Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (34 page)

“Hell, what’s the problem?” Carl [Last Name Redacted] grunted peevishly, showing teeth amazingly unchipped by his spectacular tumble down the ladder from intruder to complete boor.

“No problem, old man. She gets homesick,” Ned Finn said, crumpling an empty pack of Marlboros and patting his jump suit for another. “We’ve all been in Africa awhile. Is Nigeria your first foreign posting, Carl?”

Which was the closest Cadwaller’s adulterous DCM ever came to justifying his behavior in front of Hopsie and me. And yes, Ned at least had the grace to look troubled as his wife, awkwardly reaching out to vague blue air for nonexistent banisters, descended toward where the
Pélérin
was beached.

If you knew Ned Finn, though, the flicker of self-disgust that followed did him no credit. Rather than provoke him to change his ways, it was far more likely to end up massaging his conviction that he was the tragic protagonist here, his sessions with broad-beamed Carol Sawyer a Byronic protest against life’s confinements. I didn’t want to watch the facial mutations I was sure were coming: stoic compassion for his own much misunderstood Ned Finn-ness, self-indulgence retooled as sodden valor by his jaw’s new set as he lit his next cigarette. That otherwise intelligent man’s oft-foiled narcissism fouled his brain with rubbish sometimes even when he was sober.

As Carl [Last Name Redacted] began explaining that he couldn’t really talk about his other postings, Finn, I stood up. “Sorry to leave you, gents. This old broad needs some exercise too.”

“Going for a hike of your own, dear?” Hopsie asked.

“Have we even met? No, a siesta. I’ll be worn out by the time I wake up.”

Posted by: Pam

My towel, straw hat, and tropically swollen Dell paperback of
The Guns of August
in tow, I picked a spot where Ned and Carl [Last Name Redacted] would be inaudible unless an invasion fleet suddenly materialized offshore and got them shouting. After I’d spread the towel out on that millenia-milled sand’s warm cake batter under a couple of palms whose coconuts I made sure had fallen—no point inviting Fran Kukla-ish punctuation, was there?—I barely pretended to commune with Pam’s better as a historian before trading propped elbow for chin-pillowing forearms.

Though out of earshot, I still had a view of the whole of our now scattered American crew. Soon enough it included Carol Sawyer plodding her red-suited way up to our picnic site. No dummy, she’d taken care to be seen ebulliently mothering her own two boys and one dragooned Warren down near the surf beforehand. When it came to deflecting opprobrium, Ned favored alibis, Carol credentials.

The next time I looked over, she was as happy as a teapot, enjoying a rare stint as our Yankee Doodley colony’s sole incarnation of the female principle. Normally, Nan, Laurel, and I would’ve been tossing that job around like a beanbag: the Ambassador’s wife because of her status, Laurel thanks to her wit, Nan with any reminder that she was the glorious girl. Yet we were all three absent for once, and even short grabby curly-haired Beth McCork was an asterisk near the stove-in tugboat, midway through one of her tense little squabbles with Dunc about where she’d hidden his balls and when our econ attaché might next get a glimpse of them.

The backsliding tide giving them gilded new yards of wet sand to do it with, Fiddle and Faddle were crouched with mute giggles, remolding a sand castle the kids on the post had left unfinished to the shape of a man. At the moment, red suit perched on red cooler, Carol Sawyer—who knew enough to know she played the part better with her mouth shut—was queen of Nagon’s America.

Even by Ned and Carol’s low standards, this broad-daylight stunt was atrocious. She’d brought the broad and he’d brought the daylight, and if I knew Ned, resentment at our man from Lagos’s superiority had found a characteristically convoluted outlet. Not only a bachelor, at least on Nagon jaunts—no one was sure if he’d diddled Fiddle, but we could all tell he’d addled Faddle—Carl [Last Name Redacted] was a traveling salesman whose suitcase’s contents by some lights had more zest than ours. CIA’s unfailing belief it could claim greater glamor invited ridicule but was also impervious to it, leaving Ned torn between the jokes he could make and the envy he felt at protection from being one.

Whatever he and Carol had done and wherever they’d done it—if only for Sean’s sake, he’d damned well better have known our Checker limo was sacrosanct—the urge to shove something in somebody’s face was unmistakable. He didn’t care that the face ended up belonging to his wife.

To my further annoyance, the Ambassador’s wife had been their Get Out of Jail Free card. Nobody would have violated Pam Cadwaller’s birthday with a public scene no matter how many oinks we overheard from the wings. For Cadwaller to make an issue of it, a bare-heinied Ned would’ve practically had to bellyfish Carol in front of me, her bared paps no coins from Ali Baba’s cave—odd image, Ard, have I used it before?—but two much-chewed and slobbery pacifiers. And yes, if you’re wondering: I knew I was distracting myself. It miffed me that I had no real justification for feeling hurt by Nan’s choice.

Given the available cast, who could she have asked except Laurel Warren? Despite being Pam or even Marlene, I was still Mrs. Hopsie when the chips were down. She couldn’t have picked me as her confidante without violating protocol and, for all she knew, putting her husband’s future at risk. She had no idea in what terms Cadwaller and I might discuss things and people when we were alone. Nobody did and even you, daisysdaughter.com readers if any, never really will.

When I looked down the beach, Nan and Laurel were already nearly to the abandoned tugboat. I knew they’d turn back before reaching it, since Beth and Dunc McCork were still putting the dumb back in dumbshow and would guess something was wrong even if Nan’d managed to compose herself by then.

Unknown to the glorious girl and her consoler alike, little Nell Finn was wandering behind them, either pining for her mom to remember she too could play nurse or just hoping for a respite from being the only American girl in the world by appearing in a painting finally captioned
Three American Women on The Beach, Nagon, 1962
.
As the fishermen hauled in bushels of still living silver in their long nets, the Finns’ new black dog thought it was all a grand game.

Sioux-Sioux? No, that’s got to be wrong. The mutt’s jokey handle was some other Ned Finnism, since he named all their pets: revenge on four legs, I grasped, for Nan pronouncing Sean “Seen.” Then faraway Laurel reached out—stumbling, consoling?—to grab tiny Nan’s arm.

“Lech,” I contentedly told the sand under my chin, so fine-ground just exhaling could faintly but decisively repattern it. Pam not only knew she was quoting but, to her mild surprise, caught on she’d just accepted who’d said it to whom thirty-five years ago. Under the skies of an Africa that neither dead Daisy nor the Lotus Eater had ever seen, I could afford to make jokes now that I’d avoided those shoals.

However, Finn-Sawyer Beach wasn’t done demonstrating the art of Nagon. After my quiet Pampiphany, I must’ve dozed a good while. Indeed for over an hour, since Hopsie’s squeeze of my shoulder woke me to a visibly different edition of the ocean’s peacock courtship of the sun. Our whole Yankee Doodley crew was grouped around me: Ned and Nan, Rich and Laurel, Buzz and Carol, even the misfit McCorks and Fiddle and Faddle. Nell and Sean Finn and the Warren and Sawyer boys.

Only Carl [Last Name Redacted] was blissfully missing. Since he had to pretend Lagos needed him badly, he’d impatiently borrowed one of the Chryslers to drive back to the Embassy compound.

Hopsie had clearly waited to wake me until just a few minutes before things would’ve devolved into blatantly detaining everyone for sleeping Pam’s sake. Common enough at some posts I’ve seen where the top man and his spouse, particularly if he’s a political appointee and not a career FSO, treat the whole staff as servants blended with movie extras, exercising that kind of Ambassadorial prerogative never sat well with Cadwaller. As for me, I was muddled, since I’d spent all afternoon slipping in and out of recalling that this was my birthday. I was about to get a stranger reminder of it than anyone except my husband could’ve possibly known.

“Back among us, Pam? No bad dreams to speak of?” he murmured tenderly, too low for anyone else to hear, as he passed me a champagne flute. Then stood: “Do we all have champagne? All right, Kids on the Post. You can sing now.”

Happy to be singled out as performers, since they weren’t champagne drinkers—your great-grandfather knew how to give even children their moments, Panama—they took a clustered big breath.
“Happy birthday to you—happy birthday to you…”

Can’t you guess what startled me? Sean-pronounced-Seen, face now scrubbed of burnt cork but still wearing tin helmet and clutching toy rifle. The older Sawyer boy’s wooden Tommy gun, sawn and glued together from a USAID packing crate by ineffectual but not thoughtless Buzz. The younger Warren lad’s plastic-foliaged toy helmet and pistol, the older one’s prized child-size Army fatigue pants. Sean only the most persistent of them, keeping it up well after the others had tired, they’d all been playing D-Day.

It had been eighteen years since Pam Buchanan had waded ashore at the Vierville exit. Since the beachmaster shouted at Eddie Whitling and me to get out of the way of the first trucks to reach Omaha as a lone Spandau still hammered. Since Eddie had gotten a few stunned first-wave survivors in life-jacket cummerbunds to sing this same song to the goony broad passing out Lucky Strikes they were too dazed to smoke.
“Happy birthday to you—happy birthday to you…”

The children now singing would never believe and might even be surly at learning that this, not their cries of
“Tac-tac-tac
” and repeated debarkings from the stubbornly innocuous
Pélérin
,
was the closest they’d gotten all day to recapturing the real D-Day. It may’ve been as they sang that Pam’s blue-gray eyes, once a budding pudding’s twin Civil War memorials, acquired the secret name daisysdaughter.com readers know them by today: the mimsy borogoves.

As always happens when children sing “Happy Birthday” to grownups, their voices tangled over what to call me. Sean and both Warrens’ bland “Mrs. Cadwaller” bumped the Sawyer boys’ truculent “Mrs. Ambassador.” (Thanks, Carol, and no: no love lost on my end either.) Both were outdone by Nell’s audacious peal of “…dear
Pamela!
,” for which I cherish her. For a shining brief moment, winding up in West Africa in a skirtleted swimsuit and now grayed brindle mop as champagne grazed my lips and Barbara Tuchman sat near me seemed like the only conceivable outcome to all my yesterdays.

Hopsie later apologized for not having anticipated the echo. While he naturally knew about my Dog Green serenade, he hadn’t considered the kids on the post’s outfits, which after all were their standard togs at play. With his usual skill, he decided to ensure my forty-second birthday would coin a fresh memory and not just a cartoon overlay of an existing one.

“It’s nice to hear you all sing together,” he told them. “Can we have one more? Something from here—from Nagon.”

Emboldened by the smile I’d flashed her when she sang out
“Pamela!,”
Nell Finn appointed herself concertmaster. Happily, she started chirping with an indifference to the other kids as eerie as if she’d been blind:
“
Il était un petit navire, il était un petit navire—qui n’avait ja!, ja!, jamais navigué…”

Before the boys could join in—or worse, didn’t, unwilling to let the lone girl lead them—Hopsie stopped her with a pleasant chuckle. “I think that one might be a bit long. Bit grim, too! I’ll never understand how the French came up with a children’s song that’s a charming tribute to cannibalism.”

“Believe me, I do,” I drawled, then added
“Et toi aussi, non?”
to Nell to console her. She giggled, luckier than I’d been at Chignonne’s. However deranged a companion Sean Finn might be as they grew up, she’d never feel like the only American
child
in the world.

The other kids had made up their minds now. Jostled only by Sean’s squelched “Oh, say can you see,” Sawyer and Warren boys—and soon Sean and Nell, too—gave me my relic, now theirs as well:

“Le peu-ple nagonais s’élève!

Le peuple nagonais s’élève…”

“Perfect.” Excusing himself with a smile, Hopsie returned as they finished the anthem, carrying the package he’d been holding when he stepped out of our Checker limo in his cutaway. “Happy birthday, dear.”

I unwrapped a maquette of copper figurines from Ouibomey: a queen on a palanquin held up by eight bearers. Then I looked closer and gasped.

“
Hopsie!
How did you…”

It was us. As you know, Panama, from fondling what three generations of Cadwallers call “The African Queen,” the woman on the palanquin is a depiction of me as I was in Nagon. The bearers are Nan and Ned Finn, Carol and Buzz Sawyer, Laurel and Rich Warren—and Fiddle and Faddle, making Dunc McCork’s rank-conscious brow wrinkle when his and Beth’s turn came to examine it. But they’d only been in-country six months and our Embassy secretaries predated them.

“Nan gets all the credit,” said Cadwaller. “I borrowed a few of her snapshots.”

Of course they aren’t detailed resemblances. Yet the Ned has a mimed cigarette’s copper stub in his mouth, the Buzz’s long neck and pot belly are mimetic, and the Rich has UCLA
scratched on his chest. Aside from Nan’s miniature camera, the women are recognizable mainly thanks to their varying heights and some try at reproducing their hairdos, though I doubt it gave Carol vast joy that she’s most individuated by being the stockiest. As for me, my identity’s signaled by the crossed Buchanan gams as I lean forward with upflung arms, something I could’ve sworn I’d never done in life until I came upon myself making the identical gesture from an identically seated position for Nan’s Kodak during our first New Year’s Eve party at the Residence.

Hopsie himself isn’t depicted. But all things considered, I think you’ll agree he needn’t be.

Nan was tickled by her contribution, Ned visibly thirsting for more than champagne. Fiddle and Faddle were transfixed by themselves. Laurel was wry—“Are my arms really that skinny?”—and Carol was a beaming Medusa of seething resentments. Buzz was mostly just gloomy at the prospect of having to do the whole goddam thing over in woodwork before his wife’s first birthday at the next place they were stationed in.

The most delighted of us is missing from the maquette, as are all the other kids on the post. I’m sorry, Panama: I don’t mean to deprive you. In my note for Andy Pond, “The African Queen” has been earmarked to Nell Finn—or Professor of Comparative Literature Helen F. Eichler, as she is today. She was still tilting it this way and that like a tiny ship on her palms’ sea when the rest of us started packing the Chryslers with towels and Sears coolers, picnic baskets and wine and champagne bottles, the flag and the boys’ weaponry.

No great huge hugging farewells, obviously. We’d probably see every last one of each other tomorrow and back here at Finn-Sawyer Beach in a week. Or Warren Beach, since Rich and Laurel had gotten Cadwaller’s agreement to take their boys home on the
Pélérin
.
It looked like a fun ride, skipping off to go far out around the Plon-Plon-Ville jetty’s long Rheuma toward the lagoon whose breadth kept the Warrens’ privacy intact.

“Hopsie,” I murmured, “would Pierre mind another half hour? Once they’re all gone, let’s go for a swim.”