Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane

by Carson, Tom

  Did even Carol Sawyer, whose wide face was as Dutch as a tulip crossbred with a windmill, try those Breakfast at Tiffany’s bangs that year? No TV set in sight in any photograph: none in the country. But the Scandinavian hi-fi unit ceding its place of honor only to the Finns’ liquor cabinet is a hoot.

  Very enjoyably, we were also parodying ourselves, one of the treats of reaching the prime of life and recognizing that the ship is more or less built. Except for my Hopsie, we were all in our mid-thirties to early forties, the age when the furnishings of one’s impressionable youth—cf. Nan’s “Marlene! Marlene!”—become pleasurable as shared tokens. Anyhow, in the Foreign Service one soon learns that one’s personality on arrival at any new post is bound to be parodic. It’s not only enhanced for quicker ease of recognition by the new pack of strangers but adjusted for climate, local customs, housing, and the social origami of everyone else’s anecdotes of their previous one.

  Parody that Glory Be’s author might’ve been more struck by than most: until our first contingent made landfall, there’d never been an American Embassy in Nagon. No one had preceded Hopsie and me, Virgil Scoleri the Admin guy, and a de-Laureled Rich Warren, along to scout buildings for the USIS library. We docked at the tip of Plon-Plon-Ville’s bony Rheuma, staring at the fishermen’s pirogues drawn up on the beach.

  The Embassy compound was still being built. Until we did it the first time, no flag whatsoever had been hoisted up its new flagpole. No American flag had ever flown with Nagon’s sun-boiled sky as its backdrop.

  The reason we’d come by ship from the Ivory Coast wasn’t only that even Air Afrique only landed every third day. We had supplies in the hold: file cabinets, typewriters, desk chairs, our new President’s portrait for the Embassy wall. For the rest of our time in Nagon, we waited for ships the way you wait for phone calls. Thanks to the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, each few months brought us another delivery of goods from the home country unavailable here: bright red coolers, Scandinavian hi-fi sets and records, sneakers and blue jeans, toy guns.

  Beyond our coastal camp lay the rest of Nagon, unmanned by any personnel of ours other than Buzz Sawyer’s native assistant at the USAID irrigation projects upcountry and a couple of Peace Corps kids nobody liked. (Snobbery about non–State Department representatives of America is a Foreign Service perk.) Beyond that lay a whole strange continent, as yet uninvestigated by any of us but known to tumble on grandly and frighteningly for thousands of miles.

  On display in every American blockhouse, its pages tenderly reprised by the kids on the post long after they’d grown mossy and chipped, the Sears, Roebuck catalogue emblazoned the values, still exotic on this continent, to which we hoped to win all of its allegiance someday. Referring you once again to Glory Be’s opening chapter, “A Landing,” do I really need to say one more word?

  Hopsie did. Nautical as ever, he bought a small motorboat for the Embassy out of the contingency fund six months in. We traded one of our wry private looks once Pam saw the name he’d had painted on it: Pélérin.

  I christened it one day after filling one of our sacramental few Coke bottles with seawater, wearing a kerchief and sunglasses that strike my eye now as a Jackie move blended with a tribute to Priscilla Alden. Then we, Ned and Nan Finn, Buzz and Carol Sawyer, and their kids all clambered in—Hopsie at the wheel, happy to be skippering again—to skim across the Plon-Plon-Ville lagoon for a picnic with Rich and Laurel Warren and their two boys. Showing their usual streak of affable but stubborn eccentricity, the Warrens had chosen to live in the lone American blockhouse on the far side—Rhode Island, as I sometimes called it.

  Posted by: Pam

  Parody of a nouveau riche faux pas: the Finns’ four Nagonese servants, outdoing Buzz and Carol Sawyer’s three and the Warrens’ austere two. Of course the Residence had six, but Cadwaller’s rank clarified that as an official outlay and not a personal preference.

  Realizing that she’d embarrassed herself by adding a kitchen boy to cook, houseboy, and laundryman had the glorious girl clutching her head as soon as Carol congratulated her. Since she obviously couldn’t fire Kindassou, there all four of them are in their white-buttoned white uniforms with nine-year-old Nell and her younger brother. Louis’s extra prestige as the cook is advertised by his toque and prosperous bulk.

  “Pam, what was I thinking? I just didn’t know how I was supposed to say no,” Nan wailed once she and I were safely out of the country, meaning we’d borrowed one of the Embassy cars and drivers to zip over the border for a quick shopping run to Nigeria. We had no PX, so the Brits’ Harrod’s-parodic NAAFI store in cosmopolitan Lagos was our backup between Sears consignments.

  “No to who, Nan? Not Ned.”

  “No, Louis. He’s been doing this for a lot longer than I have. I’ve only ever hired babysitters, and I didn’t know Kindassou was his cousin.”

  “So are the other two, I expect. But you know it doesn’t really matter,” I told her. “So you and Ned are shelling out eighty dollars a month instead of sixty, big deal! That’s probably raising the per capita income by something like fifty cents. Anyhow, your cook’s better.”

  Remember, I was the Ambassador’s wife: that was rash. I didn’t need to add than Carol Sawyer’s for Nan’s eyes to quicken with covenized glee. We’d been in Nagon long enough that I knew I could trust her not to rely on my favoritism for leverage when Carol was around.

  Then she clutched her head again, contemplating an unfortunately mental NAAFI shopping list. “Oh, God! Those pretend M&Ms the kids like. In the tubes. Help me. Smilies? Sillies?”

  “Smarties,” I said and we both laughed. “ ‘Pretend’?” I added, and Nan grew even younger.

  Parody of the cold war: innocently and now there’s a first, the Soviets had located their Embassy compound in Ouibomey. Nobody in Moscow had grasped that it was only the ceremonial capital and the rest of the diplomatic community and all the Nagonese government’s ministries were in Plon-Plon-Ville. But their home-office bean counters wouldn’t let them scrap the little Kremlin they’d built next door to the leper colony, so they showed up at big receptions looking fairly wilted. They’d had to tool like mad up the coastal road for an hour in their unairconditioned (more scrimping) black Zils.

  They couldn’t very well not attend. Just as Dobrynin was later in Washington, their Ambassador was the dean of the diplomatic corps. Beating us by a week, the leisurely Brits by two, and the resentful, foot-dragging French by a month, Shishkov had been the first to present his credentials to M’Lawa at the unfinished Palais du Président. Stuck waiting in Abidjan for Virgil Scoleri the Admin guy, we’d been pinning our hopes on the West Germans, but Rommel would have turned in his grave at the way that fool Klaus Schlitten lingered in Cairo.

  Relations between Cadwaller and his Soviet counterpart were impeccably frosty, the more so as they rather liked each other. That didn’t stop Hopsie from leaping forward, pipe-wreathed and happy in his white linen suit, to shake glum but optionless Vasily Vladimirovich’s hand with crackerjack pleasure at our first diplomatic shindig after the Cuban missile showdown.

  Speaking of frosty, the Soviets’ Buzz Sawyer wasn’t noticeably more competent than ours. I’ll never forget how that obese Odessan, who’d rented a band—M’Lawa’s own, for hire between Presidential events: it was the only one in the country—blanched in his obsidian suit when a Soviet trawler triumphantly offloaded the USSR’s latest gift to Nagon. To us Americans, those six spiffy new snowplows were marvelous to watch as the enormous things, blades blazing, swung overhead one after another on derricks against Nagon’s sun-boiled sky.

  One ended up on a concrete plinth in front of the Palais du Président as a sort of trophy of Soviet interest. It was machinery, after all, and the trawler had also delivered a hefty shipment of cement. At least the Snowplow Affair let Buzz off the hook for the eight thousand screwdrivers USAID had shipped to a c
ountry that probably had fewer than eight thousand screws to use them on.

  Parody of Pam’s marital past: just a couple of blocks nearer the beach than ours on the Boulevard St. Michel, the name unchanged from mission civilisatrice days, the tiny Israeli Embassy’s blue and white flag flew. Plenty of countries didn’t even bother to have diplomats in Nagon, since there just wouldn’t have been much for an Ambassador from Costa Rica, say, to do. But the Israelis put in an envoy wherever they had recognition. Ehud Tabor was their man, handsome as a rock pool and black-haired as a jaguar. I can’t help noticing that I look unusually uninteresting and marginal when he’s nearby.

  Poised as he was, Ehud’s most ambitious event turned out to be Israel’s biggest disaster until the opening days of the Yom Kippur War. New movies usually reached Nagon a year or more after their release, and we never knew what we’d get. I still remember the oddity of seeing my old friend Eve Harrington dubbed into French in The Magpie Did It in the dank dark of the Bijou Castafiore, Plon-Plon-Ville’s largest movie house. So Ehud had to go to considerable trouble to get a print of Hollywood’s bouquet to his nation’s birth: the lavish Panavisioning of Ari ben Canaan’s headstrong early years, shrewdly stopping short of the post-1948 marital tribulations that might’ve turned the concluding reels into Cat on a Hot Tin Kibbutz.

  Or maybe those were just missing, since the reels that did turn up in Plon-Plon-Ville weren’t numbered and the projectionist had to sequence them by guesswork. Our own Yankee Doodley colony included, the whole diplomatic corps and Nagonese cabinet—fortunately, President M’Lawa was in Paris—were sitting on folded chairs in the Israeli Embassy’s only large room, from which they’d had to cart out the buffet tables as we waited outside for a couple of Ehud’s locals to turn it into a screening room. Ehud had no choice but to go ahead and hope for the best.

  Oh, God! Haifa, Jerusalem, shipboard, Gan Dafna, Jerusalem again, all seemingly cued by Nell Finn playing hopscotch. The movie opened with a prison break, but it didn’t work out: soon everyone we’d seen escape was back in stir. They declared independence, then bombed the King David Hotel in an apparent ruse to lure the British back. The opening credits burst upon us an hour or so in, triggering a doomed hope we might get our bearings. Then they declared independence again, briefly—“Seen it!” someone called—and two or three people came back from the dead. After some inconclusive fighting, everyone ended up behind barbed wire in a detention camp on Cyprus.

  “C’est tout ce qu’il y a. Il n’y en a pas plus,” the projectionist said resignedly. We all staggered out into the night like zombies.

  “Ehud!” an instantly cigaretted Ned Finn called, fumbling with matches. “Old man, I just want to tell you how personally sorry I am the whole Zionism thing didn’t work out.” Marlboro lit, he glanced around whimsically: “I wonder what they’ll use this building for now?”

  “Well! A cinema would be my guess, Ned. It seems to have a future there,” said Ehud, too experienced not to be droll but swiftly taking refuge in a cigarette of his own. Then he raised the hand forking it: “Herr Ambassador, thank you for coming.”

  A stricken face stared back. “Please, under the circumstances understand I can voice no opinion. None,” Klaus Schlitten said and departed.

  “What the hell, Ehud. It wasn’t that bad. Just like life!” I told him. “Anyhow it was fun to see Jerusalem again.”

  “Oh, yes! I’d still like to visit,” said Nan Finn eagerly. “Ned too, of course. Wouldn’t you, honey…?”

  Posted by: Pam

  The wonder and pity of the art of Nagon, Panama, is that we were surrounded each and every day by geography and people movingly determined not to be a parody of a country. On the map, Nagon was just one of the Nigeria-dwarfed crinkles near the notch of the African elephant’s ear. Yet a flag is a flag and a national anthem is an anthem.

  Yes, they might’ve had to turn to a French vexillologist—one guess why he’d prospered between 1958 and 1962—for help designing the flag. Its patterning of Africa’s eternal green, red, and yellow still flew proudly over Plon-Plon-Ville and Ouibomey, as well as from a maze of white poles outside the Palais du Président on the coastal road between them. And yes, they might’ve been ridiculed in the Paris press when the anthem’s author wrote asking Cocteau’s blessing as an Academician on the lyrics, but it was bellowed nonetheless at every public event. Well into adulthood, the former kids on the post could still sing it, even though Nagon no longer existed:

  Le peu-ple nagonais s’élève!

  Le peu-ple nagonais s’élève—euh!

  Des siècles de souffrances sans trêve—euh!

  Sont brûlées par Le soleil d’aujourd’hui.

  If you’re curious: “The Nagonese people arise!/The Nagonese people arise!/Centuries of suffering without respite/Are burned by the Sun of Today.” Yet the Nagonese people had arisen, if only in Plon-Plon-Ville’s sports palace to wildly cheer France’s formal cession of its colony, mere weeks before the Palais du Président started to do the same. I doubt a single American didn’t mutter “Uh-oh” at his or her first sight of that thing bulking up along the coastal road. Its resemblance to a massive box of sugar cubes was so striking that Ned Finn used to wonder if one good monsoon would turn it into a puddle.

  It cost three million dollars, which may not sound so pricey until I inform you Nagon’s budget that year was eight. The rectangular vats of water lining the coastal road opposite it were supposed to complement and reflect the maze of flags facing them, but they had no drainage and were soon covered in thick green scum. The detail that earned Hopsie’s “Well, well” as we mounted the steps to our first reception there was that the main entrance featured a revolving door with a ten-foot wingspan.

  That was Jean-Baptiste M’Lawa’s own idea, copied from his favorite hotel in Nice. He’d been the only real choice for President, the plebiscite a mere formality. The chunky Polytechnique-trained economist had led the delegation that negotiated Nagon’s freedom. Written largely in Switzerland during his Geneva period, his tome Les problèmes de l’Afrique moderne had influenced the Constitutions of three other former French colonies by the time his own country’s turn came.

  He could even have argued, not unreasonably, that his massive box of gleaming sugar cubes was just what le peuple nagonais needed for daily proof they were a true nation, on a par with not only Liberia or Laos but even notre bonne mère la France—the anthem’s lyric in colonial times, rhyming touchingly if none too convincingly with confiance. Yet not many of them saw it, and you can guess what subtracting three million from eight gets you in a country that has only one paved road running longer than five kilometers. At the time, Nagon’s per-capita income was $87 a year.

  We didn’t need to drive too far north on the inland trunk road, whose asphalt gave way to ochre mud just past the sports palace and Army barracks, to find villages whose children had bellies like canted Rand McNally globes and legs like compasses. Their mothers’ breasts had stretched into tattooed tube socks stuffed with two desiccated tangerines. Round mud huts with thatched roofs clustered near baobab trees on bare plain. Hump-necked cattle so bony that they didn’t look likely to supply much but the future skins for tom-toms hobbled and swayed here and there. The kids on the post got very excited when we spotted a lioness looking up at us from the guts of an eviscerated antelope.

  Our reason for making that trip was a doctor who’d written Buzz Sawyer asking if les États-Unis d’Amérique were feeling flush enough to splurge on buying him a bicycle. We brought him a Vespa instead, which turned out to be dumb. Where would he find gas, how would he pay for it? Even though the older Sawyer boy glowered like a candle in shorts when Buzz unracked Tommie’s bike as a substitute, he’d been slotted to get a new one for his next birthday and that Sears consignment was due in six weeks.

  Well after the sugar cubes got stacked up on the coastal road, co
nstruction languished on the Assemblée Nationale. At the time of M’Lawa’s overthrow, the delegates were still meeting at the Hôtel de la Plage, venerated by the kids on the post because it had real ice cream. The École d’Administration did open, but M’Lawa didn’t even wait until its first class of white-shirted, pen-proud students had graduated before he ordered the cadres of French administrators who’d stayed on after the handover to go home. He did it because Le Monde hadn’t mentioned the new nation of Nagon even once in its generally sober columns since the business about writing to Cocteau for approval of “Le soleil d’aujourd’hui”’s lyrics.

  God, how the kids on the post loved that anthem. But my most dramatic memory of it is instrumental. Along with Ned and Nan Finn, Cadwaller and I were in the reviewing stand when Nagon marked the first anniversary of independence. Fretful of protocol, the glorious girl had asked me to ask him if it’d be all right for her to bring her Kodak. Since the Finns’ seats were two rows below ours and hence even farther away from M’Lawa’s canopied chair in the top one, Hopsie thought it would. He still knew Nan well enough to warn me to warn her to take pictures of the parade only: no pivoting to gaily snap us, Vasily and Krupskaya Shishkov, the Schlittens, or Ehud Tabor, and above all not the President himself. He had bodyguards.

  Then I took my seat next to Etiènne Maurice N’Koda. Decorated by both Vichy and the Free French and still wearing those medals, he was the grizzle-bearded former French Army sergeant who now headed the nation’s armed forces. After the bright-kerchiefed and singing upcountry village women with their baskets of manioc, the students at the new École d’Administration in their pen-proud short-sleeved white shirts and stiff new black shoes, the wimpled latest graduates from the Ouibomey nursing school, and the clerical staff at the Plon-Plon-Ville Monoprix store had all filed by, the demonstration of Nagon’s military prowess was the parade’s climax.