Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (27 page)

You didn’t look very different then, Andy. Forty-eight years ago, you had the same smile. It’s never stopped saying—well, mildly mentioning, to make it more active would misrepresent you—that a man who’s never known what he’s waiting for had better learn to take pleasure in breezes, interesting random events like the fall of the French Fourth Republic, bright ads on passing buses. Its private amusement makes me wonder at times how Ned Finn would have made out if he’d learned to accept all of himself without splitting it into Ned drunk and sober. For all I know, it makes Nan wonder too.

“Well! At least we know what’s off the table,” you said. “Would you like me to take you to—?”

“My God, Andy! No. I’ve got a piece due for
Regent’s
I can finally finish. I know you’ve got to get back to the office, but can you just give me the lowdown in the taxi home? It’s not far.”

Posted by: Pammie, Ram-Pam-Pam, Pamelle, and Pamita

All the same, I’d been married under six weeks when Cadwaller told me his son was arriving in Paris next Monday. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had to deal with anyone’s child for longer than an inept nod and coo.

On the first night, I’d only swapped a few words with a very tired kid before Cadwaller showed him his room. All we were to each other was images. If I say mine of him was an unfocused Polaroid and his of me was an Edvard Munch painting, believe me I’m not being vain. He was sixteen and I wasn’t.

I hadn’t caught on at all to what I was in for until the next morning. “Oh, no, Hopsie, no!” I begged, pleading as I never would’ve for him to keep me company on our wedding day. “Not the deep end of the pool.”

“Pam, if he does dislike you, my presence will only force him to hide it. Creating a whole other source of resentment, since confusion doesn’t have many outlets at that age. Anyhow, I’ve seen you swim.” We were alone. “You swim beautifully.”

A whole day with a teenage boy. Eve’s idea of heaven, to Addison’s laughter. Not mine. True, if Cadwaller’s child had been a sixteen-year-old daughter, I could be crooning all this on tape from a straitjacket.

“After six short weeks of marriage, not to mention seventeen long, wretched years of containing my deepest urges, I now had poor Christine Cadwaller in my vampiric power. Hungrily, I led her to the
Hôtel de Lille—
non, non, je ne peux pas vous le dire, Maigret! C’est trop affreux. Au secours!
”

What of it? As Addison said, we’re all creatures. Before the spell breaks when bikini girl—Panama!—scampers away, I’ve seen looks not enough unlike mine on her father’s face. Does that mean Tim’s a monster? Am I? As I’ve said already, in my generation it was all about conduct.

I had no idea what behavior of mine might be suited to Chris. Serious lad: jacket and tie at breakfast. Exeter drill, sign of respect to his father, notice to Pam that this wasn’t his home if I claimed it was mine? I was clueless. I must say his look at the croissants was choice.

Because worry needs something to focus on, I’d focused on weather. It had rained for three days, now it was only overcast. Oh, damn. Now it was
all
up to me.

We started down toward the Seine from the Opera Quarter. As unconventional as Cadwaller could be in private, to live on the
Left
Bank just wasn’t done. Unless you were too junior to matter, the French simply wouldn’t take you seriously.

I was wondering if I was supposed to hold the boy’s hand. “Chris, how is your mother?” That was desperate.

What a rare and wondrous lad you were, you roly-poly grandfather. Walking down the rue Gambon, which like all Paris you’d never seen, you formally drew yourself up: “Miss Bucha—Mrs. Cad—oh, well, Pamela. I hope you’ll understand, but I obviously can’t discuss my mother with you. It’s not on.”

I was too touched to laugh. Glimpse of Cadwaller’s youth, replete with some Exeter teacher’s phraseology. I hadn’t been fishing, since I knew all I needed to about Hopsie’s first wife. He’d never once voiced an
opinion
,
but when pressed would give me her Bartlett’s best-of. From bedroom to courthouse, the quotes hadn’t been pretty, and going by photographs, neither was Eileen Downslow. Nice enough horsewoman’s body, but that face I knew from Purcey’s. It hadn’t improved in adulthood.

“All right and I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to pry. Just make conversation.”

“If that’s all you want, tell me about yours.”

I didn’t stare long, since even then I knew Hopsie. He’d never have burdened or furnished his son with the fact that my mother’s final choice of perfume had been cordite: Browning No. 5.

If Eileen Downslow had seen fit to mention it before Chris boarded a trans-Atlantic plane, I’d have bitten her nipples off, but I doubted it. My society-page gleanings told me she was quite happy with her new husband’s millions, the more so as he didn’t get to Middleburg often. All Hopsie’s first wife ever really cost me was a White House invite in the Kennedy years—Jackie preferred her fellow equestrienne.

“Oh, Chris! Mine died a long time ago.” Since at his age all adults were Methuselah, he’d be unlikely to grasp that could mean I’d been younger then than he was now. “That’s really all there is to say.”

Not completely fair to a sixteen-year-old boy, but I think wholly reasonable. He was still right on the cusp when fair and reasonable are two different things.

“Here’s the Seine! What shall we do now?”

Wrong question. I was the adult: that didn’t make him child but jailbird. He just looked at me quizzically.

“I know! Let’s take a
bateau-mouche
.”

Believe it or not—and my guess is that only people who’ve lived in Paris for years will have no trouble doing so—I never had. Seen them plying the Seine every day, obviously: tourism’s latter-day landing craft, their serrated cargoes of open-air theatergoers attending to a microphoned Marianne. Still, the odds were starting to look good that Chris would appreciate Paris more the less it was Pammed all to hell for him. The more microphonic the better, any substitute mother would do. Barge’s flat hull and threshing engine a substitute Cadwaller.

Bought our tickets, took our seats. Chris glanced around, neatly combed. Young or old, nobody else here was in a jacket and tie, gray pants, and polished penny loafers. Even the schoolchildren who’d just flashed by to gobble three rows were in shorts and sticky thin shirts. The pleasantly bicameral American couple behind us looked more than capable of leading my wordless ward back to our Embassy if I threw myself overboard. The engine’s threshing would finish the job.

It was so long ago that American tourists were a huge improvement on American businessmen. Panama, you’ll never understand your great-grandfather’s world—or Ned and Nan Finn’s, or Andy’s, or mine—until you grasp how baffled we were when some otherwise reasonable compatriot of ours would turn out to be here to make money.

Came Chris’s first confidence: “I like boats.” It was followed by the first twitch of a smile quickly withdrawn, accompanied by the first Cadwallerish nauticalism. “Of course you can hardly call this thing one.”

Did I put my foot in it? Oh, hell, what else was Pam here for? Hopsie, you might have given me a
bit
more to work with. Hobbies, whatever.

“More than horses?” I said.

He looked at me with a schoolmaster’s pain. Had I not understood what wasn’t on the curriculum, barred from the syllabus? “It’s really a false dichotomy, don’t you think?”

“They teach big words at Exeter.”

Oh,
good
volley! It’s a wonder you aren’t at Wimbledon, Pam. Also a cause of profound regret to the both of us right now.

“Words aren’t big or small,” Chris said impatiently. “They’re either the right size or the wrong size. Dad said you were a writer.”

Believe me, that was no invitation to start chatting about my near Pulitzer miss for
Glory Be
.
Not when I could hear him saying, “I like books. Of course you could hardly call that thing one.”

We lumbered out into midstream. Started chugging upriver past the
Île de la Cité
with godawful slowness. Our microphoned Marianne started her lecture.

“À votre droite, mesdames et messieurs, voici la Conciergerie. C ‘est ici qu’enfermée dans un cachot, la reine Marie Antoinette a passé les derniers mois de sa brève vie. Elle n’avait que trente-sept ans quand elle est montée à l’échafaud.”

Tap-tap-tap. “Heuh! La’ies and gentlemen, on your right is the Conciergerie. Here Queen Marie Antoinette was imprisoned in the final months of her life. Her age was just thirty-seven when she walked up to the guillotine.”

Of course I knew it all blindfolded, had since Ram-Pam-Pam’s childhood. That was why Eddie Whitling had barked in my ear: “Never mind the tourist spiel, Pamita. She’s dead, okay? End of story. Screw your schooldays. Get us back to the
Préfecture
, for Christ’s sake! De Gaulle’s probably there by now.”

My GI shoe was propped on our jeep’s dashboard. I was Lucky Struck under a cunt cap. Waving the match out, I started laughing: “In this mess? Eddie, if you knew French drivers, you’d know French
tank
drivers are not to be fucked with. Nooo! No more champagne for
you
,
Jacquot! My God, Eddie, look at them! Just look at them. Christ, are we going to have to go all the way down to the Île Saint-Louis to get there?”

“Et maintenant, à notre droite, l’Hôtel de ville. Brûlé à l’époque de la Commune en 1871, reconstruit peu après. C’est ici que le 24 août 1944, au soir, sont arrivés les premier chars libérateurs de la Deuxième D.B. du Général Leclerc.”

Tap-tap. “Heuh! On our right, the H
ô
tel de Ville, the mayoralty of Paris. It was burned in Eigh’een Seven One during the Commune, but soon afterward rebuilt. Late in the evening of August Twen’-Four, Nine’een Fort-Four, here arrived the very first tanks of General Leclerc to liberate Paris.”

Even at midday on August Twen’-Five, Nine’een Fort-Four, Captain Dronne still looked exhausted. Bearded, diesel-soiled, the usual oddly soft pallor around red-rimmed eyes where his goggles had been. In the summer of 1944, I was always distracted by the French Second Armored Division’s abbreviation to “
2ième D.B.”
Couldn’t help reading it as “the second Daisy Buchanan,” which unlike the first had gotten to Paris.

As they say, Paris is worth a mess. “Pamita! Ask Dronne how many tanks in the recon unit.”

“
Mon capitaine, combien de chars aviez-vous?…
Just those three over there, Eddie. And half a dozen halftracks.”

Montmirail
,
Romilly
,
Champeaubert
. Beating Callie and Cy by a number of years, those were the names of the first three Shermans in Paris. Speaking of Callie, I liked the slogan painted on Dronne’s jeep:
Mort aux cons.
The tanks and their crews were stinking with diesel, cordite, and Normandy too, not that the Parisians flocking around them cared.

“Three? This city was still crawling with Krauts last night. What in hell was he, a canary in a coal mine?”

“
Mon capitaine, s’il vous plait…
Eddie, he says his orders were to get
here. He doesn’t recall any discussions of his prospects or fate once he did…
Pardon, mon capitaine?
Eddie, he’d like us to join him in a glass of wine.”

“You sure he didn’t say a barrel? Whoof! Don’t translate that part.”

Our
bateau-mouche
was turning the corner at the tip of the
Île Saint-Louis
. Backing, engines threshing, clumsily maneuvering.

“Et maintenant, droit devant nous, vous pouvez voir la Tour d’Argent qui est un des restaurants les plus célèbres de Paris depuis la Belle époque. Le monde entier de la gastronomie connaît le fameux caneton.”

Tap-tap-tap. “And here in front of us as we turn we can see the
Tour d’Argent
, the most famous restaurant in Paris. The whole world of digestion knows the pressed duck from the, uh—
oh, merde, quoi! Oh, pardon
—
the Beautiful Time.”

It was the hardest one yet. And just when I thought I was getting used to this time-machine Shinola, too.

“Oh, Georges—it’s our last day,” said my mother. Eleven months from switching her cosmetic allegiance from Jean Patou to Browning No. 5, she was a puffy oversized pastry on a pink hotel bed. “I think we should take Pammie somewhere special for lunch. What about the, uh—the Tour Doesn’t?”

“Ah, non, Day-zee. C’est beaucoup trop cher.”
Georges Flagon, who incidentally could have afforded it easily, waved a budget-minding finger.
“Et puis tu sais bien que ton mari n’aime pas beaucoup devoir monter un tas de marches. Pas vrai, Pamelle?”

Here it came. Oh, Panama! This was me at twelve:

“Yes. And
even
if it weren’t
expensive
,
Mother—and
even
if you’d remembered Georges has trouble getting up
stairs
,
Mother!—it would still be just too
corny
,
Mother.
La Tour d’Argent! Mon Dieu, comme je m’amuse! Tu te rends ridicule, mère! Et tu ne vois même pas que je te le dis à ta gueule, mère”
—
fingersnap—
“parce que tu ne comprends pas le français quand on parle vite. Mère.”

[If you must know, and I suppose you must: “The Tower of Silver! My God, how I’m laughing! How ridiculous you are, Mother, and you don’t even know I’m saying so right to your pie-hole, Mother”—
claquement des doigts—
“because you don’t understand French when it’s spoken fast. Mother.” Oh, Panama. Panama, Panama, Panama.]

I expect the fingersnap was what did it for Georges.
“Ah, non, Pamelle! Ne parle pas comme ça, hein? D’accord.”

The fluttering eyelids in the fat and sickening destroyed beauty of her face. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Have you and Georges agreed on another place we could go? Honestly, it doesn’t matter to me! I was just trying to please you, Pammie—and I’m awfully hungry.”

“Et à notre droite, mesdames et messieurs, vous avez Notre-Dame.”
Tap-tap. “La’ies and gentlemen, we are of course now looking up at Notre Dame.”

“We made it! Hey, you guys. I think we’re here. Ain’t that the Perfecktour across the way? I know I’m sayin’ it all wrong, Miss Buchanan.”

“Hell, no, you aren’t, Luke. The perfect tour sounds right to me. Just scoot us in as close as you can, willya?”

Six days they’d held that building across the
parvis
from Notre Dame as the insurrection flickered and flared and the Allied commands wrangled before sending the Second Daisy Buchanan and our own Fourth Infantry in. Its walls were bullet-starred and smoke-scorched. Why the Germans hadn’t just blown the Préfecture de Police to hell Warsaw-style when they still had tanks and artillery and ours hadn’t reached the city is something I’ll never know.

“Jesus,” our driver gibbered in a very different tone from the way he was to say it eight months later when we came upon the death train. A heavyset redhead in a bursting sweater had just mushroomed in his lap and kissed him, and she didn’t look as if she had plans to move on.

“Come on, Eddie. Let’s let him make time with her! We’ll never get through this on four wheels anyhow. God, I bet the Parisians don’t know whether to shit or go blind. They’ve hated the
flics
for centuries. Now the cops are the heroes of the insurrection.”

“Don’t lose me, Pamita, I’ll drown in frogs. Say, what kind of country puts its goddam police headquarters opposite its cathedral?”

“All of them, Eddie, don’t you know that? Just in different ways and sometimes you can’t even tell which is which.”

Burnt-out
camions
in the courtyard with FFI markings. The building’s defenders were eager for cigarettes. The soldiers who’d liberated it were eager for wine, but it had all been poured out six days earlier to free up the bottles for Molotov cocktails. Some crazed Wehrmacht captives were looking around as if trying to guess who would protect them from whom.