The Chameleon (29 page)

The honor guards at the door started to speak to the first lady but she waved them away, saying “I would like to have a few moments alone with my husband,” and asked them to open the casket. Claire hid herself in the shadows, a reluctant witness. She watched as Eleanor stood over the president, gazing lovingly down into her husband's face, her head hanging so that she looked like a bereaved blackbird. She spoke softly to Franklin, a last farewell before she slowly lifted a handkerchief to her eyes. Then she slipped a gold ring from her finger and touched it to her lips before tenderly placing it on her husband's hand.

When she finally turned to leave the room, she was dry-eyed and her face displayed the composure of the public Eleanor. Claire watched her stop and ask the honor guard that the casket not be reopened. Her good-bye would be the last. At least she'd had that.

Claire had never been to a funeral, and she knew this was a day she would never forget. She stood beside Tom a few yards behind Anna, Eleanor, and Elliott. Harrison and Ophelia were on the other side just behind President Truman, with the cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, and Russian ambassador Gromyko. Claire looked over at Anna and studied her grieving friend. Having never known her father, she couldn't fathom losing one.

She looked across at Harrison. The corners of his mouth twitched; his lips were hidden as if he had pulled them in so as not to let the anguish he felt escape.

The crowd's silent mourning was broken by Fala barking at the booming military salute. Claire lifted her head during the singing of the final hymn to watch Eleanor in her grief. She searched Eleanor's stoic face for signs of the hurt she was concealing. This was a noble wife indeed. And she couldn't help noticing that there was no place for a Lucy here. It was unbelievable to Claire that Eleanor had actually known about Lucy, but Anna had implied it was the Lucy Mercer affair that inspired her mother to reinvent herself like a chameleon, wresting her out of the world of tangled emotions and into the world of deed.

For survival she had entered into the male-driven world of activity and accomplishments and made her mark there. Pushing into uncharted territory with the passions other women reserved for their lovers, she had created her own daisy chain of women workers and transformed herself into a magnificent leader. Clearly, Eleanor had reinvented herself. At that moment Claire Harrison wanted nothing more than to walk behind Eleanor forever.

All through dinner they had eaten in silence. Harrison's sudden announcement startled Ophelia out of her self-absorbed thoughts on legumes, Chinese wallpaper for Harry's bedroom, and the rest of her son's house going up a few hundred yards and a duck pond away from Charlotte Hall.

‘I've decided to take the president's offer to oversee the Allied economic rebuilding of Europe.”

Ophelia looked appalled. “You mean that haberdasher in the White House?” She held her heavy silver spoon in midair and then spilled some rich vanilla cream over her pie.

“He was sworn in as president weeks ago, my dear.”

“Not in front of me.” Her voice was as cold as a North Atlantic iceberg.

“Ophelia, I'd like you to come with me. It will be an interesting time to share. Europe is coming alive again.”

“I don't want to go to Europe. It's dirty and quite overrun with refugees. There are no fresh vegetables. One can't get a decent meal. They're out of everything over there. Europe's suddenly become our poor cousin.”

“But we can change that. My commission will funnel civilian supplies and services, medicine, food, and building materials into the liberated areas, all under the aegis of State. Once we've identified who needs what, this project will supply Western Europe with everything it needs to return to life. It will be a humanitarian gesture we can make together.” It was a plea by Harrison as much as an invitation. If she did accompany him, at least he'd be fettered by familiar restraints. Then his fantasies would continue to remain in his head, and he could convince himself that that one night with Claire had been an accidental collision, merely their version of battle fatigue.

“No.”

“Please.”

“My loyalties were with our Roosevelts, not to some poker-playing hatmaker from Kansas.”

“Missouri.”

“Don't correct me, Harrison. I'm still prostrate with grief. Our vegetables will be coming up in the garden soon. Stay home and enjoy our life here.”

“I don't want to go alone. I need my wife.” The intensity of his words escaped a tightened mouth. Ophelia looked as startled as if mighty Jupiter had just said he couldn't make one more thunderbolt without his wife Juno beside him lighting up the furnace.

“Oh, come now, Harrison.” Her voice was the verbal equivalent of a shoulder pat—well-meaning yet affectionless. “Someone's going to have to take a broom to Europe before I return. Anyway you've got Tom and Claire going already and a whole delegation from State if you feel you need company.” She was content to sit in her living room at Charlotte Hall with her crewel work in her lap and her granddaughter learning at her feet.

Harrison looked down the long table at the two sets of salt and pepper shakers at the head of their respective place settings. Apparently they didn't even share condiments anymore. He sighed.

“Very well, my dear.” Harrison's mind wandered off to Belgium, Italy, London, and Claire. She had agreed to join the group and assist in writing up the commission's study on the assurance that Ophelia would be part of the team. In fact, she had even made reservations for weekend side trips for Mr. and Mrs. Harrison. Would she change her mind now without the bulldog presence of Ophelia? he wondered. Since that last kiss in the car, their good-bye kiss, they had behaved toward one another like etiquette-school cum laudes—polite but not excessively so, correct but not intimate. If her “good morning” was too effusive, he shied away. If they accidentally brushed against each other in the office hallway, she stiffened but went about her business. After work hours, as near as he could tell, when she wasn't in Tuxedo with Sara, she'd have the odd night out with Tom and other young people. Evidently, they both had come to their senses.

“Go on to Europe, Harrison. Save the starving masses. Perhaps I'll join you later.”

During the long flight, Claire fell into a heavy hemlockian sleepiness, so her first impressions of Rome were the slow-motion visions of someone waking into a Technicolor dream. It was as if colors she'd only seen on Renaissance canvases existed for real just in Italy. Terra-cotta earth, a Titian orange sun, a Bellini blue sky whirled around her even as the sun-darkened olive-skinned people outside in the street bustled by, speaking a language she couldn't comprehend but whose word endings seemed to vibrate with fortissimo.

Claire turned the dials on her Timex so that her watch would be readjusted to European time.

“Claire, for Christ's sake—what kind of clothes have you got packed in this suitcase?” Tom dropped her suitcase with a thud. The members of the mission had been allowed to take only two valises each on their flight over.

“There aren't exactly clothes in that one,” she fudged.

“But exactly what?”

“Sugar and soap.”

Even Harrison looked up from the task of collecting his luggage.

“Sugar and soap?” Tom echoed.

“There's an orphanage in the Trastevere, near Santa Cecilia, that my auntie Wren has always supported through her church. It's what they asked for.” Claire's voice was as soft as the breezes blowing through the cypress trees.

“Sugar and soap. Well, guard that bag with your life. Everyone in Europe is desperate for these commodities. It's like taking six sacks of gold for a walk on Wall Street.”

“We'll put it in my car. You can take it there after we've checked into the Excelsior.” Harrison's smile was generous.

Harrison had been in a gloomy frame of mind ever since Franklin's death. In the last few months he had wondered if he'd ever shake off the dark specter of his loss. It had begun to happen on the plane.

Claire's aura had loomed larger as the plane had climbed higher, and the air he breathed became lighter. Seated next to her and across from Tom in a club-car configuration, Harrison occasionally looked up from his European Relief Program folders to watch her craning her long neck across both of them, her upper teeth biting her lower lip as she concentrated to peer out the round window of the four-motored silver C-54. She shifted in her seat, wrestling with a fold-out Rand McNally map of Europe, marking all the places where they would attend conferences on their junket and waving the smoke from Harrison's Havana and Tom's Chesterfield away from her line of inhalation.

“Let's just send her up to the cockpit and let her drive the pilots batty,” Tom finally suggested in good humor.

“She's fine where she is,” Harrison countered above the drone of the plane's engines.

Tom was about to tell his boss he was joking but thought better of it and went back to his report on the feasibility framework for rebuilding the Italian economy.

Harrison redirected the overhead light to shine only on his reading as Claire's tired head finally came to rest on her shoulder.

After a yawn-filled dinner with the delegation that was over by ten-thirty, Claire suddenly felt alert again. Whether it was travel lag or the difference in time change, she was fully revived. The bellman showed her to her room on the fifth floor of the Excelsior, the shabby, once-grand deluxe hotel recently vacated by the Fascists. Claire walked into the black-and-white-marbled bathroom, which was twice me size of her old Windermere bedroom but offered only a slim bar of rewrapped soap and a single oversized bath towel with most of the fluff washed out of it. She turned on the white porcelain handles that controlled the broken faucet, from which only a trickle of water flowed. It would take forever to fill this tub with its grandiose marble lion's feet. She sighed as she pulled her hair into a ponytail. She'd worried whether she'd brought enough toiletries and clothes to wear in the one bag she had allowed herself, but then dismissed the notion. Her small sacrifice had been worth the grateful looks on the faces of the nuns and bone-thin children. They'd have sweet dolci and biscotti for a month.

The plan for the rest of the night was simple. Her energy up—she quickly calculated it was eight hours earlier in Washington—she'd take a long soak, whenever that bear of a tub filled. In the meantime, she'd draft a letter to Auntie Wren to tell her what a success the sack of sugar and soap had been. She'd craft a clever postcard for Sara and dash off a “safely arrived” note to Harry, who, oddly enough, had wholeheartedly endorsed this particular trip right on the heels of his mother's urging her to go, especially after Ophelia herself decided to bow out. So that was how it was now. Because his mother approved, so did Harry. Claire sucked in her cheeks as she turned each side of her face to the mirror.

After her lukewarm bath, she brushed her hair one hundred strokes but was still wide awake, so she slipped on a sleeveless sheath and a pair of sandals and took the stairs, not the elevator—
“L'electricity signóra,”
the majordomo had told her, was
“come si dice,
iffy-offy”—and scampered? down the wide staircase to post her letters.

While the electricity annoyingly flickered on and off in the dim lobby, the downstairs bar was softly candlelit. She approached slowly, drawn to the silk-lined room where the blinking chandeliers and the tall ottocènto chairs cast shimmering shadows on the fabric-sheeted walls.

“Do you know anything about Italian antiques?”

Before she could attach the voice to a name, Harrison leaned out of the Baroque shadows, a smile lifting his lip.

“Ohmigosh!” Claire's hands flew to her heart and her laugh jumped a scale. “For a moment there I thought I'd flown all this way just to run into an old Field's customer!”

A stealthy waiter dropped out of nowhere to inquire whether signóre would like to buy signóra a drink.

After Claire's lighthearted interpretation of the finer points of Roman antiquities, for the most part made up, came Harrison's inquiry.

“Are you sleepy?”

“No.” A short shake of the head.

“Me either. Shall we take a walk?”

“Mmmm.”

He led the way through the palatial lobby that looked less rundown in its spotty darkness.

Outside, the round moon was astonishing, glaring like a circle of wired electricity that hadn't been dimmed by war, broken cables, and bombed-out power plants. Suddenly they could see each other clearly. Her face, fresh and earnest, was a perfect unlined stage for the moonbeams to dance across. His was already chiseled from the summers in Maine, autumnal fox hunts, outrunning the Depression, and inhaling secondhand presidential tobacco. Each line had a reason and told a story she yearned to hear. In this light their silhouettes were the focus. They were almost identical. They were tall, lean, willowy, had long-muscled limbs; she averted her eyes in embarrassment as she suddenly remembered the rocklike thigh muscles she had touched when they had made love. They walked down boulevards and turned onto narrow, crooked streets that eventually emptied into a piazza four-squared by ancient villas, coming to stop at a high wrought-iron gate with a mossy green coat of arms, its gold patina long ago dulled. He pulled his shoulders back and stepped away from her.

“I know this house.”

“It's very grand. Is it an embassy?”

“It belonged to friends of mine.”

“Do you think they still live here?” A picture of them dining al fresco in this beautiful villa's lemon garden plied its way into Claire's romantic imagination.

His gaze ran up and down the three-story stone structure, its portal urns untended, its awnings in tatters.

“Probably gone, I'm afraid. They were Jewish.” He turned to her slowly. Sympathetically, she took his arm and lightly laid her fingers across his sleeve as they continued to stroll.

“It's so strange. I don't know who of my old friends is alive and who isn't.” Her fingers tightened their grip on his sleeve. “We've all been so busy in this damn war we've forgotten the people.”