Read Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun for Free Online Page A

be.
    No need to pretend you’re jealous, though! We both know you’d have soon found a reason to be dismissive. Measuring my real career against your fantasized one, you’d’ve found Pammie’s clumsy imitation, with my big feet and my ugly hair and my stupid tugs at your beaded dress in East Egg, wanting.
    I made my way. Along the line, catching a bottle of shampoo—not champagne—from a woman gnarled as oak and naked as the truth outside Riceville, Tennessee, I fell in love with my country. Once again, we’re up against something you’d have found puzzling, since you always did treat the U.S.A. as the caterer and not the bridegroom.
    In a dopey way—and pun intended, mother mine—you pined for France. Your daughter saw it in an overseas cap and GI shoes, saw Paris liberated. Dachau too? Dachau too.
    In ways Gerson and I forbade ourselves to articulate, it bothered my second husband that his shiksa wife had been the witness he hadn’t to his fellow Jews’ destruction and survival. Vowing nobody would call his patriotism a mask for a more personal— personal!— grudge, he spent 1941–45 in Culver City, supervising training films on the dangers of loose talk, defeatism, booby traps, and finally fraternization.
    Pam had seen GIs chatting up Bavarian dollies a week after Dachau. So I had to tell him batting .750 wasn’t so bad. Showing me around Metro, Gerson grinned: “Oh, we knew it was hopeless. But that actress got a contract faster than I could say ‘Arbeit macht frei.’ ” I winced for a reason he didn’t learn for six months.
    My first husband, incidentally—like yours, mother mine—was an anti-Semite. A Communist anti-Semite, guaranteeing he and Stalin would’ve gotten on famously. Stalin a bit more famous, but trust Murphy to find a grudge. A few months into my marriage to Gerson, puttering among the breakfast bagels and bacon in Beverly Hills, it did cross my mind that somewhere Bran, in his Murphine way, was seething that I’d never stop betraying him. Well, of course not! He was Brannigan Murphy, making that the whole planet’s job. Stalin’s included.
    Yes, mother mine: for a while, your daughter basked in the voluptuous allure of Hollywood. That phrase was the lone one retained by a then sixty-plus Pam after Tim Cadwaller, hoping I wouldn’t be too irked or bored, took me to a New York bar to hear a Texan songwriter he liked. The fellow’s fondness for our pliable American idiom charmed me even as the organizing principle of his musical shuffles eluded the newly, now decisively old lady.
    Not that Gerson was a voluptuary, far from it. In a trait he shared with many another decent man, how far could exasperate him. Having to be Gerson, Gerson, Gerson all the time left him surrounded by doors he couldn’t be sure were locked from inside or out. I loved him for ignoring the invisible keys dancing all around the room.
    Came Cadwaller, and you should know he and Gerson got on well from their first meeting. As dark date palms beyond the balcony gently mopped night’s parquet, we had a lovely introductory dinner in Jerusalem. If Pam was the transom for their mutual respect, don’t blame the old bag this website calls your daughter for thinking I can’t have been all bad.
    Physically, you should know, I survived the 20th century unscathed. The only exception is or was a small scar over my left eyebrow. For almost half a century I used to focus on it in my medicine-cabinet mug shot, trying to decide if it looked more like part of an i or part of an r .Then it got lost in wrinkles like everything else except the mimsy borogoves, fat-lunetted but still mine.
    Cadwaller last, all three of the major men in my life met their end long ago. As did all three of yours, mother mine, though I hope you’ll be pleased to hear my guardian made it to old age. I discount Georges Flagon, fate unknown.
    All of Pam’s, even Murphy, left me with gifts of the type I value most: tools. Because seeing one’s own