The Chameleon (16 page)

C
laire tucked her tweed traveling skirt under her knees, Wren-like, and lowered herself straight back onto the eighteenth-century Salem side chair, her posture in strict alignment with the chair's fluted splat. Charlotte Hall was still reverberating from the news of Harry's elopement. Claire imagined that even the faces in the classical figures carved into the pediments were frowning down upon her in disdain. Ophelia, exhausted from a night over the telephone long distance with a stunned Millicent Pettibone, sat in silence in her own mother's high-backed Queen Anne chair. The inquisition of the new Mrs. Harrison by Ophelia was about to begin.

Claire was apprehensive and unnerved but as prepared as possible for the verbal assault on her humble birth, peculiar upbringing, and store-learned virtues. She looked to her husband for support. He seemed subdued in his mother's presence. Harry cowered uncomfortably in the shadows of the eighteen-foot-high mantel beneath the family coat of arms as a roaring fire bellowed from the great hearth. Surely the enormous fireplace was big enough for a human sacrifice. Claire bit her lower lip and wondered if this grand room wasn't a replica of the waiting room to purgatory.

She looked around at the proper opulence of the room. Every antique was authentic, the arrangement of the pieces precise and correct. The vastness of the house with everything in its place reminded her of the expensive dollhouses on the fourth floor at Marshall Field's.

The new bride steeled herself by looking straight into the formal library's fire, remembering how she and Harry had spent the rest of that first evening quietly closeted in the Pettibones’ small library, the rest of the party shelved. It gave her confidence and brought a comforting smile to her lips.

The low fire had crackled and Harry gallantly added the occasional log as need be, each of them tossing in their gold-embossed seating assignments and place cards. They sat across from one another, knee to knee, soul to soul, and talked in the soft, breathless voices of mutual discovery as a light snowfall began to flurry outside the library window, encasing them in their own private bell jar.

They were moving into that secret soundless world of first love, dropping the ins and outs of their own lives into the conversation.

“Oh, it's a rather odd family, you see. I have three mothers.” She turned the faintest shade of crimson.

“Hmmm,” Harry said knowingly. “Dad's a bit of a ladies’ man, is he? We have plenty of those where I come from.”

“No.” Claire laughed, holding out her hands in protest. Harry took them both, holding them tightly for safekeeping.

“It's two aunties and one mother. I never knew my father.” She lowered her lashes. She wasn't embarrassed. It was just a fact.

“Dead?” he asked compassionately, inching out of his chair. There was so much kindness in his voice. Just the way he asked was enough to endear him to Claire.

“It was all a long time ago.” When she turned her profile to the fire, he could see the exquisite contours of her face.

“I've had the happiest of childhoods, really. You can't imagine how much fun it was to be raised running loose in a department store.” She laughed.

He couldn't imagine. He envied her. He was desperate to know everything about her. He listened, enraptured, as she created lovely story pictures of how it was. In her exuberance she slid off her chair onto the floor, her hands still in his, a rustle of slipper satin and a whiff of vanilla, a pale green confection kneeling at his feet.

Suddenly, he wanted to hold her in his arms very much. His long fingers reached for her tentatively, gently tracing the slope of her cheek in slow circles. Claire warmed to the touch of his rough, sporting fingers on her own soft skin. She felt herself leaning toward him. She gasped as he brushed his lips against her slightly parted mouth. The corners of the room were rounding into a whirling circle as she let herself fall into its spin.

Looking up at him, she observed how solid he appeared, a soldier come to save her, just as his family had saved hers, so many Christmases ago, with a single purchase of a gentleman's gold traveling set. She wondered whether the elegant fingers stroking her now had ever touched those luxurious combs and brushes, pushing back that stubborn lock of brown hair off his forehead.

‘Tell me,” she protested. He had to lean forward to hear, her voice was so soft “I want to know everything about you! Where you'll be flying. When do you leave?” He watched, beguiled, as she pulled her hands back and lightly ran them across the bare skin at her throat “Will you be fighting?” She drew her brows together in concern, a foreign line crossing her smooth brow. The room was coming back into focus.

Harry did his best impersonation of his father, stern-faced and aristocratically nonchalant.

“I'm teaching navy pilots right now—and I'll…” He paused; it was against his nature to lie. “I'll be flying combat missions, probably in the Pacific, as soon as I've fulfilled some family obligations.” His voice descended into a baritone, just as his father's would have.

“Family obligations.’’ Her own high spirits were dashed. Claire couldn't see his face as he retreated back into the brass-studded leather chair out of the light of the fire.

The fiancée, Claire thought, is this where she comes in? She waited.

Harry cleared his throat and clasped his hands under his chin. How could this girl be expected to understand that in families like his, marriages were deals? How many times had he been cautioned that matrimony was the glue that bound together good families and good genes, and that the heart had no place in this anatomy? Harry turned toward the window. He couldn't meet her eyes.

As if by intuition Claire could read his thoughts: She was losing him.

Out of her gilded female past, she summoned up her teachers. She needed their guidance to hold his attention. What would her practical mother have done? Claire puckered her lips as if she had just bitten into a sour apple. Probably have handed him over to the Pettibone girls, like her dress, as if Claire weren't worthy of him.

What about Auntie Slim? Claire frowned. Auntie Slim would be no help. She wasn't interested in becoming a rich man's mistress or the target of powder-room slurs.

And Amelia Earhart? What would her heroine have done? Claire wondered. Amelia wouldn't let him just fly away, that's for sure. Not the adventuress. But how would Daisy Armstrong have stopped him?

And then she knew.

Claire blushed. She laid her arm on Harry's jacket sleeve. Her angel-light touch brought Harry back, away from his Tuxedo Park promises.

Two powerful urges were at work. Their passion was pulling them within a hair's breadth of one another. And the practicality of their respective escapes was pushing them even closer.

Harry could, with one full bend of the knee, acquire a wife and fulfill his obligation to the Harrison ancestors so that he could fly in this war instead of only train other air jockeys. And he could release himself from his unofficial engagement to Minnie. Harry grinned mischievously. He could return to Tuxedo with this pretty girl on his arm, striking out in independence with a single defiant act even while fulfilling his duty to ensure there would be a Roman numeral VI to follow his own V. Yes, he thought, putting a protective arm around Claire, by tangling his fingers in her silken hair, by making her a Harrison, he'd get his freedom to fly without the ball and chain of Minnie. Looking now at Claire's face in the firelight, he could barely remember what Minnie looked like.

“I think you've bewitched me, Claire Organ.”

Claire studied him as she would study one of her stamps under a magnifying glass. Harry's rangy good looks were appealing, as was his bookish curiosity; she found his sincerity and fine manners attractive, his honesty truly wonderful. In fact, in a vague whirl of fleeting images, he reminded her of someone. Someone important to her. She also couldn't quiet the recurring thought that he might be her ticket out of a dead-end job at the store.

The firelight danced on her face as she widened her violet eyes, inviting him in. It suddenly dawned on her. He resembled an awkward version of the man she had danced with in a thousand dreams. If he were only gray at the temples and a little more aloof, he would look just like the man she had been in love with since she was five: the man from the Marshall Field's catalog.

And so, motivated by a surge of youthful passion coupled with earthly practicality, their mouths moved nearer to one another and, closing their eyes, lips touching, they soared into the future with a kiss.

His mouth closed on Claire's with such intensity that her lips opened in surprise, allowing his breath to sweep into her. She lifted her hands up to Harry's face to hold him there in the most natural untutored impulse. Her hands rested on his ears, blocking out all other sounds and sensations other than the pull of their continuous kiss. He managed to take in some air without removing his mouth from hers and she sucked the breath gently out of him as if they were sharing oxygen. He was stirred to every part of his body.

Harry had been taught the relevancy of God, Duty, Country, Family, but never the pleasure of guiltless love or the fine-tuned maneuvers of a naturally gifted lover.

They were perfectly suited to one another. He drew her up to him and her lithe body molded to his like molten lava so there was no space between them. The lights and the fire caught him standing over her so that his darkened shadow covered the wood-paneled wall behind them. Opening her eyes as she kissed him, she suddenly turned her lips away and pointed.

“Look, Harry Harrison. You're larger than life,” she exclaimed. “Look at your giant shadow.”

Harry was gone, lost in a waterfall he had never fallen over before. He buried his head in her breast, inhaling her, his fingers tangled in her loose hair, enveloping her body, messing up her dress. If it weren't for the cumbersome dress, he might have been inside of her, their contours were so indistinguishable, his shadow swallowing hers.

Finally, Claire shook loose and pushed him away. Her laugh was clear and silvery and her high color genuine as she deftly smoothed the folds of her bodice that his hands had rearranged. Her eyes were coy as she lowered her lashes and glanced quickly to see if her small, high breasts were covered.

“Excuse me, fly-boy.” She was breathless. “I was wishing that you'd take me flying, but I was kinda hoping you'd use a plane.” She dimpled at him.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” He studiously examined his Cartier tank watch like a flight plan, his lips on her ear. Tomorrow was only an hour away.

“It's my eighteenth birthday,” she whispered, a private smile on her lips. “I'll be a woman, legally.”

There was a moment of stillness as he looked at her. “You already are.”

Harry wrinkled his forehead, the brows becoming a single furrow. “Well then, I better take you home so I can pick you up.” He pressed his mouth against her cheek. He couldn't seem to stop touching her.

A date. He was making a date with her! But he still hadn't explained away the sort-of fiancée.

“Your birthday!” Now his grin was wide. Claire recognized his teeth as rich people's teeth—big and white and well tended to. “How would you like it if I took you flying? Really flying.”

She clapped her hands together, dismissing once and for all the invisible fiancée. As she well knew, if the merchandise wasn't out on the counter, the customer stopped wanting it.

“I'll be by for you at ten,” he said. “I'd suggest you lose the dress for some trousers. Unless you think you're going to need a parachute.” The dress. She looked down horrified at the pricey, voluminous borrowed Charles James that now looked as if it had been rolling around the hayloft.

A grave look suddenly fell over Harry's features. Minnie had come trotting back into his thoughts. “How do you feel about horses?” he asked.

“Horses?” she asked. Claire had no idea how much her answer mattered.

She put his hand on her cheek. “The only horse I care about is Pegasus. He has wings.”

Delighted, Harry kissed her full on the lips and sped off to prepare for the Claire-filled day ahead.

Back in her closet-sized bedroom, Claire slung her dress over a straight chair, ignoring the padded hanger and tissue paper, and dived into bed. She had only a few hours to dream until Harry would be back to pick her up. She snuggled naked under the covers, for the first time leaving her flannel nightgown in the drawer, kicking Raggedy Ann and Pooh Bear off the bed. It had been an hour's drive from Lake Forest to Hyde Park and it would be another hour back. And then back again. Claire had tested his interest in her and he had passed the long-distance marathon. In the morning, she absentmindedly pushed past her mother with a breezy kiss and told the Aunties to put her birthday on hold. She was going to meet some friends.

“I love you, dears,” she called over her shoulder to the astonished ladies.

“I didn't know she had friends.” Miss Wren clucked in surprise.

Claire was already out of earshot and far down the hall, bypassing the slow elevator to skip down the stairs instead.

In the driveway, Harry, grinning and daylight handsome in the cool morning air, was holding open a leather flying jacket for her. She slipped her arms into the sleeves as he enfolded his arms around her.

They were aloft. Flying high over the planetarium, Marshall Field's, and city hail, Harry turned left and buzzed the Windermere Hotel. Claire gave him the thumbs-up from her backseat bird's-eye perspective as he swung out over the copper-domed Museum of Science and Industry and headed east out to the lake, until there was nothing but a brilliant morning sky, ice-blue water, and Harry and Claire in the Lockheed Electra.

There was snow. From the air, the frozen ground was a precise quilt laid out in blocked squares of white lace and linen. It felt as if the world below them, nestled under its winter blanket, mattered so much less than the closed space they inhabited together within the silver hull.

Claire inched closer to her handsome pilot. The engine noisily reverberated through the plane. Peering out the window, Claire was lost in a trance. The trees were trimmed in ice ornaments, sparkling like white diamonds in the morning sun. It was magic. She had never felt like this. Freely flying, time lost to space, soaring like Amelia.