“Because I haven't learned to drive yet.” Then Claire flashed her a smile every bit as charming as the diplomatic Harrison Senior's. She was learning.
The dogwood and forsythia along the roadway to upstate New York were in robust bloom, as were bright-hued tulips prying their way up from the moist earth, but all of them paled in comparison with the yellow silk daisies bunched on the first lady's hat. The two well-dressed girls arrived at the factory just as Mrs. Roosevelt was mounting a platform to speak with several women welders by literally walking the plank, the only means of ascending the makeshift platform erected four feet above the ground so that everyone in the crowd would be able to see her.
Mrs. Roosevelt's voice was mellifluous and pleasant, lifting up to the rafters of the former Waring factory, which now made small airplane parts instead of eggbeaters and blenders.
“If you've sewn on buttons, or made buttonholes on the machine, you can learn to do spot welding on airplane parts.” E.R.’s voice sang out like a high-pitched contralto. “If you've done fine embroidery, or made jewelry, you can learn to do assembly on time fuses and radio tubes. And if you've ever poured batter for a bundt cake, you can pour the lead for our bullets. Are you ready?”
A cheer went up and Claire's heart leaped.
“I am here today to commend you, and you are here to tell me what needs to be done. Once in a while down in Washington they listen to me when I have something to say.” She smiled. “I say, if our country needs its married women to work so that we can win this war, then the government needs to step in with day nurseries and play schools adjacent to our plants!”
Clapping, Claire turned to Minnie and said, “Isn't she wonderful?”
Minnie looked back at Claire and shrugged. “She sounds like a socialist to me. Besides, that's what we have nannies for.”
Claire turned away from her and inched closer to the applauding factory worker on her right.
“As I have traveled the country I am invigorated to see college girls and career women, shop girls and stenographers, housewives and widows, girls whose fathers are army men or girls whose husbands are flying planes and driving tanks, picking up the slack to do the work the men have left behind.” Claire applauded vigorously and thought of Harry. Surely she could think of some way to help her own flyboy.
Back at Charlotte Hall after the speech, Claire's step was lighter and her mind on her immediate goals as she raced up the elaborate floral carved staircase two steps at a time and whizzed past her father-in-law's bedroom. Something caught her eye. She backtracked and poked her head into the normally unoccupied suite. She was surprised to see Alice and Katy, the upstairs maids, involved in an elaborate bed-making ritual. As they shook the thousand-thread-count second sheet, one girl on either side of the four-poster bed, the Egyptian cotton and silk blend fabric was billowing up into a huge balloon over the bed like a perfectly shaped cloud. As the luxurious square of custom cotton fell flat, each of the gray-uniformed girls with a starched pinafore hurried to pull the top sheet taut and tuck it into hospital corners before any wrinkles could form in the fabric.
“Could you do that again?” Claire spoke with all the authority of Mrs. Roosevelt, whose no-nonsense voice still rang in her ears. “Please.”
“What, ma'am?”
“Have we left any wrinkles, Miss Organ?”
Claire cringed at the sound of her maiden name, but to the maids in this house, there would always be only one Mrs. Harrison.
“Um, yes. And you know how Mrs. Harrison dislikes sloppy work.” There was such an unexpected authority in her voice that the startled maids undid their handiwork and began again.
“Oh, and billow it out, yes, high now … and hold it, just like that … to shake the wrinkles out.” Claire directed. Charmed at the lovely sight, she leaned against the door well and watched as the sheet floated so softly to touch the mattress below it could have landed an angel. And then it came to her. Like quicksilver Claire was out of the room, bounding down the stairs again and into Harrison's office. She closed the door and began to type, her fingers flying over the lettered keys, leaving Alice and Katy, who overheard everything at Charlotte Hall, to wonder whether Miss Claire wasn't as batty as those Aunties.
The small private elevator, paneled in wood, was crammed full of crocodile suitcases forming a pyramid up to its vaulted cathedral ceiling. The Harrisons were returning to Charlotte Hall, though one of them—no one bothered to tell Claire which—was a day ahead of the other.
But Claire was busy concentrating in Harry's old nursery. She stood atop a step ladder, her pastel smocked shirt puckered at what used to be her waist, painting cumulus clouds on the walls and ceiling. The puffy clouds were bright white, their linings tinged with pinks, and they sailed through a clear bright sky dotted with shiny silver airplanes wearing big smiles on their fuselages. And in the recessed space where the crib would stand was her masterpiece, a striped hot-air balloon flanked by two creamy white parachutes gently sailing a pair of happy clowns to earth. No soldiers or guns in her child's nursery. No horses either.
“Claire. Come down off that ladder!” She was so startled to hear his voice that she tumbled off faster than her feet. Harrison caught her before she crashed to the floor.
“Safe. No harm done.” She stood up, recovering quickly. She was seized with a momentary panic as she remembered Ophelia's admonition to stay off ladders. Claire hoped Harrison wouldn't tell his wife. Who knew what punishment Ophelia might try to impose?
“How goes the work of the ambassador of war?”
“Better, thanks to the busy work you've been up to.”
So he knew. Claire could tell by his smile.
“I have to admit that when they first told me that Mrs. William Henry Harrison had secured an enormous contract for manufacturing war matériel, turning the leading producer of bed linens and hosiery into our biggest supplier of parachutes, I was astonished that Ophelia could carry off such a coup. But when I congratulated her over dinner, she didn't know what I was talking about. The following day when I looked into the matter and learned that the supplier was Marshall Field and Company, I knew that our Mrs. Harrison was you.” Harrison was wearing his genuine grin now, not his diplomatic one.
Indeed, Claire had written a series of impassioned letters lobbying her old acquaintances in the executive office to give up manufacturing Field's primary products, Fieldcrest sheets and pillowcases, and to sacrifice Zionets lace curtains and Fieldbilt lingerie for the war's duration to serve a bigger need. She suggested that by turning over their North Carolina mills and Indiana plants to the production of war goods—silk bags for gunpowder, and parachute cloth, camouflage, and mosquito netting—Field's could make good on the store's motto to “give the lady what she wants,” namely a speedy end to the war and her husband's and son's safe return. Little did Claire realize at the time that out of her instinct to help her Harry, she had helped a thousand Harrys.
“I think the war effort could use your persuasive skills more than your paintbrushes,” Harrison continued. “Come down from your ladder, Claire, and come to Washington with me.”
July 9, 1942
USS Hornet
Clairest,
Fancy that! Father tells me if I have to bail out of my bomber I probably have you to thank for the smooth ride down. Aren ‘t you the resourceful one, turning sheets into parachutes, but then I did get the prettiest girl at the party and shouldn't be too surprised at any of your accomplishments.
Darling, I can't tell you what comfort it gives me to know that you will be safe now with my parents at the Willard where Mother can look after you properly. I am truly delighted she was able to track down and persuade old Bridget to come out of retirement and be our baby's nurse. She was my nurse until I was nine and I seem to have turned out none the worse for it.
Forgive me, Claire, for not wanting to share my war news but rather to hear all about your domestic adventures, whether or not the baby has kicked you in the side yet or if
you like the plans for our house to be built on the north parcel of C.H. We will be just a stone's throw from the big house. Do you like Mother's plan for a connecting underground passageway?
I have had my first brushes with the darker side of the war and my greatest salvation is to envision the three, no three and three-quarters, of you, minding the hearth and giving so generously with your own volunteer efforts. But do remember to rest and listen to Mother—at least until our little one is born.
Clairest, write often and oftener. Even seeing your slanted script with your little drawings lifts my mood. When I come back from a mission it is like being handed a bag of coins to receive a parcel of your letters. It was especially important after we dropped the bombs onCENSOREDand on the fly-by where we got to see the mangled damage we had wreaked. All that, and to lose so many boys and then the island itself. ICENSOREDbutCENSORED. Our boys’ spirits are dampened but the tide in the South Pacific will turn soon, I am sure.
You are so perceptive, darling. You are right to see this is not the same as shooting clay pigeons. I don't know how it is you always know my mind. In the meantime, I kiss you on the lips and thank God you are waiting for me.
Your Harry
P.S. Please thank your auntie Slim for the mono-grammed stationery and portable writing table. Unfortunately the paper is not the right issue but the writing table is a terrific hit in the ship's hospital, where I loaned it to some of the fellows on the mend.
P.P.S. Did I remember to tell you it makes me have wonderful thoughts to hear that you sometimes sleep in my leather flying jacket?
Chapter Nine
Eleanor and Lucy
Mature women should enter politics in order to guard against the emptiness and loneliness that enters some women's lives after their children are grown. Today's women need to have lives, interests and personalities of their own apart from their own households.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
“What I Want Most Out of Life,”
Success Magazine
In 1942 five thousand new people poured into Washington each month, and early that summer Claire was one of them. Like Claire, nearly one-third of the newcomers were women, mostly young. They came from every corner of the country, these fresh faces in their one pair of nylons and pencil-thin skirts, all in search of jobs, excitement, and, with any luck, husbands. But Claire already had each of these in spades. As the newest staff assistant to the president's senior adviser, her father-in-law, she was dropped smack dab into a heady world of generals, cabinet members, and twenty-four-hour workdays in a city that never shut down. After the sleepy days in Tuxedo, she welcomed the frenetic activity of the capital boomtown.
Where two years earlier the prewar armies had trained with cardboard weapons and flour for gunpowder, now there was a war department so vast it was preparing to move into the largest building in the world, the Pentagon.
Daylight savings—“war time”—was instituted throughout the country, and in Washington working hours were staggered to ease congestion in the streets and offices. Stuck in a bottleneck of Nashes, Fords, and DeSotos, Claire craned her neck around to better take her first look at the capital's picture-postcard sights—as if Imperial Rome had sent over its leftover marble columns, obelisks, and temples, it seemed to her—from the back of Harrison's polished black Lincoln. His aide and sometime driver Tom Brewster explained to Claire, driving her down Pennsylvania Avenue at a snail's pace, how trees were being uprooted and streets widened to accommodate the automobile traffic that choked the city in spite of the staggered hours and rationed gas. “This town is getting so crowded that Hitler and his tank could be stuck in traffic for hours before anyone noticed,” Tom joked. He laughed with a friendliness that reminded her of Harry's straightforward warmth. Tom couldn't have been more than a year or two older than her husband. The appealing impact of his sandy hair, big white teeth, and skin tanned the color of toast was mollified by a pair of thick tortoise-shell glasses. In Washington, with its scarcity of young men, even Harvard-educated noncombatants like Tom, thanks to poor vision and rich fathers, double-dutied as drivers and couriers. “Housing is at such a premium,” Tom told Claire, watching her closely in his rearview mirror, “that secretaries working the late shift ‘time share’ a bed with someone working the early shift. One sleeps on the still-warm sheets while the other works.”
Claire listened to Tom's stories, her wide-eyed gaze locked on the Washington Monument, which loomed ahead, as a peachy gray dusk fell over the city. Eventually, they pulled up to the very proper Willard Hotel.
Because of the housing shortage, it had been decided that Claire would live at the hotel with her in-laws. Since the Harrisons didn't share a bedroom, Claire would take the sitting-room couch or the extra bedroom when either was out of town. Not so different from the Windermere, Auntie Wren had pointed out in a letter. Claire didn't care. Adapting quickly to the improvised arrangement, she was so relieved to be out of her gilded birdcage at Charlotte Hall and in the center of power and activity that no inconvenience could deter her.
In just her very first week on the job, as part of Harrison's War Materials Oversight Team, Claire had been called upon to collect projections from the chairman of Chrysler on how many and how fast its assembly plants could turn out tanks for the hush-hush North Africa operation coming that fall. She'd also made dinner reservations for Cyrus Pettibone and his out-of-town guests, owners of a Chicago scrap metal company, in town for urgent discussions about the quickest way to melt down rusty old tankers and salvage the sheet metal for airplanes. In Claire's newly opened eyes, even though the floodlights that had always bathed the city's monuments in a soft, democratic glow were switched off for the war's duration, living in the capital was like being in the center of a thousand watts of energy.
“Turkey and yams. That's what you get when Eleanor's in residence. Dry as a bone, too,” Harrison said slyly to his daughter-in-law. He shook the summer rain off his umbrella and handed it over to the usher as they followed Ophelia up the stairs to the first family's private quarters. The humidity was high, and Claire could feel the dark fabric of her summer frock sticking to the back of her knees. She was nervously excited to meet the great man himself. She could hardly believe that she was calmly making her way upstairs to the president's parlor.
“E.R.’s stomping all over the country on Franklin's behalf to learn what the American people are thinking and you're expecting her to prepare a beef Wellington?” Ophelia scolded her husband. She fidgeted with a bow-shaped diamond brooch the size of a well-fed mouse that dangled from her ample bosom.
Harrison diplomatically took both of the ladies by the arm as the trio ascended the remaining stairs to the private residence. There in the Oval Room was the president seated at a table, mixing cocktails. A pince-nez on his nose, he peered over at Claire, his broad grin and cigarette holder dominating his jovial face. His cocktail hour was the only time of the day when he let all the worries of war briefly fall from his shoulders, Harrison informed her.
“Harry's bride! And just in time. Jump down, Fala, and give the lady your chair,” he bellowed to his black Scotch terrier, who instantly handed over his seat even as he left his four-pawed imprint on the cushion.
“Eleanor's having a lot of do-gooders for dinner so we have to get the fun in before the first course. Isn't that right, Ophelia?” Ophelia waved hello and skirted out to find the first lady, still at work in her office down the hall. “What can I fix you with, my dear?”
Claire was frozen. Here was the most important man on the face of the earth asking her what she'd like to drink.
He put her at ease. “Most people ask for something with ice on an evening like this.”
“Ginger ale,” Claire gulped.
“And how about you, Harrison? The usual?” His thin lips curled into a contagious smile when he greeted his friend. Claire observed that the affection between the two men was genuine. Harrison found a leather chair that had acquired a rich glow from years of use
and slowly lowered his tall frame. Harry Hopkins handed Claire her beverage from his moist hand. If Harrison was FDR's right hand, Harry Hopkins was his left.
“Thank you,” Claire said softly to everyone.
Her eyes swept the room, taking it all in. The president's study was in fact a large oval room lined with mahogany bookcases spilling over with leather volumes and a tumbleweed decor of family pictures, Harvard ashtrays filled with dog treats, and Audubon prints. The ships in glass bottles and slightly askew oil paintings of sailing vessels were a tribute to FDR's love of the sea. Upstairs at the White House had the cozy look of a well-born family's lifetime of clutter, gathered together for a rummage sale. Claire had no idea that this untidy room—the lived-in version of the formal Oval Office directly below—was in reality the heartbeat of the White House where FDR conducted most of his business until the wee hours of the morning and that his bedroom was only a closed door away. Claire sipped at her cold drink and demurely shook hands with the Morgenthaus, the Sherwoods, Harry Hopkins, and the president's only daughter, Anna. Even though Anna was fifteen years older than Claire, she was still the second-youngest person in the room, and had the warmest smile. As a mother whose husband was also soldiering overseas, Claire felt an unspoken bond with her and so she shyly settled herself into a nearby chair. She was satisfied that at least she looked presentable, with her thick hair softly waved to her shoulders, the crisp white collar and cuffs accenting her silk maternity smock.
“The hardest job in Washington is being Harrison and the second hardest is working for him. How are you holding up?” Roosevelt asked. His broad grin criss-crossed his entire face.
“Well, it's only been ten days.” Claire blushed.
“Ten days! Why, usually they ask to be transferred after forty-eight hours to something easy, like active duty!”
The president peered curiously over his pince-nez at the wholesome-looking girl with the violet eyes whose posture was show-horse perfect.
The Chameleon Page 17
