Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (50 page)

What was it? Why, Dottie Idell’s obituary, of course. I did keep saying “recently,” didn’t I?

Posted by: I’ll Be Pammed

Sorry again, daisysdaughter.com readers. I’ve just realized I never did get around to wrapping up my conversation with Andy Pond about me being a lesbian. No doubt you could script Pam’s next line yourself:

“Cadwaller?”
I repeated with some consternation.

“Oh, sure,” Andy said. “Some days in Paris, he’d come into my office if you were meeting him, pop his pipe out, and say, ‘Where’s that big dyke wife of mine gotten to? Do you know, Andy?’ with the happiest grin on his face. But never in front of someone who might take it the wrong way, of course.”

“Then he was joking.”

“Oh, Pam! I don’t know how many times when we three were out somewhere we’d both catch you eyeing the girls through the window or getting all flustered if the waitress was pretty. He’d look at me, I’d look at him, and we’d smile. He wasn’t a winker, though—hated that kind of redundancy and knew the difference between affection and insult. So did I.”

“But then why,” I stammered idiotically, wringing Pam’s third and last wedding band on my left Rheuma Three, “if Hopsie thought so all along—”

“He was Cadwaller. A man who’d spent his career counseling people against thinking in categories,” Andy reminded me. “You could say he had ‘a certain idea of Pam.’ He loved you and he knew you adored him. He knew all that was a longing, not an imperative. He knew you’d never do anything about it.”

“And I didn’t.”

“I know, but come on. At some level you must’ve realized he was tolerant instead of oblivious. The day you dropped your oyster fork at La Coupole, the look on your face when our little Brigitte knelt down was so lovely that we both had to fight not to start laughing like two Yuletide revelers.”

“He never once hinted he knew,” I marveled. “Even in private, when we talked about everything. Not once in twenty-eight years.”

“Of course not,” said Andy. “You’d have been devastated, and then—what next? Not Cadwaller’s way, Pam. He liked having a what next well in hand.”

“Yes, he did,” I said and we looked at his bulletless gun. Then a fresh panic welled, cued by I knew not what: “Andy, you said lots of people! Does
Nan—
”

“Dear Lord, no,” he laughed. “You know our glorious girl. I guarantee she’d never wonder or guess in a century,” which relieved me immensely. I couldn’t have faced her next Christmas party otherwise.

“Listen, this is so wonderful,” Andy went on. “You know Nan’s been crazy for Sondheim for years. But I swear just last month she suddenly blurted, ‘And what’s funny is I don’t know
anything
about his personal life. Andy, do you? Marriages, children, divorces?’ We’re just lucky she did visas, not Army recruitment centers.”

“Or unlucky.” My sharp tone was only a baby step, Panama. But mine own.

“Or unlucky,” he agreed. Then his face took on the look of compassion I’d found unforgivable when I saw it on Gerson’s, but up to then Noah had been a husband and not an old friend. “Pam, if you don’t mind me asking—did you ever do anything about it? Not during Cadwaller. Even once in your whole blessed life?”

“If you must know, just once. A very long time ago. And I can’t say
I did
,
only that I was there. She was braver. And now if you don’t mind, Andy, can you let yourself out? You’ve been very kind, but I’ve had a rough day. Didn’t sleep much at all.”

Posted by: Alfred
J
. Pamfrock

She was Dorothy Idell on our Bank Street lease, Dottie Crozdetti to fans of her roistering laugh and way with a chicken on
The Good Life…
many years later. She was, uneuphoniously, “Dottie I. Crozdetti” in the headline of yesterday’s obit, suggesting some excessive minding of p’s and q’s. But in my arms, she was always—oh, good God, what am I quoting? While I rue Pam’s cowardice, which I’ve broadcast quite some time ago was splendid, I hardly think I in any way was Dottie’s monster.

She may’ve been the love of my life. Or perhaps I mean could’ve been, but what I won’t say is
was
.
Not only do I mistrust
love of my life
as a category—how can we be positive until we’ve laid eyes on the last stranger we’ll meet?—but I don’t see how it has much meaning when it’s not acted on. And obviously, Panama, if anyone does fit the bill in the life I did have, it was your great-grandfather.

But for a few precious months of 1940 and ’41, in our little nook of West Village bliss, she was so lovely and I loved her so: my Dottie, my Dottie, my Dottie Idell. And I loved her dotties and I loved her idell. Lovers’ talk, dating to when few people knew where Pearl Harbor was! No doubt she didn’t mean to be prescient when with a grin, elbow to saucily nippled pillow and bare hip a crescent of down playing dawn, she laid a finger on my nose and named me Pamique.

I made just one contribution to
The Good Life with Dottie Crozdetti
.
In Bank Street days, as I’ve mentioned, she was still caught between cooking and acting, a choice no one could’ve guessed she’d solve by combining them in a medium then embryonic. As I think I’ve also mentioned, she loved giving burlesque poetry recitals in our apartment, and one sweet afternoon (how I lived to win my Dottie’s glee, when she’d flash her small teeth with delight and toss up her sunset-colored hair!) I taught her Sinclair St. Clair’s old Provincetown jingle. When I watched her recite it in triumph on television half a century later—it was her farewell show, meaning she’d saved it up—I burst into tears. Except for a beaming “You heard me. Now good luck to you all!,” the last words spoken by Dottie Crozdetti on her old TV show were ones daisysdaughter.com readers well know:

To eat an oyster

You crack it foister.

This part is moister!

Oh, drat—I loyst her.

And it was a poem that ended it; it was a poem that triggered Pam’s fear. Oh, Dottie! We could’ve had weeks, months, a whole Bank Street year more together. Why did you have to turn on one heel in my oversized shoe, arms raised, and gloriously starkers with our windowed June at your back, just as you hit that point of “Dover Beach”—the first line and a half of its final stanza, if anyone out there is reaching for Bartlett’s
—
and your eyes and your dotties and your lovely blonde idell all stared in Pamique’s just-turned-twenty-one face? That evening was when Brannigan Murphy crashed through the commode door at the Commodore, two Pulitzer Prizes to the wind.

And oh. Are you out there, Miss Dunst? If so, please forgive me. I don’t know if the comment from “Crazy/Beautiful” came from you or some cybermasked prankster, but I do hope you were charmed.

I do think you’re a wonderful actress, Miss Dunst. But dear God, oh, God—the
resemblance!
Face, voice, manner, and all. Everything, everything, unless loving me counts. When I first blinked at you, never once having heard of you—not in one of your movies, but on TV red-carpeting it at some awards show—I thought I’d gone out of my mind and then that I wished so. Wept, stroked puzzled Kelquen an hour. Then Andy Pond, who I now realize had more than an inkling we weren’t just movie fans but still can’t have guessed the whole truth, became my tolerant escort at film after film where we were sixty or seventy years older than most.

If you care, the one in which you most resemble her is, of course,
Bring It On
.
Fans of
The Good Life with…
don’t suspect not only because Dottie’s show had been off the air for some years before you began acting but because Dottie was past fifty, hearty, and as big as a barrel by the time it premiered.

Miss Dunst, perhaps now you can see why the prospect of seeing you as Marie Antoinette first bewitched and then terrorized me yesterday. For the gallant girl who so closely resembles my Dottie—my Dottie, my Dottie, my Dottie Idell—to play the queen I most equate with Daisy Buchanan was too much crossed circuitry for one old bag to bear. Now that I think of it,
daisysdaughter.com
may owe Lady Antonia Fraser a mild apology too.

Dottie was three years my senior, which I agree ought to’ve made seeing her
WashPost
obituary painful but highly unremarkable. At my age, so many contemporaries have shuffled off to that big Buffalo in the sky that even the dearest don’t rate much more than a twinge of affection for our days flying Clio together. Even Bill M.’s adios didn’t tempt me to say the hell with it and end the whole shebang, and my District was Potusville by then. It may strike you as preposterous that even my old Bank Street lover’s obit could drive me to Lindberghize cyberspace with Cadwaller’s gun in my lap.

True. But what I couldn’t understand was why someone would murder her: my Dottie, my Dottie, my Dottie Idell. I couldn’t imagine a housebreaker vicious or panicked enough to shoot a woman that old as she and her walker shuffled out of her kitchen—my Dottie, my Dottie, my Dottie Idell.

The obituary was in the Metro section, but the box was on Page A1: “Host Slain.” When I lifted the gun out of the Paris footlocker, what overcame seven decades of dread that I’d end up making a “Like mother, like daughter” exit was Pam’s thought that my Dottie and I would at least both die by violence.

Anyhow, once I’d got done rereading the obit today—not much on Crozdetti except that he’d been a French-born banker, unless that “n” was a typo, and had long predeceased her, giving me a pang I soon stifled at our lost merry widowhood in a small house in Provence or Providence—I slid out the full page (four in all, really: newsprint seagull-wings fluttered) of the Metro section that included it to refold and then place in the Paris footlocker. Then I opened the footlocker and set Dottie Idell next to Cadwaller’s gun.

Before I closed the lid, though, I realized I had two more mementos I ought to make amends or just understanding’s belated concession to. Fishing past Dottie’s obit and Hopsie’s last gift to me—life—the Rheumas found and withdrew two old velvet cases. For the first time in six decades (Paris, 1944, briefly), I opened them and took out the two syringes inside.

Gold and silver, silver and gold! You can get Daisy Buchanan addicted to morphine, but you can’t make her stop being Daisy Buchanan. The gold one a gift from her to the Lotus Eater, coyly inscribed
Give me your answer do
by some patient, devoted, bribable jeweler.

From her to the Lotus Eater? Oh, hell yes. One thing a child’s photographing eyes very seldom get wrong is colors, particularly those featured in fairy tales. Roseately glowing, the gold one had been in the L.E.’s soft paw when that fabled bathroom door creaked open in Provincetown. Knowing my mother, swapping works wouldn’t have been Daisy’s thing. Too inelegant.

In a tiny casket I’d dropped deep down a well and made haste to cover with all manner of rubbish, I’d always secreted the knowledge that my mother had been wooer, not prey. On the beach that night in 1927, she’d gaily said “Lech” in order to sexualize the instantly sulky L.E.’s quite mild comment about the actress in the movie we’d seen. The L.E. had fled Provincetown the next day because Daisy was getting as obsessively proprietary as her own bootlegger suitor had been in the year of the Scandal. If you thought my narration was, as they say, reliable, congratulations: you got fooled by a traumatized seven-year-old.

My guess is the Lotus Eater was only in it for the morphine. When I came upon her having sex behind a dune with the wristwatched man Pink Thing needed many years to concede was probably the young Brannigan Murphy—Jesus, you did get
that
, didn’t you?—her eyes were hoping that what Pammie knew would provoke a rupture. But I’ll never know whether my mother’s passion in widowhood to get her dazzling gold Daisy-head between the L.E.’s thighs was an individual case, as Cadwaller would put it, or the lifelong and generic yearning it had been for her daughter. Certainly in Belgium she hadn’t shown tendencies. Just got fat, moody, depressed, and then suicidal, despite the best efforts of a Swiss sanatorium.

In that same tiny casket was the secret that, other than suicide, turning greedily, insanely, lickingly, ceiling-kickingly, joyously lesbian was the “Like mother, like daughter” I’d most feared and quaked at all my life. Only Dottie won out because she was Dottie, even if Celia Brady—assuming that comment too wasn’t a cybermasked joker’s—came awfully close one day at Malibu. My cruelty to Hormel was in taunting her after that poor woman’s sheer unattractiveness had made her too bloody easy to dismiss as a freak.

As for me, don’t you see I was too strange already? With both parents dead by inordinate means, the Scandal still fresh, my European schooling, my impov
erished bust, and my five foot ten? Even between L.E. thighs, my mother’s gold head was at least pert and comely. She was Daisy Buchanan, lovely and rich enough to make her own rules. But her ungainly daughter? My God, bikini girl, I had to hope or pretend that
something
about me was normal—as we called it then.

I never told Andy Pond last night that Pam’s only other confessor had been the thirty-sixth President of the United States. Can’t remember which of my White House
Piéta
s
it was, but he looked up from my lap after I’d sung “A Bicycle Built for Two.”

“You’re a big ol’ dyke somewhere in there behind those eyes. Ain’t you, Mrs. Cadwaller?” he asked thoughtfully.

My head dipped. “Yes, Esau,” I said. “How did you know?”

“Oh, hell. I’ve been mighty used my whole life to women acting like they know something I don’t know. The ones who act like they know something I
do
know always kind of jump out at me.”

Yet the other “Like mother, like daughter”—suicide—was the one I had acted on. What may surprise you is that I’m not referring to pulling the trigger of Cadwaller’s (blessedly) unloaded gun yesterday. I mean my suicide in self-defense at the age of fourteen at Purcey’s Girls’ Academy after “
Chanson d’automne
” made me a laughingstock.

Surrounded by jokes at my dead mother’s expense and cries of “Moo! Moo!,” I’d not only sworn I’d never write another goddam poemess so long as I lived. I’d vowed I’d never again let the world see Pam’s unguarded heart.

I kept that vow seventy-two years. That was why hearing Dottie peal “Ah, love, let us be true to one another!” as she turned to me in our Bank Street apartment had panicked Pamique into bolting to Bran Murphy’s arms, hairy reputation and Murphine avoirdupois. The only other
what next
would have been to find out whether she meant it or was just cutting one of her dottily idyllic capers.

What if it turned out my naked roommate was not only goofing around but her pirouette’s golden prisoner and hadn’t especially meant to address Pam face to face at that moment? Then the only
what next
for me would’ve been to like-mother-like-daughter it right off the Brooklyn Bridge. Or if I had subway fare (only a nickel then!), off the top of the Empire State Building.