Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (44 page)

“Mr. President, you know that’s not fair.”

“I agree, Hopsie. But you know what Jack said about fairness. That’s why I don’t let it get to me much. Now, would you happen to have a cigarette on you, Mrs. Cadwaller? Do you smoke at all?”

“Not in years.”

“Well, I am glad to hear that. My mother never touched one in her life. I wouldn’t want my death on her conscience anyhow. And Hopsie, I know you’re a pipe man, which of course is no help to me right now at all. Pipes are for serene Harvard men with a secret and white-haired old coots sitting out front of country gas stations and counting and naming each other’s nose hairs. Plus Jerry Ford, who can’t count and just calls his ‘My fellow guests here.’ But can you see me with one? No, I don’t think a pipe would suit me at all. I need a cigarette.”

“Mr. President? I could run out to a People’s or Dart Drug,” volunteered Judy Agnew, faltering as the idea’s absurdity hit even her. There must be cigarettes everywhere in the Mansion, summonable by pressing a button to make Felix materialize. I do like to think the rest of us had a bit more notion something else was afoot.

“Why, Carl!” LBJ said with a snicker. “Mr. Central Intelligence. Thought you said you don’t tick anymore, but what makes you tick is right in your shirt pocket. Now, why wouldn’t you give your Commander in Chief just one cigarette?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” said Carl [Last Name Redacted], fumbling the pack out. “I didn’t think you liked menthol.”

“Never did in my prime. But if Salem’s what’s here, why, I’ve got no choice. So give over.”

Extracting one, he half palmed then half tossed it into his mouth with an addict’s finesse. An ex-smoker myself with occasional relapses, I knew it was like riding a bicycle.

“Carl,”
said our President witheringly. “Now what am I supposed to do, breathe on it? I know the ‘Hey, hey’ kids in the park would believe that.”

“Sir, forgive me.” Carl patted for matches. But the Army bird colonel had just flicked open a Zippo.

“Well, well!” said LBJ shrewdly as he leaned in for the light. “Another county heard from. Colonel.”

“Sorry, Mr. President. It’s not for me. The General does like his cigar.”

“Yes, he does.” After one deeply satisfied inhale—
the First Lady’s in Texas, of course—
Johnson held up his Salem for our inspection.

“Well, now! I think we can agree that this is
my
cigarette. My saliva is on it and its smoke’s in my lungs. Doesn’t matter anymore who gave it to me. Doesn’t matter anymore who lit it. Doesn’t matter I never liked menthol much in my prime. Nobody else is going to smoke it. No one’ll take it away from me. If it does kill me bang, dead, right in front of your eyes, you all have my permission to tell them I asked for it.”

“Mr. President!” all the men said. Yes, even Cadwaller.

“Oh, don’t worry, Carl. Don’t worry, Colonel. Don’t worry, Rensselaer. Don’t worry, Hopsie. Felix Culpa has orders from me to swear an affidavit saying just that if he finds me dead from this cigarette I only lit to be sociable. Now, if you boys want to work out my next step in
Vietnam”—
he took a deep drag, then switched back from his aggressive thumb-and-forefinger pinch to two-fingered equanimity—“you go on ahead. Have something to eat while you’re at it. That is an order from your Commander in Chief. Dear Mrs. Cadwaller, come take a walk with me.”

Posted by: Dear Mrs. Cadwaller

His shirt baggy and yanked at the waistline, he’d stood. Indeed he’d stalked out, trailing twin contrails of smoke. Not feeling I had much say, I pushed my own chair back, blinking at the untasted plates of ribs, sirloin, and burgers before us. Then I found myself looking uncertainly at the most difficult moment of your great-grandfather’s professional life.

Sweat on his forehead and said forehead pale, as was his usually immaculate jaw with its faint grit of stubble—oh, Hopsie! How I loved you just then—he made himself honor the noblest traditions of the Department of State. He accepted the prospect of cuckoldry for our nation’s sake.

“Go, Pam,” he said. “Calm him down if you can. Dear God, I’ve got to see him
tomorrow
.”

“Tomorrow is another day!” Judy Agnew reassured him inanely. Or maybe not so inanely, not that she knew it, since I couldn’t help hearing Nachum Unger’s voice call, “Margaret
Mit-
chell.” I felt no less inadequate this time.

“Not these days, it’s not,” said Carl [Last Name Redacted]. “Cadwaller, you in that briefing too? I thought it was only the toyshop.”

“Please excuse me,” I said. “The President’s waiting.”

In the hall, having just handed over his highball glass—“Right away, Mr. President,” said Felix Culpa as he melted away—he was grinding his cigarette out in a sand-filled metal ashtray stand. Yes, the White House still had them then. Even though few people smoked in the President’s presence, they all did the second his back was turned and nobody found that objectionable. If you’re incredulous, these were dinosaur days: before our homemade, as you might say, Vatican III.

By then it must’ve been well past eleven. The East Wing’s main hallway was still blazing with light, as were the empty rooms I could see. The President hadn’t retired yet. “Ever been up here before, ma’am?” LBJ asked.

“No.”

“I wouldn’t say so in front of Cadwaller, but I thought maybe you might’ve in Jack’s time. It was cooze Grand Central Station anytime Jackie hopped up to New York. Weren’t you some kind of stewardess before you got married?”

Since
l’équipe
has no time to ransack my reception-line prattle, let alone scroll back to our first encounter in 1942, I can’t guess from what mislaid Johnsonian dossier that illusory Pam—not the last, daisysdaughter.com readers—had popped up tonight. I suspect learning I’d been a stewardess was the germ of what I’ve come to call Clio Airways.

“Oh, hell, Mr. President, don’t you have eyes to see?” I said with a chuckle. “I was too old to be cooze in Jack’s time.”

“Sorry. When it’s this late at night, I sometimes think it was all twenty years ago. Don’t you too, Mrs. Cadwaller?”

“We all do, I think. Anyhow, Hopsie and I were in Africa.”

“Oh, whereabouts?”

“Nagon. Djedjia now,” I corrected myself.

“Hellhole?”

“Heaven back then if you were us.”

He pondered his bourbon. “Too bad Jack never sent me.”

“He sent Bobby,” I said.

“Yeah, he would,” LBJ grumbled. Once his next sip had cued us to start strolling, he stopped almost immediately to coach the man with the briefcase containing new-kew-lear, nucleah, and nuclear codes. “We ain’t going far, so sit tight, son. Hope you’ve got a copy of
Playboy
in there.”

“No, sir, Mr. President,” came the prim reply. As we walked on, LBJ sighed.

“I keep trying to get them to smile,” he confided. “Hell, in their shoes I’d be grinning like some damn Cheshire cat.” Then we passed into a large oval room done in yellow.

“This one’s still all Jackie,” LBJ said, meaning the décor. “Only room on this floor that still is, just in case she ever decides to come back and visit.”

“She hasn’t?”

“No, never. Of course Mrs. Johnson and I have invited her a number of times. Her refusals have been mighty gracious, and I can’t say as I blame her. I don’t think Mrs. Lincoln ever came back either. I doubt Lady Bird will,” which had me catching my breath as he shoved his glass in the far door’s direction. “This next one’s the Treaty Room. Jack named it, I didn’t.”

There are paintings you don’t really think of as having originals, since they aren’t reproduced in art tomes but history books. “My God! Forgive me, but I’m a historian,” I said. As LBJ flinched, I swiftly added, “Retired.”

We gazed at George P.A. Healy’s
The Peacemakers
, showing Lincoln conferring with Generals Sherman and Grant and Admiral Porter soon after Richmond had fell. Though it was far outside
Glory Be
’s time frame, I’d always quite liked it. Suiting how I imagine him, rough red-headed Sherman is doing the talking.

“Yeah,” said LBJ softly. Newly close, newly redolent, newly Lyndonian with his shirttail out next to me. “I used to come in and look at this one a lot. Don’t so much anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. And believe me, I was.

“Well, they sure as hell aren’t going to hang one of me chewing the fat with McNamara, Rusk, and Westmoreland. We’ve got plenty of photographs. A painting like this would be tits on a bull even if—
fuck!
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Never mind.”

To have looked at him then would have invaded his privacy. Miming the scamp I so definitely wasn’t by then and never really had been, I took a few steps and peered through the next door. “Lincoln Bedroom?” I guessed once he’d had a few seconds.

“Yep,” came his voice from behind me, now more under control. “Of course, it warn’t ever his bedroom.”

Posted by: Pam

That’s going to stay my one exception to a rule I’ve been quietly following here on daisysdaughter.com. Because laughter at this man’s expense still revolts me—I can understand loathing, but
laughter?—
I’ve made no attempt to facsimilize Lyndon’s cottonmouth accent. But that word could only be spelled the way Huck did.

“It was really the Cabinet room,” he explained, recovered enough to come up alongside me. “He signed the Emancipation Proclamation on a desk right about where that pillow is now. Valenti had the numbskull idea I should sign the ’65 Voting Rights Act in here, but I said piss on that noise. Hell, all I could picture was me on the bed in a stovepipe hat and fake whiskers.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t keep the original furnishings.” Recall that in
Beverly Hills I’d put in some time as an amateur decorator.

“Hell,” Lyndon said. “Don’t you know this whole building is bullshit? All renovations. They gutted the place stem to stern back when old Harry Truman was inventing the cold war. The layout’s the same, but Abraham Lincoln never once put his hand to this wall.” His own was pressed to it.

“Mr. President, did you say inventing?”

“Come now, Mrs. Cadwaller. You never once heard that word pass your President’s lips. He had to scare hell out of the Congress to get done a few things that needed doing, was all. I’ve never asked him; we aren’t any too close. Harry doesn’t take kindly to
anyone
who sits at the desk where he used to, the more so when it’s a fellow Democrat. Anyhow, I guess he got away with it and I didn’t.”

“Got away with what, pray?”

“How in hell would I know or care what I mean, Pam? He’s Give-’em-Hell Harry and Jack is Saint Jack, but me? There’s a goddam
play
running Off Broadway
right now
about how I
murdered
Jack to make myself President, you know that? The woman who wrote it says she don’t really believe I did, but it would have been, quote, ‘the least of my crimes.’”

“I know,” I said.

“Did you see it?”

“I’d never,” I said, for some loyalties outlast the end of a love affair. Not that Lyndon knew the only real one we’d had dated to 1965, when I’d watched on TV as he quoted “We Shall Overcome” in a speech to Congress urging passage of the Civil Rights Act and made ’em like it. So help me, I’d thought of my old
Regent’s
colleague Jim Bond nattily quoting “Face of a Gauguin” back at me in 1943 and felt the mimsies go from half empty to half full. While Hopsie was no weeper, which is putting it mildly, he’d stuffed his pipe very slowly and said, “Pam, we don’t often talk this way. But my favorite ancestor commanded a colored regiment in the Civil War, and I’ve always been fairly pleased I was named for him.”

I digress, though. “Bless you,” Lyndon muttered.

Posted by: Pam

My guardian in Midwestern days—the future Brother Nicholas,
dans les grand blés sanglotants—
was fond of insisting that you can’t repeat the past. I agree that it’s stupid to try to on purpose, and I hope
daisysdaughter.com
proves I’m not prone to the fallacy. That’s why it drives me bughouse when the past has its own ideas on that score. We now come to the
second
time I heard Lyndon Johnson make water.

“I’ll just be a minute,” he said as we stepped into a startlingly futuristic bathroom. Actually only contemporary, but a shock after our progress through Jackieland’s facsimilized Lincolnisms. In a symptom of drunkenness or just Lyndonian prerogative, he was already fumbling with the front of his pants through his shirttails.

“You go on in the sitting room,” he added over his shoulder, nodding toward another chamber off to my right. “But leave the door open so I can talk.”

Note choice of pronoun. Note that Lyndon even deep in the bag, unlike his successor (oh,
Nixon
,
Panama! Honestly, bikini girl), was no believer in soliloquizing just to fixtures or paintings.

Stepping into the doorway as per instructions, I found myself transomed between contradictions. In the smallest room I’d yet seen, its only seating a couch underneath a tall window, I was once more in Jackieland, the work of an eighteenth-century temperament recreating the nineteenth midway through the twentieth. Yet the President’s voice came to me from white light and tiled glare.

“You’re in the old White House telegraph room,” he called over a stream of Johnsonian puissance. “Lincoln spent the whole war having to walk over to the damn War Department when he wanted news from the battlefields. Sure as shit not my problem, and sometimes I envy him. Never crossed anyone’s mind to put a telegraph
here
until ’65.”

“Eighteen- or nineteen?” I asked the doorway’s tiled glare. At which point it loomed large with Lyndon in disarrayed silhouette.

“Eighteen, Mrs. Cadwaller. As if you didn’t know.”

“I honestly didn’t,” I gasped. Then his arms curled around me.

A quarter century after the first time, here we bloody went again. But President Johnson didn’t know what he wanted as surely as Congressman Johnson had.

“Please, ma’am, I’m your President. Hold me,” he moaned brokenly. “Hold me, that’s all I ask. Please just come sit and hold me a spell.”

By then, we’d already launched a bear’s waltz—hopping, ungainly, and in my case blind—toward the couch under the window. As my wool-covered calves got backed into it, my eyes clawed for directions, fell on a side cabinet crowned by a few family photographs. But I got plastered to the settee by Johnsonian bulk before I’d more than glimpsed the most striking, boldly lit by the wedge of glare from the bathroom.