Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (30 page)

Poised as he was, Ehud’s most ambitious event turned out to be Israel’s biggest disaster until the opening days of the Yom Kippur War. New movies usually reached Nagon a year or more after their release, and we never knew what we’d get. I still remember the oddity of seeing my old friend Eve Harrington dubbed into French in
The Magpie Did It
in the dank dark of the Bijou Castafiore, Plon-Plon-Ville’s largest movie house. So Ehud had to go to considerable trouble to get a print of Hollywood’s bouquet to his nation’s birth: the lavish Panavisioning of Ari ben Canaan’s headstrong early years, shrewdly stopping short of the post-1948 marital tribulations that might’ve turned the concluding reels into
Cat on a Hot Tin Kibbutz
.

Or maybe those were just missing, since the reels that did turn up in Plon-Plon-Ville weren’t numbered and the projectionist had to sequence them by guesswork. Our own Yankee Doodley colony included, the whole diplomatic corps and Nagonese cabinet—fortunately, President M’Lawa was in Paris—were sitting on folded chairs in the Israeli Embassy’s only large room, from which they’d had to cart out the buffet tables as we waited outside for a couple of Ehud’s locals to turn it into a screening room. Ehud had no choice but to go ahead and hope for the best.

Oh, God! Haifa, Jerusalem, shipboard, Gan Dafna, Jerusalem again, all seemingly cued by Nell Finn playing hopscotch. The movie opened with a prison break, but it didn’t work out: soon everyone we’d seen escape was back in stir. They declared independence, then bombed the King David Hotel in an apparent ruse to lure the British back. The opening credits burst upon us an hour or so in, triggering a doomed hope we might get our bearings. Then they declared independence again, briefly—“Seen it!” someone called—and two or three people came back from the dead. After some inconclusive fighting, everyone ended up behind barbed wire in a detention camp on Cyprus.

“C’est tout ce qu’il y a. Il n’y en a pas plus,”
the projectionist said resignedly. We all staggered out into the night like zombies.

“Ehud!” an instantly cigaretted Ned Finn called, fumbling with matches. “Old man, I just want to tell you how personally sorry I am the whole Zionism thing didn’t work out.” Marlboro lit, he glanced around whimsically: “I wonder what they’ll use this building for now?”

“Well! A cinema would be my guess, Ned. It seems to have a future there,” said Ehud, too experienced not to be droll but swiftly taking refuge in a cigarette of his own. Then he raised the hand forking it: “Herr Ambassador, thank you for coming.”

A stricken face stared back. “Please, under the circumstances understand I can voice no opinion. None,” Klaus Schlitten said and departed.

“What the hell, Ehud. It wasn’t that bad. Just like life!” I told him. “Anyhow it was fun to see Jerusalem again.”

“Oh, yes! I’d still like to visit,” said Nan Finn eagerly. “Ned too, of course. Wouldn’t you, honey…?”

Posted by: Pam

The wonder and pity of the art of Nagon, Panama, is that we were surrounded each and every day by geography and people movingly determined not
to be a parody of a country. On the map, Nagon was just one of the Nigeria-dwarfed crinkles near the notch of the African elephant’s ear. Yet a flag is a flag and a national anthem is an anthem.

Yes, they might’ve had to turn to a French vexillologist—one guess why he’d prospered between 1958 and 1962—for help designing the flag. Its patterning of Africa’s eternal green, red, and yellow still flew proudly over Plon-Plon-Ville and Ouibomey, as well as from a maze of white poles outside the
Palais du Président
on the coastal road between them. And yes, they might’ve been ridiculed in the Paris press when the anthem’s author wrote asking
Cocteau
’s blessing as an Academician on the lyrics, but it was bellowed nonetheless at every public event. Well into adulthood, the former kids on the post could still sing it, even though Nagon no longer existed:

Le peu-ple nagonais s’élève!

Le peu-ple nagonais s’élève—euh!

Des siècles de souffrances sans trêve—euh!

Sont brûlées par Le soleil d’aujourd’hui.

If you’re curious: “The Nagonese people arise!/The Nagonese people arise!
/
Centuries of suffering without respite/Are burned by the Sun of Today.” Yet the Nagonese people had arisen, if only in Plon-Plon-Ville’s sports palace to wildly cheer France’s formal cession of its colony, mere weeks before the Palais du Président started to do the same. I doubt a single American didn’t mutter “Uh-oh” at his or her first sight of that thing bulking up along the coastal road. Its resemblance to a massive box of sugar cubes was so striking that Ned Finn used to wonder if one good monsoon would turn it into a puddle.

It cost three million dollars, which may not sound so pricey until I inform you Nagon’s budget that year was eight. The rectangular vats of water lining the coastal road opposite it were supposed to complement and reflect the maze of flags facing them, but they had no drainage and were soon covered in thick green scum. The detail that earned Hopsie’s “Well, well” as we mounted the steps to our first reception there was that the main entrance featured a revolving door with a ten-foot wingspan.

That was Jean-Baptiste M’Lawa’s own idea, copied from his favorite hotel in Nice. He’d been the only real choice for President, the plebiscite a mere formality. The chunky Polytechnique-trained economist had led the delegation that negotiated Nagon’s freedom. Written largely in Switzerland during his Geneva period, his tome
Les problèmes de l’Afrique moderne
had influenced the Constitutions of three other former French colonies by the time his own country’s turn came.

He could even have argued, not unreasonably, that his massive box of gleaming sugar cubes was just what
le peuple nagonais
needed for daily proof they were a true nation, on a par with not only Liberia or Laos but even
notre bonne mère la France—
the anthem’s lyric in colonial times, rhyming touchingly if none too convincingly with
confiance
. Yet not many of them saw it, and you can guess what subtracting three million from eight gets you in a country that has only one paved road running longer than five kilometers. At the time, Nagon’s per-capita income was $87 a year.

We didn’t need to drive too far north on the inland trunk road, whose asphalt gave way to ochre mud just past the sports palace and Army barracks, to find villages whose children had bellies like canted Rand McNally globes and legs like compasses. Their mothers’ breasts had stretched into tattooed tube socks stuffed with two desiccated tangerines. Round mud huts with thatched roofs clustered near baobab trees on bare plain. Hump-necked cattle so bony that they didn’t look likely to supply much but the future skins for tom-toms hobbled and swayed here and there. The kids on the post got very excited when we spotted a lioness looking up at us from the guts of an eviscerated antelope.

Our reason for making that trip was a doctor who’d written Buzz Sawyer asking if
les États-Unis d’Amérique
were feeling flush enough to splurge on buying him a bicycle. We brought him a Vespa instead, which turned out to be dumb. Where would he find gas, how would he pay for it? Even though the older Sawyer boy glowered like a candle in shorts when Buzz unracked Tommie’s bike as a substitute, he’d been slotted to get a new one for his next birthday and that Sears consignment was due in six weeks.

Well after the sugar cubes got stacked up on the coastal road, construction languished on the
Assemblée Nationale
. At the time of M’Lawa’s overthrow, the delegates were still meeting at the
Hôtel de la Plage
, venerated by the kids on the post because it had real ice cream. The
École d’Administration
did open, but M’Lawa didn’t even wait until its first class of white-shirted, pen-proud students had graduated before he ordered the cadres of French administrators who’d stayed on after the handover to go home. He did it because
Le Monde
hadn’t mentioned the new nation of Nagon even once in its generally sober columns since the business about writing to Cocteau for approval of “
Le soleil d’aujourd’hui
”’s lyrics.

God, how the kids on the post loved that anthem. But my most dramatic memory of it is instrumental. Along with Ned and Nan Finn, Cadwaller and I were in the reviewing stand when Nagon marked the first anniversary of independence. Fretful of protocol, the glorious girl had asked me to ask him if it’d be all right for her to bring her Kodak. Since the Finns’ seats were two rows below ours and hence even farther away from M’Lawa’s canopied chair in the top one, Hopsie thought it would. He still knew Nan well enough to warn me to warn her to take pictures of the parade only: no pivoting to gaily snap us, Vasily and Krupskaya Shishkov, the Schlittens, or Ehud Tabor, and above all not the President himself. He had bodyguards.

Then I took my seat next to Etiènne Maurice N’Koda. Decorated by both Vichy and the Free French and still wearing those medals, he was the grizzle-bearded former French Army sergeant who now headed the nation’s armed forces. After the bright-kerchiefed and singing upcountry village women with their baskets of manioc, the students at the new
École d’Administration
in their pen-proud short-sleeved white shirts and stiff new black shoes, the wimpled latest graduates from the Ouibomey nursing school, and the clerical staff at the Plon-Plon-Ville Monoprix store had all filed by, the demonstration of Nagon’s military prowess was the parade’s climax.

As the Nagonese Army appeared, the Presidential band crashed into “
Le soleil d’aujourd’hui
” and N’Koda leapt to his feet. A bit uncertainly, everyone else in our row did too. I didn’t dare look behind us to see whether M’Lawa had and would’ve had no way of knowing if he’d done so first or second.

Arms swinging, eight hundred men marched smartly past us in four companies. The first three were shouldering bolt-action rifles and the last one was equipped with rubber truncheons and riot shields.

Then came four jeeps. Then came five rumbling snowplows, their blades thankfully raised. As the last of them passed us, N’Koda abruptly sat down. With some hesitation, so did the rest of our row, though the anthem hadn’t ended.

Once Nagon no longer existed, I don’t know what became of its anthem. Yet “
Le soleil d’aujourd’hui
” lives on tenderly in the middle-aged memories of the former kids on the post. They sing it now at Nan Finn’s Christmas parties:

Frères et soeurs nagonais, sourions!

Vainqueurs dans la lutte contre le temps!

Commençons le travail ensemble—euh!

Dorés par the soleil d’aujourd’hui.

Once again, if you’re curious: “Nagonese brothers and sisters, let’s smile!/Victors in the battle with time/Let’s all get to work together/Gilded by the Sun of Today.”

You’ll have to forgive me, bikini girl. The mimsies have just informed me I’d best excuse myself for a bit.

Posted by: Pam

Proof parody knew the difference between itself and burlesque, at least where Pam’s marital past was concerned: no Irish flag joined the Israeli one in the Plon-Plon-Ville sky. But I remember Rich Warren’s washboard forehead the day he came by the Residence to ask whether I’d mind if he included
The Trampled Vintage
in the USIS library’s collection of significant American plays.

“I know it’s dated and not even his best. But it did win the ’34 Pulitzer for drama.” Trust Rich to use added specifics the way others do “well” and “you know.”

“What, those idiots?” I drawled in the lavish voice I’d discovered at forty had been lurking here and there in Pam’s throat all along. His forehead almost went from washboard to page of a phone book before he caught on that
Glory Be
’s author was joking—well, mostly.

“Rich, of course I don’t mind! So long as you don’t ask me to act in it, I couldn’t care less. But it was thoughtful of you to even wonder if I’d be bothered”—that wonderful little compromise between “annoyed” and “upset.”

“I’ve learned late in life that thoughtful’s my best trick,” he said, going from frown of concern to smile. “Awful football player! Just awful. Ask Laurel.”

I’d gotten the hang of him enough by then to know self-deprecation was his way of being friendly, not neurotic. So I was just letting him know I liked him: “Awful for UCLA, you mean.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Rich, you’ve just stumped me. What
is
his best?” I asked, since I knew no such category.

“For my money?
Lo! The Sh
ips, the Sh
ips
, but don’t trust me. Laurel played Conchita when the Mask and Grease Club revived it in college. You all think she’s so pleasant, but with castanets she’s a spitfire.”

“Then why not get that one? It won a Pulitzer too.”

“Out of print.”

“Poor Murphy,” I mused. “You know I hadn’t thought of him in forever? Then someone”—Jake Cohnstein, but Rich didn’t know him—“wrote me last month he’s doing the word balloons for a comic strip. From Broadway to the funnies, all in one lifetime.”

Rich grinned. “Don’t ask me to feel sorry for him. I’ve spent my whole life in the funnies.”

“I thought that was Buzz,” I said and we laughed. However inevitable, at least in those days, our USAID man’s comic-strip nickname fit him like a dropped anvil except in one abject sense. His lonely hobby was woodworking, which failed utterly to interest even his own sons until he carved Tommie a wooden Tommy gun after the toy one they’d ordered turned up missing in that Sears consignment.

Neither Rich nor I knew our Yankee Doodley crew would soon be coping with a complication that put any hint Buzz was a figure of fun out of bounds. Ridiculous he still was, but too painfully. Parody of John Updike, disliked by me for its literary derivation nearly as much as its boorishness: Ned Finn’s affair with Carol Sawyer. It ground along for four months as the rest of us writhed.

And yes, in case you haven’t noticed: the Finns and the Sawyers. I think the coincidence irritated both families, especially since the tin-roofed American blockhouses of our DCM and our USAID man faced each other with only a low wall between them on a straggling dull street five minutes’ walk from the Embassy com
pound. For one thing, they didn’t remember the Twain books well enough to be sure what sort of jokes they should make. No great lacuna to Buzz, that was a torment to Ned. If seeing Carol’s wide face aslop in voluntary sweat for a change was his idea of great-great-great-grandfather Huckleberry’s revenge, all I can say is I hope his ancestor would’ve been ashamed at how the family had gone downhill.

Dismal enough if we’d all been back in the States, illicit rutting was inexcusable in our little colony, which at its peak could muster under a dozen American adults in all. To spare you confusion,
l’équipe
has skipped over a few of our Embassy’s lesser factoti here on sneakily efficient little daisysdaughter.com: we had an econ attaché too, not to mention two secretaries that the spirit of Camelotian parody, along with a blank spot in Pink Thing’s archives, forces me to rechristen Fiddle and Faddle. Still, what a tiny group we were. In our special circumstances, the real crudity was that he and Carol both knew no one had the luxury of throwing their bad behavior back in their faces—Ned’s often silly and flushed even without booze’s help, hers oinkier than ever.