The Chameleon (27 page)

“I'm going back to the White House. Now.” She wondered what he could have left behind that was making him so upset. “And I'll be working late so I'll just sleep over in the Lincoln Bedroom. Do you understand?”

No, she didn't.

“Anna's sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom.” Her mouth was inches away from his. She was nodding her head and simultaneously starting to tremble.

“Then I'll take the Rose Room!” His mouth was so close to hers that Claire could almost taste the oysters and bourbon on his lips.

“Good idea. You can keep Mrs. Rutherfurd company,” her voice was as soft as the quiet draft at the whining window. Perhaps if she made light of his unexpected flash of temper, she could put things back together again.

“Are you ill, Harrison? Or is there some danger?”

“Claire.” He released her only to take her face in his hands. The feel of his elegant fingers against her skin made her instinctively want to close her eyes, to relinquish her face to his fingers. She fought an overwhelming urge to let him cradle her face in those hands. She could feel his need like a jolt to her body. She had always thought of him as a patrician tower of strength, something noble and marble. Why was he suddenly acting so human?

And worse, why did she yearn to respond?

She opened her eyes wider to make the room stop spinning.

“I'm not taking you to Yalta!” Harrison had never raised his voice to her. She opened her mouth to speak, bewildered. What was it about tonight that had unleashed this surge of feelings? Claire pedaled back over the entire evening but shook her head blankly.

“Do you understand? I can't.” He released her abruptly.

She tried to read his face for an explanation, but the terrain of his handsome features was as unrevealing as the outside of his diplomatic pouch. He started toward her again, composed himself resolutely, turned, and left. Stunned, she waited until the door closed behind him before she exhaled.

She stood there feeling like a stranded soldier on a battlefield after everyone else had gone home. What had just happened? Numb, Claire walked from the living room into Harrison's bedroom. The gold brushes and combs from his travel set were neatly lined up on top of the highboy, winking at her from the shadows like the old friends they were. She gently fondled the gold handle and boar's bristle. In his haste to leave, he had left them behind.

Claire's head was beginning to pound. She suddenly acknowledged to herself that she longed to reach out for him, smooth away the tight lines in his face and soothe him in his obvious distress. After all, this was the man she worshiped. While she had been with Harry for only three months, she had been by Harrison's side for nearly three years.

Having been through everything together, they had developed their own private telepathy, a shorthand with which they read each other's mind. Why couldn't she read his now? Claire sat down on Harrison's bed, hugging herself with her hands. She was feeling so cold and alone. When the first blue lights of a winter dawn peeked into the room, she was still sitting on the bedspread, puzzling. What was she supposed to do? Maybe she should take Sara back to Chicago and wait for Harry mere.

Harry was her far-away husband, Sara the child she had borne for them all, but Harrison, what was he to her? It finally dawned on her in the glare of clear morning as the alarm-clock buzzer sounded.

He had become her life.

Claire had thought her feelings for him were admiration for one of the world's great leaders. When had it changed? Somewhere after a late-night planning session when she had shed tears on his shoulder over boys lost in battle or another time when they had shared a victory of their own together, a line had been crossed. A forbidden border. If she even thought about what was happening, she had tried to hide it. Even from herself. Evidently he had thought about it too. That would explain tonight. Fuzzily, she rose and walked over to Harrison's mirror, to see herself as he saw her. The statuesque young beauty staring back at her was someone she hardly recognized. In this light, in this mirror, she wasn't Harrison's daughter-in-law, nor was she merely the “other” Mrs. Harrison; she was a sensuous woman in love. Just how long could they both go on pretending?

She heard the key unlock the latch and turned toward the door, half hoping it was the hotel maid, half hoping it wasn't. When a haggard Harrison stood in the door, need and despair etched on his face, her first impulse was to go to him. She stopped herself at the foot of the bed. She had to think. Whatever she did now would change the rest of their lives. All of their lives. The pounding in her head was unrelenting. It was in the middle of the room that they met, each taking a few hesitant steps in order to comfort the other. The love they felt for one another was so intense, it wavered there like a third person in the room. And when she stumbled, exhausted, he did what any gentleman would do. He took her in his arms.

Chapter Ten

Bombs and Liaisons

“To hell with public opinion.”

—
Clare Boothe Luce

T
heir world turned upside down overnight. Roosevelt was dead. The nation fell into such a deep mourning for the man who had led them through three presidential terms and was its Sunday fatherly voice of hope that a communal wail began to rise from one end of the country to the other. The president died in Warm Springs, Georgia, with Lucy Mercer by his side. Eleanor had been elsewhere and unaware.

But as Claire well knew, secrets could be kept even about the most visible men on earth. Lucy's presence would be eliminated in the lore that would surround his legend as soon as Eleanor rushed to the cottage in Warm Springs to learn the truth. By the time the draped funeral train rolled slowly back to the capital, a new version of his death would be invented.

Claire had been sent by Ophelia to pick up Harrison at the airport. Harrison looked bereft as he climbed down the metal steps of the
Sacred Cow,
the president's private plane, until he saw her standing alone and off to one side of the tarmac. He caught a whiff of her light fragrance even before he was close enough to touch her. His pace picked up as he rushed to her side and they embraced like the hundreds of other couples hearing the news that the president was gone.

They hugged, her windblown hair brushing against the black armband he wore out of respect for his friend. It was the first time they'd seen each other since that dangerous night when passion had separated them from all their good instincts, three months earlier.

“I didn't want you to come home to strangers.”

She held out a handkerchief in case, a lace extravagance from Slim; even a leader could cry.

“The embassy called us a few minutes after it happened and flew us back.” There was a tremor in his voice.

Claire looked closely at him and drought: ashes. His face is the color of cold ashes. With heartfelt worry she lifted a hand to touch his forehead. He gently removed it and placed it in his own, folding his fingers over hers.

“I've missed you.” His whispered words made her use the handkerchief herself. The husband and wife a few feet away wept openly. A quiet darkness enveloped them all. Even the cherry blossoms and dogwood coming into their April bloom seemed to hush and fold.

“How is Eleanor?” The statesman's usual voice returned to its owner. For Claire, it was like the temperature had dropped ten degrees.

“Distraught. She's on her way to …” she hesitated for the correct words, “bring the president home.” The next question she answered before it was asked, as she hadn't lost her knack for reading his mind. Not even after their long absence from each other, a self-imposed interval in which she'd dreamed about him every night.

“Eleanor was at the Sulgrave Club when he died. She was speaking to a women's group.” Claire's eyes flickered over Harrison's tall frame. She had never seen him look so haggard. Or so handsome. The gray at his temples had spread like silver moon rays through his thick hair in the time they'd been apart.

He pulled a leather cigar tube out of his inside suit pocket.

“We all knew he wasn't well. Eleanor should have been with him.” Harrison's voice splayed indignation as he flipped up the lid and removed the hand-rolled Havana. He pointed the cigar holder outward as if looking for someone to blame. “I don't like to think of Franklin dying alone.”

“Mrs. Rutherfurd was there.” Claire's voice was barely audible.

“And so Lucy made a back-door exit.” It was impossible to tell whether the frog that rolled with his words from the back of his throat was tragic or sarcastic.

Harrison chomped off the top of his cigar. “A rather shabby thank-you to a woman pinch-hitting for the wife.”

“Oh, Harrison. It's no one's fault. Eleanor had her job to do, too.” She pulled at the jacket of her neat tailored suit while they stared at one another awkwardly. She knew he kept his lighter in his left coat pocket so she reached in to retrieve the silver accessory. He took a few short puffs on his cigar as she held an unsteady flame.

What she had to say next was difficult.

“I've taken a room at the Fairfax. It seemed best … after everything that's happened.” They both knew she wasn't referring to the president's death, but to the eight hours of forbidden love at the Willard that had marked their last fateful evening together.

Afterwards she had bolted.

Claire had taken Sara and returned to the homing nest. There, the Aunties had hovered over her like warm breasted birds, feeding her and soothing her confusion, for it was evident that something had gone very wrong in Washington. But since Claire wasn't volunteering any information, the doting mothers wisely left her alone. The pattern had been set long ago. She protected them as much as they nurtured her.

Sara, bratty and demanding at first, had taken to the fourth floor of Field's like the mischievous toddler she was, grabbing at dolls and life-sized carousel horses the hugeness of which she'd never seen even at Charlotte Hall. Auntie Slim had opened her hat boxes and chock-full jewelry cases to her “girls” as play toys, and Violet had just opened her arms wide to love them both.

Finally after two months of unconditional love and warm reunions with old friends at Field's, Claire was feeling like she'd been given a healthy dose of homemade chicken soup. Some of the store folk made her feel self-conscious, treating her with the same adulation they gave Dorothy Lamour after she'd quit running her Field's elevator to star in the Road pictures with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.

In her own mind Claire had done nothing right but marry well, and for this she was being given a hero's welcome. Swept up in the ticker-tape mood, she had even allowed her old nemesis, Cilla Pettibone, to throw a cocktail reception in her honor at the Casino Club, the almost secretly private club downtown, co-hosted by Snookie Cuthbert, who now latched on to Claire like a long-lost best friend. The post-deb set had read about her with envy in the Washington columns and
Town and Country
and were woozy with curiosity. Cilla was deep into psychoanalysis and Snookie newly on the wagon after her latest “drying cure.” Daisy Armstrong Fitch, who still had the finest set of shoulder blades on the North Shore, now had the widest hips too, having given birth to a fine set of twins three years earlier. Pretty Lily Dunworth, divorced but gung-ho on remarriage, inquired earnestly about the man market back East.

“Claire, you got so
lucky.
” She threw her voice like a ventriloquist into the V-shaped glass of her Bombay gin martini, and it echoed throughout the marble-floored room as the other girls joined the chorus of “To Lucky Claire!” It reminded her that for all their noisy friendship, they still thought of her as the poor girl from behind the ribbon counter who'd cleverly tied one humdinger of a matrimonial knot.

Although she was the picture of refinement in a navy crepe de chine cocktail suit with a white rose in a tiny crystal vase pinned to her lapel, Claire was suddenly pulled down to her former station. It was painfully evident to her, 28 Shop graduate, that she'd need more than a new suit if she and Sara moved back to Chicago. Apparently it wasn't an option. She thought everyone here could see how much she'd changed. Weren't the pearls worn short at her neck real? Hadn't she gotten Field's to make parachutes out of pillowcases? Hadn't she earned their respect yet? For close to three years Claire had engaged in top-secret war work, been invited to join old-guard eastern clubs, and charmed bad-tempered generals, becoming a welcome fixture at the upstairs White House. Claire had taken pride in the way she had adapted to her new life, and the fact that this bunch could see only the old Claire was a bitter disappointment. They were applauding her all right, but only because they thought she'd slept with the right man.

Recovering her poise, Claire brushed a stray hair off her embarrassed cheek and graciously promised to fix Lily up with Tom as soon as she got back. Back? After what had happened was she ever going back?

While she delayed a decision, Claire arranged her social calendar like she was still in Washington with important appointments to keep. Today, Slim was taking her out to the Cape Cod Room for gossip and lunch. That morning she'd had a preview of the coming conversation: It was to be about Slim's travails simultaneously going through menopause while being a married man's trinket. Hot flashes and hot sex were evidently a tough combo. Claire laughed lightly while weighing how much about her own life to confide in her romantically free-thinking aunt. There could be quite a lot to talk about. She arrived punctually, a discipline picked up from Harrison.

“Remember, Claire, the real world runs on time. If you want to be a player you have to show up on the stroke.” She half smiled to herself, remembering his words. Slim never took time seriously and somehow, even though she took the extra time to look terrific, she was always left at the post. Shaking her head in daughterly indulgence, Claire settled herself on a red leather wing chair in the lobby of the Drake to wait and read her husband's latest bulletin from the war zone.