Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (25 page)

“Oops,” you could fairly say to that, as it isn’t a seaport. But otherwise, Murphy’s two college summers working as a shucker on a shrimp boat out of Pascagoula had stood him in good stead. Not until his lone biographer got to work was it cleared up that the only tramp steamer he’d ever swung his duffel bag aboard was Gabby Chatterton, a three-day affair dating to his one trip to Hollywood to raise money for the Loyalist cause.

The first Mrs. Murphy, who I never met—buying a train ticket with her first alimony check, she ran a native jewelry shop in Taos before dying, much too soon, in 1940—was the predecessor twenty-one-year-old Pam felt curious about when I took over the lease. It wasn’t because she’d been the same age as me when she married him; if you must know, we all were. I don’t complain about any of my husbands bumping into view when they did, since I was the right Pam for all three at the time. I still can’t help occasionally dottily wondering what it would’ve felt like to be
somebody’s
first wife.

Posted by:
Pam

I’d only just sat down with some people in the Commodore’s bar when Murphy swarmed from the gents’, belatedly pausing to check his trousers before looking back up and plowing toward us with a renewal of the heftily charismatic grin that had molarized
Time
’s moralizing cover seven years earlier (“A Warning of Disaster: Playwright Brannigan Murphy”). Alisteir Malcolm, books editor at the old
Republic
and author of
Printer’s Devil, Devil’s Printer
, a memoir of his days running a small, Satanists-welcome press in the Twenties; Jake Cohnstein, then the theater critic for
Rampages
and years away from his public conversion to anti-Communism. Addison DeWitt, Jake’s colleague from
Our Chains
, then still in the politicized early phase his delightful autobiography,
An Apple for My Eve
, calls “Red Stars in My Eyes.” Besides reviewing plays for
OC
, he published tense, difficult poetry in
Orlando
magazine—at least until its Florida-based namesake, all real-estate plugs but nonetheless
primus inter pares
, threatened legal action for copyright infringement.

There were a few others I don’t remember, and so much for evaluating the reportorial quality as opposed to the bias of the first remark of Murphy’s to leave me poleaxed. Most likely some of them
were
Jewish, but maybe it only took one Jake Cohnstein to turn him Murphine once he and I were sharing a cab. What I’m sure of is that I was the only woman at that crowded back table, a situation Pam then reveled in.

At that age, I could count on eagerness and a gift of gab to take care of my sex appeal. Along with the Buchanan gams, on good display in a skirt suit from Saks at my carefully chosen outer seat of the booth and hopefully drawing eyes away from the ridiculous miniature hat, pinned atop my brindle mop like a powder-blue pedestal whose feather resembled the display for “Comma” in a punctuation-themed fashion revue, which 1941’s daffy idea of
éclat
compelled me to wear. I was only outdone the minute someone treating prettiness as her talent was induced to sit down.

Then I was forced to behave like one more suitor if I wanted to stay part of the conversation. Not that I minded much, since my brain and my cigarette were as good at playing one of the boys as my lipstick, legs, and that stupid hat were at announcing I was one of
les biches
. But you don’t want to get carried away.

The Commodore wasn’t one of our usual spots, since the prices were stiffer and the drinks less so than everyone’s wallets and gullets favored. Alisteir Malcolm had just gotten his Guggenheim, our crowd’s equivalent of knighthood. We were seeing him off in an hour at Grand Central to spend a Vermont summer starting his admonitory novel about Benedict Arnold.

Since Arnold had a) been guilty and b)
wasn’t executed, the case didn’t add up to a patch on your average Moscow show trial. Still, American Stalinists were ardent about sticking any Yankee Doodley wig they could on the Russian Revolution’s growing pains and Alisteir’s diabolically unclever essay in the old
Republic
about Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War had backfired. Even in left-wing circles, the romance of the Confederacy was still in flower, a
nd gluing Jeb Stuart’s face onto Trotsky’s did not have the desired effect.

Oh, Panama! The intellectual life was such a Donnybrook Farm back then. If that devil Chad Diebold thought he had me on Pam’s French upbringing, her flirtation with the Communist call in the last couple of years before Pearl Harbor ought to make tomorrow’s news coverage of my act of telephonic terrorism write itself.

Posted by: Pam the Red Menace

It would be fun and not inaccurate to remind Chad I was barely out of my teens and excited by Manhattan’s high-speed amoeba dance. I just refuse to trivialize things that way.

Unlike Bran, I was never a defender of the Soviet Union under Stalin. That may’ve been a symptom of temperament rather than belief: like all defeated factions, the Trotskyites made better jokes. Even so, my main later disagreement with Jake Cohnstein—we did some colloquium in the late Seventies, Pam subbing for a too busy Mary McCarthy—was and is my inability to see why rejecting Communism’s travesty of the ideals
we’d thought
we were furthering should require Communism’s apostates to scorn the ideals themselves, justice to the disenfranchised and an end to privilege and so on.

Jake said something into his microphone about once bitten, twice shy. I said something into mine about babies and bathwater. Then we baffled our audience (Bowdoin?) by succumbing to a case of the chuckles in our dilapidated way. Not having seen each other above half a dozen times since he’d turned down Gerson’s offer of a job at Rik-Kuk Productions in 1954, we’d had quite the boozy, reminiscent lunch beforehand, and the polysyllables just weren’t coming like they used to.

Alisteir Malcolm never got in any trouble. His slowness spared the old drayhorse from swimming against the tide when his novel
Ref
reshed with Blood
(the quote is Jefferson’s) finally appeared in ’47—and was taken as a prescient endorsement of our HUAC, not an out-of-step paean to the NKVD. To my knowledge, Alisteir never complained about the misperception, which by publication day he may have shared. Despite the officiousness he affected when assigning me book reviews—“See here, young lady” coming out at the drop of a comma, and isn’t pomposity as a way of making oneself colorful pomposity at its most forlorn?—he was basically a wistful dullard, eager to participate in The Literary Life in whatever shape it took. As I recall, his final piece in the old
Republic
was a 1972 defense of black humor as the coming vogue.

Truth to tell, we’d all started glancing around fairly frantically for a waiter as soon as we sat down, knowing we’d need a lot of oiling to get through an hour when Alisteir could claim our undivided attention as his Guggenheimerized due. By the time our drinks came, the back of Addison’s head was eloquently tipped to the wall at my shoulder. I could smell his hair ointment: “It’s all right, I spell it
poum
-ade,” he’d muttered as his nape came to rest.

Murphy had pretty clearly been tanked since noon, but his liquor held him well. I will grant him virility, which in my senescence amounts to granting him Baja California as empires go. Since I was twenty-one, it was partly the virility of fame.

Fists in the pockets of a jacket impressively tailored to organize but not mitigate the Murphine bulk’s aggressiveness—fond of good clothes as a mark of authority, he’d answered the letter congratulating him on
Prometheus in Madrid
from Robert Jordan Baker, the hero’s real-life model, by inquiring if the International Brigades had a regimental tie—he made his feet’s mild uncertainties at the nature of the communications they were receiving from the Murphine brain look like a boxer’s ominous reflexes as his
Time-
cover grin led a one-man parade. When he reached us, the sweep of his muscled forearm exposed a Rolex so ostentatiously complicated it looked less like a Soviet fighter pilot’s timepiece than his plane’s engine.

“Sitting out the war on the home front, I see. Why aren’t you defending Brest-Litovsk?” he said, immunized from his own challenge by virtue of the simple fact that he was standing up. You know,
prepared
to go, the moment the Kremlin’s overlord said, “Comrades, I can do no more. Summon Brannigan Murphy.”

“But I
did
.
Just last month, at a party at Rose Dawson’s,” protested Alisteir, genuinely confused. “Oh, why—I misunderstood.”

“Don’t worry, Bran,” said Addison without lifting his head. “We know the Red Army will knock ’em back. That’s why we’re doing the same.” He dandled his glass.

(Oh, Christ. You’ll need a glossary, won’t you? Let
l’équipe
oblige. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended newly Bolshevized Russia’s participation in World War One; I can’t imagine under what circumstances Alisteir could’ve felt summoned to defend it in May of 1941, especially on Rose Butaker Dawson’s Cunard Heights balcony. The POUM was a Trotskyite faction whose militia ended up crushed by Spain’s government to Stalin’s glee if not on his orders. If you don’t know what the Red Army was, screw this.)

Murphy’s eyes had been prowling as if they were two lions and our table was the Colosseum. Now they found me: “Well, hello. I haven’t seen you before, have I? Come on, Addison, who’s the, your—”

“I do believe ‘skirt’ is the windmill word you’re tilting at. And she ain’t mine, you mug,” Addison said. “Pamela Buchanan”—his flourished hand glided from under my nose to Murphy’s general direction—“a party unknown.”

“Didn’t Mike Gold use that as a title last year?” Alisteir asked. “I might like to if he didn’t. Does anyone remember?”

He knew he’d been demoted. Up against two Pulitzers, one Guggenheim was defenseless. He was pretending he could still manage the conversation even if his promised treat of getting to dominate it was history.

“Watch out for this one, Murph,” Jake Cohnstein told him, meaning me: Murphy’s appraising grin had been no more deflected by Alisteir’s question than a locomotive by a gopher. “We haven’t lured her all the way out of hiding yet, but in her cups she can sound
awfully
fond of that old man in Mexico who so mysteriously did himself in with a pickax last year.”

“Oh, come on!” said Murphy, flaring up. “Christ’s sake, Cohnstein. Even
we
don’t say it was suicide.”

As Jake’s calm smirk advertised his joy in that phrasing, my future hubby grew restless. Decided Jake had only been translating for me and done an unfairly well-equipped job.

“Well, then. Little Miss You.” His grin had broadened with belligerence’s idea of easier game. “What
did
we see in Trotsky, back at Vassar? I can’t wait to hear your expert reasons for defending a traitor to me.”

Believe me, Panama, in the past eighteen months or so I’d seen that look more than once. Not on the face of anyone this famous, but some bulls you grab by the horns.

“Aw, becaw he wah so
kew
,” I bawled, seizing the fat end of Addison’s tie to hold it to one ear as I tilted my face and put my thumb to my lips. After frowning over it, I batted my eyes—Pam’s best facial feature, remember—at Murphy like Baby Snooks.

Unlike my second and third husbands, my first was humorless. He’d learned his way around humor’s shoals in the same way that in other crowds, at other bars, his gaze would sort the customers into who he could and couldn’t take in a fistfight. “I think I owe you a drink,” he told me.

“Another round, barkeep,” Addison said. “Murph, did you mean just
this
room?”

“I’ve got one, thanks,” I said.

He shook his head. “Not here. The hell with the Commodore. I’ve got some people I’m supposed to meet downtown. They’ll like you.”

“As she stepped into the Black Maria, Pammie heard a soft murmur of—why, could that be
Russian?
” Addison said. “And then, those coats.”

“Brannigan, my train’s in forty minutes. Do you mind?”

“Oh, come off it, Alisteir,” said Jake Cohnstein. “If he’d asked you, we’d be sitting here coughing up your dust by now.”

“And if I’d asked you?”

That was Murphy not only seizing his victory but being pretty brutal about it. Jake took the punch well, though.

“You’d have to put a pickax in my skull first. And I stand by everything I wrote about
Colum Firth
. ‘See da yellow feather waving, youse guys? Does youse?’”

“Too bad. I always did wonder if I’d like it. Do you have a wrap you need to fetch?” Murphy asked me.

“Oh, look, Pammie’s drink is gone,” Addison said. He’d just reached over and drained it. “What will poor Pammie do now?”

Posted by: Pam

Is “hooking up” what your generation calls it, bikini girl? You’ve got nothing on the Forties. Mine, anyway.

In fact, to hell with calendars. In Pink Thing’s malleable archives, it
became
the Forties at the instant I shook my head to Murphy’s coatroom question and reminded everyone the Buchanan gams weren’t just decorative. Unless I’d grabbed a pair of Dottie’s frillies by mistake, my underwear was fresh from our Bank Street fridge—old single-gal trick in pre-A/C days—and as usual for safety’s sake on social evenings, my little pessary and tube of Nonoxynol were snug in their case in my bag.

Understand, those men were genuinely my friends. They’d never have stood for seeing Pam stumble off into the night with a writer less illustrious than they were. But those two Pulitzers were clanking like Murphy’s third and fourth testicles and even Jake Cohnstein couldn’t say he’d got them from Stalin.

The chance to figuratively cuckold him in advance is another reason I wish Pink Thing could serve up the full cast list of men perusing their cigarettes’ glow in that combatively reflective Forties way and adjusting their specs or raking their hair around that table as they prepared to Algonquinize my hookup before they went back to giving Alisteir Malcolm his Guggen-Heimlich maneuver. No luck among those I remember, not that I’ve got any special regrets. Alisteir had both a wife in the East Thirties (“I wouldn’t mind if Esther didn’t understand
me
.
I mean, why bother?” he once accurately moaned. “But she doesn’t understand ‘the revolution in one country,’ either”) and a wide-hipped, savagely cleavaged secretary at the old
Republic
’s office who, in the way of these things, had turned out to be the more demanding of the two. In one pursuit he shared with Bran, Addison was addicted to actresses; he was chasing young Terry Randall that summer. As for Jake, he’d spent all spring besotted with a pimply Paramount usher, by which I do not mean usherette.

Let me guess. You’d pegged Addison, hadn’t you? Wrong, wrong. Panama, there
was
a time when men could be both witty and heterosexual—I am the woman, I was there, I laughed. Slept with a couple, too. Never Addison, but his thirty years of wedded bliss once he finally tied the knot easily outlasted my first and second marriages put together. Jake, on the other hand, bore up under the paradoxical asceticism of a man who woke up every morning juggling Trotskyism, dramaturgy, the Old Testament, and reveries of Tahitian lads in flyspeck loincloths. My future hubby had clearly known which of those—not the old man in Mexico, but the boy in Midtown—invited the lowest blow.

Unblessed by longevity, Jake’s dingy chases after subliterates whose smiles were as rare as Loyalist victories left him pained and haggard. By way of reprieve, a couple of nights a week he’d tersely decline a third round and explain he was going out to Brooklyn to stay with his family, leaving us peculiarly touched that a man of forty as cosmopolitan as he was could still be comforted by Pop and Mama Cohnstein’s Williamsburg hearth. Daisy’s daughter needed some getting used to the idea that, in certain circumstances, parental obliviousness can be soothing.