The Chameleon (25 page)

“Yep. And a dinner with the three big grand pooh-bahs from Detroit. Guess with Harrison and Harriman dodging dinner bombs with Churchill that makes you tonight's host .. er, hostess.” He ran a long look up and down her new figure. Tom's grin was unbearably toothy, his banter reminding her how much she had missed their verbal sparring. Nanny talk and arguments with Ophelia over puréed peaches had left her intellectually parched. With a pang of disappointment she realized just how much she had been looking forward to hosting this dinner with Harrison tonight.

She peeked into his empty office, hoping he hadn't really left. Ten days without Harrison would be ten long days. She tapped her red polished fingernails against his stapler with a rat-a-tat sound. Impatiently she decided to open the first of Harry's letters. It was addressed to Sara Woolsey Harrison and was a month late in arriving.

My darling Sara,

I know your dear Mother and Grandmother will have to read this for you, but I feel I must spell out my joy at knowing you exist. Because of the love that your Mother and I share, you, little Sara, the miracle of new life, have come to be. Although we have not yet met, I can assure you that as your Father, I will be more attentive and gallant than any knight in the fairy tales your Mother and Grandmother read to you in your nursery. A nursery, my sweet daughter, in which I slept and dreamed when I was small and your Grandmother …

There was more but Claire didn't want to be late for her Chrysler meeting, and then she was off to the Cafritzes’ for a reception in honor of the Luces. She couldn't wait to meet Clare Boothe Luce.

That night after dinner, with tank talk and proposed landing dates reeling through her brain, Claire lay in her hotel bed unable to sleep. A batch of Harry's letters was strewn around her like amulets evoked in a magic spell to conjure up a distant lover. It worried her that some days she was unable to imagine his face or even remember the sound of his voice. But it bothered her even more that an exact phrase from his letters would be used by Ophelia to criticize her.

Strange, it was as if the war that had brought them together was now conspiring to drive them apart. Privy to top-secret information with her new security clearance, she couldn't share with him the work that was so important to her, so she stuck to her idle, chatty reports about the child she adored but who preferred Ophelia's nanny squad to her hand these days. Keeping secrets became part of her job even if it put up another wall between her and Harry. She feared that the distance between Harry and herself was growing far greater than the distance between the Potomac and the Pacific.

She wished she could tell him about her work. She wished he could see her now. How accomplished and capable she had become. How much she had learned. Indeed, how very different she was from the unsure, unworldly girl he had fallen in love with in a forty-eight-hour courtship. Deep in her heart she knew the truth: If they had met today, they probably would never have married. Under normal circumstances Ophelia would never have allowed it. It all seemed a thousand storybook pages ago. Had they really been so much in love? Or had Harry married her just to get into the war? Was this child born out of their passion? Or had a baby been a son's present for his mother, part of some cold family bargain? The only real thing to her these days was her war work, and it consumed her.

Harry. She needed to see him. Know he was real. Touch him and talk to him. If only the two of them could be together with their daughter. Then everything would fall into place again. She puffed up two pillows and sat up higher in bed, wondering if his sleeping quarters were comfortable, and why it was that she had never dreamed about him.

Claire felt tremendous loyalty toward Harry; because of him, all this had happened to her. She tried to find a word for what she really felt for him. Tenderness … and gratitude. But she was somebody else now and you didn't dream about people to whom you merely felt grateful.

She switched on the light. She wasn't being fair. Just because she had grown up, the spell shouldn't be broken. She read a second letter.

But Harry's letters had all the forced humor of a flat gin fizz. He was flying, bonding, and bombing. He was bonding, all right. His “gang” was all there when in a third letter Harry was calling her “Little Claire” and his buddies Buzzy and Flip had both signed it as well, asking her to send some stationery from the White House so they could requisition more beer from headquarters. It was clear “the bombers” were bombed. She shook her head, laughing. She could be a good sport and read between the lines. They were obviously drunk on beer and celebrating a tough mission completed. But the cerebral side of her couldn't help wondering which one she was married to. Larry, Curly, or Mo. Flip, Buzzy, or Harry. They were kids.

Harrison was concerned. Twice in the last fortnight Claire had casually wandered into his dreams in the short sleeps he allowed himself. That graceful form so familiar to him had stood on a hill behind Charlotte Hall waving a soft, billowy scarf. And he had been glad to see her there.

This troubled him. And so he did what any high-principled man schooled in serving God and Country would do.

He fled.

“Tom, can you pack up for me? London again, I'm afraid.” On the other hand, Harrison reasoned, once his flying boat was safely halfway across the Atlantic, it seemed totally logical that Claire should be part of his fitful slumber during these days when his mind was doubled over with the numbers of supplies that hadn't been delivered in time. And Claire was just part of his overcircuited workday. Hadn't he dreamed about Eleanor Roosevelt a few nights before? And he hadn't given that nocturnal visit a moment's pause. He was sure he was uncharacteristically overdramatizing. That was all. The Stateside version of battle fatigue must be what he was suffering from. Like the flu. There was nothing even remotely pertinent about an overworked middle-aged man's dreams. He dismissed the whole business as he and Harriman smoked their Cuban cigars and read the latest telexes in the thin, pointed light of the airplane. A few more hours, God willing, and they'd be in London.

England was a distraction. Harrison had friends here and the highest regard for even the ordinary Londoners who had stoically suffered years of blackouts, the terrible drone of the buzz bombs, and the more horrible silences that came just before a hit. There was a bravado bred into the Brits that Harrison admired. One night after a particularly wearying working dinner at Churchill's country house, Chequers, with Harriman and an assortment of Allied generals and military strategists, Churchill's wife, Clementine, and their daughter-in-law Pamela joined them. It was eight-thirty and Churchill looked exhausted, but the perky Pamela announced that they had a feature film for the evening's entertainment and everyone should grab their overcoats, because it was cold in the cinema room.

Harrison sat down with a whiskey and soda and a small bowl of popcorn. The movie was a British film, long, dull, and very badly acted. So Harrison watched Churchill's daughter-in-law instead as she played hostess in the darkened room—shy Clementine having chosen to turn in early—lighting cigars, making everyone feel comfortable, and lifting the mood.

Watching Pamela hover over her father-in-law as she pulled a blanket over his shoulders with such daughterly concern made Harrison forget his own overblown worries. Sometimes it took putting an ocean between you and a problem to see it clearly, he assured himself, and filed it along with the other solved problems in his briefcase.

Claire arrived early. She took the six
A.M
. train from Washington to Grand Central and then the commuter to Tuxedo. The spring weather was fine, and she longed to hold her child in her arms. A walk around the grounds, the dogs on either side of Sara's high-wheeled Silver Cross carriage, and a picnic for all of them were uppermost in her mind. She paid the taxi driver who had brought her up from the station to the front of Charlotte Hall's iron gates and generously over-tipped him. Unannounced, in her eagerness, she had taken the quickest way instead of calling the house for a lift.

She carried no luggage, just a huggable teddy bear under her arm, and as the morning was so peaceful, she thought she'd walk the three-quarter-mile driveway to the house. The front gates were locked, she discovered as she jostled them. Standing on her tiptoes, Claire tried to peer into the gatehouse, but the heavy drapes were drawn. It was a little after eleven and she had told Ophelia she'd arrive around suppertime. Obviously the Harrison security force was in operation.

Claire turned and walked back down Winding Way Road a bit until she got to the place where the sculpted boxwood substituted for the property fence, and slipped in through a break in the corduroy-thick hedges, careful not to snag Teddy on the poker-sharp branches. She wished she hadn't. A demon dog, all black sleekness and a gnash of white teeth, flew barreling down the road, stirring up gravel dust as she stood there in the open like a carnival-duck target. She let out a scream and, covering her face with the bear, tried to roll herself back into the bushes.

Something sharp bit into Claire's leg and she cried out in pain before a series of men's names were shouted and then the dog called off her with a hysterical “Down, Hecker.”

When she regained consciousness, she was lying in her room, Ophelia coolly appraising her condition.

“It's for Sara's protection. And security for the rest of us,” she explained, less than sympathetically. “There have been incidents. Harrison is in the paper so much and everyone knows he has top-secret access and of course there was the Lindbergh kidnapping way back and one of the …” Ophelia blathered on.

“I'm the mother. Not a kidnapper.”

“You arrived on your own schedule without any regard for how it might upset ours and we cannot run a smooth household with people popping in under the bushes. With your name splashed all over the society pages it's a wonder we haven't been burglarized.” Ophelia sneered. “And with Churchill due on Monday with half the Cabinet, we had to put in security measures.”

“Please bring Sara in.” Claire was feeling groggy. The shots the doctor had given her were making it difficult to stay awake.

Nanny Bridget brought a skittish Sara to the door, but the two-year-old clung stubbornly to the doorjamb, shaking her red curls and refusing to go in; the smell of alcohol swabs and her mother's leg sewn up frightening her. Claire fell off to sleep and when she awakened, it was already dark outside. She thought she was alone until Nanny Bridget rose from the shadows.

“Mr. Harrison called from overseas.” She switched on the lamp.

“Harry?”

“Mr.
Harrison. He's had the dog removed because of you. You have a visitor.”

As Tom entered the room he was wearing a comforting grin. “These are from the boss.” He laid the long bouquet of cut flowers across her bed.

“Oh, they're lovely.” Claire reached down to pick them up.

“Well, I know Pam Churchill keeps her son, young Winston, out in the country while she works in London, but I don't think they turn the dogs on her when she drives out to visit.”

“Hush, Tom. It was an accident, not an incident. I just want to forget about it, okay? And not a word to the papers. It would embarrass Harrison.”

“Oh, right. Sure. Why didn't I think of that? So, which foot did they amputate, the left or the right?”

“You goof. It's just a scratch. Fourteen stitches isn't much. Could you ask the nurse to come in? I want to get up and see Sara. Go have your tea with Ophelia.”

Claire maneuvered herself clumsily onto her crutches and into the nursery. The pain she felt when she saw the room was sharper than the one the damned dog had inflicted on her. Her expression was one of disbelief. All of her pretty handiwork, balloons, planes, and drawings had been wiped out and painted over since last week's visit. She felt as though she had been erased.

Instead the nursery had become a pastel carousel of pink and green unicorns and horses framed by scalloped borders like an outdoor awning at the Tuxedo country club.

“Lovely, isn't it, Miss Claire?” Nanny number two appeared in the doorway with an armful of freshly laundered diapers. “Sara loves her horsies, and now everything's spruced up for the big company coming.”

Claire burst into tears. But that was to be expected, Ophelia told the staff. The Doberman had frightened her out of her wits, but she'd be just fine after a few days’ rest.

After ten days in Tuxedo with Sara, Ophelia, the nurses, and picnic parties that included the visiting dignitaries, Claire's leg was as good as new. She practically ran back to Washington.

The learning curve in wartime Washington was by necessity driven by speed. Over the next turbulent year, Claire learned by running alongside Harrison's heels. And one of the things she learned was that underneath his proper, tweed facade, Harrison had the guts of a truck driver.

Throughout the past several months he had been called upon to make countless important war decisions and now, in January 1945, he was needed more than ever. With supplies running low, FDR had made it Harrison's job to oversee and coordinate what the military needed with what private industry could manufacture. The pressure upon Harrison was enormous, and he was being badgered from every direction. To Claire, it seemed like the whole future of the free world rested solely on her father-in-law's already burdened shoulders. As Harrison sped up his work and his metabolism, Claire made herself even more available to him; she was more devoted to him than if she'd been his own flesh and blood. Shared secrets and mutual respect bonded them. The war was depending on Harrison, and Claire protected him like a doting hawk. Some days they would be at the office until well past midnight, and when his schedule couldn't be stretched an iota more, she would step in after conveying Harrison's apologies, pass out his agenda for the meeting, and just usher him in for the closing. She protected him and his time and, as she grew to understand him better, revered him all the more.