by Carson, Tom
As the Nagonese Army appeared, the Presidential band crashed into “Le soleil d’aujourd’hui” and N’Koda leapt to his feet. A bit uncertainly, everyone else in our row did too. I didn’t dare look behind us to see whether M’Lawa had and would’ve had no way of knowing if he’d done so first or second.
Arms swinging, eight hundred men marched smartly past us in four companies. The first three were shouldering bolt-action rifles and the last one was equipped with rubber truncheons and riot shields.
Then came four jeeps. Then came five rumbling snowplows, their blades thankfully raised. As the last of them passed us, N’Koda abruptly sat down. With some hesitation, so did the rest of our row, though the anthem hadn’t ended.
Once Nagon no longer existed, I don’t know what became of its anthem. Yet “Le soleil d’aujourd’hui” lives on tenderly in the middle-aged memories of the former kids on the post. They sing it now at Nan Finn’s Christmas parties:
Frères et soeurs nagonais, sourions!
Vainqueurs dans la lutte contre le temps!
Commençons le travail ensemble—euh!
Dorés par the soleil d’aujourd’hui.
Once again, if you’re curious: “Nagonese brothers and sisters, let’s smile!/Victors in the battle with time/Let’s all get to work together/Gilded by the Sun of Today.”
You’ll have to forgive me, bikini girl. The mimsies have just informed me I’d best excuse myself for a bit.
Posted by: Pam
Proof parody knew the difference between itself and burlesque, at least where Pam’s marital past was concerned: no Irish flag joined the Israeli one in the Plon-Plon-Ville sky. But I remember Rich Warren’s washboard forehead the day he came by the Residence to ask whether I’d mind if he included The Trampled Vintage in the USIS library’s collection of significant American plays.
“I know it’s dated and not even his best. But it did win the ’34 Pulitzer for drama.” Trust Rich to use added specifics the way others do “well” and “you know.”
“What, those idiots?” I drawled in the lavish voice I’d discovered at forty had been lurking here and there in Pam’s throat all along. His forehead almost went from washboard to page of a phone book before he caught on that Glory Be’s author was joking—well, mostly.
“Rich, of course I don’t mind! So long as you don’t ask me to act in it, I couldn’t care less. But it was thoughtful of you to even wonder if I’d be bothered”—that wonderful little compromise between “annoyed” and “upset.”
“I’ve learned late in life that thoughtful’s my best trick,” he said, going from frown of concern to smile. “Awful football player! Just awful. Ask Laurel.”
I’d gotten the hang of him enough by then to know self-deprecation was his way of being friendly, not neurotic. So I was just letting him know I liked him: “Awful for UCLA, you mean.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Rich, you’ve just stumped me. What is his best?” I asked, since I knew no such category.
“For my money? Lo! The Ships, the Ships, but don’t trust me. Laurel played Conchita when the Mask and Grease Club revived it in college. You all think she’s so pleasant, but with castanets she’s a spitfire.”
“Then why not get that one? It won a Pulitzer too.”
“Out of print.”
“Poor Murphy,” I mused. “You know I hadn’t thought of him in forever? Then someone”—Jake Cohnstein, but Rich didn’t know him—“wrote me last month he’s doing the word balloons for a comic strip. From Broadway to the funnies, all in one lifetime.”
Rich grinned. “Don’t ask me to feel sorry for him. I’ve spent my whole life in the funnies.”
“I thought that was Buzz,” I said and we laughed. However inevitable, at least in those days, our USAID man’s comic-strip nickname fit him like a dropped anvil except in one abject sense. His lonely hobby was woodworking, which failed utterly to interest even his own sons until he carved Tommie a wooden Tommy gun after the toy one they’d ordered turned up missing in that Sears consignment.
Neither Rich nor I knew our Yankee Doodley crew would soon be coping with a complication that put any hint Buzz was a figure of fun out of bounds. Ridiculous he still was, but too painfully. Parody of John Updike, disliked by me for its literary derivation nearly as much as its boorishness: Ned Finn’s affair with Carol Sawyer. It ground along for four months as the rest of us writhed.
And yes, in case you haven’t noticed: the Finns and the Sawyers. I think the coincidence irritated both families, especially since the tin-roofed American blockhouses of our DCM and our USAID man faced each other with only a low wall between them on a straggling dull street five minutes’ walk from the Embassy compound. For one thing, they didn’t remember the Twain books well enough to be sure what sort of jokes they should make. No great lacuna to Buzz, that was a torment to Ned. If seeing Carol’s wide face aslop in voluntary sweat for a change was his idea of great-great-great-grandfather Huckleberry’s revenge, all I can say is I hope his ancestor would’ve been ashamed at how the family had gone downhill.
Dismal enough if we’d all been back in the States, illicit rutting was inexcusable in our little colony, which at its peak could muster under a dozen American adults in all. To spare you confusion, l’équipe has skipped over a few of our Embassy’s lesser factoti here on sneakily efficient little daisysdaughter.com: we had an econ attaché too, not to mention two secretaries that the spirit of Camelotian parody, along with a blank spot in Pink Thing’s archives, forces me to rechristen Fiddle and Faddle. Still, what a tiny group we were. In our special circumstances, the real crudity was that he and Carol both knew no one had the luxury of throwing their bad behavior back in their faces—Ned’s often silly and flushed even without booze’s help, hers oinkier than ever.
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 w
ith 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 consignments, 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.
