Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (14 page)

So the tanks kept rumbling off the ramps and sinking with all hands. In our sector, that was what the morning of D-Day was like.

I doubt anybody noticed, Panama, certainly not Timmy. At my last Amherst Thanksgiving, I’m sure a peculiar look came over your Gramela’s face as the mimsies watched your little brother bang-bang his Playstationed way up a Spielbergized Omaha. I wouldn’t have so much as cleared my throat for a queen’s ransom, but still: there at the real one, even my
advice
unsought. Not that Timmy needed it, since he could and did just start over again at the shoreline.

Posted by: Pam

As a writer, I’ve often done the same. It tends to be our big advantage over infantrymen, which is why grasping I can’t on my second D-Day has taken some getting used to. Once I hit “Post,” it’s gone and out there, bandersnatching all over cyberspace as frumiously as a Slinky toy. The Slinky toy, sent forth, can never be recalled.

On top of that, I haven’t even been rereading this
charabia
before each heave-ho, much less reglancing at my previous posts. In the days when
by Pamela Buchanan
adorned the jackets of
Glory Be
and
Lucky for the Sun
, I was a far more intricately graceful stylist, not that too bloody many of you are likely to hit “Add to Shopping Cart” to confirm it.

When he still hoped to get me posting here, Tim Cadwaller told me blogging’s standards aren’t as strict, and
l’équipe
here at daisysdaughter.com is grateful for the reprieve from jousting with
mots justes
. As for
l’équipe
’s full roster, maybe it’s time you met Pink Thing and Gray Thing.

We switched names in my mid-sixties, when calling myself the Pink Thing to my brain’s Gray Thing began cutting no ice with mirrors. After the swap, the new Pink Thing’s first two cents were a reproachful whisper that I’d known it was the real Pink Thing all along. Either way, we’ve been each other’s best company and major amusement ever since.

Right now, Pink Thing’s cursing the mimsy borogoves for having so carelessly scrutinized Tim’s e-mail explaining this website’s bag of tricks. Surfing the Internet is old-hand stuff for me by now;
very
old-hand stuff, like pretty much everything else these rheumatic fingers of mine are either capable of or still interested in doing. But I’ve never generated Web content before and keep being frustrated.

I’ve seen the websites linking, each to each; I don’t think they will link to me. (Joke, bikini girl. Google “Prufrock” if you’re curious. Adieu, Sinclair St. Clair.) I also don’t know how to link to them and am in too much of a hurry to even try, so you’ll just have to trust me without any backup. It’s Google this an’ Google that an’ Wiki how’s your soul, but it’s thin red line of Pink Thing when the blog begins to roll.

Sorry! My onetime pre–Pearl Harbor Bank Street roommate, now dead as I may have mentioned, was very fond of burlesquing poetry. I must’ve acquired the taste from her

Posted by: Pam

I’ve also got no way of putting images up, no great regret to me regarding Eldritch Weaver’s
Two American Women on the Beach, Provincetown, 1927
but a real one in the case of the Paris footlocker’s vintage photos of my mother, father, and even the budding pudding that was Pam. (
insert
gag shot of Pam trying to feed Nick Carraway–snapped Kodak to her A drive, and you shouldn’t think Gerson was a
complete
sobersides.) That’s why the only image you’ve seen here on daisysdaughter.com is the same old picture of a Panamanic teenager with her arms garlanding a dentitioned cauliflower, taken not at J.D. Salinger’s latest book signing but in this apartment twenty-one months ago and captioned
Panama and Gramela, 2004
.

Until Clio Airways first Lindberghized cyberspace, that was also the most recent addition on my blog, unknown to the
blogista
herself until my dawn logon.
P
osted by: Tim C.
,
it must’ve been your dad’s last try at getting me interested before he realized I wasn’t into his damned website.

Your Christmas ornaments were just a couple of new Easter bunnies then, under the impression my dowager’s hump was lettuce. Your bray of glee wetted my ear. Finishing up
You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two
,
he’d brought you along to see the FDR Memorial.

“Hell, I’m the unofficial one,” I said. “Don’t I rate lunch?” We went to Martin’s.

Still, maybe it’s just as well I can’t do images. With the whole online lollapalooza at my disposal, I might start introducing every post with a different picture of Kirsten Dunst in
Bring It On
.
Which would be entertaining but ridiculous, since of course everyone knows who she looks like.

What, rather. As for me, I’ve never owned a camera. Never wanted to interrupt or arrange life even that long when I was enjoying it, never saw the point in recording it when I wasn’t. With a shelf of albums in her den that marches back in time nearly to Harry Truman’s election, Nan Finn is the shutterbug in our gang of Foreign Service relics.

Andy and I last ate with Nan at Martin’s in April. At least visually, may I point out with some dryness, the occasion was all but identical to the previous fifty, excepting Andy’s bold
charcoal-gray
sweater and a few added bits of desiccation all around. She’d already waved a ninepin waiter over to snap the traditional facial triad when her familiar grope in her purse came up missing a camera.

The glorious girl looked as dismayed as Potus without a speechwriter, albeit more adorable. As I protected her with a cover story I found agreeable—“More wine!”—Andy smilingly squeezed her hand.

“I know it’s a shame, Nan,” he said with Pondian fondness. “I guess you’ll just have to
remember
this one.”

“I’ll try, but how?” she laughed. “My God, at my age?” She still seems very young to me.

No matter, no matter! Should it turn out daisysdaughter.com hasn’t snared a single reader, I’ll never know. Even as I prepare to turn myself into a mess of pink and gray things on the rug in protest against this awful and unending war, I’m finding it exhilarating to be Pam in a medium new to me. If there’s one thing I’ve had practice at, it’s change.

To you, Panama, my fellow author or “author” Jack Kennedy is as remote as—my God,
Cleveland!—
was to me. Yet nobody was better at making fulsomeness sound jaunty. I liked his explanation when John Glenn became the first American to orbit in space: “This is a new ocean, and I believe America must sail upon it.”

Cadwaller, look! Here’s Pamela’s sail.

Posted by: Pam

As I strain to match the Manhattan skyline you know today with the one I saw approaching on a blustery day in March of 1934, the major resemblance is obviously the lack of a World Trade Center. Wind is ramming clouds toward Illinois and Minnesota. In a buttoned blue coat from Mme Chignonne’s, round-brimmed yellow hat, strap shoes, and, I swear, frilled socks, I’m straining at the bit to turn fourteen.

The magnetic prow of the
Paris
,
pride of the French Line, is pulling the filaments of New York City into view for my deracinated inspection. The hat is multiply bobby-pinned to my hair, caught between a gingery brindle mop whose basic relation to headgear is puzzlement and a Circe breeze that wants to lure my chapeau to its doom.

In front of my forbidden—to me, too—and mysteriously macramé-ing crotch, a toy handbag (no money) is dutifully clasped in prayer-book position. What a sight I must’ve been.

Mark of my generation, bikini girl: for decades, we went on dressing for
airplane
trips. That was the thing to do, and well!, we were the ones doing it. One day in 1970—“April first or Halloween?” Andy Pond proposed, in full agreement about the year—we realized we were the only ones doing it. Footnote to history: Pamela Buchanan bought her first pair of adult sneakers at the age of fifty-one.

Under normal circumstances, I’d never’ve been allowed to cross the Atlantic unescorted, but normal circumstances these weren’t. The
Paris
’s purser did draft an old biddy from Saratoga, luckless enough to have the cabin opposite mine and a real-life niece along for credentials, to pretend to be my duenna as she snored through gin rummy. My guardian had cabled Brussels that he could get to New York from the Midwest in time, but Europe was impossible. We’d just have to take the chance, and in the event, I was safer than a football at a tennis match. No jewel thieves on
that
crossing. Turned down the niece’s offer of a cigarette behind the second funnel.

Soon to be outdone in fame by its French Line kid sister ship, the
Normandie
,
to me the
Paris
had boasted every luxury I could expect from an ocean voyage except a mother. Still youthful enough to think it was
my
ship, designed to transport Pam and purposeless otherwise—it was practically true, since the great wedding-cake Atlantic tubs sailed barely one-third full in those Depression years—I cried in 1939 when I heard it had burned. And I admit it, thought of Agamemnon.

Customs, that perfectly named transition.
“Madam Was-elle, pass-a-port,
plea—oh, you’re American?”

“Oui!”
Pam brags. “Um, yes.”

As a huge porter in blue serge heaved my trunk onto his skyscraped and skyscraping back, I unthinkingly jabbered,
“
Mais que faites-vous? Que faites-vous?,”
undone above all by the recognition that, unlike Paris’s ebony colonials, an American Negro wasn’t exotic. Unlike a thirteen-year-old in a tilting blue coat, turning her jonquil-hatted head like a spinning top as I looked around in desperation for my guardian. I didn’t have anything for the porter’s
pourboire
.

He came up in the nick of time, gray-suited and gray-templed. “Pamela! I’m sorry. Wrong dock, red light, long story. I’d hardly have known you.”

“How did you?” I blurted, since he seemed familiar with the way things worked here and I was eager to learn my native land’s tricks.

“Fear and excitement. No, really, there just weren’t that many unaccompanied girls the right age milling around. Taxi, please. Thank you—that’s for you.”

In the cab, he explained we had just a couple of hours before we took the long trip on the long train to Chicago. A bit elaborately, he envied me both Paris and the
Paris
: “I never did get over to Europe. And now it’s—oh, too European, I suppose.”

He told me we were passing the new Empire State Building. I peered with interest at all three of its glimpsable stories. As more yellow side streets flashed by like masonry learning to tell time, a sort of considerate second mouth that had been mulling its moment inside his visible one came forward.

“Pamela, I’m so terribly sorry. Your mother was…just lovely. That’s all.”

“I know she was.” Nobody in the United States needed to hear how many pounds she’d packed on in Europe. They hadn’t been pounds but kilos. It’d been Belgian
weight—gloomy, rainy Brussels weight: not the Daisy they’d known’s weight at all. Anyhow, it was off me.

My guardian was now worried—
et pour cause
, given Pam’s hokey-pokey, still experimental, never-to-be-Daisylike form—that he’d slighted the daughter by praising the mother. “That’s a very pretty coat you’ve got on, by the way.”

“It’s a uniform,” I explained in surprise.

That reunited his outer and inner mouths, whose main point of contact had been thoughtfulness. They grinned at me as his eyes crinkled. Only my being female had been getting in the way of his remembering what it’s like to be thirteen.

“Yep, I just keep making those mistakes,” he said. “Of course, I ought to’ve saluted.” I was devoted to him until the day he died.

Posted by: Pamrod

Call it bachelor awkwardness. In his shoes, one wouldn’t, simply
wouldn’t, ever
,
pull back the curtains on a pubescent girl in a Pullman car’s sleeping berth, no matter how awful her sobs. So my guardian couldn’t give me much direct comfort when the strangeness of everything about being Pam and here overcame me on our journey.

Indirect comfort was another story. Like a black marketeer’s, a hand offered a tepid but welcome glass of water, a hankie, a green apple, and—oh, serendipity!—one of Booth Tarkington’s
Penrod
books. Wrong gender for me, but a dandy guide for any going-on-fourteen newcomer.

“All out of fashion, of course,” he confided over a dining-car breakfast the next morning as overburdened black men in white coats came down the aisle as if shooting the train’s rapids and the still reddish early sunlight made our cutlery flash taunts to vanished Injuns. “And maybe it wasn’t like that in my real boyhood—I honestly can’t remember now. Reading them reminds me of how I used to at least think things were, before all the craziness between the war and the Crash.”

“Mme Cassandre—at the school I,
was
, in—says there’s going to be another war.” Proud to be springing this European news on chugging, stubbly, inattentive Indiana (?), I picked up my butter knife.
“‘Méfiez-vous de Hitler!’
she says, shaking her ruler like this.
‘La prochaine fois, Napoléon sera de par là-bas.’
Of course, she’s a
fanatic
anti-Bonapartist, but—”

“‘Eet-lair’? Oh, Hitler. Well, who knows?”

“Cassandre! And
‘
la rue des Rosiers.’
That’s what we call, called Rose Bauer. And—” But his mind was still on the Twenties.

“Listen, Pammie,” he said, calling me that for the first time unless he had the summer of the Scandal. “Anytime you start thinking
everyone’s
flush and it’s all hunky-dory? Try to look past the crowd you’re in. Things are pretty awful now, but at least even stupid people can’t pretend they don’t know.”

“I’m sorry, Mr.—sorry. Nick,” I said, flustered. I’d never been instructed to call an adult by first name, and in France for a girl my age to do so would’ve been no joke. I’d have been indicating he was a servant. “What don’t we, they, don’t know what?”

My guardian had forgotten I was under twenty-four hours off the boat and we’d mostly been passing through farm country. Not much in the unself-conscious landscape had been shrieking “Depression.”

“There’s always misery. If we’d remembered that during the Boom, maybe there’d be less of it today.” Catching himself, he grew wry: “Said the Chicago ad man, polishing off his steak and eggs. Well, I’ll have to leave our boy a whopping tip, that’s all. Do you remember which he was?” And wryer still: “Is?”

Posted by: Pam

Some weeks of one’s life wear seven-league boots. I still think it’s preposterous that according to the calendar—they always testify for the police, prohibiting our memories from hopping getaway cars at will—only eight days had gone by since Pam, boarding at Le Havre, had grown undecided whether an empty starboard berth or an empty one portside was more likely to grow a corpse the second my eyes shut. So I’d gone back up on deck and watched the French coast turn into a soup bowl’s rim, then soup.

Back when the
Paris
had parted ways with the dock, for there’s always a thunderclap moment when
both
seem to be moving, the only Pamfetti to loose its streamers had been the scraps of a life I’d thought would have the grace to last until I understood it. Thanks to that, I’d had several reasons to decide I’d never been on an ocean liner—indeed, this one—before.