had had a “good war” during World War II in Southeast Asia working for one of the clandestine services.
From the front porch of the Hendersons’ mountain bungalow, our hosts pointed out to us Billy’s swimming pool, Ambassador and Mrs. Jones’s cottage down the hill, and the low green bushes of the surrounding tea plantation. The horizon consisted of tall, blue, cone-shaped volcanic mountains. In the valley just below, among patchwork squares colored rich gold, brilliant green, and silver, barefoot farmers were guiding big, gray, docile water buffalo to plow terraced fields for another rice crop.
American and European diplomats and businesspeople and their families were sitting or standing around Billy’s swimming pool. The adults mostly were red-faced, slightly overweight, dressed in faded cotton shirts and shorts or sagging bathing suits. (Elastic was usually the first casualty from the effects of scrubbing laundry on rocks or wooden washboards.)
Sprinkled through the crowd around the pool were honey-colored, crisply uniformed Indonesian Army officers in sunglasses, and their elegantly saronged wives, whose thick blue-black hair was caught up in elaborate chignons.
It seemed like one big house party, with swimming, drinking, card playing, and gossiping. This hum of conversation was punctuated occasionally by the sound of a J. Arthur Rank–style gong at one end of the pool, being struck by a manservant in a batik sarong draped below a white drill fitted jacket, to announce meals. Cut off from the heat and squalor of the plains where Jakarta was, this mountain resort seemed to me more like Shangri-La than like a real place in a real country.
At night after dinner, a movie screen was set out on the grass in front of a roofed terrace. Billy’s dozens of guests sat on the terrace to watch the latest film from Hollywood or a cinema classic. Villagers from miles around watched from mats spread out on the grass. Peddlers selling refreshments and curios set up their portable stalls and stoves in front of the terrace and did a lively trade on all sides.
John had once said to me that Asia grows magical after dark—and that was certainly the case here. It was a clear night, and the moon and stars seemed so much closer, with no city lights to dim their brightness. There were also little scraps of light scattered through the grass, from charcoal grills, oil lamps, and anti-mosquito coils. Zippo lighters passed hand to hand as people lighted their cigarettes before the movie began.
It was a classic film: Sergeant York (1941) with a young and handsome Gary Cooper in the leading role of a good country boy who did not like violence but became the most decorated American soldier of World War I. It was based on a true story, and it was easy for us Americans there to feel proud of a country that could produce such a man. I sensed that Billy Palmer’s handpicked Indonesian military guests could share our feelings. The social atmosphere here among these high-level Indonesians made me hopeful that John and I would find Indonesian friends, despite the ugly posters and graffiti that had greeted us in Jakarta. None of us Americans knew then that these pro-Western military men would a few years later save their country, the most populous Muslim country in the world, from falling into the hands of supporters of Mao’s Chinese Communist Party.
We were told that the Palmer estate and the tea plantation around it were surrounded by territory riddled with Darul Islam (Islamic extremist) rebels who were engaged in episodic armed combat against the religiously tolerant central government. The Darul Islam held sway after dark on the mountain road connecting Billy’s estate and Jakarta to the north and Bandung to the south. A couple of years earlier, John Henderson told us, one of his best journalist friends and another American he was traveling with had been flagged down and killed by the Darul Islam on that West Java road. Outsiders like us had no way of telling who was Darul Islam and who was not.
The word was out, however, that Billy Palmer had made a deal with the rebels that they could attend the film showings so long as they maintained a truce while on his property. Billy, who seemed to be the consummate insider, was widely rumored to be the CIA’s chief agent in Indonesia (though I doubt this was the case). But he had clearly learned from his days in World War II special operations how to build up trust and fruitful relations with all sorts of people.
John was invited after the movie to play poker with the big boys—the deputy chief of mission and John Henderson, among others—in Billy Palmer’s bungalow. I waited for him before going to bed, and overheard bits of the conversations around me—some of it apparently in Dutch—among the elegant Indonesian women guests whose high bosoms were visible through their tight-fitting sheer blouses above waistlines that Scarlett O’Hara would have envied. Most of the Western women had already retired for the night.
Sitting there in a bamboo lounge chair and looking up at a blanket of stars, I could hardly believe I was in such an exotic place among such exotic people. I thought if I dozed off and woke up, I might find myself back in Kansas, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. When John turned up and we went off to our neat, sparsely furnished little bedroom, I told him I was glad we had started off our Foreign Service life in Indonesia. No place else could be so foreign and such a mixture of the wonderful and the terrible.
In the morning, Hester Henderson took me to pay my first protocol call, on Mary Lou Jones, the ambassador’s wife. A tall, rangy woman who looked to be in her late fifties, Mrs. Jones wore a faded cotton dress and no makeup. She was down to earth in her manner, despite her husband’s rank as head of our diplomatic community. The Joneses were now on their second tour in Indonesia and must have had many stories to tell, but I could sense that Mrs. Jones, although courteous to me, was a very private person who would have preferred her weekends to be a respite from protocol.
My call on Mrs. Jones approached its conclusion, and Hester, who had kept the conversation going, rifled through my calling cards and pointed out that I should give Mrs. Jones two of John’s cards and one of mine or, alternatively, I could give her one Mr. and Mrs. card and an extra one of John’s. That was because I was supposed to leave John’s cards on both the husband and wife, since men could call on both men and women, but women were only supposed to call on women. In fact, as was usual during formal calls, neither of the men was present. Odder still, according to Hester, if Mrs. Jones had not been home, I should have turned down a corner of one of the cards and maybe written a note on it—in pencil, not ink. That was because, back in the days when the rules were made, there were no portable pens and thus a pencil showed you had come yourself.
It is easy to laugh at the absurdity of this kind of paying formal calls, but it helped us women feel that we were part of our country’s representation abroad. Since the other diplomats’ wives, regardless of nationality, were operating from the same set of archaic rules, it gave us all a quick and fairly efficient way to meet the other diplomatic families in our own and other embassies. In a secretive dictatorship like Indonesia, our diplomats could sometimes learn what was happening within Sukarno’s inner circle from foreign diplomatic colleagues.
When we got back to Jakarta at the end of the weekend, I was no longer in Shangri-La, but back in Jane Austen country. I spent most mornings of my first month in Jakarta—wearing a dress or skirt and blouse, plus a hat, nylons, and short white cotton gloves and armed with the right calling cards—calling upon the other twenty-eight (yes, twenty-eight) wives of John’s more senior embassy colleagues. Some of these women seemed worth knowing better, and many of their houses were handsome and well arranged, perhaps because these women had more experience of furnishing houses in the tropics than I did. Indeed, they had more experience, period.
Some of these women, however, had become visibly fed up with a life that—in the Jakarta diplomatic setting—made it nearly impossible to exercise their skills, whether professional work of some kind or even cooking and childcare, which were done chiefly by servants.
In those days, wives of American diplomats were often commandeered for various unpaid jobs by the embassy. There was even space in our husbands’ annual performance evaluations for their supervisor to comment on how well the wife entertained and in other ways contributed positively to the mission’s goals. (Nowadays, many more Foreign Service officers are women, and many more wives are either officers themselves or able to work in the local economy, thanks to the tireless efforts of the State Department to obtain reciprocity on work permits for diplomatic spouses abroad.)
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