Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (20 page)

In my pre-Scandal infancy, he’d tried out for a part as one of Wall Street’s many real-life Harold Lloyds, though he hung off no clocks and later told me with a smile that the secret of the memorability of that image in
Safety Last
was that it was the Boom’s unwitting version of Christ crucified. True, Harold just swung up into his sweetie’s arms, but that was a very Twenties idea of heaven.

My guardian’s own brief marriage had ended in disaster. Off she flew and down he stayed, as publicly as an avocado left on a doily. No one will ever know if his decision to quit New York was a moral decision disguised as a social one or the other way around, and to me—in a joke I hope he’d have liked—elucidating that is like firing a gun at angels’ feet to make them dance faster on the head of a pin.

As for the ad agency, however incongruous it may look on the future Brother Nicholas’s c.v., my hunch is that it was the bungled and therefore true beginning of his never finished journey to the priesthood. Men of the cloth are, after all, facilitators. Nobody blames them for
inventing
what the OT has to say about concubinage or oxen. Before the Crash darkened his penciled
deprecations of the business world’s heedlessness into swatches of van Gogh crows all over his world view, my guardian may’ve been groping toward a similar relationship to capitalism. Envisaging himself, let’s say, as the sort of conscientious objector who’d perform clerical or transport duties, but balked at being a rifleman.

Anyhow, it was a good enough little agency, thanks to a scrupulousness that predated any notion of professions or vocations and the mild but steadfast humor he was never to lose, not even in a rope belt and sandals at Nenuphar. On the wall of his office, which he showed Pam soon after my arrival—“It’s the old story of the seven blind men and the elephant, I suppose, but this is a bit of America”—a prosaic placard featured the first slogan he’d ever been hired to think up. It was for a laundry somewhere in Iowa:
we keep you clean in muscatine
.

As the published volume of his letters bears out, he’d begun even then to read the Christian apologists. But Chesterton didn’t do it for him and neither did Lewis. He wanted a view that would accommodate the tectonic instabilities of the American earthquake.

He’d also started to correspond with fellow doubters who shared his concern that a chicken in every pot might turn out to be a parrot in every kettle. Which my guardian, no revolutionary, mistrusted only because parrots are inedible. He didn’t want to see a bird that could both fly and talk mistaken for one that could do neither but could feed a family, his metaphor in Letter 13.

To my regret,
The Mountain and the Stream
(Vaughn Trapp and Co., 1971, a publisher primarily of hymnals; it’s so out of print it makes my
Glory Be
look like
The Da Vinci Ultimatum
) includes no missive announcing a perfect little Paree-sienne’s arrival in his one-man midst. For one thing, I might’ve found out to whom it was addressed: perhaps the “Father Francis,” spoken of by him but never met by me, who was eventually his conduct to Nenuphar. Few letters that predate his entry into the monastery are included, however, and I believe his abbot edited the heck out of them.

By the time I showed up, the bread lines in Chicago streets stretched like a breathing stamp collection. Roosevelt was trying whatever he could, and my guardian was practicing tithing. “You’re not seeing us at our best,” he told me as we drove out to Oak Park past splotches of the unemployed, soup kitchens, Hoovervilles, movie palaces playing Myrna Loy in
When Ladies Meet
, and news vendors shrieking up Capone. “Well, maybe with some exceptions. Who knows?”

His agency had kept a firm grip on the ledge, making up for the lost business from failing department stores, granaries, and abattoirs with commissions from shoddy amusement parks, circuses, and dance marathons. While I don’t know what they teach you in school, Panama, you shouldn’t picture middle-class life simply evaporating during the Depression, then springing back just in time to welcome the boys home from Tarawa with every calico tablecloth and beaming, secretly murderous Beulah in place. I did go to a private school, and my guardian was no millionaire: just a man who went on respecting gentility’s social values after he’d started rejecting its spiritual ones. By and large, the bourgeoisie to which I’ve never quite managed to stop belonging held its roost, just on a tree stripped of its leaves and frailer branches by a hurricane. Unofficial motto: “Whatever you do, don’t look down.”

My guardian felt helpless not to, but Communism had no appeal for him: “They aren’t wrong, Pam. But they are misguided,” he was to primly tell my avid Barnard incarnation. The first issue of
The Catholic Worker
might as well have been printed in Eureka, NY, when he bought it for the fabled penny in the spring of ’33.

As I’ve already reported myself telling Andy Pond, more conventional Catholics were appalled at the madwoman’s heresy. Her campaign to turn the Gospels into a how-to manual struck them as not only bizarre in theory—“That was then,
and honestly! Should we go back to riding camels, too?” one especially snooty Purcey’s senior sniffed one day, no doubt quoting straight from the parental fount, as she snuffed an illicit cigarette in the fourth-form loo—but dangerously socialistic in practice, no matter how strenuously Miss Day tried to pass off the resemblance as some sort of mixup at the paternity ward. A certain thoughtful Chicago ad executive, however, was sold.

“She made me understand that the purpose of thought was to provoke behavior,” he writes in Letter 123 of
The Mountain and the Stream
.
As someone who’s never been sure what, exactly,
Madame Bovary
is bidding us to
do
, I have to dissent from that, but this is his pilgrimage and not mine.

Soon in contact with the
Worker
’s only begetter, by late fall he was scouting property for Chicago’s first House of Hospitality, as the
Worker
’s free food-and-lodging edifices were officially known. “I don’t remember needing to be
taught
to take showers,” that same Purcey’s senior said. That led un-Christian Pam to un-Christianly picture her gasping under a cold one, shielding her deeply uninteresting frigleaf and lively little badminton birdies from our thigh-whacking, bobble-bopping truncheons.

Yet I don’t want my schoolgirl snits to distract from Nick’s quest. For the rest of his life, even after they differed—after Pearl Harbor and before Hiroshima, like so many people, he had serious problems with her pacifism—there was only one
Dorothy
in my guardian’s hesaurus.

You know what? The hell with it, Panama. Writers are born to seize on coincidences the rest of you find meaningless. Hello, old Scarecrow.

Posted by: P
ä
mchen in
U
nid
orm

It was to be over a year before I actually met her. (September 1935: Dorothy voyages to the Midwest to rally her troops. I suppose you
could
look it up.) Up to then, even as I defended the
Worker
’s only begetter from the dormant Tories in Purcey’s dorms and lavatories, I can’t say I’d thought about her much on my own hook. A half sawn product of Chignonne’s, I reacted to my guardian’s awakened faith with a sort of charmed bafflement that religion could be an internal matter, perplexing and harassing intelligent people—of their own volition, too—as if it were an emotion or a relationship.

As for Purcey’s Girls’ Academy of St. Paul, Minnesota, it was nondenominational in the brochure and Episcopalian in practice, my guardian having done his best to guess dead Daisy’s wishes on that front. Talk about through a glass darkly, too. Too bad for Jesus that the all-girl student body was also all adolescent, caught as if by motion-study photographs in various stages of pimples, surprise fuzz, colleen
collines
made of pale flesh, and hormonal moans—for Clark Gable, mostly, but with Tyrone Power ready to assist the cowards—along with sneaked cigs, the eternal hairstyle steeplechase (Pam a nonstarter there), rhetorical lewdness, and one honest-to-gosh alkie: Sigourney Keota of Skunk River, Iowa, nearly expelled after she threw up all over Longfellow and they found the white lightning. No wonder the sermons in chapel had an unswervingly cautionary tilt.

We heard an awful lot about how our bodies were temples, prompting Harmony Preston, who came from La Crosse and played it too, to hoot “Who does
your
temple pray to?” as she sashayed back across the Quad one Sunday. If wishes were visible, ten or twelve Gables, three or four Tyrones, two Robert Youngs, and one puckish Mickey Rooney—my God, was Sigourney
that
sozzled?—would’ve materialized in the dorms at lights out. As for Pink Thing’s own solo jimmyings of the temple door—oh, don’t go all blushy on me, bikini girl! I’m sure you do the same, not that I imagine your dad wants to think about that too much—they were usually provoked by mildly mournful alloys of moments left unseen in the
Thin Man
series. I always did aim for sophisticated.

Spare me, boys. I’m well aware which Thirties flick any male readers daisysdaughter.com may have are praying I’ll reprise.
Mädchen in Uniform
, preferably colorized, in Purceyish reenactment, yes? Even Cadwaller asked, so I know you’re all hopeless. Since
l’équipe
wants to be user-friendly, I’ll do my best to dredge something up, but I warn you it’s not much. I personally found and find it about as erotic as a month-old Spam sandwich.

Basketball practice, winter ’36 or ’37: Buchanan, gawky but determined forward, wrenches her shoulder. Miss Hormel, intramural coach and instructor in French—you
bet
she thought the world of me, folks—thinks a long soak in the tub with salts will do better at getting the kinks out than the nasty communal showers back in Radclyffe Hall. Fortunately, the teachers have private ones, waiting on their short white little Pekinese legs with their silver tongue-faucets panting.

My shoulder did hurt like the blazes; I accepted. What did I care? I can’t remember if Hormel moused up the nerve to wash my Pamback or just stood in the open door, swapping blather for lather with diffident questions about Bawdyleer. While I don’t mean to be cruel, I could’ve been
raging
to yield to the Charybdis temptation, just champing to get my strawberries soaped, and that accent would still have depressed me. Anyhow, she was furry, fifty, fat, squat, and fearful—you know, no great advertisement for Sappho’s delights, any more  than I was the gal to put more than the tall
in Tallulah. At least the Lotus Eater had been pretty. End of pornographic sex scene.

She did ask why I no longer wrote poetry, dumbfounding me with her frank if unwitting admission she was too stupid to breathe. It’d taken me two years of hard work—basketball, sneaked cigs,
Thin Man
movies, Eleanor Roosevelt jokes—to exorcise the Pam, still only a half vivisected frog, who’d spent a whole wretched semester wiping off pie or worse in Purcey’s halls after the appearance in
Pink Rosebuds
of “
Chanson d’automne
.” My lesson learned, I’d gotten a hell of a lot better at being a fake Midwestern private-school girl than poor Hormel would ever be at passing for heterosexual on any continent.

“Because I’m rotten at it?” I wonderingly asked her tile wall. “Jeez, everybody ought to be counting their blessings I catch on fast. Don’t you think, Miss Hormel?”

That wasn’t too charitable of me, since she was the kind of teacher who got rattled when asked her opinion of anything. Her class handed down Greatness with no Hormelized mediating, and I’d once struck horror into her squat soul by idly saying Corneille bored me. All things considered, she didn’t do badly, though.

“Well! Ahm, well. Ah, Pam. You weren’t all that good at basketball when you went out for the team, but I didn’t see you giving up on that.”

“Sure, but come on. Look at me, Miss Hormel,” I said, which was probably
really
unkind. “I’m the tallest girl in school except for Bellaire Petoskey from Wolverine, Michigan. There’s ‘good at,’ Miss Hormel—then there’s ‘right for.’ I started with a lot of ‘right for.’”

“I thought you did at poetry too,” she muttered, leaping like a lemming into the void of a judgment unconfirmed by the world’s approbation.

Well, I’d pretty much had it. Decided, as if I’d had any doubt, this wasn’t the tub for me. Fidgety little loon with her scalded-looking upper lip, her Bawdyleer.

I stood up. “Tell you what, Miss Hormel. I’ll try again next time my mother dies.”

Posted by: Pam

Fortunately, I do not own and have no wish to own a copy of the Fall 1934 edition of
Pink Rosebuds
.
Though it took me a good decade, I’ve successfully expunged most of my poemess from Pink Thing’s archives. During the rest of my time at Purcey’s, I wrote for the yearbook, not our simpering lit mag. And in English, since I wasn’t a fool.

To give you an idea of the flavor, the only line of “
Chanson d’automne
” I remember is
“dans les grands blés sanglotants.”
Its bathos was most likely inspired, to use the utterly wrong word, by the landscape chugging by on my trips from Chicago to school and back. Farewell to my guardian at Dearborn station, then a snip of Illinois and a lot of Wisconsin before we came into Minneapolis six or seven lion-pelted, intermittently bovine hours later. From there, I’d hop into a taxi—the now familiar Negro porter wrestling my trunk—for the backward zip across the river to St. Paul.

Oh, Pam, you unspeakably privileged twat! Hop in by all means. Stroll past the railroad guards checking the Los Angeles–bound freights for jumpers. Feel curious at a purely war-whoop and firewater level about the alcoholic Chippewas for whom, alone among the puzzled hundreds trying to sweep streets with their shoes, the Depression hasn’t changed things much. Earn your imaginary movie audience’s contempt with your ignorance of the meaning of all the impressive historical scenery.

A fairly serious amateur of the American past in his spare time, Gerson couldn’t abide that cheap vein of “We know better now” irony, and while I’m prejudiced, he was right. I was in my teens, fresh from seven years abroad. I had a very hard time believing any of this looked different from exactly how it was supposed to look in its role as a quondam backdrop to my life.