Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (17 page)

Anyhow, nobody gets away scot-free. My hunch is that Pink Thing and Gray Thing owe their birth in part to uncomfortable benches, incense, and droned but potent Latin ensnaring our bent heads in a lesser, undistinguished Chaillot church. Its crabbed walls nonetheless ascended to a ceiling whose soot had been there under, or rather over, the Sun King.

Even in ’44, dressed in fatigues and GI shoes, I didn’t risk sauntering back in. Kept expecting a long arm in a surplice to reach out with a cry of “Got you at last.”

Posted by: Ram-Pam-Pam

The vine-covered old house off the rue Plan de Trochu was only where we dormed. What Mme Chignonne’s taught best was urban topography. Mass wasn’t our only expedition.

Each form’s schedule took it to petrified classrooms in converted but still dusty ossuaries. They ranged from the rue Cognacq-Jay, where Pam would trudge past a church to be exited by Mrs. Cadwaller, with a peregrin, one day in 1958, to the Place Vendôme. One dwarfy double file of us often passed a more senior form’s taller troop of blue topped by jonquils on that
douzaine
’s bobbing return—only twelve to a year at Mme Chignonne’s—from the one we were headed to. No doubt our little parades through the Place de la Madeleine had charm in a watercolory, prewar sort of way.

Our teachers were all male if safely gelded by senescence and encased in the olfactory sarcophagus of the tobacco stench that seemed to have clung to their clothing since Gauloises was a term identifying living women. They materialize in Pink Thing’s archives as sheepdogs whose masters were briefcases. Last new trick learned, a wait-and-see attitude toward the Commune.

I still recall some of their names. Fougasse, natural sciences; Hebdomadère, mathematics. Michelin-Michelet, geography and history; Rodolphe Charbovari, French language and literature. Whispered data exchange from Fro to To on the rue Cognacq-Jay:
“Attention! Hebdo est saoûl. Faites gaffe à vos culs, les septième!”

Don’t picture individual desks, Panama. Long benches at inclined tables with shallow slots along the top to rest our pens in, next to the inkpots we began each class by extracting from our
cartables
and noisily banging into scarred inkwells. Once we sat down, we weren’t allowed to leave for
any
reason, ever. To have asked permission would’ve been to announce one was from Mars or worse. Two or three times a year, a face crowded and red as a crabapple quietly gasped, then turned eyeless and chasm-mouthed from shame as a pale puddle grew around her shoes.

Whoever she might be, her harshest punishment would be the instructor’s refusal to acknowledge anything had happened. She just had to sit there, making her frog twitch for Fougasse or whispering
“Je crois. Tu crois. Il croit. Nous croyons. Vous croyez. Ils croient”
for Charbovari. Meanwhile, the rest of us waited to see which continent the puddle would resemble in its final form.

The sense of
sanctioned
public degradation was so powerful that, in the ultimate girls’-school tribute, those episodes were never mocked or reported to the other forms, no matter how hated the stinking one might be. It’s a wonder we didn’t all become urinary erotomanes.

Did it ever happen to me? Oh, Panama, please!
Let’s not go into it. Wasn’t it bad enough that I was
l’Américaine
?
Anyhow, it usually looked more like Australia.

Our form’s left-handed girl, forced to write with her right, used to weep quietly every time her clumsy grip smeared her calligraphy’s wet ink. Bad marks for penmanship canceled out good ones for grammar or spelling. Our pens had wooden nibs whose paint had a meditative taste, a meal that turned unpleasant in a hurry when an unguarded chomp got a paint-flecked splinter wedged between two teeth. When their metal styluses got too scratchy, we’d consecrate the bishop, in Chignonne slang, by fitting a fresh one to the waiting circlet of tin at the nib’s plumper end. Not that non-Catholic Pam knew it her first year, but they did look like tiny metal miters.

Hearing the expression, Michelin-Michelet set us a composition on “Great French Churchmen.” Our choices were Richelieu, Mazarin, and Talleyrand. French citizenship would’ve been useless then without hostility to something, and ’Lin-’Let was anticlerical.

Politically, all that Pink Thing’s archives can add to newsreels of the late Twenties and early Thirties is that mine are in color. We were little girls and fairly pampered ones. When our mini-
défilés
got held up by massed coats and slogans, we accepted it as drivers do the sight of numbered strangers running a marathon.

Our
douzaines
of jonquil-hatted blue were certainly less trouble to our own supervisors, much less the authorities, than the gang at the boys’ school just a block from our vine-covered dorm. That’s where the rue Plan de Trochu became the rue Almereyda. Even Chignonne, who’d seen everything, was stunned into a violent
“Ah, non! Ah, non”
when she found a troop of us goggling through the dorm refectory’s tall windows at their latest rebellion. One of the upper-form boys was climbing the steeply angled roof to plant a black flag at its peak.

To Chignonne, it was no joke at all: that was the Anarchist banner. At least to her, it wasn’t so very long since they’d been chucking bombs at heads of state for real. She was in such a hurry to phone the police that she didn’t dismiss us first.

She could’ve spared herself the trouble, though. A couple of
flics
in kepis and capes came into view almost instantly. Scrambling up the slate in their hobnailed boots, they each grabbed an arm and slitheringly led him down again after chucking his flag and its improvised pole to the roof’s gutter.

As it teetered there, my friend Giselle Girondin squealed,
“Ooh, Pomme, regarde!”
Rising miraculously above the trees, a child’s balloon had gotten its string entangled with the flag, and we watched in suspense as it tugged. Which would win?

To our disappointment, they parted ways and were soon both out of sight. One rose skyward, the other tipped streetward. Daringly, Giselle mimicked our headmistress.

“Zéro de conduite pour le ballon rouge!”
she snapped, neck hoisted like a glare on stilts as she tapped one stiff palm against an open one. And got the same mark herself soon, since Chignonne had finished her phone call and was a black-clad guillotine with eyes right behind us.

If you’ve just coughed, my daisysdaughter.com readers if any, I believe I know why. My
friend
Giselle Girondin? Oh, yes. This was ’32 or ’33. The social calculus at any school is wanton cruelty mitigated by jadedness.

My translation into just another Chignonne’s fixture was far more inevitable than Pam could’ve guessed the afternoon she realized the closet really was
locked
, and next that I wasn’t yet certain of the French for “Help.” By my third year, I was no longer “the Americaness,” my favorite title as a Barnard freshman for my autobiography. However much my classmates’ tone mimicked wet percussion, I was
Pamme
,
Pamelle
, or even, to Giselle Girondin,
Pomme
.

For part of ’32 and all of ’33, I was also
Ram-Pam-Pam
. For that I can thank a far more famous, infinitely less shy Americaness, not that we ever saw her shows or were supposed to play her records. But the many gifts to Paris from Josephine Baker’s undulant hips and abundant smile included rechristening me. As in:

“Ram-Pam-Pam! What is it, all the fracas up there?”

“Oh and then. The littles of the Seventh saw a
flic
pursuing a thief in the Vendôme Place. They all pulled the tongue.”

“Hold! That’s truly efficient. Eh! But to the thief? Or to the
flic?
”

“Without doubt that depended of their politics. But what do you have? You have the air of a someoness one has slapped.”

“Oh then shit. The Wastebasket Alliance [Molly Flanders-Fields wasn’t
universally
popular] said to The Break-face [i.e.,
Le casse-gueule:
Chignonnese for Cassandre] that it was me who put herself to laughing at the moment that Great Mutilated One [not school slang:
grands mutilés
was the official term for disfigured war veterans] with the crutches slipped at the Invalids. It wasn’t me, it was the little Bemelmuh-muh-muh-
muh
[horrid simper].”

“I surmised that of myself. She becomes truly disgusting since the stupid appendicitis.”

“Ah, ah! But you know very well that the Madam [not having a nickname was the most frightening certificate of Chignonne’s authority] will not that believe of me! Even if I tell it her. Ah, no! No. Never in the world her little darling.”

“We would have well done to simply let Mister the Tiger eat her.”

“Agreed. But that’s not all. Regard me this, Apple! What horror.
I am commencing to push out some breasts!
You know very well the uncle of whom I’ve to you spoken. He makes always some dirty cunteries, it him amuses. My God! Easter! It will be a torment.”

“As is habitual, me, I remain here…But shut your shirt, finally, Gigi! I don’t want to look at your tangerines, finally!”

Posted by: Pam

Skip the occasional reek of nubile piss in winter wool, impatience with Giselle’s proudly displayed new
mandarines
(did you really think she’d been complaining?), or belatedly recognized literary rivalry. The proof of Pam’s integration—I’m still tickled I picked Talleyrand, that genius of adaptivity—is that I stopped yearning for my mother to rescue me and then even to come visit.

She and Georges would train down from Brussels two or three times per year. That was just often enough to give her ever cloudier Paris a meteorological correlative in every season except summer, though Day-
zee
’s eyes increasingly seemed to be at sea to me—lingering somewhere in mid-Atlantic, unlike Pam’s now propellerized blue-gray Lindbergh-Blériot twins. Still, the precious side of any
rencontre
we had in Europe was a reminder that here there were a few things only she and I knew. Not until I turned twelve did Ram-Pam-Pam start trying to tug her away from Mme Chignonne’s as quickly as I could.

So far as any practical reason for her to hang around went, that was no problem. French schools followed the sausage-making principle by treating education as no sensible parent’s business. To Cassandre and Chignonne, the meddling that goes on now would be as bizarre as a mother following her newly drafted son to boot camp.

Unaware that here I was
Pomme
and Ram-Pam-Pam, my mother would look uncertainly around two facing rows of metal beds. An intruder, she at least understood her opinion was moot.

Amateur archeologist of Daisy Fay that I am—is that a search known to all daughters, or only those with mothers as lovely as mine’d been called by fifty uniformed beaux in the balmy days before her first engagement?—I should probably’ve been mesmerized by how her puffy face brought out tricks of vivacity she hadn’t had to summon up since Louisville. Showing lively interest without having opinions of anything had been the lure for swarms of khaki with officer’s buttons. Instead, I twitched through those vague inspections. Ram-Pam-Pam dreaded what would happen if any of my schoolmates wandered in.

Nor was I much better when I got her past those vine-covered walls and out to the gate where Georges Flagon waited. My mother’s idea of a celebratory treat was always a meal in a well-known restaurant. I’d try to get her out instead to the relative safety of the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, or—best of all—her and Georges’s hotel room. Anywhere the odds of her making a fool of herself were reduced.

It wasn’t that she behaved badly, Panama. As the years went on, her helpless presence in my life seemed to have less and less to do with any kind of behavior at all. Nor was I upset by the onetime sylph’s Brussels-induced expansion into ever more capacious, less contoured coats, along with the low heels her porcine calves and swollen ankles now pleaded for. My mother had so much beauty to drown that for a long time gaining weight just seemed like her Belgian hobby, even if by the end—her hair dyed brown too—she did look like a stricken match girl peering out of a too large, fleshy Daisy mask.

Among other things, it was pleasant to reflect that now the Lotus Eater wouldn’t recognize her. Besides, if forty kilos of flab paid the ransom for no trip back to Switzerland, it was worth every quiche. But I was mortified to stupefaction by—and on at least one occasion I don’t think I’ll share on daisysdaughter.com, actively cruel about—my mother’s faltering, inept, gauche French.

Posted by:
Pam

Switzerland was a spurious country, invented solely to give my mother’s face placid backdrops. It was an enormous broken wine bottle, the upper shards streaked with snow. Their only job was to supply an open-air arena for the air you whooped down in big gulps. You were glad if somewhat terrified to be guzzling the pure elixir after nothing but shoddy imitations.

Pleased to be quasi-airborne once our toy train from Geneva had clambered up to the sanatorium, Georges even made an exceedingly rare joke, and about a generally taboo subject at that. As we climbed to the gate, he grunted that he found it agreeable to be someplace where
both
his ankles creaked. Yet with the as yet unnamed Pink Thing and Gray Thing’s memories of his surviving foot’s shell-blasted twin still so new and jarringly unique, as the fond ex-owner’s weren’t, I was too stunned to answer. No doubt my muteness inadvertently advised that pained man to give it another decade or two before his next try at humanizing himself with a wisecrack.

We stayed there just three crisply soaring, sharded white-on-blue days, waiting for my mother’s final discharge. It seemed very Swiss to get us here first and judge her cured second; maybe they make good psychiatrists because the banking impulse runs deep. Pam was warned not to engage with any other patients, only some of whom were, like my mother, there for addiction. Plenty were lungers, as we used to call them when TB was still common enough to rate its own slang.

The problem was that others were mental cases. Nothing distinguished one pair of pajamas from another in the way that, say, Disneyland keeps Fantasyland and Tomorrowland’s workers recognizably garbed. Surprised, Panama? Don’t be: Gerson and I were guests at Anaheim on opening day. But as you may well have learned in Disneyland itself, an eight-year-old’s control over what or whom she deals with is limited.

I was frightened when a woman with chopped hair, her mouth like San Simeon’s letter slot after an earthquake, taloned my wrist in a braceleting grip. Her strange hawk’s eyes roving, she insisted I was her Scottie—and after what I’d been through vis-à-vis SooSoo in the Summer of the Lotus Eater, being confused with someone’s dog
again
was no joy. Her warder was all rushed politeness: “
Madame, madame!
Please, you know you don’t belong here. What would your husband say to all this?”

Another woman was so pretty—San Simeon’s letter slot
before
the earthquake, more or less—that I wondered what past, or whose, she could be expiating. She looked as if she belonged on the Riviera, not here. It turned out she was married to the one American doctor on staff, a weak charmer whose cheek was warmer than a medical man’s probably should’ve been.