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

by Carson, Tom

  The Mass was obviously in Latin. We were in pre-Vatican II days, the detail more than any other that brings back to me how long ago this was. Not having sat through one since Chignonne’s, I relearned how they do go on. We had it easy compared to the two Nagonese soldiers on vigil to either side of the altar, who stayed at a stiff-armed garde-à-vous the whole time.

  Then the Bishop of Ouibomey—“Bishop of Plon-Plon-Ville” had been too much for Rome—turned to our pew. “Le Président du Nagon,” he said, ceding the stage.

  Grizzled, sashed, and bemedaled, N’Koda stood stiffly and walked to the coffin. Resting one hand on the flag, he stood there a moment before he about-faced. “Puisque ce sont nos amis d’Amérique qui sont le plus durement frappés par ce deuil, je demande à Mme Cadwaller, la femme de l’ambassadeur des États-Unis, de traduire mes paroles en anglais.”

  Nobody’d warned me I’d be asked to translate his eulogy, and N’Koda later apologized. He hadn’t thought of doing it until he turned around and saw our white-faced American crew dotting the congregation. As he gestured to me to rise, I sat paralyzed until Hopsie’s nudge: “Dammit, Pam. Go.”

  Standing, I walked to the other side of the coffin. At least now I faced away from the portrait. My tense nod answered N’Koda’s discreetly raised eyebrows.

  “Le Président Kennedy était un bon ami de l’Afrique.”

  “President Kennedy was a good friend to Africa,” I said as loudly as I could manage.

  “Il a encouragé le peuple nagonais à devenir fièrement indépendant.”

  “He encouraged the Nagonese people in their proud independence.”

  “Il a créé le Peace Corps.”

  “He created the Peace Corps,” I said and the two goofy kids from upcountry nobody much liked sat up straighter in their denim cut-offs and boots.

  “Il m’a envoyé ses meilleurs voeux quand j’ai moi-même pris la responsabilité de poursuivre notre Révolution.”

  “He sent me his best wishes when I myself took responsibility for continuing our Revolution,” I said, stammering a bit. Helpless not to recall a merry telegram sent the week Glory Be nosed out Profiles in Courage on the Times bestseller list: “i’m just glad you’re not a politician. best wishes jack kennedy.”

  “Il nous a envoyé son frère unique en mission de paix.”

  “He sent us his only brother on a mission of peace,” I said and started bawling. Felt my chin go, yanking around without my brain’s say-so. Then the most awful blubbering came up out of my lungs. Sucked onto my face by my gaping mouth’s first intake of breath, my veil was soaked in three seconds. The horrible weeping of the Ambassador’s wife was the only sound anywhere in Nagon.

  “Pardon, pardon,” I gasped between sobs. “Un moment, s’il vous plaît.” I think N’Koda might’ve waited an hour, but then Nell Finn stood up and came forward in the little banana-colored party dress from her most recent birthday. Discounting Tommie Sawyer, already destined for Harvard in his parents’ eyes by his first black suit, the kids on the post had no appropriate togs for a funeral.

  She took my hand. “Continuez, Monsieur le Président,” she said firmly.

  “Nos pensées vont aujourd’hui à sa belle épouse Jacqueline, que nous invitons à venir en Afrique afin de se remettre.”

  “Today we are thinking more than usual of Jackie,” said Nell in her now ten-year-old voice. “We want her to come here to Africa to—”

  “Recuperate,” I murmured.

  “Recuperate.”

  “Elle pourrait constater par elle-même à quel point son mari était aimé, ainsi que ses enfants d’ailleurs, le petit Jean-Jean et Caroline.”

  “She would see for herself how her husband was loved. And the children too, John-John and Caroline.”

  If you’re wondering, N’Koda’s written invitation went out with Hopsie’s endorsement in our Embassy’s diplomatic bag a week later. He got a short but nice note back from Jacqueline Kennedy—en Français, bien sûr. Gist: not now, perhaps someday.

  “Et aux Américains présents parmi nous aujourd’hui, le peuple nagonais offre sa sympathie la plus vive et l’expression de son amitié la plus chaleureuse.”

  “And to all us Americans, the Nagonais people offer their—”

  “Keenest,” I murmured.

  “Keenest sympathies. And their most warmest friendship.”

  Pivoting smartly, N’Koda saluted the coffin. Turning herself, only briefly uncertain and well trained by the boys on the post—and I swear, we hadn’t yet seen That Photograph—Nell saluted him back. Then N’Koda returned to our pew.

  “Come on, Pam,” Nell whispered. “Ça va.”

  She got me sat down again, a hand still childishly moist from her grip now held by Cadwaller’s. Then Rich Warren’s prize English speaker—the same one who’d gotten halfway through “Hiawatha” before Bobby Kennedy said “Please tell him we have another event”—sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” to us. I later wrote Rich and Laurel that I wished Rich could have been there to hear him.

  Then the Bishop of Ouibomey pronounced a benediction. Then great hoary brown doors flung us out into African sun, everyday rattling bicycles, everyday stench of diesel and cow pies, everyday honks of ancient Citroëns and even older Renaults.

  “Wasn’t that something?” said Dunc McCork, hefting a camera. “One for the kids down the road—right, Beth?”

  Even if you dislike him or her, everyone deserves at least one chance to speak for the community. “You asshole,” Carol Sawyer spat. “It’s one for ours now.”

  “Dunc! You took pictures?” Nan Finn gasped, revulsed.

  “McCork, hand me that film.”

  Dunc looked startled. “Are you serious, Ambassador?”

  “I’m not an Ambassador,” Hopsie said. “I am bigger than you are, however, and in fairly good shape for my age.”

  Posted by: Pam

  As I’ve said more than once, Panama, Nagon no longer exists. It’s as absent from any Rand McNally globe you’ll spin as Constantinople or Leningrad. At around the same time the Congo metamorphosed into Zaïre and Upper Volta renamed itself Burkina Faso—and Dahomey, of course, became the République du Benin—it turned into an entirely different country known as Djedjia.

  Plon-Plon-Ville was replaced by a city on the identical spot that calls itself Djedjiamey. Oh, no doubt, if you visited, you’d see beaches whose waves boom in all the way from Brazil and fishermen hauling long nets full of still living silver out of the sea. No doubt the Catholic church from mission civilisatrice days and the Portuguese fort at Ouibomey both still stand, maybe even the Hôtel de la Plage and the Israeli Embassy. I’ll bet my bottom dollar they’ve kept the Palais du Président’s sugar-cube box looking grand. But the Nagon where Ned Finn boffed Carol Sawyer, American boys ran around shouting “Pan, Pan” and mimicked Mark Twain for Nan’s Kodak on a raft made from the lids of USAID packing crates, 1962 was so happy to be here it lasted twenty-three months, Nell Finn and I translated Etiènne Maurice N’Koda’s eulogy to John Fitzgerald Kennedy into English, snowplows thundered by in hundred-degree heat, and Pam accepted her own middle age and her mother’s Charybdeanism on some faraway beach is now gone.

  Djedjia is a dictatorship, no great surprise there. N’Koda hung on until ’65 before the Palais’s revolving door did its thing. He and his wife wound up in Antibes, not too far down the Côte d’Azur from M’Lawa and Celeste. I’m told they used to socialize.

  By the late Seventies, before Cadwaller’s long dying began, I noticed I no longer felt the special State Department sharpening of alumna interest when I spotted stories about the former Nagon in the papers. That was soon after the onetime Minister of Education, Culture, and Tourism got his turn in the revolving door and spent a year slaughtering some ten thousand of his compatriots and raping three hundred m
ore, mostly schoolgirls, until they killed him too. Since La Terreur P’kapa, the tale’s been monotonous, just decades of suffering without respite. Sometimes I wonder whether modern Africa became a tragedy not least because tragedy felt more indigenous and peculiarly nobler than farce.

  The Finns left in early ’64, not long before Hopsie and I were transferred ourselves. When we saw them off at the airport, of course they were dressed to the nines, because that’s how the Foreign Service did it. Our DCM was wearing a black wool suit that would be far more comfortable where they landed than where they were leaving from, Nan her nicest maternity dress. Nell had on the same banana-colored dress she’d worn at JFK’s Plon-Plon-Ville funeral, matched now by the ribbon the same color in her hair.

  Sean was in a white linen suit with short pants. As they mounted the Air Afrique ramp, he turned and looked back at me in perplexity, as if he’d only now grasped that all this could be snatched away forever by jet engines and his clutching eyes had decided the Ambassador’s wife was the creature who made the rest verbiage. What had I come out of to be holding my hat on as we waved goodbye?

  I’d never know if he was one of the kids who used to call me Cruella DeVil. But he was clutching a signed hardcover copy of The Longest Day. Now that I’d crossed out “Pammie Buchanan,” the inscription read “To Sean-pronounced-Seen”—that’s so he’d know it could only mean him—“with all good hopes for your own future work. Yours, Cornelius Ryan.”

  He left with the book but without his cannon. The birthday gift from Ouibomey his mother had wangled through Portugal’s consul never saw another country unless Djedjia counts. Virgil Scoleri flatly refused to spend taxpayer dough on shipping it Stateside, even though the Finns’ storage allotment came in under the weight limit. Nan hasn’t forgiven him, one reason I was surprised the year he showed up at her Christmas party. Rules are rules, and judgment calls based on taste weren’t Virgil’s to make. I still can’t help thinking it may’ve been for the best.

  As for the glorious girl, she was six months pregnant when they ascended the ramp. Believe me, I’d more than understand if she and Ned never considered “Carol” as a name for their lastborn, but would’ve been giving credit where credit was due. Back then, we could bet on the reason when couples had a belated new baby.

  That was the future Stacy Finn, today over forty and diagnosed with pretty bad mental problems some years ago. Nan goes out to the West Coast to visit her often, not having much choice if she wants to see her youngest child. Not one of the chemical combos they’ve tried out has cured Stacy’s terror of airplanes.

  She was born in West Berlin, the Finns’ next post after Nagon. Strangely enough, it too no longer exists.

  At least here in the District, the only evidence Nagon ever did is a store near the upper limit of Georgetown on Wisconsin Avenue whose name may not surprise you: The Art of Nagon. One of its curiosities is that State Department families are seldom affected enough by a given post to alter their lives in its wake. Neither Nan Finn nor I has ever bought anything there; God knows we’ve got plenty of African tchotchkes, and ours were acquired at the source. Since we like Rich and Laurel, though, we both stop in every so often. They own it.

  3. Esau

  Posted by: Pam

  Andy Pond had him later in Lisbon. Like me, if more amiably, Andy’s flummoxed by fate’s sense of humor in a game Pam once named American roulette. Neither of us could’ve guessed on a dare which dim name from our past would end up making us champions of Potusville’s dinner-party quiz show.

  Cadwaller’s gone, Ned Finn preceded him. Andy himself is retired and unknown. Now pushing seventy, little Duncan McCork is one of the architects of this awful war.

  Of course today no one knows him as Dunc. He’s been Mack McCork since Nixon’s second term, bobbing up in the cesspool of one American foreign-policy disaster after another. While a man who gets and keeps a new nickname in his thirties can safely be described as ambitious, even Hopsie had to admit the switch improved our former econ attaché’s jawline.

  Fools that we were, Andy and I thought we were shut of him twenty years ago. Not long after Cadwaller died, Duncan “Mack” McCork nearly got indicted for perjury after grinding the skeletons in the Reagan White House’s closet down to pumice in his Congressional testimony over the Iran-Contra thing. To those of us who’d known him when, the hearings’ real surrealism was the flashed title we kept having to blink at under his microphone and impossibly fierce new teeth.

  Assistant Secretary McCork? Maybe it’s for the best that Hopsie’d been too ill to pay much attention to appointments by the time that one got made. Yet his listlessness in following them was one of the dozen things that told me his long dying had begun in earnest.

  Until Potus brought the former Dunc McCork back into the Department, I’d honestly thought he was either safely parked in a think tank’s gunless turret or dead. I’d barely opened that morning’s WashPost when the phone rang: “You know, Pam, those guys in the Econ cone always did have a lean and hungry look,” said Andy. Like Cadwaller, like Ned Finn, Andy belonged to the Foreign Service’s crème de la paper airplane: the political section.

  In the flesh, albeit from a safe distance—Nan and I were under JFK’s bust with our intermission wine, they far down the red carpet as Mack greeted Elliott Abrams and Jerry Bremer—I last laid mimsy borogoves on the McCorks two years ago at the Kennedy Center. The short grabby curly-haired Beth we knew in Nagon has grown quite grand and glassy-eyed, the default expression of someone who ignores twenty faces for each one she bares a smile at in public. She’s the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, goddessed here and lambasted there for her scourgings of left-wing bias in academia.

  In the WashPost’s Style section, which could find strained whimsy in an outbreak of bubonic plague, they’re often cutely hailed as the MackBeths. You’ll never understand Potusville if you don’t grasp it’s meant as flattery—and taken that way, too.

  I know I shouldn’t waste ink on them here on daisysdaughter.com. I’ve got better things than Mack McCork to blog about as the light begins to change at last on Pam Buchanan’s longest day.

  Posted by: Pam

  And—oh, et puis zut, as Celeste M’Lawa would say. The little shithead just exasperates me.

  Like all Potus eaters, Mack McCork does the bad-penny routine on the Murphy Channel pretty regularly. Since this awful war began, I’ve seen him pontificate many a time to the lip-licking nods of one or another of my first husband’s three heads. Call it Foreign Service snobbery or just Hopsie’s widow’s, but I can’t help feeling the only relic of Cadwaller’s time who’s still active is letting us all down.

  That’s not only because he’s swallowed Potus’s view of the world and can be counted on to regurgitate it with the glee of a bulimic, whose faces are conspiracies with only one member. Whenever he’s not the only guest, he’s also got his fat nose up the crack of intellectual sock puppets thirty years his junior: Potusville’s neocon Richelieus. Dunc was no heavyweight on either character or brains, but he’d still belonged to the old gang.

  Since he was on hand the last time we got ourselves into this kind of mess, how could he not recognize the rerun’s familiar lurch to disaster? Among ourselves, we mostly knew by 1966. That spring at an Annandale dinner party, Carl [Last Name Redacted] looked fatigued by his two years in Saigon.

  “I guess you could say the python’s out of the snake house for real,” he said with a wince, recalling Pam’s old warning about Ouibomey. “Even we can’t build a cage big enough to talk it back in.”

  “Can’t say I’d have picked you out to be Mr. Metaphor, Carl,” I said, honestly trying to cheer him up. We were all so compassionate to fellow members of the insiders’ club that I hadn’t even reproached him for calling Eddie Whitling’s brain aneurysm—“What that pompous bastard called reportage was giving aid a
nd comfort, Pam”—a blessing in disguise.

  “I’d like to think you didn’t know me completely. I did want to tell you I was sorry to hear about that girl of yours—the goofy Embassy secretary who got pulled down by a shark. What was her name again?”

  Perhaps it was thoughtless, but I’d always been curious. “Carl, did you ever—?”

  He turned dark raging eyes on me. “No, Pam. I never fucked her. I fucked the other one, all right? And I can’t remember her name either.”

  That was how people were suddenly talking then, with flare-ups of bitterness no one tried or needed to explain. Later that night I saw Carl [Last Name Redacted] impatiently reach a paper napkin out to a candle down the table and pull it back past three other guests’ faces in flames to light someone’s cigarette.

  Buzz Sawyer’s USAID tour in Phuoc Tuy province left even that drowsy man apprehensive. “Early on, I learned I couldn’t argue with lieutenant colonels. By the end I couldn’t argue with captains,” he told us at a pool party in Falls Church that summer. “One more year and I’d have been dodging sergeants with my little trowel.”

  “Oh, hell, Buzz. Plus ça change,” I said. “I’ve never heard you argue with anybody.”

  He gave me a defeated smile. “It wasn’t my personality, Pam. It’s because I was wearing a white shirt and they weren’t.”

  At the brunch we threw in our Georgetown house to welcome the Warrens back from Athens that fall, Rich told us he was leaving USIS. “When a library’s just one more American thing for kids to throw rocks at, and you can’t blame them either? Well then.”

  “But what will you and Laurel do?”

  “Play our Coltrane and remember, what else?” he said. “All the same, we didn’t think we’d get old this young.”