Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun by Tom Carson Read Free Book Online

deadly horses.
    Before pretzelhood, I also had the genetic custody of a gangly build I blessed for changing me from a Purcey’s exotic to the tall girl who played basketball. Plus a jowl of which I was less enamored, its hammock of misleading sullenness only lifting when I smiled or laughed. Though I still do plenty of both, now it’s just another county heard from in a face made of Clio Airways–carved newspaper crumples.
    Then to mimsily borogoved now, my face’s best foot forward has been my eyes, balanced between blue and stormy gray like twin Civil War memorials. And just as well, since my functions as a child were purely ocular. My mother’s widowhood filled my retinas with a rich brocade, pattern mostly indecipherable, in which she figured mostly by omission.
    She was a white back scampering in dresses that daringly exposed it from her helplessly disputative shoulderblades nearly to the spinal nub’s Appomattox. When she returned in another taxi next morning or next Monday, a hand as hasty and vague as a postcard from a Beaux Arts ball would caress my forehead as if for luck. Whose unknown.
    My early hope was that she was trotting off to Manhattan to see Daddy, who was only dead in Nassau County. That didn’t outlast the night her cab led a convoy of peculiarly dressed people back from there and he wasn’t one of them. I got scooted up the stairs as glasses swayed in hands detached from any identifiable owner, prefiguring the minor Dali canvas Daisy would later tire Georges Flagon into buying for her in a final token of her stint as a free spirit.
    That transfer of Dali Buchanan from Manhattan to East Egg was a onetime affair. At home, where I was looked after by a succession of mighty-aproned Scandinavians all prone to clucking at me as if I were not one but several chickens, my mother’s masterpiece was the Sleeping Daisy. At its pre-Raphaelite best, it was executed in daytime amid vomited dress shops and her sheets’ blue typhoon behind a muslin screen’s impersonation of blond twilight.
    One hand would be curled as if guarding her soft breaths from monsters, a logical worry to me at six. The other was most often wrapped around an oblong velvet-covered pencase: a minor mystery, since no letters were ever mailed from our home. My mother’s later attempts at fiction began with the purchase of a Smith-Corona manual typewriter, its carriage rearing over the keyboard’s tadpoles as strictly as a nun’s cowl. Twenty years later I clattered through Nothing Like a Dame on it, secularizing things considerably.
    Then she’d go away again to Manhattan, miraculously restored to the Daisy I knew best: a stranger twitching taxiward with marcelled coif, bright eyes, and sequins that bragged their good fortune at mincing on such enfevered shanks. That’s when I used to warble along to her anarchic bedroom and rifle her lace-leaking chiffonier for that pencase. At least when my latest nanny, peeled like a nippled onion field, was doing the Sleeping Scandinavian in her own unventilated quarters and I’d gotten tired of observing (and inhaling) the mysteries of Copenhagen.
    I can’t say whether Pammie’s curiosity about my mother’s pencase meant I was already a budding scribbler or simply jealous of any thingummy whose proximity my mother so clearly preferred to mine. As if there’s any difference, writers everywhere will roar. I never found it, though, much less opened it up to gaze at its innards, and just as well. A pencase it wasn’t.
    Posted by: Pam
    In the frisky days of her young widowhood, my mother’s favorite saying was on the chilling side. “Beauty is as beauty does,” she’d coo into the phone or—at her worst—to the uncomprehending Scandinavian, justifying her newest achieved or anticipated act of Daisyesque frivolity with affected hurt followed by an unaffected giggle.
    The adjectives traded places by 1928, and she quit saying “Beauty is as beauty does” at all once she’d lost her