The Chameleon (62 page)

“Power gets up early.” Grant winked and clinked his glass with those people important enough to be gathered around the four tables of ten that filled the dining room and spilled over into the trellised garden room. “And we newspaper fellows have to be up even earlier to cover it.”

His guests always laughed at this same joke. Clever Washington insiders would never jeopardize their public careers with a snub to the capital's press lord.

At the eleventh stroke of the Adams clock in the hall, he would kiss his wife good-bye and jump into his car for the ride back to the office. There he returned to the horrors of Hanoi, the glut of deaths in the Gulf of Tonkin, the bloody massacre at Kent State, and the wiretapped mess of the DNC Watergate offices—all Shangri-las to him. As were the unattainable guests whom he would have preferred to have had at his carefully Claire-tended round tables that night: Mao Tse-tung, Patty Hearst with the Symbionese Liberation Army, General Westmoreland, Jackie O., and Deep Throat, the unnameable source who had fed the
Post
reporters tips about the Watergate break-in. Congressman Claire's and Publisher Grant's lives were so full of bean-spilling sources, daily disgraced Nixon revelations, and Claire's demanding California constituency that the mere fact that the Fenwick Grants’ marriage was held together more by politics than passion went unobserved. Except by Harrison. His chatty hand-scripted notes arrived regularly from exotic places, all bearing colorful postage stamps.

In her professional life Claire had decided to remain Claire Harrison. No poll had been taken as yet on the matter of women politicians giving up their last names for their new husbands, but she instinctively felt that the Zeitgeist demanded she hang on to her own identity. It was 1974, and Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem had replaced Betty Grable and Jane Russell as pin-up girls since the last time Claire had lived in Washington. A more modem Claire had been one of the first investors in Gloria Steinem's new magazine,
Ms,
along with the
Washington Post's
chairman, Kay Graham. Together they lent an air of white-gloved, dignified accomplishment to the marching, miniskirted missionaries. The times had changed, and adaptable Claire changed along with them.

Claire pulled her horse, a ladylike palfrey, away from the trail and across the back fields of HurryUp. She loved this place. She surveyed it now with eyes framed by thick lashes wetted with snow. This country house had become home. Maybe Pam was right. It was time to become a woman of property. She had always lived in her husbands’ houses, running perfect showplaces for the men of the moment, and had never been mistress of her own.

Not so different from Pam, Claire thought as her mare jerked her head up stubbornly, trying to get her shod hooves back on the beaten trail.

Claire pulled her horse around, steering Tooker to a clearing with an unobstructed view of HurryUp. From here she could see the white frame and fieldstone house sitting atop a rolling bluff. It wasn't as imposing as Charlotte Hall with its foreboding Gothic vastness, and while not as richly ornate and baroque as Palazzo Duccio with its centuries-old splendor and gold woven tapestries, HurryUp held a charm for Claire that no other pile of bricks or stone had ever inspired.

She had been comfortable enough in Lefty's rented Bel Air house all done up in Hollywood moderne decor and accented in colors like avocado and peach. And while life with the Aunties had been delicious, it had been lived in a residential hotel, inside rooms with weekly rates on the doors. No, she had never really had a home of her own. Not until now.

She lifted her eyes from the base of the great oak tree shading the property to the house it protected. Perhaps home was where you finally realized it was. She felt secure in the notion that her daughter's Volkswagen bus, rocking with the laughter of Claire's grandchildren, Violet, Billy, and Dylan, each blessed with the high spirits of Six, would be arriving for the weekend party in a matter of hours. The steady predictability of Seth and the responsibility of raising three healthy, demanding children—a task Sara refused to share with nannies or maids—had done more for her daughter's well-being than all the years of psychoanalysis. It was Thursday afternoon, and they would have plenty of family time before the “Big 5-0” party. It filled her with a sense of peace to know that Violet and Mr. Zolla and Auntie Slim were noisily unpacking in the upstairs guest rooms in their usual dramatic fashion. And that even Auntie Wren, who had a year ago been laid to her final rest in HurryUp's old circle cemetery, or “the Pie” as it was referred to, was present in spirit.

A shadow crossed Claire's forehead as she ducked a low, bare branch. She wanted to bring Six home, too, and bury him lovingly in the center of the Pie. The thought had been gnawing at her. Finally there was a home to bring him to. She would have the old plot weeded and beautifully replanted. She could turn it into a garden of tranquillity.

She'd have to battle Ophelia finally to have her child back, she thought. But the wheels of fortune had turned full circle for Claire. Suddenly she had all the clout in the world with which to fight her bitter foe.

With resolution she pulled the reins to ride Tooker closer to the elevated bluff cradling the Pie. Warm tears stung her eyes. She feared and despised Ophelia. But she loved the memory of Six more. A picture of him, always unchanged, sitting on a white cloud, always filled part of her thoughts. She, Six, Sara, and Harrison. Could it have ever worked out for them? Was it ever even an attainable possibility?

Claire finally gave her horse its head and let Tooker lead her away from the eighteenth-century burial plot and onto the frozen mud path curving around the back of HurryUp.

The house before her had grown up over one hundred fifty years and changed, accommodating its inhabitants, surviving—like herself. It was a home that had evolved, sprawling in its added-on foundation that comfortably combined three types of American architecture. The kitchen and heart of the house, on a low rise, sloped to accommodate the view, had been built in 1803 with wood from the surrounding forests. The later foundation and bedrooms were laid with local fieldstone, and the whole hodge-podged facade had been pulled together from bricks molded and fired on the property. By 1897, the broad, tall facade of red brick and fieldstone had a second floor from which its inhabitants could watch out for forest fires, its windows and the gabled ones on the third floor trimmed in polished sandstone. In the 1920s the house had been sold to the founder of the
Washington Post,
Grant's competition, and when he had purchased it for a whistle in the late fifties it had been known as the Post House. Grant, who had used it only to bed underage girl grooms or married Middleburg equestriennes, renamed it HurryUp, as he had usually used it from a rushed late-Saturday-night seduction supper until a rumpled Sunday brunch.

Claire chose to ignore the house's most recent history, appreciating it instead for its ability to encompass many different styles yet retain its own integrity. It reminded Claire of herself.

She'd never liked the gazebo, though, a wooden relic from the Victorian period built for high tea and low romantic assignations. Her head in the snowy clouds, Claire barely noticed that Tooker was taking her directly to that paint-faded structure now.

She was mildly surprised when Tooker dropped her off right in front of the gazebo, as if it were a destination. The gazebo sat on the rim of a duck pond, and the worn brick path was strewn with untended reeds. She was startled to hear little grunts and moaning quacks from the fowl. She hadn't realized ducks were so noisy or that enough of them to make that kind of commotion hadn't gone farmer south for the winter. The sensible part of her brain, all caught up in her reverie, hadn't prepared her for the raw scene of libido that smacked her squarely in the face. She was speechless, but her widened eyes spoke for her.

Grant, caught with his pants down, was unapologetic.

Even with his charismatic personality, he couldn't disguise two naked bodies in flagrante delicto in the gazebo.

“Oh. Claire. You startled me. You know Charity Foxley here.”

Charity.
In her shock Claire made a mental list: first Patience, now Charity. Charity in the raw.

“Yes. I know all your virtues,” she snapped.

Grant covered his penis with his ascot. Claire turned to face Charity.

Charity's thoroughbred body rippled as she rose to her full height, turning herself sideways almost for Claire's appraisal.

Claire watched, agonized, as Charity took her time covering her bare breasts and bottom in the nippy air with looker's plaid blanket.

Grant was as debonair and sophisticated as a lead actor in one of Lefty's light comedies. As a man who had spent his career documenting the extremes of human behavior, gratifying his own baser carnal pleasures was to him, well, ordinary. Still naked, he leaned, arms folded, against the gazebo wall, his lip curled as if he might crack a rakish joke. After all, he could always make the argument that she had had to walk over another woman's lingerie the night she had proposed to him. “So what did you expect?” he asked. “Fidelity?” Fidelity certainly wasn't one of his virtues. Or was there a girl somewhere, Claire angrily wondered, with that name who knew her husband's weakness for firm young flesh? Preferably from fine old families. It suddenly occurred to her that Grant might be pursuing a perverse hobby of bedding all the virtues in Virginia.

“Have you no scruples at all?” Tears lessened me impact of her shouted words. Claire's eyes looked off toward the sky, as if visualizing another place with another man was a balm for the tacky scene she had stumbled upon.

“You knew what you were getting into when you married me,” Grant said matter-of-factly.

“I thought we respected each other.”

“As much as people like you and I can. Nobody puts chains around me. Or restrictions on my comings and goings.”

“But this is our home.”

“My home.”

Claire was furious. She was mad at Grant less for being unfaithful than for making her feel like Eleanor to Charity's Lucy. Like the blind-eyed do-gooder wife cheated on with her own White House china, crystal, and sheets while she was away on her missions. Mad as hell that if he were going to betray her he had the nerve to do it at HurryUp. Furious he was jay naked wearing only a wide grin of “So what?” nonchalance and his Cartier tank watch and his smooth Jack Kennedy coif. Madder still that Charity's twenty-eight-year-old thighs were slimmer than her own and that her childless belly was as taut and flat as a drum skin. And that her face bore a sneer that told Claire clearly she was challenging her openly for her husband. Charity was a modern-day Lucy Mercer.

“Excuse me, Congressman Harrison.” Bare-breasted and with her tight breeches cupping her firm ass, Charity languidly pulled on her jacket as she breezed past Claire in the doorway.

“See you at the party, Grant,” she called over her shoulder, casually carrying her sweater and underwear in her hand.

“Happy birthday, Senator.”

Claire felt like she'd been kicked in the chest by her horse, knocking all the wind out of her.

“Damn you, Grant.” The color had fled Claire's face and drained her lips, leaving them a milky white.

“Grow up, Claire. There are three hundred guests coming on Saturday. If you want a menopausal drama, do it for an audience.”

“You're such an impossible prick.”

Grant groaned, irritated only that he had been caught. “This”—he pointed his chin toward Charity's retreating figure—“isn't about us. It's about sex. So I'm attracted to youth and beauty. Get over it.”

Youth and beauty. She had once been youth and beauty to Harrison's power and intellect. Maybe that was the perennial payoff, the same drama being recycled time and again. What did an older, wiser woman have to trade? Was power a marketable commodity for her as well?

“I want a divorce.”

She said it with quiet fury, but what she really wanted was to wail, “I don't want a divorce. I want a home and someone to share it with. Why are you mucking it up, you selfish bastard! Can't you keep your penis in your jodhpurs?”

She swung out at him with her riding crop. He grabbed her wrists before it hit his shoulder.

“No divorce. I haven't got the time. And a respected congresswoman would never survive the public scrutiny. You know, Claire, you're beginning to bore me. All your do-goodness consumes you. A few close huddles with Senator Pines and you think you're the belle of the capital. Although God knows you spend more time there than you do at home.”

Home. Her family was there now, unpacking their dresses for her big birthday bash. She had already seen Sara and Seth's van pull up from the clearing. So her grandchildren were home, too.

“I don't want your naked equestriennes on this property.”

“Don't get so emotional. It doesn't suit you.”

“Of course I'm emotional. How can you make love to another woman right under my nose? It's so contemptible.” Claire's voice startled any ducks that had hung around for the mild winter, skipping Arkansas or Georgia. “How can you be so insensitive?”

“Hey, I'm an insensitive kind of guy.”

“Then let's get a divorce.”

“Why bother? I don't want to marry again anytime soon. If I'm saddled with you, I have a good excuse not to marry my horsey girlfriends, as you call them.” His grin was wide, almost appealing if you couldn't hear what he was saying. Even when he was being a lout he exuded an irrepressible charm. He moved toward her as if he wanted to finish with her what he had started with Fidelity or Chastity or whatever her name was. In his own mind he was forgiven.

Claire was shaken.

He smiled at her. “No divorce, all right? Just when I have Vietnam exploding and no access to Gerald Ford, I don't need to be distracted. I need to spend my time on big stuff like the Nixon tapes, or whether Jackie is leaving Ari.” His gray eyes sparkled, and she was appalled at herself for finding him appealing.

Claire could feel all the dignity leave her face. Her anger fumed into degradation. “I need to think.”