Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (16 page)

The door opened, how I couldn’t guess. Not unless the thing’s bearer had had the stomach to one-arm the thing as he turned the knob. Two beefy hands set down a jar in which something boomerangy and mushily toenailed floated. A faded handwritten label (oh, yes, Pam, let’s please read the label; the label deserves our exclusive attention) read
d’un obus. Liège. 5
a
oût 1914
, along with a catalogue number.

“Tu sais ce que c’est, Pamelle?”
His hands folded in front of it, Georges was unperturbed. So help me, I’m fairly sure he was smiling. His chin lifted as if pleased to introduce one business acquaintance to another:
“Eh bien, ça, c’est mon pied!”

Understand, the urgency of denying my eyes’ report that it was
a
foot had strained my concentration to its limit. So Georges’s confession that it was
his
foot went straight from my unprepared ears to unprotected brain, where it’s stayed in Pink Thing’s archives to this day: a recording labeled
Bruxelles. 5
a
oût 1928. I was eight. She was in Switzerland
.

Even though Pam was present, I can’t really write “we.” I’m not sure there’s a pronoun that covers the situation. Even though various factors—e.g., my refusal to exist—made my timekeeping iffy, I don’t think the séance lasted over ten minutes. In more than one sense, Georges wasn’t looking at anything he hadn’t seen before. His hands never unclasped, nor did he speak again. Too tunelessly for me to guess the song if any, I think he hummed once or twice.

Finally, he glanced up past the jar.
“C’est bien,”
he said with satisfaction.
“Vous pouvez l’emporter.”

The beefy hands hadn’t unclasped either. This was a specimen, Georges was known to them only as a veteran with a dispensation allowing him to visit his own foot. They couldn’t take the chance that, left alone with his foot, he might smash the jar and try to reattach it. Now the beefy hands came forward and lifted the thing. Luckily, my memory is blessedly blank as it was seized and rose on scream-inducing details about bobbing, corns, state of pedicure, illusory soccer kick at my eyes’ goalpost, and the like.

The like?
I saw worse in the ETO. But except by cold during the Bulge, it hadn’t been
preserved
, and certainly not for longer than I’d been alive. I’m grateful to this day the beefy hands made the jar disappear to parts unknown before we got up to leave. Otherwise, I’d’ve had to walk around it with my eyes glued to the thing, not knowing what it would do. That might’ve put me off ballet for life.

“C’était aux premiers jours de la guerre,”
he told me as a miraculously unchanged outer world bowed with its granite tulle skirts. It was his lone comment before we regained the rue Rémi, whose characteristic duns and powder blues, toyshops, displayed diving suit, bright exotic birds, small Inca statuette, and white balloons—somehow somehow more  voluble than the red ones I was used to in Paris—the war had left so poignantly immaculate.

He may’ve thought he needed to account even to Day-
zee
’s daughter for what in retrospect must have seemed to medical students the absurdity of preserving a sample of what Krupp’s new shells could do. During what historians call the Battle of the Frontiers, the medicos couldn’t have guessed the Western Front would provide them with literally millions of such artifacts, all but interchangeable. Well, to everyone but Georges.

Yet he may have felt he creakily marched in veterans’ parades as a fraud. With his ridiculously early maiming, he was a relic of when the Belgian infantry had gone to war in peaked caps. He’d known nothing of helmets, gas masks, barbed wire,
mitrailleuses
,
trenches, and the rest of the apparatus that now defines World War One.

Invalided out to a French hospital, for there was only a coastal widget of Belgium left by that September, it may even have been as a volunteer that he and his artificial foot returned to limited duty. He helped to wheel out Spads and Nieuports on rustic airfields. Pilots needed to be able to run for them.

Posted by: Pam

That was in 1917, Panama. French troops took to baa-ing as they marched to the front. Mutinies flickered like grassfires, though there was no longer any grass, and trees, like farm animals, were only a memory. Like all wartime ground crews, Georges must’ve stayed out under the sky even in cold weather once the planes he’d been responsible for wheeling out were aloft. He was unwilling to be warmed by a stove or go back to the card game until his Spads and Nieuports tipped out of sight toward a dogfight.

At least among Barnard’s livelier sophomores, nobody was less surprised than Pam when the Belgians and French crumpled in the face of the Hitler blitzkrieg. Nor could I force myself (I tried) to feel too reproachful when I learned, as I did somewhere—I never saw Georges again after he saw me off at the Brussels train station in 1934—that he’d been a
collabo
. He put Flagon & Cie.’s stocks at the Luftwaffe’s disposal and its contacts abroad at the Abwehr’s.

His compatriots probably didn’t blame him. Business owners were in a special bind. Their only option would’ve been to shutter their companies and the Germans might not have permitted even that. I’m not endorsing his behavior by a long shot. Still, however you may judge Georges yourself, I can’t accept that keeping the rue Rémi intact was an unworthy goal.

Naturally, my opinions are as anachronistic as your Gramela’s childhood in what our dry, unhearing SecDef dismisses as old Europe. I don’t suppose, Panama, that either he or Potus has ever watched a not especially interesting or likable man gaze at his own foot in formaldehyde fourteen years after losing it. But the reason Europeans know something I wish we could learn without finding out the way they did is that they don’t go
away
to war.

Posted by: Pamelle

During the Occupation, Mme Chignonne’s
École des Filles
was taken over by the Gestapo. I’ve won laughs with that line from L.A. to brightest Africa, but I was taken aback the first time Gerson and Gene Kelly chortled. I hadn’t thought of it as a punchline. I was just noting my old school’s most recent function as of August 25, 1944, the day Pam Buchanan scrambled out of a jeep to revisit.

Since the
Geheime Staatspolizei
had had its pick and those screams would’ve been screamed anyway, my main regret is that it was such a nice old building. All covered with vines, as they say, off a cul-de-sac in Chaillot called the rue Plan de Trochu. Since the
Trocadéro
as we know it didn’t exist, that relic of the Exhibition of ’37 was to baffle a certain gal in a jeep—one heard all too recently braying she knew this
arrondissement
blindfolded—as I gave our driver directions and Eddie flicked the flowers thrust at us near the Place de la Madeleine at random bits of Paris and Parisians.

Until recently, though—that damned Tour Montparnasse!—the genius of Paris was to know which temporary things to make permanent. And which not, like the flag Cassandre herself, more stooped but as vulpine, was bundling as I reached past our driver’s shoulder to honk.

I wasn’t sure if she’d recognize me. Should have known better, as I’d left only ten years ago under memorable circumstances.
“Madame!”
she called to Chignonne.
“C’est l’Américaine.”

“Ah, enfin! Elle est venue reprendre son colis”
my old headmistress answered. She gave me the most fleeting of nods before a terrifyingly familiar jerk of her head produced a brisk summons.
“Venez!”

“I can see why you wanted to come back, Pamita,” Eddie told me. “Love like theirs doesn’t bloom every day.”

“Ta gueule,”
I said automatically. Eddie didn’t know Cassandre and
Chignonne
. I’d never seen either one express affection for anyone or anything.

Nor did I feel any tenderness toward them, except possibly dating to the night I left school. Dealing with my situation had put them in peril of acting unlike themselves, which made me even more relieved to see them back to normal. You don’t want to look up and catch one of Notre Dame’s gargoyles practicing its golf swing.

I also had no idea what they were talking about. I’d taken my trunk with me to the Gare du Nord in February ’34 and you’ve already glimpsed it being heaved up by a New York porter on daisysdaughter.com. What they meant was the Paris footlocker, which I hadn’t known existed.

Reaching the rue Plan de Trochu from Brussels after I’d reached the States, it had stayed in a corner of the dorm’s attic for a decade. Uninspected even by the Gestapo and just as well, since they might have thought my mother’s pages of
The Gold-Hatted Lover
were in code. They’d have arrested Cassandre and Chignonne for harboring a spy.

As we climbed, I kept annoying Cassandre, who was groaning in French up ahead—and Eddie, moaning in American behind—by pausing on every landing. Yet I couldn’t help it. Not only had I spent seven years here as a boarder, but this was a first for Pink Thing and Gray Thing alike. Starting with Provincetown, I’d never been
back
anywhere.

Recalled nearest the attic, the first year was the grimmest. Untutored in French, the budding pudding that was Pam had soon learned the language’s ability to departicularize her by personalizing her nationality. It was especially stinging in the feminine case.

As Marie Antoinette had been
l’Autrichienne
to eighteenth-century Paris
and the Empress Eugénie
l’Espagnole
in Second Empire salons, so Daisy’s daughter—definitely the tin can in that progression—was
l’Américaine
to Mme Chignonne’s. You could say I got off easy if you’ve ever heard a French epiglottis try to pin “Buchanan” two counts for three. Since the day of my enrollment I never had even once.

At that age you get your bearings through mimicry, leaving me out of luck as well as out of place. The only other Anglo name frisking around Chignonne’s belonged to Molly Flanders-Fields, indecorous offspring—born August 1919, and let your fingers play calendar—of Marshal Foch’s housekeeper and some Irish brass hat on Haig’s Intelligence and Planning staff. Now there was a man with time on his hands.

But Molly was two forms ahead of me, raised in France and known as neither
l’Anglaise
nor even
l’Irlandaise
. Too engaging and quick with retorts and her nails for that. Her dorm monicker was
la Belle alliance
.

L’Américaine
, on the other hand, was a figure of fun. A bumbling pudding in my blue, yellow-tabbed school frock, I clambered up the stairs and down the stairs, hiking the most of them on my shortest legs. We roomed by year, and one of the upper forms’ perks was fewer flights to climb.

Since I’m in a hurry and “
Chanson d’automne
” looms, I won’t avail myself of the chance to reprise my travails in detail. Let’s just say imitations of me were miles more popular than I was. Greeted with laughter that stripped paint all the way to the attic when they realized I was a witness—one whose stunned stare usually proved two out of three details right, I’m afraid—the basic elements were wide eyes in a gibbering face, an open textbook imbecilically clutched upside down.

I wasted an hour and my pillowcase’s most recent laundering trying to sort out what a wailed and batting
“Oeil! Coude et doigt, coude et doigt”
could mean syntactically. Joke about my clumsiness, some sort of plan for a group attack? Finally deduced it was “Hey! Cut it out”—my regression to English one helpless day.

The worst sensation wasn’t loneliness or bewilderment, Panama. The novelty was to learn I was a cretin. Shouldn’t I either have been advised of that or protected from knowing it at my birth?

Back in my lost world, I’d been precocious intellectually. Had even had a few hints it might be my ace in the hole. Now the silliest girl at Chignonne’s outranked me and I couldn’t call it injustice. She
did
know more than I did. What I knew that she didn’t couldn’t have been more irrelevant to us both if I’d been Iroquois.

Adding to the confusion, the religious instruction at Chignonne’s was, of course, Catholic. Our daily catechism was overseen by Chignonne herself, who as an advocate of Christian mercy was on a par with a cook specializing in fish made of barbed wire. Mass each Sunday was the only time when our full blue-coated, jonquil-hatted regiment got marched all at once in the same direction to the same place, no gainsaying allowed from either Rose Bauer or a nominally Protestant
l’Américaine
.

To remind Chignonne or Cassandre I’d been baptized a Presbyterian, something I scarcely knew I knew anyhow, would’ve been like announcing my determination to attend class wearing nothing but a Stetson. As for Rose—school nickname, the vicious
la rue des Rosiers
, often shortened to
la rue—
she had her hands full protesting that her family didn’t even
know
Léon Blum.

Google away, Panama. With a little persistence, you’ll turn up that charming slogan of the French right in the Thirties: “Better Hitler than Blum.” The rue des Rosiers was and is the heart of Paris’s Jewish quarter.

If my mother’s death included any sort of reprieve, it was that it happened the year
Pamelle
would’ve been confirmed. That might have roused even Daisy to catch on she’d had her hand off the steering wheel awhile.

You probably don’t need me to tell you my religious education didn’t take. At Chignonne’s, it wasn’t supposed to take. It was supposed to
be
, irrespective of what any of us made of it. To be raised in France, even as abortively as Pam was, is to experience Catholicism simply as a table society has laid: no leeway about the menu, no pretense that this has a blessed thing to do with one’s own hunger pangs. If Jesus had been French, paintings of the Last Supper would isolate Judas by showing him using the wrong fork.