Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (40 page)

What would that have been like, I wondered? Odd thought, since I never knew if he preferred to take the girl’s part himself and invariably had to stop picturing a nude Pam sharing the dark with newly feminized and knowledgeable Jacquina. Anyhow, we weren’t sure they’d located any such creature, but we hoped to forestall them.

Did, too. After taking Jake through the roundelay (yes, those dates sounded right; no, we’d never so much as kissed), Bran’s lawyer was still incredulous at our indifference to the mud they could dredge up with the simple words “We believe it speaks to the witness’s credibility and character, Your Honor.” The warning shot he decided to try was exactly what we wanted.

“Well, of course you’re a lifelong bachelor, Mr. [affecting a touch of neuralgia, Jake rubbed one shoulder] Captain Cohnstein. In fact, the common expression is ‘confirmed’ bachelor, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know where you get your information, but I’m nothing of the kind. And as a happily married husband and father, I resent what I believe you’re insinuating.”

Posted by: Pam

After the recess—and you’d better believe Bran’s baffled lawyers asked for one—Oliver Watson, briefed by then, took over. “I believe you were saying you’re a happily married man, Captain Cohnstein. Is that correct?”

“Yes. I married the former Sharon Halevy on August 12, 1921. We’re the proud parents of David Cohnstein, born in May of the following year.”

“Is your wife present, Captain Cohnstein?”

“It’s thoughtful of you to ask, Mr. Watson. That’s her in the second row.”

“Would you rise, Mrs. Cohnstein?”

And she did, beaming: Sharon Halevy Cohnstein, who’d stood under the chuppah with a still troubled Jake when pleasing Pop and Mama Cohnstein was the one act whose value he trusted. She’d lived blissfully ever since—raising their boy, pleased by her husband’s success in Manhattan, and content to cook and play checkers with no further carnal demands on her rotund physique. Sharon and David were the “family” he’d let us all misguess was his parents when he spent nights in Williamsburg, deeply satisfied by the respite from his and the world’s complexities.

“Is your son in the courtroom, by any chance?” Oliver Watson asked.

‘I’m afraid not. He’s a waist gunner on a B-17—‘somewhere in England,’ as they say. I’m sure you know that’s all they’re allowed to tell us when they write home. I’m glad to say that David does often.”

After that, Murphy’s lawyers could’ve shipped half the District’s rough trade up to Manhattan to tell tales. They wouldn’t have dared call one epicene specimen. It was bad enough they hadn’t realized the effect of
Captain
Cohnstein showing up instead of the civilian Bran remembered. To besmirch a B-17 crewman’s only dad as his wife and the crewman’s mother looked on would have made them Hitler’s pinch-hitlers and Hirohito’s pinch-hitos. Over celebratory drinks that evening, only Addison stayed irrepressible: “You’re just lucky the boy isn’t a tail gunner, Jake. Brother, would that have brought down the house.”

When I think of my friends, I think I must’ve had something. Still, we were hardly out of the woods. Even if Jake’s testimony had made hash of the adultery charge, we hadn’t been able to crack Viper Leigh. With much Murphine encouragement, she was under the impression she could be the next Mrs. Bran if she played her hole card just right.

Posted by: Pam

Having swapped Sutton Place for my editor’s donated sofa in the study of his Upper West Side apartment—where I slept alone, at least then—I’d spent a restless spring. The trial’s preliminaries kept me
cooped in Manhattan and unable to go on the road as often as I was addicted to.

I did get to Texas and Delaware in February for “Finding Mr. Wright,” whose title’s true secret wink was Roy wishing me well in my own new sky. Then I spent a week in New Mexico in April for “The View from Ward Three.” That report on the Army’s Albuquerque nursing school was both my final home-front piece for
Regent’s
and my first experiment in making Pam herself a story’s tailor’s dummy, since “the patient” volunteering for mock bandaging, splinting, sponging, and comforting was none other than your Gramela.

A few short takes from Washington on quickie trips aside—and yes, I’d avoided reinterviewing LBJ—those two pieces were my only reprieves from the drudgery involved in becoming the latest ex-Mrs. Murphy. After my Columbian year, I had days when it drove me half batty to wake up feeling engulfed again by an environment and characters my journeying had largely left behind.

That meant not only Murphy himself, now an infuriating clown as he flashed
Time-
cover grins and told whoppers for a stenographer’s benefit. It meant tepidly circumlocutious, porcelain-pale, easily flushed John Lavabo and
the cast of
A Clock with
Twisted Hands
. All of them but Hal Lime—bruited for a supporting Oscar by now after playing Gunnar Dyson, the wisecracking Swede who ended up staying behind to cover his squad’s escape, in
Corrigedor Story—
got shaken down for their two cents and wooden nickels regarding Bran and Viper.

I did like seeing Hans Caligar again, especially after his denturized elevator mutter of “Remember, the smart only shame themselves by negotiating with the shtupid.” Yet I’d found myself blush-worthily eager when Viper’s own turn came to be deposed, swiftly setting it down to a yen for revenge.

That yen was disappointed. In a polka-dot dress all wrong for March and warning us what to expect in May, she’d played the tearful innocent much better than she had
Vickie
Patricia
Lucy,
not that Pam had great grounds to scoff there. No, she’d never had anything “like
that
”—nice moue of disgust—to do with Mr. Murphy. She didn’t go with married men, and had liked and admired me much too much [insert two-way stare here] to even think about it. Yes, she’d been up to his room at the Peter Minuit those five times. (We knew it was more like fifty, but five was all the hotel’s former night clerk could confirm.) But only to help him with his revisions by reading
Vickie
Patricia
Lucy’s new lines, and she’d never removed so much as a hairpin.

Yes, she’d been admitted to Bellevue—no, not the psychiatric wing!—on December 5, 1941. Only for unspecified “abdominal bleeding,” though, not a miscarriage. The verdict was an early period and bad cramps. The hospital records bore her out, but in those days it wouldn’t have taken much pleading from someone as lissome as Viper for Bellevue’s Kildare-was-here not to have written everything down.

And she was sorry, but would we—would we mind? Her high-school fiancé, really the only boy she’d really loved, had been killed at Kasserine just last month. It was awful to answer these questions when she was still grieving for him.

Unsurprisingly, when our gumshoe checked, said boy’s genuinely grieving parents were stumped that Betty, as they knew her, had flashed out of Flatbush in June 1940 without a toodle-oo to now mantlepieced Phil. Even so, Kasserine Pass was Kasserine Pass: our worst defeat at German hands before the Battle of the Bulge’s opening days, and we didn’t know about the Battle of the Bulge yet. Grieving parents are grieving parents, and Viper was so good Oliver Watson had made up his mind he wouldn’t challenge her testimony directly.

We knew we had to call her if they didn’t. I’d named her, after all, but Oliver was dreading what it would do to our case. That changed once Trinka Solynka took the stand.

Posted by: Pam

Remember, they were still trying to nail me on desertion. Trinka’s job was to describe Bran’s life after Mrs. Murphy started wanderlusting all over the country—just for the romps and nectar, I gathered. A pitiful picture she gave too, applying that artless accent like dill on a turbot: sad Mr. Murphy shutting himself away for hours before emerging to test the pillars’ lack of give, Samson-style, a stricken expression on his sadly beardless face (she mimicked him slowly, regretfully checking). Gulled Mr. Murphy gazing at gulls under the portrait of Dolores Ib
á
rurri—the
other
Mrs. Gillooley, and why hadn’t I seen that until now?—in the vain hope I’d swoop in on my broomstick and start sweeping the kitchen.

It was just how Bran behaved when I was on hand, and it wasn’t Pam he was mourning. It was inspiration’s failure to pipe up now that Dolores no longer leaned down. But I don’t think Trinka ever understood what he did for a living, or indeed that he wasn’t just a millionaire—her exaggerated estimate of his place in the cosmos—by dispensation of strange American gods. Certainly in her day no evidence of his labors had made it out of his office except when she emptied the trash.

As indifferent as I was to the money angle, it did annoy me that Trinka was Murphy’s witness when my signature was the one on her checks. My whispered question whether that could be brought out earned a look of woe from Oliver Watson, since it would indicate financial independence and he
did
care about the alimony. It was not only what I was paying him for but, if all went well, with.

More infuriatingly, Bran’s lawyers made bold to ask Trinka about the Murphys’ conjugal relations—and she quite naturally reported they were nonexistent. Of course they were, when she was there cooking or cleaning! She wasn’t a live-in maid, and Miss Hormel (not called) to the possible contrary, I wasn’t an exhibitionist. Yet Trinka had been an awed if dictionaryless witness to some of our rawer fights, and her recaps of those gave spectators their first real prickle of juridical porn. Spoken in lisped and zaftig Danzigzags, “An’ then Mist’ Murphy say I never knew how good Colum Firth had it—an’ she say well I sure rather look at Vacheton Moment than
that
God damn thing” had a tawdry allure so fleshy Trinka might as well have been kneading her own mammarial concertina at the time.

I hadn’t seen myself impersonated since Purcey’s callous halls. In this case, any fool could see and hear that Trinka’s regal tut-tuts, airy chinlifts, and dismissive those-little-piggies flutterings of fingers were the fruit of spellbound attendance at Brooklyn movie palaces.

Still, as I watched her burlesque a Pam I knew had never existed, one thought kept insisting it was fertile. Dear God, was Bran determined to turn us
all
into actresses? And bad ones at that? Bolstered by Addison’s lunch-break mutter of “You know, I do wonder if Murph’s been smiting the sledded Polack on the ice,” that intuition convinced me to lobby Oliver Watson for a fresh line of questioning when Trinka returned to the stand.

My attorney hated the idea. With all our attention focused on Viper, we’d never raised the issue during discovery. Like most trial lawyers, Oliver had a horror of asking questions whose answer he didn’t know, and he was still nettled at Jake and me for keeping Sharon Halevy Cohnstein’s existence hidden. But with Viper herself due to testify next and still unbudgingly backing Murphy’s story, he reluctantly agreed.

Before he got to it, he had to take Trinka back through her whole morning’s testimony—chivvying her as to whether Mrs. Pam hadn’t
really
said Thus-and-so instead of Such-and-such, etc. With her Danzig-in-distress English up against his curlicued kind, it was so tiresome it bored even me, and I’d been the one God damning the Mighty Tower to begin with. It was late in the day before Oliver, fresh out of pickable bones and splittable hairs, gave me a helpless glance to see if I still wanted to go ahead. I nodded.

“Ah, before we let you go. One last question, Miss Solynka. By any chance, in the past eight months, have you yourself ever had—ah, sexual congress? With your employer?” Even Oliver couldn’t keep it straight that Bran didn’t pay her wages.

“What? No!” Trinka cried just before giving Lyndon Johnson’s afternoon delight my worst scare of the trial. “
She
go Congress! Not me.”

“No, no. That’s not what I’m asking. Miss Solynka, have you—yourself—ever had illicit relations with Mr. Murphy?”

Trinka thinking hard was like a steam shovel waiting for its operator to show up. “My aunty she come say hi one time. Was bad?”

“No, no. Have you—your honor, may I have a word with my client?”

Since he was sitting behind me, I didn’t actually see it. Languidly coughing to draw Trinka’s attention, Addison raised both hands for a gesture involving a circled thumb and finger, a forefinger and movement.

As her first moment of total understanding during an ordeal that puzzled and frightened her dawned, her face bloomed happiness that she could be helpful at last. No wonder Bran enjoyed banging her.

“Oh,
boinky-boink!
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Tuesday, Thursday, Tuesday, Thursday. But never when Mrs. Pam home”—and her face went from virtuous to sly. “When she go Congress.”

Posted by: Pam

That was how Viper Leigh went from being the final witness scheduled on Bran’s side to the first called on ours. To say she was seething is to remark Versailles cost money, and that polka-dot dress was history too. When she marched her upthrust pear boobies and tight-skirted rear past Bran’s table, her icepick heels were stabbing the floor like Trotsky’s comeback in the role of Banquo’s ghost.

Unlike Trinka, whose testimony is what gets
Murphy v. Murphy
cited in dictionaries of American slang (“boink, v.: sexual congress; wide 1943–45 service, Broadway use; from ‘boinky-boink,’ n.; earliest known citation…”), Viper didn’t say much for the books. She sure made a splash in the papers, though:
red playwright promised marriage, stage cutie avers
[“Bombers Pound Hamburg”—see p. 4].
viper’s heartbreak at lost child: ‘my poor muffin,’ she sobs
[“Algiers Conference Wraps Up: Churchill Pleased”—see p. 9].
two-time pulitzer champ can’t even spell: ‘peter minuet tonite?’ murph’s mash note read
[“Attu Battle Ends with Mass Nip Suicide, Says Army”—see p. 15].

I wasn’t prepared for how much her confession hurt. You get used to seeing these things as circuses, Panama. Then you remember how once there you were in the forest. I hadn’t known Murphy first took up with Viper in October ’41, before she’d been cast in
Clock
and just two months after our return from Maine. I could have lived without learning their nickname for me was Helen Keller. Nor had I known he’d had her on the same Sutton Place sofa where he and I—early on, early on!—had done our best to widen Dolores Ibárurri’s eyes once or twice.

Remember, not only was Bran my first husband. For what now seemed longer than he’d deserved, I’d gone on thinking he’d be the only one.

By the time Oliver finished leading Viper through her Peter Minuit minuet, my hubby’s lawyers were peering under their chairs for a briefcase to piss in. Out to discredit her, they fell back on trying to bully her into admitting she’d set out to entrap Bran by getting preggers. Was that a mistake, and not only because Viper’d succeeded in provoking compassion for that tiny Murphine seahorse flushed into the sewer system. When they pushed one time too many, her eyes glistened.

“I’m sorry, would—would you mind? I’m sorry. I’m doing my best, but—
oh, Phil!—
my fiancé was killed at Kasserine Pass. And he never even—we never. And it’s so awful, so awful, you see—to be answering these dirty sex questions, when—
oh, Phil, Phil, Phil!
Oh, I’m so sorry, Your Honor.” [
murphy trial bombshell: bran called viper’s uso work in phil’s honor ‘waste of time,’ says weeping flatbush girl
.
see p. 45 for yankees win and all sports coverage.
]