by Carson, Tom
On the beach in toy helmets, splashing off the Pélérin’s placid bow. “Aaagh!”
“Come on, men. Only two kinds of people are staying on this beach. The dead and those that are going to die!”
“Pan, pan, pan!”
Nine-year-old Nell didn’t even look up from her Enid Blyton book, brought back along with the Smarties in the most recent NAAFI haul from Lagos. “Merci, Amerloques! Vive l’Amérique. Tac-tac-tac. Hilfe,” she called and went back to her reading.
Her brother was the real obsessor, enraged when the other kids on the post faltered. Since Tim Cadwaller knows Sean Finn, he knows something about Ned and Nan’s only son that most daisysdaughter.com readers presumably won’t. (I have no idea how popular or not his odd semi-obscene comics about the superpower diaspora are or ever will be, the forthcoming—so his mother says—and bafflingly titled Yuiop included.) That’s the peculiarity that his first name’s pronounced as spelled: that is, “Seen” and not “Shaun.”
Nan’s still fairly sheepish about that one. The proof’s that I only heard her tell the story once in Nagon and never since. If you’ve known her forty-five years, as I have, you know that’s a statistic without peer in Nan Finn’s anecdotal repertoire, and she’s normally not abashed about telling stories where she’s the fool. Sean’s name had been her worst gaffe back in Frankfurt.
The glorious girl had been stuffing that pillow of future little boy under her dress—I couldn’t imagine her pregnant!—for going on eight months when Cy and Callie Sherman, the mighty Consul General and his wife, came to dinner for the only time at the very junior Finns’ hopeless little apartment. Having settled herself at dead center of their one comfortable sofa, predictably not noticing that left Nan a choice of hard chair or standing, Callie asked the inevitable question.
Or not so inevitable, since Nan’s inward clutch of her head told her she and Ned hadn’t talked names in months. For either boy or girl, the primary mystery back then: we’d have found knowing a baby’s gender in advance pure sci-fi. Still do, really, but obviously not our headache or lookout.
Anyhow, Callie Sherman was asking. That meant people with a proper sense of how the thing was done always had a name ready. At a loss and having used up all the quick-wittedness at her command by instantly rejecting “Adlai”—it was October 1956—Nan’s just-clutched mind leapt at a recent crumb from the Herald Trib. By then a lush if not the world’s fattest heroin addict, Errol Flynn was shooting a movie in Biarritz.
He might be a wreck, but how she’d loved him as Robin Hood. His son was named Sean—in like Finn!—which sounded offbeat but elegant. But the name was much less common then. So much so that Nan Finn had never heard it spoken aloud.
When she blurted “Seen,” Cy cleared his throat. Callie’s chin lifted—oh, Callie, how could you! Yes, even you. That poor girl, so frightened of what you’d make of dinner she’d damned near forgotten she was pregnant at all.
That was when Ned Finn had his great moment in archery. Fitting his Marlboro’s arrow to the bow of his lips, he blew cheerful smoke. “We always thought it sounded better that way. Didn’t we, hon?”
The problem was afterward. With all the pugnacity and bitterness Ned did his best to transmute to good cheer before letting it surface, he wouldn’t back down: Sean-pronounced-Seen it would be if they had a boy. That’s how his gallantry coarsened into another opportunity to demonstrate unrepentant Ned Finn-ness, and of course he never considered—nor did Nan, I think—that their son was in for a lifetime of correcting telemarketers and people to whom he was applying for jobs.
That was the boy who patted Ouibomey’s cannon, begged Nell to cry “Tac-tac-tac” as he jumped monotonously off the Pélérin’s bow and read my old acquaintance Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day until he’d made a tropically dropsical card deck out of the sixty-cent Fawcett Crest paperback Ned had bought at Idlewild. Once in a while I’d consider telling Sean-pronounced-Seen that both Ambassador and Mrs. Cadwaller had been on hand, but was stopped every time by what I’d be in for. Besides, his own dad had too, and surely pilfering that Davy Jones locker of anecdotes would be enough to sate even insatiable Sean.
I still wasn’t prepared for the sight that greeted me at the beach on my forty-second birthday. That would be Nell’s brother gripping a toy rifle, wearing a toy helmet and cartridge belt: nothing unusual there. Unlike the burnt cork smeared all over his face.
I sat up. “Nan Finn, for Christ’s sake! We’re in Africa. How can you let Sean run around playing Amos and Andy? Not that the fishermen care, we aren’t quite human to them anyhow. But my God.”
“Pam, don’t you think I know? He doesn’t think he’s in blackface. He thinks he’s playing One-Oh-First Airborne. That’s what they did when they jumped into Normandy, that’s what Sean does. You of all people should know it’s June 6.”
“I’m sorry. He has got to scrub that off before Cadwaller gets here.”
“I’ll try!” Then she drew up her Nan-knees and hugged them. Looked out to sea, crimped her lipstick.
“What is it, honey?” That too was rash, and not because I was the Ambassador’s wife. She didn’t notice, though.
“Oh, Pam. He screams. He screams, he screams, he screams. I hope the Sawyers don’t hear it, but I know they do.”
I couldn’t help thinking how glad I was the Residence was five minutes away from the Finns and the Sawyers. I’m afraid that wasn’t because I could’ve gotten there quickly in a pinch.
“He wanted me to sew him a parachute,” said Nan. “I’m all thumbs. What’s going to become of him?”
“Geronimo!” Sean yelped, hopping off the sandfloured trunk of a fallen palm. I hunted how to console his mother without egregiously changing the subject.
“Hell, Nan. Back when we were kids, he’s the one who’d’ve had a career all lined up and waiting. Remember Al Jolson? ‘How I love ya, how I love ya—my dear old Swanee…’”
Turning, she tossed her nose up and giggled softly. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Ambassador! I may be pretty hopeless. But I’ll never take that picture.”
Posted by: Pam
One thing you should know about the snapshot of Hopsie at the beach is that I’d never seen it until Nan, too tactful to present it in person, mailed it to me in a manila envelope a few weeks after Cadwaller’s funeral. Used as I was to her little camera coming out on every and any occasion, I’d never thought twice about the forty-odd photo albums that march along the bottom shelf in her den as if she’s trying to recreate the now vanished Berlin Wall. When I asked to see the Nagon scrapbooks the next time we had lunch, she looked shyly pleased.
An hour later, I looked up in wonder. “And we used to make fun of you!”
Unlike Chris, the professional in the family—well, now there’s an interesting slip, Ard—she was only a shutterbug-crazed Foreign Service wife. Yet as I paged through her hundreds of photographs, nearly all black and white with mounting smatterings of color, I had moments of thinking they were the civilian equivalent of the famous ones my ETO acquaintance Bob Capa had taken of Omaha Beach under fire.
Imagine everyone teasing Ned Finn’s giddy better half as she got out her Kodak yet again to click off shot after shot, not all of them unattractive by any means and none deliberately so, of Carol Sawyer during the four months her husband was screwing his want of courage to that sticking place. These were occasions and so must be preserved. The photographer’s feelings were unimportant when the moment was irrecoverable.
Chris never got to Africa, to his regret. A young dad scraping by as an Agence France-Presse stringer in those pre-Amherst years, Cadwaller’s son couldn’t afford the trip and Hopsie knew better than to offer to foot the bill. We saw them on trips to Paris instead. Pivoting in her swimsuit or little A-line cocktail dress under fire, framing our Yankee Doodley colony’s oddly Hopperized Norman Rockwells and
Rockwellized Edward Hoppers in front of the Rothkokomo of Ouibomey’s Portuguese fort or random Jackson Pollockries of palm fronds, Nan Finn was the chronicler of the art of Nagon.
“My God, Nan.” I’d already decided against teasing her about Ehud Tabor’s centrality whenever he appeared, since I had no idea what’d happened and strongly suspected nothing had. Movie fandom by other means, that was all. “What’s going to become of all these?”
“Oh, the kids are still bickering. But Sean says they’re the only thing he’s ever asked for, so…So.”
“Well, well,” I drawled, clapping the album shut. “Parachute sewn at long last.”
By the time Hopsie got back from his swim—along with Rich Warren, he’d been detained in the surf once a couple of the kids on the post begged to clamber onto their shoulders to play Dinosaurs, brawling and shoving as the waves smashed in—the top hat was safely stowed with the rest of his formal wear in the Ambassadorial limo’s trunk. And I’ve got to describe that car, which looks as impressively odd as a scarab butler when it appears in Nan Finn’s photo albums. Unless other small posts took advantage of Andy Pond’s inspiration, there may have been no other Ambassadorial limo like it in the world.
Our bean counters at the Department hadn’t budgeted for a limo, thought our new Embassy’s half dozen Chryslers would be adequate to any Nagonese occasion. Cadwaller dug in his heels, and if you think personal vanity was involved, bikini girl, you’ll never understand your great-grandfather. He was damned if he’d let the United States look as if it did things on the cheap or took Africa’s newest nation less than seriously, and we didn’t yet know what Hopsie’s Soviet counterpart would be rolling around in.
The bean counters just went on farting back at him until Andy, back from Paris by then and reassigned to the Secretariat, had his brainstorm. Even though the Checker Motor Corporation of Kalamazoo, Michigan, was baffled by our request, you could sway a U.S. business in those days by explaining American prestige was involved. Yes, incredible as I know that sounds.
When our Checker rolled off the assembly line, it may’ve been the first in the company’s history to be painted black. It was probably the first to be fitted with twin flagpoles on its hood. It was definitely the first to swing on a derrick in Nagon’s sun-boiled sky before it was lowered and rolled down the Plon-Plon-Ville jetty as the kids on the post cheered. Even Hopsie couldn’t resist when I said we had to repaint its meter’s little tin pop-up flag in Betsy Ross’s honor.
After all, it was originally red—and that wouldn’t do. Once Sean Finn got to work with a six-year-old’s debut squint and his watercolors and we showed Pierre how the meter worked, our chauffeur got a great kick out of making our limo’s tiny Old Glory go “ding” as we pulled up in state outside the Palais du Président, the Hôtel de la Plage, the other Embassies, or the fort at Ouibomey. One thing Cadwaller knew was the distinction between silliness and style. That little tin flag was our announcement that the world’s mightiest nation was also its merriest, as indeed we often were in Kennedy’s time.
God, how the kids on the post loved that car. Even Nell, so often exiled by the boys’ passions: we used to find Barbie dolls propped on the dashboard. As for her younger brother, maybe because for once he’d been treated as skilled, our Checker limo may have been war’s only rival in Sean-pronounced-Seen’s affections. When given permission, he could spend an hour making the jump seats go up and down and toying with the meter whose tin flag he’d painted, and that was how his mother convinced him to scrub off the burnt cork before Cadwaller joined our beach picnic.
“I told him I wouldn’t let him go in the car if he didn’t. And I couldn’t’ve, really, could I?” At the thought that practicality gave her less credit for ingenuity, her face touchingly clouded.
Then Hopsie stepped out in his cutaway, a wrapped package in his hands, and greeted me with a rare but appropriate public kiss. An additional reason for me to cherish Nan’s snapshot of him in his top hat and swim trunks is that it was taken on Pam’s most memorable birthday in Nagon: my forty-second, June 6, 1962.
On the beach? On the beach, which wasn’t just any beach. Brackish tall palms in gray fright wigs and bearded coconut jewelry lined the seaward side of the coastal road like a defeated army long forgotten by nature’s generalissimos and still awaiting its Dunkirk fleet. Beyond them was an impossibly floury strip of iridescent white sand, deserted except for the fishermen hauling in their long nets as waves boomed in all the way from Brazil. I don’t know currents, but that’s how unstoppable they looked, their mile-long blue chess sets swelling from distant pawns to white-tipped rooks before they heaved up and crashed at last, spreading carpets of ermine a hundred feet wide for the sun to parade on.
The sky was as blue as Easter-egg dye and so enormous your eyes begged your chest’s help to measure it. Occasionally decorated by a tiny freighter or trawler docked at its fingertip, the long bony Rheuma of the Plon-Plon-Ville jetty pointed toward St. Helena for the benefit of any clouds ambitious to visit where Napoleon had died. Nearer us was the abandoned tugboat, stubby mast aslant and deck awash even at low tide, that the kids on the post treated as a sort of waterlogged haunted house.
Then came the rock breakwater near the frond-roofed gazebo where we most often made our American camp. Tommie Sawyer and Sean-pronounced-Seen used to squabble over who got to Iwo-Jima the flag both boys insisted should be taken on every expedition, which can be seen slapping Star-and-Stripily away between a palm trunk and someone’s bare shoulder in quite a few of Nan’s snapshots.
To the Nagonese, it was all just la plage. We called this stretch Finn-Sawyer Beach, since they lived nearest. Warren Beach—or Laurel’s Beach, as uxorious Rich tried to get us to call it—was several kilometers east, beyond the jetty and near their lone American blockhouse on the far side of the Plon-Plon-Ville lagoon.
Aside from the fishermen and an occasional religious procession—white smocks and chicken feathers, half Catholicized voodoo and half voodooized Catholicism—we and our red Sears coolers had it all to ourselves. If M’Lawa or his successors had ever found investors to put up some resort hotels and figured out how to lure tourists, by now Finn-Sawyer Beach would make Cancun look as seedy as Monterey. When your Gramela imagines it Cancunized, any thoughts of a lost Eden are doused by a single remembered statistic: a per capita income of $87 per year.
Somehow, I don’t think the fishermen or even the religious processions would mind telling our unspoiled African paradise to go fly a kite.
Posted by: Pam
My birthday fell on a Wednesday that year, but nobody was going back to the office after our picnic unless you count Virgil Scoleri, who’d never left it. Issuing visas to the smattering of well-off Nagonese who wanted to visit the States and the larger but more penurious number eager to emigrate, helping the occasional U.S. citizen who’d not only found his or her way to Plon-Plon-Ville but needed a passport replaced or had run afoul of the police or the Hôtel de la Plage’s concierge, plus staying abreast of political and economic developments in mighty Nagon, so electrifyingly vital to our interests—well, they called it a hardship post, but not because of the workload. There were plenty of days when everyone but the duty officer knocked off by midafternoon.
Luckily for the rest of us, Virgil Scoleri loved to be duty officer. Like all Admin guys, he secretly thought it was his Embassy and could swagger about at will, receiving the mute homage of file cabinets and typewriters temporarily reprieved from serving false masters. Normally the color of cooked pork, he’d gone the color of raw sirloin the day Cadwaller found him, in a stupor of fastidiousness, erasing Ned and Buzz’s penciled jottings from previous months on their shared office’s wall calendar.
Since I was the Ambassador’s wife and it was my birthday, that day the gathering didn’t only include our core group, as I’d come to think of it. The Embassy’s lesser factoti were there too:
Duncan McCork the econ attaché with his grabby short curly-haired wife, the two secretaries I’ve dubbed Fiddle and Faddle. No doubt attractive to their own age group, to Pam’s eyes they were as sexless as government-issue pens in the two-piece bathing suits that advertised their topic-free youth.
Which may tell you middle age and/or my third marriage had changed me, but I digress. Sunglassy and wrists clasped in a few of Nan’s snapshots, the real outsider in our birthday beach gang—and one visibly undaunted by that status, as his own sense of insiderdom was portable and indifferent to ours—was the Agency’s junior man in Lagos. First name Carl and last name redacted, if only by Pink Thing’s apathetic archives, he was in Nagon on one of his periodic wild-goose chases. To Cadwaller’s gratification, our Embassy had no spook of its own; he generally had the regard for CIA that a cabinet-maker would have for an arsonist.
We couldn’t not have invited Carl [Last Name Redacted], since he was putting up at the Residence while chasing his latest wild goose. A few bits of conversational confetti over the last few months, badly glued together in the Agency’s Nigerian toyshop, had convinced him Vasily Shishkov was thinking of defecting.
Oh, it was such silly stuff, Panama! Even if Vasily had been, which I doubt, he was smart enough to know that proclaiming himself Benedict Arnoldov in a post as minor as Nagon would be lucky to get him three paragraphs on page A22 of the WashPost. Then a glum apartment in Bethesda instead of a house in Silver Spring and the same old unairconditioned Zil of a Krupskaya instead of a sensationally hubcapped new T-Bird of a mistress, with nary a book deal in sight. Still, they all had to keep themselves amused somehow.
