Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (12 page)

In her Beverly Hills study, blond sun squaring a desk squaring a typescript as yet four pages long, Mrs. Gerson worked like the dickens to get that reek into their clothes. A blue pencil (we had dozens around the house) behind one ear as President Ike’s wandering assessment of Dien Bien Phu relocated Oz in Kansas on the radio, I imagined grime oiled by sweat and then resealed by frozen mid-Atlantic rime. Almost seventy unlaundered days at sea.

They had the laundresses; only fresh water was hard to come by. What lousy sailors they’d been! Now birds by the thousands were on the wing.

The longboat grounds in the shallows. Cold as ice cream, but unfrozen, the sea swirls around patched boots and foul trousers. Now isn’t the time for pronouncements: the hollers are practical as the boat is beached. Clattering oars join a wooden orgy: meet me in the bilge. Standish is swelling with a landsman’s new scope of command.

Or could they really have been prating their dreadful, grim nonsense already? Whatever you think, it will sustain them. Horrid people, but they
got
here. The Pilgrims are ashore in America, and birds by the thousands are on the wing.

Shakespeare had been dead less time than Potus has been President. I searched the documents in vain for some original of the man I wanted to imagine undoing his too complicated trousers, grateful to piss at last with no deck’s heave splashing half of it back at him. Their digestions harrowed by the Atlantic’s slaps and rancid food’s punches, I’m sure they were farting like Oldsmobiles.

Soon, coming across a stock of corn that’s plainly been hidden—that is, by men, not nature—they’ll steal or rather “confiscate” it. Whoever had that idea launched a great tradition. Looking back, one of them finally lets himself be frightened by the castled smallness of the smelly ship that brought them.

It doesn’t matter a damn. England’s way-back-when is over, and the great “Now” that begins ours is cawing around the bedraggled voyagers on the beach. Half resolute, half eager—is the secret of being a Pilgrim a refusal to recognize the difference?—they plod on toward the site of the Pilgrim Monument.

Obliviously, Miles Standish’s eye rakes past the spot where seven-year-old Pammie’s filling her pail with another wet tower. Intent on nourishment and their God’s approval, maybe not even in that order, they can’t see the radiant teenage girl rushing toward them and flaunting the answer to both. Thrusting out its bountiful Christmas ornaments, her T-shirt boasts that it’s from
new york fuckin’ city
.

Toward the end of “A Landing,” I mention that they soon went back to their smelly toy ship and sailed on. Yet to the indignation of Midwestern, for some reason, reviewers most of all, I only mentioned the Mayflower Compact in my book’s opening sentence: “An emergency agreement as to purpose stopped the malcontents from bolting once landfall was made.”

God! Did I work on
that
son of a bitch, too. A, e-e-e-a-ee-e, o-o-o-o-o-o-o, a-a-a-a. I didn’t say they’d name the place they did stay Plymouth. They hadn’t known that at the time I let the
Mayflower
vanish into white space: “From any perspective except those of the passengers, it was soon again tiny.”

By today’s standards, I had to force things a bit to end on “tiny.” No editor now would let that word arrangement stand. But I’m still very happy with “those.” Unless “malcontents” counts, it was
Glory Be
’s first indication of multiplicity, my theme.

I cheated on one thing. On my research trips, I spent more time than I’d’ve otherwise cared to in Boston. Before I wrote the concluding chapter, I walked all over Lexington. But I didn’t go back to Provincetown. My argument—which was with Pam, so I won—was that my distance would make it feel more like history.

Posted by: Pam

Restlessly disguised as sea and night, the Pilgrims were on the march outside our rental’s window as Pammie struggled to finish
The Patchwork Girl of Oz
. We’ve come to my final night in Provincetown, which wasn’t supposed to be. I recall we had the rental until Monday.

We’d been to the movies. Or to something that resembled moving pictures at the mechanical level, but was otherwise as foreign to the budding pudding’s eyes as Francis X. Bushman in
Ben Hur
had been reassuringly American. It was plainly out of the ordinary for Provincetown’s lone movie palace, whose marquee promised a promisingly mustached Victor Muet opposite Tesla Morse in
Mixed Signals
. One of Euclid’s scrambled comedies, it had been seen and giggled at by a now lost, Scandinavian-accompanied edition of me just weeks earlier.

My mother herself may have footed the bill for bohemia’s one-night takeover of Commercial Street. Anyhow, I distinctly remember Sinclair St. Clair lofting a jug of wine as his broad rear crushed a seat not far from a usurped-looking, preemptively bored Eldritch Weaver. As for the first film we saw, the dates don’t quite mesh when I Google. Nonetheless, sitting next to Dwight Macdonald at a MoMA screening in the Forties, my realization that I hadn’t been surprised by what the straight razor was for convinced me this wasn’t my first viewing.

The projectionist at my second was the man who’d made the movie. Known to us only as Dali’s estranged collaborator, since the results of that particular hare-and-tortoise derby were the future’s best-kept secret—of course it would’ve been Dali’s name that excited my mother’s friends when a smuggled copy of
Un Chien Andalou
showed up in Provincetown that summer—he was a lean exile with the exquisite manners of a man who knows that trying to explain who he
really
is, was, or will be is futile.

After hearing two words of my Spanish—and I had at least four more in the bullpen, too—he switched to strained English until we swooned into French. To Tim Cadwaller’s incredulity, since to
Qwert’s
Man in the Dark the biographical tidbit that I once met Luis Buñuel is the equivalent of learning I once swanned around with Zeus, I can’t remember what we were mourning. Our shared Paris, most likely, then Nazi-occupied.

As for Dwight, over a decade later he ended up slamming
Glory Be
in the worst review it got, lambasting “Mrs. Gerson”—up yours too, McDonuck: it was
by Pamela Buchanan
, said so right on the cover—for her “sewing-club” vulgarization of W.C. Williams’s
In the American Grain
.
“It’s a mug’s game, this trick of disguising her theme’s sentimentality with acid or hard-nosed details”—oh, well. He’d caught my hard nose red-handed there.

When next we saw each other, in Washington in the fall of ’67, he hurried over like a Macy’s Santa about to hoist me onto his lap without sitting down. Dwight had a way of greeting friends whose books he’d eviscerated as if they’d been in a bad car wreck. Genuinely glad to see us on our feet and talking again, he was oblivious to having caused our week in traction. That had been literature, not personalities. On the other hand, I did and still do prize my nice letter from Williams, who hadn’t read my book but said he didn’t care much who got what from who so long as the thing went on.

Not that I knew it, but the thing was unquestionably going on in Provincetown as I squirmed in my seat and St. Clair Sinclair passed wine over my head. A few hundred feet from the spot where the Pilgrims had dragged their stinking longboat ashore, staggering in freezing surf that rushed like emeralded ermine under a dull but cawing sky, two or three dozen people dressed in the Nineteen-Twenties’ floppy notion of bohemian liniments sat in the dark, watching what almost certainly must’ve been the first American screening of Luis
Buñuel’s
, forget Dali,
Un Chien Andalou
.
While I’ve never been able to explain why, I think of that as the crystallizing moment when I unwittingly became the Pamela Buchanan I later knew best and favored most when her name marched along behind a two-letter flag:
by
.

Afterward, two American women on the beach, decorated by a little dog and a child who probably should’ve been kept home reading
The Patchwork Girl of Oz
,
strolled back to their cottage in a newly frameless dark. Surf was all around us, primarily by sight ahead and primarily as sound behind.

Guessing wrong about posterity, my mother and her friend were chatting with some difficulty about the other movie on that night’s bill. Some German thing, Teutonic in the way that makes you wish they’d add some damn gin. “I thought the one who played the vamp was pretty,” the Lotus Eater volunteered, or something equally inane.

Remember, these were the primitive early days of sound. So much so that both the movies we’d just seen, like the one advertised on the marquee—
Mixed Signals
,
the comedy I’d giggled at only weeks earlier—had been silent. On the soundtrack, my mother’s reply is maddeningly fuzzy.

Scratched by night-surf even then, it’s since been further garbled by too many trips through Pam’s projector. I’m still nearly positive she said “Sketch” just before stumbling, as she must’ve for her purse to end up konging her companion’s arm in that misleadingly intimate way. Among the other possibilities, while I’d be the first to agree “wretch” fits the L.E., I can’t see the provocation. Its vulgar soundalike would hardly have been a likely Daisyism.

Unless my mother was in a spectacularly bad humor with the Lotus Eater, which I doubt as the profile she turns to her lesser binary before stumbling glistens with a quick moonlit smile, “Fetch” would’ve been addressed to our dog. So no, no. “Sketch”—as in “Well,
you’re
a sketch,” an authentic 1920s-ism that would’ve been only mildly infra dig in my mother’s crowd or crowds—is the strongest candidate by miles, a wry way of disputing her fellow female’s opinion (“I thought the one who played the vamp was pretty good”) of an actress whose performance my mother hadn’t cared for.

Given not only its nonsensicality but Daisy’s bum language skills even after she and her daughter had moved to Europe,
“Mèche,”
the French for wick or fuse—as both Sean Finn and Tim Cadwaller would know, a despairing or triumphant cry of
“La mèche est allumée!”
would mean “The fuse is lit,” for instance—isn’t even in contention. Still, I realize memory can play tricks. One proof is that I’ve just described the fuzzily soundtracked clip, in phosphorescent b&w thanks to night and sea rather than photography, that turns up most often by mistake—counting on its status as a memory to fool me into awarding it pride of place over authentic East Egg snapshots snapped by others—when I’m asked about my parentage.

Posted by: Pam

I was usually left undisturbed once their room’s shut door had turned into a faintly outlined rectangle of light, except sometimes by my mother’s bad dreams and the bed’s squeaks as it tried to wake her. Though I’d never known her to be scared of the dark, in Provincetown she slept with the lamp on. But that night my eyes were cracked open first by the door’s click, next by a padding rustle. In a nightgown, which unnerved me more than a naked L.E. would’ve (it was another
difference
, you see), the Lotus Eater was slipping into our bathroom. She had something oblong and vital to her in one hand.

When the light went on inside it, the outlined rectangle of light was thicker on one side: she hadn’t managed to close its recalcitrant, weather-warped door all the way. Then came the click of a pencase’s hasp, audibly more expensive than the light cord’s abject one had been. Then the prosaic clank of a tuning fork trapped in a kitchen spoon’s body as she dropped hers with a faint, surprisingly human “Drat.” The impatient rasps must’ve been matches.

Always more helpful with the blue-pencil stuff than Murphy, Gerson objects to the melodrama of having that badly shut, weather-warped bathroom door swing open to reveal the Lotus Eater in the throes of shooting up. Even so, it did swing open sooner than it should’ve, by which I don’t mean sooner than never. I never liked her, but starvation’s just too horrible a way to go.

It swung open in time for me to see the silver syringe the L.E. hadn’t yet restored to its case. Since I now know my mother’s was the gold one, the distinctively reddish flash of the hypo the L.E. was holding, however long imprinted on my retinas, shows just how easily even a child whose functions were purely ocular could get things wrong. Unless the L.E. had
borrowed
the one she’d given Daisy, but that strikes me as unlikely.

How do I know my mother’s was the gold one, Panama? How do I know it was a gift to her from the Lotus Eater and not the other way around? Simple. When I found them in the Paris footlocker on Liberation Day, opening the black and the midnight-blue cases and lighting a fresh Lucky Strike before I handled each for the first and only time, the gold syringe was the one with the—yes, get ready to blink: this was the Jazz Age, and they were both rich—engraved inscription.

Etched at the L.E.’s bidding by some bribable jeweler, its words were barely decipherable without a magnifying glass. Unless you had good reason, which Daisy Buchanan’s daughter did, to be familiar with the old-fashioned lyric they quoted. No doubt a court might demand more conclusive proof of who was the would-be seductress and who was the prey—something like
To Daisy from your Lotus Eater, with love and hopelessly thwarted Charybdean lust.
But that wouldn’t have fit, and I defy a single
daisysdaughter.com
reader I may have acquired this morning to see any ambiguity in the inscription Pam read, crouching in her correspondent’s uniform as she lifted the surprisingly petite gold hypo to the light, shortly before sunset on August 25, 1944:
Give me your answer do.

Posted by: Pam

Since the Lotus Eater had just slammed a Gulliver-sized dose of morphine into the delicate Lilliput of her arm, her assimilation of the information that the door was open, the bathroom light was still on, and Pammie was watching from the cottage’s darkened front room was no match for her jellyfish leer the last time I’d caught her in flagrante. I was merely someone she’d forgotten about, not a startling pseudo-stranger staring as some wristwatch wagging a man or some man wearing a wristwatch fuck-fuck-fuck-fucked her. The only real news she had to absorb was that I wasn’t asleep.

She just blinked a few times, muttered something in a fairly pathetic voice about me not knowing how lucky I was—presumably meaning I didn’t have to
court
Daisy to have a relationship with her—and got rid of the silver syringe’s reddish glint by putting it back in the case before she fumbled for the light cord. Then the bedroom door’s faint outline of light widened on one side, grew a huge black tulip nodding on two stalks as the L.E. was briefly silhouetted by my mother’s bedside lamp, and closed again.

After a while, I grew conscious that the insistent murmur of my mother’s voice had stayed more protracted than its midnight norm. Unable to make out her words, I couldn’t help hoping she was berating the L.E. for subjecting Pam to such a sight, or even—that
other
Gulliver, other Lilliput—sights.

That wasn’t because I was even any too sure the Lotus Eater deserved castigation other than for breathing. Nobody’d told me what the rules were, and a child who lacks rules is a neglected blackboard, happy for any old chalk at all. Reproaching the L.E. would simply have meant I was Daisy’s topic, a budding pudding worth salvaging from what I now saw I’d been intuiting for some time was chaos.

I never did find out which shore her voice’s faint surf was scrabbling at. Or what eventually provoked it, having realized it was water, to break down in sobs. If only the L.E. hadn’t been there—nightgowned, not nightgowned? Hands to recocked hips, arraying her pretty body’s Ali Baba coins and Charybdean salt lick before my mother’s, my
mother’s
,
blindly pained eyes?—I could have crept in and comforted her.

Morning. Pam’s alone on the unpeopled beach. Through the screen door behind me, I can hear the two ends of a conversational ball of yarn getting tangled, but I’ve had it with knitting. They’re the ones with the needles, not me. I’d never have gone back to the house if SooSoo hadn’t taken it into her snowball head to sniff a jellyfish.