Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (35 page)

He squinted down the beach cheerfully. “You know, the fishermen are
awfully
far away. There isn’t a religious procession in sight.”

“Oh really?” I said as I waved at the departing cars.

So we propped my birthday present where we’d be able to keep an eye on it from the water. It looked nice on top of our swimsuits. As my fifty-two-year-old husband and I ran down to the surf, we smacked past the sand castle Fiddle and Faddle had turned into a golem, its sand feet now lapped by the returning tide. Since they’d left as well, we never did learn which captain or king he was their beach-party tribute to.

Posted by: Pam

If you go by Department records, Cadwaller’s Ambassadorship—the first to Nagon in U.S. history, one reason he prized it above India in some ways—ran from mid-1961 to mid- ’64. In Pink Thing’s archives, which I’ll go on considering truer than calendars until Potus or sundown puts paid to me, the bean counters’ mistake is their failure to grasp that 1962 lasted twenty-three months in Nagon. Finding itself unusually happy there, it decided to stick around awhile.

Our 1962 was when M’Lawa still occupied the
Palais du Président
and also when our core group was all present and accounted for. The first departure—the Warrens, for Athens—came in what bean counters would call August  1963. That was all of a month before Faddle’s shark pulled her down off Finn-Sawyer Beach when she went out too far one day, taking that living emblem of 1962’s fluff prematurely as well.

And yes, since I’m not wholly immune to middlebrow yardsticks: 1962 was the year Bobby Kennedy came to Nagon. Mind you, we got him for just seven hours, since Nigeria beckoned. He slept in Lagos that night, and did Carl [Last Name Redacted] ever dine out for years on
that
Agency briefing.

Carl’s luckless station chief was in Philadelphia on home leave. It’s only fair to add he shot himself for wholly unrelated reasons, and Ned Finn was just skylarking when he used to claim otherwise. By the way, I’m sure among themselves they talked every bit as uncharitably about diplomats as we did about spooks.

Since we knew we had just seven hours, never had
“Le soleil d’aujourd’hui”
sounded so endless as it did once the first jet ever to land at Plon-Plon-Ville’s airport had rolled to a halt. (Yes, they’d built a new runway for the occasion. Now they had two.) As Cadwaller and I stood beside
Président
and Mme M’Lawa, I blessed Nagon’s skimpy military budget. Ruffling that forelock as we’d all seen him do, just never in color, Bobby had no idea he was stalking past the entire Nagonese Army, stiff forearms perpendicular to their bayoneted bolt-action rifles in the old French style.

Our DCM had had his work cut out for him talking N’Koda into excluding the snowplows of the
1er Régiment Blindé
. Not only would explaining their presence to a baffled Robert Kennedy have used up a good hour of our seven, but the Soviets might well have claimed it as a belated feather in their cap. Whatever else I’ve had to say about Ned Finn on daisysdaughter.com, he was good at his job. If the price of keeping those snowplows off the tarmac was the creation of the Nagonese Navy, I’m sure the Pentagon never missed those two mothballed minesweepers.

Since the kids on the post wanted to be reviewed too, Cadwaller himself had taken charge of another negotiation to ensure the helmets, the toy rifles, and the wooden Tommy gun stayed out of sight. On top of that, Hopsie’d had to mollify a Buzz Sawyer disconsolate at being denied an upcountry caravan to tour USAID’s best irrigation project by granting
forty-five precious minutes of our seven hours for a slide-show simulacrum that had the rest of us wanting in anticipation to chew our eyes out with our own teeth.

Here they came, and I was taller than he was. My big hat—protocol, not preference, Panama—probably didn’t help. Those blue eyes didn’t like to look up unless he was the only man sitting down in a room where everyone else was standing.

“Welcome to Nagon, Mr. Attorney General.”

“Thank you, I know where I am, Mrs. Cadwaller,” he snapped back.

It’s conceivable it was meant as a joke. Yet even if he’d had the instinct for drollery—and no way I’d know—he didn’t, unlike his brother, have the right face
for it. Some men don’t.

Or the voice, since to be humorous and peremptory at once only works among courtiers. We were, and I damned well do include myself, professionals. If Nixon had won in ’60, we’d all have performed the identical chore.

Similarly, some broads have great gams and some don’t, my guess as to one reason Ethel Kennedy’s greeting was no huge improvement. I’d seen her eyes narrow as she and Bobby came off the ramp, but what was I supposed to do? Though my hemline was more than respectable, we were in equatorial Africa, where sheath cuts were hell before nightfall. The Department’s advisory had said nothing about affecting Amish dress to put our VIP’s Mrs. at ease.

As we shook hands, she squinted. “I’ve broken my sunglasses,” Ethel Kennedy said. “Do you have a pair I could borrow?”

We both knew I did: the pair in my other hand, which I’d naturally removed as soon as the jet’s door hatch swung open. I passed ’em over, she poked ’em onto her nose. “Thank you,” Ethel Kennedy said. And I had to take her to Ouibomey.

That wouldn’t be until after our formal session with M’Lawa at the
Palais du Président
, and to be fair her little laugh when she was escorted to our Checker limo wasn’t at all unpleasant. Still: it was
our
Checker limo. Not only beloved of Sean-pronounced-Seen Finn but envy, not that she’d have believed it, of the Soviets.

Perhaps it’s in her husband’s favor that he seemed to pay no attention at all to what kind of car he was in. Then again, unlike Ethel and me, he wasn’t on one of the jump seats. Realizing I’d forgotten something and hoping neither of our guests had enough French to follow, I spoke over my shoulder.

“Pierre! Faut pas faire le truc avec le petit drapeau aujourd’hui, compris?”

“Oui, madame.”
Hopsie gave me a nod, but Pierre’s day and opinion of Kennedys were both spoiled. He enjoyed making Old Glory pop up on the meter.

“I don’t understand why he can’t just ride with us,” said Bobby, meaning M’Lawa. Of course we were doing the whole motorcade bit, the vast convertible whose rear seat contained the
Président
’s broad back and Celeste M’Lawa’s scarf rolling ahead of us in a mobile cat’s cradle of motorcyclists. “It’d save a lot of time.”

“Sorry, sir, it wouldn’t,” Cadwaller said. “At best you’d just have the same conversation twice. M’Lawa’s very proud of the
Palais du Président.
”

“Christ. As if I care whether I meet Kosygin at the White House or, or—Dixie Liquor.” Opened at the Georgetown end of Key Bridge the year Prohibition was repealed, that stubby little place—booze shop to New Dealers, Fair Dealers, Ike’s-grins, Camelot, Great Society, and now Potusville—has a charm only District lifers can fully appreciate: nongovernmental longevity.

“Sir, I’m sorry. It’s different,” I explained, leaning forward as we hit a bump in the coastal road. “Your brother didn’t build it himself.”

“Oh, yes he did,” Ethel said, a Kennedyism if I ever heard one.

“Dixie Liquor?” I said. Whenever Hopsie tried to reproach me, he ended up weeping with laughter all over again.

Posted by: Pam

Luckily, Bobby was too distracted to notice the sixth snowplow on its concrete plinth in front of the
Palais
as we drove through the gates, though I think Ethel gave it an odd look from her jump seat. But the prelunch session with M’Lawa didn’t go well. Overflowing one of the only five Louis XVI chairs in Nagon—most likely the reason Celeste was indisposed—he said, “Please tell Mr. Kennedy I’m sorry his President has only one brother.”

That was Hopsie’s translation, and Bobby’s face tightened. “He’s got two. He had three. Christ! I’ve been briefed on this man. Do you mean to tell me he
hasn’t
been briefed on the President of the United States?”

He’d misunderstood M’Lawa’s point.
“Moi, j’ai des millions.”
I have millions. “Every man in Nagon is my brother. Every woman in Nagon is my sister.”

“Well! There must be a mother in there somewhere,” said Bobby. “I hope.”

Cadwaller’s brows arched at his impatient glance. “You won’t want me to translate that, sir.”

“When I don’t want you to do your job, Ambassador, I’ll tell you.”

Even he may’ve realized that was a mite rude. Over lunch with the Nagonese Cabinet, which found Mme M’Lawa miraculously re-un-indisposed, he made amends of a sort. Eyeing the local version of
choucroute garnie—
the meat was wild boar—he turned to Cadwaller. “Peasant specialty?” he murmured, giving the grin I’d started to think he saved only for newsreels.

“Technically, yes, sir,” Hopsie murmured back. “But the only real one they’ve got is no food whatsoever.”

Wearing my sunglasses (of course I never got them back), Ethel wasn’t at all bad in Ouibomey. She was good at the nursing school, very good at the leper colony. I think she was bored at the Portuguese fort, where our guide laid it on thick about the legend that the walls of its dungeon still ran wet with blood one night a year:
des siècles de souf
frances sans trêve
, as “
Le soleil d’aujourd’hui
” had it. I’m pretty sure she never grasped what the priest at the snake house was trying to tell her about the python. She’d seen eight countries in nine days.

She did her best at the artisanal shops, concentrating hard before she picked out two pretty good maquettes of copper figurines: “Not really my area,” she’d mumbled to explain her frown. “Jackie can be pretty merciless, you know.” The woodcarvers’ African Adams and Eves, male dowsing rods and female genital pineapples in full frontal view, never had a chance of boarding her jet. She was still Catholic, and the 1962 version of the white woman’s burden—cosmopolitanism—had its limits. It’s just as well she never saw the Nagonese version of Christ on the cross in Plon-Plon-Ville’s oldest church.

Then we got back in the one of the Embassy Chryslers whose air conditioning Virgil Scoleri had determined still worked best, Hopsie having retained our Checker limo and Pierre to trundle Bobby back to the Embassy compound after our lunch at the
Palais du Président
. As we started back down the coastal road, ahead of us were two motorcyclists on loan from M’Lawa’s cat’s cradle, impressively clearing no traffic at all. Behind us were another Chrysler for the security boys, a third for the traveling press, the Portuguese Ambassador’s green Mercedes, an old Citroën holding Nagon’s Minister of Education, Culture, and Tourism, and an even older Renault that sardined Plon-Plon-Ville’s one newspaper editor, Nagon’s one radio-station manager, the lyricist of “
Le soleil d’aujourd’hui
” and West Africa’s one female pop celebrity, whose Francophone version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” was a regional hit. “Dominique” was the flip side.

“What on earth do you do for real shopping?” Ethel Kennedy asked me. “Clothes.”

“Oh, for everyday things, we’ve got Lagos. Or the Sears, Roebuck catalogue! But for anything special, we usually wait until we’re back in the States on home leave.”

“How can you stand it? I’d go nuts. Just bonkers. Loony, insane, certifiable.”

She gnawed at a cuticle. “Say! That’s pretty. Is that the Atlantic or the Mediterranean?” Ethel Kennedy said. “Can you ask the chauffeur?”

Posted by: Pam

Taking Ethel to Ouibomey got me out of attending Buzz Sawyer’s AID slide show, which I heard from a canary-popping Laurel Warren had been marred by too many views of Buzz’s older son hands to hips in front of grateful Nagonese. Then came one mention too many of what a bright, concerned lad Tommie was.

“Do you want me to adopt
him? I’ve got plenty of children,” Bobby icily barked. Not our seven hours’ highlight for either Buzz or Carol, since of course that was the muddled, irrational dream.

I also missed the visit to the USIS library, where Bobby instantly checked whether
Profiles in Courage
was on display and one of Rich’s prize English speakers got halfway through reciting “Hiawatha” from memory before Bobby said, “Please tell him we have another event.” However, I was on hand for the failure of Ned Finn’s joke, which all of us felt bad about for his sake.

He’d been searching for the right one for weeks. If the Sawyers had fallen prey to a fantasy of having Tommie appreciated as a quasi-Kennedy in African exile—
recognized
,
might be the
Prince and the Pauper-
ish word—Ned’s dream was Ned Finn-ish. He wanted to uncork one quip so amusing that Bobby might repeat it to his brother back at the White House. Like so many men his age in or out of the government, Ned had never had a President he identified with until now.

Aware it couldn’t be too impertinent, he wanted his joke to convey a nearly ineffable mix of wry aplomb, fealty, and metaphorical connection. When he tried his favorite on one of the only two people on the post who’d met JFK (the other was Cadwaller), I told him I thought Jack would be tickled. What we’d overlooked was that it’d never reach Jack except through Bobby, whom neither Hopsie nor I had ever met.

Worse, while Ned had worried he might have to force the setup himself, our visitor gave him the perfect opening. That made our Yankee Doodley crew’s humor warrior look as chuffed as if he’d just been seated on a charger.

“And in emergencies?” Bobby asked once he’d gotten over his incredulity that we had no telephones, just the teletype machine for cables. When we needed to make a phone call, we drove over to Plon-Plon-Ville’s main exchange and paid our money like the rest of the queue. “Revolution, natural disasters, Amcits who need evacuating. What do you do then?”

This was it: Ned Finn’s apotheosis. I’d never seen him so happy without either a Marlboro or a drink. “Well, sir,” he said, “if all else fails we’ll probably just carve a message on a coconut.”

(We geezers get so tired of
explaining
things, Panama! Jack Kennedy had done that to signal his crew’s survival after his PT boat was sunk in the war. The coconut sat on his desk in the Oval Office. Everyone knew it. Back then, familiarity with all things Kennedy was as axiomatic as
Roseanne the Umpire Slayer
is to you.)

Kodak ready, Nan giggled. Since Ned wasn’t in Coventry anymore for boffing Carol Sawyer, Rich Warren readily chuckled. Robert Kennedy’s eyes, on the other hand, could’ve turned the Caribbean into a skating rink.

“Are you making fun of my brother’s war record, Mr.—uh, Finn?” he asked in the deadly tone that treating a question as a pure request for information can have. “Do you even have one yourself?”

Ned was staggered. “Oh, no, not at all,” he muttered, meaning only to disavow any mocking intent but inadvertently killing the sailor who’d Morse-lamped
Reported chaos on beach
from the bridge of the USS
Maloy
on the morning of Pam’s twenty-fourth birthday. “Oh, why, uh, sir”—he’d just stopped himself from saying “hell”—“it was really just a joke about Africa.”

“This continent has terrible problems,” Bobby upbraided him, which certainly helped clear things up for everyone in the room. Oh, we’d had our suspicions—but we just couldn’t
know
.
“I don’t think whimsy’s an attitude many Africans would appreciate, do you?”