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

  I do fault Dr. Nassau—not the name he’s known by to history, which is none at all—for producing the mind’s equivalent of Botox to “cure” her of hysteria. She’d watched Daddy’s panicked mount hurl and then maul him as if he were a jackbooted beanbag with a Yale degree, a cheat’s instincts at polo, and too much money to need to know much about much. Dead so young herself, my mother was always a naif around medicos—unlike her gnarled daughter, now on Ph.D. terms with doctors the age of the Hardy Boys.

  Doc Nassau soon went back to Supernumerary Hospital, outflashed in the role of nemesis by an intruder ideally devised to carry the brunt of blame. Aside from a chestnut coiffure I wanted to own or possibly just pet, everything about her was ghastly. Let me introduce any daisysdaughter.com readers I may’ve acquired—no comments signaled yet when I homepage, but it’s awfully early—to the Lotus Eater.

  I knew the L.E., incidentally, well into Eisenhower days. Her hair oyster-shelled by then, she’d stare with dead fish eyes if Gerson and I happened to sit down on our New York visits in one of the Manhattan restaurants where she liked to hobnob. I’d get an arctic smile only once she’d established to her satisfaction that a) my husband still wasn’t a millionaire, b) clothing shops in Beverly Hills still hadn’t caught up to the latest from Milan and Paris, and c) I still hadn’t grown or bought breasts whose Lollobrigittian magnificence might’ve flummoxed her. While I could fish her name out of the septic tank if I cared to, let her stay the Lotus Eater here.

  She took up residence in our lives one breakfast too soon after my seventh birthday in June ’27, still wearing the scoopbacked powder-blue number and Cuban heels she’d had on the evening before when I came upon her and my mother, brisk snap of a pencase closing as I entered Daisy’s room, after their unexpectedly joint return from my future guardian’s wedding in the city. In later years, he remembered Pammie as having been a flower girl, and I didn’t tell him that by peopling the scene with loyalists his mind was trying to make up for his bride’s contrary vamoose just four months later. He never tried that gold-ring stunt again.

  That morning, the Lotus Eater was proud of herself for having woken up and discovered she was the Lotus Eater. Petulance, her kewpie face’s at-rest expression, was experimenting with malicious tranquility as its fresh mask.

  “Hello, sweetie!” said my mother, her smile coping as usual with the surprise that giving birth to me hadn’t all been a dream. “Why, you two didn’t get properly introduced last—yesterday. Darling, this is my young daughter, Pamela.”

  “Hullo, Pamela.” It was plain the Lotus Eater would’ve gladly left it at that. Briefly, her face wondered why the Scandinavian didn’t just toggle a light switch to pop me back into invisibility. Since that wasn’t going to happen, she had to make a show of creating a relationship, and did by jiggling her plate oddly forward and back.

  “Don’t even think about stealing one of these sausage links, little girl,” she said with a disturbing and unnatural attempt at making her keen features appear jolly. “That’s death! I’m ravenous. I’ll stab you in the heart with this knife!”

  “I’ve eaten,” I said stolidly. “And they’re made from pigs, not lynxes.”

  “Why, of course you’ve eaten! You won’t believe it, but I was a good little girl once too. I know they’ve got to get up early! Then quick as death, they’re off to…school?” she asked my Scandinavian mother, by which I mean her glance invited either woman to take the job.

  “It’s summer vacation. I won’t go back until the fall,” I explained.

  The L.E. had already gone back to deciding dead pigs were the best use for her mouth. “Where are you sending her, Daisy?” she asked, chewing.

  Posted by: Pamalyst

  Even without a White House cue—why don’t they call?—I may be readier for the glue factory than I knew. Blinking at my Mac’s screen, on which a word rhyming with “Lotus” has appeared more than once, Pam has realized the old synapses aren’t what they used to be.

  To be fair, the Beltway loons and goons I’ve just reclassified as Potus eaters—addicted as they are to jingoism’s heroin—tricked me by behaving differently. Instead of nodding off, they’re energized. Bolts of vitaminy special-effects lightning shoot from their fingers. Trumpets are wedged in their throats.

  With one exception, they’ve got no traits at all in common with the sulky, quite pretty, and, to be fair, evidently troubled young woman my mother took on as a sort of experimental grown-up Pam—or so I was left to guess, taking what passed for optimism where I could—in the summer of 1927. Said exception is a staggering inability to imagine the planet exists for any other purposes but their own.

  Potus himself is a creature of habit, no longer including the big one he kicked. Well, let’s all keep our fingers crossed on that one, what do you say? As sobriety was his major accomplishment at forty, he treats it as evidence he’s got the cojones to make big decisions, meanwhile staying cagey about just how much whiskey and cocaine went thataway in his youth. Since Jesus got the credit for weaning Potusville’s answer to Tom Buchanan off the sauce—oh, the ego of these people!—he now guzzles God like Jim Beam.

  So far as we know, otherwise his substance abuse is confined to his speeches. The Potus eaters, on the other hand, seem in no hurry to sanitize their polluted blood. That’s why for six years the test of Pam’s stamina has been my ability to go on reading the WashPost and NYT. I’ve spent time around junkies before.

  Did I know it then, Panama? In the sense of information, no. At six or seven, adulthood as such describes itself to your perceptions as a state of being drugged. Odd reactions, puzzling apathies (look at the seagull, Mommy!), unprovoked laughter, secrets. I had no other ready image of motherhood to test against Daisy’s, as Scandinavians plainly reproduced by some means all their own that skipped childhood and went straight to chafe-wristed and gargantuan middle age.

  The new calculus the Lotus Eater’s advent presented to Pam was that I’d obviously been right in guessing that having a child might be the overlooked cure for my mother’s restlessness. I’d just as obviously been wrong to count on myself as the solution she’d spot rubbing my fat nose under her dainty one. Her evident loneliness—always the one adult condition any child has decent odds of correctly identifying—had been my main reason to hope one day she’d catch on I was here at hand.

  As garbled as my understanding was, I still think Daisy might’ve reveled in maternity if she could’ve given birth to a daughter exactly her own age or perhaps a year older. Preferably one who was pretty and outgoing but not quite as alarming a beauty as Mom (“Just call me Daisy, darling!”), keeping the tacit sexual and social pecking order undisputed. Hell, I’m just glad I’m not bitter.

  Yes, that’s a joke. But I hate bitter people, always have. The Lotus Eater was so born to it that, so far as I could tell, she got bitter first and then set out to find a provocation.

  Posted by: Pam

  Many years later, as the auburn-laced ice cubes of a Georgetown November did their best to mimic stained glass in our living room’s bay window—Church of the Late Great Society, I think: maybe 1965—Cadwaller was intrigued by my verbal sketch of his unmet Daisy-in-law’s morphine crony. Peculiarly so, since he and I never spent much time discussing each other’s antediluvia.

  Besides, by then Daisy’s daughter was a tall forty-five or so, sipping a Bloody Mary amid Sunday papers as a Redskins game hutted and jabbered from the den. My mother’d been pushing up repetitions of her first name for decades. What did it matter and who cared anymore?

  Yet it turned out at halftime that Hopsie’d known the harsh Thirties residue of the Lotus Eater in Newport. Complete with youth’s black toupee above white flannel trousers I can barely imagine him wearing, my future husband was disguised as a sailing instructor.

  In his college and law-school years, Panama, your great-grandfather k
ept himself entertained and in pocket money by running over there summers to reteach drunken millionaires’ wives boatmanship from his own people’s merely genteel digs in Providence. During Franklin Pierce’s unmemorable Presidency, the first Cadwaller was in whale oil, among the oddly hatted merchants scanning the horizon for the Pequod’s return. Once his sons caught on Ahab was no businessman, the elder went into shipbuilding; Hopsie always said his bark was worse than his frigate. The younger—your great-grandfather’s ancestor—opted for banking.

  Sensibly aware his forebears’ industriousness had left him privileged, my own Cadwaller was bored silly at the thought of a life spent making the beast with two greenbacks. Half a decade at a white-shoe New York law firm avidly dedicated to keeping said beast away from the taxman didn’t excite him either. The aversion got turned crystalline by his three years—he was a pipe-smoking thirty-five when they ended—of skippering a corvette in the North Atlantic during the war. On a welcome break from hunting submarines, he was herding landing craft off Omaha Beach the same afternoon his war-correspondent wife traipsed ashore. After our wedding night, which predated our marriage by several months, we laughed about our nonexchanged glances across that crowded room.

  Among other things. For certain men of Cadwaller’s generation, the great test of their poise was retaining an air of virility while telling a woman to whom they were sexually drawn their undergraduate nickname at Harvard. My Hopsie brought it off without either batting an eye nor losing an ounce of manhood, which should’ve made my third guess my first.

  “As in ‘hopping down the bunny trail’?” I ventured.

  “Nope.”

  “As in ‘Please don’t throw me in the briar patch’?”

  He rubbed his now bald head. “That would have been more Princeton’s sort of thing. Andover’s, really.”

  “Cadwaller, do you want to tell me about the rabbits?”

  He beamed delightedly. “Nope. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any.”

  Posted by: Pam

  Nope, Panama: the Lotus Eater’s Thirties residue wasn’t one of his cottontails. Your great-grandfather wasn’t remotely interested. Besides, even though the former L.E.’s doltish husband stayed up in the attic, mucking around with his collection of vintage spyglasses—he’d clearly never trained one on his yard—somebody named Dicky was on the ground floor and came along on the sailing lesson.

  “It seemed to be one of those off-and-on things that go on forever,” Hopsie shrugged that auburn-and-ice-cube Sunday. “I doubt they even liked each other much, just had similar manners and didn’t want to explain themselves to somebody new.”

  “That’s her to the teeth,” I said bitingly. “Doesn’t that sound exactly like too many marriages?”

  Your great-grandfather could always outfox me. “To me it sounds like all of them. Except for the liking part, which you’ll agree makes a difference.”

  I’d just turned over the paper to exile her oyster-shelled photograph. “Trust me. Nobody could’ve liked her.”

  “Didn’t your mother?”

  “Hell, what did she know? She was on morphine.”

  “What did she really want, though?” he asked alertly, which didn’t necessarily mean anything. A man who’d stood a few deck watches, he still had one ear posted to monitor halftime’s scrimmage of commentators from the den. Dear bright-eyed dog having its whiskery belly ruffled on our sofa, were you Jubjub or Peanut?

  Imagine, Panama: there was no such thing as the Super Bowl. On the other hand, Bloody Marys were well known to us aborigines. Must’ve invented them right after we killed the last dodo. Never had liked its stupid, accusing stare.

  “More morphine. What else? And someone to fix with. I’ve told you. To my mother, nothing made sense except as a social situation.”

  “I meant the girlfriend. What was she after in all this?”

  “She was awfully young,” I said after a minor hesitation. “I doubt she knew.”

  “That’s how I remember the sailing lesson going, but I’m asking you, darling. The perceptive one. What’d you make of it all?”

  “I probably hated her much too much to make anything.”

  “Ah, well. There’s a clue right there,” he said, gesturing with his briar. Take it from me, Panama, there isn’t a pipe smoker on the planet who can resist Sherlocking it up on occasion. Near the end of Cadwaller’s long dying, I remember reading his favorite Holmes story to him: “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

  “How so?” I asked a mite peevishly. He had just called me the perceptive one.

  “Maybe you sensed she was out to kidnap you. When she met me, she knew I’d get Pamela instead. Maybe that’s why she tried to brain me with the oar that day.”

  “Oh, she didn’t.”

  Since it was usually his wife who provided the slapstick in our three-decade-long conversation, he beamed. “I think it gave me my taste for danger.”

  A crunch of celery proved Cadwaller was being whimsical on just one Bloody Mary. I was mixing, and I usually forgot the celery sticks on the second round. I wondered if I should have another or straight vodka once he went back to the Redskins game. Back then I was a lot less used to reading the obituaries of people I’d known, although sometimes even now I still feel I’m not.

  “Kidnap me for what? Believe me, she had loads more money than we did. Even then.” I meant the now extinguished Buchanans, not the just lit (I’d turned on a lamp as the dog stopped glowing) Cadwallers.

  “There are other kinds of ransom.” The Sherlock routine was really starting to wear thin.

  “Oh, she never paid any attention to me. To be honest, I imagine she was just looking for a harbor. Like most women,” I added, since he’d know I was exempting myself and my surprising kindness to the Lotus Eater had annoyed me.

  “Ah! They’re back at it,” my husband announced. “Have you seen my tobacco pouch? No, the yellow, not the leather. That one’s empty. I think I’ll switch to beer. Come on, Bandicoot! Let’s go watch the home team finish fouling up this one, what d’you say?”

  With a raucous meow, the creature I’d been petting—sorry, but I’m in a big hurry and memory does play tricks—arched its Siamese back. Alert enough to Cadwaller to be reacting to him all the same, it independently hopped off in a different direction. Nonetheless, my mother’s pet back in the summer of 1927 had definitely been a dog.

  Posted by: Pam

  A nameless one, at least almost eighty years later. What I do remember is that the Lotus Eater sometimes seemed to get the pooch and me mixed up, although the different amounts of attention paid to us by our shared mistress should’ve tipped her off. Not being fussed over as I stubbily glared meant I was probably Pammie.

  After that first lynx-eyed breakfast—my reassurance that she wasn’t committing cannibalism had zoomed right by her, you’ll recall—the Lotus Eater graduated to becoming a form of weather, her East Egg appearances as unpredictable as fog’s fingers in Jack the Ripper’s London. From my third-floor playroom, to which the Scandinavian with the special murmur of one uselessly instructed used to cart the toys I’d formerly had leave to scatter almost anywhere, I’d hear the L.E. skidding hither and yon downstairs with those odd squeaky little pulleys in her laughter.

  Before the Scandinavian had shut my door behind her, I’d hear my mother’s enchanted babble: “Darling! But we mustn’t. What, so soon, again? Pammie, after all…No, no, no! I see we must. Well, when I say so, it’s different. It is, nasty, and so there!”

  I knew Daisy had just stuck out her tongue, that enamel-sentineled rose petal. “I am her mother, don’t forget. Oh, what am I saying? Do. Did you tell the cab to wait?”

  Then off they’d jitterbug again to Manhattan. Either less or more expensively so, depending on your point of view, once the L.E. began turning up in our driveway behind
the wheel of a touring car as long as a Dreiser novel. Pammie thought she’d seen a gray-backed chauffeur on the L.E.’s first visit, but he must’ve been imaginary. And too bad, since anticipating his return—what else did I have to keep me occupied?—the precocious reader that was me had named him Quint from The Turn of the Screw.

  Once they’d rolled on, tiny and chic in the Dreiser, out of my playroom’s window, I’d troop downstairs, occasionally tossing a ball or a doll ahead of me on the coal-mine canary principle but once again at liberty to do nothing wherever I liked. More than once, that rotten little dog and I ended up beyond the overgrown grass at our grounds’ seaward end.

  Not that I understood anything yet about the Scandal. Just had dim memories of a summer when my father’d been more volatile and head-tossing than usual, my future guardian even more observant. I still used to gaze across our private jug-jug of Long Island Sound at a boarded-up mansion, never reoccupied and soon torn down, from a wharf that had lost its lone green eye at night once my mother, widowed by then, gave up puzzling over the fusebox. Then the dog would bark.

  Posted by: Pam

  Deep into the night, my mother and the Lotus Eater would return, the Dreiser’s headbeams now a U-boat firing torpedoes at the house. Contradicting the glow of curiosity in Cadwaller’s pipe bowl, since I wasn’t such a ninny as to misunderstand the submerged possibility piquing his interest, the L.E. always went to sleep in a separate room. Across the way from Pammie-after-all’s, it was far down the hall from my mother’s.

  I used to hear the L.E. wandering back from there, wall-whiskbrooming and slow, after they’d spent a nightcap hour examining the pencase. Its hasp’s clicks and evident fascination had led me by now to revisualize it as a sort of stereopticon. Cued by one of my mother’s rare audible indiscretions (“Darling, don’t be so greedy! He was mine first, you know. But if you’re nice, I promise we’ll get you one of your own”) as I padded past the door, pretending the living room was going underwater and I had to rescue a dolly the Scandinavian had been too hefty to stoop for, I’d decided the two of them were arguing over pictures of the strange men, not to be redundant, they’d met in the city.