Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (4 page)

“Well, there’s your book,” said my agent, though I’d only dried up because I was nerving myself to talk about Dachau. Not the easiest topic to carom off a bright laugh in a Midtown aerie, with Cath’s green nails adding busy ticks of New York ornamentation to the silver baptismal cup—bought for a GI Bill song by one of her young authors in Rheims—she used for mint juleps come sunset. “How fast can you write it?”

Answer: pretty fugging fast. Five months: April to September ’46, in the furnished apartment I’d rented in a Brooklyn rooming house. Not a New York I’d ever known, but Sutton Place, the West Village, and the Upper West Side were looking like three on a match to me. Lifting dead Daisy’s typewriter out of the Paris footlocker, I ignored the Lotus Eater’s malicious invitation—chauffeur-capped for some forgotten bit of Twenties zaniness, she was peeking out of a snapshot in the backwash of curios underneath—to hoist the window’s sash and scatter my mother’s chaotic pages of
The Gold-Hatted Lover
to the winds. Then I Smith-Coronated a kitchen table where Pam would never slice a single onion, much less spend an idle May morn dotting muffin dough with cherry bits in nothing but my borrowed shoes, and started clattering away like Perle Mesta’s bracelets. I mostly ate cigarettes.

After going to the then considerable trouble of getting my ETO
Regent’s
articles photocopied, I doubt I looked at them even once. The scrupulous Pam who’d written those had been able to welcome midnight as I hunted for an appropriately valorous evocation of “smelly” before one a.m. gave me my lead: “Rank means very little at this crossroads south of St. Vith, where rankness is the key to your fellow Americans’ respect. Climbing out of our jeep to be briefed on the situation, which looked tricky but promising, by Captain Maxwell H. Folger [how had Roy let that one by?], 24, of Coffeyville, Md., we felt disgracefully scrubbed and pink…”

And so on for the rest of “Tiger! Tiger!,”
by Pamela Buchanan
’s 2,000 pungent words about life in a tank-destroyer battalion ten days after the relief of Bastogne. Yes, we were ornate in those days, Panama: had to be, to prove to Hitler and our readers that no obscenity we saw could blunt our sensibility. Now I had no one to do justice to but me and I knew I was trivial.
Gloriously
trivial, like the bright yellow cabs going by in no fear of artillery spotters or the ball game blaring from the sidewalk.

When one doubleheader stopped my fingers in midair, I was nearly done with a bit of foolery about Eddie quizzing a perspiring Vichy mayor on the local Calvados and fromages. To keep the mood light, I was skipping the coda that his former nonstituents were preparing to hang him. The astonishing urgency in the announcer’s voice had me wondering what counterattack or map coordinate “Cookie Lavagetto! Cookie
Lavagetto!
” was code for, but Red Barber was speaking in clear and I heard thimbled roars. Then I went back to batting out
Nothing Like a Dame
as if I were lustily joshing at a party.

Which I often also did for real, since those same unabashed cabs pumpkined me into Manhattan more nights than not from my Brooklyn digs. Once the postwar edition of Midtown enfolded me, the heaped lights looked like avalanches in reverse, breviaries in an aviary: I’d last seen them dimmed to keep U-boat captains from figuring out whether the Bronx was up and the Battery down. Any wingding whose backdrop was Rose Butaker Dawson’s Cunard Heights balcony or Ann Darrow Driscoll’s Central Park zoo would’ve had the rest of their riffraff combing the hospitals if I was a no-show.

I’d been to both houses in my last Pamcarnation. But when I got back from our European war, both those salty pillars of society—Rose, the Picasso collector at the pinnacle of art’s meeting with commerce; Ann, the blonde ingenue famed as the first bride to scream “I do” from the top of the Empire State Building—took me into their fold as if we now shared something too obvious to speak of. I lost touch with Ann when she left New York after a notoriously botched mid-Seventies facelift, but the bowl old Rose had finished glazing just before her death in 1997 got sent on to me by her granddaughter. UPS delivered it in Etruscan shards, but I was flattered all the same.

Posted by: Pam

As I was, bikini girl, truly, when your dad dedicated his damned book to me. His passages Egyptologizing my now mummified
Nothing Like a Dame
(Henry Holt, 1947) and its 1949 screen mutation could still have benefited from Roy Charters’s blue pencil. “The hilarity of these faded reminiscences [mine is part of a lineup, given away by Pam’s wilted corsage] can make us wonder if their authors were idiots,” writes Tim, taking the bull by the horns as he never does conversationally. “But they weren’t. They were crazed with relief because it was over. If you ever come across
Nothing Like a Dame
at a library sale, treat it kindly. You’re holding the postures and japes of a sensitive woman who’d seen atrocious things. Now she’s trying to convince us as merrily as she can that neither she nor her generation were scarred for life when they sailed on the
Titanic
’s return trip to face down King Kong.”

Bizarrely mixed analogies aside—we didn’t smash into a hairy black iceberg, did we?!?—I do wish Tim had asked me before he volunteered to play Pam’s shrink in print. Trauma, please! Ask the boys under snow in the Ardennes about traumas, even though you’d have to sew that one’s fucking mouth back on to get an answer out of the dumb fuck. Jesus Christ, Eddie! What had that dumb fuck been thinking to go back for his fucking
gas mask
,
something even the dumbest GI tossed on his first route march? Jesus!

Consider the odds that I sounded like a glib, shallow ninny because I bloody well
was
a glib, shallow ninny, like most people that age—not really that much more advanced than yours, bikini girl. Since turnabout is fair play, my diagnosis is that your dad’s the one playing shell games with bonnets and bees: overcompensating, as the Floydians say, for the fact that he’ll never know what it was really like.

And soon nobody will. No one at all on this groaning, valiantly sashaying planet; not even dear Bob, whose clout with this administration is clearly more minimal than he suspects. Leaving out Vonnegut, whom I regret I’ve never met, he’s almost the last of them left whose name people will recognize in the obituary. Besides Norman, obviously, whose own clacking cubby in Brooklyn I learned many years later wasn’t too far from mine. Sure can’t say the same for the respective results of our labors.

Of those gone on ahead up the bluffs, I suppose Bill’s obit affected me most. “Come on, Pammie! Cut yourself some slack. The nurses aren’t in mine either,” I reheard him say as the Jan. 23, 2003,
WashPost
slid out of lunette range and became an annoyed Kelquen’s hat. I rescued it as she shook it off, more slowly than she might’ve when younger. “What’s that line from Whitman everyone loves now? ‘The real war will never get in the books’?”

“Oh, Bill! At least you tried.”

Posted by: Pamita

Once my manuscript was moored like a cockleshell among Holt’s dreadnoughts, I did have misgivings. They just aren’t those Tim attributes to me.
Four different editors tried to talk me out of reprinting “The Gates of Hell,” my May 17, 1945,
Regent’s
report from Dachau, as
Nothing
’s very peculiar appendix. One of them suggested I at least give readers fair warning by prefacing it with the Webster’s definition of “incongruous,” and I took Doc Selzer up on it too: “Not corresponding with what is right, proper, or reasonable; unsuitable; inappropriate.” The whole garish misstep was dropped from the paperback, even from the hardcover’s last dozen printings.

A few otherwise
Dame-
smitten reviewers chided my “immaturity” (
Boston Carbuncle
) or “surprising tastelessness” (
Savannah Klaxon
) in subjecting readers to that final, I swear, “cold shower” (
Sacramento Malaprop
). One or two oddballs admired the discordance; I learned from Gilbert Seldes, no less,
Krazy Kat
’s champion back in the Twenties, that the best writing in the book was the page Holt left blank between the main text and “The Gates of Hell.” Pro or con, those were the exceptions. The vast majority of
Dame
’s glowing notices ignored my odd appendix, like diners too stuffed with turkey to mention the hostess had soiled herself, the universal stain browning her wiggly white satin, as coffee was served.

Their deafening silence was why I agreed to an appendectomy when we went back to press. But Tim got his mitts on a first printing, and did
You Must Remember This
ever go to town on Dachau’s there-and-not-there. I could so easily have set your dad straight, bikini girl! I knew my motives for reprinting a sample of my war reporting, and the agenbite of inwit played no part. They weren’t conscience-stricken; they were vain.

Only my never met champion Celia Brady pegged it in her
review: “Now that she’s finished clowning, the lovely Miss B. would like us to know she can so play Hamlet.” Bingo. I didn’t want readers of what might be my only book to think giggles were all I had on when I hopped out of the cake, and I was proud of “The Gates of Hell.” It was the hardest piece I’d ever had to write, and its opening line—“This pile died in a boxcar”—had won the admiration of none other than Cyril Connolly.

Anyhow, were I fifty years younger, I’d be tiddling my nose at Tim now in cyberspace. With one obvious exception, who left us long ago—brain aneurysm, 1965, Saigon—nobody, Panama’s dad included, ever divined the identity of the tailor’s dummy I’d anonymized in
Regent’s
as “the soldier”: “Quite possibly for good, the soldier’s face changed” and so on.

He was the very same fellow who’d rollicked through the rest of my book barking bon mots like traffic commands: “‘Oh, hell,’ Eddie groaned. ‘It’s the seventh Calvados to the rescue’…‘I don’t know about you, Pam, but I think Field Marshal Montgomery just told us to turn left at the snow job,’ Eddie said…‘Shut up, Eddie, for Christ’s sake,’ I told him. ‘I’ve had it with your masculine wiles.’ ‘I’ve had it with yours too,’ he grunted. ‘I’ve hated you since Normandy.’” If those tastes of our wit strike you as caviar, by all means start haunting library sales. Not counting selling my own, which I won’t (“Glad I could help you out, kiddo—whoever you were, are or will be. All my love, Bill”), there’s no such thing as a copy of
Nothing
I can make money from, so I’m not being mercenary.

Since I never called Eddie anything but Eddie in the print version of our romps, only our fellow ETO correspondents knew that the Dame’s breezy sidekick was famously sepulture-voiced Edmond Whitling, then known as “the conscience of radio.” Not unmasking him was what he came to my party to thank me for, so he said, waiting for his gratitude’s full range of meanings from abject to insulting to sink in. By my lights, his own war book, a stentorian thing called
The Rough Draft of History
, had exactly one joke in it, the dedication: “To my dear wife, who not only kept the home fires burning but let me feed my rough drafts to them when I got back.” Don’t blame Pamita if she never got to his ruminations on Dachau.

“The Gates of Hell” had paralyzed me until I hit on misrepresenting him as a nameless GI. Then every other element fell into place. We all took shortcuts in those days, and I suppose using Eddie gave me the clutchable point of familiarity I needed to get on with it. In my defense, as I’d reminded Bill in Chasen’s, everyone could have been anyone. Eddie hadn’t been quite Eddie—or even Edmond Whitling, his other masquerade—since we came upon the death train.

No guards, no locomotive, no explanation. Just a stench as big as the Prado under a low pewter sky that kept it sealed in over thirty or forty boxcars and flatcars packed with former people, none alive. Preserving my sanity for your benefit, Pam wasn’t Pam either, and when she resurfaced in midafternoon—in a squabble you’d better believe I left out of “The Gates,” and it’s Maggie Higgins who should’ve thanked me for that one—I was aghast. As Tim Cadwaller charitably says, having only
appropriate
reactions to Dachau would be proof of psychosis.

Even so, it was not-Eddie—not not-Pam—who broke down when he saw the impractical souvenir of life as a human being one claw was guarding: a toothbrush. That was probably the origin of his transformation into “the soldier” in “The Gates of Hell.” Angrily rubbing his jaw and smacking his face, he detached himself from the “we” of the lead, the plural vanishing as mysteriously as the collective narrator who introduces Charles Bovary.

No, daisysdaughter.com readers. I’m not even going to try to describe all we saw. Doing it once in dulcet magazine prose nearly killed me, and I was lots younger and spryer then. Just more game all around, you might say. But as a sample of what doesn’t get in the books and didn’t in
Regent’s
, I’ll tell you about Eddie’s and my first test—which we passed—in the etiquette of genocide.

Not that the latter term was current back then, just as the former one isn’t today. It was a practical dilemma, because we’d yelled at our driver to stop and scrambled out as soon as we came upon the train some minutes after the Thunderbirds’ leading patrols. (“Thunderbirds” meaning the U.S. 45th Division, oddly enough Bill M.’s old outfit until he’d been detached to
Stars and Stripes
. They’d been at this since Sicily, too.) Three or four cars down, we saw that it stretched on and on.

Eleven months after D-Day, Eddie and I knew each other best when wordless. Here was the question we asked with our skins: now that we knew, when did this get redundant? The two thousand or so
other
dead Jews could be not unreasonably assumed to be more of the same. Oh, we might spot one whose specs still encircled his I-was-a-tailor stare at the sky, proof he’d stayed a person until nearly the end. Maybe one ex-little girl would be clutching a doll: human interest at last!