Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (11 page)

One thing about an invasion beach is that for the life of you you can’t tell where all the
junk
came from. Look at one of the most often reproduced photographs of our men going ashore, snapped from the landing craft they’ve just left, and your eye is caught by a mystifying tangle of white on the ramp. Toilet paper, bandage roll? No, Panama: kung pao. By the time I reached Omaha there was junk everywhere. Gear that had burst its stuffings, bloodied French phrase books, even a typewriter from some clerical unit clearly sent in too soon. Armed Forces edition of a pulp paperback called
The Dark Deadline
.
It was as if we’d hurled our attics at the Germans, not our army.

The clutch of first-wave survivors Eddie induced to sing “Happy Birthday” to me was on the shale near a trackless bulldozer. Some were still wearing their waist-cinching life preservers, those odd cummerbunds of D-Day that, more than any other single detail, bring back Pam’s twenty-fourth birthday when I spot them in photographs. But they were all so bewildered that, incredibly, not one wanted to smoke.

The few who reached the sea wall had stayed huddled there in a trance of fear, taking more casualties but uncommanded, scattered, mostly weaponless, and at a loss for any behavior except waiting dully for themselves or someone else to get hit, like children in a brutal orphanage, as one hour piled onto the next and wreckage piled onto wreckage. Eventually, once the Navy’s destroyers started chancing destruction themselves by steaming dangerously inshore to pelt the bluffs with five-inch shells (Cadwaller’s corvette’s popgun played its part), Norman Cota, the 29th’s assistant commander, had pried some Rangers, engineers, and gamer infantrymen to their feet to take and clear the beach exit. These boys hadn’t been among them, though. Since six-thirty a.m., they hadn’t been among anyone.

Mr. Spielberg? That was Omaha. Not your hardy Ranger outfit, with its forty-two-year-old (!) Captain Tom, that somehow recovers from being annihilated at the waterline to get up the bluffs and start wiping out Jerries in twenty-five intrepid minutes. At low tide the real Omaha, unlike yours, forced them to cross at least a hundred yards before they got to dry sand, much less shelter.

Anyhow, companies that have just been annihilated don’t slaughter anybody. They aren’t in the mood and the 29th, unlike the Big Red One, had never seen action. I will never understand why that massively planned invasion’s planners pitched an unblooded unit at Omaha, unless they knew that whoever landed first was going to get massacred and the choice of the virgin 29th was sacrificial.

And oh, Mr. Spielberg! Indulge me, I’m elderly and I shan’t be around too much longer. Where did those paratroopers come from? Paratroopers—behind
Omaha
?
They landed on the Cotentin side and any patrol sent out to rescue your private would’ve started from Utah. With Carentan still in dispute, Eddie and I couldn’t even get over there until June 13 or so. But Utah Beach wasn’t gory enough for you, was it?, so you cheated. You cheated for the exciting sake of your bloodbath.

Don’t misunderstand, daisysdaughter.com readers. My fight is with thrills disguised as kung pao, not D-Day’s enshrinement alongside Bunker Hill and Gettysburg. No doubt you’d believe your Gramela if I said I’d witnessed all three.

It took us dull weeks and weeks to nudge the Germans out of Normandy’s hedgerows. The Battle of the Bocage was Brad under apple trees beside his command trailer, bareheaded unless Bernard Law Montgomery was due to visit. With its Aussie and tanker badges, Monty’s beret required a helmeted Brad so that
our
wispy-haired general wouldn’t look like an
American Gothic
farmer in newsreels. It was a luckless, fuckless Eddie and a luckless, fuckless Pam scouring narrow, tree-Gothicked, hotly jammed roads as we looked for a story that wouldn’t just be the same one with altered coordinates and a different unit and more dead cows.

We said the hell with it one day in July, flagged down a truck headed beachward to flag down a supply ship returning to England. Spent two nights making naked kung pao in a Plymouth hotel before Pam, safety-pinning her otiose bra’s broken strap, retreated to London to tap out “The Stalemate.” It never saw print: when we got back to France, Operation COBRA had started. The bocage gave way at Falaise.

Paris was a mezzotint kermess, possibly the only one those urbanites have ever yielded to without restraint. Paris was a mass: de Gaulle’s. Paris was flowers, Mme Chignonne’s and the Paris footlocker’s poisoned, therefore preauthenticated kung pao, from dead Daisy’s typewriter on top of
The Gold-Hatted Lover
’s amok drafts to two velvet cases holding one engraved gold syringe—beyond a glint of doubt, my mother’s, its minuscule
Give me your answer do
identifying it unimpeachably as the Lotus Eater’s Charybdean gift—and one unengraved silver one. Q.E.D., the L.E.’s own, despite Pam’s fallibly colored memory of the one time a budding pudding had seen its roseate gleam in the L.E.’s soft paw.

Put both syringes back and snapped both cases shut, haven’t looked at them since. But I know they’re still down there, trapped like women miners in snapshots and rubbish. All I ever rescued was dead Daisy’s typewriter, determined to make “Like mother, like daughter” come true only in the arena where I had a track record—
by Pamela Buchanan—
and knew she had failed.

What you won’t see on the footlocker’s lid, much less in the kung pao–challenged (Glenn Ford! Kirk Douglas!)
Is Paris Burning?
, are two palmprints: Pam’s own. Months late, Eddie’d just read “Bacchanapoli,” and I’d rather not consider that he might’ve been imagining my long gams as toothpicks and my bloomers as shorts. Yet Paris addled me too, and we spent a week in a swim of notional identities and light-hearted transformational games (“Pretend you’re nice today, Eddie. All day,” I commanded. He said “Okay”: did a crackerjack job) before we woke up one afternoon and remembered somebody’d told us Patton was on the Meuse. By the time we got to it ourselves, his columns had stopped: no more gas.

I had even less use for Patton than Bill did, from his high-pitched squeaky voice to his humps with the Red Cross girl we all knew was his niece: two bits of kung pao
Patton
left out. Of course the whole thing is just a big musical, with the hard-working (on film) Spanish army as both the Sharks and the Jets in its lavish production numbers. The niece killed herself, by the way.

Worsening weather, rain in our bones where the marrow had been, forests so dark and grim breadcrumbs would’ve been useless: that was the Huertgen. Navigation skills boxed and outfoxed by too many trees, we kept getting lost, which was scary. We’d orient ourselves by which way the beat-up stretcher bearers were jogging, shamed—at least I was—that spotting them was a relief.

Division after division got put in and chewed up there, to this day no one knows why. For the first time I felt disgusted around combat generals, not just rear-echelon ones. So we said the hell with it again, headed back to now dripping and pigeon-gray Paris to fuck-booze-munch-ablute some more. But played no light-hearted transformational games, our tribute I suppose to knowing the war had gone bad.

You know what falling snow means in this story, don’t you, bikini girl? If you don’t, your dad’s been remiss. The Ardennes was where outfits bled white in the Huertgen and the grass-green new 106th got sent for either a reprieve from or a mild smattering foretaste of combat. Ten Panzer divisions hit the thinly held line.

On the mend after Holland, one debacle Pam neither witnessed nor wrote, the 101st Airborne got pulled out of its rest camps, shuttled up to hold onto Bastogne. In swirls of icy confetti not far from Neufchateau, I watched the trucks rolling by and heard a shout I still cherish.

“Hey,
Regent’s—
hey, red! Miss Buchanan! Remember me? Carentan! Hey, what the hell is new since?”

“Beats me, soldier! Everything!” I was walking in icy confetti and mud alongside. “Where you headed?”

“Some shithole!”

“Well, I know that, sonny! Some help…”

His tailgated face had vroomed on before “…you are!” Identical but for his shout, other trucks came bumbling and lumbering through icy confetti. They didn’t even have winter overcoats, Panama. Like most of our army in Europe, they didn’t have a lot of practice
defending
much either, but they turned out to be good at it. More determined, in fact—and you might as well know what Ike, Brad, and Patton all knew—than our reluctant GIs ever were when attacking. That’s why the Germans only broke when the weather did and our fighter-bombers could hit them.

That was the Bulge. But not
The Battle of the Bulge
,
a largely snowless—and mudless, witless, characterless, pointless, indeed everything but deathless—affair that may have the least kung pao of any movie I’ve seen. I can only imagine management’s mixed feelings at District movie houses when they saw Mrs. Cadwaller march up in the Sixties and Seventies for the latest World War Two epic. They knew I’d yell rude things and hoot before walking out early, but without me they’d have been screening the matinees for mice and cockroaches, from
Rome Dead Ahead—
with that callow idiot Chuck Troy impersonating the GI I was sure he’d never been in real life—to
The Bridge at Remagen
.
Seen on Tim Cadwaller’s recommendation when I’d about given up (of course all these movies litter the index of
You Must Remember This
), only
The Big Red One
had what makes kung pao irrelevant: the right poetry.

As the war’s way-back-when grew more distant, what frustrated me most was even the costliest epic’s inadequacy at conveying even a pitiful facsimile of the
size
of the thing. It didn’t take place in bespoke bits of landscape churned up in all too visibly limited ways that wouldn’t annoy the banks, TV aerials, and Volkswageny flows of vacation traffic just off camera. It was our everything and Europe’s everywhere.

The few vestigial bits of what you’re pleased to call ordinary life—whose return inside a decade to West Berlin, even, no one who’d seen it as rubble and big masonry eyes would ever stop finding preposterous—were what seemed pointlessly contrived and stupid. Even in exhilaration, we Americans were mundane to ourselves, of course, but amazing to everyone else. In the real town of Remagen, when I saw a woman the age I am now clucking endearments as she fed her cat an unbelievably precious sardine, I almost jumped out of our jeep to go smack the demented old hag. Yet I’d have done the same for Kelquen.

Never saw
Schindler’s List
,
Mr. Spielberg, and sorry. A man who can’t get Tinkerbell right isn’t my idea of a good guide to Auschwitz and by then I was seventy-three. But my Dachau you know: “I’m Nachum Unger—Nachum Unger, the poet. We are colleagues.
Here I am.
” And you know its kung pao, which I’ve never recorded until a soon-to-be-gone-with-the-wind Pam did: “Hey, fuck you, Maggie! I got here first.” If he heard me, Nachum might’ve had a thing or two to say about that.

As for Pam’s own failure, well. Withered as they are by now, the Glendale memories in Pink Thing’s archives say I’d find Peg Kimball’s kung pao–less antics with Chet Dooley and Eddie Harting in
The Gal I Left Behind Me
excruciating. That one started with me and so I bear the blame. Hearing Andy Pond tell me he’d rented the damn thing for my birthday would’ve been reason enough to seize Cadwaller’s gun even if I’d been feeling merry up to then.

Yet over the years, I’ve also told myself that for Peg Kimball’s 1948–49 to do justice to Pam’s 1944–45,
The Gal
would’ve had to last sixteen hours, be unwatchable, cost half the country’s GNP, and require its audience not to bathe for a week as part of the price of admission. Breaking new ground in kung pao, Eddie Whitling’s Flynn would appear as itself—and if I knew it and its owner, demand top billing too.

I didn’t write
The Naked and the Dead
or even
The Young Lions
,
let alone
The Gallery
. I wrote
Nothing Like a Dame
instead. Pam may just lack a novelist’s urge to transmute haywire events into concentrated truths, alchemizing how-it-was into a raftered here-I-am. Much less, with wretched “
Chanson d’automne
” at once the exception and the proof, a poet’s: “Minds crabwise interlock, with luck, and scuttle/Then it’s done.”

That’s from Addison’s “To My Wife on Some Anniversary,” if you’re wondering. It’s in
The Pilgrim Lands at Malibu
and too few anthologies. When I was actually at work on
Dame
,
yanking each day’s final page from the roller so I could shimmy into Manhattan via pumpkining taxicab, I never felt I was recording. I felt I was living, suiting my priorities.

As for the rest, isn’t it enough it all happened? And has stayed imprinted, untransmuted but there, on my elderly mimsies, nostrils, cerebellum, and skin. Like everyone else’s from Bill M.’s to Cadwaller’s, Pam’s Second World War will all only unhappen at the instant I die.

Sorry, Tim. I can’t do it, though as you see I’ve just tried. It’s futile. Just waves slapping bodies, engine noise always, food out of cans. Too many cigarettes, hairy black icebergs, mud and shouts, fucking. Sometimes I wake to a thunderstorm and think they have our range.

Posted by: Pam

At my age, however, one’s memories dwell as much or more on what
didn’t
happen, which can mean things that might’ve but didn’t or things you aren’t wholly sure did. The day in 1951 when thirty-one-year-old Pammie Gerson, a blissfully childless producer’s wife who hadn’t yet conceived
Glory Be
,
realized her life in Los Angeles had crossed over irrevocably from a light-hearted transformational game into confining if pleasant kung pao had elements of both.

Gerson and I had been married two years. As I’ve said and his warm letters after our divorce c
onfirm, we were happy. When Pink Thing plays safecracker, though, I’m forced to accuse myself—for his sake, not mine—of treating my second marriage a
s a respite. A lulling sanatorium stopover, prefigured by Metro’s whitewashed buildings and green lawns on my first Gersonized tour of the lot.

That morning in our now twice redecorated Beverly Hills home—Stella Negroponte’s picture, what did I care?, still watching from the den—my husband had let out a swiftly muted cry. The script he’d found in his briefcase was supposed to have been messengered the previous day to some actor or actress whose name I don’t recall. He was addled enough to reach for an already emptied juice glass.

“Pammie, I hate having to ask. Could you please, please run this up to Malibu? We’re in horrible rewrites on
That’s All She Wrote
”—one of Gerson’s sorrows, originally based on Abigail Adams’s correspondence. “You know I’d do it, but I don’t have time.”

Was I resentful? It’s possible. A request that mars your day’s plans is as nothing irritation-wise to one that interferes with none. A week had gone by since my welcoming telegram and it was obvious Bill M. wasn’t going to take Pam up on her offer to play the knowledgeable Los Angelena while he was back in town.

If he had, of course I’d’ve had to tell Gerson the truth
The Gal
had so nearly hit on. It would’ve been worth it to see Bill again. And possibly, now it was all in the past tense, confess to him too, with the amused valedictory laugh at my youthful foibles I was getting so good at. Sometimes one quick candled look in a restaurant gives you all you didn’t have in an instant, sparing both parties the trouble of having lived through it but nonetheless curing regret.