Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (48 page)

Hello, Pamique! What’s cooking? It was a lovely oyster stew, too. Adieu, lover, adieu.

P.S. Toto says woof!

Posted by: Maisie

I really liked what you wrote about that summer in Provincetown! I’ve never been there, but now I feel like I have been.

Posted by: Scout from Milledgeville

I think you have a very firm sense of Right and Wrong. My question is, Where did it come from? Mine came from my Father. This doesn’t seem to be your situation.

Posted by:
Madeline

Ram-Pam-Pam, so you and
pauvre petite
Gigi didn’t like me? Boo hoo. Having my appendix out wasn’t my idea. Saying
“je t’emmerde”
to you is.

Posted by: DOOM

Dear Mrs. Cadwaller,
I run an online support group for daughters of oblivious mothers. Would you care to join? Please let me know. Topsy Diver, Laura Wingfield, and Caddy Compson are already on board.

Best wishes,

Pearl Prynne Dimmesdale, founder of DOOM

Posted by: Bonnie Blue Butler

Sorry, I can’t link to DOOM. Can anyone out there help me?

Posted by: Eve in Topanga

Pam, don’t you know the kids love
The Gal
nowadays? You should come to my next filmcon—last time I signed autographs for two hours. Or maybe you shouldn’t, since you know what I’m like. It’s always been all about me.

Posted by: Sabra in Passaic

Thank you so much for writing about my late husband. Nachum and myself as well greatly enjoyed our times with you on your and Ambassador Cadwaller’s visits to Jerusalem. And yes, I’m afraid what’s happened to Israel today is depressing.

Best always,

Sascha ben Zion (had you forgotten my name? I didn’t forget yours.)

Posted by: A Psychiatrist

Dear Mrs. Cadwaller, I believe you would benefit from a consultation and I am a professional. My rates are quite low.

Yours,

Lucy Schroeder, Las Vegas

Posted by: Diva in Brussels

Ah! Je ris de me voir si belle en ce miroir.

Meilleurs souhaits,

Bianca Castafiore-Hergé, rue Rémi

Posted by: Une Dame Parisienne

Je n’avais que sept ans le 25 août 1944, mais je me souviens très bien de vous agitant votre “cunt cap” pour amuser une petite fille ahurie qui vous regardait d’un balcon alors que vous rouliez vers la place Saint-Sulpice dans votre “jeep” avec M. Whitling. Je n’aurais pas su comment vous répondre mais je serais enchantée d’enfin faire votre connaissance. J’habite toujours le même immeuble.

Fifi Rol-Tanguy

Posted by: Prof in Birmingham, AL

Pam, I can’t believe I’m inheriting “The African Queen”! But I don’t want to for years and years yet. Many happy returns,

Professor Helen F. Eichler, University of Alabama

Posted by: The Mermaids

Hi, Pam! And we were singing to you. So there.

Love, love, love

Claire and Emily (a “Kirsten” to you)

Posted by: Ernest Warning, Esq.

Ms. Buchanan, please cease and desist or we’ll be forced to take action. You may be an old lady without even a cat, but a stalker’s a stalker and we can’t be too careful these days.

Yours,

Ernest Warning (attorney for Ms. Kirsten Dunst)

Posted by: Crazy/Beautiful

Oh, come off it, Mac. I’m charmed. And Pam, I really am awfully good in
Interview with the Vampire
. Tom and Brad, not so much, but go figure. I knew what I was doing and they didn’t.

Posted by: C

Pam, you honestly didn’t know it was me at the beach house that day in 1951? Oh, well.
Honi soit qui Malibu
, as Dad used to say. If you aren’t going to shoot yourself, why don’t you come visit Edinburgh? J.K. Rowling lives nearby.

Your warm admirer,

Celia Brady (White, Singh, O’Grady)

Posted by: FSF

lol

Posted by: Dolly from Gray Star

i am alive i did not die i am a grandmother today in gray star alaska

lolita

Dolores Haze Schiller

Posted by: A Friend of Andy Pond’s

I’d just gotten through mumbling “Well, hello, Dolly” when I heard a key in my door at the Rochambeau and clicked my Mac’s screen off. “Pam, what on earth does this mean?” Andy called, half amused but half worried.

As he stepped into my living room past the African Adam and Eve, he was holding Kelquen’s collar and a sheet of paper warning him in 72-point boldface type:
andy—don’t come in. call the police
. (Had you forgotten? So had
l’équipe
.
That was well before noon on Pam’s longest day.)

“Oh, Andy! I’m so sorry to scare you. But my hair was just a wreck,
and—oh, I don’t know what I was thinking. Give it here.”

He did and I crumpled the message. Laid Kelquen’s collar next to my Mac before closing it down. With an octogenarian’s careful if whistling (in truth, carefully whistling—we geezers are awfully brittle even as flutes) version of litheness, Andy returned to the foyer to collect the other burdens he’d set down: a grocery bag loaded with my birthday dinner’s makings and two DVDs, along with a desiccated cardboard box whose inexplicability alarmed me.

He deposited the groceries in my kitchen and put
Meet Pamela
and
The Gal I Left Behind Me
next to my TV. Then he rehefted the box, clearly the unadvertised
pièce de résistance
of the whole business, and presented it to me.

It was the size of a child’s coffin. And the weight too, as I learned when he laid it across the arms of Pam’s wheelchair. “Andy, what is this?” I said.

He glowed with self-pleasure. “Oh, how I planned it! I planned it for months. I first e-mailed Nenuphar back in November.”

“Nenuphar?”
Then I grew more incredulous: “Nenuphar has e-mail, for Lord’s sake? Some bloody monastery.”

“I think they have to for the bread. You know, ‘Flour of the Lily.’ I’ve got a loaf of their sourdough in the groceries too. It’s said to be, well, heavenly.”

“Then is this what I think it is?”

“Brother Nicholas’s earthly possessions,” Andy confirmed. “They turn everything in when they enter the order. But what they want preserved after they’re gone gets put in a locker—like street clothes when you go swimming. This is all that your guardian asked them to keep, but no relative ever came forward to claim it.”

“But how did you get it? You
aren’t a relative.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Andy triumphantly. “Andrew Carraway Pond, at your service. Cadet branch of the family on my mother’s side.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me that?” I demanded, glancing up with some reluctance. All the mimsies wanted to do was stare stunned at what I’d never guessed might still exist: the Paris footlocker’s missing twin.

“You never said ‘Carraway’ once until you mentioned his old agency last fall at the Kennedy Center. He doesn’t come up all that often, and when he does, it’s always been ‘Nick,’ ‘Uncle Nick,’ ‘Brother Nicholas,’ or just ‘my old guardian.’ That’s when I got curious and checked.”

“And then never told me,” I protested.

“I wanted it to be a surprise. Isn’t that what birthdays are for?”

“Are they ever,” I grumbled through my dentition. Of course Andy knew nothing of Pam’s longest day.

“Well!” he said, still beaming over his hat trick or tricks. “I know very well you can’t wait to look inside. But I also doubt you want an onlooker while you do, since it’s not really the same as cooing at the brand-new scarf Panama will probably give you. Why don’t I go absent myself in the kitchen and start prepping dinner? I’m no Dottie Crozdetti, but I hope I’ll do.”

Posted by: A
W
a
r
d

Once I got the thing open, inhaling its twice cloistered smell of
grands blés desséchés depuis longtemps
, the mimsies were greeted by a framed photo I’d studied many a time in my adolescence. Nick, Daisy, and Father stood in summer whites on a dim dock whose white lightpole a budding pudding had often done her pudgy solo best to turn into a maypole soon after I learned to walk.

Underneath it were a dozen or so unframed others in an envelope, including one that showed a surprisingly saturnine young Nick chatting with a Twenties dandy who had one white-shod foot balanced on the wide running board of an over-ornamented
nouveau riche
touring car. While I’d never laid eyes on him in the flesh that I knew of, I guessed his identity and instantly disliked him. The humorless self-love, the pompous narcissism of that superficially “sensitive,” not unhandsome face had the power to appall me over eighty years later. It was true the former James Gatz had died young and by violence, but still.

Next came a manuscript carefully typed on an old typewriter, no doubt the same austere Olivetti I’d often seen parked on his desk’s side table in the back room of the Carraway Agency’s office. While I knew it could only be the memoir of my mother he’d claimed he’d destroyed, the title puzzled me. Beneath a crossed-out
Trimalchio in West Egg
, the top page advised that this was
Under the Red, White, and Blue
by Nicholas Carraway.

I read the opening paragraph, smiled reminiscently. Nick, your younger and
more
vulnerable years? And just how did those differ from your later ones?

I didn’t want to grow absorbed, as Daisy’s daughter and Nick’s ward was reasonably
sure she might be, and then get interrupted. While my practiced riffling of pages told me the thing was probably under 50,000 words long—bad for its commercial prospects had he ever considered publishing it—that was still far too much to get through while Andy mimicked
The Good Li
fe with
Dottie Crozdetti
in my kitchen, making just enough noise to confirm his lack of proximity for my benefit.

So I put
Under the Red, White, and Blue
aside and promptly regretted doing so more than I ever had not drinking the Great Unknown’s sun tea, which is saying something. The final item in the Nenupharcophagus was something I dreaded seeing.

Unlike one of the contributors to it, the Fall 1934 edition of
Pink Rosebuds
hadn’t changed a great deal. Same inept drawing of a nude screened by flowers as she gazed at a unicorn on the duly pink cover, same dutiful if sneakily brutal dedication “To Miss Hormel, Our Onlie Begetter.” And above all, as the Rheumas turned now dully age-grayed pages the mimsies didn’t want turned, the same long mentally suppressed poemess: “Chanson d’automne,” by new girl Pamela Buchanan.

One minute later, an aproned Andy rushed to my side with an octogenarian’s careful version of urgency. “Pam, my God, my God! What is it?”

Wrapping my ribcage for protection, I was keeling and keening in my wheelchair. Jaw blindly agape and fat-lunetted mimsies groping like unfed mouths, I was begging somebody, something’s, anything’s mercy.

Cast away violently, the Fall 1934 edition of the Literary Magazine of Purcey’s Girls’ Academy of St. Paul was a mess of pink and gray things on the rug.

Posted by: Our Newest Pink Rosebud

Even as five clawing Rheu
mas waved Andy away, the mimsies turned wild Civil War memorials on him. Desperate for concealment, what little was left of my unsplattered but still shipwrecked brain grabbed
petit-navire
-style at a straw. As I’d told a jumpy Georgetown faculty wife once long ago, it’s always the time for literary criticism.

“Oh, my God, Andy! It was just, well, it’s just. It’s just, you see! I always thought my French was so good back then—and it wasn’t. Honestly, how could  I—could I of all people!—have used ‘
arrachent
’ as an
intransitive
verb? At that age? That’s the sort of mistake Tim would make. He was out of that bloody country by the age of seven.”

“Come on now, Pam. We know each other,” Andy gently reminded me. “Just try to regroup a bit first. I’ll wait.”

“I’m perfectly all right. But Andy, the
tense change!
From the conditional! It’s so awful, so awful. My God, even you would know better! And Hormel—poor Hormel—poor Hormel didn’t. Her and her Bawdyleer! Oh, we were made for each other, that’s obvious.
C’est le bal de la comtesse Hormel!
”

Delicately stooping in lunette-befogged triplicate, Andy collected
Pink Rosebuds
from the rug. “Forgive me, honey,” he said. “I’m just not going to be a lot of help if I don’t know what’s upset you.”

“Go on, then! Go on. You’ll laugh ’til your sides split, I swear,” I cawed at him. “Christ, in all these years I never knew how lucky I was to be at stupid Purcey’s by then. At Chignonne’s, they’d have laughed at me more! Hated me, hated me, made fun of me more—and for better reasons, too. They can do without honor, but grammar’s the last line of defense.”

Unlike his role in my life as Cadwaller’s proxy, Andy’s own French wasn’t Proustian. But it hardly had to be to decipher my mess of a poemess. As its sole virtue was brevity, he didn’t need long.

And was unfooled. “Pam, I’m so sorry. I had no idea. What an awful mistake this was. I should have gone through the box first and then asked what you wanted to see.”

“No, no. I’m honestly fine now,” I shakily said, reaching for Kleenex. Tried to smile: “My God, what came over me? Andy, forgive me. No excuse at my age. It was seventy-two years ago.”

For one minute it hadn’t been. For that one minute, flitting, mincing, and sauntering around me, Purcey’s Girls’ Academy had once again snared gawky boat-footed Pam in its corridors.

The burlesque declamations of “
Chanson d’automne
” as I crept by to beg Hormel to let me drop French class. The jokes: “Guess we know now why Buchanan’s mom did it. God, Harmony, could
you
have stood that sniffling one more second?” (
“May nawn
, Sigourney,”
Harmony Preston snickered.) And worse yet, since Daisy was at least dead but I wasn’t and didn’t know how to be, the lowing greeting that stopped me in doorways, sent me hastening down hallways, kept me blubbering in bathrooms: “Moo! …Moo, big Sandy, here comes Buchanan!…
Moo!
”

“Sure you’re okay now?” Andy asked. “Glass of water?”

“Scotch. A bloody great big one,” I said and wondered why I was quoting John le Carré. If
anyone
’d earned a drink at the end of the day, you must agree
l’équipe
here at daisysdaughter.com had.

“Water and ice?”

“Do I look like I’ve changed? And oh! Andy, of course get whatever you like for yourself. I should’ve said so earlier.”

“Pam, I’m your cook! I did feel entitled to pour a glass of red wine in the kitchen.”

“Then bring that too. At least it’s good for your heart,” I told his back as he went.

“Oh? It is, really? Good news.”