Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (21 page)

Panama, at that age, in my shoes, it’s
all
Oz. My guardian’s attempt to help put things right on Dorothy Day’s yellow brick road, which I defended simply because anything he did was unimpeachable, struck me as one more fixture of this universe, not an effort to amend its rules. He was the one who gave me cab fare, presumably for dead Daisy’s sake, to cross the river in style to my second-rate (cf. Hormel) private school.

Anyhow, I guarantee my image of
“les grands blés sanglotants”
had no socioeconomic dimension, even if it does sound like the title in French translation of some lesser Steinbeck novel. The real epiphany of one train trip had nothing to do with either the “sobbing” wheat and rye or the Depression, and I claim it transcended both.

On a Pullman going south, Pam reads a discarded schedule. Goggling, she learns Muscatine’s a
place
. Thinking of it as a product, like Crisco or Rice Krispies, I’d pictured Iowans frothing in it up to their sudsy necks after my guardian’s sales job, happy to be keeping clean in Muscatine. That’s what I should’ve written a poem about. I might have if “Chanson d’automne” hadn’t cured me forever of trying.

My guardian often took a train north to visit me, since there was a Worker house in St. Paul whose bedding and cookware he’d had a hand in supplying. After celibately squiring me around on the Saturday, he’d stay over to volunteer on the Sunday, sharing the dispossesseds’ lives as Dorothy wished. Then back to Chicago on Monday, determined to find urgency in the rhetorical pretense that Ypsilanti could use more Rice Krispies or only no Crisco stood between Toledo and joy. If you find that absurd, may I recommend Belgium? I promise you’ll be happier there.

Naturally, once it got around he wasn’t a relative, his twinkling, patient waits for Pam in the lobby of Nordhoff Hall—a man then in his forties, his gray hair closely cropped, hat to slackly draped thigh and jacket parted to announce his no longer trim waistline’s second act, all finished off by his one Twenties souvenir, white shoes—were bound to excite comment. Girls will say anything about anyone but themselves.

“Get wise. What does he want with you, Buchanan?” said Cass Lake of Deer River, Minnesota. (Or was it Marion Swayzee of Kokomo, Illinois, Alma Franklin from the vicinity of Red Cloud, Nebraska?
Où sont mes vierges d’antan?
) “I bet he’s just an old lech. One snowy night, he’s going to—”

“He is not. And you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hormel was going to like this
composition
,
or rather cum-paw-Z-shun. I could’ve done it in my sleep, probably had more than once. I slammed my book shut.

“A lech? Oh, but I say he is. They all are. Maybe he was the same lech you saw on Cape—”

“God! I can’t stand that word. Can’t you be stupid with more
variety
?” (If he ever reads this, Andy Pond may well call that quote “Dawn.”)

“What, ‘lech’? Ooh, Buchanan doesn’t like to hear ‘lech.’ Lech, lech, lech, lech!”

Five foot ten of basketball player belted her tormentor’s shoulder, which shouldn’t have even made Cass blink—or was it big Sandy Hingham from near Chester, Montana? At Purcey’s, we used to smack each other around like sumo wrestlers, only trimmer. But she rubbed her arm: “Ouch, Buchanan. I was teasing.”

It’s true, though. I did hate to hear women say “lech,” common enough slang though it had been since my childhood. My guess is the aversion’s source was my lonely bilingualism, since
lèche
,
lécher
,
lécheuse
, and so on meant something altogether different if no more, in some contexts, palatable. Since I was trying to be an uncomplicated American girl in my ersatz way, the distraction must’ve annoyed me.

Posted by: Pam

Having put in time among the grandees of Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and what used to be called the Third World, I’m responsibly placed to tell you this. To the last man or woman, the egotists who burst upon us with the news they’ve transcended their egotism have unknowingly only sublimated it. During the Great Depression, the Dorothy who found her Scarecrow in my guardian was an example to beat the band.

What I won’t do is beam after that remark as if it’s a grand slam that puts the troublemaker in her place, letting the rest of us go airily back to discussing the futility of everything. Sublimation is as sublimation does, and she got a lot of people fed.

Thanks to my presence in September of  1935 at Dorothy Day’s lunch with my guardian, the future Brother Nicholas, I can also report a certain amount of comedy is involved in entertaining a saint. Don’t think I’m speaking figuratively, as the Vatican has started to kick canonization down the road. She’ll be only the third American woman with her own Catholic baseball card, and sometimes I wish I hadn’t been fifteen the only time I met her. More often, I’m glad I was.

It was understood they weren’t going to eat at the St. Paul Worker house itself. Dorothy had shared a thousand meals with her flock of capitalism’s displaced, but under the pressure of a tour including radio talks, personal appearances to browbeat the well-heeled into forking over, and the continuance of her column in the
Worker
while she traveled—it was still “Day by Day” then, not “On Pilgrimage”—she could honestly use a break. Her brusque request to my guardian to find some decent place for lunch before she shot on to St. Cloud and Milledgeville without him tested even his acute sense of appropriateness just the same. In Dorothy’s vocabulary, “decent” had enough potentially clashing meanings to make the Sphinx go crosseyed.

The future Brother Nicholas obviously couldn’t take her to one of the posher places where, as dedicated in his job as guardian as he was in serving Dorothy, he treated me to non-Purcey meals on his visits. She’d’ve been on her feet before the appetizers, prowling for rich folk who looked Catholic and demanding that they open their wallets. He did want her to have a good meal, however, and after some hunting settled on a plausible-looking Italian place, one checked tablecloth and jacketed waiter up the scale from a workingman’s café. It was all of a block from the former appliance store whose windows now proclaimed in hand-lettered white paint,
The Catholic Worker Hospitality House.  All are welcome. Whatever ye do unto the least of these my brethren, ye do unto Me.

Pam was surprised to be brought along. Though he was pleased anytime I asked about it, my guardian had never tried to get me involved in relief work. I’d never even gone to see him at either this Worker house or the one in Chicago where he spent most of his Sundays cooking for fifty. “Cooking for four, I can’t do,” he’d said once. “They know where to find you, after all. But fifty? I can just blend into the angry crowd.”

My recollection is lunch was his only chance to see me this trip, since he was in St. Paul as Dorothy’s facilitator and not Pam’s guardian for a change. I only wish the old bachelor’s concerns had included the odd fashion tip. So help me, I think I was wearing white gloves.

If his worry had been the ambiance, he’d wasted his time. I suspect Miss Day came into
everyplace
as if it were a train station in disguise.

“Dorothy! We’re over here,” my guardian called just before her unbraked momentum would’ve taken her into the kitchen for a word with the conductor. “Dorothy, this is my ward, Pa—”

“I probably shouldn’t eat at all,” she said rapidly, sitting down in a chair that had needed its wits about it to be in the right place at the right time. “I’ve just found out I’m speaking
tonight
in St. Cloud. Virgil talked the Lions into giving me my say, but I hate what all this does to my nerves. Nothing but butterflies in my stomach! Oh, well. I suppose I can’t let them starve.”

“No—they didn’t know what they were getting into, either. But you speak in public all the time,” my guardian said affectionately.

“The Light Brigade charged, too. What’s your point? Oh God. Is this a menu or my schedule? Nick, am I due to speak to Neal Parmegian at eighty o’clock?”

She still had that Saracen nose you see in earlier photographs. In the later ones, the rest of her face seems to have crept gauntly forward to keep it company. She hadn’t yet started doing her hair in the tightly wound braid whose resemblance to a crown of thorns might’ve struck you as hubris if it hadn’t looked so practical. In the restaurant, she sat with her hands coiled around her elbows, turning her torso into a shell for her face to thrust forward from. I swear she kept kicking the table.

“Have we had any word about more beds for the Detroit Worker house? I’m sorry, but I didn’t have time to find out myself.”

“Six are on their way.” My guardian looked pleased.

“Six? They’re sleeping in the bathtubs! A whole factory closes, and you found me six beds? And smile? What are we here for?”

“To have lunch before your train goes.” He said it so gently I wondered if she genuinely needed the reminder. “Six beds is six more, and let’s face it, I’m not you. I can’t perform miracles, Dorothy.”

“I don’t. But nothing in the Gospels says we aren’t allowed to try.”

Was I awed to be in her presence? While I’d love to say yes, the truth is the whole torrent of words had left me on the riverbank. At loose ends, I was wondering if I should tell my guardian what I’d discovered about the new draftsman at his agency on my last visit there that summer.

“What can I say? You’ve always known I don’t have the stuff,” he cheerfully told Miss Day. “It’s been the same ever since Yale. I only got into religion in a failed bid to make myself popular.”

“Hah! Did I tell you about one
wonderful
letter I got last year? Oh, it was sublime. Its author prayed God would give him the patience to endure my what was it, ‘lunacy,’ until the police shut us down for encouraging loafers, traitors, and—oh, yes!—‘publicity-seeking psychotics.’ My hunch is that last fine phrase was lobbed in my direction unless he meant Maurin. It was written by a priest.”

Surprised—I shouldn’t have been—I laughed. That obliged Miss Day to absorb my inclusion at the table: the white gloves, a frilled blouse I quite liked in real life, tulip skirt. Thrillingly grown-up stockings too, but I’m not going to indulge any male daisysdaughter.com readers I may have. For God’s sake, back then we
all
wore garter belts! Under the impression they were practical.

“What sort of work do you
do for us?” she asked as if she’d missed shaking hands with me among the volunteers at the Worker house.

“I’m in school,” I said, stumped.

“I’ve been trying to introduce you, Dorothy. This is my ward, Pamela Buchanan. Daisy’s daughter. Let up on her, will you, she’s not even—”

“Catholic?” Miss Day guessed. [Wrongly, I think: my guess is Nick was about to say “sixteen.”] “Yes, yes, I know: the excuses for doing nothing are endless. I do realize it’s not your fault. I met your mother once or twice.” With a swift smile, she tossed her face ceilingward: “Well, that certainly came out wrong! Oh, they’re going to love me in St. Cloud tonight, Nick. At this rate?”

Pam was shy about asking, but in those days I read the way otters swim and I’d been mad for
The Emperor Jones
.
“Miss Day, excuse me. Did you really know Eugene O’Neill?”

Message from a future edition of Pamela to a prior one: for Christ’s sake, act on any curiosity you’ve got about O’Neill
now
. Once you’ve married Murphy, you’ll learn he can’t abide the name. One of several major differences between them is that O’Neill will have no idea they’re rivals.

In the meantime, the detectable narrowing of Miss Day’s eyes had mystified me. I didn’t know she disliked being reminded of her free-and-easy bohemian youth—concerned, so she said, that young people would assail their parents with “If Dorothy Day did it, why can’t I?” Then she decided to concede I was fifteen and therefore asking about a Great Man, not the one she’d drunk under the table in Village saloons.

“Oh, I knew all sorts of people then,” she said not unkindly. “Gene was struggling for God in his own way, I think. Black Irish, you know—they always do it by insulting Him.” I don’t normally capitalize that
H
, Panama, but believe me, she did. “Why, does writing interest you?”

“She writes poetry,” my guardian said proudly. After the effort he’d put into deciphering “
Chanson d’automne
” a year earlier, he wasn’t about to admit he needn’t have bothered. I shudder to think the copy of
Pink Rosebuds
the poetess fulsomely inscribed to him may still exist somewhere.

“Then you should talk your uncle into writing for the
Worker
,” she told me. That not only promoted him with such certainty that he and I eyed each other as if we might as well enjoy our new connection but proved Dorothy Day was Dorothy Day without letup. “I was hectoring him to try half the way from Chicago. I think he’d have a gift.”

“Oh, no,” my guardian said. “One year, I wrote a series of
very
solemn and obvious editorials for the
Yale News
.
The relief when we parted was mutual. Besides, I’ve been writing ads too long. Stringing together above eight words at a time would feel unnatural.”

I knew that wasn’t strictly true, since he’d once told me a bit awkwardly that he’d tried to set down his memories of my mother for my benefit after her death. Yet he didn’t feel he’d captured her, so he said—my own hunch is the portrait came out more unsympathetic than was fit for her daughter to read—and ended up burning the thing.

If he was fibbing about destroying the manuscript, I’ll never know. Nenuphar kept his effects when he died, and there can’t have been many of those. As I’m not blood kin or in contact with Nick’s surviving relatives, if any, I’ve got no access to them.

“Stuff and nonsense,” Miss Day told him. “Or quite possibly vanity. Where do you think I’m going to write Monday’s column? On the train to St. Cloud. Will it be artful? Of course not. Will it say things worth saying? All we can do is hope.”

“Can I ask the subject?”

“Oh, Nick! Don’t look at me that way. Or do, since I couldn’t care less and it seems to give you a peculiar sort of agonized pleasure. Yes, I’m going to be writing about the tenant farmers’ strike
again
. And yes, I’m going to tell the
Worker
’s readers to send every penny they can spare to the union. They’ve got nothing, nothing! Isn’t it bad enough I have to listen to Peter about this?”

“I think Maurin’s right,” my guardian said stubbornly. “I don’t think we should be taking stands in these labor disputes. People are only too happy to lump us in with the Communists as is, and it gets the movement involved with, well, ‘Caesar’s things.’ That’s not personalism to me. And more important”—and if you want proof he was no revolutionary, here it is; pay close attention, Panama—“my feeling is that we have to think carefully about where we want to be standing, and with whom, when this current economic crisis ends. Because it will.”

I’m told Dorothy very seldom reverted to the loose talk of her Village days, making my most cherished
viva voce
quote from the saint more precious. If any reader cares to pass it on to the Vatican’s canonization crew, be my guest.

“Oh, balls, Nick,” she said. “Now is now.”

Despite an avuncular glance my way—unsure of her best move, Pam tried to make her face simultaneously communicate that I heard people say “Balls” all the time and didn’t have a clue what it meant—my guardian smiled. “And ‘sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.’ Is that it?”