Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (31 page)

You couldn’t just toss them aside like an Updike paperback before reaching instead for the glowing, rock-steady best of Cheever (the Warrens). Not only would that mean chucking Nan out with the bathwater, but we were all stuck here until our tours’ various ends. You learn fast overseas that the fabric of intra-American life can’t be allowed to unravel. With its talk of sports and old movie stars and its familiar idioms, it’s all you’ve got to keep the unrelieved exoticism from turning excruciating.

The only one who could’ve braced Ned was Cadwaller, who loathed confronting subordinates about their personal lives. Our DCM might be inanely plying his dowsing rod with his back turned to Lake Superior, but his work hadn’t slipped and, except intramurally, he wasn’t disgracing his country. Either of those sins would’ve had Hopsie giving ex-Signalman Finn pungent proof this Ambassador
still
knew how to speak Navy.

Partly at my prodding, since I couldn’t stand it for Nan’s sake any longer, he was getting ready to read Ned the riot act anyway. Then the whole piggish thing unmistakably lapsed the night Carol, wearing a sleeveless flowered dress and a tight-cheeked smile, is sweeping away invisible warders with those stocky Dutch arms and a Marlboro has been left to burn itself out in an accidental-looking ashtray in the foreground.

But while it went on, we all knew. Amiable Rich Warren forced himself to stop laughing at Ned’s jokes—even “Born Toulouse, I’ve lived my life Lautrec,” sung
a
l’improvvisatore
apropos of nothing but surf one night on the merry ledge between first and second drink at the
Hôtel de la Plage
. Laurel looks on more than one occasion as if she wants to
spit
out that canary.

If Buzz didn’t know sooner than most, he should’ve had himself shipped in one of his USAID packing crates to some World Museum of Boneheadedness with the standard stencil on the box: “
a gift from the people of the united states
.” Maybe even the kids on the post knew. And poor Nan: of course the glorious girl knew. How could she not, given that proprietary glow in the background of all three of Ned’s eyes—nature’s plus cigarette’s—as Carol, caught turning in closeup, stares with a nearly crazed facial push-pull of panic and sexual smugness?

At least among the minor players in our old Nagon crowd I’ve bumped into since, the only one who didn’t know was Virgil Scoleri, the Admin guy. For pure bullnecked obtuseness, Panama, not much beats your lifelong bachelor who
isn’t
a homosexual.

“Ned and
Carol?
” he bellowed as all five of his eyes (specs plus half finished drink) bulged. He couldn’t grasp that not only were we at Nan’s Christmas party but Carol was coming out of the kitchen.

Nan still invites her, and that old fool Buzz comes too. We never see the truck that brought Carol or the vacuum cleaner that annually goes into reverse to cough out her husband. Yet while I could’ve sworn Nan herself was out of earshot—at the room’s opposite end, she was trilling like three sitcoms as she bid goodnight to the Warrens and greeted the dear, translucent Bergs from her and Ned’s West Berlin days—I’ve never spotted Virgil Scoleri, the Admin guy, at any of her parties since.

Or anywhere else, but that doesn’t prove anything. It’s just pleasant.

Posted by: Pam

If any
daisysdaughter.com
readers are let down by my apparently declining interest in sharing Pam’s inner tribulations and torments, which I certainly do hope you’ve enjoyed in
l’équipe
’s earlier posts—the anguish, the drama, those fun muddled longings—I invite you to put two and two together. In Nagon, there weren’t any. Never underestimate a happy marriage’s benison.

Instead, when I’d consider my lot in my early forties, the Pamela Buchanan Experiment felt as if it’d been reasonably well achieved. And a damned close-run thing too, as the Duke of Wellington would put it. I well knew how easily my middle age could’ve been a series of shipwrecks: stripping with the shades up? “Red rover, red rover”?

Now, for the first time in my life, I was most prone to boredom when alone in a room. I just didn’t have any special country I was itching to wander in between my own ears. Our frequent book shortages between Sears consign
ments, Lagos trips, or someone’s home leave put paid to my only other reason to crave solitude when I had no literary project of my own underway. I did write a great many letters and was told they were wonderful by Gerson, Jake, Eve and Addison, Nachum ben Zion, and even (I only wrote him the once) Wylie White.

Other than that, when Hopsie was at the Embassy and I didn’t have him to talk to, something I’d still be doing ecstatically if we’d been granted a century on a desert island, I liked spending time with my fellow wives and those of Nagon’s grandees. While it’s true an hour with Celeste M’Lawa would explain rather better than any number of books why her husband turned dictator, she hadn’t had anyone killed and could make any limo ride go by in a flash.

Yes, Ard: I avoided saying “nonetheless.” As for Carol Sawyer, preferring her company to being alone could’ve been a sign of either raving despair or deep contentment: in my case, the second. I had six servants to oversee, things to plan, obligations. The short version is I was an Ambassador’s wife and found that it suited me.

Besides, if you don’t know me by now, then God help you. Nagon, on the other hand, no longer exists, and in the time that remains me I’d like to resurrect a few bits of its memory. As Marlene Dietrich once said in another context—but to my face—there weren’t that many of us over there.

Parody of Twain, much more to my liking: Nell Finn’s brother Sean and the two Sawyer boys in their rolled-up jeans and white T-shirts, poling a raft improvised from the lids of a couple of Buzz’s USAID packing crates around the Finns’ backyard. Like all of Plon-Plon-Ville just then, it was under two feet of water. Monsoon season quickly explained why all of our tin-roofed blockhouses were built three feet above ground, since Hopsie had to roll up his pants past his shins and carry his shoes and socks to wade across the compound from Residence to Embassy for a month. He usually lit a fresh pipe beforehand, nautical being as nautical does.

Parody of suburbia: both Sawyer boys and the Warrens’ two lads racing around with toy six-guns beneath the frown of Ouibomey’s seventeenth-century Portuguese fort. That was the day we all caravaned at the invitation of Nagon’s Minister of Education, Culture, and Tourism to tour the country’s most viable cottage industry, at least in this century: tchotchkes for export to Afrophiles.

Carol Sawyer spent the most time in the stalls where women were sewing floral and faunal appliqués and bunting on bright panels of cloth for wall hangings. Laurel and Rich—and more unexpectedly, Hopsie—lingered in those where craftsmen tapped tiny hammers to assemble copper maquettes of miniature figurines: king under umbrella in palanquined processional, man-woman-child family unit akimbo, the whole thing smaller than a tea tray. Cloddishness being as cloddishness does, Buzz Sawyer offered advice to the woodworkers hollowing out tribal masks and gluing on straw hair dyed purple. As for me, the wooden sculptures I liked best were the statuettes, nude, gaunt, half life size and including the pair who stand guard in my living room today: the African Adam and Eve.

Other than Nell, the kids on the post couldn’t have cared less about copper figurines that weren’t toy soldiers. But the boys didn’t know enough about imitating gunslingers to even yell “Bang.” Instead, they were shouting
“Pan, Pan”—
the French equivalent of “Bang, bang” or “Pow, pow.” The school they went to in Plon-Plon-Ville was a holdover from
mission civilisatrice
days, all instruction in the language of
notre bonne mère la France
.

Nor did they have access to American comic books, and thoughtful Rich Warren looked troubled.
“When we get Stateside, they’re all going to have a hell of time with baseball,” he said. His voice’s dawdle when he got to “all” was for Ned Finn’s benefit. We all knew his unathletic son was a worry, and where was Sean? Probably up on the fort’s ramparts, patting a Portuguese cannon in his private sacrament. He didn’t like cowboys and Indians, just war.

Ned himself didn’t grasp the nicety.
“Hell, Rich, how come?” he burbled. Not from interest, only because he hadn’t thought of a joke that would attract attention back to him.

“Because nobody’s taught them,” Rich explained patiently. “I’ve tried with ours, but they’d rather
‘Pan, pan’
with the other kids.”

Ned guffawed. “Christ. Were you taught? Was I?”

Now that his affair with Carol Sawyer was done, he tried to win the laugh he’d clearly noticed he’d been cheated of at the
Hôtel de la Plage
. “Born Tou-
louuuse
,
I’ve lived my life Lautrec…”

Posted by: Pam

Not parody but proof no one who wasn’t there will ever have a clue what Nagon in 1962 was like: one or two years ago, his old Gramela mentioned to
Qwert
’s Man in the Dark how puzzled I was that movies and for that matter fiction so seldom explored the kinds of lives the likes of us had led abroad. Off the top of my head, I could think of only one movie whose hero was a U.S. Ambassador:
The Ugly American
,
starring Marlon Brando as what a few Foreign Service vets speculated at the time might be an impersonation of Cadwaller. If so, and it strikes me as unlikely he’d have been informed enough to know Hopsie existed, he certainly made a briar-sucking hash of it.

I’d seen the grown-up Nell Finn at Nan’s not long earlier. With her oddly delighted, enthusiastic wistfulness—beats wistful enthusiasm, I agree—she’d mentioned how isolated that omission sometimes made her feel when the Finns came back Stateside. Everyone else her age had scores of period TV shows—and later, dozens and dozens of drivelingly nostalgic movies—that approximated their childhood experience. She had no choice but to cherish a brief glimpse of two frightened State Department children in
The Ugly American
as Hollywood’s only acknowledgment that families like hers had ever existed.

“She’s wrong,” Tim said promptly. “Tell her to try
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
.
I bet that brings it all back.”

I marvel sometimes that he makes a living doing what he does. Never having seen it myself back in the Fifties and only dimly recalling the title, I asked Andy Pond to Netflix or Nextflick it. Sat there bored mindless until Pink Thing blessedly reached for sleep’s mallet.

What on earth were you thinking, Tim? A pack of shaggy-dog stories set in the Old West—at a
cavalry
outpost, for Lord’s sake? Mating rituals, drunken sideshows, and people riding away as everyone lauds life in The Cavalry as if it’s some sort of secret society? You hardly even see any Indians, or I hadn’t before sleep’s mallet came down.

When I called him back to complain, Hopsie’s grandson only snickered. “Oh, well. There’s always
Walkabout
.
I know Sean Finn likes that one.”

“Dear God, and what’s
it
about? No, don’t even tell me. I’ll give it a try if you say so.”

Tim laughed. “No, Grammie, don’t bother. It’s about the kids on the post, not the grownups.”

“Oh, really! Where are they?”

“Nowhere. There aren’t any.”

Posted by: Pam

Parody of cosmopolitanism, overheard by the Ambassador’s wife as, stepping over a disquietingly cluttered but not bad drawing of shellbursts and multiply waving Stars and Stripes, she passed a clutch of Searslessly idle children at our Thanksgiving party in the Residence: “Are you Pan Am?” chirped some young Sawyer, Warren, or Finn to another. “
We’re
TWA. They give you wings, you know.”

Parody of World War Two, bemusing to not only onetime ETO correspondent Pamela Buchanan but onetime Signalman Second Class Ned Finn, onetime Marine medic Rich Warren, and onetime Lieutenant Commander “Hopsie” Cadwaller: all the kids on the post but one were nuts for it. Bored silly with voicing Kraut rat-a-tats and welcoming Frenchmen, Nell Finn volunteered to be a nurse once in a while, but the boys weren’t big on being wounded, much less tended. They all wanted to be killed.

On the beach in toy helmets, splashing off the
Pélérin
’s placid bow. “Aaagh!”

“Come on, men. Only two kinds of people are staying on this beach. The dead and those that are going to die!”

“Pan, pan, pan!”

Nine-year-old Nell didn’t even look up from her Enid Blyton book, brought back along with the Smarties in the most recent NAAFI haul from Lagos.
“
Merci, Amerloques! Vive l’Amérique. Tac-tac-tac. Hilfe,”
she called and went back to her reading.

Her brother was the real obsessor, enraged when the other kids on the post faltered. Since Tim Cadwaller knows Sean Finn, he knows something about Ned and Nan’s only son that most daisysdaughter.com readers presumably won’t. (I have no idea how popular or not his odd semi-obscene comics about the superpower diaspora are or ever will be, the forthcoming—so his mother says—and bafflingly titled
Yuiop
included.) That’s the peculiarity that his first name’s pronounced as spelled: that is, “Seen” and not “Shaun.”

Nan’s still fairly sheepish about that one. The proof’s that I only heard her tell the story once in Nagon and never since. If you’ve known her forty-five years, as I have, you know that’s a statistic without peer in Nan Finn’s anecdotal repertoire, and she’s normally not abashed about telling stories where she’s the fool. Sean’s name had been her worst gaffe back in Frankfurt.

The glorious girl had been stuffing that pillow of future little boy under her dress—I couldn’t imagine her pregnant!—for going on eight months when Cy and Callie Sherman, the mighty Consul General and his wife, came to dinner for the only time at the very junior Finns’ hopeless little apartment. Having settled herself at dead center of their one comfortable sofa, predictably not noticing that left Nan a choice of hard chair or standing, Callie asked the inevitable question.

Or not so inevitable, since Nan’s inward clutch of her head told her she and Ned hadn’t talked names in months. For either boy or girl, the primary mystery back then: we’d have found knowing a baby’s gender in advance pure sci-fi. Still do, really, but obviously not our headache or lookout.

Anyhow,
Callie Sherman
was asking. That meant people with a proper sense of how the thing was done always had a name ready. At a loss and having used up all the quick-wittedness at her command by instantly rejecting “Adlai”—it was October 1956—Nan’s just-clutched mind leapt at a recent crumb from the
Herald Trib
. By then a lush if not the world’s fattest heroin addict, Errol Flynn was shooting a movie in Biarritz.

He might be a wreck, but how she’d loved him as Robin Hood. His son was named Sean—in like Finn!—which sounded offbeat but elegant. But the name was much less common then. So much so that Nan Finn had never heard it spoken aloud.

When she blurted “Seen,” Cy cleared his throat. Callie’s chin lifted—oh, Callie, how could you! Yes, even you. That poor girl, so frightened of what you’d make of dinner she’d damned near forgotten she was pregnant at all.