Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (28 page)

Came Pam’s first Paris
collaboratrice
,
her head shaved and stripped to a lumpily unsexy slip already moist with her fellow Frenchmen’s saliva. A swastika crudely daubed backwards—four years of this, and they
still
didn’t know the alignment?—over her firmly closed eyes, her hips still metronomically brisk from pure Parisienne habit as she was shoved through the courtyard. Don’t know if they’d decided she’d had about enough or wanted someplace more private to get started in earnest.

Does it sound like a movie to you? Just too corny, to coin a phrase? But I saw it, I saw it: the white stars on our Shermans, the bright summer haze stamping everything with instant eternity. The oceanic crowds, the flags and the flowers as more halftracks and jeeps became islands of GIs crushed under Parisiennes and someone called out that von Choltitz had signed the surrender. On a balcony, a small girl was baffled by why she’d been jammed into last year’s Communion dress to watch a circus hit town. Hoping for a smile, I sailed my cunt cap around like a lasso, but she was looking for someone to make sense of it all and I wasn’t much help. I saw it, I saw it, I saw it.

“Eddie! This one
mec
wants to know if
we
know when de Gaulle’s getting here.”

“Ain’t that grand? Four years of waiting for us, then it’s
merci
and boom and back to waiting for
him
.
What are we, chopped liver? Ah, fuck you.”

“Mon copain vient de vous dire qu’il pense que le Général de Gaulle arrivera bientôt.”

“I, uh, speak some English. Please tell your friend that refusing his invitation to copulate does not mean we think a brief cry of
‘
Vive l’Amérique’
would be inappropriate.”

“
Et voici le Louvre.
La’ies and gentlemen”—tap-tap—
“le Louvre.”

Massive stairwells, tiny but endlessly multiplied clatter of shoes. In my blue coat and bobbing jonquil hat, I was ten years old, nine years old, eight:
“Ram-Pam-Pam! Eh, Pamelle. Eh, euh—l’Américaine! Bouscule pas, garde ton cul. Eh, Madeleine! Vas dire à Chignonne et Cassandre que nous autres, on n’en a rien à foutre de la Joconde. Mon sourire à moi est vachement mieux. Tiens, prends ça!”

“Et là—toujours le Louvre.”
Scripted joke. “It does go on for a bit.”

That was when this part of the Louvre began to look different from not only the previous part of the Louvre but the rest of Paris. We only understood why when first the previous part of the Louvre and then the rest of Paris began to look more like it instead. Our microphoned Marianne squinted skyward.

“Ah! Enfin un peu de soleil. On a eu bien de la chance qu’il ne pleuve pas!”
As weather reports weren’t part of her script, she mentally groped before saying, “We are lucky for the sun.
Et maintenant, à votre gauche, l’église américaine de Paris, la première église américaine construite à l’étranger.
La’ies and gentlemen, on our left, the American Church of Paris. This was the first church constructed by Americans in a country not their own.
Oh, mais madame! Madame. Merde! Pardon, le micro. Qu’avez-vous, madame? Qu’y a-t-il, enfin?”

“Miss Bucha, Mrs. Cad—Pamela. Are you okay?”

“Sorry, Chris, sorry. Yes, it’s all right.
Ce n’est rien, mademoiselle. Mille pardons. Ça va.
”

Engines backing, engines threshing: as we docked, all this somehow made it more vivid than the trip had that we’d been on a river the whole time. Back on land, I decided directness might be what Cadwaller would advise.

And I’d outlived her.

“Chris, how old do you think I am?” I asked as we walked.

Not only did that catch him off guard, he was still young enough to feel obliged to stop and study me physically before framing his answer. “I don’t know. Old enough for Dad, I guess. Say, was that the church where you—”

“I’m thirty-eight. Yes, it was. And I wish you liked me better.”

Astonishing me—even your grandpa admitted he wouldn’t have done it if he’d been a year older—he took my hand. “Oh, but I do now,” Chris said very seriously. “I didn’t know grownups cried.”

Posted by: Pam

Chris’s stepmom got the worst reviews of her not wholly unspittled life when my third book came out in 1968. Yet my look at three ages of Paris, three ages of Americans in Paris and three ages of myself in Paris is still my own favorite among the blinking, huh-durn-near-forgot-our-manners trio you’ll meet if you search for books
by Pamela Buchanan
online. It also has my favorite among my titles, and God love the faulty English of Paris’s
bateau-mouche
Mariannes. Even as I sat bawling my brains out next to a concerned young Chris Cadwaller, Pam’s authorial instinct was laying burglar’s hands on
Lucky for the Sun
.

After the me-me-me of
Nothing Like a Dame
and then the ruthlessly I-omitting
Glory Be
(Pam’s self-equation with Martha Shelton was a secret I took to her grave), I found a new bridge between the two. One reason I like the book is that I like myself in it. On most of its pages, I sound like a fairly lively, likable—sane!—human being.

I don’t think it was all imposture, though of course some of it was; I’m a writer. Despite everything else going on in 1966 and ’67, writing
Lucky
made me happy as neither
Nothing
nor
Glory
had. I even got in touch with
La Tour d’Argent
to ask if I could include their recipe for
caneton
as an appendix. I thought the gesture might give special pleasure to at least two readers—one all but guaranteed, as Chris was sent the first copy, the other conjectural but fondly imagined a full quarter century after Pearl Harbor.

Blame the slow grind of the publishing mill for the drubbing I got. One welcome exception was a belated rave from my never met champion Celia Brady (White, Singh) in Jaipur’s
Pink Courier
, a name that prompted a blink or two. I didn’t yet know the Pink City is Jaipur’s nickname. Still, I doubt praise from a maharajah’s wife would’ve cut much ice with my Stateside critics.

Even I could see that whatever the ideal season might be for a book like
Lucky for the Sun
, the spring of 1968 wasn’t that season. It reached stores midway between the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, and you’d better believe most copies just sat there until remaindering put them out of my if not Simon and Schuster’s misery. Aside from
Lucky
’s brioche not being in huge demand, it was obvious its author had led a fairly privileged life—once again, duh! as you children say—and by the late Sixties people like that were being measured for rhetorical tumbrils.

Even though Hopsie had only needed to hear the first minute of Chris’s talk about the
caneton
to understand that he was really praising his new stepmother and it was all right, the big lunch with my sixteen-year-old stepson I used as my penultimate set-piece came in for special abuse. Maybe that was unavoidable. Other than a passing remark that it was the first time either of us had eaten at
La Tour d’Argent
, sharing my private motivation for taking him would’ve upset the book’s tone.

Owing to a similar reticence, my dedication—“To the memory of Marie Antoinette and la première D.B.”—got smacked around everywhere from the Salt Lake City
Pillar
to the Chickamauga
Post
.
Above all, my epigraph from Talleyrand got cited as proof of my political insensibility and obliviousness to
the crisis we all faced. On
Lucky
’s pathetic book tour, whose only silver lining was getting to see Nick Carraway in the Davenport hospital one last time before he died, I never quite figured out how to explain to hostile under-thirty interviewers that one could know how sweet life had been and still be
for
the Revolution.

To whatever extent a middle-aged white woman writing checks from her Georgetown home to Gene McCarthy’s Presidential campaign could be considered the equivalent of one of the Commune’s
pétroleuses
,
I was. Not one bloody critic noticed that Pam ended her description of visiting the
Mur des Fédérés at Père Lachaise
with a superficially valedictory, sneakily prescriptive
“Vive la Commune.”

It was my recognition that the world was changing in a way I applauded but whose cost to things I cherished I knew I’d regret that had gotten me started on
Lucky
to begin with. Not wholly unlike, so I speculated, Talleyrand himself, I thought one could mourn the soap bubbles tossed up by a bygone era’s values without either advocating those values or failing to support the need for new ones to replace them. I still wish I could remember the full name of the émigré who brought me to the costume party for Lady Diana.

I call an ability to do both at once the true mark of civilization. The minds capable of doing only one or the other on either side of the Sixties divide struck me as equally pigheaded, equally smug. That’s why I used to turn even Cadwaller’s pipe upside down when I’d rant about campus protesters desecrating libraries and so forth, then stomp upstairs to write another fat check to the McCarthy campaign. Tim, isn’t there some aphorism that would explain what I mean about believing in and acting on two contradictory ideas at once?

As my book came out in the States, Paris was being taken over by barricades and street battles for the first time since its liberation from the Nazis. Back in their customary role of truncheoned proof that there’s no thug like a uniformed one, the once again hated
flics
were firing tear gas and advancing on student demonstrators who, while providing one inverse example after another of the forgotten wonders of shampoo, threw prised-up paving stones back and retired to the next barricade. The
Tour d’Argent
was wreathed in green and gray police smog.

It went on for weeks, looking worse even on TV than the aftermath of the Stavisky riot Ram-Pam-Pam had glimpsed thirty-four years earlier on my way to the
Gare du Nord
after my mother’s death. When it ended, something’s back had been broken, and I’m not sure anything ever grew to replace it. What neither side knew was that they were brawling over who won bragging rights in France’s last command performance on the world stage.

Cadwaller’s feelings were mixed at the time. He knew de Gaulle had to go, had set aside private fascination for professional antagonism ever since
Le Général
had pulled France out of NATO. Incidentally forcing its headquarters’ relocation from Paris to—where else, mother mine?—Brussels. Yet Hopsie loathed chaos, passionately believed in dispassionate discussion. He’d already made his only exception to that rule, and she was the one arguing with him.

He was also personally alarmed, as was I, when we realized Chris and Renée must be in the thick of it. We didn’t hear from them for weeks, but their stories were as inevitable as the way Nan Finn’s giggle follows her nose’s upward toss. Depositing Tim with a friend, Renée had calmly plodded off to volunteer in the improvised infirmary set up by the students inside the Sorbonne once they realized the
flics
were checking all the hospitals after every street battle. As for Chris, trained by his father to recognize that a U.S. passport was a responsibility as well as a privilege, he knew he couldn’t join the demonstrators. Instead he took the best photographs of his life. They were later published by Kaylie & Gallagher as
May or Mayn’t
, the book that interested Amherst in hiring him.

When Cadwaller got done leafing through it the next year, he set aside his pipe and looked at his son thoughtfully. Behind us on the self-same rug I’m planning to splatter with a mess of pink and gray things come Potus or sundown, Renée was leafing through
The Golden Book of the American Revolution
for seven-year-old Timmy’s benefit, clucking here and humming there to teach him how a woman would interpret it.

“Well, Chris,” Hopsie said. “You’ll never convince me all this was any sensible way of getting what they wanted done, done. I abominate it! I don’t despise it, but I do abominate it. But you did convince me it had one thing she’s taught me to revere. No matter the setting, the season, the reason, the anything.”

“What, Dad?”

“Beauty.” Soon after Cadwaller’s long dying ended, Chris told me that was the compliment from his father he’d prized most. Since he was knocking away tears and the morality of all confessions, large or small, is their timing, I waited a few years to tell him it had also been mine.

Sometime in the long afternoon of crowded gabble that followed Hopsie’s burial, placid and nonliterary Renée surprised me by volunteering to try translating
Lucky for the Sun
into French. Touched as I was, my favorite of
by Pamela Buchanan
’s books was an eighteen-year-old flop by then and I seriously doubted—what with the raw feelings stirred by everything from Reagan’s visit to Bitburg and the placement of Pershing missiles in Europe to our then current peccadilloes in Central America—that too many Frenchmen were baying for an elderly
Américaine
’s elderly book about our share of their capital.

I also knew it was a gesture to her father-in-law, not me. Before I could find the right way of showing how touched I was while letting her off the hook, she saw she had to attend to Tim. He was twenty-four when she spotted him tearing up over his grandfather in our Georgetown kitchen, and imagining the lifelong effect of all those Olympic hula hoops and spheres rubbing and saying
“Ah, chéri”
left me awed for neither the first nor last time at Panama’s dad’s sexual sanity. But I digress.

Back in 1968, everyone who didn’t scoff at
Lucky for the Sun
’s epigraph slammed me instead for its closing sentence, and a few greedy reviewers did both. It was taken as more narcissism, but I meant it as a reproach, a regret, a commemoration: a memory, in short. When I think of how much more painful a reproach, regret, and commemoration it’s become in Potusville’s day, I could bawl more loudly than I did on the
bateau-mouche
almost half a century ago.