Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (10 page)

As for what Daisy Buchanan looked like when she slipped off her silk bath wrap and slid into the far end of the tub, I’m sorry. She was my mother and I’m not a pornographer. She had Those Things (had I suckled them? No information, but I must’ve drained both). She had That Thing,
which I thought was too pretty and small for me to’ve come out of it. Briefly and discreetly, she’d had its hind twin’s scything when she joined me in the tub.

She still had the smile that had made the Fay house in Louisville swarm with khaki and officer’s buttons. She had Rorschach-blotty purple and yellow splashes of bruises from shooting up morphine all over her arms and legs.

She pushed a duck at me and giggled. She let me take off the honey-colored bathing cap and soak my head when I complained for the third time about how gunky it felt. She asked her daughter to look away when she stood up with water cascading and reached for her robe, and I did even though I regret it.

She called me “Pammie,” not “darling,” during most of the bath.

She never mentioned the Lotus Eater. She never touched me, not once, not even when we were both toweled. I’d never done towel turban before. She helped. That was as close as she came.

Not once. Other than that, for once I don’t care about history. You bastards! Do you expect me to tell you what her snatch looked like? She was my mother.

Posted by: Pam

Foreshortened into troglodytism by the downcast view from my third-floor playroom, the Lotus Eater got out from behind the wheel of her Dreiser, and that was that. Intermission accomplished. She looked as ratty in her white dress of surrender as a Popsicle wrapper glued back onto the stick after the Popsicle’s gone, but that couldn’t have mattered less to my mother. Going by the murmurs that rose once I’d crept down to the second-floor landing—my mother’s bright “All you want, darling! Whatever you want,” the L.E.’s forlornly merry “
Quid pro quo vadis
, Daisy. Isn’t that in Dante somewhere?”—I gathered all was forgiven. By whom and for what, I’ll never know.

The L.E. drove away only an hour or two later, after a reconciled parting at the front door I’m sure Pam didn’t witness. I have a vivid memory of toycotting it instead in the playroom, mauling two of my dollies’ heads together as if I were trying to force them to swap faces and making disgusting “Shmek, shmek” noises which I must’ve been mimicking from the Scandinavian’s mutters when at some point she shoved a third doll into the room. A stupid one I’d always hated, too close to me in size to be good for much; that was why I’d abandoned it on our pointlessly boatless wharf.

My memories of that night and the next morning are more muddled. I’m positive I remember an exhilarated Daisy prattling about what wonderful fun the Scandinavian, SooSoo the dog, and I were going to have during the whole week bothersome, bossy, blissfully flickering Mummy was away. Yet when I came down to breakfast, she was anticipating her Belgian second husband’s line of business—Georges Flagon peddled safety equipment to small airports—by waving two squares of burnt toast around an otherwise vacant kitchen.

The toot of a hired car outside made her wildly eye me and then the now odorless, Scandinavian-less servant’s quarters behind her. Then a cupboard, as if wondering how long she could responsibly trust Pamela to survive on a diet of dishcloths, dog food, or whatever it contained. Ironing board, Mother.

A second toot unlocked her feet and hurried me upstairs, where my mother began to toss random Pam-garb into a suitcase she’d rejected while slowly feeding her own wardrobe, Smee-style, to three much wider sets of crocodile jaws the night before. Her haste was complicated by her dashes to the window to semaphore our progress to a—what do you know, Miss Jessup?—gray-coated, jackbooted, quintessential (he was male, albeit Asian) chauffeur.

“We’re going to the most wonderful place on Cape Cod,” she told me as clothes flew. “You’re going to meet all Mummy’s bestest, most special friends! Oh, here’s a lovely sort of little Russian blouse. Is it mine?”

“It’s the sun dress I had on yesterday, Mother, and it’s dirty. And too small.” Taking it back from her dazed hands, I thought the Scandinavian might use it to wipe furniture or finally blow her great big nose in if we still had a Scandinavian. “How do you know where we’re going is wonderful?”

“Because I’ve decided it will be! For everybody, and I’m always right. Yes, always! Wasn’t I smart enough to pick you out from all those other
little jellybeans when Daddy and I went to that great big expensive candy store on Fifth Avenue?”

“Is
she
coming?” No need to identify who
she
was, much as I might wish my mother hadn’t unconsciously agreed.

“Why, of course! She’s going to help me take care of you. Won’t that be fun?”

“Then I don’t want to go. I hate her,” said the budding pudding that was Pam, with twin Civil War memorials for eyes. “She’s a witch.”

“Oh, sweetie, don’t be silly. You’re too young—don’t know enough about anyone yet to really and truly hate them. And she isn’t a witch! She doesn’t look like one, does she? Isn’t she pretty? Well, now, doesn’t that just show you? She, oh, she just gets put under a spell sometimes—by her father, who’s an awful, wicked, mysterious ogre in the mountains—and that makes her act like one. But she doesn’t want to! That’s the important thing. Please remember that, Pammie. Watch out for the people who want to. Won’t you? For me?”

My mother’s failure to become a writer was a failure of discipline, not imagination. Either on the page or in person, I’ve never been able to improvise like that. Not without a single nugget of reality to wrap my words around.

My face scraped a crushed Daisy-bosom’s blossoms in surprise as she lifted me, apparently forgetful that I’d been three the last time she’d tried and was more of a handful now. Unable to maintain a rib grip, her hands scooted up under my armpits as the suitcase staggered toward my unexpectedly defrocked rump. I thought she was going to pack me in it and spare the Lotus Eater the sight of Pam until we got to Provincetown, but it turned out she only wanted me to sit on its lid.

Posted by: Pam

Of course it’s peculiar to be getting ready to describe Provincetown to you, Panama. You know it better than your Gramela. You weren’t born yet when a cousin of Cadwaller’s with no children deeded her place on the Cape to your grandpa Chris and his wife Renée not long after Hopsie died.

I still wonder sometimes if that unmet Cadwaller relative was the mournful adolescent watching Daisy, the L.E., and Pammie wander through Provincetown from her chair on a now ruddily mobbed, bikini-throbbing, and thong-thronged porch that nonetheless looks familiar in your grandpa’s photographs. That porch and the house behind it have featured in every summer of what you always amuse me by calling your
whole
life.

You’re the age your grandfather was when I met him. In my memory, he goes in an eyeblink from a wiry sixteen-year-old I’m leading onto a
bateau-mouche
to a newly bearded nineteen-year-old snapping cross-legged pictures of his equally new French bride—today your placid, rotund grandmother—from the rug that then lay in our Paris living room, home now only to the Metro section and Pam’s feet.

Chris was still an
Agence France-Presse
stringer when he first grew the scraggly fuzz that left us unsure at first if he was trying to look older or younger. Once
May or Mayn’t
,
his photographic documentation of the ’68 Paris upheavals, got Amherst interested in putting him on the faculty—Hopsie and I both bemused by his impersonation of an academic, not to mention Amherst’s of swinging with the times—he gradually added the belly, wire-rimmed glasses, and cheerfully glottal middle-aged voice that to this day makes it sound as if the piece of paper stuck in his throat has the most wonderful joke written on it. His zest for zany adult masks went on tickling us until we realized they connoted him. Before Cadwaller died, at least he got to see his son complete.

Even down here in Potusville, I’m aware Provincetown has evolved too, not only since my five-day visit in 1927 but over the decade and a half you’ve been alive to join your parents’ jolly, sunburnt two weeks with Chris and Renée there every summer. I’ve certainly seen lots of pictures, supplemented lately by your Panamanic Margaret Meadisms on the phone about the local boys’ club celebrating its XY-seeking-XY summer festival—though no girls’ club celebrating an XX-seeking-XX one, I gather, at least from your long-distance descriptions—in that gay mecca, as I believe it’s called. It must be a comfort to Tim to know you could saunter around starkers without being an object of more than ornithological curiosity to all but a few of the XY’s in sight.

Then Chris comes on the line to report on his latest sighting of my onetime trapeze partner—hi, Norman! Bye, Norman—on the 1948
NYT
bestseller list. In the near sixty years since
Nothing Like a Dame
was going down on one side of the gutter as
The Naked and the Dead
scooted up the other, he’s certainly outdone your Gramela at productivity of every sort. Now a full-time Provincetonian, my fellow author gets around these days on two gnarled canes, so Chris told me last year. To which I retorted, “Thirty-odd books, nine children! What,
only
two canes?”

I never met him in ’48 and surely won’t remeet him now. Every year, you all (no, not Norman) pile on the phone to beg me to come to Provincetown, and every year I refuse. I steadfastly did so even back when I still got up to Amherst every turkey day and to Manhattan half a dozen times a year—so often that sometimes I’d come and go without seeing you. “Next time,” we’d agree and usually make good on it.

No such thing now. No
next time
for anything I’ve done or haven’t done, with the exasperatingly likely exception of having to hit “Save” once, twice, or three or four more times to heave Pam’s lap and the rest of her up for the tiresome process that is peeing at my age—a chore whose one interesting novelty today is that each time I’ve had to set aside Cadwaller’s gun, telling it not to worry and I’ll be back soon. Trust me, Panama: you’ve got no idea how boring one’s own ablutions get. You’ll look back with wonder on the ballerina days when you just yanked ’em down, yanked ’em up, flushed in a flash, and raced back to the party.

Even if I weren’t getting ready to knock myself off when the White House calls, I’m afraid I’d still have to decline your clan’s invite to come up to Provincetown this year. Doesn’t my Mac have oodles of downloads of Chris’s pictures from previous Cadwaller-fests? Wasn’t I there for five days in 1927? Aren’t I reasonably observant? And isn’t the rest just architecture?

My God! Pam, you senile imbecile. Maybe Dr. Johnson was right that the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully, but what he left out is that the thing being concentrated on is the prospect of hanging.
When
do you all traditionally implore me to come to Provincetown, Panama?

On your unfailing group call to Gramela on my birthday. Oh, bloody hell.

Posted by: Pamincetown

Naked or not, I can’t imagine what it’d be like to walk along Commercial Street today. Living up to its name must be a gaudy challenge. But in my day or my five of them, the fleecings of leisure took a distant back seat to practicality’s mutton. There was food and, even under Prohibition, drink, for which my mother’s friends blessed the wine-bibbing Portuguese fishermen whose forebears had added Catholic spires to Provincetown’s sea-scoured skyline well before Teddy Roosevelt turned up, appropriately escorted by the skirts of seven battleships, to lay the cornerstone of the Pilgrim Monument. The booming salutes of the ships’ guns blew out half the window glass in the harbor.

Yet even the rare restaurant with white tablecloths was roughly weathered. Whether olive-skinned or Whartonishly Yankeefied, culinary Provincetown still made it its business to fill customers’ stomachs, not their eyes, and without emptying their wallets either. Poets, playwrights, painters, and critics had been congregating there for over a decade; if they hadn’t, my mother wouldn’t have known the place from Rangoon. They still saw themselves as the décor’s fans, though, not its reason for being. Adults who see everything as the occasion for themselves make me shudder.

My mother would’ve been the last to understand that a seven-year-old child sometimes needs to. So during my five days, I was largely left to make all that up for myself: tugging the masted scrawl of scenery that broke blue infinity in half into a crescent that Pam-Hur’s Roman chariot could scoot along in shy triumph to the sea’s tame cheers, pressing my mother’s and the L.E.’s ambling sack-dressed backs into unwitting service as a pair of stallions. Picking my way alone along the breakwater, which was new then, to act the Little Mermaid to blackened fishing smacks, obligingly yodeling dorymen, and the occasional white quiff of a skiff.

When all else failed, I made sand castles: no mere beach pastime to a child, but the atypically concrete representation of a year-round endeavor. If you ever find yourself at the Art Institute of Chicago, you’ll naturally rush to
American Gothic
first. But not far from its place of honor, you’ll find Pam depicted in the act.

Despite his recent rediscovery—busy, busy, Ph.D.s, how I wonder what you see—I’m no admirer of Eldritch Weaver (b. here, d. there, who cares). As a measure of his powers of observation, the sky’s chartreuse makes me glad he was never a witness in a murder trial. In life, my mother’s profile was an albino salad, not a slab, and her costume has idiotically been given more presence than her limbs. While I get no joy from knowing it, the Lotus Eater, 1927 edition, was prettier than the gouached squash peering anxiously at Grant Wood’s masterpiece in the next room.

That this is said to be the earliest American painting in which anyone is wearing sunglasses gets no very awed ululations from me. Nonetheless, it may be I’m most hostile to the painting—on behalf of my violet but recognizable Pam-face, pale knees, and empty pail, included in the lower left-hand quadrant for balance with the lone blue (never!) sail keeling seaward in the upper right—because of its title:
Two American Women on the Beach, Provincetown, 1927
.

I’m sorry, Panama, because what you wrote on the back was funny: “Eldritch Weaver, gay deceiver.” But I didn’t keep the postcard.

Posted by: Pam

My mother’s Village friends were up on the Cape in force. As promised, that gave me my first look since a younger Pam’s quickly shuttered glimpse of Daisy’s lone attempt to Salvador Dali-ize East Egg, which had cost us our first Scandinavian, at the people she and the Lotus Eater had been madhatting it with in Lower Manhattan all summer. Minor painters, minor poets, minor don’t-get-the-wrong ideologues, they’ve all fallen out of the history books except for an occasional letter in which they promise to repay that five-spot to an eventually more famous friend. That the exception turned out to be Eldritch Weaver just proves immortality is a game of American roulette in which only one chamber
isn’t
loaded.

(No, don’t be jealous, Cadwaller’s gun. Despite being lighter and more manageable than I worried you’d be before I lifted you from the Paris footlocker’s still life of way-back-when rubbish, you’re no figure of speech. You’re every bit as real as my eighty-six-year-old lap.)