Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun Read Online Free PDF Page B

to Amherst at Thanksgiving and New York anytime the latest ridiculous musical’s reviews fooled me into thinking it was worth snoring through, are three generations of Cadwaller’s progeny. The eldest is Hopsie’s son by his first marriage, and I marvel that the alert adolescent who took Pam’s hand as we strolled along the Seine is a grandfather. Even before his biological mother’s death, Chris taught his son and later grandchildren to call me Gramela, giving me all the fame and none of the responsibility.
    As does Panama—for now—Chris’s son Tim adores me. Before he settled into his current job, he wanted to pitch a profile of Pam Buchanan, museum-quality war correspondent, to Smithsonian magazine.
    The exhibit put the kibosh on that. “Absolutely not. I know you, young Mr. Cadwaller! I’ll just be an excuse to fill it with tommyrot. You’ll get moony over the liberation of Paris, and all I really remember is the horrible headache I got from all the diesel fumes.”
    “Then why don’t you write it yourself? Not just the war, the whole thing.”
    “But I have.In Nothing Like a Dame ,and—”
    “Gramela, you always say yourself that was twaddle,” Tim objected.
    “Yes, and don’t you understand that anything I tried to write this late in life would be too? By now I can hardly remember the difference between what happened and what you wish had. That’s why I like your imagination better.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s uninformed. That’s what imagination should be. When nothing’s true, everything can be.”
    “It’s not completelyuninformed,” grumbled the author of You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two .
    “If you mean history books, no. But we didn’t have them.”
    Soon afterward and what a mazurka I danced, Tim had a friend design the website I’m using now. It has lain fallow for two years. That’s why he and his fellow Cadwallers are less likely than random strangers who won’t care to stumble across these June 6 posts and try to stop me from carrying out my protest, since Tim and company gave up long ago on the idea I’d ever use it.
    Among other things, I hated its name: daisysdaughter.com. My amateur psychoanalyst—see how I’m already contending with his projections?—is a sucker for not only the Jazz Age, something I don’t remember hearing it called at the time any more than we called Jack’s Administration Camelot, but the whole cavalcade from Depression to war to Ike to Jack to how many kids did you kill today. Around then Tim’s own juvenile presence in front of TV sets starts making his Gramela’s hoarded way-back-when less precious, less unique, less fucking magical. Not that reminiscing over Jimmy Carter’s epic Presidency strikes me as Shazam time either.
    I felt dismayed by the website’s name for professional reasons as well. Since Tim’s one himself, he ought to’ve known which bauble of identity any writer guards most fiercely: his or her byline. His clever notion of reducing me to nakedness also disguises me from whatever handful of readers still recognize it, since anyone romantic or idle enough to Google Pamela Buchanan, most likely to confirm she’s dead, may not learn before scrolling gets tiresome that daisysdaughter.com is her blog.
    I never cared in social life. I was Pamela Murphy when my divorce testimony knocked the latest Washington benefit performance by Winston Churchill’s one-man rep troupe off New York tabloids’ front pages in May of ’43, I was Pammie Gerson to other industry wives in the creamily ceramic Cinerama of Beverly Hills. I was Pam Cadwaller to not only the Foreign Service Journal but Lyndon Johnson’s White House operators. But all through my marital trolley transfers, by Pamela Buchanan was the war cry I exulted in.
    For better or worse, I was Pamela Buchanan on the rollickingly corpse-free cover of Nothing Like a Dame , my eager-to-please account of the fun side of World War Two. Now long out of