictions on new tailoring in stoic silence—my now imminently former hubby took his best guess. “Twenty-two?”

“Twenty-three.” And I meant to be affectionate; it just didn’t come out that way. “Too old for you anyhow!”

His face darkened, then grew confused. “Bye, Snooks,” he said and blunderbussed my cheek. “Good luck.”

I wished his back the same. The
M
was for Murphy, the snotrag’s in the Paris footlocker. Whether or not the White House calls, whoever finds me here will find it there.

Posted by: Pamoha Beach

Sixty-two years ago today, as late as noon—as
late
as
noon
, Mr. Spielberg—they were still arguing over whether to evacuate Omaha. Write off the landing, bring away as many of those miserable upholstery tacks as they could and redirect the supporting troops to one of the beaches where the thing had gone better. On the command ships, they couldn’t see and weren’t in radio contact with the handfuls of soaked survivors who’d finally gotten to their feet and uttered their own equivalents of “Oh, fuck what the traffic will bear” before starting up the bluffs under fire.

Still far out to sea ourselves, Eddie Whitling and I couldn’t see them either. By noon, we’d gotten ourselves off the
Maloy
to hitch a ride in on an LCT packed with artillery that was scheduled to land in early afternoon. It wouldn’t; everywhere around us were slewing and bobbing landing craft of every type. They’d either tried to make the beach and been driven off by the obstacles that were supposed to have been blown by then or were being held back by new, contradictory, or out-of-date orders from either the command ships or the Coast Guard cutters slicing through the seaborne traffic jam to keep us megaphonically herded.