The Chameleon (34 page)

Harrison indulged his wife, but was sustained by the knowledge that this child carried the best of all the Harrisons. The belief he held that his secret son could be the third family president alleviated his suffering. After all, Harrisons were about serving and sacrificing.

Even Harry puffed up with a young father's pride when Six was able to throw the ball the farthest on the playground and ride his pony at a full gallop by age five.

Everyone tended to talk at once, mostly to brag about another of Six's accomplishments. And since Claire had allowed Sara to be the only one besides herself to rock him on her knee and later teach him his ABCs, the big sister felt more protective love than all of them combined. Somewhere in Six's half-dimpled smile and behind the luminous eyes was the knowledge that he was the tender tether that held this family together.

“Six, you've got to stop showing up the other boys. Let somebody else win at soccer. Part of being a good leader is to let the other fellow make a goal once in a while. It's how you inspire team loyalty that matters.” Harrison rolled his Brussels sprout over to Six in demonstration, to Ophelia's mild irritation.

“You handled Joe like a true equestrian, darling,” Minnie blathered. For years now the Mortimers had been Sunday evening regulars.

“Grand-mère, when will Six and I be old enough to do the Tuxedo Steeple Chase?” Sara had a soft-eyed chestnut gelding named Prancer, and Six's barrel-chested pony, a gift from Minnie, was registered as GI Joe. The two children spent as much time as possible down at the stables, grooming their horses and holding one another's reins as they took turns exercising their ponies in the ring, the only place they were allowed to go unsupervised. Claire thought it was too dangerous for them to venture out onto me estate's trails alone.

“When Grandfather says you can. That's when.” Claire shifted the authority to the man she respected.

“Aw, geez, Claire, don't be such a good mother. Minnie and I were riding at their ages.” Harry's eyes were bloodshot.

“And look how well they turned out!” It was remarkable how Minnie's mother had grayed without an ounce of wisdom to compensate.

“Please, please,
please,
we want to jump the north field fences this weekend. Can we, Grandpa?”

“If you let the groom go along and it's all right with your mother, you have my permission.” He always let Claire have the final say.

Claire frowned, worried about her children's safety. “All right, but wear your helmets.” Claire knew that, as delicately beautiful as Six was, he had a reckless brave streak. Already he had broken one arm going for a goal and endured a bloody nose defending a playmate. On his long walks with his mother and the dogs he was forever playing champion to every frog and bunny on their trail.

“You needn't ever be afraid, Mother,” he told her one afternoon after a big summer storm. “Sir Six will always come to your rescue.”

“Oh thank you, my brave protector.” Claire smiled and knighted him gently with a tap of her umbrella on each shoulder.

Claire's love for her own children deepened her concern for the rest of the world's offspring. Although she'd conceded to Harry and quit her social-work courses at Bard, she started her own children's refugee center in Tuxedo, naming it Eleanor House, and found homes for Eastern European children still adrift after the war or the babies newly orphaned by the Communist strikes through South Korea.

Harry seriously wondered if she
had
become a card-carrying Commie or just a daisy-chain lesbian. Maybe those rumors about Eleanor were true. In his increasingly intolerant point of view, Claire was probably both and certainly suspect. Why else wasn't she making love to him? In their unfriendly atmosphere the two were constantly grating on each other's nerves. Just last night they'd had a blowout over which movie to go to: Harry had wanted to see Jimmy Stewart in
It's a Wonderful Life
again, but Claire was set on
Notorious,
starring Ingrid Bergman. Perhaps he should be taking his own Lucy, he thought to himself one morning as he rode the commuter into Manhattan, the
Wall Street Journal
neatly creased at the article he was reading. After all, he
was
entitled, even more so now that their European investments were booming. Every time Fulco Duccio built another shipyard, the Harrisons got richer. As silent partners, they could accrue the increasing riches without sullying the family name. Harry was repulsed by the little Italian—Duccio was such a scumbag. The article on the left-hand side of the
Journal
outlined his rapid progress from dockloader to one of Italy's most successful financiers, leaving out what they couldn't know: who his well-connected backers were. Good thing his father had cut the deal so that one was equally beholden to the other. After all, how could the Harrison tradition continue if they faded away into the hand-carved woodwork like the other mainline WASPs, only doing business with their own kind? Without money these old
Mayflower
families became blue-chip has-beens who consoled themselves with the notion that anything handed down and properly threadbare was better than new money with its gaudy accessories, houses full of Monets with price tags hanging proudly from the frames. Fellows like that could never get memberships in his club; Harry himself had blackballed a dozen of them, with names like O'Reilly and Levitt, men who had gotten rich too quickly after the war building homes for the returning boys and bottling their ketchup. And if the Harrison fortune grew vaster because they did a few deals with thugs like Duccio, it allowed them to live their life of privilege and occasional noblesse oblige. Harry's eyes had been pried wide open when he had been taken into the inner sanctum of his father's firm.

Why couldn't Claire fall into line? Ophelia had volunteered her time and done her good deeds, but she never brought one of the recipients of her largesse home to dinner. Which is exactly where Claire fed her malnourished children, with names like Tatjana and Wang Kon. If she wanted more children, why didn't she just let him do the honors some Saturday night? He should have done like his war buddies, using a pretty girl to satisfy his libido but saving marriage for the girl next door. He chortled to himself. “Next door” in his case meant the million-dollar estate adjoining his, and the girl was an heiress who could hunt and fish with her man but also knew her proper place in the house, which was to laugh at his boyish jokes in the breakfast nook and pour his martinis every day at 5:45. What he needed was a bloody good companion. And as Ophelia had tried to tell him, Minnie knew how to stay put in the saddle. She had this way of eagerly laying aside whatever she was doing when Harry came into the room, and if she smelled too much like harness leather or wet fly-casting boots, these aromas were strong reminders of their happy childhood days together. Reason enough to take her to dinner at the Metropolitan Club before her horse show tonight.

Ophelia cackled out loud when she heard Claire announce at a Sunday supper that she was bringing over two four-year-old orphans from Seoul. “I thought slavery went out with Lincoln. Pass the cream.”

“No, Grand-mère.” Six's smile was so disarming that Ophelia missed the flash of temper that had momentarily widened his pupils. He flew his mother's flag. “If bad soldiers took their parents away, I don't mind sharing my toys with them.”

“Ophelia, you misunderstand my intentions. I'm not planning to adopt these children. I'm just placing them in nice homes,” Claire said, wondering how the wicked witch of Charlotte Hall could possibly imagine that her house was a more suitable atmosphere for two frightened children than a mortgaged Cape Cod decorated with love in a suburb of Long Island. She thought back to her own first meeting and inquisition by Ophelia and shuddered. You didn't save a child from North Korean bombings only to throw him into the society wars of the North Shore.

Sara spoke up, sensing that Six had said the right thing. “I'd love to have a Korean of my own.” The Aunties had sent her a Korean doll couple from Marshall Field's fifth-floor Toys, and she kept the pair, with their green silk pajamas and black stovepipe hats, on her Most Favorite Ten Things shelf.

“Well, as long as they're out of here by Christmas.” Ophelia swallowed her coffee.

“That's the spirit.” Mrs. Mortimer looked around the table pleasantly.

And so with the arrival of the little refugees, the “apocalypse in a thimble,” as Slim later referred to it, began.

“Who's been peeing in my Pillsbury?” Cook, flour coating her thick arms, was in a tizzy. She stormed into Ophelia's study to complain about the “slant-eyed savages invading my house.” With her aluminum bowl filled with a discolored recipe as evidence, not only the tiny Koreans but also Claire were put on trial. It was the final instance of breaking the rules Ophelia had been waiting for to bring her case to court. In her relentless campaign to purge this misfit from her otherwise perfect universe, the attack on the dinner rolls by Claire's non-toilet-trained orphans was tangible evidence for the prosecution.

“Heaven knows what else they've contaminated. We could be catching Korean cholera just by eating muffins at our own table for all we know. I
insist
you put a stop to this, Harry, and I hope it opens your eyes to the fact that this woman who doesn't love you is only using us. Divorce her.”

And if Harry had any misgivings about his mission, the lieutenant commander was constantly flanked by his mother and Minnie to be sure he stuck to his guns.

“Son, if this intruder loved you she wouldn't need to find time away from you with these little yellow creatures,” Ophelia preached to him at breakfast.

And during their secret suppers in New York, it was Minnie who manned the guns. “Darling, you needn't uncork your thrills.” Minnie shook her finger and pulled the after-dinner bottle of Tanqueray away from Harry. She twisted around, exposing her boyish breasts as she placed the bottle on the bedside table. And there, beneath the Union Club's wainscoted ceiling, in a room reserved for its top-drawer members to freshen up before the theater or unexpectedly stay the night, she wet her finger and used it to satisfy Harry in the way he preferred.

Afterwards, as Harry rested back against the headboard with his jug ears pushed forward, Minnie propped herself up with a bony elbow and massaged his temples.

“Claire's been a fine brood mare and given you two wonderful children. We should be
grateful
to her for that.” Minnie didn't bother telling Harry that all the best doctors in New York and Boston had pronounced her infertile. “Let's just give her a big thank-you, a nice send-off, and the freedom she needs to save her lower classes. I have no qualms about doing it our way and writing a great big check to CARE and the Red Cross at Christmas.”

“Oh, Minnie, my little pudding. What would I do without you?” Truth be known, Harry had felt more in the shadow of his father than ever, and Minnie was the perfect wall sconce to shine a little light on his secondhand quarter of the universe.

Tom Brewster, whom Harry had sent as his messenger boy, came to Claire with the divorce papers. The two old friends met for lunch at “21,” and over corned-beef hash and with miniature Texaco trucks, oil derricks, and New York Yankee pennants hanging over their heads, he outlined to a surprised Claire which assets would be available to her. She had known their marriage was a sham, but she had assumed that to the Harrisons’ appearances were too important for something as seedy as a divorce. Tom's papers probably laid out a civilized arrangement, Claire thought, with her and the children ensconced in one of the guest cottages, still under Ophelia's watchful authority.

Her eyes scanned the masculine, childish decor—big boys’ trophy toys representing the businesses owned by the tycoons who ate there—and desperately searched for something familiar, like a Marshall Field's truck or an ice-skating Sonja Henie. She leaned the sleeves of her Lord & Taylor suit on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth and pushed the creamed spinach around on her plate.

Her reaction was less emotional than she might have thought. She had been leeched by Ophelia so many times she was almost too anemic to respond to this publicly delivered cut. Tom rattled on in dull lawyerly tones, and Claire noticed a blue-haired friend of Ophelia's whispering into Walter Winchell's ear, both of them trying too hard not to look in her direction but obviously there for the show. She was determined not to give them one.

“Take your time here, Claire, and by all means get your own counsel if it'll make you comfortable. But the Harrisons feel, since it's a friendly divorce, I can represent both parties.”

“It's not a party, Tom.” A good buddy to her during the war years, when life returned to normal and he'd become the Harrison firm's in-house legal counsel, he'd put some distance between them. Claire was disappointed but understood. After all, what was six years of friendship compared to a six-figure income and a powerful position? “I see no reason to drag this out. The Harrisons are nothing if not honorable. I'm sure they'll be fair.” She thought she caught a glimpse of a silly-hatted Minnie giggling in the corner with another girl. The hat, pulled down low, could disguise her horsey face but not that whinnying laugh. Finally Minnie lifted the brim and openly smirked at Claire, as if challenging her to a contest.

Claire restrained herself. She didn't want to behave like the ill-bred shop girl they wanted her to be. “Why don't you have the papers drawn up and send them to me in Chicago? I think I'll take the children to see the Aunties for a few days.”

“We can do it now or wait till you come back. That'll be about a week, right? Nobody's forcing you to sign.” There was a twitching in his hand as he held his butter knife. She sensed there was another piece of news he was almost sorry he had to be part of. “But it would be the Harrison preference to sign off on this unpleasantness here and now. I'm sure you wouldn't want to a create a drama.”

“Has Harrison approved this … document?”

“They've been drawn up to protect
all
the Harrisons. Of which you are one.” Tom's tone was that of both a friend and a lawyer.