Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (36 page)

“I realize that.” Ned was still poleaxed. “But, well—as you can see, there aren’t any present.”

“And the one I just saw right outside that window?” Bobby asked keenly.

“The night watchman is deaf, sir,” Cadwaller said.

Posted by: Pam

What a prick. Spin it any way you want, but
l’équipe
stands fast: what a prick. I know Bobby’s biographers say he grew more compassionate after his brother’s death. Daisysdaughter.com has no reason to disbelieve the conversion’s pain or sincerity. May I point out that a good few of us manage that pole-vault to adulthood based on less of a loss.

Afterward, we tried as best we could to bathe our seven hours in dazzle. The Nan Finn of today recalls it as marvelous, but her husband dragged himself around like a sick cat for three days. I caught Carol Sawyer screaming at Tommie, normally the apple of her eye. Cadwaller’s carefully worded report to the Department—while he had no C Street enemies he knew of, this one would be scrutinized on Pennsylvania Avenue too—was able to judge the Nagon stop as at best a middling success. He was pleased when I told him Ethel was good at the nursing school and better at the leper colony, since that allowed him to praise her role unreservedly. Hopsie left out my request for my sunglasses.

Though I found Jack more enjoyable on our brief acquaintance, I’m not sure but what America is better off
imagining
Kennedys. The beauty was ours and they only instigated it. Our mimicry was the real magic, since we were acting out our ideal of them without constraint by truth’s cold shower. It must be wrenching for the current members to realize they’re doomed to emulate a clan that never existed.

“M’Lawa’s no good,” Bobby told Cadwaller as our Checker limo ferried them back to the airport. Cat’s cradle of motorcyclists, etc. “Anyone else in line for the job?”

Ethel gaped in her Jules Verne agony. “The night watchman? Bob, even for you, that’s—”

“No, dear. The President we met this morning. What’s his opposition?” Bobby asked Cadwaller.

Hopsie started explaining the animosity between Nagon’s upcountry tribes and the coastal one most endowed by France’s
mission civilisatrice
to which M’Lawa and nearly all of the Cabinet belonged.
Bobby cut him off: “No, no. A man. All this means nothing unless there’s a man. Is there one?”

“N’Koda’s a northerner. But he’s ex-colonial too, and so far the Army’s stayed loyal.”

“Why didn’t I meet with him?”

“You shook hands at lunch. But M’Lawa would no more permit a private meeting between you than—if you’ll permit—you’d give Jimmy Hoffa the keys to your home.”

“You did ask, though.”

“As best we could without myself being declared persona non grata and N’Koda put under house arrest. It’s not much to my liking, but you should know that by now our reputation precedes us.”

Bobby let that one go. “Who keeps tabs on N’Koda?” he asked.

“Ned Finn.”

“The coconut man? Oh, I want someone else on that file.”

“That’s really not possible. I don’t have a chief of political section here,” Cadwaller explained. “It’s Finn or no one.”

Probably the first time since ’61 I’d heard him call Ned by last name only. But we were in a car with Robert Kennedy, and Hopsie had been in the Navy.

“Can’t you do it yourself?” Bobby asked.

“Not without shredding my relations with M’Lawa. Of course I’d do it if instructed that was our policy.”

“Then assign someone else,” Bobby said. “I don’t give a damn about your bureaucratic State Department chart.”

“No reason why you should, sir. But N’Koda might, since he does know who’s senior after me at this post,” said Hopsie blandly. “I’m afraid your only option would be to have Ned sent home and replaced. I’d call that drastic.”

Bobby gave him a surprisingly friendly smile. “That’s not a word that comes up too often around me. But if all it takes is a phone call to Rusk, then—”

“Obviously my resignation would be on the Secretary’s desk the next morning,” Hopsie explained. “That’s unless our teletype machine here broke down. I do enjoy making my own personnel decisions, but I’ve never thought I’m indispensable.”

Bobby looked at him. “Family money, Ambassador?” he guessed after a moment. Now,
that
was class.

“Oh, I’m sure Pam could keep me. Any book on the horizon, dear?”

“You’re a writer, Mrs. Cadwaller?”

He looked worried. New information, late in the day. People like Robert Kennedy are likely to treat whatever hasn’t come up as something you’ve been withholding. Never mind that you withheld it because you know you’re minor in the big panorama.

“Oh, hell, yes. When I feel like it,” I brayed. “I just haven’t felt like it since your brother beat me out for the Pulitzer.”

“Excuse me?” Words not too many people ever got to hear from Bobby Kennedy’s lips, I’ll wager. Starting with the family maids.

“Mr. Kennedy,” I said. “When you see the President next, would you mind terribly giving him Pamela Buchanan’s affectionate regards?”

“Pamela Buchanan? Who the hell’s she?” Ethel asked.

“Me. As I was then, Mrs. Kennedy. As I was then.”

Posted by: Pam

Since the downside of dealing with a restless mind is often its upside within hours, most likely the Attorney General had forgotten about getting Ned axed by the time they hit Lagos. Cadwaller never heard a peep from Washington about it. And despite Bobby’s antagonism to M’Lawa, I know for fact that the coup that took place toward the end of our twenty-three-month-long 1962 (it was July ’63 by the calendar) bore no White House fingerprints. Our house blusterer Virgil Scoleri was sure he smelled Russians, but his evidence was so stupid even Dunc McCork told him to put a shoe in it.

God, how the kids on the post loved that coup. It was the first one any of us had witnessed, and we had front-row seats at its outbreak. That wasn’t by accident, since it was timed for our Embassy’s annual Fourth of July reception and cookout. Besides the usefulness of knowing where M’Lawa and the entire Nagonese Cabinet would be, along with most of the diplomatic corps, N’Koda had an idea the date would make it harder for the U.S. to complain about a revolution. Let alone withdraw foreign aid or refuse to recognize his new government, which he confessed to Hopsie and me over drinks at the
Palais
some weeks later had been his chief worry.

“And the Soviets,
Monsieur le Président
?” Hopsie asked.

“Mr. Cadwaller, you know
parfaitement bien
they’ll recognize anybody. Only Americans play hard to get.”

The Fourth was sacred anyway to the kids on the post, since to them America was a distant planet they’d been expelled from and this was its orbit’s perihelion. I looked forward to it too, but getting ready for the damn thing was no bowl of cherry bombs. In Nagon, coming up with a day’s worth of uniquely American-type activities that didn’t involve toy helmets and wooden Tommy guns, along with a menu of uniquely American-type food, wasn’t the easiest chore, and I never missed our nonexistent PX more. Useful the rest of the year, the Brits’ NAAFI store in Lagos was no help on Independence Day.

Among other things, we could get hot dogs, hot-dog buns, and ground beef for burgers. Hamburger buns were the missing Grail. The Finns’ cook thought he’d solved that one year by rolling beef patties in the shape of hot dogs, but even the kids on the post couldn’t eat them. They looked too much like turds.

That was when I decided nothing was
really
more American than Southern-style fried chicken. Not only could we get the birds, which weren’t plump but were edible. For a reason neither we nor the Nagonese ever, ever alluded to—not even in front of the seventeenth-century Portuguese fort at Ouibomey, and definitely not on the Fourth of July—our cooks took to the spicings as if they’d, um, invented them.

Dear God, you children can be slow. What do you think those enterprising Portuguese had been exporting, anyhow? Whose blood do you think legend claimed still ran wet one night a year on the walls of the Ouibomey fort’s dungeon? Did you even wonder what that line in “
Le soleil d’aujourd’hui
” about “centuries of suffering without respite” alluded to? At the time, U.S. visa and immigration policy gave considerable preference to applicants with blood relatives who were American citizens. Every Nagonese who applied had thousands of them. They just had no way of knowing, much less proving, who any of them were.

The kids on the post moped at being deprived of guns outright, so I compromised by confining them to the Revolutionary War. Hadn’t I seen a Sears-consignment toy musket in Sean-pronounced-Seen’s arsenal? He looked exasperated: “It’s a
Civil
War musket, not a Continental smoothbore. And they take so darn long to reload!”

Some tyke, that Sean. No wonder Nan and Ned looked woebegone every time they remembered him. He only decided the musket and the now moldy tricorn hat Hopsie’d worn as John Paul Jones would do once Laurel and Carol aroused his jealousy by outfitting the Warren lads and the younger Sawyer boy as the Spirit of ’76.

Carol sewed a blue panel with a colonial circlet of thirteen stars over the fifty-state version on one of the Embassy flags. The Presidential band wouldn’t part with its snare drum, so Laurel improvised with a tribal tom-tom from Ouibomey and two wooden kitchen spoons. The flute was from Ouibomey too, but a flute is a flute is a flute.

Nell Finn was glumly contemplating life as Betsy Ross again. Unlike Carol, she couldn’t sew any more than Nan could, which had made the whole act a bit Marcel Marceau at our last Fourth of July. She brightened up when I suggested Pocahontas and lent her a copy of
Glory Be
bookmarked at “A Princess.” Instantly, Tommie Sawyer decided he’d be an Injun brave, but don’t misread puppy love there. By some peculiar boyish measure, he now outranked them all—Pocahontas had no tomahawk.

Bunting on the Residence, bunting on the Embassy. Paper red-white-and-blue bouquets topping each corner of our compound’s walls. On the Residence’s tin roof, portraits of JFK and wife and M’Lawa and wife flanked the banner bearing Pam’s favorite motto and her cheerful translation: “
the declaration of independence makes a difference/
la déclaration d’indépendance, sans blague
(Herman Melville,
romancier Américain
,
1819–1891).”

Sousa,
Victory at Sea
, and “Seventy-Six Trombones” playing on speakers. Aromas of hot dogs and sizzling fried chicken, so strong in the heat they almost knocked out Plon-Plon-Ville’s two olfactory constants: motorbike fumes and cowflop. In Bermuda shorts, Faddle was stocking our biggest cooler with Coca-Cola, a rare treat even the kids on the post understood must be saved for the sacred day. They usually made do with the local French product. In the Embassy’s garage, we’d set up our movie screen and 16mm projector to show the creaky Hollywoodisms we could rent without busting our budget: Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig in
Pride of the Yankees
,
Ronald Reagan as George Gipp in
Knute Rockne, All American
.
I’d decided a sports theme was both Yankee Doodley and benign.

When I stopped by to get the name of his projectionist, Ehud Tabor laughed helplessly. I didn’t really expect anyone to play close attention to the movies, though. They were just there to forestall people thinking there was nothing to do, the eternal crisis of the Plon-Plon-Ville diplomatic corps.

The drill was that our American gang was on hand by midmorning. Then the diplomatic corps showed up, followed by the Nagonese Cabinet. The vital thing was that M’Lawa—and in our final year, N’Koda, who continued the tradition—had to arrive with the full crowd on hand, and heaven help the luckless Nagonese official who dawdled in after him. As for us, our main worry was that Ned Finn might be not only well oiled but leaking lubricant by the time the
Président
arrived. Luckily, he too remembered the nearly disastrous timing of his Nagonized version of
West Side Story
last year—“
M’Lawa!
Say it soft and it’s almost like freedom/Say it loud and you’ll weep as you read ’em”—and was sticking to beer.

He wasn’t bad with the new Soviet Ambassador, either. Vasily Shishkov having left us for Buenos Aires, his replacement was a fellow named Goliadkin we all thought was a charlatan. The Central Casting types often have that effect, precisely because you meet them so rarely.

“I’m glad to see at least a few of your indigenes survived,” Goliadkin said heartily as Nell trotted by in her Pocahontas feather, rolling a Sears-consignment hula hoop. Nobody’d told her what they were for. “What tribe is the little girl from?”

“She’s a Kulak,” said Ned offhandedly. “Unless you’d like something harder, Mr. Ambassador, would you care for a Coke?”

“I’ve counted coup!” Tommie Sawyer bopped Nell with his tomahawk. “Now I’ve got to scalp you. That’s the rule.
C’est la règle, Nell, tu le sais.
”

“Tommie, ouch!” Nell said firmly as he tried to wrestle her to the ground. “
Et de quoi parles-tu, hein?
We don’t scalp girls in our tribe.”

“Oh,
ta gueule
.
C’mon, please? I’ll let you be the first to give
la lèpre
money outside Monoprix next time. Nobody else has hair long enough to get scalped.”

“Oh, go scalp your mom.
Fous-moi la paix
,
Tommie! I’m Pocahontas. Now give me back my hoop.”

“I can’t scalp my own mother,” said Tommie disgustedly. Sometimes, I think Buzz and Carol’s bid to get him recognized as a quasi-Kennedy wasn’t so far-fetched.

“Monsieur le ministre!”
I called. “So good of you to come. How goes
l’Édu
cation, la Culture et le Tourisme?
”

Of course he wanted to reminisce about Ethel’s visit to Ouibomey, our increasingly tattered social habit ever since. “Naturally, we dream of
her
,” he said with a reverent nod up at Jackie’s photograph on the roof.
“Elle parle Français, vous savez?”

“Bien sûr.”

Then that beetle-browed shy academic—he’d written his dissertation on Alfred Jarry’s African influences—surprised me. His eyes grew furtive, his voice intense. I was no longer engaged in social diplomacy, but the political kind.

“Mrs. Cadwaller, please pass this on to Washington. If I could host Jacqueline Kennedy here for even one day”—a no longer academic finger went up—“a coup of that magnitude might make me the most popular man in the country. I share the New Frontier’s ideals. I—”

Philippe Paul-Christophe P’kapa was interrupted by the opening notes of “
Le soleil d’aujourd’hui
.” In Nagon, it only played on one car’s horn, as if the blatting of a cat’s cradle of motorcyclists wasn’t enough of a giveaway.

“
Monsieur le ministre
,
please excuse me. I must greet
le Président
.”

“As must we all. Sooner or later,” the Minister of Education, Culture, and Tourism said resignedly as M’Lawa, massive in a boxy electric-blue suit, exited his Presidential convertible. Its buttery Catskills honeymoon bathtub of rich leather upholstery made it the only car grander than our Checker limo in all of Nagon.