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

by Carson, Tom

  As we shook hands, she squinted. “I’ve broken my sunglasses,” Ethel Kennedy said. “Do you have a pair I could borrow?”

  We both knew I did: the pair in my other hand, which I’d naturally removed as soon as the jet’s door hatch swung open. I passed ’em over, she poked ’em onto her nose. “Thank you,” Ethel Kennedy said. And I had to take her to Ouibomey.

  That wouldn’t be until after our formal session with M’Lawa at the Palais du Président, and to be fair her little laugh when she was escorted to our Checker limo wasn’t at all unpleasant. Still: it was our Checker limo. Not only beloved of Sean-pronounced-Seen Finn but envy, not that she’d have believed it, of the Soviets.

  Perhaps it’s in her husband’s favor that he seemed to pay no attention at all to what kind of car he was in. Then again, unlike Ethel and me, he wasn’t on one of the jump seats. Realizing I’d forgotten something and hoping neither of our guests had enough French to follow, I spoke over my shoulder.

  “Pierre! Faut pas faire le truc avec le petit drapeau aujourd’hui, compris?”

  “Oui, madame.” Hopsie gave me a nod, but Pierre’s day and opinion of Kennedys were both spoiled. He enjoyed making Old Glory pop up on the meter.

  “I don’t understand why he can’t just ride with us,” said Bobby, meaning M’Lawa. Of course we were doing the whole motorcade bit, the vast convertible whose rear seat contained the Président’s broad back and Celeste M’Lawa’s scarf rolling ahead of us in a mobile cat’s cradle of motorcyclists. “It’d save a lot of time.”

  “Sorry, sir, it wouldn’t,” Cadwaller said. “At best you’d just have the same conversation twice. M’Lawa’s very proud of the Palais du Président.”

  “Christ. As if I care whether I meet Kosygin at the White House or, or—Dixie Liquor.” Opened at the Georgetown end of Key Bridge the year Prohibition was repealed, that stubby little place—booze shop to New Dealers, Fair Dealers, Ike’s-grins, Camelot, Great Society, and now Potusville—has a charm only District lifers can fully appreciate: nongovernmental longevity.

  “Sir, I’m sorry. It’s different,” I explained, leaning forward as we hit a bump in the coastal road. “Your brother didn’t build it himself.”

  “Oh, yes he did,” Ethel said, a Kennedyism if I ever heard one.

  “Dixie Liquor?” I said. Whenever Hopsie tried to reproach me, he ended up weeping with laughter all over again.

  Posted by: Pam

  Luckily, Bobby was too distracted to notice the sixth snowplow on its concrete plinth in front of the Palais as we drove through the gates, though I think Ethel gave it an odd look from her jump seat. But the prelunch session with M’Lawa didn’t go well. Overflowing one of the only five Louis XVI chairs in Nagon—most likely the reason Celeste was indisposed—he said, “Please tell Mr. Kennedy I’m sorry his President has only one brother.”

  That was Hopsie’s translation, and Bobby’s face tightened. “He’s got two. He had three. Christ! I’ve been briefed on this man. Do you mean to tell me he hasn’t been briefed on the President of the United States?”

  He’d misunderstood M’Lawa’s point. “Moi, j’ai des millions.” I have millions. “Every man in Nagon is my brother. Every woman in Nagon is my sister.”

  “Well! There must be a mother in there somewhere,” said Bobby. “I hope.”

  Cadwaller’s brows arched at his impatient glance. “You won’t want me to translate that, sir.”

  “When I don’t want you to do your job, Ambassador, I’ll tell you.”

  Even he may’ve realized that was a mite rude. Over lunch with the Nagonese Cabinet, which found Mme M’Lawa miraculously re-un-indisposed, he made amends of a sort. Eyeing the local version of choucroute garnie—the meat was wild boar—he turned to Cadwaller. “Peasant specialty?” he murmured, giving the grin I’d started to think he saved only for newsreels.

  “Technically, yes, sir,” Hopsie murmured back. “But the only real one they’ve got is no food whatsoever.”

  Wearing my sunglasses (of course I never got them back), Ethel wasn’t at all bad in Ouibomey. She was good at the nursing school, very good at the leper colony. I think she was bored at the Portuguese fort, where our guide laid it on thick about the legend that the walls of its dungeon still ran wet with blood one night a year: des siècles de souffrances sans trêve, as “Le soleil d’aujourd’hui” had it. I’m pretty sure she never grasped what the priest at the snake house was trying to tell her about the python. She’d seen eight countries in nine days.

  She did her best at the artisanal shops, concentrating hard before she picked out two pretty good maquettes of copper figurines: “Not really my area,” she’d mumbled to explain her frown. “Jackie can be pretty merciless, you know.” The woodcarvers’ African Adams and Eves, male dowsing rods and female genital pineapples in full frontal view, never had a chance of boarding her jet. She was still Catholic, and the 1962 version of the white woman’s burden—cosmopolitanism—had its limits. It’s just as well she never saw the Nagonese version of Christ on the cross in Plon-Plon-Ville’s oldest church.

  Then we got back in the one of the Embassy Chryslers whose air conditioning Virgil Scoleri had determined still worked best, Hopsie having retained our Checker limo and Pierre to trundle Bobby back to the Embassy compound after our lunch at the Palais du Président. As we started back down the coastal road, ahead of us were two motorcyclists on loan from M’Lawa’s cat’s cradle, impressively clearing no traffic at all. Behind us were another Chrysler for the security boys, a third for the traveling press, the Portuguese Ambassador’s green Mercedes, an old Citroën holding Nagon’s Minister of Education, Culture, and Tourism, and an even older Renault that sardined Plon-Plon-Ville’s one newspaper editor, Nagon’s one radio-station manager, the lyricist of “Le soleil d’aujourd’hui” and West Africa’s one female pop celebrity, whose Francophone version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” was a regional hit. “Dominique” was the flip side.

  “What on earth do you do for real shopping?” Ethel Kennedy asked me. “Clothes.”

  “Oh, for everyday things, we’ve got Lagos. Or the Sears, Roebuck catalogue! But for anything special, we usually wait until we’re back in the States on home leave.”

  “How can you stand it? I’d go nuts. Just bonkers. Loony, insane, certifiable.”

  She gnawed at a cuticle. “Say! That’s pretty. Is that the Atlantic or the Mediterranean?” Ethel Kennedy said. “Can you ask the chauffeur?”

  Posted by: Pam

  Taking Ethel to Ouibomey got me out of attending Buzz Sawyer’s AID slide show, which I heard from a canary-popping Laurel Warren had been marred by too many views of Buzz’s older son hands to hips in front of grateful Nagonese. Then came one mention too many of what a bright, concerned lad Tommie was.

  “Do you want me to adopt him? I’ve got plenty of children,” Bobby icily barked. Not our seven hours’ highlight for either Buzz or Carol, since of course that was the muddled, irrational dream.

  I also missed the visit to the USIS library, where Bobby instantly checked whether Profiles in Courage was on display and one of Rich’s prize English speakers got halfway through reciting “Hiawatha” from memory before Bobby said, “Please tell him we have another event.” However, I was on hand for the failure of Ned Finn’s joke, which all of us felt bad about for his sake.

  He’d been searching for the right one for weeks. If the Sawyers had fallen prey to a fantasy of having Tommie appreciated as a quasi-Kennedy in African exile—recognized, might be the Prince and the Pauper-ish word—Ned’s dream was Ned Finn-ish. He wanted to uncork one quip so amusing that Bobby might repeat it to his brother back at the White House. Like so many men his age in or out of the government, Ned had never had a President he identified with until now.

  Aware it couldn’t be too impertinent, he wanted his joke to convey a nearly i
neffable mix of wry aplomb, fealty, and metaphorical connection. When he tried his favorite on one of the only two people on the post who’d met JFK (the other was Cadwaller), I told him I thought Jack would be tickled. What we’d overlooked was that it’d never reach Jack except through Bobby, whom neither Hopsie nor I had ever met.

  Worse, while Ned had worried he might have to force the setup himself, our visitor gave him the perfect opening. That made our Yankee Doodley crew’s humor warrior look as chuffed as if he’d just been seated on a charger.

  “And in emergencies?” Bobby asked once he’d gotten over his incredulity that we had no telephones, just the teletype machine for cables. When we needed to make a phone call, we drove over to Plon-Plon-Ville’s main exchange and paid our money like the rest of the queue. “Revolution, natural disasters, Amcits who need evacuating. What do you do then?”

  This was it: Ned Finn’s apotheosis. I’d never seen him so happy without either a Marlboro or a drink. “Well, sir,” he said, “if all else fails we’ll probably just carve a message on a coconut.”

  (We geezers get so tired of explaining things, Panama! Jack Kennedy had done that to signal his crew’s survival after his PT boat was sunk in the war. The coconut sat on his desk in the Oval Office. Everyone knew it. Back then, familiarity with all things Kennedy was as axiomatic as Roseanne the Umpire Slayer is to you.)

  Kodak ready, Nan giggled. Since Ned wasn’t in Coventry anymore for boffing Carol Sawyer, Rich Warren readily chuckled. Robert Kennedy’s eyes, on the other hand, could’ve turned the Caribbean into a skating rink.

  “Are you making fun of my brother’s war record, Mr.—uh, Finn?” he asked in the deadly tone that treating a question as a pure request for information can have. “Do you even have one yourself?”

  Ned was staggered. “Oh, no, not at all,” he muttered, meaning only to disavow any mocking intent but inadvertently killing the sailor who’d Morse-lamped Reported chaos on beach from the bridge of the USS Maloy on the morning of Pam’s twenty-fourth birthday. “Oh, why, uh, sir”—he’d just stopped himself from saying “hell”—“it was really just a joke about Africa.”

  “This continent has terrible problems,” Bobby upbraided him, which certainly helped clear things up for everyone in the room. Oh, we’d had our suspicions—but we just couldn’t know. “I don’t think whimsy’s an attitude many Africans would appreciate, do you?”

  “I realize that.” Ned was still poleaxed. “But, well—as you can see, there aren’t any present.”

  “And the one I just saw right outside that window?” Bobby asked keenly.

  “The night watchman is deaf, sir,” Cadwaller said.

  Posted by: Pam

  What a prick. Spin it any way you want, but l’équipe stands fast: what a prick. I know Bobby’s biographers say he grew more compassionate after his brother’s death. Daisysdaughter.com has no reason to disbelieve the conversion’s pain or sincerity. May I point out that a good few of us manage that pole-vault to adulthood based on less of a loss.

  Afterward, we tried as best we could to bathe our seven hours in dazzle. The Nan Finn of today recalls it as marvelous, but her husband dragged himself around like a sick cat for three days. I caught Carol Sawyer screaming at Tommie, normally the apple of her eye. Cadwaller’s carefully worded report to the Department—while he had no C Street enemies he knew of, this one would be scrutinized on Pennsylvania Avenue too—was able to judge the Nagon stop as at best a middling success. He was pleased when I told him Ethel was good at the nursing school and better at the leper colony, since that allowed him to praise her role unreservedly. Hopsie left out my request for my sunglasses.

  Though I found Jack more enjoyable on our brief acquaintance, I’m not sure but what America is better off imagining Kennedys. The beauty was ours and they only instigated it. Our mimicry was the real magic, since we were acting out our ideal of them without constraint by truth’s cold shower. It must be wrenching for the current members to realize they’re doomed to emulate a clan that never existed.

  “M’Lawa’s no good,” Bobby told Cadwaller as our Checker limo ferried them back to the airport. Cat’s cradle of motorcyclists, etc. “Anyone else in line for the job?”

  Ethel gaped in her Jules Verne agony. “The night watchman? Bob, even for you, that’s—”

  “No, dear. The President we met this morning. What’s his opposition?” Bobby asked Cadwaller.

  Hopsie started explaining the animosity between Nagon’s upcountry tribes and the coastal one most endowed by France’s mission civilisatrice to which M’Lawa and nearly all of the Cabinet belonged. Bobby cut him off: “No, no. A man. All this means nothing unless there’s a man. Is there one?”

  “N’Koda’s a northerner. But he’s ex-colonial too, and so far the Army’s stayed loyal.”

  “Why didn’t I meet with him?”

  “You shook hands at lunch. But M’Lawa would no more permit a private meeting between you than—if you’ll permit—you’d give Jimmy Hoffa the keys to your home.”

  “You did ask, though.”

  “As best we could without myself being declared persona non grata and N’Koda put under house arrest. It’s not much to my liking, but you should know that by now our reputation precedes us.”

  Bobby let that one go. “Who keeps tabs on N’Koda?” he asked.

  “Ned Finn.”

  “The coconut man? Oh, I want someone else on that file.”

  “That’s really not possible. I don’t have a chief of political section here,” Cadwaller explained. “It’s Finn or no one.”

  Probably the first time since ’61 I’d heard him call Ned by last name only. But we were in a car with Robert Kennedy, and Hopsie had been in the Navy.

  “Can’t you do it yourself?” Bobby asked.

  “Not without shredding my relations with M’Lawa. Of course I’d do it if instructed that was our policy.”

  “Then assign someone else,” Bobby said. “I don’t give a damn about your bureaucratic State Department chart.”

  “No reason why you should, sir. But N’Koda might, since he does know who’s senior after me at this post,” said Hopsie blandly. “I’m afraid your only option would be to have Ned sent home and replaced. I’d call that drastic.”

  Bobby gave him a surprisingly friendly smile. “That’s not a word that comes up too often around me. But if all it takes is a phone call to Rusk, then—”

  “Obviously my resignation would be on the Secretary’s desk the next morning,” Hopsie explained. “That’s unless our teletype machine here broke down. I do enjoy making my own personnel decisions, but I’ve never thought I’m indispensable.”

  Bobby looked at him. “Family money, Ambassador?” he guessed after a moment. Now, that was class.

  “Oh, I’m sure Pam could keep me. Any book on the horizon, dear?”

  “You’re a writer, Mrs. Cadwaller?”

  He looked worried. New information, late in the day. People like Robert Kennedy are likely to treat whatever hasn’t come up as something you’ve been withholding. Never mind that you withheld it because you know you’re minor in the big panorama.

  “Oh, hell, yes. When I feel like it,” I brayed. “I just haven’t felt like it since your brother beat me out for the Pulitzer.”

  “Excuse me?” Words not too many people ever got to hear from Bobby Kennedy’s lips, I’ll wager. Starting with the family maids.

  “Mr. Kennedy,” I said. “When you see the President next, would you mind terribly giving him Pamela Buchanan’s affectionate regards?”

  “Pamela Buchanan? Who the hell’s she?” Ethel asked.

  “Me. As I was then, Mrs. Kennedy. As I was then.”

  Posted by: Pam

  Since the downside of dealing with a restless mind is often its upside within ho
urs, most likely the Attorney General had forgotten about getting Ned axed by the time they hit Lagos. Cadwaller never heard a peep from Washington about it. And despite Bobby’s antagonism to M’Lawa, I know for fact that the coup that took place toward the end of our twenty-three-month-long 1962 (it was July ’63 by the calendar) bore no White House fingerprints. Our house blusterer Virgil Scoleri was sure he smelled Russians, but his evidence was so stupid even Dunc McCork told him to put a shoe in it.

  God, how the kids on the post loved that coup. It was the first one any of us had witnessed, and we had front-row seats at its outbreak. That wasn’t by accident, since it was timed for our Embassy’s annual Fourth of July reception and cookout. Besides the usefulness of knowing where M’Lawa and the entire Nagonese Cabinet would be, along with most of the diplomatic corps, N’Koda had an idea the date would make it harder for the U.S. to complain about a revolution. Let alone withdraw foreign aid or refuse to recognize his new government, which he confessed to Hopsie and me over drinks at the Palais some weeks later had been his chief worry.

  “And the Soviets, Monsieur le Président?” Hopsie asked.

  “Mr. Cadwaller, you know parfaitement bien they’ll recognize anybody. Only Americans play hard to get.”

  The Fourth was sacred anyway to the kids on the post, since to them America was a distant planet they’d been expelled from and this was its orbit’s perihelion. I looked forward to it too, but getting ready for the damn thing was no bowl of cherry bombs. In Nagon, coming up with a day’s worth of uniquely American-type activities that didn’t involve toy helmets and wooden Tommy guns, along with a menu of uniquely American-type food, wasn’t the easiest chore, and I never missed our nonexistent PX more. Useful the rest of the year, the Brits’ NAAFI store in Lagos was no help on Independence Day.