Daisy Downpour
A corset-maker who spends ten years at her window dropping a linen rose into Dame Musset's garden, waiting for a signal that never comes.
To be sent for. She has asked only that Musset put a pot of geraniums on her sill on the day she is wanted, and she has watched the sill for ten years.
The book
At a glance
- The unwanted admirer of the October chapter
- Corset-maker, known as such in the arrondissement
- A pot of geraniums on Musset's sill — never set out
- Ten years at the window
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeDaisy Downpour is an invented character in Ladies Almanack, the 1928 mock almanac by the American writer Djuna Barnes, and the subject of its October chapter. She is a corset-maker, known as such in her arrondissement, and she is in love with Dame Evangeline Musset, the book's heroine, who does not want her. The chapter is the only sustained account in the book of desire that is not returned, and Barnes plays it for comedy and then lets it curdle.
The narrator says she might as well be called Daisy Downpour as anything else, which is the book admitting it has stopped bothering to disguise anyone. No identification with a particular woman in Natalie Clifford Barney's circle is established.
How the book draws them
- The display at the windowShe lets down her hair, works a shoulder loose and exposes a pair of near-pink machine-hooked undergarments, deliberately loosened in the weave at four good points — all of it aimed at Musset, who is walking in the garden below and never looks up.
- The linen roseShe throws one down every autumn. The first goes under Musset's foot and into the earth without being noticed, and she keeps throwing them, year on year, singing the same French song at her casement.
- The wrong classMusset's objection is not to her looks but to her trade and her people: she is a woman so much of the people that Musset can see the whole line behind her. Musset spends a paragraph wishing she were a peer so she could confer the Order of the Garter and drag her up the social ladder to bed, then decides it is beneath her.
- Assembled out of better partsInstead of wanting Daisy, Musset stands in the garden building an imaginary woman out of the best features of eight others — a scullion's eye, another woman's breasts, another's hips, another's shins — and repeats the specification twice, getting longer each time. Of Daisy she selects not one tendon.
- Becoming a curseBarnes tracks the name through Musset's mouth over the years: first God, then God Almighty, then God Dumbfounding, then God help us, and finally God Damn to Daisy Downpour. Indifference packed down on scorn is the phrase the book uses.
- Feared, then, rather than pitiedBy the end of the chapter Musset is frightened of her — she knows when Musset goes out and comes home — and says that in the mind of a woman lost twice there is one furrow with one weed growing in it, and the weed is herself.