Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (29 page)

Would that I’d been half as brainy. As I’m obliged to keep bleating, I was twenty-one. My intelligence still served only as an emergency technique for fencing with whatever had just been chucked at me, not a way of reaching an independent understanding of what was going on. Not only a world-class chucker, my first hubby was twice my age and a colossus in the world I most wanted to move in. Even when I saw through him, it excited my youthful vanity to see through a man so important.

So far as charisma and male persuasiveness go, keep in mind that the Brannigan Murphy you’re meeting on daisysdaughter.com is Pink Thing’s later and wiser dismantling. The only choice Murphy gave me at the time was between being swept away and swept under the rug, and like most twenty-one-year-olds I feared dismissals from others more than mistakes of my own. Besides, that much masculinity snorting at you is a powerful convincer of one’s femininity, and in those days the only definition of womanhood society trusted was a man’s. Don’t blame the goosey, easily rattled Pam I was if she clutched at getting her public certificate of non-Charybdean desirability from such a recognizable source.

If I’d had a better understanding of what the enjoyable part of the whole deal was, I’d have tried to sustain the romance by delaying the marriage. Even in the face of Addison DeWitt’s delighted cynicism and Jake Cohnstein’s amused sympathy—or was it the other way around?—it was fun to go around town as “Brannigan Murphy’s new girl,” the tizzied whisper that turned me into human Alka-Seltzer in public all July. I didn’t grasp that wedding bells would give Bran someone to be unfaithful to, only catching on the night
A Clock with
Twisted Hands
opened in December.

Addison may’ve been the one who tried to warn me. “Well, dear girl!” he chortled in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central the day I got back from my honeymoon. “A shock is as good as a holiday. To think even I never guessed you’d end up the
latest
Mrs. Brannigan Murphy. You know, as I wrote once, we often wondered—”

“Never mind what we wondered,” said Jake. “Pam, just tell us you’re happy.”

“Jake! I wasn’t prying. I was about to quote myself. It’s a privilege not granted to many.”

“You could fool me,” Jake said. “And the publicists too. Remember ‘Tesla Morse’s ecstatic
Dots and Dashes
deserves to run forever’? Well—”

“Not this poem. I was quite young when I wrote it. Shall I clear my throat first, or just wet it down?”

“Just so long as you don’t close your eyes,” Jake advised. “I’ll laugh you right out of your chair.”

Naturally, Addison did all three. “We often wondered,” he began.

We often wondered

What had been plundered

Before the wanderer

Met the panderer.

Was she a blunderer?

Asked the ponderer.

No, she was a child.

So said the wild.

“When did you write it?” I asked. “Oxford?”

“In the cab coming down here,” Addison said. “But I was already drunk.”

Posted by: Pam

The thunderheads that did loom over my marriage almost as soon as we got back from Maine were even triter than adultery. As I was learning domesticity wasn’t my strong suit, Murphy grew more adamant that it should be my only one.

Perhaps from fear of old Mrs. Gillooley, or whoever she’d been, hobbling out of his past with a beckoning talon and a gleam in her one good eye, he’d kept no maid since his bust-up with Elsie Dodge Plough. It was a shameful thing to do to a Deco apartment no matter how goddam Marxist you were. And ah, how the lacquer grew cloudy, darlin’, if you’ll allow me to Gillooleyize myself. Within a week, Cinderella in reverse—the way that movie usually runs outside theaters—there I was, scrubbing and dusting. Luckily, after my one attempt at dinner had sent Dottie Idell’s still moist ghost into gales of laughter, even Murphy acknowledged the pleasures of good restaurants.

He’d been incredulous that I meant to go on doing my book reviews for the old
Republic
and
OC
. Wasn’t I married to a
real
writer now—and hadn’t that been the goal? My bid to convert a small pantry into my workplace (it was the Sutton Place lair’s only windowless room, which I’d hoped might improve the odds) got refused: “You’ll put a cot in there next.”

He said so as if onto my treachery. As I hadn’t yet committed or contemplated any, I did feel a pang of compassion as I wondered from what recollected Gillooleyan or even pre-Gillooleyan betrayal that jeer had sprung.

Instead, once I’d cleaned up after breakfast, sent out the laundry, wiped down the lacquer, and retrieved the chrome ashtray I’d beaned the wall with last night, startling him but not altering Dolores Ibárurri’s bullet-eyed self-canonization by a hair, I used to set up my typewriter at the Queensboro Bridge end of the long living room table. The Mighty Tower looked down from its place of honor as I started pecking away. Often, sensing another glower beyond it, I’d glance up to catch my hubby, in the doorway of his own monumental, in every sense, office—he had bound volumes of every press notice he’d ever gotten, annotating the negative ones with “kike-fag-Trotskyite-traitor-hooey-go-to-Madrid-and-see-for-yourself” abuse—gazing at me with genuine if baleful perplexity, a cup of cold coffee in hand.

The thunderheads receded once
A Clock with
Twisted Hands
was in production at the Rosalie Gypsum. Murphy was buoyed by the imminence of his first full-length play in four years, and to Pam’s relief script conferences with Pat Carpet, casting, and then rehearsals got him away from the house. Not that I ignored my chores or even moved my typewriter, but the work went more smoothly:

Beyond the author’s dim grasp of a Europe whose politics and landscape seem to be regrettably, if understandably, cobbled together from Hollywood back lots, Rita Cavanagh’s
Sybil Choate
is most marred by the mawkishness and triviality of the incidents she introduces to justify her heroine’s belated decision to join the underground. Surely, treating schoolgirl woes and an apparently thwarted romance as motivation for her final sacrifice can only insult the brave souls now resisting the occupier in reality. Given the crisis we all face…

Even so, my respite turned out to be shorter than expected. In November, rehearsals now underway in earnest, Murphy started pleading with me to come to the Gypsum, saying he needed my judgment: “Things aren’t going well, Snooks. I can’t see why for the life of me. I know this script’s true Murphy.” Given that he was bedding the ingenue, inviting me could’ve been either foolhardy or a numbskull’s idea of camouflage, but I rather think he wanted me to find out. Among the wives, even cautious Five agreed our discoveries seemed key to the infidelity scenario.

As yet unaware that pea-brained but pear-boobied Viper Leigh, née Betty Schtupter one day when Brooklyn was at loose ends, had been landscaping Bran’s mighty tower with her legs’ pale saplings for six weeks at the nearby Peter Minuit Hotel, I went along gamely enough. That was despite being under few illusions he really wanted Pam’s two cents. With Elsie Dodge Plough’s eye-opening course in what a loyal New York wife could get away with still fresh in his mind, it’d been exasperating him no end that his new wife refused to see anything wrong in going out to dinner, a bar, or, sin of sins, other plays with now de-Vermonted Alisteir Malcolm, Addison, Jake Cohnstein, or whoever from the old
Republic
and
OC
when he got kept late at the theater.

“Damn it,” he raged. “Don’t you at least have any
hen
friends?” Oddly or not, I didn’t, not then. Even Dottie Idell and I had stopped being chums once I’d quit Bank Street, something attributable mostly to a new discomfort on my end. I worried that if I saw my former roommate now, proudly showing off my still damply glued Mrs. Murphy mask, I might learn something I didn’t want to.

Posted by: Pam

No, Panama: I haven’t been holding back out of embarrassment. Your Gramela has just refused to believe ever since that it was at all consequential—the giggled “Dover or Calais?,” the scamper, the delirium of Dottie’s PJ-less warmth. I was pretty swacked the first time, and then it stopped seeming unusual. She was too light-hearted and silly, too exactly the same goofy joker in bed she was out of it, for her awkward roommate to believe our fooleries on Dover nights and Calais mornings mattered that much.

No doubt that’s one reason I wasn’t panicked by my usual warning images of the Charybdis temptation’s price: the tension etched in the Lotus Eater’s face by my mother’s idlest touch or glance, poor Hormel’s loneliness. Another reason was that we’d had no onlookers—myself for once included, you could say.

Yet now that I was one again, the thought of discovering I’d been wrong unnerved me. Spotting even the faintest wistful hint in Dottie’s eyes that our idyll hadn’t been so blithe as she’d affected would’ve been too horrible for words, and so that number stayed uncalled. That didn’t stop me from fretting she’d track Bran’s unlisted one down. Or even, in a scenario I imagined over and over, show up on our Sutton Place doorstep to confess she’d been ready to succumb to the Charybdis temptation in earnest—and with me of all people. I didn’t want to know.

Unless TV counts, I never did see her again. A few months later, my nightmare was laid to rest when I heard she’d married a man named Crozdetti and moved to Louisiana, and of course it’s as Dottie Crozdetti she’s much better known. Thanks to some tin-eared or unduly finicky copy editor, she was “Dottie I. Crozdetti” the last time I read her name in a headline, fleetingly making me and no doubt many others hope against hope—even though the small box on Page A1 had told us otherwise—that some other Dottie Crozdetti was no longer with us. But the photo of a hefty gray-haired woman laughing in her famous kitchen was the one everyone knew, and the obit was twice as long as any Bran got when he died.

And hell, if I’d just played my cards right—no, I’m joking, dear. It’s true nonetheless that, even among the few academics who still play Scrabble with Murphy’s work in hopes of spelling “Ph.D.,”
A Clock with
Twisted Hands
does not rate high. Titled “Time Runs Out,” Garth Vader’s chapter on the play in
Dat Dead Man Dere
has two epigraphs, one from Pat Carpet: “Live by the clock, die by the calendar. That was Murph.” As it’s a line from the play, I mildly resent the other being attributed to me: “Aaieee!”

The villain is a German industrialist, naturally in it up to his chin with Hitler, paying a weekend visit to the Connecticut home of an American newspaper magnate whose past conceals a secret. (Yes, Bran claimed Orson Welles had read an early version.) The purpose of Count von Deutrifau’s trip is to silkily persuade, then browbeat, then blackmail the publisher into maintaining “America First” isolationism as his vast media empire’s editorial policy. That’ll help keep Uncle Sam snoozing as Adolf tears into
Poland
France
Norway
Greece
the USSR, where “The bastard may have finally bitten off more than he can chew”—to quote the stirring qualifier looped in above the Baedeker of cancellations in Bran’s two-year-old script.

Yes, the convention of the Suave Nazi was already established. But in his final rewrite, my hubby had let a few of his more teapot-sized tempests creep in. The man of the hour by first intermission, Addison pronounced himself delighted with his portrait. At the final curtain, the Count’s attempted rape (“Bit of a one-trick pony, aren’t you, Murph?” Addison—well, silkily—said) of the magnate’s virginal, politically even more so daughter,
Vickie
Patricia
Lucy, had been thwarted by her fiancé, Brendan Leary. He was
newly
well, just last year
long since returned from flying for the Loyalists in Spain. Once von Deutrifau had skulked back Third Reichward, hissing imprecations, Brendan bitterly indicted America’s theatergoers for their laggardliness in joining the fight against fascism.

His lies about his Spanish-American war service aboard the
Maine
exposed, the magnate was dead by his own hand. Offstage, but how I loathed hearing that gunshot. “Bit Prussian, wouldn’t you say?” was Addison’s unwittingly soothing comment at second intermission. “I think he should have beaten himself to death with a sled.”

Well! He hadn’t been watching
Clock
get wound up since November. One foot dandling toward Hollywood like a cat burglar’s, Pat Carpet breaks off blocking scenes to take calls from his agent, who’s angling to get him into the director’s chair for the film adaptation of—this had to hurt—
A Clod Washed Awa
y by the
Sea
,
an anti-Nazi play by a onetime Murphy mimic named Ernest Bellman that ran at the Gypsum for most of 1940 while Bran, hands tied by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, fumed on the sidelines. Old Floss Bicuspid, Ethel Barrymore’s understudy in
A Doll’s House
in 1905 and taking her first crack at political theater as Mrs. Magnate, keeps trying to ingratiate herself by fluting that she’d love to play Eleanor Roosevelt. And a certain pea-brained, pear-boobied ingenue has just grabbed a wastebasket to retch the unmistakable retches of an otherwise healthy girl in the first stage of pregnancy.

“Meta
Carpet
.” That’s Hans Caligar, the dignified refugee from the Berlin stage recruited to play Hitler’s emissary. His accent tends to thicken when indignant: “On behalf ufa cast, I henreid [can read]. I must ask, murnau weill dalio marlene [more now while daily I more lean] brecht waltz to please you, veidt U.S.A. [why do you say], ‘Avast, palatial hum’”—he smacked the script—“when
dix-sept
is salka viertel fritz lang [this set is such a virtual prison]?”

“Minute, Hans.” Pat Carpet’s on the phone, finger screwed to free ear like an unpopped champagne cork. “Who? Gabby Chatterton? Christ, no. Well, all right.”

“You’ll just have to act more impressed when you walk in, Hans,” says my hubby—chipper, grandly sweatered, and betraying his agitation only with a slightly sickly
Time-
cover grin. “Acting! That’s what we pay you for.”

“So magnificently.”

“Damn it, Hans. Viper, stop vomiting! And don’t look at me like that. I told you that restaurant was no good. Where in hell is Lavabo? Listen, Herr Caligar—we’re all making do, all right? We tried again just last week to get a bigger sets and props budget, but those Yid bastards who do Rose Dawson’s books turned us down.”

“I am a Yid bastard, Meta Morphy. My last Berlin performance was on Kristallnacht. It is
agony
for me to play this Nazi role—
crated
by an impish isle [imbecile].”

By then, you might think even Murphy would’ve known an anti-Semitic Irish playwright working in left-wing theater in New York might want to watch his goddam mouth. Grudgingly (Hans had had tears in his eyes), he did write a speech about Kristallnacht into Act Two. After von Deutrifau got done gloating about it, Brendan Leary—usually ready to have at the Nazi bastard for paragraphs at a time—got a surprising stage direction: “Speechless with fury, Brendan changes the subject.”

Placating his own production wasn’t my hubby’s only worry as winter drew near. Brendan’s diatribes lashed out so furiously at America’s unpreparedness—“Tell those dead men lying out on the hills in Spain we’re safe at home” and so on, Viper Leigh winning Murphine dudgeon when she piped her guess that, while she didn’t know much about Iberian hygiene, they’d probably be buried by now—that it was a relief when the hero wound up and remembered to blast Hitler for a change.