Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (13 page)

I’d never gotten on with my canine rival, any more than SooSoo and I liked the Lotus Eater when
she
turned up. A mutt the size and color of an off-white, ragged muff, our dog had been limping and whining—probably grazed by a car—near our front gate on Long Island for two days when she was adopted not long after Pam’s now tiny papa (he was riding away) played his last polo match. My mother took a new widow’s privilege by daring anyone, even our ur-Scandinavian, to complain at how she spoiled that trotting bit of angry fluff.

Even so, a stung nose is a stung nose, and ownership—however carelessly delegated—is ownership. A yelp of pain is a yelp of pain, and to a dog, a jellyfish is an incomprehensible accident. Bundling SooSoo in my arms like fifty furry, wiggling worms, I trotted back to our cottage for help.

SooSoo never got any, although—unlike me, I suppose—she recovered soon enough. Barging through the unlatched door, I heard my mother, my
mother
,
begging for the L.E.’s mercy. What she was babbling made no sense, but the explanation for her voice’s frantic despair was the sight of Daisy trying to stop a nightgowned Lotus Eater from smashing her in the face.

Or was she trying to rip her clothes off, have her way with her at last? Seems too Fu Manchu even for Murphy, but it didn’t matter: their frenzied faces made almost any scenario possible. If my mother’s grip on the L.E.’s wrist had been any less of a manacle, that clawing hand would have just
flown
.

“Let me!” the Lotus Eater raged. Then her wild eyes saw Pam staring unexpectedly at her in flagrante for the fairy-tale third time.

“God!”
the L.E. screamed in frustration, and my fearful mother’s white-knuckled grip was finally able to relax. Jerking her still tense arm away, the L.E. wheeled, working off her stymied aggression by making the bedroom door see stars—Victor Muet, Tesla Morse?—when she slammed it. If SooSoo hadn’t already bounded out of my arms, that crash would’ve done it for sure.

“It’s just—pain, that’s all, sweetie,” my mother tried to make excuses for the Lotus Eater’s crazed behavior. “She’d, oh, burnt her arm on the coffeepot! And I was trying to make it better by putting on some salve. Now where did the jar roll off to? Help me look for it. But the big silly just thought it would hurt even more. Don’t worry! She’ll be all right.”

“SooSoo isn’t,” dutiful Pam reported. “She got stung by a jellyfish.”

“She did? Poor little woof-woof dear. Well, it’s all. It’s all. It’s all just really just kind of a shambles, isn’t it? At least
you’re
all right. Oh, where’s she gone?”

I was stupefied. “The bedroom.”

As if I’d slapped her myself, my mother burst into tears. “Dog,” she finally choked. “Oh, Pammie, I try so hard.”

Then I started crying too, since I couldn’t find a dog to fetch her. Nudging the screen door with that same nose, SooSoo’d had trotted back outside, where things were apparently safer: jellyfish yea, humans nay. As the Lotus Eater yanked drawers open, punished closets for existing, and hurled away shoes that didn’t fit, my mother and I ended up on the vacationer-scarred ottoman that had been my bed, her lap Pam’s pillow at last as I lay there lumpily sniffling with my face turned to her trim belly. Still crying herself, she did her best to soothe my unsmoothable hair.

The bedroom door’s groan of “Enough” as it was reopened told me the L.E. was back in the room. I’ve never been prouder of my mother than I was when her hand on my Pam-hair didn’t stop moving. Neither of them said a word before the screen door got its chance to creak “Good riddance,” but I don’t know whether they looked at each other or not. I was blinded by my mother’s lap.

“Is she gone?” I finally asked, since the uncomfortable part of being comforted is usually the breathing problem.

“Yes, darling. She’s gone.”

“Forever,” I insisted. My insights at seven could’ve held their own with Henry James, but my dialogue was pure L. Frank Baum. Every childhood’s unbridgeable chasm.

“Yes, sweetie. It looks that way.”

“She was mean to you, wasn’t she.” I can’t account for my impulse coda: “Like Daddy.”

Things I’d heard Daisy say since his death had left an aura of cruelty around his missing silhouette, but what paradoxically made it easier for the idea to take hold was Pam’s belief that the cruelest thing he’d done to her was vanish. Maybe he’d been thoughtless in life too.

“Yes.” Then: “No, not like Daddy. Like, oh—” and I was glad to hear my mother’s old silvery, mocking laugh, even though her unfamiliarity with children’s stories was never so well illustrated—“Little Red Riding Hood.”

That was my cue to pull my head off her lap, since the smuggled-in subversion of the Grimms’ tales is that the children are always explorers. For that much license, you’d risk the odd gingerbread house. Besides, one thing children can always do for their parents is
scout
.

“She left her clothes and suitcases all over everywhere. She took the car, though,” I reported after an all-the-way trot around our cottage’s exterior and a peek in the bedroom. I’d hoped to catch her being swallowed by a whale, but back to Gramercy Park would do.

My mother looked quizzical, the most reassuring expression I’d seen on her face in some time. “What, darling? Wait. Our driver, too?”

I hadn’t known that would need amplifying, since I thought of them as a unit. You may’ve just read the single most illuminating detail regarding my material situation and my perception of it before we lost the Buchanan money in the Crash.

“Yes,” I said. “Or ate him. Anyway, Wong’s wong gone.”

“Well, isn’t
that
rich,” my mother said. “Well, we’ll show her! We don’t need that lousy car. Do we, Pammie? We’ll swim.”

“To Long Island? Golly.”

“No. Out to the first big ship we see. It’ll stop for me, I promise.”

Posted by: Pam

I swear to Christ, if it doesn’t ring soon, I may end up just shooting the goddam telephone. Don’t misunderstand, my daisysdaughter.com readers if any: this
has
been fun. Not that even one of you has seen fit to out yourself when I homepage. But the mimsies have taken a drubbing from my Mac’s screen and my fingers are starting to cramp in rheumatism’s version of Morse code.

I do need to be sure at least one of my hands will retain enough vim, control, and general can-do spirit to hoist and fire Cadwaller’s gun once I’ve said “Yes, this is Mrs. Pamela Cadwaller” under what I don’t doubt will be considerable strain. Even in the final months of Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency, it wasn’t as if the White House switchboard called me every fucking
day, you know.

I only hope Potus gets me before the Cadwaller clan chimes in with its birthday greetings. Now that I’ve remembered their tradition of telephonically gathering to wish the batty wreck of Hopsie’s old U.S.S.
Bonne Femme Pamela
many returns of June 6, it’s driving me bughouse that I don’t know whether the phone’s first ring will be my summons to Valhalla or Hallmark.

Not, you’d better understand, that fifteen minutes of providing the mangy slice of toast for all of you to butter up has the remotest chance of shaking my dawn resolve. Uh-uh, Hopsie’s brood. I can’t think of a thing Chris, Tim (is he back from Cannes yet?), or even Panama could say to make me reconsider. It’s just that when you read tomorrow’s headlines, I hope you’ll understand if your Gramela sounded a mite, oh,
distracted
.

At least you’ll have the consolation of belated evidence my mental capacities were unimpaired. If you’ve ever known me at all or truly remember him, maybe you’ll be moved to learn I used Cadwaller’s gun. Maybe if you read this you’ll understand why I could never go back to Provincetown, no matter how many times you asked. I’d still honestly rather get this over with not having had to cope with and fend off your jokes and warmth, your whoops of “Chen-chen!” to each other, your affection.

Sleep late, Panama. Oh, please sleep in, bikini girl: you know Chris and Tim won’t make the call without you. Why, it’s not even nine a.m.! Well into the White House’s working day, but no hour at all for a teenager on vacation to get out of bed. No, not even in Manhattan, wondrous as it is. Sleep on, my rebellious and untrammeled namesake that was, exactly three score and ten years younger than me.

Doesn’t the cool pillow feel nice where it’s mashed against your cheek, snaring some of and yet ruled by that oceanic insurrection of Goya-black, untamable hair? You probably don’t even know one reason we’re fond of the sight of you sleeping is that now it’s our only chance to study your newly bursting lips in their old role as the soft gates of breath’s castle, not energetically hurled into action in the scream of a Panamanic grin or yelping on the phone. That’s all lovely, dear. What it isn’t is Platonic.

Besides, to get to the bathroom, you’ll have to schlep down the hall past your dad’s cubby. Poor Tim’s been at work since dawn! I imagine about the last thing he wants to see is a vision of Goya-haired teen pulchritude saunter past, yawning and arching her new Christmas ornaments.

Underneath her T-shirt, they’re unmistakably nippled as she reaches back to scratch her barely pantied plum. Then she mumbles, “Morning, Dad. Don’t you ever stop working?” and vanishes in search of a toothbrush. It must be pure hell for even the most conscientious father when it’s his own flesh and blood.

But me? I’m just old Gramela in Washington, far removed from the action by age and by now vestigial gender. Honestly, Panama, at the pretzel stage, you only notice in the tub; you’d better believe it’s reluctant. I’m preoccupied by other things. Chiefly, getting ready to blow my brains out in a protest against this awful and unending war.

I have the strangest fantasy that if only for a moment, they’ll be lovely: a pretty girl in her birthday suit exploding out of a birthday cake, just as she should’ve over seventy years ago but didn’t. I may’ve put together one hell of an interesting life to distract me and everyone from
that
little corpse, but as a terrorist I grant I’m a late bloomer. Shall soon be a very late Bloomer indeed the minute the White House finds that teensy gap in Potus’s schedule to honor an odd request from one of his own party’s once baleful, now doleful elders.

Are you dog or cat, Cadwaller’s gun? I’ve owned and loved both in my time. SooSoo, Jubjub, Peanut! See, they bark at me. Born in West Africa, Bandicoot, our hook-tailed Siamese, caught a mouse in Georgetown and then came on with us to India, dying with one paw stretched toward Jaipur in the land of Shere Khan. Do you know what, little gun? That wasn’t long before I saw you leap into my husband’s hand the night that amazingly brazen thief (we never caught him) broke into the Residence.

As for the noise you’ll make when I pull the trigger, right in Potus’s astonished hearing, I’ve always liked the old word
report
.
Yes, little gun: you’ll be Pamela Buchanan’s last report.

Her first was called “
Chanson d’automne
.” All too inevitably, my mawkish poemess was fourteen-year-old Pam’s clumsy attempt to say goodbye to my mother—or maybe hello, but you know what sniffly twerps girls that age can be—after she shot herself in Brussels in 1934.

Not without venom, my fellow Purcey’s alumnae, your classmate can boast it’s taken me over seventy years to throw in the towel. But all right. I’ll give you your fucking
Like mother, like daughter.
See the mess on the rug?

The mess on the rug? Pam, you idiot! Pamidiot. Why was I worrying about the Cadwallers? Far from here, they’ll only read about my suicide. Unless I can think of a way of warning him off, Andy Pond—who has his own key, and lets himself in as well as out—will be the one who finds me.

Wearing his old sports jacket and ancient, carefully tended Florsheims—slacks too, unless Andy’s
really
gunning for a birthday surprise—he’ll whistle along the dowdy hall. In its cabbagey and kingly upper-Connecticut,
echt-
District way, the Rochambeau does have its Miss Havisham side.

Putting down the bag of groceries he’s brought to cook my birthday dinner—yes, and those stupid Netflix or Nextflick DVDs of
The Gal I Left Behind Me
and
Meet Pamela
, too—he’ll fish for his keys and open the door. The foyer will tell him nothing except that Kelquen’s collar is still there.

In the foyer, so far as Andy knows, I’ll still be alive. But once he doglegs into the living room, he’ll see a crumpled pretzel and my splashed brains in their birthday suit at last. My mother didn’t spare me much, but she did spare me that.

4. Hosts

Posted by: Pamphibious

Hello again, sweet sleepyhead. Along with any readers (show yourselves!) I may’ve attracted since dawn. It’s now 9:15 a.m.

Believe me, sixty-two June 6ths ago—at least on British Double Summer Time, invented by the Brits for the duration: “Double Summer Time, and the living is easy,” Eddie Whitling used to tunelessly croon—Omaha looked like a raving shambles by then. Not that we could see such a hell of a lot from miles offshore.

Three waves gone in, the landing craft jerking on that choppy sea like cockroaches crossing a Whistler painting. With disbelief, we’d watched the launching of the amphibious tanks: Shermans supported by canvas water wings, one of our team’s secret weapons. They bloody well stayed one too, sinking faster than Thomas Wolfe’s posthumous reputation almost as soon as they plopped off the ramps.

Their crews were inside, and the commanders of the tanks behind had seen those in front of them founder. Not one stopped. It was Omaha, and even one tank might’ve helped. We all knew by seven that the leading infantry was pinned to the shoreline like upholstery tacks.

Where, unlike Tom Hanks and his gutsy crew in a certain movie that shall go nameless, they didn’t recover from the shock of slaughter to start killing Germans as enterprisingly as Winnie-the-Pooh’s pal Tigger. Too incapacitated by what was going wrong everywhere around them to understand that any behavior of theirs could affect it, they went right on being upholstery tacks.

When the second and then third waves dumped their loads into this mess, the survivors took one disbelieving look around and became miserable upholstery tacks too. Even the incoming tide couldn’t nudge them. Arguing with the water that was creeping around their bit of upholstery was as incomprehensible as arguing with the fusillade that had nailed them there.

With all its gore, the supreme fact the Movie That Shall Go Nameless never permits its audience to grasp is that the thing could have
failed
.
Not only were Eddie Whitling and I sure we were onlookers to a disaster, we could tell that Gerhardt—he was the 29th’s C.O., and his headquarters aboard the
Maloy
was to stay our box of the Navy’s floating opera house until around noon—and his staff feared the same. Even from this far offshore, any idiot could see that no matter what was getting piled onto the beach, absolutely nothing was moving off it.