Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (8 page)

I drew an East Wind and hummed in dismay, knowing I had to keep it. No help to me, it was a risky discard when none of its three matching tiles was in sight. Choosing another from my rack and setting it down, I grumbled “Polly”—our private mahj name for One Bamboo. Unlike the other tiles in its suit, it showed not count-’em-and-weep bamboo poles but a bird of paradise.

My mother’s hand was all concealed, a virtual scream she was angling for one of her would-be high-scoring masterpieces. She barely glanced at her new tile before she discarded it. “Polly want a Five Crack?” she said.

With two chows and two triplets in plain view, the Scandinavian had only one tap-tapping tile unexposed, so we knew she was just waiting on her pair. The North Wind she drew and gruntingly flipped for our benefit was no use to her. Or the rest of us, as she could see for herself: the other three North Winds were already face up in the discard rows that had lengthened until they nearly formed the square of a single-tiered fort inside the vanishing two-tiered one’s outline.

Then the Lotus Eater drew. As if her new inability to concentrate—not with that morphine stereopticon calling to her and Daisy from its pencase upstairs—left her no choice but to mimic the Scandinavian’s gesture, she put the tile down face up right away: “Six Dot,” she said restlessly.

Once she heard herself
call
it, though, some hophead circuitry substituted the sound of her own voice for plain sight. Her hand fluttered: “Oh, no! I need it. Can…? Um,
chow!
” said the L.E. nonsensically. Making as if to retrieve her own discard, she gave the nitwit giggle—and nothing’s more likely to offend a child—of someone who’d stopped taking the rules seriously.

Offended, my ass. I was appalled. “You can’t chow yourself! And it’s too late. We’ve all seen it. And anyway—
pong
.” I reached out.

A boiled red hand superseded us both: “
Mah-
yongg.” But she never knew I’d seen her naked, crouching with hands gripping white bedstead bars in her tumid room as she napped. That same red hand that had just seized the tile was at rest next to scrub brush whose crevasse hid Bering Sea herring. The last thing that would’ve occurred to me was that I had one too.

“Oh, dear. Look at this,” said my mother, crestfallen enough to commit the mahj solecism—to Pam the stickler’s eyes, at least—of displaying a losing combination. “I had all the dragons, hidden! And my own wind. I only needed the pair.”

Except for the L.E., who was fidgeting now that she’d spilled the tiles back off her rack onto the table—but then, unlike me, she wouldn’t be saying goodnight to my mother just yet, but “chen-chen”—our commiserations were genuine. It was a nearly miraculous hand. Or would’ve been if my prosaic Scandinavian nanny hadn’t barged to victory with a common, low-scoring, practical two chows, two triplets, and pair.

Her only reward was to rebox the tiles. We never knew what became of her after she quit near the end of the summer, but I don’t doubt that, unlike her employer, she lived to be a hundred.

Posted by: Pam

My recollection is that the scene that ended any chance of chowed or unchowed companionability between me and the L.E. took place the next morning. Be warned I spent eight years in Hollywood and a day and a half there will teach you glib dramaturgy if you’re susceptible.

Whatever morning it was, I’m sure it was one of mid-August’s drowsiest. My mother came downstairs just before midday, dressed for Manhattan but less soignée than usual. That meant she looked like a
lesser
Modigliani for a change.

She grew more jittery as a whole hour of August dithered by without the L.E. appearing. Then finally crazed enough to kiss my head out of nowhere, her delicate hands caging Pammie’s stunned ears like white spiders, and act as if we did that all the time.

What I intuit in hindsight is that they’d used up the last of their M the night before. My mother was frantic to get back to Manhattan and score before the cravings grew strong enough to make madness look like an appealing alternative. And for that, she needed the L.E., not having driven a car since the Scandal.

She finally scooted me upstairs—a first—to wake her chauffeur. Another turn of the screw, and why hadn’t I seen it sooner? Not Quint, whom I’d plainly imagined: Quintess. No jackboots or uniform, that was how I’d been fooled. The scariest phantasms are those in plain sight. Right then, I’d’ve sooner climbed onto a pony.

“Why can’t you?” I complained. “She’s your lousy friend.” If that sounds comical, Panama, I’d better explain that back then people still knew lousy meant infested with lice. I might as well have said
fucking
.

Daisy was too nervous to rebuke me. “Because little girls are sweeter,” she said, a non sequitur if I ever heard one. “Besides, you know [though I didn’t] she doesn’t like me walking in on her. I’m, oh!, much too noisy, you see. With my great big feet. Clump, clump!, like your father’s,” she improvised, using her hands to demonstrate. “I must’ve gotten them from him, I don’t know. Oh, Pammie, please.”

Just like her hands, my mother’s feet, if you can’t guess, were elfin. Mine were the boats, and genuinely my father’s chromosomes having a laugh: one reason my growth spurt in teenhood was a relief. But her plea wasn’t one I could’ve refused. Other than mah-jongg, this was the most important I’d been since my birthday in June, and I clumped up the stairs.

Across the hall from mine, the Lotus Eater’s door was closed. My soft knock got me silence, my bad-dolly one did too. When I pushed, I was mildly surprised (but why?) that she didn’t lock it. She was asleep in a grotto of shadows, one stalactite stocking hanging down from her bed’s canopy.

From the sheet tugged around her slender frame to its unmistakably pent youthfulness even in exhaustion, she made the mountainous Scandinavian look like a member of a different gender altogether. Petite with more hips than bust, made to order for Twenties couture: thank God I was her age in the boxy, Rosalind Russellized, row-row-row-your-shoulders-girls Nineteen-Forties instead. Her back was to me as I came around her bed.

She was sucking her thumb. Its tip was nestled in her parted lips as if it had either lost hope upon finding teeth there or been reassured by their existence. On her bare other arm, flung out past the pillow, I could see a few of the same violet stains that blemished my mother’s arms at the rare times they were exposed. That didn’t surprise or upset me, since I knew they gave each other bites with the stereopticon.

What did surprise me was that her face, seen now for the first time without her jerkily wired mind’s pulleys playing puppetmaster, seemed kind. Kind only to herself, I grant, but we’ve all got to start somewhere and she didn’t know I was present. Anyhow, the revelation to Pam’s puzzled eyes was that acting pleased with herself, which was how I saw the L.E., didn’t necessarily mean she was being kind to herself.

Or that anyone else was, but I was here on a mission and unsure how to accomplish it. “Hello,” I told the sleeping L.E. “Mommy says it’s time to wake up.”

Nothing. Breathing. Nothing. “You have to wake up,” I explained to her. “Hey, it’s time for school!”

I thought that might make her laugh the nice way she did during mah-jongg, not the nasty one when nobody joined her. She didn’t stir, and they must’ve shot up enough M to take care of a wounded platoon. So the adult Pam is in a position to estimate, having seen those syrettes stuck in enough dead men’s blasted bodies as Eddie Whitling and I barreled on in our jeep toward Falaise or Bastogne.

I’m not sure I can explain what prompted me to do what I did next. A girl of seven’s most attracted to what she misses most in herself. That chestnut bob’s lustrous gloss and svelte motion had become the tangible representation to Pammie of everything I wasn’t and couldn’t be in either my mother’s eyes or my own. For young girls, destiny’s earliest prefiguration of giving birth to an idiot child is having hair nobody can do anything with.

Not your problem, Panama! You never do anything with yours either and no one would want you to. Even in adulthood, during most of which time I could afford to try driving any coiffeur to drink I cared to, mine stayed a gingery brindle mop, courtesy of the Buchanan side and resistant to gentling.

One of old age’s few perks is that, cut short, it’s turned unremarkable. The best even Hopsie could do was “Harvest moon, misty night in October,” and at the time your great-grandfather was playing 20th-century Song of Solomon, gallantly lyricizing each part of me.
All
of them, and you shouldn’t blush. I want you to know what the world can be like at its best, too.

Anyhow, I started stroking the Lotus Eater’s hair. Played gliding Niagara with its silky fall, mussed and rechoreographed those docile bangs. “Wake up, wake up,” I crooned in my mother’s old singsong, not heard by me since I was a toddler.

Eventually, she woke up. She screamed as if I were a hairbrush on fire.

3. Provincetown

Posted by: Pam

After eighty-six years as a frequent flyer and sometime stewardess on Clio, I know how often bits of the way-back-when have vanished by the time searchers find Carole Lombard’s plane’s black box. No, Panama: don’t go all Wiki in the knees. It didn’t have one. On a tour to sell war bonds, that infectious actress got smacked into a mountain with twenty-two other people in 1942. I had a posthumous connection to one of her fellow passengers, which I’ll explain on daisysdaughter.com if Cadwaller’s gun hasn’t been fired by then.

No competent social history of the Twenties omits the mah-jongg craze. Some tenured Tom Swift’s mention that there was one won’t bring back the slither between my fingers of wood-backed ivory as Pam chose to discard a white dragon, the gradients thermometerizing my nanny’s arms, or the Lotus Eater’s habit of keeping us waiting by applying full makeup before—chestnut-bobbed, kohl-eyed, and green-mouthed—she sat down to play in our monstrously boxy East Egg kitchen. For that you need Gramela: the mimsy borogoves’ retinal photographs, the
autentico
prattle of Long Island Shakespeare eighty-odd years ago. Just invaluable, aren’t I?

Even if I weren’t licking these withered lips at the prospect of doing myself in with a shriek and a bang right after I hear “White House calling for Mrs. Cadwaller,” I’ll obviously never read a social history of the year we’re living in now. Still, listen, Swift; your ancestor Jonathan would’ve. I don’t want you to neglect the mimsies’ most jarring sight of our national insanity in the jangled third spring of this awful and unending war.

For months now, a pack of tatterdemalion loons has been turning up outside Arlington Cemetery for military funerals. Jeering and catcalling, they hold up repulsively gloating signs as the thunderstruck mourners enter and exit.

I’d seen this on the local news. Then with greater disbelief I watched it crawl by in three dimensions as Andy Pond drove me to some geezers’ waltz on the Virginia side of the river.

“My Gawd, Andy!” I squawked once I’d gotten mimsies, fat lunettes, and dentition back inside some sort of rational corral. “I’m so sorry. Can we turn around and go back to the District? You know what a forgetful old lady I am.”

Turning us south toward Lyndon Johnson Memorial Grove, Andy simpered. “Oh, Pam! Did you leave your ACLU card at home
again
?”

“Yes, but how did you know?”

“I’ve heard that joke before.”

“Andy, so what? Haven’t you heard
all
of them?”

“Well, I hope not,” Andy said.

Famous last words, don’t you think? “You’d better,” I told him as we swept past the now repaired Pentagon. “I’ve heard all of yours.”

Posted by: Pam

Pam’s consolation was that it was Memorial Day weekend. Only a week ago! That meant the Rolling Thunder boys were in town.

So long as they’ve got hairily aging Vietnam vets straddling them, I’ll never let blatting motorbikes annoy me. By now their annual rumble, filling our streets with Steve McQueen’s sons, is as Washingtonian as the Tidal Basin cherry blossoms that precede them. No doubt the cherry trees’ unbottled messages to Thomas Jefferson will outlive Rolling Thunder’s Chincoteaguean roar.

Is that sad or not? Can’t decide, doesn’t matter. It’s no skin off my nose, as the leper said to the headwaiter. Unless dear Bob’s pull with the White House is nil, I’ll be dead as Dickens’s doornail by sundown.

By my own hand
,
I think with a thrill the authoress of “
Chanson d’automne
” would have shared and may well have prompted. Then I ask myself: left or right? I usually pick up the phone with my right. Must try playing with Cadwaller’s gun with my sinister.

Anyhow, some of the vets had made a cordon between the picketers and the cemetery’s entrance. It won’t be on audio at the Archives, but I’d like Pam’s octogenarian voice to go on record here on daisysdaughter.com as saying, “Thank you, boys. Good luck to you tomorrow, boys.”

Who were these protesters, you ask? Some callous pack of peacenik crazies, venting their hatred of this awful and unending war by scoffing at its dead? Oh, heavens, no, Professor Swift. They’re demented homophobes. They show up at funerals to brag—the right word—that the coffins being shipped back home are fit punishment for America’s tolerance of homosexuals.

“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ,” I said to Andy once we’d seen those loonies in action. “Cripes! What’s Denmark
coming
to?”

Posted by: Pam

From what I gather, Panama, your generation could not care less where love is found or which two sticks (or not) two people rub together to make fire. I just hope there’s a recognizable U.S.A. around by the time you’re in a position to call the shots, because the anti-fag outrage you and yours so merrily see as quaint is our other national pastime’s final inning.

Not that I’m urging you to try experimenting with homosexuality’s cunning, titillating, enjambed, and netherworldly distaff version, certainly not at your age. Your father may read this and I do want Tim to stay fond of me after I’m gone. Even without Cadwaller’s gun in my lap, I know I won’t live to see the end of the long haul that began on April 19, 1775. Decades before your birth, that was the date chosen by your Gramela to cap the final chapter of her now forgotten 
Glory Be
.

I’m sure that looks like a shameless bid to boost my “Used and Collectible” sales on Amazon. Most likely that’s because it is one, and I must say I wish I’d discovered the egocentric pleasures of having my own blog a bit sooner. But my point is that once you and yours are done, at least until the Martians or Venusians land and give us all new six-eyed, twenty-bellied scapegoats, there won’t be anyone left in this country whom it’s permissible to hate.