Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (23 page)

“On my way out, I can ask at the desk and have them phone you,” he offered. “For your sake, I hope you won’t have to stay on an extra day on my account.”

It was silly, but maybe not getting my “You are, too” in the bravery sweepstakes had rankled a bit. It wouldn’t have had to mean any more than another driver’s thank-you wave after passing into the turn lane.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Now that I’m a free woman, maybe I’ll stay on a couple. I’d kind of like to go back to Tirat Karmel.”

“Tirat Karmel, really? What do you know? I wouldn’t call that one of the highlights. But, well, vive la dee-ferance. I did like that funny little restaurant.”

“Me too. Noah, will you do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“When you get to Nachum’s, can you ask him how you say ‘The Great Unknown’ in Hebrew?”

Posted by: Pam

I didn’t go, no. (Duh! As you children say.) I shunned Tirat Karmel on later trips in the Sixties and Seventies, even though I alone in the bus or limo knew of a little restaurant that served the most divine, divine, divine!, hummus, falafel, and olives, brought to your outdoor table if you were in luck by a girl with eyes dark as tamarind and hips expert as miniature race cars. I’d inhaled her skin: “I am Israel. I’m sun, valor, hardship—and joy. I’m the most daring thing you’ll ever do if you’ve got the nerve. Are you Jewish, by chance?”

“Would it really matter?” my skin babbled back. But she was fetching the next table’s water by then.

I still hope Israel’s Great Unknown wasn’t killed in any of the wars. She’d have been getting on by my last trip: 1979. For her sake, not mine, by then I obviously had to hope she wasn’t still waitressing.

Instead, when obliged as expected to stay over an extra day, I ate a meek last supper alone in the King David’s restaurant. Was disgustingly, disgracefully relieved when ben Canaan’s surviving eye didn’t show up to rake me over the coals as a whore combined with a hypocrite and coward, two things your true whore—I’d seen Napoli, remember?—never is or could be. An American, in short.

Flew back the next morning to the land of Fran Kukla’s
Hamlet
.
Yet of brave Martha Shelton and so much else. Still unsure whether one citizen’s idea of a promise betrayed is another’s idea of its fulfillment.

Perhaps the real prayer is that neither’s decision will ever be final. When I think of Israel, that’s certainly the hope of a philo-Semite like me.

Philo-Semite, you ask? What of your cleverness in spotting all those signs to the contrary? Oh, I swear. You’re children. As I should’ve started telling you much earlier on daisysdaughter.com, you’re all too fucking easy.

Yes, I belong to my generation. With the mother I had, not to mention the father, I could not help but be conscious of Jews as Jews. Smart ones can spot it eight decades later at Nan Finn’s Christmas parties, and unless they’ve got no humor—not bloody likely, not least given the goyish occasion—they dig it.

Me too, though I’ve got to be awfully bombed on Nan’s hopeless Chardonnay before I talk about Noah’s death. I yawp on instead about Pam’s first trip to Israel. If only thanks to the fact that I saw it before most of my auditors were alive, that keeps them interested until I’m outdone by the next round of canapés.

I swear, if Andy Pond were Jewish or could even fake it—had the odd bit of
crackle
,
you know, along with his brain’s fine imitations of the weak lovely music Mozart would have composed if he’d lived into his eighties—I’d have probably married him ages ago. I’m still the shiksa and I know the drill. In the first decade or so of my final widowhood, it was my favorite way of being socially sexy.

I’ve been called a kike hag. Before you rise up in outrage, demanding the coiner’s name, I assure you he’s beyond your reach. His name was Nachum ben Zion—born Nachum Unger, the poet. Nachum only bothered to mince words when he was dealing with people who might misinterpret them.

He said it (“Oh, colleague! You’re such a…”) at a round table on the patio of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem one night in the spring of 1965. I’d just learned of Eddie Whitling’s death in Saigon. Nachum’s wife—a sabra, by the way—was the only one who even rolled her eyes. Noah did blink before he chortled, but then Ruth rattled something off to him in rapid Hebrew and he started to laugh helplessly. Never did find out what she’d accused him of. Ehud Tabor, whom Hopsie and I knew from when he’d been Hopsie’s Israeli counterpart in Nagon, grinned at me and said, “They do come in handy. How’s Nan Finn these days?”

As for Cadwaller, he knew damned well he’d better be the quietest laugher. But he beamed over his pipe: “I’d never put it that way myself. But you’ll have to admit the shoe fits, dear.”

I’m sure Noah would’ve been disappointed but refused to judge had he known Nachum emigrated to the United States after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon: “Next year I’ll be seventy, colleague. At my age, you can’t help wanting to live in a country where ‘rockets’ red glare’ is a figure of speech.” Hired by some think tank, he used to show up on TV a lot when the Middle East was the topic. He died in 1995 in Passaic, oddly enough all of six blocks—not six million—from Noah Gerson’s childhood home.

Posted by: Pamorana

As for me, I might’ve stayed on in Los Angeles for decades, happily ogling girls in Newton-defying bathing suits and looking for the Great Unknown at parties, if Luz and Ava hadn’t decorated our home for the Gersons’ return. Coming into the den to see that forlornly tinseled, eternally Pam-sized Christmas tree next to Stella’s picture just about did me in. I moved on.

Though Noah didn’t even need to ask for me to send him his first wife’s photograph, I was touched when he wrote back requesting one of his second. He had a particular image in mind, a pensive shot of Mrs. Gerson in our old Beverly Hills garden. Being Noah, he hoped it wouldn’t be too much trouble for me to get him his own print of the picture of
Glory Be
’s author in
Vogue
.

Even though it cost me a marriage—and would it be a happy ending if I’d kept him unhappy? Sorry, I’m not that big a narcissist—I wouldn’t have missed seeing Israel in 1956 for the world. I wouldn’t presume to articulate what its existence back then meant to most Jews, much less “the” Jews. Nor am I the one to fathom what its existence must’ve meant and still does to most Egyptians, Palestinians, Syrians
,
and so on. I do know what it meant to some of us goyim, especially if we hailed from Los Angeles.

How could we not catch our breaths? Never mind Hollywood. Israel was the greatest movie any bunch of impatient Jews ever created, a cinematic masterwork. And it was real.

I know for fact that attitude used to drive a lot of Israelis nuts. Yet my second husband was not only, as he’d said, American, but a filmmaker. Even with Nachum ben Zion as his caustic best friend, eleven years of living there never knocked the awed Panavision out of him. Who are you to say it should have?
Aliyah.

Noah Gerson died in June ’67. He was shot through the head by a sniper just hours after the documentary unit under his command had photographed something not seen in two thousand years: Jews praying at the Wailing Wall. They were young Israeli paratroopers with slung Uzis, but they were there and so was Noah. The world gasped at those images of history resurrected on film.

The ben Zions sent me the picture printed in
Haaretz
and taken sometime earlier that day. Halfway out of a jeep, Noah’s wearing something he never did in Hollywood: sunglasses. His right hand, slightly blurred, is reaching for what may be a candy bar. His smile could part the Dead Sea.

You won’t understand, but I knew him. I can’t regret it happened when it did: I mean, before. Before too many displaced Arabs, too few Americans
,
and a good many Israelis, Nachum ben Zion sardonically in the forefront, started wrestling with the fact that history resurrected wasn’t history redeemed. Before the fulfillment of all his hopes my Noah filmed at what I know was the happiest moment of his life turned so sour.

Before the Panavision epic he loved and loved living in got degraded into an endless, relentless TV series, its production values unimproved by the abandonment of the early seasons’ rousing black and white for muddy, perplexing color and its travesty of
Hamlet
with any number of real corpses unresolved by the emergence in Israeli politics of any number of Gene Rickeys. (To Bibi or not to Bibi, that is the question.) Before Nachum ben Zion said the hell with it and ended up dying in New Jersey. Before even Noah would’ve had to face knowing his Israel had started down the gray road to becoming, as the United States has or must and even California may, just another country.

Yes, Ard: that’s just one more reason to stick with my new pal Pink in the landing craft. Too depressing to creep like anybody into a District theater to see
Marie Antoinette
in October, knowing that if I’d played my cards right I could’ve been at Cannes in May. Champagne with Kirsten before I paraded amid bigger, more golden bubbles of music up the red carpet on her perfumed arm—only, of course, because I’m so doddery and she’s as sweet as she is talented. Honestly, what else could it be?

Posted by: Pam

Beyond Paris and self-pity—and on the second count, I might as well have called the thing
Vainglory Be—
I can spot several reasons for Pam’s impulse to pop Marie Antoinette between hard covers. One: I’d turned thirty-seven, Antoinette’s age when she died. That had been on an October day probably not too unlike those I saw previewed in each wind’s flips of wet leaves on my walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, not far from the flat Pam had rented in the rue St. Sulpice.

Two: I was twice-divorced damaged goods, had good cause to think my female charms were themselves now
ancien régime
.
Remember, I’d just spent eight years in Hollywood. At thirty-five, actresses who fell short of beautiful started mud-wrestling for the chance to play Thelma, the heroine’s cranky old well-weathered maid.

Three. The most obvious cue shouted from every train schedule that included Brussels. At the age of thirty-seven, which I knew dead Daisy would be much happier to hear styled “the same age as Marie Antoinette” while leaving her daughter out of it, my mother’d put a gun in her mouth to play lollipow.

Never written, my Antoinette would have been my third book.
Had I done it right, however, it would’ve been the first by Daisy’s daughter. By now I felt I’d done enough living of my own to absorb that role without feeling swiftly exiled to tininess, oafish feet clumping on stairs and a gluey maternal disappointment cowling my every wail.

For one thing, I was old enough to understand Daisy’s chagrin was provoked not by what kind of daughter she had but the fact that she had one;
still
had one. A less thoughtless, more loving, less selfish child would’ve vanished along with the polo-dispatched proto-Potus who left her a widow and still smirks in scalloped photographs in the Paris footlocker.

After closing up what was left of my life in Los Angeles (discharging Luz and Ava was no fun: I might as well have had to tell them Gerson had died), then spending some meaningless months in New York—Pameata’s for-old-times’-sake fling with beflabbed Eddie Whitling still makes me shudder—I’d come to France with a very different program. When Cath Charters pressed me on
Glory Be
’s sequel, I’d looked at the cup from Rheims on her desk and started talking about Americans in Paris during the Revolution: Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, our envoys. Plus John Paul Jones, a favorite of mine long before I met his fellow sailor Cadwaller. As eager as my agent not to repeat the long drought between
Nothing
and
Glory
, I thought I was improvising.

As usual, I wasn’t. Having lost a husband to Israel, Pam was probably looking for her own other country. Besides, I had a notion of doing a whole cluster of histories that would depend on the Revolution for interest and point without ever confronting July 4 directly. I’d pay a circuitous tribute to Herman Melville’s profundity in a letter to Evert Duyckinck—“The Declaration of Independence makes a difference”—by never dealing head-on with the white whale staring every last one of my readers in the face.

What vanity I had then, bikini girl! I’m glad I gave up that scheme. To be honest, as a writer I think I’ve had a few innings. Still, your Gramela could never have sustained an approach that refractive for tale after tale, alluding obsessively to a heart of the matter I refused to call by name even once. I was probably seduced into thinking I could do anything by Cath’s green nails tapping the baptismal cup she still used for mint juleps.

Despite missing out on a Guggenheim as I’d missed out on the Pulitzer, I had enough
Glory Be
royalties to convince even a Frenchman I could sign a year’s lease.
La gloire américaine
was in bookstores by then, not that it did well in translation. No great surprise and, by my lights, a bit of a compliment.