Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (38 page)

How the radio station followed the announcement of the Provisional Government—“when that term’s not a lie, it’s redundant,” Cadwaller said—with West Africa’s hit Francophone version of “Blowin’ in the Wind”:
“Combien de routes doit le Nagon marcher/Avant qu’on l’appelle un pays?/Et combien de voûtes doit le Togo chercher/Avant qu’on récolte le maïs?”
After a baffled pause—what now?—it was followed by “Dominique.”

How M’Lawa and Mme M’Lawa were intercepted by the fourth snowplow as they drove on a back road to the Plon-Plon-Ville airport and brought back to the
Palais du Président
under arrest. That wasn’t because N’Koda didn’t want them gone; they were in Nice a week later. He just wanted the Nagonese left in no doubt that they were going into exile on his orders, not escaping.

Besides, even if M’Lawa had talked the pilot into it, the Nagonese Air Force couldn’t have withstood the departure of its only plane. So he and Celeste ended up journeying to their new life on the Riviera on first Air Afrique, then Air France. Economy class, to punish his excesses—not that the distinction was an especially vivid one to most of their former compatriots.

We heard a lot of it from N’Koda himself before sunset. By late afternoon, it was obvious the shooting had mostly stopped. It’s not wholly unlike listening for the rate of popping popcorn to slow. Most of the diplomats at our Fourth of July reception and cookout had gone back to their Embassies to start cabling.

Released from the Residence, though not yet the compound, the kids on the post were vying to outdo each other’s confused shouts of
“À bas Jacqueline!”
and
“Pan, pan.”
Then at twilight the vast Presidential convertible, sans blatting cat’s cradle of motorcyclists, pulled up once again at our reopened gate.

“General N’Koda,” Hopsie said, extending his hand. “We worried we wouldn’t see you today.”

“I’m a respecter of custom, Mr. Ambassador. Nagon’s head of state arrives last.”

Once we’d assembled our info, Hopsie gave Ned Finn the job of writing the cable. It spent a few months as a C Street legend, rivaled only by Ehud Tabor’s light-hearted report to Tel Aviv recommending that the Israelis look into the uses of converted snowplows as terror weapons. Of course that was the idea he revived in earnest as Defense Minister thirty years later, to no end of suffering on the West Bank.

Ned’s cable had no such consequences. Yet from its opening words (“
staff
was celebrating Independence with dependents”) to its repeated identifications of the trotting northern tribesmen as “General
n’koda
’s
force de frappe
”—as in, “The
force de frappe
’s bows and arrows demonstrated to
m’lawa
that the ball was now in the other Agincourt”—it was generally reckoned to be one of his triumphs. Even glum Dean Rusk was alleged to have cracked a smile at the coda:
“no amcits or amgovs or usgov property harmed, though human elements of foregoing much bemused. we’re all right, jack. yours truly finn, u.s. embassy, plon-plon-ville, nagon.”

It won him his dearest wish, too. When Andy Pond’s final message on the subject from the Secretariat reached us a week later—
your cable of 5/7/63 read aloud in oval office to much hilarity. congratulations ned we knew you could do it
—Ned Finn walked on air until August.

Nan Finn told me years later that despite knowing better, Ned couldn’t help nursing a fantasy that the Oval Office’s occupant would request a meeting with that clever cable’s witty author on the Finns’ next home leave. They were due to head back to the States for six weeks’ R&R in mid-December 1963.

Posted by: Pam

I saw Ned Finn get blubbery in his cups a number of times. I heard him cry sober just once, and I had no option but to retreat from the Residence’s porch without a word. That kind of loneliness can’t be cured by companions—male, female, or child.

I too was in shock, of course. We all were for a week. The welcome exception was Virgil Scoleri: our Admin guy’s lack of any imagination had its plus side for once. Less welcome was Dunc McCork’s blitheness. But my shock stayed dry-eyed until the ultimate triumph of the art of Nagon.

The first dislocation is that to us it was night. The cable from Washington clicked over the teletype in an empty Embassy, wasn’t read ’til the following day. We had no TV, as I’ve said. Instead, we nearly all listened to the BBC World Service in the evenings, and that was the reason that first Ned and Nan Finn, then the Sawyers—the Warrens were in Greece by then—stumbled on foot in the dark to the Residence, children still dressed for bedtime in tow. We were expecting them too, with no need for acknowledgment. I’d made coffee by then in the big urn for parties, not the old percolator we used when alone.

The second dislocation is that we were an American handful abroad, surrounded not by compatriots but foreigners. Over the next few days, that was both a reprieve and a burden, for we were suddenly magical. People looked at us as if there were something wondrous in the fact that we were still in Nagon, moving around and speaking as if we were still real.

I’ve never had so many strangers, European and African, invent reasons to touch me. I’ve still never forgotten that after the Finns and the Sawyers, the third and last knock on our door was Ehud Tabor’s. If it was policy, I’d rather not know.

Because we were so few and so far from home, we felt one added incredulity. The thing was, we’d
had
our death on the post for the year. Faddle had been pulled down by her shark just weeks earlier, and if you’re wondering, yes: we’d gone right on swimming. What were the odds of its happening twice?

Nagon’s climate and lack of facilities had left us no choice except to seal Faddle’s remains in the biggest of our Sears-consignment coolers, in which I’m afraid they fit comfortably. It was the same one she’d stocked with Coke on the Fourth of July, wearing Bermuda shorts and popping her bubble gum. Awaiting her last plane home, she’d lain in state for three days in the Residence’s big freezer, and I was enough of a coward that I couldn’t bring myself to fetch anything out of it for weeks even after Faddle’s Sears cooler went back Stateside for burial. It seemed preposterously excessive to lose another member of our tiny Embassy so soon afterward, even though his only job there had been as a portrait in the reception area.

Unbelievably, none of us—not even Ned Finn, or perhaps him especially—had a drink for a week. That was among the reversions to normal life that would’ve seemed sacrilegious, and we had so little control of our emotions on coffee that one gin and tonic could have triggered delirium. Ned even tried to quit smoking, but he was only human and that bobbing Marlboro stayed his equivalent of our Checker limo’s tin flag. The dazed kids on the post agreed to have their toy guns locked away until Christmas, since we couldn’t bear the sight of them or a shout of 
“Pan, pan.”

Nell Finn learned to sew by helping the post’s wives stitch black mourning bunting on the Embassy flags. Carol Sawyer was in charge of that, since she was the seamstress among us. Reducing our wardrobes considerably, none of us women could stand to wear anything alluding to Jackiehood. When grabby short curly-haired Beth McCork turned up at the Residence in a white A-line dress two days into it, we had such trouble speaking to her that she went home and changed.

That same evening, I was on about my twentieth cup of coffee—and smoking one of Ned’s cigarettes too, for all that I’d mostly quit a year earlier—when Nell Finn, sucking her thumb (not regression: no thimbles), came to stand in front of me. Taking advantage of a private new license she’d adopted since my forty-second birthday, she said, “Pamela, how come everything’s
staying
so strange? Is this just what we’re like from now on?”

“Oh, no, honey. It’s just—well, right now
we
don’t know what’s expected of us, either.” It was the only time I’d alluded to our strange dialogue as snowplows clanked toward us on the day of the coup. “All in the same boat at last,” I tried to smile.

Naturally, that week was also bereft of music. Our Scandinavian hi-fi sets gathered dust. Neither Hopsie’s
Victory at Sea
nor Ned Finn’s “Seventy-Six Trombones” nor the one the kids loved—“Dis-donc, dis-donc” from
Irma la Douce—
broke the silence of our American camp. But soon after Nell went out on the Residence’s porch and sat down fists to chin to gaze at and inhale the redolent Nagonese night, I heard her quietly singing,
“Il était un petit navire, il était un petit navire…”

Somehow I knew she meant the
Pélérin
,
which indeed we didn’t take out again for two months. Too reminiscent of a PT boat or a Cape Cod pleasure skiff, even after Christmas came and we let the boys have their toy guns back. They even got some new ones, but of course that Sears consignment had been ordered months ago.

Installed in the
Palais du Président
since July and busy merging the Presidential Guard with the Army, N’Koda pulled up in his inherited Presidential convertible the first morning to pay a formal condolence call to the Embassy with his wife, an upcountry woman as bulky and tribally scarred on both cheeks as Celeste M’Lawa had been sleek and cheek-pecking. Once they’d gone, Hopsie came over to the Residence with a peculiar expression. “N’Koda’s going to give him a state funeral.”

“A memorial service, you mean.”

“No, that’s just it. A funeral. It seems…well! It seems that was the custom in
mission civilisatrice
days when French heads of state died. Binding the colonies to the mother country, and not at all stupid when you think about it. They haven’t done it since Independence, nor ever for a foreign one. But he wants one for Jack.”

“Hopsie!” I said. “You never called him that in your life.”

“No, and wouldn’t have dreamed of it,” Cadwaller agreed. Then he got a look on his face I’d never seen before. “Now I can,” my husband said softly, knocking the ash from his pipe.

Posted by:Pam

The funeral was in the grim Catholic church from
mission civilisatrice
days, flinty and gray as a Breton squall made of stone. It stood on Plon-Plon-Ville’s erratically paved, bicycle-rattling main east-west road, which our Yankee Doodley picnic convoys drove down less often now that the Warrens were gone. Officially the
Boulevard du Quatre Juillet
since N’Koda’s coup, it was still known to all of us, Nagonese and foreigners alike, by its traditional name: the rue d’Écu.

Thanks to its respelling once the church had been consecrated, that was a bowdlerization of its rough-and-ready monicker when the
mission civilisatrice
was no more than a French Army outpost. Back then it was the road where African girls in lantern-lit cribs had serviced the garrison for a few grubby francs at a time, presumably gratified by their introduction to Western economics and also relieved that they got to do so on Nagonese soil rather than in Haiti, Brazil, or Alabama. Plon-Plon-Ville’s own name was another memento, some sergeant’s satiric mess-hall tribute to the newly departed Napoleon III’s most blackguardy cousin.

Checking the protocol, we learned I needed a mourning veil, something I despaired of finding on either short or long notice in Nagon or even Lagos. Carol Sawyer sewed me one, not that I wanted to know where our seamstress had gotten its filmy black gauze and lace trimming or cared to think about where it might’ve been before landing in front of my nose.

Hopsie’d said “funeral,” Hopsie’d said “state.” The coffin was alarming anyway. Covered by a taut and immaculate Stars and Stripes on loan from the Embassy, it stood just feet away from the front pew where we sat. Beside us was N’Koda in full uniform, his medals from Vichy, the Free French, and M’Lawa now augmented by those of the new
Ordre des Compagnons du Quatre Juillet
.
 
Mme N’Koda’s yards of black silk and black kerchief kept looking like a trick of photography, since the tribal costumes her mourning garb mimicked were always of cotton and festively colored.

Dank as a laundry, the church’s interior was as grim as its outside. Grim rough-chinked stone walls, dark banquettes, no stained glass or saints’ statues at all. Over the altar, the Christ on the cross—the work of the grandfathers of Ouibomey’s woodcarvers—may have been unique in all Christendom. That’s because he was nude, his never used (so they say) dowsing rod projecting down toward the coffin. As the Church often did elsewhere, the
mission civilisatrice
’s French Catholic priests had amalgamated local cults’ customs into their liturgy, and an uncocked Christ made no sense in Nagon.

Gazing up at dowsing-rod Jesus through a mourning veil made of Carol Sawyer’s old lingerie, irreligious Pam found herself recalling a line from Sinclair St. Clair’s least favorite poet, apt here for the only time in my experience:
Polyphiloprogenitive, the sapient sutlers of the Lord.
The church’s only other decoration was the portrait placed on the altar, which we’d also loaned from the Embassy; which indeed we had given, since we had no further official use for it. That’s unless you consider the empty coffin decorative, which I might’ve been able to from the back row but peculiarly couldn’t when sitting this close.

The Mass was obviously in Latin. We were in pre-Vatican II days, the detail more than any other that brings back to me how long ago this was. Not having sat through one since Chignonne’s, I relearned how they do go on. We had it easy compared to the two Nagonese soldiers on vigil to either side of the altar, who stayed at a stiff-armed
garde-à-vous
the whole time.

Then the Bishop of Ouibomey—“Bishop of Plon-Plon-Ville” had been too much for Rome—turned to our pew.
“Le Président du Nagon,”
he said, ceding the stage.

Grizzled, sashed, and bemedaled, N’Koda stood stiffly and walked to the coffin. Resting one hand on the flag, he stood there a moment before he about-faced.
“Puisque ce sont nos amis d’Amérique qui sont le plus durement frappés par ce deuil, je demande à Mme Cadwaller, la femme de l’ambassadeur des États-Unis, de traduire mes paroles en anglais.”

Nobody’d warned me I’d be asked to translate his eulogy, and N’Koda later apologized. He hadn’t thought of doing it until he turned around and saw our white-faced American crew dotting the congregation. As he gestured to me to rise, I sat paralyzed until Hopsie’s nudge: “Dammit, Pam. Go.”

Standing, I walked to the other side of the coffin. At least now I faced away from the portrait. My tense nod answered N’Koda’s discreetly raised eyebrows.

“Le Président Kennedy était un bon ami de l’Afrique.”

“President Kennedy was a good friend to Africa,” I said as loudly as I could manage.

“Il a encouragé le peuple nagonais à devenir fièrement indépendant.”

“He encouraged the Nagonese people in their proud independence.”

“Il a créé le
Peace Corps.”

“He created the Peace Corps,” I said and the two goofy kids from upcountry nobody much liked sat up straighter in their denim cut-offs and boots.

“Il m’a envoyé ses meilleurs voeux quand j’ai moi-même pris la responsabilité de poursuivre notre Révolution.”

“He sent me his best wishes when I myself took responsibility for continuing our Revolution,” I said, stammering a bit. Helpless not to recall a merry telegram sent the week
Glory Be
nosed out
Profiles in Courage
on the
Times
bestseller list:
“i’m just glad you’re not a politician. best wishes jack kennedy.”