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

biological role in creating them, and that your dad did baffles even Tim. Most people can’t repress a blink when they learn that Panama’s the spawn of his prosaic, too often ashily Dockered loins.
    At forty-four, he’s presentable enough. But he’s tending to stoutness like his dad and showing signs of growing as sparse up on Mt. Noggin as his grandfather. Years of New York screening rooms, followed by computer sessions as he dredges up the deep thoughts about that month’s slew of cinematic shallowness of Qwert magazine’s “Man in the Dark,” have given him a molelike mien augmented by a certain incredulity that in real life people can hear and respond to what he’s saying. When he looks at you, Panama, his dilemma is that he often can’t think of a thing to say.
    You left him poleaxed even as a baby. As you skidded into adolescence, poor Tim’s awe grew talons of paternal anxiety. When last you two came to Washington and he and I watched you scudding, hipboned and earplugged, around the FDR Memorial, he rolled only belatedly comical eyes my way: “For God’s sake, Gramela! Pam, help me. What on earth am I going to do ?”
    He and I have different apprehensions. Grounded in his own experience, Tim’s fear is that even on movie screens, let alone in Manhattan high schools, beauty like yours is an open invitation to the world to crash in, destructive and greedy. After all, if he can’t help reacting as he does, what sorts of sewers must be flooding the brains of those less fettered by paternity? My fear is that beauty is a drug that ends up craving other drugs for company.
    Posted by: Pam
    Did I blame my mother for turning hophead? In my teens, definitely. She was off the stuff by then, but that age’s vengeful motto is “Better late than never.” A child’s wishes are an adolescent’s accusations, persisting well into maturity nowadays if Oprah’s to be trusted. By middle age, they’ve reverted to wishes, now colored by sepia mournfulness rather than crimson (Oprah isn’t to be trusted) urgency. When you’ve made it to my reef of the surf, far out past the warranty’s three score and ten, even the wishes are the same weak shade of wash as everything else.
    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