Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (29 page)

After the set-piece of my big
Tour d’Argent
lunch with Chris, my final chapter paid homage to Dutourd’s
Les horreurs de
l’a
mour
by imagining a long walk through the city, starting at our Embassy and going on to the replica of the Statue of Liberty near the Pont de Grenelle, Edith Wharton’s first Paris apartment at 58, rue de Varenne, and the plaque in the rue de Lille marking the building where Adams, Franklin, and John Jay had signed the treaty ending our Revolutionary War. Its last stop was the Place St. Sulpice, which I described as I remembered it on August Twen’-Five, Nine’een Fort-Four: mobbed with islanded GIs in jeeps and halftracks and happy Parisians celebrating under two determined towers announcing to the sky that this was as far as they got. There was no reason why the sky should care, but they did.

Then I wrote the most bitter, most grateful, most puzzled, most complicated line of my career. This was it: “And of course, we were loved.”

2. The Art of Nagon

Posted by: Pam

In my favorite snapshot of Hopsie from our time in West Africa, he’s wearing a top hat and looks debonair. His eyes are two crows’ nests that have just sprouted crows’ feet. One hand tips a glass in salute, though neither it nor his smile is greeting the camera.

For a reason that would’ve struck me then as too obvious to articulate, I know the little girl watching fishermen haul long nets from the sea can only be Nell Finn, the older of Ned and Nan’s two kids. I’m almost positive the boisterous American back and raised hand Cadwaller is facing belong to Nell’s father. Ned could be very funny at that time of day.

Naturally, I know that’s Rich Warren in preoccupied jaw-rubbing profile behind them. Seated nearby, our USIS man’s wife Laurel is the only one glancing up into the lens. She looks feline, something Laurel could never keep up for long. The canary in her mouth is about to be set free with a grin.

Even more than the fishermen behind them or the gray palm-frond roof of the gazebo they’re in, one detail proves that they’re all in Nagon. Hopsie’s top hat aside, the men—him included—are all in swim trunks. Laurel Warren has a swimsuit on too. So does Nell Finn in the background.

Cadwaller had worn his Ambassadorial topper in all seriousness earlier, but I assure you clapping it back on now wasn’t his way of lampooning whatever ceremony he’d been to in Ouibomey. An hour away down Nagon’s coastal, sunlit and palm-slashed, only fully paved road, it was the official capital, thanks to its preserved royal courtyard from the old tribal days, its Portuguese fort from entrepreneurial seventeenth-century ones, and its convent-cum-nursing school-cum-leper colony left over from France’s
mission civilisatrice
—euphemism for colonialism. Plon-Plon-Ville, where we all lived, was the administrative or, as Ned Finn called it with binary irony, the working capital.

When I asked her, Nan couldn’t recall either which Nagonese occasion required our Ambassador to gussy up in the same rig that our London envoy would have less dehydratingly worn to Edward VII’s coronation back in 1901. Hopsie would have been indignant had anyone mocked maintaining the custom in equatorial Africa. He valued punctilio for being to public diplomacy what a signature on a treaty is to negotiation. Not only the thin skins of Africa’s new republics but our and even their former masters’ determination to wish them well by symbolically vouching they were our sovereign equal in the great hall of nations demanded top hat and white gloves.

Knowing the rest of us would be at the beach, he’d come straight there and changed to swim trunks whose pattern, thanks to the snapshot, I now remember better in black and white than in color. Were those pale whorls blue or green? Now that we were behind our invisible intra-American palisade again, since the fishermen certainly didn’t care, he was wearing the top hat to waggishly parody his role as the chief of our much smaller Yankee Doodley colony.

If my daisysdaughter.com readers are wondering, at the time young Nell Finn was the only American girl her age in the country. Now in her fifties, she still acts and sounds thrilled to no longer be singular when I see her at Nan’s Christmas parties. But like the rest of us, Nell says she wouldn’t have missed Nagon for the world. Spin the globe all you like, you won’t find it today.

Posted by: Pam

Hopsie always did have acuity. Moments after that snapshot was taken, he ended the joke by handing the topper to me before racing Rich Warren—onetime UCLA lineman, ’46 season only: once Laurel entered the picture, he got tired of having to fake humorless animosity before every snap—down to the surf for a swim. Any longer, and the juxtaposition of rank and good fellowship might’ve turned buffoonish or self-satisfied.

As for me, I’d been Pam Cadwaller long enough not to model his Ambassadorial chapeau. Didn’t matter how tempted I might’ve felt when Nan Finn’s giggle summoned me. Bringing up the Kodak that in Nagon followed Nan’s laugh as inevitably as Valentine’s Day follows Christmas, she called, “Marlene!
Marlene!
”

Panama, I’m not optimistic high-school teachers of English even know this themselves, much less explain it to frizzily tress-stressed, only fizzily attentive bikini girls. But parody has all sorts of dimensions. It needn’t be intentional to be not only ironic but, variously, acrid, bemusing, or even rhapsodic. Indeed parody is often most poignant when unanticipated and accidental. It has its own gift for beauty and pain. In 1962, it was the art of Nagon.

What were we parodying? Camelot, most strikingly, in our hairdos, costumes, and Kodak-immobilized gestures. Our version was contemporary with Washington’s famous one. But we were six thousand miles away at what most people would call the ends of the earth—even though, to those of us on the spot, it looked and felt more like earth’s beginning. Visibly, that didn’t stop us from turning the beach a mile or so west of the bony long concrete Rheuma of Plon-Plon-Ville’s jetty into our sham Hyannisport.

As one of the kids on the post idly snapped off the tail of a small wall-scaling lizard—impressed every time by no blood or evident consequence, though perhaps it’s as well lizards can’t talk—we were no less visibly mimicking intimate East Wing soirées in our now petrified hand dances and profiled palaver on those dreary government-issue sofas of ours. They were backed against the grainy cement-block walls of the tin-roofed blockhouses most of Plon-Plon-Ville’s diplomatic community called home, and the equestrienne’s influence had to’ve been seismic for Pam to risk that little black A-line cocktail dress. Not my best look, even if I daresay the splendidly crossed Buchanan gams were still in business at the old stand.

Did even Carol Sawyer, whose wide face was as Dutch as a tulip crossbred with a windmill, try those
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
bangs that year? No TV set in sight in any photograph: none in the country. But the Scandinavian hi-fi unit ceding its place of honor only to the Finns’ liquor cabinet is a hoot.

Very enjoyably, we were also parodying ourselves, one of the treats of reaching the prime of life and recognizing that the ship is more or less built. Except for my Hopsie, we were all in our mid-thirties to early forties, the age when the furnishings of one’s impressionable youth—cf. Nan’s “Marlene!
Marlene!
”—become pleasurable as shared tokens. Anyhow, in the Foreign Service one soon learns that one’s personality on arrival at any new post is bound to be parodic. It’s not only enhanced for quicker ease of recognition by the new pack of strangers but adjusted for climate, local customs, housing, and the social origami of everyone else’s anecdotes of their previous one.

Parody that
Glory Be
’s author might’ve been more struck by than most: until our first contingent made landfall, there’d never been an American Embassy in Nagon. No one had preceded Hopsie and me, Virgil Scoleri the Admin guy, and a de-Laureled Rich Warren, along to scout buildings for the USIS library. We docked at the tip of Plon-Plon-Ville’s bony Rheuma, staring at the fishermen’s pirogues drawn up on the beach.

The Embassy compound was still being built. Until we did it the first time, no flag whatsoever had been hoisted up its new flagpole. No American flag had ever flown with Nagon’s sun-boiled sky as its backdrop.

The reason we’d come by ship from the Ivory Coast wasn’t only that even Air Afrique only landed every third day. We had supplies in the hold: file cabinets, typewriters, desk chairs, our new President’s portrait for the Embassy wall. For the rest of our time in Nagon, we waited for ships the way you wait for phone calls. Thanks to the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, each few months brought us another delivery of goods from the home country unavailable here: bright red coolers, Scandinavian hi-fi sets and records, sneakers and blue jeans, toy guns.

Beyond our coastal camp lay the rest of Nagon, unmanned by any personnel of ours other than Buzz Sawyer’s native assistant at the USAID irrigation projects upcountry and a couple of Peace Corps kids nobody liked. (Snobbery about non–State Department representatives of America is a Foreign Service perk.) Beyond that lay a whole strange continent, as yet uninvestigated by any of us but known to tumble on grandly and frighteningly for thousands of miles.

On display in every American blockhouse, its pages tenderly reprised by the kids on the post long after they’d grown mossy and chipped, the Sears, Roebuck catalogue emblazoned the values, still exotic on this continent, to which we hoped to win all of its allegiance someday. Referring you once again to
Glory Be
’s opening chapter, “A Landing,” do I really need to say one more word?

Hopsie did. Nautical as ever, he bought a small motorboat for the Embassy out of the contingency fund six months in. We traded one of our wry private looks once Pam saw the name he’d had painted on it: 
Pélérin
.

I christened it one day after filling one of our sacramental few Coke bottles with seawater, wearing a kerchief and sunglasses that strike my eye now as a Jackie move blended with a tribute to Priscilla Alden. Then we, Ned and Nan Finn, Buzz and Carol Sawyer, and their kids all clambered in—Hopsie at the wheel, happy to be skippering again—to skim across the Plon-Plon-Ville lagoon for a picnic with Rich and Laurel Warren and their two boys. Showing their usual streak of affable but stubborn eccentricity, the Warrens had chosen to live in the lone American blockhouse on the far side—Rhode Island, as I sometimes called it.

Posted by: Pam

Parody of a
nouveau riche
faux pas: the Finns’ four Nagonese servants, outdoing Buzz and Carol Sawyer’s three and the Warrens’ austere two. Of course the Residence had six, but Cadwaller’s rank clarified that as an official outlay and not a personal preference.

Realizing that she’d embarrassed herself by adding a kitchen boy to cook, houseboy, and laundryman had the glorious girl clutching her head as soon as Carol congratulated her. Since she obviously couldn’t fire Kindassou, there all four of them are in their white-buttoned white uniforms with nine-year-old Nell and her younger brother. Louis’s extra prestige as the cook is advertised by his toque and prosperous bulk.

“Pam, what was I thinking? I just didn’t know how I was supposed to say no,” Nan wailed once she and I were safely out of the country, meaning we’d borrowed one of the Embassy cars and drivers to zip over the border for a quick shopping run to Nigeria. We had no PX, so the Brits’ Harrod’s-parodic NAAFI store in cosmopolitan Lagos was our backup between Sears consignments.

“No to who, Nan? Not Ned.”

“No, Louis. He’s been doing this for a
lot
longer than I have. I’ve only ever hired babysitters, and I didn’t know Kindassou was his cousin.”

“So are the other two, I expect. But you know it doesn’t really matter,” I told her. “So you and Ned are shelling out eighty dollars a month instead of sixty, big deal! That’s probably raising the per capita income by something like fifty cents. Anyhow, your cook’s better.”

Remember, I was the Ambassador’s wife: that was rash. I didn’t need to add
than Carol Sawyer’s
for Nan’s eyes to quicken with covenized glee. We’d been in Nagon long enough that I knew I could trust her not to rely on my favoritism for leverage when Carol was around.

Then she clutched her head again, contemplating an unfortunately mental NAAFI shopping list. “Oh, God! Those pretend M&Ms the kids like. In the tubes. Help me. Smilies? Sillies?”

“Smarties,” I said and we both laughed. “ ‘Pretend’?” I added, and Nan grew even younger.

Parody of the cold war: innocently and now
there’s
a first, the Soviets had located their Embassy compound in Ouibomey. Nobody in Moscow had grasped that it was only the ceremonial capital and the rest of the diplomatic community and all the Nagonese government’s ministries were in Plon-Plon-Ville. But their home-office bean counters wouldn’t let them scrap the little Kremlin they’d built next door to the leper colony, so they showed up at big receptions looking fairly wilted. They’d had to tool like mad up the coastal road for an hour in their unairconditioned (more scrimping) black Zils.

They couldn’t very well not attend. Just as Dobrynin was later in Washington, their Ambassador was the dean of the diplomatic corps. Beating us by a week, the leisurely Brits by two, and the resentful, foot-dragging French by a month, Shishkov had been the first to present his credentials to M’Lawa at the unfinished Palais du Président. Stuck waiting in Abidjan for Virgil Scoleri the Admin guy, we’d been pinning our hopes on the West Germans, but Rommel would have turned in his grave at the way that fool Klaus Schlitten lingered in Cairo.

Relations between Cadwaller and his Soviet counterpart were impeccably frosty, the more so as they rather liked each other. That didn’t stop Hopsie from leaping forward, pipe-wreathed and happy in his white linen suit, to shake glum but optionless Vasily Vladimirovich’s hand with crackerjack pleasure at our first diplomatic shindig after the Cuban missile showdown.

Speaking of frosty, the Soviets’ Buzz Sawyer wasn’t noticeably more competent than ours. I’ll never forget how that obese Odessan, who’d rented a
band—
M’Lawa’s own, for hire between Presidential events: it was the only one in the country—blanched in his obsidian suit when a Soviet trawler triumphantly offloaded the USSR’s latest gift to Nagon. To us Americans, those six spiffy new snowplows were marvelous to watch as the enormous things, blades blazing, swung overhead one after another on derricks against Nagon’s sun-boiled sky.

One ended up on a concrete plinth in front of the
Palais du Président
as a sort of trophy of Soviet interest. It
was
machinery, after all, and the trawler had also delivered a hefty shipment of cement. At least the Snowplow Affair let Buzz off the hook for the eight thousand screwdrivers USAID had shipped to a country that probably had fewer than eight thousand screws to use them on.

Parody of Pam’s marital past: just a couple of blocks nearer the beach than ours on the Boulevard St. Michel, the name unchanged from
mission civilisa
trice
days, the tiny Israeli Embassy’s blue and white flag flew. Plenty of countries didn’t even bother to have diplomats in Nagon, since there just wouldn’t have been much for an Ambassador from Costa Rica, say, to
do
.
But the Israelis put in an envoy wherever they had recognition. Ehud Tabor was their man, handsome as a rock pool and black-haired as a jaguar. I can’t help noticing that I look unusually uninteresting and marginal when he’s nearby.