Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (27 page)

Ah, yes: the lurid sexual confessions begin. Signal event though it’s supposed to be, Pink Thing’s archives are vague about the circumstances under which and the perp with whom I first became trite—some more than usually aggressive Columbia boy, I do recall that. I haven’t thought about it in forever.

The crushed corsage and more than usually strenuous attempt to do something about my damned hair are clues I could follow if I thought they mattered. That my mute reaction on taking cognizance of Pam’s half masted, then one-ankled unmentionables was “Let’s get it over with” tells me I was probably blotto.

I know I was standing up. Bump, bump. Like the hair and ear scrubbing my cheek, the chin gouging my left collarbone—bump!—stays anonymous. My back was being ground against painful, ranked protuberances—oh, my God. An elevator.

It’s just as well I never told Murphy. He’d have columned firth on the spot.

Posted by: Pam

So there we are in the cab—see, youse guys? My future hubby has just unloaded a flagrantly anti-Semitic remark. Pam has done her best to riposte. If you’re wondering why I didn’t stop the cab instead, end this future before it began—ah, well.

I repeat: June 1941. I was four years away from seeing my radio colleague Eddie Whitling, the most cynical man I’ve ever known, break down in tears as we were led by the nose—you never forget that stench, never—into Dachau. I was eight years from marrying Gerson, fifteen from my first sight of Israel, and verbal anti-Semitism (we knew no other kind) was a social drawback at worst. To put it in 2006 terms, Panama, it was viler than littering but not nearly so awful as, say, smoking. Not an attractive warp, but to all but a few goys’ minds, not a decisive one.

Besides,
my
decision had already been made. And in a flash too, which all bragging aside I’d hardly have you think was typical of me in those days. Dottie Idell and I had spent more nights and cloistered Bank Street weekends being just-us-gals than I probably want to admit.

“Do you really have people to meet downtown?” I asked, gauging my chin’s upward tilt with finesse. High enough for the dipping Buchanan lashes to turn my eyes wry simpl
y indicated sophistication about these white fibs. High enough to let him glimpse the flaring Buchanan nostrils would’ve been whorish.

The Murphy canines joined his incisors in the smile club. “Hell, yes. Couple of Spanish War vets who want to have at me over
Prom in Madrid
.” He checked himself: “I really shouldn’t call it that to civilians, but it ran so damned long. We got tired of saying ‘Pro-mee-theus’ every time.”

“I’m no theater critic, but I have to tell you”—out of belated loyalty to Jake Cohnstein is my guess—“even I had a hard time swallowing that Parnell Mulligan would send his own brother to the firing squad, and honestly! Was Maria supposed to have been in love with him and not Fred all along, or just a sort of sensible gal who didn’t see the point of putting off until tomorrow what you can do today? I mean, the body wasn’t
cold
yet—Bran.”

“Crap. You weren’t there, Snooks.” He hadn’t been either, but the only one to point that out had been Orwell, a less than awed witness to the London production. “Anyhow, we lost the damned war. That’s all the proof anyone needs I was right.”

Far from bridling, Murphy was aglow with complacency at my familiarity with his masterpiece. It hadn’t yet closed when I’d hit Manhattan in the fall of ’38. Neither had the Spanish Republic, but the play’s prospects looked better and the young Margo Channing had still been playing Maria.

Then he looked at that eye-catching Rolex of his. “You know what, though—the hell with it. I already know the line they’ll peddle, and they probably got tired of waiting.”

“When were you supposed to meet them?”

“Yesterday. But around this time.”

“Then where are we going?”

“Why don’t we have a drink at my place? If you like theater, Snooks, I can show you a piece of Broadway history. Did you ever see my play
The Mighty Tower
?” Even Bran knew that not prefacing that title with “my play” in this context risked bringing on an outburst of Snooksian laughter.

“God, no! I was twelve.”

And in Paris, with a plump, depressed Daisy not Browninged yet up in Brussels. Before Purcey’s,
“les grands blés sanglotants”
and that cruel little scene with poor Hormel, before—oh, who cared? I was in a cab with Brannigan Murphy, and you might not see immediately why what I’d just said was not only flattering but flirtatious.

So think about it, Panama. I was declaring that I knew exactly how old I’d been when
The Mighty Tower
was on Broadway. The delicate revelation that I’d been twelve just nine years earlier turned the Murphine masculinity from saturnine to taurine.

“If I’d had my way, Snooks, it’d have still been running when you were eighteen,” he grunted, cupping my knee with one championship paw. (Two Pulitzers, eight public fistfights, “Shucker of the Month” his second Pascagoulan summer.) “The hell with the critics!
Tower
was the one. I’ve had better luck since, but you know that swell line of Mary Tudor’s. ‘When I am dead and opened, you shall find—’”

“Yes, yes! Of course I know it.” I waved my hands—well, how to put this? Airily. “I’m just surprised you do.”

“Hell,” he said, putting the long arm of Rolexed coincidence around my shoulders. “Is that really how people think of me?”

“Why not? It’s how you want them to,” I managed to get out before my first Murphine kiss, as crushingly manly as a diesel truck in a barbering school.

Windows facing the river, his Sutton Place digs told the story of a bear who’d caught on too late bears don’t hatch from eggshells. He’d had it done in Deco on moving in soon after the first Pulitzer, when “successful playwright” as a generic category had more sway over him, and had been trying to wrestle it back into reflecting his threatened Branhood ever since. The decorator’s Bakelite and lacquer shrank from the flea-market bric-a-brac commemorating his nonexistent career in the Merchant Marine, the autographed
painting
, not photo, of Dolores Ibárurri—innocent of English if not much else, Spain’s fabled La Pasionara had rendered
“No pasaran”
as “No pass around”—and the undeniably crowded and much used bookshelves. In a clench-browed way, Murphy did take himself seriously as a literary man, making it rather sad that today almost nobody does.

As promised, the central prop from his play about Padraic Titan stood before the center window in the large living room. Unfortunately, its shaft was dwarfed by the great leap into the dark of the Queensboro Bridge, no bogus architect’s model and already venerable. Beyond the river’s flowing coffin—odd image, but its belustered black had handles to my eyes—were Astoria, the unrevisited Long Island of Pam’s childhood, the Atlantic.

We had a drink; we chatted. The unnerving haste with which he’d picked me up or I’d let myself be picked up demanded a pause to civilize us. He told me where the idea for Colum Firth’s rape of the mannequin had originated: not as a symbol of political frustration—“Jake Cohnstein was full of hooey”—but after watching a religious procession in Little Italy go by. He predicted the Red Army would put Moscow to the torch before letting a single invader set foot there. “Just like in 1812,” my future hubby boasted, proving his grasp of pre-Bolshevik Russian history wasn’t all it might be.

Not that I saw much percentage in being pedantic then or indeed want to be pedantic now. Yet Bonaparte did view the fire’s troubling beginnings from inside the Kremlin. He’d had a wonderful time there for a while. That’s why “Moscowa” is among the names of his great victories inlaid in gold in the onyx base that girdles his tomb at the Invalides, even though it proved short-lived and ended in a disastrous retreat. He later said he wished he’d died the day he entered in triumph, which even Cassandre conceded was
plutôt beau
as our jonquil-hatted troop peered down at the love-cheated little clown’s enormous coffin and remains the only comment of his I ever found touching. I generally dislike him. As before,
l’équipe
here at daisysdaughter.com thanks you for your attention to this utterly irrelevant matter.

Then, taking up my handbag as unobtrusively as possible—but why in hell be unobtrusive? I could’ve kicked furniture and yelled “I don’t want to get pregnant,” and that wouldn’t have made it any more obvious—Pam asked to be aimed at the bathroom. I don’t know if you’re on the Pill or need to be, Panama, something I doubt your dad likes to dwell on even if he’s in the loop. If so, lucky you for just getting to pop your birth control like a Tic Tac. Those crouching, squirted Forties preparations amid admonitory tile and porcelain were no fun at all.

On the other hand, as Dottie had more than once reminded me, they weren’t optional on dates with men, unlike the answer to a question I always disliked—namely, how to make my theoretically seductive reappearance. Unless you were a hell of a lot racier than I was, it just wasn’t done to skip back out in the old birthday suit. Even Dottie, far more uninhibited than I, admitted she couldn’t face that combination of road to Damascus and drama critic in male eyes.

Besides, the Buchanan bod, however friendly—thanks again, Hopsie!—didn’t exactly conform to the Forties’ ideal of pulchritude, with an upper endowment that didn’t rival even Dottie’s own petite dotties despite Pam’s extra three inches of height and slightly equine hips that made it easy to tell when I’d grabbed a pair of my roommate’s undies from fridge, floor, or Dover by mistake. She only ever envied me my legs—or emjambments, as we called them, amusing ourselves once again with our shared private passion for poetry.

Even though the tucked-towel look did the most for the Buchanan gams while minimizing Pam’s upper inadequacies, it had just reminded me of poor Hormel. After some hesitation, I took the royal Murphine dressing gown off its hook and wrapped that around me instead, but I must’ve lingered in there longer than I’d realized. As I crossed the long, now empty living room from prop tower to real but inaccessible bridge, Murphy loomed up in the bedroom’s darkened doorway, his torso comically Roman in a half wound sheet. “I was wondering where that was,” said he, honestly disgruntled before he remembered that this was a seduction scene, not a bad day at the Lost and Found.

Posted by: Pam

Once we’d retired to the royal chamber, the old buck and wing went well enough at first. He was famous and soused, I was twenty-one and tipsy; the lamp was off, and the Mighty Tower, if thankfully not comparable to the ad, was
okay
. For a couple of minutes, anyhow, after which the Buchanan bod started to feel like a pummeled stairwell as stubborn furniture movers plugged away. Bump, bump, bump, not getting anywhere, Bannister. Without previous bouts of Murphine buck and wing to guide me, I couldn’t tell if this was his pleasure or evidenced his lack of it.

Of course, he was as wordless as a bulldozer, and I wasn’t about to ask. Even at that untutored age, querying a dieseling male face with an anxious “Is something wrong?” wasn’t my idea of a great moment in intimacy. Yet while it hadn’t been that warm a night, the room was growing stifling. The smacks of the burly Murphine
poitrine
on Pam’s strawberry pancakes might as well have been the soundtrack to a scaremongering documentary about the Everglades.

He’d had a lot to drink, but I had no way of knowing if that was Murphy’s Achilles heel or his motivation. As the minutes kept landing soggy, overheated punches, I realized my eyes were now so well adjusted to the dark that I could’ve written my next book review on the ceiling. Visualizing Alisteir Malcolm’s face, as I helplessly did, was no great way to put paid to Pam’s worry that she was on the receiving end of the two-backed version of writer’s block.

Did he think he was building the goddam Moscow subway? Just too loyal to Comrade Stalin to protest the non-arrival of a train. A five-year plan, a five-year plan, a five…? Dear God, I’d be
twenty-six
when he came! My youth gone, my clothes out of fashion. Crazed with hunger to boot.

I may have actually sobbed, which didn’t throw the switch either. Bran could be brutal, but a sadist he wasn’t. I was honestly wondering if there was a pistol in reach when an unmistakably appreciative tail-wag in response to Pam’s limp caress made me realize how the future might work.

By then, I’d’ve tried anything to make this gulag stint end in laggardly goo. I’d never done it before, but my hunch and hope both were that expertise wasn’t a requirement. Soaking a forefinger in hard-won saliva, I did my dubious,
où est la plume de ma debutante-
ish best to stick it where red moons don’t shine.

Murphy columned firth like a spout. All of ten seconds later, as I lay thinking that the always awkward transition back to one’s conversational self might be a bit stickier than usual, I heard a snore.

Posted by: Pam

I was up first the next morning. Showered long, then—still heaped on the bathroom floor, my clothes looked singularly morbid—rewrapped myself in the royal dressing gown. Can’t say if I wanted to provoke him, be declarative in some unformulated way, or just didn’t think about it or give a fuck. Thank God, my handbag still held half a pack of smokes.

I made my own coffee, amazed by a kitchen I both could and had to walk around in. Then I sat down to figure out what I’d call myself if I weren’t me. Truth to tell, this kind of instant coupling was unprecedented in Pam’s not really that extravagant experience. Up to then, my occasional innings, however unromantic, had been with men I’d at least palled around with some first.

While I hadn’t managed to stay friends afterward with all of them, two out of three seemed pretty civilized. I might’ve even managed a grand slam if I hadn’t stopped having any reason to run into my elevator deflowerer once I’d dropped out of Barnard and moved to the Village.

As for the other two, I’m still sure one if not both of their faces was bobbing among the supernumerary blobs around the Commodore bar’s back table at Alisteir’s sendoff. If how much of a mark either beau left on Pink Thing’s archives is measured by your Gramela’s inability to positively fit so much as hornrims on one or confidently light a cigarette for the other, the situation nonetheless makes it obvious we could be sociable just ten and eleven months later with no strain.

I hadn’t been planning on going out at all. After we got up, Dottie Idell, still on her seafood kick, had spent the rest of Sunday afternoon dreamily inventing an oyster stew to end all oyster stews. When the phone call came from Addison, I’d practically bolted to the Commodore, to my roommate’s hurt surprise.

She’d just cracked ’em foister, and all she had left to do was drop them in. I might’ve wavered if she hadn’t gone into another of her farce poetry declamations—burbling “The sea is calm tonight” for the second time that day, my God. The first recital of “Dover Beach” had been triggered by hearing the news of Hitler’s attack on Russia on the radio, but only an unfeeling ninny would
reprise
it.

If Murphy hadn’t shown up, I don’t know who the hell I’d have gone home with. Bless fate for at least rigging the schedule to ensure Alisteir Malcolm had a train to catch.

Anyhow, in fairness to myself, Murphy didn’t really fit the bill of complete stranger. Meaning, of course, that his fame had imbued Pam’s first-ever sight of him with a magnetic familiarity, creating an illusion this wasn’t our first encounter. My companions’ chaffing as soon as he swept his Rolex at us had no doubt helped. I got used to the double-exposure effect in my Hollywood years.