The Chameleon

by Sugar Rautbord

  “All of Europe's at war and Adolf Hitler is the ringleader. Daddy says he's the madman leading Europe straight into a nervous breakdown.”

  “Holland and Belgium were seized by Hitler too.”

  Cilla Pettibone looked bereft. “Does that mean I can't get my thousands of tulips from Holland for my party?”

  “Not unless you're planning to invite Hitler, kiddo.”

  “Well, Hitler was just this short little mucky-muck in Munich when I was visiting my sister and Brenda Frazier at school over there. We used to see all the funny SS men in front of the opera house and the monuments. They'd parade up and down the boulevards at night with torches and we'd think, Oh what a fabulous parade!” Lily Dunworth had actually met the Führer. “My sister and Brenda got invitations all the time from him. Brenda Frazier even had lunch with him.” She gulped a giant sip of iced tea in a dramatic pause.

  All the girls perked up when they heard the name of the girl who turned being a debutante into being as famous as a film star or Eleanor Roosevelt. When she “came out” in New York in 1938, her dark delicate features, powdery white skin, and liver-red mouth had even made the cover of Life magazine. The girls fell silent listening to Lily. Even Claire lifted her eyes from her book.

  “Hitler used to invite all the English and American schoolgirls in Munich to his little teas.” Lily pulled the mint leaf out of her glass and placed it on her tongue.

  “Hitler had tea dances?” Snookie Cuthbert made a face.

  “No. Just tea. He and his sidekicks.”

  The girls were snuggled for the night into the recently redecorated glass-roofed solarium of the Pettibone estate on Green Bay Road in Lake Forest with its pearly marble floor, cozy overstuffed couches, and majolica vases crammed with dozens upon dozens of summer roses and peonies. They were planning their participation in the annual Passavant Cotillion Ball held during Christmas break, and Priscilla Pettibone's at-home debut party. The double social whammy would tax their nerves, their parents’ bank accounts, and test the girls’ physical stamina, but they were preparing to perform their upper-class culture's rite of initiation into the adult world with committed gusto.

  Claire was the invited but unwelcome guest at the girls’ weekend sleep-over at Cilia's, the youngest of the Pettibone daughters and the last to be launched out of the gilded nest. After a day of tennis, swimming, and poring over row upon row of boys’ names from the best families around the country to be invited to her debut party the night before the big cotillion, the sun-kissed girls were pruning and weeding their list like social gardeners. Green books and blue books, regional social registers with summer and winter addresses and private phone numbers, unlisted anywhere else, were scattered around the floral swirled needlepoint rugs.

  It was only July, still five months away from Cilia's presentation to society, but preparations were in full swing. Lester Lanin's band had been booked, starvation diets begun, and the caterers hired, along with the invaluable Violet Organ from Field's to coordinate it all. Violet was a recognized authority on Brenda Frazier's coming-out party at New York's Ritz, as all her clients wanted to incorporate at least one “Brenda” detail into their own launches, be it the bridal-like bouquet of orchids she held in the receiving line or the four-strand pearl bracelet she wore at her wrist. To the girls’ chagrin, along with that jewel Violet came her sappy daughter. The prettiest dresses and the best balls all had Violet's practiced hands on them. And Claire Organ, perennial wallflower, was part of the “arrangement.” Of course the girls didn't understand that their mothers’ allegiances to Violet were still held in that “other” social registry, Violet's ledgers of IOUs.

  Violet's little experiment in extending credit during the long Depression was paying off in social spades. In her genteel way, Violet, clad in her basic black with the bouffant bunch of long-stemmed silk violets at her shoulder, planned the social gatherings of Chicago's elite. She never raised her voice. She didn't have to; the power of her leather ledger combined with her credo of quid pro quo resonated through even the softest of whispers.

  Her services were so valuable that the quiet words “It would make me so happy if my Claire could be included” were enough to propel her reluctant daughter right to the top of a party roster. Easing Claire into a world where she might find a suitable husband had become Violet's raison d’être. Little did she understand that her mission had also become Claire's bête noire.

  Claire peered over her book. The slim, wholesome, pale-skinned seventeen-year-old was conspicuously out of place among these girls, some of them looking a good ten years older than they actually were with their sophisticated, tony images. She preferred bridge to boyfriend bingo, and was an avid reader as well as an ardent stamp collector. She was going to try for a college scholarship but she knew the Aunties were pushing her down a more heavily traveled road. So the serious attitude that had begun to cover her face, masking her perfectly arranged features, was rendering her solemn instead of plainly beautiful.

  Claire was what the mothers referred to as “a girl with potential,” as if she could be coaxed to bloom with a little watering from a gardening can and a ton of face powder. Aloof and alone, she felt more at home among the fine pieces in the quiet Antiques Section of Field's where she worked part time than in her mother's gossip-driven all-female department. “The Bitches’ Boudoir” was what Auntie Slim called the salon. Claire wasn't “coming out,” nor was she participating in any of the cotillions like the Passavant, but she was nonetheless Cilia's guest this weekend because both mothers had separately insisted on it. Claire had read enough in the London Times, available in Field's Reading Room, to worry more about the turmoil in Europe than her chances of picking up either social credentials or a husband in this fast social company, and she certainly knew that Hitler was more than a crooked politician. Sometimes she wondered just what was it some of these girls learned at their snooty boarding schools anyway. Daisy Armstrong, the one tough-talking and irreverent deb Claire found rather interesting, liked to say they were sent off to learn to “mix a stiff drink, develop a stiff upper lip, and make their potential husbands stiff with desire.” Perhaps between her public school education and the lessons she'd learned at Field's, Claire hadn't done so badly after all. She sighed quietly to herself.

  Snookie Cuthbert caught her sigh and fixed an analytical stare on her. She thought the out-of-place girl had a quiet, cool way about her that could beat any one of them out of the gate if only Claire had had the wherewithal to race. Luckily for them she didn't. How could anyone see those astonishing eyes if she never raised them? Snookie had seen that kind of nonchalant handsomeness before, and calculated that Claire didn't even know she had a “look.” Snookie's father had married three times, and the last two wives had that same kind of unstudied charm. Claire, feeling Snookie's eyes on her, blushed and shivered simultaneously, turning her attention back to Lily's fond memories of Munich before the war sent them home. Snookie's stares were making Claire uncomfortable, so she pulled her book up to her forehead.

  “Brenda said Hitler had terrible halitosis.” Lily still held the other girls riveted.

  “Well, all of Europe is at war with him now and we may soon be too, and then your whole guest list will be in uniform.”

  “Yes, shooting it out while your daughter is coming out.”

  “Does that mean I can't invite that Hapsburg boy we met in London?” Cilla put down her half-eaten doughnut and frowned.

  “Who even knows if he's still alive?”

  “Or a Nazi.”

  “Well, then take him off the list. I don't want to have to change my seating arrangement at the last minute. I only want live boys. Preferably who know how to dance the rumba.” Cill Pettibone waved away that unpleasant business in Europe with a childish chubby hand, polished with dark red nail enamel—just like Brenda Frazier wore.

  “Aren't any of you aware how serious this European war is?” It was Claire who spoke. “Even if we're not pulled into it, we're all
affected.”

  All the girls turned to stare at their companion, whose long hair was pulled back off her face in an Alice in Wonderland style. She was spoiling the mood. When Claire furrowed her brow, only Snookie noticed that it was enhanced by a widow's peak that gave shape to her square jaw and broad cheekbones. The chiseled cheeks were the scaffolding of her symmetrically constructed face. Since Claire's thick brows were left unfashionably unplucked and feathered high over her naturally dark lashes, the impact of the explosive violet eyes was diminished. The dazzling color was the only thing about Claire every girl envied, and the fact that her thick lashes were black as indigo without the benefit of Maybelline's cake mascara.

  “She's the kind fathers find attractive, you know, with that wide-eyed dreamy look. Any modern boy is going to find her drippy,” Cilla whispered into Lily Dunworth's ear.

  “She's like a spy with the sneaky way she just listens, reads, and never joins in,” Lily stage-whispered back.

  “My God, she smells just like a vanilla bean.” Hadley Tipps sniffed, the tip of her nose practically brushing the white patch of skin between her eyebrows. She was referring to the vanilla-based aroma Claire had had a French perfumer touring Field's mix up for her. Claire preferred this homey brew, a reference to her Candy Kitchen girlhood, to the expensive perfumes like Quelque Fleurs and Shalimar favored by the deb set.

  “I hear her evening dresses are borrowed from the store. They have to be back first thing in the morning. Like curfew.”

  “But you have to admit she has a certain grace.” Daisy Armstrong's family had the largest fortune on the North Shore, so she could afford to be generous. Daisy usually tried to buffer Claire from any real cruelties, more from a sense of noblesse oblige than niceness, but Claire was thankful nonetheless. The girls’ sniping, snubbing, and ridicule hurt Claire more than they could guess.

  Claire had lost much of her perkiness, Miss Wren's word for her spunky courage, as she grew older. As long as she was a small child, she was the store's pet. In the early years everyone laughed at Claire's precocious charm, admired her golden curls, or pinched her pink cheeks. Then gradually, as she grew taller, and older, her thick hair now dark and merely wavy, Claire had become a problem.

  She was too small for one peg and too big for another. The mothers of more awkward debutantes among her mother's clients were jealous of Claire's well-versed talent, and of her even more evident porcelain skin, but consoled themselves with the fact that the penniless girl didn't have a social chance in hell. Suddenly, Claire Organ was out of place no matter where she was.

  So she was simply ignored. Mothers and their daughters whom she had known as friendly customers all her life now looked right through her as if she were transparent, talking about things as if she wasn't standing but two feet away from them handing Madame Celine straight pins in Field's fitting rooms while their dresses were altered. It galled her to find herself being treated the same way certain careless people treated taxi drivers, waiters, the household help, or anybody else who they thought didn't matter enough to care about Only the Pettibones, the Armstrongs, and a handful of her mother's best clients remembered to include Claire at their daughters’ dances or gatherings, even though Claire disliked being there every bit as much as the girls resented having her around—although they all pretended otherwise.

  “So non-us,” Lily Dunworth had described her.

  Claire wished she didn't have to go to these little gatherings where part of the sport was snubbing her. And then there was her discomfort, too, of being a guest in the enemy camp, with her guilty knowledge of the five-and-a-half-year affair between Auntie Slim and Mr. Pettibone—although by now she had learned enough to keep her own secrets. Mr. Pettibone had even brought Claire back a small gift after he'd first whisked Auntie Slim off to Paris—a little French ballerina turning on her music-box stand to the strains of “Clair de Lune.” Upon their return, Slim moved out of the Windermere to the North Side, where she currently resided in a sun-filled one-bedroom apartment at the Churchill on State Parkway, decorated with a Coromandel screen and suede upholstery, just like Chanel's private quarters above her salon at 31 Rue de Cambon. A pull-out couch was set aside for Claire's weekly visits, except on the evenings when “Uncle” Cyrus might be stopping by.

  Claire wondered what Cilla Pettibone would do if she knew her father had not only been to Paris with her Auntie Slim, but that the same life-sized picture of Cyrus Pettibone that hung in the vast foyer of the Lake Forest house also sat in a small silver Christofle frame on Slim's skirted bed stand.

  As the debs-to-be and Brenda Frazier wanna-bes chatted on about dresses and boys and guest lists, Claire selfconsciously looked down at her fingernails, as naturally unpolished as Amelia Earhart's. She could hear Auntie Wren in her head telling her that she must be a very hardy girl, the half-moons of her fingernails being so wide and all, taking up almost one-third of her nail, a true sign of health and well-being.

  She supposed she had a stronger constitution than most. In fact, the only time Claire remembered being truly sick was in July 1937, when a viral episode coincided with the first reports that Amelia Earhart's plane had gone down somewhere in the Pacific after having taken off from New Guinea.

  It can't be, the devastated girl had thought then, becoming glued from that moment on to the radio, her knees pulled up to her chin as she rested fitfully on the couch listening for news of the flier's whereabouts and fate. Had the Japanese detained her, or had she been captured by savages off New Guinea? Or had the plane, more mundanely, experienced mechanical difficulties? As the world waited and speculated, Claire instinctively knew the answer. Her navigator had let her down with his geography. Just like her father. Eventually, when the search was called off, with nary a piece of wreckage or luggage having been sighted, she put away her girlish dream that one day her life would cross again with the flier's. It was a little blow absorbed and almost forgotten, much like the phantom father.

  “Hitler's changing the entire geography of Europe,” Claire spoke again, leaving her private thoughts behind. Her eyes were flashing. “Any maps we have will be useless. We should be worried about that and the terrible suffering that is going on there and not about who's coming to your party.”

  “That reminds me, I almost forgot the McNally boy,” Cill piped up, referring to the Chicago family that manufactured all the world's maps, globes, and atlases.

  “Oh, Claire,” Lily moaned. “You're so tiresome.”

  “Oh, what a bother.” Cill would go to her mother again to complain about Claire having to participate. Why did Claire Organ always have to be included? She was a nobody.

  “There must be some kind of butlers’ ball with a polka contest Claire could debut at,” Daisy tittered into Lily's ear.

  “Doesn't she know the reason our grandmothers invented society in the first place was so that everybody could belong to their own class?” Hadley stage-whispered back.

  The girls shouted with laughter, stealing sidelong looks at the object of their scorn, who flushed hotly but kept her eyes on her book.

  Claire quite agreed with the others about not belonging there. But Claire wouldn't have revealed herself in front of the Priscilla Pettibones of this world for any amount of money, even as tears now stung her eyes and her lips quivered. She couldn't wait to leave the world of women behind her. She had been in a cackling henhouse without a rooster long enough. The hens had gone berserk and were pecking her to death. A real tear slipped down her cheek in spite of her best efforts to detour it.

  “So the Armour boys, Marshall Field the Fourth, and Andy Ryerson, who's at Yale. He's so utterly handsome,” Cill continued, taking no notice of Claire. “Hanky Clifford from New York, and both—”

  “Is there a Rockefeller in our age group?” asked Lily. “Have him.”

  “Oh, and Phipps from Oyster Bay. He's my brother's roommate at Dartmouth.”

  “Don't forget Reg Dickerson the Third from Tuxedo Park. I met Dicky at the Everglad
es Club in Palm Beach last winter. Too divine. Maybe he'll come.”

  Claire lifted her violet eyes and hastily wiped her cheek dry with her fingertips.

  “Tuxedo Park. Yes, ask Harry Harrison too.” Lily was busy dabbing her toes with Debutante Pink.

  “Oh, he's such a twit. He'll probably just keep his nose in a book the whole time.”

  “But aren't they awfully rich, the Harrisons?”

  “Of Winding Way Road?” Constance read from the blue book.

  “And isn't his father an ambassador or something?”

  “S'pose. But he can't dance!”

  “So don't ask him.”

  “I'll have to,” Cill lamented. “His father went to Princeton with Daddy.”

  Claire bit her lip and wondered what kind of books Harry Harrison read, and if his father didn't have a fourteen-karat-gold dresser set from Marshall Field's & Co. The Harrisons of Tuxedo Park. Could they be the very same Harrisons who had saved her little Christmas years ago and indirectly “bought” the Amelia Earhart overnight case for her? Claire half smiled to herself and felt a twinge of excitement for the first time in months. Maybe this ball wouldn't be so terrible after all.

  Chapter Five

  Family Values

  There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human society, are created, strengthened and maintained.

  —Winston Churchill

  William Henry Harrison IV didn't carry his ancestors around lightly. He ducked his silver gray head to avoid a summer branch as he easily took the jump over the field-stone fence that intersected the north end of his Tuxedo Park property. As usual, his son Harry was several jumps behind. Both of them cut youthful figures with their trim male bodies gracefully wedded to the horses they rode. Father and son were casually and almost identically dressed in brown leather riding boots, tan jodhpurs, white shirts, and houndstooth jackets. But then there weren't many choices for proper sartorial attire in Tuxedo Park. Only forty-odd miles from roistering Manhattan, Tuxedo Park was a rustic enclave in the Ramapo Mountains restricted to New York's most elite, well-bred WASP families, along with their deer, horses, partridges, pheasants, wild turkeys, and whiskey sours. The horsey patrician residents guarded their privacy aggressively within their slabbed-stone walls, and tried to conduct their well-ordered aristocratic lives quietly and with valor, regardless of the fact that young Griswold Lorillard had given their private park a notoriety of sorts when in 1886 he and a few of his puckish friends had daringly worn tailless dress jackets to the Tuxedo Club's autumn dance, inventing in the process the tuxedo, the gentleman's preferred formal evening attire now worn everywhere by everyone. The Lorillards held the property on the eastern boundary of the Harrison estate looking down over the lake and, like the rest of their neighbors, these pillars of Tuxedo Park society elected to preserve their privacy more than fifty years after “the little notoriety” of the birth of the tux. The Tuxedo people regarded being written up in the New York “café society” columns as akin to having mug shots published in the Police Gazette. But there were exceptions, like the time Ophelia's great-aunt had gone mad and shot the butler who was serving her cold tea, winging him on the ear with a pocket pistol. The family was glad to see this nasty little episode reported in “Talk of the Town” instead of on the front page of the New York Times.