Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun Read online

  “A perfect mirror of the ‘American century.’”

  —“Editors’ Choice,” The New York Times Book Review

  A Washington Post “Notable Fiction” selection for 2011

  Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter

  “Tom Carson’s new novel is simultaneously an epic sequel to The Great Gatsby, a tour-de-force meta-narrative of the last 90 years of American history, and a dazzling feat of old-fashioned storytelling. The octogenarian narrator of Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter is by turns wistful, sarcastic, bemused, nostalgic, furious, and scathingly funny as she evokes—intimately, pungently, and in gorgeous detail—the best and worst century in human history (so far). She is the first great literary character of the new millennium, and her all-encompassing story is some sort of crazy masterpiece.”

  —James Hynes, author of Next and The Lecturer’s Tale

  “You’re unlikely to find a wittier, more ingenious, more compulsively readable novel this year than Tom Carson’s latest … If The Great Gatsby didn’t quite reach the green of the Great American Novel—it’s too short for such a big country—Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter lands within putting distance of the grand old flagpole.”

  —Steven Moore, The Washington Post

  “Trippy, hilarious, brilliant.”

  —Susan Coll, author of Beach Week, Acceptance, and Rockville Pike

  “The most distinctive voice to be found in any recent American novel … Maybe building a cockamamie epic out of a maddening jumble of cultural and historical ephemera is the only way to really do justice to the American century in all its chaos and contradictions. Even if it isn’t, F. Scott Fitzgerald still owes Carson a drink for trying.”

  —Jason Anderson, Toronto Globe and Mail

  “Playful, imaginative, and extremely funny … Great dames of the 20th century, open your ranks: Pam Buchanan is part of the sisterhood.”

  —Farran Smith Nehme, the Self-Styled Siren

  “As brilliant as fireworks exploding over the Washington Monument, Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter is that rarest of triumphs—a laugh-out-loud funny novel that’s also dead serious … Here is history seen through the looking glass—delirious, diabolically witty, and absolutely unique.”

  —John Powers, Critic at Large for NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and author of Sore Winners: American Idols, Patriotic Shoppers, and Other Strange Species in George Bush’s America

  “An uproarious, antic, tender and proudly huge novel … Earns its status as an American epic even while it redefines what a literary epic is.”

  —Mark Athitakis, Washington City Paper

  “Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter is an acute, hilarious, and moving vision of the 20th century as refracted through two unique sensibilities: that of its indefatigable narrator, and that of the supremely witty, deeply wise, and endlessly playful writer who dreamed her up.”

  —Glenn Kenny, critic for MSN Movies and blogger at Some Came Running

  “Huzzah!”

  —Susann Cokal, author of Mirabilis and Breath and Bones

  “Inventive and masterful.”

  —Thaisa Frank, author of Heidegger’s Glasses and A Brief History of Camouflage

  “Sprawling, clever, flamboyant, recklessly ambitious, Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter takes gigantic risks and delivers gigantic rewards.”

  —Geoff Nicholson, author of Bleeding London and Gravity’s Volkswagen

  “Carson—the film critic for GQ and the author of the novel Gilligan’s Wake—gives himself wholeheartedly to scouring Pam’s lifetime for iconic moments and succeeds: Pam edged out for the Pulitzer by Jack Kennedy, Pam with [Lyndon Baines] Johnson’s head in her lap before his speech forestalling nomination, Pam in a Hollywood both seedy and glamorous, Pam at D-Day … For our purposes, Pam is America, and once, for better or worse, America was everywhere.”

  —Tadzio Koelb, The New York Times Book Review

  Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter

  Book 1: Cadwaller’s Gun

  Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter

  Book 1: Cadwaller’s Gun

  Tom Carson

  River House INK

  New Orleans, LA

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2011 Tom Carson

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, online, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher (Csaba Lukacs, River House INK).

  Cover painting by Glenn Arthur

  Author photo by Victoria F. Gaitán

  Design and copyediting by Nita Congress

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9825973-3-0

  Published in the USA

  Original one-volume edition published by Paycock Press, Arlington, VA

  River House INK

  625 Marigny Street

  New Orleans, LA 70117

  Visit daisysdaughter.com.

  In memory of Alice, with love to her friends.

  My deepest thanks to Richard Peabody—a man I’m proud to call “Big X”—and to designer/editor extraordinaire Nita Congress. A special thanks to Glenn Arthur for letting us use Le Navigateur and Le Commandant de Bord.

  For help of various kinds, I’m also grateful to Virginia Carson Young, Ron Perkowski, Saïdeh Pakravan, Arthur Shaffer and David Rowland, Ron Anteroinen, and Alberto and Victoria F. Gaitán. My thanks as well to Csaba Lukacs, David Lummis, and River House for undertaking this new two-volume edition of Daisy Buchanan's Daughter.

  “One thing that flatters me and Bill a lot is that Diana, who is normally shy with children, seems genuinely devoted to ours so we don’t feel that it is a strain for her when we take them to Chantilly. Anne hangs on her words and follows her in from the garden helping to carry the great heaps of flowers, and stands adoringly passing them up as Diana creates one of her magical arrangements. ‘Four delphiniums now, Anne, mix the pale blues with the darker. Thank you. Now a big bunch of roses. That’s it. Always remember when doing a mixed bouquet to have clumps of the same flower together. Not one here, one there, that makes for an arty bouquet. Arty things are common, don’t you agree?’ ‘Yes, Lady Diana…Is it a party, Lady Diana?’ ‘No, it isn’t, and that is why we must take a lot of trouble…Suppose we put the white china unicorn on the middle of the table and make a wreath of white flowers for him to wear around his neck. Shall we go to pick the wild flowers?’”

  —Susan Mary Alsop, To Marietta from Paris, 1945–1960

  There was an old man of Khartoum

  Who kept two black sheep in his room.

  To remind him, he said,

  Of two friends who were dead.

  But he never would specify whom.

  —quoted by Gene Smith in When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson

  Part One

  1. Cadwaller’s Gun

  Posted by: Pam

  As of now—6:22 a.m. on Tuesday, June 6, 2006, my eighty-sixth birthday—my full name is Pamela Buchanan Murphy Gerson Cadwaller. I’m waiting with some asperity for a telephone call from the President of the United States.

  You know how his minions must’ve hounded poor Potus, congratulations to the likes of me not crisp in their
relation to his game plan. “The old bag will never make it to ninety, Mr. P.!” they said. “And she did a lot of something or other back in the way-back-when.”

  True enough, I did. Google away. For the fuck of it I sometimes do myself, checking Pam’s grip on cyberspatial immortality. Are you surprised this old bag knows how to surf the Web? Mine was the first female voice broadcast from Omaha Beach. Beyond its grassy bluffs, a lone Spandau still hammered as D-Day waned. I believe I can handle your toy.

  That five-mile crescent was ours by then. The proof was that rations were being unloaded around us along with ammunition. I’d done Anzio, and I knew how that first case of Hershey bars meant victory. Just didn’t expect what happened next, as the flicks of distant tracer fire making a tailor’s dummy out of twilight had damned little resemblance to candles. Neither did the hulks of charred landing craft to gifts.

  “Happy BIRTH-day, Miss Bu-chan-an—HAP-py birth-day to you.” Heard in the States on my better-known colleague Edmond Whitling’s radio report, the original recording is in the National Archives, crackling on earphones for school groups to whom such sonic chaff is now the Baskin-Robbins side of history. Listen close for Pam Buchanan, just turned twenty-four, saying faintly, “Thank you, boys! Thank you all very much.”

  I’m now a longtime Washingtonian by not only address but temperament. Encased in fat lunettes, the mimsy borogoves I call my glaucomedic eyes have watched those school groups spill out of the Archives many times into our summer’s gobs of unhaulable heat. Then their no less Baskin-Robbinsy teacher calls out, “All right! Who’s going to the Holocaust?” As lovely girlish arms stick up, I wonder if they’ve just heard my voice.

  Sensational 1943 divorce from Murphy or no sensational 1943 divorce from Murphy, I’m sure none of those temporary survivors of Company A, 116th Infantry, 29th “Blue and Gray” Division, landed to be massacred at H Hour and left behind like dazed American barnacles on the Vierville sea wall by fresher troops’ advance, knew me from Venus on the halftrack. All they were in a position to understand was that some lanky dame had crouched among them—“And now what?,” their eyes said—yelping “Where you from, soldier?” and passing around dry Lucky Strikes. I may’ve been a sort of human Hershey bar with two almonds under the wrapper myself, maybe not the finest candy but definitely made in U.S.A.

  Getting sung to on Omaha as bulldozers finished clearing the exit wasn’t Pam’s idea of “If they mean to have a war, let it begin here.” But Eddie Whitling was no chump at contriving human interest for the home front. Hearing a grainy “Happy Birthday” sung in no longer wholly occupied France would tell the other Omaha—Nebraska’s—that not only were our boys ashore but the day’s costs hadn’t damaged their humor. Spotting his opportunity in Company A’s lack (I wonder why) of officers, he beguiled—since I don’t want to use a stronger word—beguiled those weaponless and stunned late adolescents into singing to his pal Pamita.

  “Happy birthday, Miss Buchanan—happy birthday to you.” In Pam’s own D-Day piece, finished with a gin assist (I just hated those buzz bombs) in London two weeks later—“The Day the Tide Ran Red,” Regent’s magazine, June 28, 1944—I omitted that chorus in chafed fatigues around the perpendicular pronoun. There I am thanking them in the Archives’ earphones like some lost stewardess on Clio Airways just the same. Then I inanely add, “Good luck to you tomorrow, boys!” On the recording, the grind of newly landed trucks blots out my most vivid viva voce memory: a teenage voice saying, “Tomorrow?”

  Eventually, Eddie and I had a confused fight about his stunt. It was over a dinner of omelettes à la rations K near Notre Dame, in a Paris forced to depend—oh, but it was enough—on its pure Parisness for wonder. On an ocean of cheers, de Gaulle had just strolled up the Champs-Élysées, and Eddie grinned at my naive belief our friendship made him human. Nonetheless, when it comes to memorable birthday serenades, Potus will have his work cut out for him to compete.

  Posted by: Pam

  “She was some sort of stewardess for something called Clio Airways, Mr. President,” they said. “She wrote some book called Glory Be and married some Ambassador. No, one of ours, not one of theirs. He’s long dead and she’s one of those old bags who roost on upper Connecticut Avenue like falcons. On the plus side, she used to be on some museum board with your mother.”

  I was for fact, the pearly bitch. Even then, she looked as if she launched herself each morning by smartly cracking a perfume bottle over her own jaw. Recruiting Pam thirty years ago for whatever District cultural chore stood in urgent need of pointless discussion must’ve been one of Callie Sherman’s odder jokes, which if you know Callie is saying something.

  “Just make the call, please, sir,” they said. “We know it won’t do much for your afflatus, Potus, but it’s only a blip in your day. No, sir—we can’t figure out why he cares either. It’s the first time he’s asked us a favor in forever.”

  Dear Bob. I don’t really know my Senatorial benefactor well at all. Callie Sherman introduced me to him too, and later he surprised and touched me by adding Pam’s name to the honored-guest roster for the dedication of the World War Two Memorial on the Mall. I gather he’s forgiven me for what I brayed as that atrocity smacked my fat lunettes: “My God! Why didn’t they tell us the Germans won?”

  Even so, he’s plainly never wrapped a brain with plenty of more bulging files in its cabinets around the fact that I’m a liberal Democrat. Or else he supposes the flattered senior citizen or noblesse oblige Washingtonian in me will make decorum win out. Oh, well, what the hell: his factotum did hang up without asking me what I think of this awful and unending war.

  Bob doesn’t know my bitter current name for the city we both love is Potusville. When his office phoned yesterday to give me a heads-up about the treat he’d laid on, I felt mildly pleased he’d remembered me, much less my birthday. Also mildly amused by his faith I’d be honored to get even this President’s June 6 salutations and mildly annoyed at the prospect of having to take the damn call. Only when I let the Metro section of today’s WashPost settle rugward, skating-seagull style, did I gather a decision I hadn’t even known I was mulling had been made.

  My only remorse is that Bob meant well and I’m fond of him. What I’m planning is a betrayal of his apparent, surprising affection for me. The White House won’t be panting for his next request to give some upper Connecticut Avenue crone a holler, put it that way. And too bad, because is Potus ever going to get an earful!

  The gun in my lap was Cadwaller’s. It nestles near my most intimate memory of his cranium in younger, nuder days, during that expert diplomat’s preferred (he swore!) stage of our lovemaking. Like so much about Hopsie, the pistol seemed mildly absurd until the night a thief brazenly broke, with an annunciatory crash whose declarativeness would’ve pleased Beethoven, into the Residence in Delhi. Then my brisk third husband reached behind a certain book on our shelves and it jumped into his hand as obediently as a phone receiver, his customary daytime armament.

  Which sound is the one with which Potus is most unfamiliar? Because I’m only human, I’ll laugh if you say “Beethoven,” but the answer is a shot fired in anger. If I can find the nerve to fire it, mine will be.

  “She’s harmless enough, your brush-cutting majesty,” they said. “What can she do to you? Even if she’s a tiresome old bag and no Christian, she’s too old to be a terrorist.”

  Hah. As I fetched the gun from the Paris footlocker, I began humming a tune I’d heard for the first time quite recently. Didn’t get far, since I’m eighty-six and have the singing voice of an aardvark. But I wanted to please Panama, Cadwaller’s unmet—by him, not me—great-granddaughter.

  Posted by: Pam

  Rightly or wrongly, I think I’ve got some standing as well as a stake in all this. That’s not just because Glory Be was edged out for the ’57 history Pulitzer only by Jack Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. At le
ast I’d written mine myself, not that Jack laughed when I told him so.

  Or that Richard Anson “Hopsie” Cadwaller was one of the finest envoys this country ever produced. Or that the interior décor of my digs at the externally nondescript Rochambeau Apartments, a pile of slag in wolverine gray whose juts and recessed windows probably looked eloquent when Coolidge was in, is actually pretty goddam, well, descript.

  Panama Cadwaller is now sixteen. Her pirouetting and earplugged visits to “Gramela” always seduce her into examining bric-a-brac whose oddity must strike her as belonging to a forgotten ancien régime somewhere on Mars. Yet to Pam’s fellow old District hands, my loot—“Oh hé, oh hé, bibelot,” goes the corsair song of the U.S. Foreign Service—is instantly decodable as the spoor of diplomatic postings in the way-back-when.

  Once visitors dogleg from foyer to living room, they’re met by the African Adam and Eve, two whittled sentinels of mine whose unabashed dowsing rod (his) and genital pineapple (hers) vaunt fertility as a be-all and end-all. Also from the former Nagon is my small maquette of copper figurines pegged to a salver. Depicting a seated woman with arms outflung on a palanquin, it’s been known to three generations of Hopsie’s progeny as “The African Queen.”

  On the wall above is a silkscreened Ganesh, Pam having adopted the elephant-headed god as her mascot during Cadwaller’s Ambassadorship to India. During her own time in Delhi, my dear friend Nan Finn was always a Hanuman gal instead. No other religion has gods that so invite affection and followers who don’t feel insulted when that’s all there is to it.

  Signed by Hopsie, me, Andy Pond, Callie and Cy Sherman, and a couple of dimmer names, the framed menu is from Paris, where Cadwaller and I met in the Fifties. We’d been married two years by that La Coupole lunch, and I still remember how I dropped my oyster fork and the waitress crouched to retrieve and then replace it with a new one even though my dish was empty. Who knew whether the happy American lady would order another half dozen after she’d smiled her gratitude and wonder?