Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (17 page)

Not the best sentence I’ve ever written, no. Just the best
last
sentence I have, as of now anyway.

Some planned opening chapters were discarded as well. The Vikings got lopped and so did Columbus. As I’ve mentioned, I began with “A Landing,” and Panama? Sorry: I’m a writer. If I couldn’t bring myself to revisit Provincetown for a
book’s
sake, there’s no chance a ring of jolly Cadwallers on the elephone, barked at and barged at by a lively little dog, will persuade me.

Gerson-led, Gerson-loving, I set myself rules. Pure narrative: no anticipation, flashbacks, or reflections outside each bit’s time frame. Each chapter hung on an incident, a moment—even just “a sort of anecdote,” as Mencken had described the Scandal. I honed the writing, ditching not only
Nothing
’s careless prattle but my old
Regent’s
molasses. Like my other two books,
Glory Be
had jokes in it; I did want to make Gerson smile. But no
mugging
.

From “A Landing” on, chapter titles were abrupt. My rule was never to use “
Th
e,” which was falsely defining. It was always “A Cargo” (first slave ship docking at Jamestown), “A Misfit” (Roger Williams: last words, “Rhode Island”), “A Sermon” (Cotton Mather), “A Storm” (Franklin’s kite), “A Fort” (the untried George Washington in the French and Indian War). And so on, from the well-meant, off-rhyming with “cargo,” but now archaic “A Negro”—Crispus Attucks, of course—all the way to “A Morning.” Off-rhyming with “landing,” you see.

Ah, Cadwaller’s gun! How it depresses your owner’s widow that April 19, 1775—and all that goes with it, from Minutemen to “If this be treason, make the most of it” and so on—has been appropriated in our day by the crackpots who wrathfully style themselves militias. Generations of high-school history teachers got driven to despair by my compatriots’ fabled hostility in every poll to their topic, and now this.

And curse liberals too, for ceding the whole beautiful thing’s imagery to their opponents just because its unsophisticated musketry embarrassed them. Unless April 19, 1775, belongs to all of us, it can’t belong to any of us: the lesson a pigheadedly Mayfloral Pam learned from her Gerson’s stubborn library-shelved conviction that he had a claim on events predating his family’s arrival at Ellis Island by a century or more. I wrote
Glory Be
to hold him when he began to despair of believing that it was a claim on much.

No, I had no formal training. One proof’s that it took me two years. Each moment laboriously researched, sites (all but one) visited, each chapter written and rewritten until I could’ve staged my own ticker-tape parade with typewriter ribbons. And no, the reviews weren’t all glowing. My old friend Dwight Macdonald had company. But I spluttered whenever “cinematic” popped up as a term of abuse, often with a slighting reference to my then current roots—an Americanism if I’ve ever coined one, by the way. Though my Los Angeles address wasn’t fudged, Cath and Random House agreed I’d better leave Pam’s marriage to a Hollywood producer unannounced on the dust jacket. But
Vogue
and everyone else profiling me printed it.

So what and of course! Perhaps you’ll see what they couldn’t. I meant to give Gerson one movie Metro’s pashas would get no chance to dicker and euchre into eunuchhood; two dozen fabled historical prefilm occasions Rik-Kuk Productions couldn’t turn thumbs down on. Take it from me, daisysdaughter.com readers: if you want to make the movie or TV show of your dreams, write a book.

Near Pulitzer miss or not,
Glory Be
isn’t in much repute nowadays. Tenured ninepins sniffed from the start, since
Lux et Veritas
is Latin for “No amateurs need apply.” By the mid-Seventies or so, none did—and my God,
narrative
was a term of abuse! So was “entertaining,” so was “brisk.” When one ninepin calls another’s book “highly readable,” both parties understand the next step is cudgels at dawn.

Glory Be
’s author is a minor member of a forgotten breed. The most recent online citation of my once much loved book is a mention in some ninepin’s withering dismissal of yesteryear’s “popular historians.” Scorned for being more interested in the reader’s pleasure and my own prose than substance, I’m a minnow alongside bigger fish in the barrel. They include not only Gene Smith and Cornelius Ryan, whose letter apologizing for Pam’s deletion from
The Longest Day
(“I left out Marty Gellhorn too”) is in the Paris footlocker, but—here’s where this old bag’s jaw dropped—Barbara Tuchman.

Barbara Tuchman? No, really? I’ll take that with bells on, you unwitting flatterer. Good Christ, how that woman could structure and write!

Posted by: Pam

It wasn’t all Gerson, too much Beverly Hills, or disgust at having shown Stella Negroponte Pam’s Coos Bay. The blacklist was on my mind too, despite my regretfully scrapped Salem chapter “A Trial.” Arthur Miller had dibs. The play whose London production he’d been denied a passport to see was
The Crucible
.

By the time
Glory Be
reached stores, the witch hunt was waning. Brave as ninety-five mice confronting a rat, the Senate had finally censured McCarthy. That didn’t spare me from being attacked in left-wing circles, some of whose circlers had known me in my old
Republic
days. I was guilty of knuckling under to the Age of Conformity with a craven
American Heritage
hymnal—a charge repeated as late as 1965 in his lugubrious
How the Red Faded Out of Old Glory
by a creaky weathervane you’ve met before. You old fraud, Alisteir Malcolm.

Not a bit of it. Pam was as fed up as any of them with the flatulent complacencies of the
Nine-
teen
Fif
-ties, from its scrims for Ike’s grin to his true grandson Howdy Doody capering on General Motors’ strings. Now a dyed-in-the-Loy liberal Democrat, I hadn’t forgotten our Thirties hopes. Gerson and I did our best to stay chipper; blowing our brains out was at best Plan D, only rarely discussed and only while driving, ever Los Angeles’s Ferris wheel for conversational caprice. Yet even before Jake’s visit, in moping moods my husband would worry as we drove that spending one day in Fran Kukla’s U.S.A. would convince Lafayette it had all been for nothing.

Privately readier to agree with him than he yet was with himself, more likely in later years to think the Marquis’s IQ was all in his wig anyhow, I wrote my book to not only hold Gerson but buck both of us up. I meant my look back to prompt him and any other readers it might attract to look forward. To restore, if saying so’s not self-aggrandizing—oh, what the hell if it is? I’m just babbling unheard out in cyberspace anyway—a sense of possibility, accident, circumstance, hope.

In two words, of beginning. It wasn’t called
Glory Was
.
My people weren’t preserved in aspic. With a few grim exceptions (spend a month with Cotton Mather and a taxidermist won’t have you), they were urging us to go forth and do likewise in our own metamorphoses.

The catch any author will recognize is that what I was doing to hold Gerson took me away from him. Not only on my research trips, since there wasn’t a lot I could do about the fact that California’s part in stirring up the American Revolution, however prominent in my own case in 1954–56, had been fairly limited in 1620–1775. Even at home in Beverly Hills, pacing and typing in my heretofore barely used study above Stella Negroponte’s room, I was a Mercury astronaut before they existed, my only hairdresser a pencil for weeks at a time. I believe Antoine scraped by.

Luckily, my husband had never had to count on his Mrs. for cooking or cleaning. Nor did the servants need Pam’s compass to navigate our house, since both Luz (the housework) and Ava (the kitchen) dated from Gerson’s first marriage. That was how redecorating, which I’d never given a tinker’s dam about, had become my early declaration of Pamhood, though I swear I never once waited, let alone hoped, to hear Luz crash into a sofa where a clear path had been.

Yet now there was many a Saturday and Sunday when my husband, home from Rik-Kuk and increasingly weary of Winken, Blinken
,
and Nod, could go well past sunset more likely to hear a peep out of Stella than me. Being Gerson, he wouldn’t have put it that way on a dare, but he did mutter sometimes.

“Why, Gerson!” I tried to reason with him. “I used to spend all day here waiting for you
to get done working. Never once complained.”

“Not on weekends. And I wasn’t right on the other side of the ceiling the whole time,” he said, nodding upward. “I can still hear you sometimes, but I can’t see or touch you. It’s an
adjustment
,
Pammie, that’s all.”

If you’d like proof Gerson loved me, he didn’t bring up the most obvious difference. His job at Rik-Kuk was supporting me, trips to Jamestown and Boston and the site of Fort Necessity now making that dog-tongued receipt drawer bulge more. Though
Dame
’s royalties
had kept me in Antoine and toreadors (the pants, Eve, not the bullfighters) for the first year or two of our marriage, even then all the big bills were his.

If every marriage has one boast kept untarnished, ours was a good one: we never once fought about money. He did that with Gene Rickey, not me. We weren’t to be reprieved from all marital cliches, however. I was two-thirds of the way through my manuscript when he wretchedly asked—at a ten p.m. dinner, gone cold: Ava did chicken salad for lunch a lot in those days—if I was having an affair with someone back East.

“Someone” was the Hollywood note, since the faint implication he’d know them was leverage grasping at straws. I’d put him through a lot if he was thinking like a producer, but that’s not the only reason I gaped. Living people weren’t especially real to me in those days. Airplanes, trains, hotels, taxis, whole cities—Boston, ugh—were simply obstructions I had to put up with for the sake of one building, one church spire at daybreak, one hill young Washington had cantered along, one fringe of trees
,
or one library. The full Pam materializing only when I’d made contact, I slid through the rest like a ghost.

“No, Gerson, no! My God,” I said. “If I were having an affair with anyone, I’d be having it with you.”

Didn’t quite hit the right note, did it? He didn’t think so either. “Say the word, Pammie. Name the day.”

I didn’t mean to be glib. I meant to be poetic: “April 19, 1775.”

He looked down at his plate. “I’ll be in Europe,” he said.

Posted by: Haroun Pam-Raschid

Oh, buck. I’d bucking well bucked us up good and proper, hadn’t I? But I was in the literary opium den, greedily puffing on a pipe shaped like a Colonial fife. Turbaned and scimitared, I was mentally sauntering among the perfumed lemons and melons of history’s seraglio, murmuring “That one” to Qwertyuiop: my Smith-Coronal, many-eyed vizier. The eunuch had no say! By that stage in
Glory Be
’s composition, I could no more have braked or redirected myself had I been a bullet.

The truth is, Gerson’s obtuseness mostly just maddened me. Couldn’t he grasp the rose in the nettle? Not only was my book my gift to him; it was his to me. If not for my husband’s quaint and then frighteningly unreliable passion for Winken, Blinken
,
and Nod, I’d have never understood, never cared, never experienced this world’s true fourth dimension: yesterday. Never have discovered a past I now saw had precipitated me.

Knowing both sets of my forebears had been on the scene, I searched as if drunk for Buchanans and Fays. Dead Daisy’s daughter wanted one chapter to serve as a not too conspicuous marker indicating her stake in the emerging pattern. Never found a good one, but in my own mind I settled on a metaphoric substitute. Too little known planter heiress Martha Shelton (b. 1707, d. 1745) became the heroine of Chap. 15, “A Romance.”

In an episode I saw as crystallizing the new fluidity of social relations in the still apple-carted, British-aping, yet inchoately freedom-seeking colonies, she’d alarmed the proud Virginia Sheltons by falling in love with one Alfred Wiggins (b. ?, d. 1767), the family tutor: mathematics for her brothers, pianoforte for her. Alarm turned to outrage when she married Wiggins once his seven years’ indentured servitude were up. All was posthumously forgiven when Shelton Wiggins (b. 1745, d. 1806) became a captain of the Continental volunteers, cited for unusual valor at the Battle of Brandywine—you had to turn to
Glory Be
’s appendix, “The Aftermaths,” to learn this—and a friend to both Patrick Henry and Jefferson. No mean trick, incidentally.

“Saltsbury” still stood outside Culpeper, where Cadwaller and I were to buy a
pied-à-terre
we liked many Indian-summery years later. Already visited once, it was Martha Shelton’s home I was off to, with a stopover at Nenuphar to see Brother Nicholas, when I confronted Gerson’s true anguish. I doubt my husband had ever seriously worried I was parking the Buchanan bod gams ahoy to welcome the penetrating historical insights of Philadelphians and Richmonders. That was just the comic-book sexualization of his deepest dread.

He always drove me to the airport when he could, with a goodbye kiss as pleasantly dry as those we’d exchanged before we ever slept together. But this was a night flight, and I suspect that’s why he couldn’t take it. He was gripping the steering wheel like a fatal X-ray.

“Gerson, are you ill? I thought the chicken salad was a little off myself. But you know how Ava gets when she thinks you’ve repoached—sorry, reproached—her.”

Knowing it would have trouble speaking, his mouth meticulously squared itself. “I swear,” he said, “I swear I never think about it when it’s me who’s flying. And if we’re flying together, Pammie? Then I can always tell myself, ‘Well, at least…’”

He didn’t need to finish that one. “Yes,” I said. “Me too.”

“Do you, can you, have any idea how I hate to leave—how I hate
dropping people off
, at airports? I’ve never told you, but I wait every time. I sit in this car and I watch the takeoff. Day or night, I follow the plane with my eyes until it’s not there anymore. Then I just hope it’s still somewhere.”

“Gerson, Carole Lombard’s plane—”

“Please don’t call it that. No, never mind; that’s not the issue. I know everyone always will. But now you do it all the time, all the time!” he cried, meaning flying rather than misnaming Stella Negroponte’s plane. “All the time.”

“Well, I’ve got no choice now! You know that.”

He let that one pass. “I don’t want to have to ask Wylie White for another favor, Pammie. I don’t want it to happen again! I couldn’t stand it. And even when you’re
home
,
but up there, you know—working—I start imagining it’s already happened.”

“Oh, love! Gerson, I promise. I vow. History isn’t going to repeat itself.”

“How can you say? How can you know? It’s random.”

“I’m not. And I’ll never be.”

He looked at Pam for confirmation. What did he see? The yes in my eyes, the no of my nose. The mixed-up thou of my mouth. Through my clothes, which he always could read like a book, the dotted I-I of Pam’s nipples. The nave of my navel, the us of my—ah, screw it. I knew I’d get in trouble sooner or later. I still rate that moment the most intimate Gerson and I ever shared.

Notice what I didn’t say:
And I’m not pregnant.
We’d never spoken of his garbled admission to Jake that Stella had been, which he didn’t realize I’d heard and I gathered nobody knew. Wylie White would have told me if Gerson and the first Mrs. Gerson had shared the happy news before she boarded. Nonetheless, in my own writerly mind, saying I wasn’t pregnant wouldn’t have been true—and in Gerson’s mind, since he loved me, it wouldn’t have been true either.