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

Cadwaller relative was the mournful adolescent watching Daisy, the L.E., and Pammie wander through Provincetown from her chair on a now ruddily mobbed, bikini-throbbing, and thong-thronged porch that nonetheless looks familiar in your grandpa’s photographs. That porch and the house behind it have featured in every summer of what you always amuse me by calling your whole life.
    You’re the age your grandfather was when I met him. In my memory, he goes in an eyeblink from a wiry sixteen-year-old I’m leading onto a bateau-mouche to a newly bearded nineteen-year-old snapping cross-legged pictures of his equally new French bride—today your placid, rotund grandmother—from the rug that then lay in our Paris living room, home now only to the Metro section and Pam’s feet.
    Chris was still an Agence France-Presse stringer when he first grew the scraggly fuzz that left us unsure at first if he was trying to look older or younger. Once May or Mayn’t ,his photographic documentation of the ’68 Paris upheavals, got Amherst interested in putting him on the faculty—Hopsie and I both bemused by his impersonation of an academic, not to mention Amherst’s of swinging with the times—he gradually added the belly, wire-rimmed glasses, and cheerfully glottal middle-aged voice that to this day makes it sound as if the piece of paper stuck in his throat has the most wonderful joke written on it. His zest for zany adult masks went on tickling us until we realized they connoted him. Before Cadwaller died, at least he got to see his son complete.
    Even down here in Potusville, I’m aware Provincetown has evolved too, not only since my five-day visit in 1927 but over the decade and a half you’ve been alive to join your parents’ jolly, sunburnt two weeks with Chris and Renée there every summer. I’ve certainly seen lots of pictures, supplemented lately by your Panamanic Margaret Meadisms on the phone about the local boys’ club celebrating its XY-seeking-XY summer festival—though no girls’ club celebrating an XX-seeking-XX one, I gather, at least from your long-distance descriptions—in that gay mecca, as I believe it’s called. It must be a comfort to Tim to know you could saunter around starkers without being an object of more than ornithological curiosity to all but a few of the XY’s in sight.
    Then Chris comes on the line to report on his latest sighting of my onetime trapeze partner—hi, Norman! Bye, Norman—on the 1948 NYT bestseller list. In the near sixty years since Nothing Like a Dame was going down on one side of the gutter as The Naked and the Dead scooted up the other, he’s certainly outdone your Gramela at productivity of every sort. Now a full-time Provincetonian, my fellow author gets around these days on two gnarled canes, so Chris told me last year. To which I retorted, “Thirty-odd books, nine children! What, only two canes?”
    I never met him in ’48 and surely won’t remeet him now. Every year, you all (no, not Norman) pile on the phone to beg me to come to Provincetown, and every year I refuse. I steadfastly did so even back when I still got up to Amherst every turkey day and to Manhattan half a dozen times a year—so often that sometimes I’d come and go without seeing you. “Next time,” we’d agree and usually make good on it.
    No such thing now. No next time for anything I’ve done or haven’t done, with the exasperatingly likely exception of having to hit “Save” once, twice, or three or four more times to heave Pam’s lap and the rest of her up for the tiresome process that is peeing at my age—a chore whose one interesting novelty today is that each time I’ve had to set aside Cadwaller’s gun, telling it not to worry and I’ll be back soon. Trust me, Panama: you’ve got no idea how boring one’s own ablutions get. You’ll look back with wonder on the ballerina days when you just yanked ’em down, yanked ’em up, flushed in a flash, and raced back to the