Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (28 page)

Early on, I was constantly treating people I’d only known in two dimensions as if they were people I’d known in three. They were clearly too used to it to gainsay me, even though for better or worse none of them took the advantage of that confusion that Bran unmistakably did. Since I was older and less susceptible by then, I’d have also been a hell of lot more likely to say “Hey, hang on a minute.” There is a Washington version of the phenomenon, but during most Administrations the magnetic aura around a famous face seen in 3-D is more likely to be repellent than beguiling.

Posted by: Pam

Reasoning with cigaretted help that I’d
sort
of known Murphy before Sunday night was about as far as Monday-morning Pam had gotten when the man himself came bounding in, bathed and fully dressed. Apparently, a fresh shirt and slacks made the dressing-gown issue moot. It hadn’t been possessiveness per se, just Bran’s easily nettled sense of his own most appropriate costume.

“Hello, Snooks.” Turning my head to chuck me under the chin, he grinned his
Time-
cover grin. Then he turned fatherly, not that I’d know from experience: “Listen, kid. If we’re going to be an item, one thing you should know. What happened last night is never to be repeated, understand?”

“You mean you didn’t want me to do it?”

“I didn’t exactly say that. But it can’t ever be spoken of.” A Murphine finger wigwagged from his chest to mine. “Not even between you and I.”

“Me,” I said automatically. “But between you and me, we
seem to be talking about it now.”

He frowned. “I won’t need help every time,” he said, which turned out to be true. Even so, the single exception that proved him right isn’t my fondest memory. “And I know it’s got nothing to do with who Brannigan Murphy is. This headshrinker I’ve been seeing—”

“Wait. You go to a psychiatrist?” Call the Forties unenlightened, Panama. Picturing a man like Murphy on the couch was tantamount to learning that the Himalayas were made of construction paper and pie topping.

He looked derisive. “Of course! For research. He doesn’t know I’m analyzing
him
.
I’m out to paint the big picture of my times, Snooks. Like Pushkin or Gogol. I’ve got a play sketched that’s going to knock the stuffing out of that quack, bourgeois profession, and he’s one stupid bastard. I’m using an alias, and he doesn’t even recognize me.”

“I think you mean Balzac or Zola, Bran,” I said. (Wifely of me, don’t you think? I spared him repeating it in print.) “Tell me, how long have you been doing this, research?”

“Two years, give or take a month or two. I’m about ready to wrap it up. I told you, kid, he’s a stupid bastard. That’s just why he’s perfect for me. Anyhow, he thinks my nursemaid back in Pittsburgh—”

“Wait. You had a nursemaid?” In every interview, Murphy claimed he’d gone to sea to escape the bitter poverty of his upbringing. Not until long after his death did his lone biographer check the enrollment records for Andover’s Class of 1917.

“Really just a good Irish woman from the neighborhood. My parents were kidding themselves, Snooks. Poor bastards, with their delusional middle-class pretensions! Anyhow, it was before the Crash.”

“Well, of
course
it was before the Crash, Bran,” I said. “You were
thirty years old
when the market crashed. And living here. My God, is Mrs. Gillooley about?”

You’d be wrong to think his courtship of me that July was fueled by anxiety that Pam had the goods on him. The right word would be excitement, and for all I know that’s how it worked with the other wives too. While I’m not by any means complaining, he never showed the faintest interest in getting the goods on me. After I’d turned thumbs down on Cape Cod, unmoved by my new husband’s muscular memories of working on
Lo! The S
hips, the S
hips
there during what I thought of as the Summer of the Lotus Eater, we honeymooned instead on Maine’s coast in August, Murphy often remarking that the landscape reminded him of his seagoing days.

2. A Husband with Three Heads

Posted by: Pam

Why don’t they call us, Cadwaller’s gun? It’s not as if they’re so bloody busy taking care of the planet’s prospects. I was no good at science in my abbreviated schooldays, but I can read a thermometer.

If the summer that’s coming is the furnace the last one was, the instructions I’ve just printed out for disposing of Pam could end up making me the envy of the sweltering folk left behind. Compared to the bog they’ll be reeling around in, my trip into the incinerator at Gawler’s could sound as refreshing as Dottie Idell’s old Bank Street tradition—dear God, sixty-five years ago!—of opening the icebox door to let its frost breathe on our skins: “We’ve
earned
it,” she’d say. “Oh, just a couple of minutes. Then August can do what it wants.”

At least you’ve got the body for it, Panama. When the Lycra clutching your newly theatrical globes and molding your oyster become fit attire for a New York December, you’ll have less reason than your portly dad to shudder at doing your Christmas shopping in the near nude. How I pity those soggy Macy’s Santas.

Of course, in July’s 140-degree broil, even that much clothing will have to come off, bikini girl! Let poor harried Tim go crosseyed, I want you to be comfortable. Pity you won’t be visiting Provincetown anymore unless you’ve got scuba gear. Maybe the very tip of the Pilgrim Monument will still be above water, qualifying as landfall now only to Chekhovian seagulls.

Shan’t see it, but Potus might. I picture him spending his declining years in a Texas the size and shape of Delaware. Glancing down, he spots a moldy piece of ancient string knotted around one formerly Potusian finger: “Oh, darn,” he mutters sheepishly.

Unlike him, I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything important. Checks to the cleaning lady and Gawler’s; one last sentimental check each to Alley Cat Allies and the good old ACLU. Disposition of the African Adam and Eve, Ganesh, the signed La Coupole menu and the copper maquette you Cadwallers named The African Queen. People can take from the Paris footlocker what they like except for my mother’s chaotic pages of
The Gold-Hatted Lover
, which Andy’s been told to burn. I don’t want dead Daisy met that way by people who never knew her.

Tucking checks and to-do list into an envelope marked “Andy” felt puzzlingly familiar until I realized how closely my chore mimicked the detailed instructions for Kelquen’s care I used to leave for him when I traveled. A few years in, he gently swore he knew the drill.

One other thing I’ve done since my last daisysdaughter.com post struck even me as eccentric. Though I haven’t autographed a book in decades, I clumped over to the trophy bookcase and took down my copies of
Nothing Like a Dame
,
Glory Be
, and
Lucky for the Sun
.
Turning to the title page, not flyleaf—author’s prerogative, you know—I signed all three. Dedication: “To whom it may concern.”

Posted by: Pam Slivovitz

You never can tell. Murphy, whose pearly-white choppers once dentifriced
Time
’s cover, was a forgotten man writing ballooned dialogue for
Seamus Shield, Agent of Fury
when he died in Moscow, Idaho—ah, the Murphy touch—in 1964. His
Collected Plays
(Hofstra, 1981) could probably’ve been printed upside down without anyone discovering the mistake. The lone biography—
Dat Dead Man Dere
, by a nice but not too talented Canadian named Garth Vader—didn’t even get Garth tenure at the University of Saskatchewan.

Sadder still, as Bran’s theatrical reputation winks out,
Seamus Shield
has been rediscovered by the sort of overgrown lads whose Adam’s apples seem to tug their faces along behind them like skittish kites. I gather it’s mostly for the artwork, but even Pam gets an occasional e-inquiry. I always write back explaining that the hero’s prosthetic steel arm and curvaceous, loyal assistant, Nadya—who doesn’t become Mrs. Shield until a convenient villain has torn her tongue out, arousing Seamus’s pity—long postdate my trip through the marital tollbooth.

Yet for a couple of unwitting million TV viewers who dote on his vital essence, Brannigan Murphy lives. When Andy Pond calls or stops by in the evenings, he’s usually horrified by which cable-news channel the mimsies are glued to, but what can I do, Panama? Am I supposed to
ignore
a television network apparently designed for no other purpose than to remind me of my first husband?

The saying that leopards can’t change their spots will no doubt outlive the last four-footed example, giving the species a conversational hold on life for a couple more brow-mopping decades before the proverb fades like the Cheshire Cat’s grin. Watching the spots switch leopards is one of the grimmer fascinations of my old age. Needless to say, what Pink Thing snickeringly calls the Murphy Channel has no idea it’s channeling Murphy.

His politics would have been anathema to them, which just proves that attitude is the ultimate ideology. If you care to see a facsimile of my Bran’s public manner, look no further than the sack of vanilla vomit manqué I’ve rebaptized Murph Vanity, the nominal co-host of an obnoxious hour Tim Cadwaller calls
The Th
ug and the B
ug
.
Despite an only fleeting physical resemblance, since the original Bran was burlier and didn’t simper, Murph Vanity has the moxie down pat. The ability to swagger while sitting down is not a gift given most men.

The Bran I knew domestically, however, shows up an hour earlier, in the mightily towering form of Brannigan Gillooley. In this case, I’m relieved to say—I did have to bed the original—there’s no physical resemblance whatsoever. But oh, the truculence, combined with an injured certainty he’s more harassed than harassing, more badgered than badgering! The conviction that any hypocrisies we detect in his dust are irrelevant gnats to the deeper truths of his self-dramatization’s caravan; the futile wait for him to express sympathy or concern for any creature other than himself except adversarially. The show known to Pink Thing as
The Gillooley Factor
can take me back to Sutton Place, circa 1941–42, on Clio Airways faster than dreams.

Dour, implacable, bridling at his rivals, Murphy the playwright is represented by Bran Hume, as I once inadvertently called him
aloud
to Andy Pond when we spotted him seething at a steak in Martin’s. That he is the channel’s official anchor, but overshadowed in practice by his colleagues, fits Pink Thing’s memories of the original Bran as dramatist, social creature, and spouse to a T.

Bran Hume’s compassionate side only comes out when he fawns over his favorite interviewee: that underdog Chad Diebold, in all Chad’s many guises. His sense of appropriate cues for moral indignation can’t help reminding me of the real Murphy’s ability to lash out at the Girl Scouts as a nest of defeatists—selling us cookies on Sutton Place, one sweet little lass had innocently wished us peace, not victory, in ’42—while brushing aside the USSR’s collectivization famines as either Fascist lies or the fabled omelet’s recipe.

Since Pam’s never explained her private shock of wifely recognition, no wonder Andy’s baffled I spend so many nights watching the Murphy Channel. But I’m too pretzelly for sex, my cat is dead, my latest Hardy Boys doctor has limited me to two glasses of wine a day and there hasn’t been a new Kirsten Dunst movie since last October. My Bran’s unwitting epigones are the closest I’ll ever come to attending a séance.

Forty years dead, there my three-headed hubby is, inverted from Stalinist hack to jingo. Not that I’m implying his triple resurrection shares the original’s anti-Semitism, any more than I’d care to speculate they share his craving for a womanly knuckle up the giggie. Still, I’ve never forgotten something Gerson said once: “Someone’s always got to be the Jew.”

1952? 1952. In his Packard, not my newly acquired Olds, we’re driving into literal, not figurative, Hollywood. The Oscar ceremony’s at the Pantages this year and we’re meeting the DeWitts at the Frolic Room for a drink first. “Not to me, I hope,” I say.

“No. To someone with that mentality.” Gerson never much liked using Murphy’s name. “I don’t think it’s selfish to wish it wasn’t literally us so often. But once you can’t think without enemies, someone always has to be.”

Day in and day out, the Murphy Channel’s hunt for new Jews carries on. At different times, liberals, Muslims, illegal immigrants, atheists, and child molesters, among others—spot the genuine bad apple planted to spoil the barrel there—have all fit the bill. Not that I’ll be around to see it, bikini girl, but my sensational 1943 divorce from Murphy will get an odd reprise tomorrow. Once I’ve carried out my protest against this awful and unending war, I’m sure to spend all day as the Murphy Channel’s newest Jew.

Funny, too, since I always did enjoy playing the shiksa around real ones. If I have time when the White House calls, I just may switch on the TV to turn Murphy’s three-headed reincarnation into my witness. That’ll be Pam’s way of saying, “There! See the mess of pink and gray things on the rug, youse guys? Do you?”

Posted by: Pam

When we got cocktail-party chances to compare notes after our various escapes, it was agreed by all the later wives but Five (the widow, remember—she had something to protect) that we’d have been happier being one of the girlfriends. Didn’t really know how we’d ended up as the Mrs. Murphys instead, watching the cooze scoot by. “Moral of the story is,” said Four, always my favorite—touchingly, since he’d been on the skids by then, she had less worldly polish than Ruby or me, but was infinitely nicer—“there are some guys no woman with half a brain should go near
unless
he’s married.”

However, we were necessary, since Bran’s compulsion wasn’t sex as such but infidelity. The two-year gap between his breakup with Ruby and his wedding to me was the longest in his marital dossier, and everyone knew the explanation. Murphy had tried to go society, conducting an affair with an East Side dish blissfully named Elsie Dodge Plough. Closer to him in age than any of the wives, she was also rich in a way that made Bran’s Broadway loot look like the sawbuck sewn into a steerage passenger’s coat. That left her profoundly amused by his idea that she should divorce the Plough millions and hitch her costly wagon to his red star.

It must’ve bamboozled Murphy that a woman could get involved with him from priorities of her own: entertainment, mostly. When Pam met her long afterward, Fabergé-bosomed and Cartier-haired Elsie could’ve turned the Lotus Eater into a supplicant and poor Hormel into a puddle even at sixty. She made me laugh instead by repeating the line that had finally shut Murphy up about marriage: “Oh, Bran, why bother? Then I’d have to
do
something about you.”