Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (22 page)

“That’s all she wrote!” Dorothy agreed. “Well, actually, I hope not. That’s death.”

“Pam, what is it?” my guardian asked.

“Oh! I’m sorry,” I said. “I just used to know someone who said that all the time.”

“Oh who?”

They must both have realized what a neglected third party I was. It was an improvised interest, as when you collar the dullard about to go neck with God-knows-whom by announcing that you
must
know where she got that dress. Pam was fifteen, didn’t know the better part of valor is vagueness. Soon to do my college share of necking with God-knows-whom and then some, smoothing my undeterred hips and mumbling “Saks, Saks,” I found myself lamely describing the woman you know as the Lotus Eater. Without going into the syringe bit or the Charybdean bent, of course.

“Why, I know that name,” Dorothy astonished me by saying. “Isn’t that odd? Nick, I was in prison with her mother.”

“Which time?”

“Occoquan, during the suffrage days. I regret it now—misdirected energy.” Then she grinned like a toothy iguana. “But you’re always sentimental about your first time in jail.”

Posted by: Pam

“Do you like
her, though?” I asked my guardian on my next trip to Chicago, all tangled knees and feeling my way at the concept of admiration independent of affection.

He smiled. “Oh, Pam! Nobody
likes
her. She won’t allow it: too mundane. Of course plenty of us adore her, but that’s our lookout. I think she’s reasonably fond of herself, but I guarantee it’s completely impersonal.”

By then, I’d decided I wasn’t going to say anything about the illicit drawings the new draftsman at his agency made on the side. I know it sounds as if Pam did more snooping than Nancy Drew, so please remember I’m leaving out all sorts of days when I
didn’t
nose around like a ferret. That Sunday back in sluggish, glazed, Chicagooey August, my guardian and I had been on our way to the zoo.

Driving past his agency’s building, he remembers a portfolio he needs. Once he flicks it open on the desk in his back office, a recollected deadline dictates a phone call: “No more than ten minutes, I swear.” In the outer room, its three drafting tables and two copywriters’ desks deadened by weekend sunlight’s optical version of a drone, Pam gets drugged on one of adolescence’s most perishable moods, never felt by anyone over sixteen: mild spookiness combined with utter boredom.

Through the partly opened door, I can see the right-hand edge of an old placard, white lettering on a blue background:
ou
, then the much larger
an
of “
clean
,” then back to smaller type for the
tine
of “
muscatine.
” Brief game of eye Scrabble gets nowhere: no I, a tune. Bits of guardian’s strangely artificial phone voice (when he talks on a long-distance line, I’m usually on the other end in St. Paul), half droll and half exasperated: “Well, how did he get the idea it’s in the Midwest? Can
someone
explain that to me?”

Hum, hum. Flies hum, I hum. They can’t carry a tune. No, I can’t. On the new man’s drafting table, a rough for an illustration to good old Vern Jewel’s copy for the upcoming zeppelin show attracts Pam’s admiring but untrained eye. What else is he working on? Heave up the pad’s page, big as a skirt.

As I recall, the respective dimensions of that cock and the puny man wielding it were those of the Washington Monument and a hairless chimpanzee. At least in Pink Thing’s salvage job, though, his partner is drawn in a detail lascivious enough to arouse Sean Finn’s envy: not just a black button on each white cupcake, but twin worms of paler dark to promontorize the nipples. Each curl of adult femininity’s parachute emblem is as caressed and embossed as the more famous hairdo up top. Overlarge in the same style as more legit Thirties cartoons, the head would’ve been recognizable even if the first panel hadn’t provided a title:
Gabby Chatterton in ‘Who’re You Callin’ a Dyke, You Whore?’

Have you ever heard of Tijuana bibles, Panama? I’m sure Tim has, but can see how they might not be the stuff of father-daughter moments. Contraband more lurid than heroin, they featured famous people—either figures of real-world renown or barely disguised fictional characters like Little Morphine Annie, though I’m not sure any smut-stained wretch ever went to the extreme of fusing
the two—in situations whose appeal combined crazed lust with simmering resentment. Making its way to Purcey’s, one that starred Cary Grant had been squawked at by a bouquet of damn near purple rosebuds until Flora Olney of Mt. Carmel, Illinois, our most dogged reader of the actual Bible, leapt up wreathed in wrath to seize the thing and chuck it in the incinerator. So she said.

And Gabby Chatterton? Oh, she was another Thirties screwball comedienne. Her name could as easily have been Claudette Harlow or Myrna Alloy. I admit that when I met her in Hollywood a dozen years later, I felt gunshy about shaking hands.

Her own legs locked together—I might as well have had a tourniquet around both knees, from which you shouldn’t infer any literal equivalent whatsoever—Pam keeps feeling like she needs to whiz but knows she doesn’t. She can’t figure out if what’s left of her brain is screaming at her guardian to get off the phone or screaming at him to realize he needs more privacy and close his office door. Hearing his tone shift to the staccato preliminaries of goodbye, I let the pad’s top page fall back down, half expecting my face to go with it in the optical effect known in old Hollywood as a vertical wipe.

Out came my guardian, who I knew had never done anything like
that—
much less
that!—
in his life. “So!” he said, scratching his head. “Off to the zoo now, yes? I’m sorry to’ve kept you dawdling. But I’ve only known one man in my life who didn’t know where San Francisco was, and he’s long dead.”

Quoth Pam, “Could we please go to the movies instead?
Wings in the Dark
is at the Roxy.”

Posted by: S
t
. Pam

Crazed with self-important hysteria—no tune, just I and more I—and eager to erase, no, crush its cause, I spent weeks tempted to tell him his new draftsman moonlighted as a pornographer. By the time he brought me back to Purcey’s after our lunch with Dorothy Day, I’d decided I wouldn’t, and I didn’t.

My guardian would’ve had to fire him. Not even for the offense so much as my exposure, tarnishing his honor as the man dead Daisy had chosen to look after her daughter. This was the mid-Thirties and the new man was everyone’s junior. Plenty of people had trouble making ends meet, though I’m sure Nick paid the best wages he could.

Not that you could’ve convinced me then, but there are worse things in this world than illustrating Tijuana bibles, too. In that category, I’d include some people’s ideas of how to illustrate the New Testament.

You see, Panama? I didn’t want his unemployment on my conscience: rote concept since Chignonne’s, now internalized. My silence helped keep one unspeakably filthy-minded man afloat in the Depression. It wasn’t quite feeding the hungry, and definitely a far cry from clothing the naked, but I did my part.

Perhaps to my guardian’s unvoiced regret (he wouldn’t have voiced it to save his life), I was never tempted to convert to Catholicism. That’s despite occasionally thinking I’d’ve made a sensational nun. Nor was I ever a pacifist, and Andy Pond among others can tell you I’m no ascetic. I honored Dorothy Day in my own way.

If the Church does canonize her, I’m glad I won’t be here to see it. What, a “publicity-seeking psychotic”? (Yes, that letter was real.) It could be the most hypocritical thing the Vatican’s done since they glued Joan of Arc’s charred remnants back together after burning her. Unless drinking Eugene O’Neill under the table counts, it would also be nonsense to pretend they’ve turned up even one miracle—the minimum cover charge, I’m told, for admission to the club.

The tribute I’d like to see, and fat chance too, is a WPA-style mural in the Capitol. The Minneapolis Chippewas, Chicago Negroes, Mott Street bums, and Los Angeles Okies should be shuffling toward a storefront whose window proclaims,
Whatever ye do unto the least of these my brethren, ye do unto Me.
Front and center, her Scarecrow beside her, is that perfect pain in the hoo-ha: St. Dorothy of the Depression.

If the artist’s any good, and I know who I’d hire if perchance The Unknown Draftsman’s still alive, lip readers will be able to guess what she’s saying: “Oh, balls. Now is now.” Someone waves a union sign. In a corner, one man’s contentedly flipping through a Tijuana bible.

He’s their Savior, Panama, not mine. The only vital role Christianity has played in my life was its responsibility for the construction of the church of St. Sulpice in Paris. That was because I fell in love with your great-grandfather when he and his pipe were mulling other things while standing in front of it.

Even so, I’d like to know how come they treat their Good Book as if it came from Tijuana. They ransack it for the dirty parts—e.g., “The poor you shall always have with you”—that let them work off their most brutal aggressions and resentments. Why do they masturbate to the Word of God? Why is the only part of the thing they can’t and won’t take literally the Sermon on the Mount?  How has Chad Diebold made it all Aramaic to them?

Posted by: Pam

Kuala tea: that was the pun. “Oh, no, Sir! The kuala tea of Mercy is not strained.” A nonsensical joke, Panama, but you were seven. Still in the habit of threshing the uncountable, endlessly shuckable fingers of one hand with the other. Round (it was then) face crammed with the forthcoming giggle. Your Gramela’s laugh at the silly capper came mostly from pleasure that, like your pretzelly ex-namesake, you were drawn to the circus tricks of words.

Yet the mouths of babes do their best work when they burst out laughing and divulge a wet secret. As I applauded with rheumatic fingers, it occurred to me that unlike intellect or even humor—if I know myself, I’d go on bawling jokes on a desert island, naked as the first day I was bored and awaiting only my gal Friday—mercy, whether strained or not, can only exist in relation to someone else.

I’ve tried to brew Andy some kuala tea. Opening a fresh document and setting the font size to 72-point type, I’ve just clacked this out in boldface:
andy—don’t come in. call the police. pam
.

My printer purred at its rare, too brief treat. Exiled to the table, Cadwaller’s gun looked anxious: did it have a rival? (Flatterer! Don’t worry, Pam’ll be back soon.) Then I tottered out to take my best try at mercy to the foyer. If 72-point boldface type on the endtable where my mail piles up can stop Andy in time, he’ll be spared the sight of my mess of pink and gray things on the rug.

There was nothing to weight it with but Kelquen’s collar. Full name, Ilya Kelquen, derived from Andy’s announcement—
“Il y a quelqu’un dans la maison”—
as he deposited a live bundle of tortie fur in this same foyer not long after I moved here from Georgetown in ’87. The unmistakable femininity her trotting tail soon displayed was another reminder that Andy’s French is a joke. A good one, though, since he treats speaking it as intrinsically humorous. (“American diplomats don’t have skills, they have hobbies”—Cadwaller.)

Her collar has stayed on the marble-topped endtable since Andy brought me back here from the last trip I’ll take to any vet’s. Perhaps it’s obvious why your mind will fix on oddities, but I remember thinking so at the time, glancing around the exam room as Kelquen got vaguely interested in a bird outside the window and Dr. Miranda explained their eyes don’t close. After decades of bringing pets to animal hospitals, I’d just realized I’d have no further use for an entire profession.

That list has gotten considerably longer since dawn. No more Hardy Boys doctors, never again a
Popular Mechanics
dentist or voluptuous or frowning-lipped lab assistant hunting for a vein in my arm’s tapioca and balsa. No ninepin waiters (“More wine!,” or maybe more kuala tea) at La Chaumière. No more grandfatherly photographers on holiday from teaching others the craft producing exquisite images of bikini girls.

As of today, the only two helpmeets of any use or consequence to me are a White House operator and the President of the United States. And now I think of it, not without amusement, you could call mine an
assisted
suicide. Potus opposes helping folks turn up their toes-es, adding a bonus to Pam’s intent to draft him as my Kervorkian.

Afterward—just so long as it isn’t beforehand, Cadwaller’s gun!—there’ll be police. An undertaker: Gawler’s, most likely, pretty much the Foreign Service’s belly-up answer to Grand Central Station. Cleaning lady: I’d better make sure to leave a note to Andy and write an extra-hefty check as her bonus for wiping up the last of Pink Thing and Gray Thing. Will any of me hit the wall, I wonder? Except on television, I haven’t seen anybody shot in the head since 1945.

Kelquen’s collar is where it is only because depositing it in the Paris footlocker would be too hard a farewell. In the two years since, I’ve occasionally caught Andy eyeing that circlet of name-tagged turquoise leather as he considers and then cancels a suggestion. That he always checks to see if it’s still there is why I’m gambling my 72-point boldface shriek will stop him before he steps into the living room.

As a further tipoff, I thought of leaving my wedding ring there too. Unless he’s really slipped a few cogs, to Andy that wou
ld be the difference between guessing and knowing. But trying to work it off my finger would deter the average graverobber, let alone tapioca-and-balsa m
e. Kelquen’s collar will have to do.

Yes, Andy: like my last cat, I’ll soon be nowhere and nothing. (Good
God!
Why don’t those stupid, lazy bastards call? Who’s running things down there today, FEMA?) Please, though, the rest of you, even if you’re children: no sentimentality about the old bag’s imminent reunion with Kelquen. I promise she and I would race to see which of us could cough up a bigger furball. When you call animals dumb, remember that they make themselves fewer illusions than we do about death.

Posted by: P.B.

As anyone who owns
The Mountain and the Stream
knows, my guardian, once my parents’ closest friend in East Egg and later St. Dorothy of the Depression’s Scarecrow, passed away in 1968 in a hospital in Davenport, Iowa. He was a few months short of turning seventy-six and had led a full if, to mimsies with as much appetite for the world as Pam’s, bewilderingly renunciatory life. I still regret how a nurse’s thoughtlessness flooded his own eyes with misery during his final afternoon of breathing this planet’s air. Hospital-canned, but breath’s breath and air’s air.

His week as a terminal heart patient was the only time in twenty-one years Brother Nicholas, as he’d been known since 1947, had left the grounds of Nenuphar, the monastery between Davenport and Iowa City where he’d spent what must be one of the longest novitiates in the order’s history. He’d always refused ordination; I may be the only one who knows why. I’m proud that Letter 86, the fullest of several explanations of his decision to become a monk, is addressed to “P.B.,” the maximum extent to which any of us recipients are identified in print. Like the others, it makes no mention of his lone qualm about Christian doctrine, a secret he shared with me just hours before the end.