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

by Carson, Tom

  “Any kids of your own, Carl?” I brightly asked Langley’s man from Lagos early on, before Hopsie’d shown up in our Checker limo and while Sean Finn, miniature paratrooper, was still skulking around and yelping “Geronimo!” in blackface. Screwing a glass of white wine turned zephyr-pale by sunlight into sand, he’d just hefted a coconut and mimed lobbing a forward pass at a couple of puzzled Warren or Sawyer boys, apparently without considering it would’ve thwacked their small torsos like a cannonball.

  Because Agency hands all got their dialogue from the same TV hack advised to stick to the corsair note, he bared jaunty teeth and said “Probably.” I gave a wry snort out of habit, meantime surprised by my aversion. It took me years to recognize that what made the core group the core group was that we were the ones who were parents, Hopsie included thanks to invisible Chris and me by the osmosis of stepmomhood. If not, more osmotically yet, by Glory Be, which Rich Warren had thoughtfully included in the USIS library without asking me first. Even dim Dunc McCork and grabby short curly-haired Beth might’ve made the grade if they’d had children.

  Astonishing me, Carl [Last Name Redacted] next had the gall to lift one wrist-clasped hand to put the brakes on Rich as he approached with a wine bottle to refill Pam’s beckoning glass. Such things just weren’t done on Finn-Sawyer Beach.

  “Something I’ve been meaning to ask you, Mrs. Cadwaller,” he said easily. “Can I trust the boys at the Residence?”

  Oh, crap. Did they never tire of this folderol? The things I did for you, Hopsie! We’d caught on fairly fast that the Agency visitor’s professional vanity was insulted by the task of blending into our little community even on an idle afternoon at the beach. He was itching for his proper element and due: solo conversation. Only the Ambassador’s wife could oblige him without giving him the jackass satisfaction of establishing a pecking order where we just saw Ned, Buzz, Rich, and so on.

  “Trust them with what?” I said and stifled a laugh. Having circled around behind Carl [Last Name Redacted], Rich Warren was brandishing a now recorked wine bottle, a CIA-braining leer of mock savagery distorting his genial face. “You can trust Pierre with a car. Implicitly and explicitly, you can trust Kojo with a chicken. Those are their jobs.”

  “Take a note to Ouibomey. I can’t go myself. Too conspicuous.”

  “I’m sorry. You want one of our boys”—and yes, bikini girl, we did call them that; I won’t lie—“to pedal a bike sixty kilometers and back for your sake? And my God, don’t you know Ouibomey is the one place in Nagon where a white tourist won’t surprise anybody? Borrow Nan Finn’s camera, for Christ’s sake. Visit the snake house, see the fort. Honestly!”

  His sunglasses regarded me pityingly. “My mistake. I thought you were in charge of them. Maybe I’d better speak to Cadwaller.”

  “Feel free to go right ahead, but not today.” I was watching Fiddle and Faddle rise and fall with each wave, frog-kicking with their temporarily unanchored legs but conversationally gesturing with their hands and rapidly tossing hairdos. They weren’t that bad, just young and silly.

  “Well. I’m not sure when I do is completely up to you, Pam.”

  “Of course not, but it is up to Hopsie. And that’s the second good piece of advice I’ve given you in my patriotic way. Can’t you give it a break? Carl, does this beach really look like the goddam Bay of Pigs to you?”

  Carl [Last Name Redacted] grinned again, his teeth as impeccably white as his sunglasses’ two scoops of Pam-twinning black ice cream were dark. “Damned if I’d know. But that’s a rotten thing to say about your husband’s secretaries.”

  It was my turn to look at him pityingly, not that my glance made a dent or I expected it to. One thing about the Carls of this world that may explain quite a lot of CIA’s history is that they don’t care if their guesswork is accurate. What’s important is that it sounds shrewd.

  He’d still spent three whole weeks under the Residence’s roof, making me marvel that his take on the Cadwaller marriage could be so blitheringly wrong. Of course it never crossed his mind that I might’ve been watching Fiddle and Faddle because I was fed up with spotting twin Pams being targeted in his sunglasses. The truth is that when Faddle got killed by a shark a year later, even Hopsie had to concede it did wonders for her memorability.

  Carl [Last Name Redacted] clearly thought he’d zinged uppity—and jealousy-crazed, aging—Mrs. Cadwaller but good, though. “Maybe I could ask them to go to Ouibomey,” he offered in case I’d missed it the first time.

  “Better not for their sake. The snake house unnerves the fuck out of them.”

  “What’s in the snake house?”

  “You don’t know that either? Well, one helluva big, dusty old python, Carl. What rattles Fiddle and Faddle is that he gets let out of the snake house once a day to slither fairly unpredictably around Ouibomey by his priest.”

  “His say what?”

  “Priest. It was one of the voodoo cults M’Lawa was going to ban, at least along the coast. Not the image our Président wants for le Nagon d’aujourd’hui. Of course he doesn’t give a damn about the rites upcountry. But it brings in a bit of tourist money, so the python stays.”

  “You’ve seen him? On his…constitutional?”

  “My God, yes. Cadwaller fed him a couple of very unhappy palm rats we’d taken along just in case. Very much an honor, since the Russians are right there in their appalling compound and they’ve never been asked. That did more for us in Ouibomey than fifty bags of rice.”

  “Great moments in diplomacy,” Carl [Last Name Redacted] said.

  “Mmm-hm. You boys might want to try it sometime.”

  Posted by: Pam

  I’ve got no idea whether or how he ever got his silly note to Ouibomey. Either way, the upshot was plainly zilch, since Vasily Shishkov went on his pudgy Krupskaya-chained way to his next post in Buenos Aires some months later, his phantasmal memento a slow wink at Cadwaller. I was certainly glad to be shut of our man from Lagos when he unscrewed his wineglass and ambled down to the waterline to hail Fiddle and Faddle. They were emerging from the surf like two moderately toasted marshmallows in search of more burning.

  The Buchanan bod and I were on good terms that year, sharing a hiya-Old Paint-howdy Buffalo Bill brand of mutual amusement. Provoking male interest wasn’t a priority; I had Hopsie’s, which was private and more guaranteed than sunrise. So I had no qualms about letting the good old gams prop up my favorite white swimsuit in public. Africa did play hell with my skin, birthing orangeade ant farms of new freckles on my shoulders and arms. I knew I wouldn’t learn their actual hue and staying power until the tan that spawned them stopped being a year-round one. Back in the States, they mostly faded, but the damage was done.

  Whatever science says to the contrary, I’m also sure three years of African sun also hastened my hair’s premature graying. I found I didn’t mind at all. Even before I started having the first of Antoine’s several District successors cut it skullcap-short in my mid-sixties, the old brindle mop looked rather better in b&w, by which I don’t just mean in Nan’s photographs. Yet only after we’d returned from Africa was I especially conscious of it as a transformation. Like the freckles, up to then my newly slate-and-seagullish peruke had simply seemed to be Pam’s Nagon incarnation, subject to reversal once my circumstances changed.

  That was how I looked when Nan waggled her Kodak and called, “Marlene! Marlene!” It’s safe to say the resemblance was minimal, making the glorious girl’s delight a susceptibility based on affection. When I recall how that merry face was crisped an hour later by tears she’d sooner have died than let drip in front of us, I might still have a hard time forgiving her husband if Ned weren’t decades gone.

  Even so, the one I shouldn’t forgive and doubt any of us did is Carl [Last Name Redacted]. My guess is he’d approached Cadwaller and gotten Hopsie’s brushoff
by then. Anyhow, he was the one who, between last white and first pink gnaw on a drumstick, looked around and said brusquely, “Where’s Finn?”

  First off, any of us would’ve called Ned by first name. But secondly, whether or not Nan was sitting right there—and she was, forwarding a roll of blank film through her camera until she saw that tiny “1” appear in its odometer—something we all knew better than to ask in public in June of 1962 was “Where’s Ned?” Even Rich Warren’s eyes couldn’t resist the roundup establishing that Carol Sawyer was also missing. The day of my forty-second birthday, their affair was still in the present tense.

  Luckily, Buzz was down at the waterline. We could hear him instructing a couple of annoyed kids—his own—on how to flip the Pélérin’s outboard motor out of the water before beaching it. That may’ve left Nan more bereft, though I never saw them stoop to the tag-teaming social protectiveness of spouses whose spouses are straying. She was still the glorious girl, and anyhow Buzz would’ve muffed it.

  She knew that silence would tempt one of us to leap in with a fib, decoying Carl [Last Name Redacted] at the intolerable price of confirmation that our whole gang was aware of Nan’s marital Calvary. It’s all the more garish when it’s sympathetic.

  “Oh, Ned!” she instantly piped up, her thumb mashing the Kodak. “I think he ran back to the office awhile. He finally got that meeting with N’Koda, and”—her free hand mimed Ned typing, or possibly playing “Roll Out the Barrel” in a whorehouse—“while it’s still fresh in his mind, you know!”

  “Huh. Well, at least someone’s…”

  Even Carl [Last Name Redacted] knew better than to say “on the ball here” as a swimsuited Cadwaller sat by with a look of placid interest. “Bound to read that one,” he finished instead, which was at least a generic insult to the Department rather than our post in particular.

  “I’m sure he’s coming back, though, Pam,” said Nan, deflecting attention back to my birthday at some cost to keeping Ned’s other can of worms sealed. “You know he wouldn’t miss the champagne!”

  “Carl, how soon do you head back to Lagos?” I wondered with deep pleasure.

  “Yes. We’ve all been asking ourselves when we’ll lose you,” Rich Warren said so affably that even Carl [Last Name Redacted] had no choice but to take it as dismay. But Laurel looked as if the canary in her mouth had just struggled energetically.

  “Oh, Pam! How thoughtless,” Rich said then, refilling my wineglass.

  “I’ll take some of that too, Rich,” Carl [Last Name Redacted] said a tad sulkily. “Well, I don’t know yet when I—”

  “I do,” said Hopsie serenely, his straight-stemmed favorite briar sticking out like a pleased tollgate. “Your boss cabled as I was leaving for Ouibomey. General effect, he can’t do without you, so Code Quick Brown Fox and so on.”

  “I’m supposed to decode those myself, sir,” Carl [Last Name Redacted] said.

  “It wasn’t coded. I’m afraid I was just being whimsical. Dear God, Pam, how does the rest go: ‘over the lazy hedgehog’? Senility at last! How I’ve waited.”

  “What about—?” The Agency man’s face thickened. He couldn’t discuss the real reason for his three weeks in Nagon, even though we all knew it. The Finns’ new black dog probably did, being an alert sort of mutt.

  “Oh, Lagos thinks we can monitor things on our own for now. Any new wrinkles, of course we’ll let the toyshop know.”

  And no, Panama: I wasn’t too surprised when your great-grandfather later admitted he’d very nearly slipped up and said “Lagos agrees.” The cable from the station chief there had been a reply to no less than three from Plon-Plon-Ville recommending that Carl [Last Name Redacted] pack his bags instanter.

  “I’m pretty sure friend Vasily was just playing out the string for the hell of it,” Hopsie told me that night in our bedroom, where we’d made love any number of times to the arrhythmic scuffle of a monsoon-fleeing palm rat’s claws on the tile floor. “But even if he’d been halfway serious, an approach that clumsy was making us laughingstocks. What did it for me was Klaus Schlitten asking if Americans always did their Christmas shopping so early. When Klaus sounds bright, you know we’re stupid.”

  That was later. On Finn-Sawyer Beach, as we all fought to contain our relief at Carl [Last Name Redacted]’s imminent exit, Laurel Warren started to talk with much brio about her last shopping trip to Nigeria, puzzling us slightly. Incapable of being dull, she still usually spun her conversational gold from something less NAAFI-chafflike.

  Then we realized her quick eyes had spotted Ned Finn coming down to us from the Embassy Chryslers parked behind our Checker limo. Presenting an altogether unnecessary new case of wine as the alibi under his Marlboro’s pilot fish, he was clad by then in the Sears-consignment jump suit he affected that year in his off-duty hours: odd vanity seventeen years after the war’s end, combined with safari effect he no doubt hoped we’d see as droll. For Nan’s sake, Laurel knew, something animated had to be going on when he reached us, giving him time enough to redaub some familiar, jolly Ned Finn-ness on the stark face of a contented adulterer.

  “Well! Of course they’re just hopeless for music, so I finally asked—oh, hello, Ned—finally asked if they’ve even heard of any other composers besides Elgar. And with great pride, they brought out a dusty Nigerian pressing of My Fair Lady. I nearly died! We’re down to our last Coltrane, and Rich always says Brubeck gives him arachnophobia. But you like show music, don’t you, Ned?”

  “Oh, God!” said Nan, gallantly turning into half of a happy couple on a dime. “Six straight months of The Music Man. By the end, even Kindassou could halfway sing along to ‘Seventy-Six Trombones,’ and not only doesn’t he speak a word of English but he doesn’t know what trombones are and he’s never seen seventy-six of anything.”

  “I was hoping to get Louis on ‘I Got the Horse Right Here’ while he was serving the meat the night we had Shishkov over. But Guys and Dolls showed up broken,” Ned grinned, smuggling himself back into husbandhood. “Blame Sears all you want. I’ll never forgive that son of a bitch Roebuck.”

  “We can loan you The Sound of Music,” I said. “I’ve about had it with that one. Even Hopsie’s started singing ‘Edelweiss’ with a Cockney accent in the shower—‘May you bloomin’ grow.’”

  “Only when there’s no hot water,” Cadwaller reproached me mildly. He understood distraction was vital, but he was the Ambassador.

  “I think we’ve still got Oklahoma!,” Laurel offered. “Do you have that one, Nan? It skips on ‘Oh! What a Beautiful Morning,’ but—”

  We instantly knew it had been a mistake. In one of Laurel’s rare miscalculations, addressing Nan Finn instead of her husband had made it too obvious we were plying the glorious girl with compensatory gifts. For a fraught second, Nan’s face tried to keep gaily going. Was that Rodgers and Hammerstein or Rodgers and Hart? But it was Rogered and Hammerheart, and two rocking-horse slivers of private Atlantic shimmered in her lower lashes. As the surf boomed in fatal encouragement, she jumped up like a soldier hearing gunfire, dashing sand from her bare thighs as if she’d just felt it start to crawl upward.

  “Well! I think I’ll go for a walk,” she announced. “Do you feel like one…Laurel?”

  “Can’t get fat, can we?” said Laurel, which was ridiculous. Physically, she was a watchmaker’s dream of well-organized economy, a swimsuit virtually her version of her husband’s football rig in college. Still, even someone as graceful as our USIS man’s wife needed some ingenuity to make getting up to join Nan look indolent instead of hasty.

  “Hell, what’s the problem?” Carl [Last Name Redacted] grunted peevishly, showing teeth amazingly unchipped by his spectacular tumble down the ladder from intruder to complete boor.

  “No problem, old man. She gets homesick,” Ned Finn said, crumpling an empty pack of Marlboros and patting
his jump suit for another. “We’ve all been in Africa awhile. Is Nigeria your first foreign posting, Carl?”

  Which was the closest Cadwaller’s adulterous DCM ever came to justifying his behavior in front of Hopsie and me. And yes, Ned at least had the grace to look troubled as his wife, awkwardly reaching out to vague blue air for nonexistent banisters, descended toward where the Pélérin was beached.

  If you knew Ned Finn, though, the flicker of self-disgust that followed did him no credit. Rather than provoke him to change his ways, it was far more likely to end up massaging his conviction that he was the tragic protagonist here, his sessions with broad-beamed Carol Sawyer a Byronic protest against life’s confinements. I didn’t want to watch the facial mutations I was sure were coming: stoic compassion for his own much misunderstood Ned Finn-ness, self-indulgence retooled as sodden valor by his jaw’s new set as he lit his next cigarette. That otherwise intelligent man’s oft-foiled narcissism fouled his brain with rubbish sometimes even when he was sober.

  As Carl [Last Name Redacted] began explaining that he couldn’t really talk about his other postings, Finn, I stood up. “Sorry to leave you, gents. This old broad needs some exercise too.”

  “Going for a hike of your own, dear?” Hopsie asked.

  “Have we even met? No, a siesta. I’ll be worn out by the time I wake up.”

  Posted by: Pam

  My towel, straw hat, and tropically swollen Dell paperback of The Guns of August in tow, I picked a spot where Ned and Carl [Last Name Redacted] would be inaudible unless an invasion fleet suddenly materialized offshore and got them shouting. After I’d spread the towel out on that millenia-milled sand’s warm cake batter under a couple of palms whose coconuts I made sure had fallen—no point inviting Fran Kukla-ish punctuation, was there?—I barely pretended to commune with Pam’s better as a historian before trading propped elbow for chin-pillowing forearms.