Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (10 page)

The pool itself was still brightly lit, presumably on the off chance Carole Lombard’s plane’s pilot might spot it in time. Yet from the chaises and tables to the famously pink but now murky imitations of the
Palais
Royal’s walls that framed it, its surroundings were dark. Mine, all mine!

After wrapping the Buchanan bod, still in the pointless altogether, in a That Hotel robe, I grabbed my cigarettes. Having made sure Gerson’s breathing was even, I slipped out. So bored he’d clearly hoped his ornate uniform would do the job without his waking help, an age-speckled doorman stirred downstairs: “Pool’s closed, Miss.”

“I’m naked under this,” I said impulsively. “Want to see?”

Blearily looking me up and down, he considered the idea. Then he said “No” so wryly we both laughed. “What the hell. Just tell them you found the door unlocked, okay?”

“Sure thing. But won’t that get you in trouble—Admiral, sir?”

He smiled. “I’m not the guy who locks it.”

Once he’d ushered me through, I found a prime chaise. Someone’s abandoned copy of
The Naked and the Dead—
or was it
The Young Lions?—
lay broken-backed below my feet. Every hunter of tranquility knows that in a state like mine you’re better off waiting for thoughts to come instead of chasing after them. Especially if the lure of water’s nearby, you need only put out the bait: yourself.

Feathery and Lombard-light, they settled as I tried not to disturb them. Between Glendale and Beverly Hills, each time the studio car I’d shanghaied had proved privilege’s uselessness by stopping at a red light, Pam had grown irritably aware that her fine fettle of outrage at everything under the moon except me wasn’t the whole story. Now, drawn by the pool and the noncomma of noncleavage in the terrycloth V of my plush robe, the rest could peep into view.

My indignation at
The Gal I Left Behind Me’
s travesty of Bill had hidden abject, cowardly relief that now no one would ever guess my most bathetic wartime secret. What’s unnerving about Hollywood distortions is that they can hit on camouflaged kung pao as easily as not. At that June story conference, only a monkey’s-paw coin toss whose upshot I’d awaited in panic—“We argued, but I like this Eddie”—had stopped
The Gal
from spilling the beans.

Oh, crap; oh, Christ. Of course, you fucking fools. Of course I’d been in love with Bill! I was
crazy
in love with my Anzio Bobbsey twin, as in love as I’ve ever been with any man up to Cadwaller. I’d let Eddie Whitling pound Pam’s socket from London to Bavaria to see if I could learn to ignore it.

It stayed not only chaste but unmentioned. If I once or twice told myself I’d seen a certain something in Bill’s cheerful eyes, it was probably delusional—or just a friendly, accepting, possibly agreeing but unverbalized reaction to seeing the same something in mine. I do realize daisysdaughter.com hasn’t been long on evidence I’m dainty, but did that snapshot of his wife and baby do me in. Besides, so much had already been spoiled and wrecked and shot up around us that I knew I could never do anything to spoil our beachhead twinhood. If Bill did do any fooling around in the ETO—and remember, he was young, adorable, far from home, and even by 1944, famous: famous at twenty-three, sweet Jesus—he kept it out of his memoirs. Aside from helping me out of the odd dugout, he never touched me once.

In a token, I suppose, of my helpless respect, he doesn’t in my favorite recurring daydream of us either. As I recline on a looted, luxuriant couch at Nettuno, wearing only dog tags, I’m letting—letting!—him sketch me in the nude. One arm hooked behind my head, I’m smiling as his eyes flick back and forth from his pad to the newly lush Buchanan bod.

Unlike
Nothing Like a Dame
’s cover art and my old friend Rose Butaker Dawson’s broken bowl, that drawing exists only in my mind. If it ever existed in his, by now it might as well be at the bottom of the Atlantic. Or the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Posted by: Pam

Never shared even with Gerson, since by our rules I’d have only had to if he was going to be introduced to Bill in my company, that little secret was to add another irony to a cranium bulging with them when these astonished, then amused mimsies scanned Tim Cadwaller’s defense of
The Gal I Left Behind Me
.
“Of course it’s untrue to 1944–45,” he blusters. “So what? It’s preciously true to 1948–49, which we remember less. The only generalization I’ve ever allowed myself about movies is that they’re always really about how life looked to people at the time they were made.”

Pompous, no? “Allowed myself” is beneath you, Tim. No reader does or should give a fig about our inner tussles. So you wished you could sleep with luscious Eve Harrington? That makes you stand out from the crowd.

I’m not saying it’s charmless. Nobody else cares and I can’t help being tickled when people like Tim vouch for the kung pao of eras that predate their birth. As you know, Panama, I’m fond of your dad. On my generation’s rotting behalf, I’m flattered our whole moldy shebang means so much to him.

How it must drive him berserk that he’ll never
know
Hollywood’s voluptuous allure in 1948–49. Much less what the ETO was like in 1944–45.

What was it like? I’m not sure I can say after sixty-plus years. Pam’s gone from gal to pretzel. Traducing
Dame
’s cover sketch, my medicine-cabinet mug shot burlesques the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. And I just don’t think about the war that often.

Sorry, Tim. I know it was your dream of dreams when you set up this website: your Gramela’s reminiscences of 1944–45. Normandy, Anzio, the liberation of Paris! All of which I lived through, saw, smelled, ducking at times and waving at others. But I’m going to be a mess of pink and gray things come sundown and I don’t want to waste my last hours. Let Dachau stand for the rest.

Trucks droned by and sweaty men jerkily plodded. What do you want, Mr. Cadwaller? I was awfully young and lived superficially, and to tell it all properly would need a book as fat as—though I hope far more readable than—Edmond Whitling’s forgotten
The Rough Draft of History
. It was only a war long ago and I can’t believe the world is still interested. Much better just to fast-forward to me in 1949, still lying poolside in a darkened hotel.

There, as I recall, I did make an attempt to cull and preserve some bits of kung pao now that I’d seen what Hollywood could do. Since I was near bright floating bought water [fix later, Ard], I thought of how I’d watched more than one LST (Landing Ship, Tank) come off the stays in Memphis and New Orleans shipyards. Seeing one at the surfline—reversibly, thanks to those huge things’ shallow draft—as enough wheeled and tracked vehicles rumbled out to make you think it hadn’t been their transport but their factory, wheels and tracks thrashing Mediterranean water and then gouging Italian sand, had made me gape even though I’d just disembarked myself and briefly looked back.

Boxes and cases and bidons and crates of supplies were stacked up everywhere, not looking as high as they actually were. They were half interred, camouflaged, tented. We got shelled every day and nothing we held was out of German artillery range. Too tizzied by my own survival to understand the meaning of the corpsmen pushing past us to where Anzio Annie had sent up gouts of sand and some darker soft rocks and green and red sticks, Pam’s giggly talking jag after her baptism of fire (I was here! It was there! Here I am! How amazing) ran its hysterical course without Bill interrupting. Then he brought me ever so gently back down to earth: “Come on, Pam. Those guys in the Hermann Goering Division may be fanatical Nazis, but they’re only human. You know they’d never hurt
you
.”

That was all of a week before one German pilot in a hurry dumped his bombload wherever and I heard someone call “Nurses too.” Then someone else in the villa called out “How many?” as we dumped our coffee and grabbed for our helmets and pencils and someone called “Three.” Someone stopped and said, “Jesus. Not Ellie Farnsdale,” because she was the one we all worried about. But someone called, “No, she’s all right. She took charge.”

Even though his old division held a sector farther west, Bill’s favorite outfit when scouting material was the First Special Service Force, a joint Canadian-American commando brigade. They did things Bill knew he’d be accused of fancifulness for using in his cartoons, like electing one of their favorite lieutenants mayor of a pocked sun-blasted village out in no man’s land they’d moved into for the fun of it and renamed Gusville.

Most units didn’t have favorite lieutenants, but the Force wasn’t most units. I got treated to dinner out in Gusville once; my waiter was a German prisoner picked up on patrol. So I was led to believe until he took off his coalscuttle helmet, quit glaring, and laughed, “Ma’am, I’m from Toronto. We just felt a mite bored and like goofing around. No disrespect.” The next time we went back we were told he’d been killed.

That was Anzio. But not
Anzio
,
a Cro-Magnon opus starring Robert Mitchum as a war correspondent more likely to try eating a typewriter than use one, which I walked out on twenty minutes in. It had no kung pao at all. That was five less than I lasted at
The Devil’s Brigade
, leaving a blessedly empty Washington theater to go surprise Cadwaller at the Department once I got fed up with red-faced William Holden insisting he was Robert T. Frederick, the First SSF’s CO.

Not much against Holden, Panama. But by ’68 he’d seen better days and in ’44 Bob Frederick hadn’t. He was my definition of a leader of men and out of combat you’d have taken him for the only prof at a small Midwestern college who could order kung pao beef without fear and saw that as the limit of courage, though never civility.

If Bill ever noticed I always decided to hitch a ride with the Navy back down to Naples when he did and back up to the beachhead when he did, he was too kind or just worried—not shy? As Jake Cohnstein said, hope springs eternal—to mention it. If you had dispensation, it was easier than hailing a cab in Manhattan. Our side’s water taxis plied back and forth constantly, ferrying wounded men one way and materiel the other.

Far enough out to sea to be sure any shore guns in the mood for a potshot would only liquidate water, we’d watch the coast’s toothy towns and lumpy spearmint-sprigged squeezes of batter slide by. Casualties in flapping or newly sliced uniforms shared the rail on the down trip and equipment was lashed at our backs on the up. As if the sight reminded us that Italy would’ve been overseas even had it been peacetime, it was most often then we’d find ourselves chatting about our lives in the States.

Taken in fall ’43 by the troops climbing the boot from the heel up, the word for Napoli by the time I first saw it was
requisitioned
. Requisitioned hotels, requisitioned apartments, requisitioned bottles glug-a-glug with requisitioned wine. Requisitioned women, girls, and boys with toothpick legs in wide short pants easily shed, getting by however they could in the khaki, jeep-revving, saluting and placarded, occasionally kilted (Highlanders), kepied (French officers), or even turbaned (the Moroccan goums) carnival of the Allied rear echelon. In Naples, distinctions between “liberated” and “conquered,” like those between “requisitioned” and “pillaged,” had never been more than semantic.

Skirts up for food! Kneeling, gobbling, and swallowing for a promise of medicine. Bent over a jeep, oil drum, or desk for a vague guarantee of a job scrubbing pans. Brisk trade in C rations, cigarettes, jump boots, chewing gum, jerricans, typewriters, watches, gasoline, blankets, daughters, and penicillin. Dogs mostly were spared, at least boys don’t get pregnant and I didn’t know half of it. The Army censors and Roy only let me print a tenth: “Bacchanapoli,”
Regent’s
,
April 12, 1944.

On my five or six jaunts there, Pam the good girl (well, I was, Panama! An Anzio Bobbsey twin, as deficient in Italian as I’d been when I was trying to interview Count Sforza, I never sold so much as a pair of black-market stockings. Never walked even once down a rot-smeary, rat-scrabbled, rut-perfumed street fondling a virginal pack of Lucky Strikes, flushed with disquieting awareness that the one with big eyes or the one with small children would do anything at all if I could only explain it. Hell, no. Your Gramela had ’em, she smoked ’em) mostly knew the classy end of the Napoli bacchanal. Those were the parties thrown by Naples’s scuttling mobs of Army and Navy PRO’s for visiting firemen from brass hats and editors to Congressional junketeers and USO stars. They had real Stateside brand liquor and something hotter and fresher than “O Sole Mio” on a working gramophone.

Got away mostly unscathed, twisted and no doubt unsatisfyingly unhillocked nipples aside, and never went until I was sure work, tap, tap, tap, was done for the day. While I never saw Bill at those, his absence proves nothing. I couldn’t be everywhere and there were usually several of them going on.

But the Second Front was my story, had been Roy’s goal for Pam all along. Once I’d finished “Bacchanapoli,” I knew I’d better get a move on if I wanted a prayer of seeing D-Day from a landing craft’s prow. Hadn’t once thought of scheming to get ashore, that was Eddie Whitling’s improvised gift. What I did know was Bill wouldn’t be going, since Italy’s guys were his guys.

He only got to France when they did in the second landing in August. Once I knew we shared a country again, I passed up opportunities to bump into him. By then I had a cynical, talkative, quip-prone, and humiliating reason to avoid him.

His sendoff at Anzio had been fond but unsatisfactory. “I’ll see you, Pammie. Who knows, maybe even in New York. I’ll find out who’s in Grant’s Tomb if it kills me.” We didn’t even hug. You’ll have a hard time believing this, bikini girl, but back then people only embraced in public if they were Italian, related—which we had been, but weren’t now—or lovers.

In Naples, I sued a general who’d twisted my nipples to let me fly as cargo on a C-47 hop to Gibraltar. Saw the Rock for the first and last time. Adios, Bill.

England was barrage balloons over Parliament, “Ma’am” in pubs and every other street’s still smashed eyeglasses from the Blitz staring in a daze at my long gams and cunt cap. It was Ike pacing the Southwick House lawn in our reportorial circle, chain smoking, realizing I was the one correspondent he didn’t know. “
Regent’s
,
huh? Where you from, Miss Buchanan?”

“That’s a hell of a long story, sir. But I digress. So, the Free French…” He cracked up damn near gratefully. Knowing what his burdens were, I’ve boasted since that I once made him laugh.

England was also almost instantly Eddie, who bragged he’d do better when he wasn’t knackered by liquor and did. I was in that overwrought condition where it seems like a miracle that anyone at all wants to sleep with you. Yet there had been those nipple-twisting Napoli generals, not to mention Floyd Young, and I knew my real willingness—how well life prepared me for life as a Foreign Service wife, all in all—was geographic. I needed a new country to be fuckable again.

We sailed for the invasion aboard the
Maloy
.
A DE or destroyer escort, not much interesting about it except it was the 29th’s floating headquarters and one of its bridge signalmen was eighteen-year-old Ned Finn, years later the cigaretted, alcoholic DCM to my Cadwaller in Nagon. (Deputy Chief of Mission, Panama. Honestly, bikini girl! Respect your great-grandfather and whatever you do, don’t end up hungry in Naples in wartime. I don’t and I can’t want to see you that way.) Shaking hands on Plon-Plon-Ville’s long jetty before he brushed dear Nan and then their children forward, we knew better than to pretend we’d had the remotest cognizance of each other on invasion day. Like Cadwaller, Ned and I both knew how huge, clankingly scary, and monstrously impersonal it had been.

Twisted this way and that by the waves, bumped by the planet’s indifference against that Martian alphabet of German obstacles, a few dozen of morning’s waterlogged dead were still being prepped for eternity’s surgery when I—I, Daisy Buchanan’s daughter, I, Ram-Pam-Pam; I, Pomme—waded past them on that one and only day. Not wanting to make every step a slogging flounce, but you know how it is with surf. Your choice is Columbus or an anonymous corpse. Then I ditched my misleadingly Red-Crossed helmet before anyone could feebly or urgently call, and Eddie and I each got to work chasing up somebody who still had the power of speech to tell us about it.