Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (33 page)

I beamed instead. “To be honest, I was working on puzzled. You wouldn’t be trying to tell me they’re still French.”

“Absolutely! And it’s still politics. Prewar grudges I can’t follow to save my life, along with constant fighting over a very small pie and a lot of what sounds like the silliest rot if you don’t have a scorecard. Well, I don’t. Neither do most Americans. Can you guess why my next words might be ‘Uh-oh’?”

“That could make them unpopular sooner or later.” (Do I give myself credit for catching on fast? Yes, I give myself credit for catching on fast.)

“It could at that. That’s one reason too many people in Washington wish they’d all go away, which we don’t want and isn’t likely to happen. Obviously,
Regent’s
is all for them, but I’d still like to see a treatment that’s more sophisticated than what we’ve run so far. It might help. Are you interested?”

“Of course. I’m sorry, though: what’s the book?”

“You’ve misunderstood. I want you to go talk to them. I’m pretty sure you can handle the frame of reference, and you’ve got the language. They might be more willing to open up now that we’re in. Do you feel like taking a crack at that for me?”

Did I? All I could think of was how different my life might be if he’d asked on June 21st. It took me a second to realize Roy was waiting for my voice to answer and not just my face.

“Damn right I do.”

“Good! And, oh—goodbye, Sam. See you in, I’d say, about a week.”

Like a fool, I did it in four days. And had a wonderful time, racing out of Sutton Place past Bran’s darkening brow for heraldic coffee here and a timely square meal there opposite dive-bombing mustaches, hands playing bosun to invisible bosoms, and Gallic profiles too visibly down to sharing their last razor blade. They were marooned in Automats and argonauted by argot, and I hadn’t rattled on so much in French in seven years. Or written it since, dismal memory, “
Chanson d’automne
,” but now I was jotting down quotes.

Unsurprisingly, they were leery of divulging the underground’s internal squabbles, those over the razor blade excluded. I made headway by patiently
pierre-
scissors-
papier
ing the Buchanan gams, saying “Oh, keep the pack” and smilingly reasoning that their common cause now would be more impressive, not less, if the U.S. public understood they hadn’t all stayed blank slates politically until they leapt fully formed from de Gaulle’s kepied brow. Since one of their few luxuries was that they’d never heard of Brannigan Murphy, my interviewees were surprised at how Pam excelled at nagging them on their Communists. No-shows the Occupation’s first year—Kremlin spank—the PCF had since become the underground’s lions of Belfort.

Then I’d come home forlorn with unconfessable envy. My brief from
Regent’s
was to unravel the motives underlying the plucky little band’s arrival at this point, yet the reraveled marvel was that they
were
at this point: it had clarity. Absurd as it was to see Pam’s
confusions as an invidious contrast—and the Lotus Eater’s jellyfish leer, caught between an unidentifiable male head and a mighty wristwatch’s prominent flash on a muscled forearm, had maddened me regularly since opening night with its incoherent insistence that maybe now I’d have more compassion for her—I couldn’t help doing just that and indeed soon learned I shouldn’t. Such incongruous goads were often to give my
Regent’s
reporting more intensity.

Even so, Roy’s face clouded as he turned the last page. “This is smart. But you don’t have anything here from our own people in Washington. No White House, no State Department—nothing. What gives?”

“Well, of course not, Roy! They’re on the fence—not ready to cut the cord yet to Vichy, you know that. Anything they say will be evasive and dull.”

“Yes, Pam, it will be. And that will be revealing,” Roy said, teaching me my job. “And Pam? While you’re in Washington—”

“Pardon?”

“When you run down to
Washington, tomorrow
, try to talk to the Free French mission there. Lots of friction with New York, I hear. And Pam? Vichy does still have an embassy. My confidential sources tell me the number’s probably in the book,” Roy said, teaching me my job some more.

Posted by: Sam

Sixty-five years ago, on my first visit to my final hometown, Union Station was all herds of brown, olive drab, Atlanticized blue, and Pacific vanilla muddling through a gigantic spittoon overlooked by dull statues gagging on nicotine. Attribution forgotten and context hazy, a random fragment of poetry in Pink Thing’s archives retrospectively captions the surprise poster I saw hailing our new Russian allies:
To live it hurries and to feel it hastes.

Scrambling into a cab, I caught sight of the Capitol—not banalized the way it was to you by TV long before you eyed it for real, Panama, but a genuine L. Frank Baum surprise to someone who’d never pictured it being
part
of something. Then I was off.

Even with
Regent’s
name and Roy’s list of contacts, I was a nobody in a District that had been at war just over a week. Doubtless that’s why Harry Hopkins never got back to me: my ur-encounter with a White House switchboard whose laziness or worse your Gramela’s been cursing since dawn on her second D-Day. I had better luck over at State, where Bob Murphy, just back from overplaying our indispensable man in North Africa—no relation to Bran, he was nonetheless a bit of a showboat by Cadwaller’s verdict—gave me a superbly noncommittal quarter hour. That same night, the price paid for admiring my hairdo by the nipper beside me in the Mayflower’s bar was a swamping quiz once she turned out to be someone’s gal Monday on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

I met and liked Adrien Tixier, Raoul Aglion’s Washington opposite number. Met and disliked (call me impetuous, but Pam was an instant Gaullist—just add Lourdes water) Alexis Leger, later better known and no more beloved by me as St. John Perse. My stop-in at the French Embassy—i.e., Vichy—got me a three-minute denunciation of adventurers and traitors from its press attaché. It was followed by a furtive phone call to my room at the Mayflower that led to an equally furtive stroll in a bare-branched but leaf-hieroglyphed Rock Creek Park.

Not far into it, I divined what the nervous cluck beside me hoped I’d guess and forget: he was slipping info to the underground on the sly. Self-impressionable as I was, and it
was
your Gramela’s first cluck-and-dagger moment, I wasn’t Pamidiot enough to hint at his existence in the two thousand words I pecked out in the Sutton Place living room, rather mourning the Mayflower’s bar—my
hairdo
,
really?
I could get to like Washington—and took to Roy on the first day of winter.

He chopped them to fourteen hundred tighter ones and ran it in
Regent’s
ten days later. Obsolete Christmas trees sledded around me as I ran to the 57th Street newsstand to buy a few thousand copies. Too elated to augment the pile with the
OC
containing the last book review (“Silent Knight, Lonely Knight”) I was to write for some years.

He hadn’t flagged my piece on the cover; that wouldn’t happen until the next summer. Flipping spilling pages on a chill chalk-swept sidewalk, I panicked. Had Roy changed his mind? No. Illustrated by a graphic of the Cross of Lorraine growing out of victimized France’s swastikaed soil, there was—and is, if only on microfilm in Luddite libraries—my story: “A Cross with Many Roots,”
by Pamela Buchanan
. And I was twenty-one years old.

Bran, you should know, was enraged by that title. I hadn’t picked it or been consulted, and Roy later swore the do-si-don’t of “A Cross with Many Roots” and
A Clock with
Twisted Hands
had been too subconscious to register. Anyhow, aside from cleaning the stain left on Dolores Ibárurri’s noble nose by Murphy’s lashing of cold coffee, I couldn’t have cared less what Roy called it. Mine eyes—the future mimsies—dazzled at that byline.

I’d seen it hopping a freight atop dinky book reviews, but that
by Pamela Buchanan
was different. Not that I had a glimmering of the
La Bayadère
procession of future Pams it was to transpose from ballet’s mists to fact and now memory. They were giving each others’ tushies pats in rehearsal all the same.

The Pam loudly laughing at a bawdy gal welder’s joke about idle hands (“Well, I know
that
,
Rev. This one, anyhow”)
in Toledo. The one entranced to be led by a WAVE along the halls of a Pentagon so new its still damp cement made it smell like the locker room of a football team going for its first championship; we’d all learned from the great Katharine H. how over-the-shoulder prattle simulated an off-the-shoulder gown, but I’d never mastered the gambit and was clearly impressed. The tense one following helmet-lamp beams I kept having to tell myself were Viv, Tess, Josie, and Babe to the ends of the earth; the one who heard “Happy Birthday” sung to her on Omaha.

Or my sentimental favorite, however reframed in nettles by the painful outcome: the one being sketched by Bill M., my Anzio Bobbsey twin, while I read a letter from Nick Carraway in the correspondents’ villa at Nettuno. Or the one in the scene I still grin at despite its less comic Vietnam-era sequel: the Pam being bent back over a Capitol Hill desk in October ’42 by the rangy Texan who first put horns on Brannigan Murphy.

That
by Pamela Buchanan
gave me those Pams and more. That
by Pamela Buchanan
hoisted my flag for World War Two.

Which Murphy, you may not be surprised to hear, sat out on Sutton Place in a perfect sulk. Not only can a flop do terrible things to a playwright, but I suspect he was a bit of a coward.

Posted by: Pam

As regards our soon to be vestigial home life, nobody could have been wronger than the Girl Scout who provoked him by wishing us peace rather than victory in 1942. Bran and I were at loggerheads from the moment he said, tossing
Regent’s
aside, “You’re really so much better at those little book reviews. Stick to your last, Snooks.” Then he rose from the sofa and lumbered off to berate John Lavabo by phone for shrinking
Clock’
s ads to the size of “Help Wanted” ones as the next-to-last play of his to ever see footlights slumped toward its demise.

Title and all, Murphy might—I emphasize might—have forgiven “A Cross with Many Roots” had it turned out to be a busman’s holiday from those little book reviews. Roy Charters had other ideas, and Pam had just one. That was to grab any assignment he offered.

In the usual sophomore jinx, my second try, about Italian anti-Fascist groups and titled, no skin off Bran’s nose this time, “
Che Te Dice La Patria
?,”  was a dud. I didn’t have the language, our government’s open backing made the subject much flabbier, and I never got to interview Count Sforza—which was writing up Barnum and Bailey the night the star elephant had a cold. As my editor and I postmortemed and pre-Mortimered the drab results, I despaired of getting another
Regent’s
byline ever again. Then Mortimer himself—
Regent’s
publisher—ambled into the office to tell us with a club man’s pointless chuckle that Edith Bourne Nolan’s long-nursed bill to create a Women’s Army Corps had just hit another snag in the House, and Roy eyed me.

I eyed him. We both smiled. I eye-eyed him. “See you in a week,” said Roy. The exile beat behind me, I had found my
boulot
.

To think Murphy had groused I didn’t have any
hen
friends—and what a delightful way of putting it, too. First was Edith herself: sixty, plump, gray, unfailingly gardenia’ed, and a Congresswoman since Charles Nolan’s widow had won her husband’s seat after his sudden death in the Twenties. In a bonus Roy hadn’t foreseen, we grew enchanted with each other as soon as she matched and, to be honest, raised Chignonne’s with Madame Julien’s, her own pre–World War One finishing school in Neuilly.

When that coincidence gave my hubby a pretext for the classic accusation about our affinity, I smacked his chest while sober: a first. Besides being old enough to be my mother’s aunt, Edith was one of those enviable people whose faces announce that their youthful program was to sail for Olympus, unimpressed by mere swimmers’ splashes in the straits of Messina. After “Skirting the Issue?” came out in mid-February, earning a wince from me for Roy’s cutesy title but launching my giddy rebirth as
Regent’s
rover-gal chronicler of my gender’s war, I went back to her again and again, never leaving without a useful crisp quote or more guidance to Washington’s wicketry of acronymic bureaucracies. She probably never realized how often my knocks at her nameplated door were for the sake of her quick crinkle of dignified pleasure at my latest news of her daughters’ metamorphoses from virgins to dynamos.

At that age, every writer’s ideal marriage is to his or her ideal subject—even if those too can end in a messy divorce. We get the offspring, though: articles, books. Unread in over sixty years by anyone but Tim Cadwaller, who dug up the whole slew for
You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two
,
my progress reports on the cuke-unencumbered half of the citizenry’s new prowesses in bandannas, overalls, and finally khaki have an iridescence in Pink Thing’s archives I’ve never cared to spoil by revisiting the originals. Not until five or six assignments into my spree did Roy, watching Mortimer detain a file-burdened office filly outside a flashing elevator, see fit to mention in passing that his mom had been Dayton’s first woman doctor.

That didn’t stop him from blue-penciling my most ardent Pamegyrics to the all-female night shift at a parachute factory converted from turning out wedding gowns in Scranton, PA: “Brides without Grooms,” April 1942. Or to the dawn-fingered Rosies filing into a shipyard to build the landing craft that figuratively and for all I know literally brought the gal who wrote “She-Worthy”—blessing, as did Roy, the dawn-fingered Rosie who’d earnestly told me, “They don’t just have to be seaworthy, ma’am”—ashore at Omaha many months later. Or to the matriculators in the Army Air Force’s first nimble Women’s Flying Training Detachments, hailed by a reluctantly grounded Pam (rationed on fuel, they wouldn’t let the kibitzer break the surly bonds herself) in “Finding Mr. Wright” the next February. As that last title may tell you, Roy knew one secret of being a good editor is to be a good smuggler.

In her own way, so was Edith Bourne Nolan. Yet my Capitol Hill fairy godmother—and how puzzled Edith would’ve been to learn I thought of her as one—had no way of guessing that the Pam who doted on feeling in league with her was someone
neither
of us had met before. When I first interviewed Rep. Nolan (D-Ma.), her chin-cupped reprise of her bill’s setbacks as she stroked her desk’s bald spot had turned me into a previously unmet Pam who was raring to enroll in her cosmos. Flummoxed when standing up proved we still shared a dress size, I’d heard my mesurper downright gushily thank the Congresswoman for her time.

In this millennium, Andy Pond can testify to Pam’s love of Talleyrand’s motto as Foreign Minister: “Above all, no zeal,” as useful an island of good sense in Napoleon’s day as it would be in Potusville. He also knows my allergy to identification with my species at large, let alone its cuke-unencumbered half. He’d have laughed in astonishment at the 1942 Pam’s passion as I reviewed my notes—“soldier” or “solider”? Oh, “solder”!—in twice-drafty rail terminals, their pews snoring with uniforms in front of the schedule board’s clacking chapter and verse, or restlessly scouted my next piece’s lead sentence (“She’s only a dot in the sky now”) in Gulf Coast hotel rooms too stickily dingy for the chiffonier to be hiding a phone book, my version of Gideon in that part of the country. Until I got Roy to give me the use of a cubby at
Regent’s
,
Murphy’s newly dressing-gowned pacings as my typewriter tapped were those of a turnkey while I trafficked in contraband.