Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun
Read Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun Online
Authors: Tom Carson
“A perfect mirror of the ‘American century.’”
—“Editors’ Choice,”
The New York Times Book Review
A
Washington Post
“Notable Fiction” selection for 2011
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
“Tom Carson’s new novel is simultaneously an epic sequel to
The Great Gatsby
, a tour-de-force meta-narrative of the last 90 years of American history, and a dazzling feat of old-fashioned storytelling. The octogenarian narrator of
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
is by turns wistful, sarcastic, bemused, nostalgic, furious, and scathingly funny as she evokes—intimately, pungently, and in gorgeous detail—the best and worst century in human history (so far).
She is the first great literary character of the new millennium, and her all-encompassing story is some sort of crazy masterpiece.”
—James Hynes, author of
Next
and
The Lecturer’s Tale
“You’re unlikely to find a wittier, more ingenious, more compulsively readable novel this year than Tom Carson’s latest
… If
The Great Gatsby
didn’t quite reach the green of the Great American Novel—it’s too short for such a big country—
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
lands within putting distance of the grand old flagpole.”
—Steven Moore,
The Washington Post
“Trippy, hilarious, brilliant.”
—Susan Coll, author of
Beach Week
,
Acceptance
, and
Rockville Pike
“
The most distinctive voice to be found in any recent American novel
… Maybe building a cockamamie epic out of a maddening jumble of cultural and historical ephemera is the only way to really do justice to the American century in all its chaos and contradictions. Even if it isn’t, F. Scott Fitzgerald still owes Carson a drink for trying.”
—Jason Anderson,
Toronto Globe and Mail
“
Playful, imaginative, and extremely funny
… Great dames of the 20th century, open your ranks: Pam Buchanan is part of the sisterhood.”
—Farran Smith Nehme, the Self-Styled Siren
“As brilliant as fireworks exploding over the Washington Monument,
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
is that rarest of triumphs—a laugh-out-loud funny novel that’s also dead serious … Here is history seen through the looking glass—delirious, diabolically witty, and absolutely unique.”
—John Powers, Critic at Large for NPR’s
Fresh Air with Terry Gross
and author of
Sore Winners: American Idols, Patriotic Shoppers, and Other Strange Species in George Bush’s America
“An uproarious, antic, tender and proudly huge novel
… Earns its status as an American epic even while it redefines what a literary epic is.”
—Mark Athitakis,
Washington City Paper
“
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
is an acute, hilarious, and moving vision of the 20th century as refracted through two unique sensibilities: that of its indefatigable narrator, and that of the supremely witty, deeply wise, and endlessly playful writer who dreamed her up.”
—Glenn Kenny, critic for
MSN Movies
and blogger at
Some Came Running
“Huzzah!”
—Susann Cokal, author of
Mirabilis
and
Breath and Bones
“Inventive and masterful.”
—Thaisa Frank, author of
Heidegger’s Glasses
and
A Brief History of Camouflage
“Sprawling, clever, flamboyant, recklessly ambitious,
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
takes gigantic risks and delivers gigantic rewards.”
—Geoff Nicholson, author of
Bleeding London
and
Gravity’s Volkswagen
“Carson—the film critic for
GQ
and the author of the novel
Gilligan’s Wake
—gives himself wholeheartedly to scouring Pam’s lifetime for iconic moments and succeeds: Pam edged out for the Pulitzer by Jack Kennedy, Pam with [Lyndon Baines] Johnson’s head in her lap before his speech forestalling nomination, Pam in a Hollywood both seedy and glamorous, Pam at D-Day …
For our purposes, Pam is America, and once, for better or worse, America was everywhere
.”
—Tadzio Koelb,
The New York Times Book Review
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
Book 1: Cadwaller’s Gun
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
Book 1: Cadwaller’s Gun
Tom Carson
River House INK
New Orleans, LA
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2011 Tom Carson
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, online, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher (Csaba Lukacs, River House INK).
Cover painting by Glenn Arthur
Author photo by Victoria F. Gaitán
Design and copyediting by Nita Congress
ISBN-13: 978-0-9825973-3-0
Published in the USA
Original one-volume edition published by Paycock Press, Arlington, VA
River House INK
625 Marigny Street
New Orleans, LA 70117
Visit
daisysdaughter.com
.
In memory of Alice, with love to her friends.
My deepest thanks to Richard Peabody—a man I’m proud to call “Big X”—and to designer/editor extraordinaire Nita Congress. A special thanks to Glenn Arthur for letting us use
Le Navigateur
and
Le Commandant de Bord
.
For help of various kinds, I’m also grateful to Virginia Carson Young, Ron Perkowski, Sa
ï
deh Pakravan, Arthur Shaffer and David Rowland, Ron Anteroinen, and Alberto and Victoria F. Gaitán. My thanks as well to Csaba Lukacs, David Lummis, and River House for undertaking this new two-volume edition of
Daisy Buchanan's Daughter
.
“One thing that flatters me and Bill a lot is that Diana, who is normally shy with children, seems genuinely devoted to ours so we don’t feel that it is a strain for her when we take them to Chantilly. Anne hangs on her words and follows her in from the garden helping to carry the great heaps of flowers, and stands adoringly passing them up as Diana creates one of her magical arrangements. ‘Four delphiniums now, Anne, mix the pale blues with the darker. Thank you. Now a big bunch of roses. That’s it. Always remember when doing a mixed bouquet to have clumps of the same flower together. Not one here, one there, that makes for an arty bouquet. Arty things are common, don’t you agree?’ ‘Yes, Lady Diana…Is it a party, Lady Diana?’ ‘No, it isn’t, and that is why we must take a lot of trouble…Suppose we put the white china unicorn on the middle of the table and make a wreath of white flowers for him to wear around his neck. Shall we go to pick the wild flowers?’”
—Susan Mary Alsop,
To Marietta from Paris, 1945–1960
There was an old man of Khartoum
Who kept two black sheep in his room.
To remind him, he said,
Of two friends who were dead.
But he never would specify whom.
—quoted by Gene Smith in
When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson
Part One
1. Cadwaller’s Gun
Posted by
:
Pam
As of now—6:22 a.m. on Tuesday, June 6, 2006, my eighty-sixth birthday—my full name is Pamela Buchanan Murphy Gerson Cadwaller. I’m waiting with some asperity for a telephone call from the President of the United States.
You know how his minions must’ve hounded poor Potus, congratulations to the likes of me not crisp in their relation to his game plan. “The old bag will never make it to ninety, Mr. P.!” they said. “And she did a lot of something or other back in the way-back-when.”
True enough, I did. Google away. For the fuck of it I sometimes do myself, checking Pam’s grip on cyberspatial immortality. Are you surprised this old bag knows how to surf the Web? Mine was the first female voice broadcast from Omaha Beach. Beyond its grassy bluffs, a lone Spandau still hammered as D-Day waned. I believe I can handle your toy.
That five-mile crescent was ours by then. The proof was that rations were being unloaded around us along with ammunition. I’d done Anzio, and I knew how that first case of Hershey bars meant victory. Just didn’t expect what happened next, as the flicks of distant tracer fire making a tailor’s dummy out of twilight had damned little resemblance to candles. Neither did the hulks of charred landing craft to gifts.
“Happy BIRTH-day, Miss Bu-chan-an—HAP-py birth-day to you.”
Heard in the States on my better-known colleague Edmond Whitling’s radio report, the original recording is in the National Archives, crackling on earphones for school groups to whom such sonic chaff is now the Baskin-Robbins side of history. Listen close for Pam Buchanan, just turned twenty-four, saying faintly, “Thank you, boys! Thank you all very much.”
I’m now a longtime Washingtonian by not only address but temperament. Encased in fat lunettes, the mimsy borogoves I call my glaucomedic eyes have watched those school groups spill out of the Archives many times into our summer’s gobs of unhaulable heat. Then their no less Baskin-Robbinsy teacher calls out, “All right! Who’s going to the Holocaust?” As lovely girlish arms stick up, I wonder if they’ve just heard my voice.
Sensational 1943 divorce from Murphy or no sensational 1943 divorce from Murphy, I’m sure none of those temporary survivors of Company A, 116th Infantry, 29th “Blue and Gray” Division, landed to be massacred at H Hour and left behind like dazed American barnacles on the Vierville sea wall by fresher troops’ advance, knew me from Venus on the halftrack. All they were in a position to understand was that some lanky dame had crouched among them—“And
now
what?,” their eyes said—yelping “Where you from, soldier?” and passing around dry Lucky Strikes. I may’ve been a sort of human Hershey bar with two almonds under the wrapper myself, maybe not the finest candy but definitely made in U.S.A.
Getting sung to on Omaha as bulldozers finished clearing the exit wasn’t Pam’s idea of “If they mean to have a war, let it begin here.” But Eddie Whitling was no chump at contriving human interest for the home front. Hearing a grainy “Happy Birthday” sung in no longer wholly occupied France would tell the other Omaha—Nebraska’s—that not only were our boys ashore but the day’s costs hadn’t damaged their humor. Spotting his opportunity in Company A’s lack (I wonder why) of officers, he beguiled—since I don’t want to use a stronger word—beguiled those weaponless and stunned late adolescents into singing to his pal Pamita.
“Happy birthday, Miss Buchanan—happy birthday to you.”
In Pam’s own D-Day piece, finished with a gin assist (I just hated those buzz bombs) in London two weeks later—“The Day the Tide Ran Red,”
Regent’s
magazine, June 28, 1944—I omitted that chorus in chafed fatigues around the perpendicular pronoun. There I am thanking them in the Archives’ earphones like some lost stewardess on Clio Airways just the same. Then I inanely add, “Good luck to you tomorrow, boys!” On the recording, the grind of newly landed trucks blots out my most vivid
viva voce
memory: a teenage voice saying, “Tomorrow?”