Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (26 page)

As I got up, Murphy beamed in frank appreciation at the sight of Pam and gams unfolding like a whooping crane. “Buck up, Alisteir,” he said to my editor, who was still befuddled by how his
bon voyage
had turned into mine. “It’s not as if we’re packing you off to Siberia. She’ll be here in September!” Indeed the new Mrs. Murphy was.

Peculiarly, that seemed to prompt poor Alisteir to list Siberia’s ingredients. “Ice, tar—”

“And so will Russia. Like it or not, gents,” Murphy cut him off to advise the room at large, making up for the round of drinks he hadn’t bought by offering the contents of his own skull around Odin-style. “Ready, Snooks?”

“I started out as a pacifist,” Alisteir’s successful Polonius groan detained us. (It was true; compensating for not having been a veteran of the Great War by establishing himself as a veteran of the peace, his dreary poems about mass dismemberment and disarmament had been collected as
A Chorister’s Song in Parlous Times
in long-gone 1919.) “Can anyone tell me why does war always make everything
easier?
Damn it to hell. Last night I banged Esther for the first time in three months. I don’t know—she just looked good.”

“Careful, Alisteir. The walls have secretaries,” Addison said. “But I never gave a hydroelectric dam for ‘revolution in one country’ myself. Full fathom five thy Trotsky lies, so let’s just hope they win. Confess it, Bran: haven’t you missed hating Hitler?”

“He doesn’t know what he’s let himself in for,” said Murphy bluffly, already picturing how
A Clock with
Twisted Hands
would let a chastened Führer know he’d just awakened Sutton Place’s sleeping giant. “Come on, kid. Let’s go.” And we went.

The cabs on 42nd Street were sweeping along on now obscure wheels like low-flying birds in the dark. When the weather’s good, what stepping into night does for Manhattan’s noises and purposes is to temporarily generalize them. It creates a blissful, blued illusion of energetically flowing tranquility.

Murphy had steered me out of the Commodore and across the street by one elbow. In the cab, he offered a Murphine shoulder as a bulwark. I opted instead for Pamlatticed coquetting on my side of the banquette, my still fresh proximity to Addison’s POUM-ade making me gingerly about accepting another set of male smells so soon. I didn’t want to be olfactorily promiscuous.

“What were you doing with that bunch of sheenies, anyway?” my future hubby asked comfortably. “And with a good name like Buchanan, too.”

“Oh! Well, of course it was Pam Slivovitz before I changed it,” I drawled. “And incidentally: it was Barnard, not Vassar. I stress was.”

Posted by: Pam

I do realize, Panama, that these last few posts have zoomed past
Pam Buchanan: The Barnard Years
. One reason I didn’t graduate is that I was raring to get on, so why act differently now? I’ve spent enough time posing in dorms on daisysdaughter.com—modeling quaint schoolgirl fashions, exposing my strawberry pancakes and honey to bait Hormel. Overseeing the development of a body that, while never the curviest, ended up rangy and maneuverable in a number of ways I was told were pleasing.

One reason I regret pretzelhood is that those two or three inches of extra height were my social calling card in new places for decades; it takes a real lust for shyness to keep it up at five ten. One reason I won’t regret making my big exit when the White House finally calls is that I just don’t make entrances like I used to. With any luck, I’ll be one pretzel Potus will choke on.

Far from losing my nerve, I’ve twice considered calling dear Bob’s office to see if they can light a fire under the White House. But to someone ignorant of my plan, my impatience would be sure to sound like an old bag’s pathetic eagerness for attention. Maybe I’ll be dead in hours, but I’d like to go out clean, an ambition I’m sure my Senatorial benefactor will understand. He is less than three years younger than I am, and he served in World War Two.

Unlike me, however, he finished college first. Pleased as my guardian was that I’d gotten into Barnard—except in French, my grades hadn’t been spectacular—its main flaw as an establishment of higher education had started to glare at me inside seventy-two hours. It had New York for competition.

To my eyes, Manhattan on subway maps resembled a lean but many-branched Christmas tree whose presents were heaped near the bottom: around Union and Washington Squares. It took me under half my first semester to winkle out where the excitement was, and the Columbia boys who were my first guides to New York radicalism should’ve taken vows of silence at graduation. They’d used up their share and then some of polemical oxygen.

Once I could fructify on my own hook, I didn’t see much point in campus meetings about the world crisis when more consequential rallies were milling just a subway ride away: Vito Marcantonio’s amplified squawk scaring the pigeons right out of Union Square, with newspaper umbrellas over everyone’s heads in the rain, or the Lincoln Brigade’s Robert J. Baker, no less militant in civvies, making a fist at Franco beside Garibaldi’s statue after the fall of Madrid. Didn’t see much point in sitting through lectures in bumble-behinded classrooms when livelier teachers held office hours in Village coffeehouses, Manhattan’s buildings seeming to rear like dragons whose quarreled-over prey was sky when I’d totter back uptown after my latest attempt to find the gibbet in flibbertigibbet. Above all, I didn’t see much point in wasting my Pam-prose on term papers when it looked like my best chance to join the hurlyburly.

While still notionally attending classes, I made myself the trad pest at the old
Republic
and
OC
. Did it help that the new gal ready to fetch coffee and handle correspondence was a Barnard willow among broader-beamed CCNY shrubs, spoke French, and had gams up to Sunday? I can’t say it hurt. Going through Alisteir Malcolm’s “Maybe” pile each week on what we called Grab Day, I’d crowd my arms with up to half a dozen books. Once I’d sorted my best bets on the IRT, I’d bash out one or even two reviews on spec as “‘The Iron Gates of Life’: Which Side Was Marvell On?” went unwritten for English 241. The first one Alisteir printed was a pan of a politically comatose novel by a Twenties mummy named Lady Brett Ashley, and the $25 I got paid bought the drinks at Pam’s twentieth birthday party. You bet your ass I’m proud.

The proof Alisteir had a kind side was that he never told anyone I’d first come to his office toting the 1937 and 1938 Purcey’s yearbooks as writing samples. But not, of course, the Fall 1934 edition of
Pink Rosebuds
, lair of the now hated “
Chanson d’automne
.” In my days as a book reviewer, I always turned down poetry, though Alisteir stayed fond enough of his vestigial self to cover a good deal of it. Pam worried she’d wrong some real poet by seizing the chance to mete out the same treatment in print I’d met in Purcey’s corridors.

I could handle damn near anything else, though, being a quick study. That got me tagged by some, not inaccurately, as glib. My ace in the hole was that I was funny, a quality then as now in even lower supply than demand in left-wing book reviewing: “Given the current world situation, in the exceedingly unlikely event of a second printing for
Farewell the Sun
, Lady Ashley’s publisher might perform a public service by restoring to the ‘Paris’ and ‘London’ through which her titled characters cavort their proper names of Lutèce and Londinium, as well as retranslating their arch chitchat into the original ungrammatical Latin.” Maybe you had to be there, but that squib made Addison DeWitt ask Alisteir who I was.

The review
by Pamela Buchanan
that caused the biggest flap in the old
Republic
’s offices didn’t appear until the spring of 1941. Alisteir had given me the assignment in the full expectation of a demolition job, not only because that was more or less my specialty. From our point of view, shooting might be too good for the inviting fish in this gilded barrel.

In our crowd, the movies weren’t taken seriously. I’d spent my Purcey’s years flocking to anything Myrna Loy was in, but by ’39 I’d been reeducated—by my own aspirations, always youth’s cruelest and least foresighted commissars—to the point of turning up my nose at joining the crowds bleating to see
Gone with the Wind
.
Hollywood was a preposterous place to us—ironically, given Mrs. Gerson’s eight mostly enjoyable years there in a later Pamcarnation—and the vulgarians who ran the studios were obviously beneath contempt. So I sat down to read
The Producer’s Daughter
with my pencil sharpened to a dueler’s edge.

Nothing could’ve prepared me for the kinship I felt. In East Egg, Pammie Buchanan had used to wonder what it might be like to have a sister, and Celia Brady—or Celia Brady White, as she was by then—was the closest approximation I had or would ever come across. The last time I’d felt my own identity slithering out of my grasp this way, I’d been an eight-year-old in a Swiss sanatorium and a madwoman with chopped hair and strange hawk’s eyes had been insisting I was her Scottie.

It wasn’t an exact resemblance. She was Los Angeles born and bred, and our frames of experience were very different. She’d had oodles of money all her life and never thought twice about why, not true of me since the Crash. By 1941, I scarcely identified myself to myself as
having been
a rich girl, since it didn’t seem to me wealth counted until you were in a position to make decisions about it and I hadn’t. As a result, my twin’s politics—the prism of prisms for me then—were undeveloped at best.

Yet the tone, not only the provocations for amusement but its manner, stirred up a maddening illusion of sibling rivalry. On the page, Celia Brady sounded more like me than Pam herself had yet managed to in print—if only, I daresay, because I hadn’t realized that was a priority. As a sample of how I wrote then when deeply affected by a book, here’s the conclusion Alisteir printed with considerable suffering:

From a socialist perspective
[yes, I still cleared my throat that way; we all did]
, not the least of the many delightful surprises here is the interest Miss Brady takes in Hollywood’s labor situation circa 1935. While this child of privilege is blinkered, she’s not blind. Nor can one dispute the poignancy given these light-hearted “memoirs” by their appearance so soon after the death of her actual father last December. Surely, if we automatically scorn the perceptions that can be gleaned from mindsets unattuned to Marxism, we only deprive ourselves of useful knowledge of the world; and the moment we deny even the most affluent a claim equal to our own on life’s universal emotions, we risk abandoning one small but vital crag of a moral high ground otherwise ours for the asking.

You’ll be incredulous, but that turgid last sentence—especially on top of all the praise I’d heaped on
The Producer’s Daughter
earlier—made me the Antichrist of the week at the old
Republic
. Your Gramela’s shame at the style is offset by pride that I didn’t falsify my reaction to give them the rap sheet they wanted, and my duffer of an editor deserves credit for printing the review in full despite formidable pressure to at least cut my counterrevolutionary ending. Even with my one concession to his woeful countenance—“risk abandoning” instead of “have abandoned”—that savagely cleavaged secretary of his refused to park her forked hams on Alisteir’s lap for a week.

Posted by: Pamique

No longer a member even in poor standing of Barnard’s Class of ’42, by then I was sharing an apartment with another single girl on Bank Street. Still years from Nenuphar’s robes, my guardian had been troubled when I wrote him in May of 1940, just as the Battle of France began, that I was a) staying in New York that summer and b) didn’t plan on returning to college. I needed his agreement to keep sending me the $15 per week he’d been paying out from the tiny inheritance I was due to come into at twenty-one: the last of the Buchanan gelt, mostly generated by the sale of dead Daisy’s minor Dali.

Since that basically meant he’d be staking me for a year before the whole unmagnificent sum was mine anyway, also because his scruples told him his writ didn’t extend to
forbidding
the apple to fall close to the tree, Nick gave in after three paragraphs of thoughtful counter-arguments in the same sloping hand that had once announced a perfect little Paree-sienne’s arrival. Since there was no other man I’d have put up with hearing
Like mother, like daughter
from, I’ve always been glad I didn’t hear it from him.

The joke was that my new digs weren’t that different from the dorm I’d left behind. The décor of twin beds, communal nightstand, and mingled stockings on the radiator was augmented only by one novelty—a small but not badly stocked bar—standing in a corner of another: a living room.

As for the other name on the lease, Murphy had hit close to home. Dottie Idell
was
Vassar: Vassar ’39, not ’33 as her recent
WashPost
obit claimed. By day, she was the receptionist for a West Side psychiatrist—a new breed then, at least in having chosen the career from the start rather than having helped invent it. By the Forties, Freudians were as keen on evangelizing in the face of popular benightedness as had been aviators a decade earlier.

On the ledger’s plus side, he let my roommate take acting classes and go to auditions on weekdays and paid well enough to let her pillage Village vegetable stands and downtown fish markets for her great weekend passion, which was cooking. That was for pure love, since back then women didn’t make a career of it except maritally and Dottie was too busy enjoying the frisky life to be on the lookout for a husband. So I ate well instead.

To be as honest as I can, daisysdaughter.com readers, I hardly remember what Dottie Idell looked like. Three inches shorter than Pam, she had hair the uncertain color of spring’s first warm sun, a deviant nose that pulled up short just in time to avoid going seriously thataway, a jolly little body she was pretty jolly unabashed about in private, and a smile that turned her upper gum into a happy orchestra pit whose bright enamel music stands were waiting for players. That’s really about it. She had as little interest in left-wing politics or writing as I did in acting or cooking, giving our little Bank Street nook the clemency that comes of knowing up front the twain shall never meet for long.

Unexpectedly, our truest and most playful bond was poetry. She’d declaim it with flourishes that reveled in exposing the fustian streak in Victorian sonorities—T.S. Eliot’s included, and not much beat Dottie’s rendition of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at making the shoe fit. One of her, well, dottier whims was to invent dishes based on poetic figures of speech: “I’m going to come up with a recipe for Ragged Claws if it kills me,” she sunnily greeted me over a book from our living room sofa on my return from the old
Republic
’s office one day, leading Pam to reflect that August was August and I liked Boucher too. Auditioning to play Louise O’Murphy in the altogether would still make more sense if there were, in fact, a play about her to audition for.

Dottie being Dottie and Pam being me, I’d’ve felt remiss not teaching her St. Clair Sinclair’s old jingle: “To eat an oyster/You crack it foister,” and so on. She was delighted, but I hardly expected to hear it burst from her lips on TV almost fifty years later. As for real poetry, even Purcey’s hadn’t killed Pam’s private affection for the stuff so long as I wasn’t asked to provide any execrable samples of my own. While I’d have died sooner than share “Chanson d’automne” with her, I got drawn into the recital game; she’d do Matthew Arnold, back I’d come with “Jabberwocky.” That’s how we fell into the inanity of calling our two beds Dover and Calais, as in “I left the book on Dover” or “Your laundry’s on Calais.”

Of course, bikini girl, you’d better believe there were nights when only one or even neither of us slept there. Bank Street didn’t really suit for our dates with men. We both knew girls who’d do the you-take-the-living-room-and-I’ll-take-the-bedroom bit, had signals like a shifted vase to let the roommate know she had the couch tonight and so on, but somehow it wasn’t us. The aversion was to tawdriness, not candor. Three years older than I, Dottie herself had introduced me, via the name of a woman doctor, to the rubbery, unguentine world of pre-Pill birth control.