Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (15 page)

“That’s all right. Panama, good for you,” I told them: them, since she already knew. “I can’t, dear. I really can’t travel and I’d be the most awful fuss if I did.”

“Not this year!” Chris boomed. “Sorry, Pam, but we’re putting a gun to your head. We’ve hired someone to help out just for your sake. She deals with geezers like us [he wasn’t a diplomat’s son for nothing] all the time.”

“What’s her name?”

“Moesha, oh—Moesha. Hang on, it’s right here. Moesha Kendricks. Wow! That’s a very odd question to ask off the bat.”

True, but I couldn’t have asked them to send me a picture and its caption was my only substitute. “What of it? I’m elderly,” I said. “One foot in the grave and one in my mouth. I’m fucked if I know which is which anymore.”

“But you do know we all wish you didn’t say things like that.”

“Why on earth not? Tick-tick-tick. No fountain of youth I can see in the neighborhood. Can you?”

“The reason we don’t like it is it’s your excuse for everything and you aren’t dead yet,” Tim put in. “Grammie, Dad’s hired her. That’s settled. Come on, will you think about coming?”

“Pleeeeeeeeaase, Gramela?”

“All together,” Chris commanded. Muddled elephonic roar of group Cadwaller “Please,” frantic barking.

“All right! I’ll think about it. Just to shut Scarf up,” I said.

“Yay!”

Duty done, the Cadwaller carnival was shifting its focus: I was audibly one item in a big family’s day. I say so with no resentment, since if calling a pretzel like me was the
highlight
,
I’d flee such bores by speedboat. Then Panama burbled again:

“Gramela, I nearly forgot! Did you listen to the iTune? Did you like it?”

“Dear, I’m sorry. The I-Tune?”

“The song?”

“Oh, yes! Yes, I did like it. Believe it or not, I was humming it first thing this morning. Well, trying to. Can’t say I got very—”

“Oh, good! I’m so glad. Okay, chen-chen!”

“Chen-chen!” I called.

“She’s gone, Pam. You know her. Faster than a speeding bullet.”

Posted by: Pink’s Newest One

Panama’s faith that my frail life is enriched by exposure to the Panamanic beeps her generation decoys its hips with is one of those pumpings of teenage enthusiasm even a faux relative as gamy as me knows better than to trample on. I can recall Pam’s failures to get Daisy interested in anything at all that interested me. Guessing my methods were inept, I never grasped that for my mother the source was what invalidated it.

I’m also not blameless, since at Panama’s age you can’t tell the difference between an occasion and a newly announced hobby. Unconvinced by Andy Pond’s and Nan Finn’s praise, I’d never been to the FDR Memorial until Tim brought her along to see it for
You Must Remember This
.
Hadn’t quite understood how it tumbled on, with varied rushes of water that grew magnificently still at the final pool marking death.

That was two warm springs ago. Past cherry-blossom time, but before District air’s summer mimicry of car exhaust. Though I was still grumpy about my new wheelchair, I was relieved we’d brought it.

I got re-grumpy when I saw a shrunken (he was lifesize) Roosevelt seated in my chair’s less gadgety prototype at the entrance. Not part of the original design, as I tri-grumpily knew from the
WashPost
. The tapdancing-challenged, or whatever the handicapped bloody call themselves these days, had lobbied for a representation of their fellow cripple sans illusions.

Nicophobes had lobbied equally successfully against any depiction of him with cigarette holder. If you asked
my
generation, which clearly no one had, that was denying Toscanini his baton. Bunny lovers had wrangled over letting Eleanor Roosevelt Rigby’s statue show her in her fur stole. Ridiculous, just ridiculous.

“Oh, he wouldn’t have liked that at all,” my dentition and I grumped at the spring air, meaning the chairbound FDR. “He really did keep it hidden from us.”

“Yes, Gram. I think I’ve read that once or twice,” said Tim fondly. “I haven’t been making up this damned thing  off the top of my head, you know.”

As Tim rolled me on, however, I grew touched. The sculpted and, to my eyes, inevitably Dorothy Day-ified breadline was the turning point. Strange to think it was now
my
generation—Pam’s “us”—for it hadn’t been at the time. To a Purcey’s girl, all this had been primarily an adult business, and like all adolescents we’d concluded they’d fashioned the world as it was then by choice.

Skirling nearby, alarmingly naveled and hipboned—that was the day Tim looked at her and said, “Help me, Pam. What am I going to do?”—Panama was earplugged as she softly crooned. So often to my eyes, all these gadgets’ purpose seems to be to redefine formerly demented public behavior as sane. Still, I did understand she meant no disrespect. It just wasn’t fathomable to her that one kind of self-definition could preclude another, a pliability I hope stands her in good stead.

Then one of her croonings took me aback, seeming as it did to indicate she was hearing messages from another world after all. Tunelessly—the tune’s fault, I soon learned, not hers—she chanted, “In the
Nine-
teen…
Twen-
ties.”

“Panama!” I demanded. “What on hell’s green earth are you listening to?”

She couldn’t hear me. When I re-asked in sign language, grimly bracing the while for some concert-challenged group to bustle up and arrest me, one earphone popped out of her Goya-dark curls. After providing some zoolike name I can’t place, she said, “They’re really one of Dad’s bands. So don’t tell my friends! But I like them when I’m alone.”

“No, dear,” I said as curls got ready to reseize their plastic prey. “The song. What is that song?”

“Oh, I like it a lot.” Teenage logic. “It’s like, it’s like sort of like when you tell us about the way-back-when. It’s called ‘Being Boring.’”

“Well, I like
that!
” I said, tossing my head back with a dentitioned laugh. Not sure if she’d just proved she was young or growing up. And away from me.

“No, no! It’s about how all of you were
never
boring. Listen.” Before I could protest, her unabashed fingers had reprogrammed the gadget and fitted the plugs into my kidnapped ears.

My
generation isn’t comfortable in earphones unless we’re over Schweinfurt.
My
generation feels at a loss for appropriate facial expressions to assume when we’re listening to metallic chipmunks mate under the keen observation of two cinnamon-sprinkled dark eyes and a smile lost in curls in breath-kissing closeup as if we, not the chipmunks, are unwilling specimens in an open-air lab. Not that I’d have told Panama, but hearing slithers of electronic dots and dashes in tense situations isn’t completely unfamiliar these days to
my
generation: EKGs, MRIs.

Yet this young doctor’s murmur did have its soothing side, even if it did go on and Panama’s face was a goddam billboard Panamanically selling toothpaste, breath mints, skin moisturizers, false eyelashes—no, those were real—and impossible bliss. Tim was hovering somewhere as Potusville temporarily rearrayed itself, old-family-retainer style, into my Washington.

Quite the backhanded compliment, I thought quadri-grumpily, eyeing FDR’s gigantic
i hate war
hewn in stone. Not boring. Most centuries don’t get even that much credit in Panama’s ledger, I suppose.

“Did you like it, Gramela? Did you like it?”

“Oh, yes. I did. Confusing, mind! But nice.” Not sure I meant the song.

So it began, although my great reprieve has been that I no longer need to contend with Panama’s face in closeup as I listen. Far from thoughtless, her e-mails give me full instructions every time on how to mouse-click the downloads into sonic existence on my Mac. Far from oblivious to my age in other ways as well, she only sends me songs she guesses or hopes will speak to Pam in some way.

They may well, but most of the time I’d be the last to know. They’re in a language that’s indecipherable not because it’s a lost one but because mine soon will be. I can’t tell if I find them excruciating because they’re chockablock with chipmunks and EKGs or from pain at my own ignorance. Only occasionally does a bit of pidgin make sense to me, the case with Panama’s most recent offering.

But I don’t know whether her tastes are esoteric or trite. Tell me,
daisysdaughter.com
readers, has anyone but Panama even heard of a caterwhauler who calls herself Pink? Charming name, bound to warm me as I downloaded. I had the opposite reaction to the song’s title, since I could remember a winsome number yclept “Dear Mr. Gable” and sung by the very young Judy Garland in
Broadway Melody of 1938
.
If this unknown Pink’s unknown ditty confessed a similar infatuation with Potus, I couldn’t imagine what Panama could be thinking.

Once I’d dutifully listened, I went back to her e-mail. Understood better its quip about Pink’s career suicide. The photo or twelve my curiosity got me to hunt up online had me nearly choking. And I’d thought
Panama’s
dress code left too much too decipherable?

Mouth like a jaguar’s, too. Eyes like twin six-guns enjoying the suspense at a birthday party. Will flags shoot out, or something else?

Other than that, I know just two things about her. One’s that her voice is a syrupy bray I’ll never learn to call musical. The other is that she’s got more guts than the entire Democratic Party—oh, than all of you, all of you! All of you should be shamed.

I wasn’t lying on the elephone just now, bikini girl. I can be evasive but I don’t lie. As I fetched Cadwaller’s gun, I did find myself humming “Dear Mr. President” in my aardvarky croak. Your Gramela was damned if she’d let that half naked child with the jaguar mouth and laughing six-guns for eyes be any braver than me.

Posted by: Pam

Googling tells me her CD didn’t do very well, though. Stendhal’s fabled pistol shot at a concert is anathema to Americans. But just as hearing Pink’s pained warble a few days ago first prefigured and then bolstered my birthday resolution, so now glad tidings from France have prompted an unlooked-for crisis.

Isn’t that always the crossroads, Tim? “Dear Mr. President” or
Marie Antoinette
?
Go down fighting like Pink in June, hold on for succor from Kirsten in October? I wonder if they know each other, that would be grand.

Oh, damn! Oh, damn. Like so many people my age, I can’t help missing simpler, less ambivalent times. In my case, this morning. Now I may not know until Potus rasps in my ear or the light fades to indigo on upper Connecticut which of my imaginary great-granddaughters I’ll honor in the observance or the breach.

Half a century ago, when Gerson chose, accepting froth was the suicide option, not the vote for life. And no, I don’t mean leaving Metro and movies for Rik-Kuk and TV; I mean the decision that broke Pam’s heart. You could call it the worst review
Glory Be
got and, to the extent any writer writes for anyone other than him- or herself, I’d written it for him. Yet he wouldn’t have been Gerson if he’d stayed mine. Civilized, soothing, thoughtful, and diffident: he was all of those things and more. Timid, no. The lone coward among my three husbands was Brannigan Murphy, not Noah.

His choice and Pam’s heartbreak—our final his-and-hers hotel towels, you could say—were still hanging unseen in the future’s darkroom when my second book made its first blurry appearance in a mental snapshot I’d thought was of something else. (Sorry, Chris: you’re the photographer, not me. It was good to hear your voice, though.) If not for that, I guarantee I’d have burned it instead of sharing it on daisysdaughter.com.

In a rare treat, since we usually went to him, Jake Cohnstein was in L.A. New at Rik-Kuk, still optimistic, Gerson’d had the very Gersonish idea of one-upping the live dramas still common then by using the medium to recreate legendary theatrical performances of the past:
Hamlet
as Sarah Bernhardt had done it, say, albeit obviously with another actress impersonating her impersonating him. In that case, only a very primitive and soundless screen version survived.

On our last New York trip, listening to Jake rue all the fabled productions he could only describe to his Whitaker students at one or more removes had been what first got my husband thinking. That was his reason for inviting Professor Cohnstein out to the Coast to discuss a possible change of career. If Gene Rickey approved and Jake agreed, he’d be producing the series, which Gerson had provisionally named
Proscenium
and Pam, unconverted by her husband’s home-screen neo-Platonism, kept calling
You Scrim, I Scrim, We All Scrim for Ike’s Grin.

On Jake’s last night, we’d arranged a mini-reunion featuring Addison, whom Jake of course knew from pre–Pearl Harbor days, and Eve, whom he’d never met. Once he and Gerson drove off to Burbank, I’d spent a pleasant day alternating between overseeing the cooking and cleaning—likely to show up in slacks, Eve was still Eve Harrington
—
and reading the papers. News story datelined Dien Bien Phu, anonymous whispers of trouble on the set of
A Star Is Born
.
Brief and maddeningly photoless society-page item on Celia Brady’s new life as the wife of a real maharajah, not Hollywood pasha, in faraway Jaipur. He’d shown up on a stallion and she rode a tame tigress at their wedding; I’d definitely never get to meet her now.

The meal went off without a hitch, if to Gerson’s regret without a Hitch. Despite Rik-Kuk’s eager pursuit,
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
premiered a year later under a different aegis. While I felt bad for Gerson’s sake and wouldn’t have minded meeting
Rear Window
’s director in other circumstances, I wasn’t sad he’d declined our dinner invite. We’d have had the Hollywood-party problem of two contending spheres of interest—figurative in Eve’s case, damned near literal in his—and also wouldn’t have quite been among friends anymore. Gerson assured me his manners were exquisite, but obviously Hitchcock couldn’t have helped introducing an element of uncertainty.

Stella Negroponte welcomed us for coffee. A ritual best understood in the
Nine-
teen
Fif
-ties, even in our relatively booze-unfueled house, bikini girl, as setting out a half dozen cups of interesting liquid for guests to observe as they went on drinking. Everyone was cheerful, a monochrome-shirted (for once!) Addison included. Drunk or sober, the den was his favorite room.

“Do you know this story, Noah?” he drawled. “As Pushkin lay dying, he was asked whether he cared to say goodbye to his friends.”

“No, I don’t. Did he?”

“Yes and no. Looking up at his bookshelves, that great poet called feebly, ‘Farewell, friends.’ But whenever I walk in here and look up at your proud towers, I feel I should say ‘Hello, children!’ instead.”

“Feel free to borrow whatever you like. I’ll be pleased,” Gerson said. “I’m done with them.”

“No, no! Just admiring. Damned good improvement on the real brats we’ve got to meet. Oh, Jake—so sorry.”

“Not at all,” said Jake. “It’s been ten years. Has it really? Yes. The tree I planted for David in Jerusalem must already be taller than I am. It was around Sharon’s size then, probably what made me pick it. Something familiar.” He smiled.

“Oh, that’s nice! Maybe I should disguise myself as a rosebush,” Eve said. Legs tucked and a propping thumb and forefinger inviting us to guess where the picture frame’s other half was, she’d turned a couch into her boudoir as usual. “
Then
Addison might write a poem about me. Damn you! I’m nature, too.”