Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (3 page)

A true bill it was too, from
Marseillaise-
humming, gustatorially concupiscent Joe Liebling on down. I was three years out of Barnard and I couldn’t bring myself to buck my prejudices. Bugs, diseases, larvae, ordure, MacArthur: no cocktail shakers nearer than Sydney. Hell, I’d’ve
swum
to France.

Incidentally, my objection to Liebling, and I know having any puts me on the outs with settled taste, is that he
wrote
like a fat man. Nothing so disastrous to humanity that he couldn’t adjudicate it as a meal. Gerson, my second husband, loathed him. But no matter.

I was about to launch into a splendid discussion of my cowardice. Look! There’s the
WashPost
’s Metro section at my feet, done with its dotty brief imitation of a Chekhovian seagull. Considering I’ve just explained my intention to fire a gun whose bang will surely shock the shit, indeed we did and do talk that
way, out of Potus—not that he’ll otherwise be its target or in harm’s way, since he’s a couple of miles from here and I’m visibly alone in this room, without even a cat—you may be forgiven for wondering just what I’m hoping to
avoid
thereby.

In the glow of my plan’s dawn thrill before I logged on, my answer would’ve been a heroic “Nothing!” Even though Pam’s one appearance onstage, subbing for ailing Viper Leigh in
A Clock
with T
wisted Hands
on its opening night in 1941, got me clouted with the accurate verdict “no-talent” by the playwright (Murphy), I do have an actress in me, as Cadwaller may have known best of all. The truth is that self-devised heroics, or vainglory in a drool cup if my charm as a telephonic terrorist is utterly lost on you, are never exempt from the bubble-bubble-stew of multiple agendas.

Even as I fetched Cadwaller’s gun and hummed Pam’s aardvarky “La, la, la—la, la,” I decided to suspect my own buried motive. I knew Andy Pond would and fat chance I’ll ever let him be smarter than I am. Nicer, not smarter, is the trophy I’ve never competed for against Cadwaller’s onetime Paris deputy. One proof Andy’s got a monopoly on nicer is that he never complains when I hurt his feelings.

Hurt his feelings, though, this will. I don’t know what kind of coverage my protest will get: my protest on behalf of bankrupt, never existed, but fondly remembered Clio Airways against this Administration’s splatter of diarrhea over everything we stood for—flawed, lumbering, but gallant—in the way-back-when. But even if my act is ridiculed, Andy knows me.

He’ll understand that to his old friend Pam, her idiosyncratic pistol shot had dignity. Unfortunately, as a trained analyst of mingled public and private motives—Hopsie always said Andy got it better than most—he’ll also intuit the corollary. To wit, that I must’ve decided that remarrying at my age—and in my shape, since now I look and usually feel like a pretzel someone gave up on midway through unbraiding—did not.

Andy, if you pass up the vaudeville cue to murmur “Pam, a simple ‘No’ would have done fine,” you’ll disappoint me.

Posted by: Pam

Even under duress, I’d never have blurted out my reaction when Andy’s hope of a December-January matchup first dangled its withered mistletoe. To wit, that it’d feel like marrying my favorite endtable, bought by the new Mrs. Cadwaller in Paris in ’58 and presently doing marble-topped mail-catching duty in my apartment’s foyer. I didn’t even think it was an insult: when you’ve moved house as often as I have, you’re fond of seeing the good old furniture turn up on the next continent. I can still see how he might not be delighted by the comparison.

Not that he’d take offense or anyway show it, since he’s a gentleman. He was awfully good during Cadwaller’s long dying. Then he made every practical decision—except for the site, my one fetish
—
about Hopsie’s burial in the diplomatic section of Rock Creek Cemetery.

In the District, where pigeons have their pick of gesturing admirals (“What the hell is that, Gridley? Land? Explain yourself, sir”), mounted generals (“I’ve put in two quarters, and this thing
still
isn’t moving”), and inquiring Founders (“This place is strange to me, Miss. Could you direct me to the Executive Mansion?”), that patch of moss near the Madeleine Lee memorial is the only monument to the “striped-pants boys,” as the way-back-when’s yahoos called them. There Cadwaller’s ashes have rested compactly since 1986, and only many years later did Andy start to press his quiet suit.

Eventually, he got into it, put the ironing board away, chose a tie, and came over here. Sorry, but Andy does bring out my Perelman side. In truth, it may’ve been a decade since I’ve seen him in a tie. After his last posting in East Berlin, he adopted retirement’s male uniform of old sports jacket, gray slacks, open-collared white shirts under V-necked red sweater—when the
sweater
is the splash of color, a man has calmly accepted aging—and ancient but lovingly tended loafers. In some leafy and unevenly sidewalked residential neighborhoods of the District, that outfit says
retired Foreign Service officer
the way antic frogging under coronation headgear would lead you to expect a chorus of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

My junior by two birthdays, Andy has the fine head of a minor jurisprudential figure in a Siena mural, teeth from nature’s catalogue rather than the
Popular Mechanics
manual my teenaged dentist uses—“And which Hardy Boy might
you
be?” I asked unkindly when he first examined my X-rays, and of course he’d never heard of them—and elegant long fingers he’s fond of flexing and steepling. When a man’s last surviving pride is his cuticles, he’s no longer thinking of the world’s approval but his coffin’s.

Andy’s also a lifelong bachelor, and as he’s awfully easy on the eyes, that used to raise knowing eyebrows in our crowd. Then those brows’ owners would learn better, in my case from Cadwaller. “He’s had a girl at every post I’ve known about,” my final husband set me—and you might say Andy—straight soon after I’d met his Paris No. 2. “He just likes women who won’t complicate the rest of his life.”

“And nothing ever comes of it?”

“I gather what I’ve just said didn’t cover that for you,” said Hopsie. “The Foreign Service is full of bores who’ve mistaken themselves for enigmas. Andy’s the reverse.”

True, since something about him so pleasantly forbids inquiry that half a century later I still don’t know what Andrew C. Pond’s middle initial stands for. He’s a “Yes, and” conversationalist: “Yes, and then Rummy called it old Europe,” he’ll say to my latest Pamamiad over lunch with Nan Finn in Georgetown at Martin’s or La Chaumière. “Yes, and did you see what Peggy Kristhammer wrote yesterday?” he’ll chirp as he drives Pam to the Kennedy Center for another stinko production of lousy
La Traviata
.

Of course his “Yes, ands” always jump-start me. “Considering the intelligence of the average NRA member, I think they’re doing the world a
favor
by leaving lots of loaded guns around for their children, don’t you?” I’ll say, craning my neck a bit awkwardly as he loads my despised wheelchair—“Just in case”—into his car’s back seat before we set out on the long drive to another geezers’ waltz past Bethesda Naval Hospital toward Maryland or past Arlington Cemetery into Virginia. And Andy will close the rear door and then mine, open the one on the driver’s side, get in, smile, and say, “Yes, and don’t forget little Mack McCork saying reconstruction will pay for itself. Rakh, rakh, rakh.”

He’s never outright proposed. At our age, getting down on one knee has its perils. Forcing Cadwaller’s old ring past my rheumatic knuckle to slip on a new one would require passing up the minister so we can hire a surgeon. In recent months, though, the oblique equivalent—“Did I really just nearly sideswipe that messenger? Pam, I’m definitely not the driver I used to be. Wouldn’t it be much easier if we were under the same roof?,” etc.—has cropped up more and more often.

I do loathe this wheelchair, or perhaps I mean that I loathe being seen getting trundled along in it in public when Andy insists on sparing my shaky pins. If I’m sitting in it now as I rattle away on my Mac, that isn’t because Pam’s too dilapidated to manage the distances inside this apartment from the table beside my living room window to the bathroom, the bookcases ranged along the interior wall next to the foyer, the bathroom behind my right shoulder, or the Paris footlocker in the catless and sexless bedroom behind my left. I’m sitting in it because sitting in it means I don’t have to look at it.

Posted by: Pam

One reason I know Andy has marriage and not shacking up in mind is that he was so close to Cadwaller. While marrying Hopsie’s widow would earn him nothing but congratulations from Hopsie’s ghost, shacking up would put Andy at perennial risk of watching my third husband tug his ear and mutter something mild but devastating about seemliness. We’ve also been friends since Dick Nixon was in Vice-Presidential short pants, and after half a century with chumhood as our Pondian bond, we both know we’d need to formalize the transition.

No less familiar with the actuarial tables than I, Andy must realize I’d spend precious few years as Mrs. Pond. Yet no doubt he figures I’d spend that or fewer as what I am now, and it’s true we get along. He has the quiet humor of acceptance; I have the brash humor of assertion. His hints never wander into our bedroom arrangements, and I’ve got no idea whether he can or still wants to, as they say, perform.

If he’s merrily stocking up on Viagra, would even I have the right to disappoint him? So far as flying solo goes, you could call me Amelia, but Pam’s last session with a partner occurred the night of Clinton’s first State of the Union and was even less memorable. The C Street
grognard
in question had been Cadwaller’s inept replacement heading up the Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and bluff Homer MacWhite turned out to be worse at imitating Hopsie in the sack. Thirteen years later, the thought of Andy’s and my wattled flesh attempting to commingle makes my pretzel-shaped half of it creep.

Better the pistol. My rendezvous isn’t in Tenleytown but by phone past the end of Connecticut. Past proud Dupont Circle—nobody’s ever been sure what it’s proud of, but imprecision that stout-hearted has its Washingtonian pleasures—and the Mayflower Hotel. Past Farragut Square (“Damn it, Gridley! Have you gone deaf?”) and the Army-Navy Club’s amber heap.

Past Lafayette Square, where forty years ago we watched scattered out-of-town picketers swell over the seasons into crowds calling, “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” The man they were taunting so hated that chant he could never bear to repeat it in full, and I should know: these mimsy borogoves once watched him try and fail in Shakespearean closeup. While I don’t mean to bore you by sounding like a cranky,
neiges d’antan
sort of old lady, back then the White House switchboard had a lot more hop-to-it-iveness about getting Mrs. Cadwaller on the line.

Oh, yes, Potus: as Huck Finn would say, I been here before. And I wish your fucking switchboard would hop to it. What they don’t seem to understand (and listen to me treating understanding as an operative value in Potusville; what a Yankee Doodley true believer I must be even today) is that forming and then hanging onto this resolve wasn’t all that easy. I mean, glamor of the thing or no glamor of the thing. Yet all Bob’s secretary could tell me was that the call would come sometime between now and sundown, whenever a window of opportunity beckoned in Potus’s seething schedule.

And it’s hard work. We have that apparently not self-evident truth from his own mouth, whose itchy lips, take it from the convive of plenty of hard drinkers, haven’t stopped wondering what became of all that lovely bourbon. A nicer old bag than Pam would be flat on her withered ass with gratitude that he’s promised to find time today to congratulate her on living long enough to see these atrocious sights.

Granted, my own side of the aisle is no Tennyson poem. Maybe our man last go-round looked good on paper, but that stuff’s foldable and he was pretty much origami by Halloween. At least a few of us geezers saw the writing on the wall at Nan Finn’s Christmas party the winter before.

Ever “the glorious girl” in Pam’s shesaurus, Nan’s someone I’ve known since her husband Ned was Cadwaller’s DCM in Nagon. Half the decrepit Foreign Service retirees in the District shuffle up her Woodley Park front steps to attend Nan’s annual “Deck the Halls with Frank Sinatra” Yuletide wingding, as her son once called it. Hard to believe the strange lad I used to hear yelping “Geronimo” as he repetitiously reparachuted off a chair or a log in West Africa is now a fifty-year-old graphic artist whose bizarre comic books about what he calls the superpower diaspora have, from my limited sampling, a streak of obscenity.

His mother does her best to keep the median age south of eighty by including a few other relative youngsters besides her son. We generally congregate around them like moths around a crayon we’ve mistaken for a candle, including that year’s charmer: a Snapple-cheeked, BlackBerry-checking female lobbyist who’d met our limberly deboned white knight and gotten an invite to sign on with his Presidential campaign. When her work and prospects got apologetically divulged—after all, she knew we had neither—someone asked how she’d sized him up at her job interview.

She gave a wrinkle-free frown, that miracle of under-forty skin. “He’s less telegenic in person,” said she, sounding troubled.

So were we. Luckily, our faces are trained as well as wizened, so we managed to nod without looking noticeably more grotesque than we do anyway. Once she’d traded in our Dubuffet of duffers for our hostess’s hors d’oeuvres, I put up my hand as if leading a tottering school group from Archives to Holocaust.

“Hell, I’m
done,” I drawled. “Anyone else need a ride to the glue factory?” Frail as a fork but sharp as its tines, Laurel Warren gave a two-fingered salute.

Forgive me, Andy. I don’t really believe Potus will even be nonplussed by Pam’s protest. Why should he be? I’m eighty-six and eminently 86’able. What’s left of our dapper, boozy, questing, and imperfect generation is just marking time in the Clio Airways lounge as we wait to hear our separate boarding calls for Carole Lombard’s plane. He’s probably never heard of that lovely lost star either, but some parting gesture has to be made.

Posted by: Pam

When you’re waiting for a phone call of the unnatural nature I’m waiting for and plan to end it the unnatural way I’m hoping to, said phone’s actual ring is no ordinary event. Baggy heart lurching into bridgework, feet moaning “Haven’t we suffered enough?” from outdated habit as they smacked the rug, I seized Cadwaller’s gun: “
Yes!
Hello. This is Pamela Cadwaller.”

“Believe me, I know,” a tickled voice said. “Pam, are you expecting another call?”

Gun lowered, heart leakily loping back to business at the old stand. Feet in mild pain, rug’s feelings unknown and frankly unconsidered, I tamed my fat lunettes: “Oh, Andy. It’s you.”

“I know that too.” He’s always peppier than I at this hour. “But if you’re expecting another call, I can—”

“No, no! Just snoozing over the paper. Honestly, does anyone think David Broder’s funny?
He’s the worst humor columnist I’ve ever read. Andy! How are you?”

“Oh, fine. More important, how are you? I realize we’re seeing each other tonight, but I thought I’d check on the old birthday girl.”

“Mf,” I sniffed skeptically. At my age, you come to appreciate how written Hebrew has no vowels. “You didn’t have anything better to do either, huh?”