Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (47 page)

Perhaps because this was India, where immunity to experience isn’t in the cards, she was much pleasanter company. I had a hard time of it all the same to keep from goggling when she started to talk eagerly about her oldest son’s Presidential prospects. Not only were we riding back to Delhi as roadside entertainers, hoping for a penny from the caravan, hiked dancing bears to their feet—the stick that gets them up on their hind legs is thrust through a ring in their noses—but I’d just recalled a day at Ouibomey when the Warren and Sawyer kids had been chasing each other around with toy six-guns, yelling
“Pan, Pan.”

I think it was after Ethel’s visit that Cadwaller looked up to see me drooping dramatically in the doorway of our private quarters at the Residence. Not Mrs. Kennedy’s fault, but it
had
been about my twentieth trip to Agra.

“How’d it go, dear?”

“Oh, Hopsie,” I groaned. “When you’ve seen one Taj Mahal, you’ve seen ’em all.” Not having seen it as often as I had, he chuckled.

To my disappointment, our tour didn’t overlap with that of Nan Finn, who came out to Delhi soon afterward in her hopeful, nervous new guise as a junior consular officer. After Ned’s too early death—proving what a crapshoot the whole thing is, neither cigarettes nor booze was to blame—Andy Pond had arranged to bring her into the Department, since the glorious girl had been part of our world too long for us to lose her. You’d better believe we took care of our own when we could.

More peculiarly, by the time I reached India and saw the Pink City, my old champion Celia Brady—then White, then Singh—had just left Jaipur for good. Once things went sour with her maharajah, she’d married an eccentric DNA researcher and moved to Scotland. That turned out to be among the few places Hopsie and I never got to during your great-grandfather’s final State Department job, in some ways his true calling all along.

In others, he was being put out to pasture and knew it. By then Kissinger was Secretary of State
en titre
as well as in influence, and Cadwaller spent a few months walking the halls—old-hand jargon for a senior officer without an assignment—before Henry punched his ticket: Director General of the Foreign Service. The Kissingerian diminution in that promotion was that he was cut out of policy, but Hopsie was the kind of man whose love of country, unlike his wife’s haywire version, was most fiercely projected through devotion to the one of its institutions that best expressed his idealism. The appointment was as popular within the Department as Kissinger himself wasn’t.

That’s when our greatest travels together took place. In Leningrad, not yet restored to its identity as St. Petersburg, I laid eyes at last on Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great, the surreally active protagonist of Pushkin’s great “The Bronze Horseman.” In Moscow, I surprised our guide—and given our official status, mildly nettled Cadwaller—by choking up at John Reed’s burial spot in the Kremlin’s wall.

I didn’t think he’d been anything but deluded. I’d still known a number of his co-delusionists, and it seemed right that one of them had made it to Churchill Downs. Bran was gone by then, but otherwise I might’ve broken our long silence by sending him a not wholly unaffectionate postcard.

I sent Jake Cohnstein one instead, but it wasn’t quite the same. I’m still glad we were in touch right up until Jake’s death just months before Hopsie’s; he was the same age I am now. The last time we saw each other, he introduced me to the much younger man who lived with him—a first.

We saw Asia, though naturally not Vietnam (drat!). Saw Central and South America, though naturally not Cuba (double drat). Saw Africa, though not the former Nagon: it was the time of
la Terreur P’Kapa
,
and Hopsie himself had given the order to withdraw all but our most essential personnel. So we never revisited the beach where he’d worn swim trunks and a top hat, but his favorite picture of
me
in later years was taken in Sydney, Australia. By a fluke of the breeze, the big bonnet I’m clutching to my gray mop simultaneously mimics and quarrels with the swoop of the opera house behind me.

Determined to be as hands-on as he could—monitoring resources and morale, reassuring himself that every Ambassador who was a political appointee had a good career DCM, learning where CIA or the Pentagon was playing hardball in the endless turf wars, taking care to meet every junior officer who’d been described as a thorn in people’s sides and often coming away as his advocate—Hopsie wanted to see every U.S. Embassy and mission worldwide. We didn’t fall far short of it. Some of our dearest friends during his too short retirement were people we’d met in Cairo or Manila for a week.

Trailing a step or two behind him and getting my first whiff of whatever the local climate’s cinders had just sparked, I watched my husband step forward at airport after airport, the remaining close-cropped hair around his ears now snow white and his pipe lit on landing, hand outthrust as he said “Cadwaller” to the young FSO sent to collect us. It was at those moments I most often decided he’d been too modest, no great surprise there, in front of St. Sulpice.

Panama, it isn’t only that other human impulses beside religion deserve commemorating in architecture more poetic than C Street aircraft carriers for paper planes. Nobody proved better than your great-grandfather—who’d have crinkled his eyes in amused dismay had I ever teased him with the notion—that other vocations earn the right to be called priesthoods. Especially dogged ones to which the world pays little heed unless you’re bad at them, something he never was. Of course he’d have said that the American St. Sulpice wasn’t C Street but a few pieces of faded eighteenth-century paper under glass in the Archives.

Hopsie’s retirement bash at the DACOR Bacon House on F Street would’ve been the greatest night of Nan Finn’s shutterbug career if the glorious girl hadn’t been interviewing visa applicants in New Delhi. Kennan only sent a telegram from Princeton, but Cadwaller’s earliest Department mentor was too well on in years to travel much by then and everyone else came: Nick Veliotes and his wonderful Pat, Brandon Grove. Even McIlvaine and his wife, and I was as happy as always to see her: Alice and I were the two tallest women in the world of the Foreign Service. Because Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, is a long way from Washington, Cadwaller himself was most touched when John Burns put in an appearance. Names unknown to you, known to too few, unmentioned until now even on daisysdaughter.com. But they were the best of the best in our lot’s glory days.

We had a few good years then, entertaining other District geezers for whom the State Department’s magic carpet now stood framed in bits and pieces on their walls. That’s when we got our weekend place outside Culpeper, Virginia, first seen by Pam in the
Nine-
teen
Fif
-ties when I was hoping to surprise Martha Shelton’s pregnant ghost around a corner of “Saltsbury.” Then Cadwaller’s long dying began.

He was diagnosed in late October of ’83. Both when alone and out in public, always our marriage’s version of
mens sano in corpore sano
,
we kept up not what you children call appearances but our life’s staunchest, most valued realities for another year or so. My husband’s Vietnam-era stint as head of Policy Planning had made him more expert than I’d ever be at finding real pleasure and intellectual stimulation in objective considerations of a situation for which no good outcome existed.

Even by 1985, however, he was too sick for me to ask if he wanted to come downstairs to watch Reagan’s State of the Union Speech. In former times, so much as imagining skipping it would have struck us as absurd no matter who was President. As it was, Pam felt selfish and guilty when she devoured the
WashPost
’s transcript of his callous
niaiseries
the next morning while Cadwaller still dozed after a restless night.

Your great-grandfather went into the ICU in early October of ’86, deliriously muttering about the idiocy of people who took rabbit’s feet on airplane trips. By mid-November, his pain was so awful that I realized at his bedside I’d only make it worse by chatting about the news, normally as nourishing to Hopsie as the glucose dripping from an IV into his now Cape Codified arm. He died late in the evening of November 25, 1986, and Andy Pond drove me home from Bethesda Naval Hospital for the last time soon before he left himself to take up his final post in Berlin.

Today my deepest regret, bikini girl, is that your great-grandfather never knew you. Because Cadwaller understood the difference between values and priggishness—the latter consisting entirely of the belief that anything
you
wouldn’t do is something no one else should do either—I think he’d have enjoyed your grandpa Chris’s picture of you last summer on the dunes near Provincetown’s Pilgrim Monument. As you stand with bare legs planted in surf and Goya-dark hair tumbling, a Spandex oyster footnotes your black T-shirt’s defiant and eternal
new york fuckin’ city
.

That’s about all I can manage for now. Though the bookshelves, neighborhood, and millennium are new, Cadwaller’s gun has been tucked not back into the Paris footlocker but its old post of honor behind
Glory Be
.
Andy is due any minute, bearing his dubious gifts on DVD of
The Gal I Left Behind Me
and—what was the other?—
Meet Pamela
,
a forgotten Franco-American romp chosen solely for its title. Those are always such fun to actually sit through, but I’m rather hoping that’s the one he chooses. I’ll have a better excuse to start snoring early.

Oh! If you’re wondering what’s going on, I should probably explain I’m now convinced Potus won’t call. In fact, I guarantee it.

That’s because he did around seven-fifteen. Oh, yes, the elephone rang. We spoke.

7:15 p.m., June 6, 2006: around when the first trucks went lumbering up the bluffs beyond Omaha. Around when that lone Spandau stopped hammering, probably done in by a grenade. Around when those dazed boys barnacled to the Vierville sea wall got done singing
“Happy birthday, Miss Buchanan—happy birthday to you.”
That’s when Eddie and I knew we had to say goodbye to this bloody beach and go inland.

Dear me, what sloppy habits I’ve gotten into on daisysdaughter.com! And me a writer, too. I should probably have mentioned Potus’s call earlier, shouldn’t I?

Posted by: A
C
ad
d
y

“Mrs. Cadwaller? This is the White House calling,” said a decorous but understandably brisk female voice. “Please hold for the President.”

I seized Cadwaller’s gun. “I’m here,” I pointlessly told limbo.

“Hello?” he said when he came on the line. “Caddy?”

“This is Mrs. Pamela Cadwaller,
yes.”

“Don’t they call you Caddy?” he asked pleasantly. “They ought to.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. President.” It was out before I knew it; I’d spent too many years as a diplomat’s wife. No, not enough of them, Hopsie!

“You know I asked my mom about you,” he confided. “Want to know what she said? ‘Why, George. I don’t recall you calling me on
my
last birthday.’ Heh, heh. I had to say, ‘Well, Mom, I had the Turkish Prime Minister in here and I had Tony Blair the day before. I had to work.’”

“Yes, I remember Mr. Blair’s visit.”

“Well, we get along. I like to tease him, you know: ‘How can you call yourself an Oxford man? You’re wearing a pink shirt.’ But once a Mom always a Mom, what I say. Isn’t that so, Caddy?”

“I guess so, Mr. President.” In my lap, the Rheumas curled around my ordnance.

“No guessing allowed! That’s our rule in this White House. You’ve got to be a mother yourself, I imagine.”

“I’m afraid not, Mr. President. Only a writer.”

“That’s right and I want to tell you, Caddy. The First Lady is a big admirer of, uh”—check your notes, Potus—“
The Gory Bee
.”

He may have thought I wrote children’s books. “Well, I know it’s no
The Pet Goat
,
Mr. Pres—”

But he hadn’t stopped talking. “I know you had one, though.” He meant mother. “They tell me she was somebody, too.”

“Everyone is, sir,” I said, which may have been the closest I came to succeeding at elephonic terrorism.

“Sorry, what’s that you say, Caddy?”

“Nothing, Mr. President. Just clearing my throat. Please excuse me.”

“Well, I’m glad we got this chance to talk. You know the Senator”—that would be dear Bob, of course—“must think awful highly of you. He came down here, showing everyone his gun.”

I had no idea what that meant. Don’t blame me if I felt stuck inside, immobile, with the Potus blues again.

“Mr. President,” I said and suddenly didn’t know what to accuse him of. Where would
you
have begun?

“Anyhow, Caddy. You keep well, you hear? Be careful blowing out those”—did he use index cards or a PC?—“eighty-six candles. We want you with us for a good long while yet. Well, good—”

“agh!”
I screamed. Shakily hoisting Cadwaller’s gun and putting its barrel to my temple, I pulled the trigger.

Posted by: A Failure

Mission accomplished? Plainly no. What’s Denmark
coming
to?

In Pam’s defense, my
“agh!”
—though no pistol shot at a concert—did rattle Potus somewhat. “Hey, Caddy! You all right there?” he said. (“I think she’s having a heart attack,” I heard him murmur swiftly to someone in the pause.)

“Oh, my! Dear me. Oh, sorry, Mr. President. Just a cat jumping in my lap. Kelquen, how you startled me.”

“You ought to try it with daughters,” he advised. “Anyhow, happy birthday again, old Caddy. Keep well. Anything at all we can do for you down here, just let us know.”

“Well, Mr. President, for Bob’s and my sake, you could try attending at least one soldier’s funer—” But he was already gone.

Once the line went dead and I realized Pam wasn’t, I gazed in a Lex Luthor stupor at Cadwaller’s gun, now relowered to my ancient snatch. Hopsie, what—?

Your dandy little gun, so handleable and light even in your eighty-six-year-old widow’s uncertain grip. Your nifty nickel-plated pistol, so near to weightless every time I’d hefted it since dawn. Your damned unloaded gun whose ammo clip Pam Buchanan, onetime ETO war correspondent, had never thought to check once I’d fetched it from the Paris footlocker.

I knew it was always loaded in your lifetime and I hadn’t touched it since. So who—? And when? And why?

“Heck of a job, Pammie,” I muttered, staring at a rug obstinately unspattered by pink and gray things. “Heck of a job.”

Then my fat-lunetted mimsies wandered to my Mac’s screen and the Rheumas feebly homepaged as I wondered if I could possibly eradicate
daisysdaughter.com
’s flood of posts from human memory. But my God! That little dialogue box I’d given up on must have been glowing for hours as my Mac docilely updated the numbers.

You have 18 comments pending
,
it read. When I tremblingly clicked on it, I saw that the first was a mildly sick joke. But I won’t deny it came from a shrewd reader.

Posted by: Dottie from Kansas