by Carson, Tom
“Et là—toujours le Louvre.” Scripted joke. “It does go on for a bit.”
That was when this part of the Louvre began to look different from not only the previous part of the Louvre but the rest of Paris. We only understood why when first the previous part of the Louvre and then the rest of Paris began to look more like it instead. Our microphoned Marianne squinted skyward.
“Ah! Enfin un peu de soleil. On a eu bien de la chance qu’il ne pleuve pas!” As weather reports weren’t part of her script, she mentally groped before saying, “We are lucky for the sun. Et maintenant, à votre gauche, l’église américaine de Paris, la première église américaine construite à l’étranger. La’ies and gentlemen, on our left, the American Church of Paris. This was the first church constructed by Americans in a country not their own. Oh, mais madame! Madame. Merde! Pardon, le micro. Qu’avez-vous, madame? Qu’y a-t-il, enfin?”
“Miss Bucha, Mrs. Cad—Pamela. Are you okay?”
“Sorry, Chris, sorry. Yes, it’s all right. Ce n’est rien, mademoiselle. Mille pardons. Ça va.”
Engines backing, engines threshing: as we docked, all this somehow made it more vivid than the trip had that we’d been on a river the whole time. Back on land, I decided directness might be what Cadwaller would advise.
And I’d outlived her.
“Chris, how old do you think I am?” I asked as we walked.
Not only did that catch him off guard, he was still young enough to feel obliged to stop and study me physically before framing his answer. “I don’t know. Old enough for Dad, I guess. Say, was that the church where you—”
“I’m thirty-eight. Yes, it was. And I wish you liked me better.”
Astonishing me—even your grandpa admitted he wouldn’t have done it if he’d been a year older—he took my hand. “Oh, but I do now,” Chris said very seriously. “I didn’t know grownups cried.”
Posted by: Pam
Chris’s stepmom got the worst reviews of her not wholly unspittled life when my third book came out in 1968. Yet my look at three ages of Paris, three ages of Americans in Paris and three ages of myself in Paris is still my own favorite among the blinking, huh-durn-near-forgot-our-manners trio you’ll meet if you search for books by Pamela Buchanan online. It also has my favorite among my titles, and God love the faulty English of Paris’s bateau-mouche Mariannes. Even as I sat bawling my brains out next to a concerned young Chris Cadwaller, Pam’s authorial instinct was laying burglar’s hands on Lucky for the Sun.
After the me-me-me of Nothing Like a Dame and then the ruthlessly I-omitting Glory Be (Pam’s self-equation with Martha Shelton was a secret I took to her grave), I found a new bridge between the two. One reason I like the book is that I like myself in it. On most of its pages, I sound like a fairly lively, likable—sane!—human being.
I don’t think it was all imposture, though of course some of it was; I’m a writer. Despite everything else going on in 1966 and ’67, writing Lucky made me happy as neither Nothing nor Glory had. I even got in touch with La Tour d’Argent to ask if I could include their recipe for caneton as an appendix. I thought the gesture might give special pleasure to at least two readers—one all but guaranteed, as Chris was sent the first copy, the other conjectural but fondly imagined a full quarter century after Pearl Harbor.
Blame the slow grind of the publishing mill for the drubbing I got. One welcome exception was a belated rave from my never met champion Celia Brady (White, Singh) in Jaipur’s Pink Courier, a name that prompted a blink or two. I didn’t yet know the Pink City is Jaipur’s nickname. Still, I doubt praise from a maharajah’s wife would’ve cut much ice with my Stateside critics.
Even I could see that whatever the ideal season might be for a book like Lucky for the Sun, the spring of 1968 wasn’t that season. It reached stores midway between the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, and you’d better believe most copies just sat there until remaindering put them out of my if not Simon and Schuster’s misery. Aside from Lucky’s brioche not being in huge demand, it was obvious its author had led a fairly privileged life—once again, duh! as you children say—and by the late Sixties people like that were being measured for rhetorical tumbrils.
Even though Hopsie had only needed to hear the first minute of Chris’s talk about the caneton to understand that he was really praising his new stepmother and it was all right, the big lunch with my sixteen-year-old stepson I used as my penultimate set-piece came in for special abuse. Maybe that was unavoidable. Other than a passing remark that it was the first time either of us had eaten at La Tour d’Argent, sharing my private motivation for taking him would’ve upset the book’s tone.
Owing to a similar reticence, my dedication—“To the memory of Marie Antoinette and la première D.B.”—got smacked around everywhere from the Salt Lake City Pillar to the Chickamauga Post. Above all, my epigraph from Talleyrand got cited as proof of my political insensibility and obliviousness to the crisis we all faced. On Lucky’s pathetic book tour, whose only silver lining was getting to see Nick Carraway in the Davenport hospital one last time before he died, I never quite figured out how to explain to hostile under-thirty interviewers that one could know how sweet life had been and still be for the Revolution.
To whatever extent a middle-aged white woman writing checks from her Georgetown home to Gene McCarthy’s Presidential campaign could be considered the equivalent of one of the Commune’s pétroleuses, I was. Not one bloody critic noticed that Pam ended her description of visiting the Mur des Fédérés at Père Lachaise with a superficially valedictory, sneakily prescriptive “Vive la Commune.”
It was my recognition that the world was changing in a way I applauded but whose cost to things I cherished I knew I’d regret that had gotten me started on Lucky to begin with. Not wholly unlike, so I speculated, Talleyrand himself, I thought one could mourn the soap bubbles tossed up by a bygone era’s values without either advocating those values or failing to support the need for new ones to replace them. I still wish I could remember the full name of the émigré who brought me to the costume party for Lady Diana.
I call an ability to do both at once the true mark of civilization. The minds capable of doing only one or the other on either side of the Sixties divide struck me as equally pigheaded, equally smug. That’s why I used to turn even Cadwaller’s pipe upside down when I’d rant about campus protesters desecrating libraries and so forth, then stomp upstairs to write another fat check to the McCarthy campaign. Tim, isn’t there some aphorism that would explain what I mean about believing in and acting on two contradictory ideas at once?
As my book came out in the States, Paris was being taken over by barricades and street battles for the first time since its liberation from the Nazis. Back in their customary role of truncheoned proof that there’s no thug like a uniformed one, the once again hated flics were firing tear gas and advancing on student demonstrators who, while providing one inverse example after another of the forgotten wonders of shampoo, threw prised-up paving stones back and retired to the next barricade. The Tour d’Argent was wreathed in green and gray police smog.
It went on for weeks, looking worse even on TV than the aftermath of the Stavisky riot Ram-Pam-Pam had glimpsed thirty-four years earlier on my way to the Gare du Nord after my mother’s death. When it ended, something’s back had been broken, and I’m not sure anything ever grew to replace it. What neither side knew was that they were brawling over who won bragging rights in France’s last command performance on the world stage.
Cadwaller’s feelings were mixed at the time. He knew de Gaulle had to go, had set aside private fascination for professional antagonism ever since Le Général had pulled France out of NATO. Incidentally forcing its headquarters’ relocation from Paris to—where else, mother mine?—Brussels. Yet Hopsie loathed chaos, passionately believed in dispassionate discussion. He’d already
made his only exception to that rule, and she was the one arguing with him.
He was also personally alarmed, as was I, when we realized Chris and Renée must be in the thick of it. We didn’t hear from them for weeks, but their stories were as inevitable as the way Nan Finn’s giggle follows her nose’s upward toss. Depositing Tim with a friend, Renée had calmly plodded off to volunteer in the improvised infirmary set up by the students inside the Sorbonne once they realized the flics were checking all the hospitals after every street battle. As for Chris, trained by his father to recognize that a U.S. passport was a responsibility as well as a privilege, he knew he couldn’t join the demonstrators. Instead he took the best photographs of his life. They were later published by Kaylie & Gallagher as May or Mayn’t, the book that interested Amherst in hiring him.
When Cadwaller got done leafing through it the next year, he set aside his pipe and looked at his son thoughtfully. Behind us on the self-same rug I’m planning to splatter with a mess of pink and gray things come Potus or sundown, Renée was leafing through The Golden Book of the American Revolution for seven-year-old Timmy’s benefit, clucking here and humming there to teach him how a woman would interpret it.
“Well, Chris,” Hopsie said. “You’ll never convince me all this was any sensible way of getting what they wanted done, done. I abominate it! I don’t despise it, but I do abominate it. But you did convince me it had one thing she’s taught me to revere. No matter the setting, the season, the reason, the anything.”
“What, Dad?”
“Beauty.” Soon after Cadwaller’s long dying ended, Chris told me that was the compliment from his father he’d prized most. Since he was knocking away tears and the morality of all confessions, large or small, is their timing, I waited a few years to tell him it had also been mine.
Sometime in the long afternoon of crowded gabble that followed Hopsie’s burial, placid and nonliterary Renée surprised me by volunteering to try translating Lucky for the Sun into French. Touched as I was, my favorite of by Pamela Buchanan’s books was an eighteen-year-old flop by then and I seriously doubted—what with the raw feelings stirred by everything from Reagan’s visit to Bitburg and the placement of Pershing missiles in Europe to our then current peccadilloes in Central America—that too many Frenchmen were baying for an elderly Américaine’s elderly book about our share of their capital.
I also knew it was a gesture to her father-in-law, not me. Before I could find the right way of showing how touched I was while letting her off the hook, she saw she had to attend to Tim. He was twenty-four when she spotted him tearing up over his grandfather in our Georgetown kitchen, and imagining the lifelong effect of all those Olympic hula hoops and spheres rubbing and saying “Ah, chéri” left me awed for neither the first nor last time at Panama’s dad’s sexual sanity. But I digress.
Back in 1968, everyone who didn’t scoff at Lucky for the Sun’s epigraph slammed me instead for its closing sentence, and a few greedy reviewers did both. It was taken as more narcissism, but I meant it as a reproach, a regret, a commemoration: a memory, in short. When I think of how much more painful a reproach, regret, and commemoration it’s become in Potusville’s day, I could bawl more loudly than I did on the bateau-mouche almost half a century ago.
After the set-piece of my big Tour d’Argent lunch with Chris, my final chapter paid homage to Dutourd’s Les horreurs de l’amour by imagining a long walk through the city, starting at our Embassy and going on to the replica of the Statue of Liberty near the Pont de Grenelle, Edith Wharton’s first Paris apartment at 58, rue de Varenne, and the plaque in the rue de Lille marking the building where Adams, Franklin, and John Jay had signed the treaty ending our Revolutionary War. Its last stop was the Place St. Sulpice, which I described as I remembered it on August Twen’-Five, Nine’een Fort-Four: mobbed with islanded GIs in jeeps and halftracks and happy Parisians celebrating under two determined towers announcing to the sky that this was as far as they got. There was no reason why the sky should care, but they did.
Then I wrote the most bitter, most grateful, most puzzled, most complicated line of my career. This was it: “And of course, we were loved.”
2. The Art of Nagon
Posted by: Pam
In my favorite snapshot of Hopsie from our time in West Africa, he’s wearing a top hat and looks debonair. His eyes are two crows’ nests that have just sprouted crows’ feet. One hand tips a glass in salute, though neither it nor his smile is greeting the camera.
For a reason that would’ve struck me then as too obvious to articulate, I know the little girl watching fishermen haul long nets from the sea can only be Nell Finn, the older of Ned and Nan’s two kids. I’m almost positive the boisterous American back and raised hand Cadwaller is facing belong to Nell’s father. Ned could be very funny at that time of day.
Naturally, I know that’s Rich Warren in preoccupied jaw-rubbing profile behind them. Seated nearby, our USIS man’s wife Laurel is the only one glancing up into the lens. She looks feline, something Laurel could never keep up for long. The canary in her mouth is about to be set free with a grin.
Even more than the fishermen behind them or the gray palm-frond roof of the gazebo they’re in, one detail proves that they’re all in Nagon. Hopsie’s top hat aside, the men—him included—are all in swim trunks. Laurel Warren has a swimsuit on too. So does Nell Finn in the background.
Cadwaller had worn his Ambassadorial topper in all seriousness earlier, but I assure you clapping it back on now wasn’t his way of lampooning whatever ceremony he’d been to in Ouibomey. An hour away down Nagon’s coastal, sunlit and palm-slashed, only fully paved road, it was the official capital, thanks to its preserved royal courtyard from the old tribal days, its Portuguese fort from entrepreneurial seventeenth-century ones, and its convent-cum-nursing school-cum-leper colony left over from France’s mission civilisatrice—euphemism for colonialism. Plon-Plon-Ville, where we all lived, was the administrative or, as Ned Finn called it with binary irony, the working capital.
When I asked her, Nan couldn’t recall either which Nagonese occasion required our Ambassador to gussy up in the same rig that our London envoy would have less dehydratingly worn to Edward VII’s coronation back in 1901. Hopsie would have been indignant had anyone mocked maintaining the custom in equatorial Africa. He valued punctilio for being to public diplomacy what a signature on a treaty is to negotiation. Not only the thin skins of Africa’s new republics but our and even their former masters’ determination to wish them well by symbolically vouching they were our sovereign equal in the great hall of nations demanded top hat and white gloves.
Knowing the rest of us would be at the beach, he’d come straight there and changed to swim trunks whose pattern, thanks to the snapshot, I now remember better in black and white than in color. Were those pale whorls blue or green? Now that we were behind our invisible intra-American palisade again, since the fishermen certainly didn’t care, he was wearing the top hat to waggishly parody his role as the chief of our much smaller Yankee Doodley colony.
If my daisysdaughter.com readers are wondering, at the time young Nell Finn was the only American girl her age in the country. Now in her fifties, she still acts and sounds thrilled to no longer be singular when I see her at Nan’s Christmas parties. But like the rest of us, Nell says she wouldn’t have missed Nagon for the world. Spin the globe all you like, you won’t find it today.
Posted by: Pam
Hopsie always did have acuity. Moments after that snapshot was taken, he ended the joke by handing the topper to me before racing Rich Warren—onetime UCLA lineman, ’46 season only: once Laurel entered the picture, he got tired of having to fake humorless animosity before every snap—down to the surf for a swim. Any longer, and the juxtaposition of rank and good fellowship might’ve turned buffoonish or self-satisfied.
As for me, I’d been Pam Cadwaller long enough not t
o model his Ambassadorial chapeau. Didn’t matter how tempted I might’ve felt when Nan Finn’s giggle summoned me. Bringing up the Kodak that in Nagon followed Nan’s laugh as inevitably as Valentine’s Day follows Christmas, she called, “Marlene! Marlene!”
Panama, I’m not optimistic high-school teachers of English even know this themselves, much less explain it to frizzily tress-stressed, only fizzily attentive bikini girls. But parody has all sorts of dimensions. It needn’t be intentional to be not only ironic but, variously, acrid, bemusing, or even rhapsodic. Indeed parody is often most poignant when unanticipated and accidental. It has its own gift for beauty and pain. In 1962, it was the art of Nagon.
What were we parodying? Camelot, most strikingly, in our hairdos, costumes, and Kodak-immobilized gestures. Our version was contemporary with Washington’s famous one. But we were six thousand miles away at what most people would call the ends of the earth—even though, to those of us on the spot, it looked and felt more like earth’s beginning. Visibly, that didn’t stop us from turning the beach a mile or so west of the bony long concrete Rheuma of Plon-Plon-Ville’s jetty into our sham Hyannisport.
As one of the kids on the post idly snapped off the tail of a small wall-scaling lizard—impressed every time by no blood or evident consequence, though perhaps it’s as well lizards can’t talk—we were no less visibly mimicking intimate East Wing soirées in our now petrified hand dances and profiled palaver on those dreary government-issue sofas of ours. They were backed against the grainy cement-block walls of the tin-roofed blockhouses most of Plon-Plon-Ville’s diplomatic community called home, and the equestrienne’s influence had to’ve been seismic for Pam to risk that little black A-line cocktail dress. Not my best look, even if I daresay the splendidly crossed Buchanan gams were still in business at the old stand.