Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (42 page)

Nobody knew for sure what was happening anywhere. Everything between us and the smoke-shrouded beach itself looked like the most abominable mess. But everything behind us just looked stupidly safe.

On top of that, they’d told me as far back as Portsmouth I wouldn’t be allowed to disembark. Only Eddie had official license to, being cuke-encumbered and killable. Our LCT’s skipper had been told through a megaphone to only let Miss Buchanan of
Regent’s
observe from the bridge before I got sent back aboard the
Maloy
.

Aside from
You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two
,
most books only mention one American woman correspondent who successfully waded through Omaha’s surf late on D-Day. My better-known rival Martha Gellhorn of
Collier’s
wasn’t supposed to get ashore either. Unbeknownst to each other, we used the same subterfuge, which put a smile on Tim Cadwaller’s face when he told me so.

Tim didn’t know where she got her corpsman’s Red Cross–marked helmet and brassarded jacket. I know where I got mine, though: Eddie. Our LCT had finally been cleared to start the run in when he beckoned me to one of the few spots aboard that wasn’t a bramble of legs, gear, and sea wash and puke. He had the stuff bundled inside a GI rain poncho he’d stuffed under the last jeep in line to be offloaded.

“Make up your mind, Pamita.” He had to shout in my ear above the engines and Coast Guard megaphones. “You’ve been bitching since England about what men can do. Are you game?”

“Why in hell didn’t you ask me before now?”

“Jesus Christ! And let you
think
about it? I’m not that kind of monster. Other kinds, sure, you bet. But you don’t mind those.”

Whoosh!
A rocket barge had just loosed forty fuming spikes beachward over our heads. We’d both just discovered how nervous we were by stupidly ducking. “Where did you get it?” I bawled.

“What the fuck does that matter?”

“I can think of one way it could!”

“If you mean is he alive, of course he’s alive. Look around! We haven’t taken one casualty yet.”

“And what am I supposed to do
if I
’ve still got that crap on when we do? Say ‘There, there, soldier’—but I’ve got no morphine? Huh?”

“Don’t put it on now, you dumb twat. Wait ’til we beach and move fast. Then ditch the helmet, that’s what they look for.” (It was thoughtful of Eddie not to specify whether he meant our boys in need of a medic or snipers in search of a target.) “Are you coming?”

“Damn close.”

“That’s not what I meant. Are you coming ashore with me? I did this for you. It’s the only damn thing I, Eddie Whitling, will ever do for you. Yes or no!”

And yes I said yes I will yes, as they say, and here I am with a gun in my lap and my mind now made up. I suppose
l’équipe
has known all along there can be only one end to Pam’s second D-Day.

For once, Ard, the pleasure’s all mine. No Eddie to shove a Red-Crossed GI helmet at me, no Roy to charter me, no Edith Bourne Nolan to set me on fire. No longer a difference between squandered and plundered. And as of now—
as of now
;
wasn’t that how I began?—no phone call from Potus to give this old bag her cue to settle this hash.

I’ll give
him
until sundown. Once the color of evening most closely approximates the indigo hue of the tracer-flicked sky over Omaha when I heard “Happy Birthday” sung to me at the Vierville sea wall by a dozen dazed relics of dawn, I’ll leave a mess of pink and gray things whether he’s listening or not.

There, now. It’s settled, or will be once I hit “Post.” Then I’ll be back in an LCT sloshing toward Omaha as the sea starts to grow cascading gray fir trees from the German artillery and we see that Martian alphabet of destructive contraptions that still haven’t been blown. As one boat to starboard becomes a black bathtub with a half dozen swimmers, the next one starts noodling to portside—and a Coast Guard megaphone barks through the explosions,
“LCA Five-Two-Twelve, you are not a rescue boat. Stay on course for Dog Green.”

Ard, I’m nobody’s rescue boat, not even my own. All I can do is stay on course for Dog Green. Here we go.

Posted by: Pameleanor Rigby

Only because Murphy’s
Collected Plays
lives up to its title is
The Two-Faced War
even in my library. I’ve never read it and now never will. Yet Garth Vader’s
Dat Dead Man Dere
seconds Addison’s report from the aisle that lizard-blooded “Catherine Steptoe,” gadabout whoresspondent for
Majesty
magazine, was transparently Bran’s old Snooks turned Medusal.

My impotent yet homosexual lover, Solomon Roth, is some sort of spatula in FDR’s kitchen cabinet. We’re in cahoots to bleed the Red Army white by delaying the onset of the Second Front. That I was played by Viper Leigh, apparently willing to let courtroom snakes lie in exchange for lead billing, certainly rang my old
plus ça change
gong.

Enter a ghost from Catherine’s past: Fingal O’Flaherty, a one-legged, eyepatched—dear
God
,
Bran—alum of Madrid. He very nearly derails our scheme. As the curtain falls, we’re congratulating each other on having made my shooting of Fingal (Addison claimed he woke up and clapped) look like suicide.

Even though Viper pointblank refused to be discovered in bed with Catherine’s mother—poor Floss Bicuspid! At least she dodged that bullet—Garth Vader does his Saskachewanful best to argue that Bran was exploring new themes. But his old bogeys took precedence, and his anti-Semitism had progressed from social bluster to typewriter. According to Addison, devious Sol Roth made Shylock look Methodist. Despite Garth’s pro-Murphyism,
Dat Dead Man Dere
adds the further damning detail that the psychiatrist Bran had started seeing in 1939 was also named Roth.

Anyway, you might think he’d learned his lesson about writing plays that could be overtaken by events.
The Two-Faced War
opened a week after Normandy. Dachau made headlines ten months later. If there was a single valid
aperçu
in Bran’s Murphine stew, even the most perceptive theatergoer couldn’t see it.

Once his back vanished and I was left with his stancher, I soon gave up finding a cab. It was a pleasant June evening, and the sailors’ on-the-town whites had started glowing like ice cream among the wheat of khaki and the chaff of fedoraed civvies. Besides, a taxi ride felt too personal in a way. You can turn queenly and tumbriled in a Checker’s back seat. I’d spent ten days in the tabloids: I walked.

I strolled up Lafayette a while before I started tacking randomly westward, as one can when
walk
and
don’t walk
are calling the shots and sunset’s fingers choose you like a recruiting poster. Unless I wanted to tramp until it was pitch dark, sooner or later I’d have to either cab it or play IRT ladybug to get back to Roy’s, the only bed in New York I had a key to. He’d left court early, giving me a glum feeling I’d walk in on his idea of a victory feast—some
echt
-Roy combination of champagne and potato salad.

It was just as well my editor was allergic to shellfish. Otherwise, he might’ve cracked the desperate game of code I’d played with my austers and ostricas and kamenicas and joysterlings and lamellibranchia, never quite admitting it to myself until one sunset finger showed me the Hudson and Pamique had to face that she wasn’t just ambling at random. I wondered who’d lapped up the dish I’d passed up when I bolted to the Commodore to meet Jake and Addison nearly two years ago.

I also didn’t know if Roy would be robed in pajamas, for months just his attire when he came to the study door to wish Pam goodnight but in recent days a quiet invitation. Yet my hunch was he too knew the jig was up on our sad-sack bid to behave like generic New Yorkers. Tonight would no doubt be understood by us both in advance as our valedictory try, the kind of sex—and there are many worse—that amounts to a friendly handshake without clothes. You get snagged on wondering why the other times weren’t like that and then the question answers itself. As frightened as I was of the new freedom plaguing my brain with Pams insisting they need no longer stay phantoms, I wasn’t such a fool as to think keeping things going with Roy was any solution.

Hell, at least Sharon Halevy Cohnstein could cook. Not that I’d find out in person until my birthday on Sunday, when she and Jake said they wouldn’t take no for an answer. Luckily, she kept kosher, forestalling any chance of a too painful parallel to Pam’s uneaten meal. If I’d been Jake, I’d have stayed snuggled up next to her in Williamsburg forever.

Back last December, it must’ve been at about this time of day—though dark and freezing—that I’d finally come up out of the mine. Fresh air, live air, air that moved without dynamite! Even though Viv, Tess, Josie, and Babe didn’t act as if they were in any hurry, the sudden leaps of their jokes hither and yon as we emerged told me a strain you get used to isn’t the same as a strain that’s gone away. Unless I was fooled by the novelty of hearing their voices in unconfined space.

Pam’s ultimate experience of belonging while being treated as exceptional was stolen from me all too soon by its converse. The only sentence in “To the Ends of the Earth” that alludes to it is mundane, thanks partly to my editor’s alert blue pencil: “The women have convinced management to build them a communal shower, its hastily nailed broads [“Pam, you did mean ‘boards,’ yes?” asked Roy] already water-warped and the unchinked gap between palisade and roof open to the biting winter cold.”

That doesn’t begin to convey my consternation when we ambled into the same rough structure, marked by a hand-painted
Wymen Only
,
where I’d put on my loaned overalls ten hours earlier. That had been bad enough, but I hadn’t been outright naked and neither had they. Now hissing water through a door I hadn’t noticed this morning stilled Pam’s garrulity at being back from the ends of the earth.

A long way from Purcey’s, where even in the basketball team’s locker room nudity had been far more a matter of glimmers than striding—can you see better now why tormenting Hormel with
ma plume
was so unforgivable?—and even farther from Long Island, where a budding pudding in search of information as yet unsorted into categories had peeped at a fifty-year-old Scandinavian housekeeper in the buff, I wasn’t prepared for the matter-of-fact unpeeling that began as soon as the outer slat door was shut and hook-and-eyed. I was still twenty-two, and the wildcats were so—well,
ungainly
,
the damning word (please note ambiguity as to damnation’s recipient) that popped into my mind. Josie’s Andean slopes, Babe’s Bazooka-pink breadth. Tess’s ropy back and wattled glutes. Since I’d known her the longest—three days—Viv’s cinder-crisped Van Dyke alarmed me most.

Even if I’d brought a towel, to wrap myself in it would’ve been a mortal insult. Theirs were all over one shoulder or trawled. All gingerly meekness, I joined their shuffle into the shower stall, where at least we were a bit more spread out.

As they laughed and tossed their only bottle of shampoo (it was as harsh as lye) back and forth, anonymity wasn’t in the cards even so. Not only was the gal from
Regent’s
as anomalously gangly as a Manhattanized Schiele among Tennessee Boteros, but of course they had to tease me about my mere smudges of coal compared to its deep ingraining on them.

“Ain’t
you
a waste of good Ivory!” called Tess, herself the color of a Paris church from wrists to elbows and forehead to clavicles. “We ought to report you to the Production Board.” They all hawed with delight, and understanding that I was the object of that delight—not malice, delight—humbled me. They were tickled and pleased I’d stuck it out in the mine, but not because I could do what they did. They went back down to the ends of the earth every day. I hadn’t particularly earned their respect. So far as recognition went, I doubt any of them cared what I wrote in
Regent’s
.

I’d simply been somebody who wasn’t there normally and could have stayed away if I’d chosen to, and the wildcats didn’t expect much of a nod from the world up top. Mrs. Roosevelt I wasn’t, God knows. But as folks say in Tennessee, I’d do, and I was just catching on that I was surrounded by the most magnificent female beauty I’d ever see when Viv called, “Hey, New York! Think fast.”

While you might guess looking up at Eddie Whitling’s shout to see the tricolor break out atop the Eiffel Tower was pretty hard to beat, catching that shampoo bottle was your Gramela’s happiest moment of World War Two. I laughed and called back, “Not wasted on me?”

“Hell, it’s wasted on us,” Viv barked. “Ain’t you got eyes?”

“Ain’t on me yet,” Babe drawled. “Mary
As-
tor, read me ’n weep.”

To dry off I borrowed a towel still damp with Andean moisture. When I looked up from my bench for my stored clothes, the other women—still nude—were gathered under the outer stall’s lone light bulb. “Miz Buchanan,” Viv called, newly flinty, “would you please come join hands with us? It won’t take but a minute.”

As I stepped between Josie and Tess, I’m sure I was beaming. Couldn’t wait to find out what new treat of this companionship was in store! The tumble of imaginings had barely gotten to urine-drinking when I realized all the wildcats’ chins were lowered and their eyes closed.

“Babe, I think it’s your turn,” Viv murmured.

“Okay.” Babe bit her lip. “Um, Lord—we thank you for this day. We’re sure grateful nobody got killed or even hurt. We hope you don’t mind all our rough talk and foolin’. And, uh, we’ll be back tomorrow! You know we’ll stick at this. If it helps, we ain’t even gonna say a word about Oak Ridge.”

She didn’t call it that, since it hadn’t been named yet. That’s what she meant, though.

“And the swap is we pray you’ll send as many of our boys back in one piece as you can see your way clear to. But if you can’t, we’ll stick at it anyway. You know us. Amen.”

“Amen,” they all said.

“That was good, Babe,” Josie said quietly. Tears were streaking her cheeks.

“Wait. Don’t break the circle.” Troubled, authoritative, Viv’s eyes were on mine. “Miz Buchanan—
please
.”

“Oh! Amen,” I said for the first and last time in my adult life. But their looks stayed disturbed though they went on being polite. I wasn’t sorry to be handed Roy’s telegram.

Otherwise, I’m not sure I could have faced that night of killing loneliness. I had practice, but it’s different when however unreasonably—and I knew it was—you can vividly recall a moment of feeling its opposite.

Posted by: Pamhattan Hellodrama

Somehow I found myself down at the dockside. Nipped or should I say Japaned into a bar, Italian or Irish—Costello’s, McGinty’s?—and asked for a gimlet. Looking down a counter thick with hands resting steins next to shot glasses, the bartender said, “Ma’am, you bring out the artist in me.”

Despite my foolish choice of drink, though, Pam did know a bit about New York. I expected to nurse my gimlet undisturbed and did.

An hour or two later I’d’ve faced mauling. By midnight I could have risked being chained in the cellar. Yet it’s all about sunset. And stopping at one drink, since two would’ve announced I’d brought my chain with me and was hoping for some gents’ assistance. But I could stay here in safety for as long as I nursed one or it me. It was the color of cactus in Albuquerque.