The Chameleon

by Sugar Rautbord

  “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.”

  Claire followed his pace in silence.

  “Do you mind walking a little longer?”

  “As long as you keep talking.”

  He stopped and took her by the shoulders. She knew what was coming and could have prevented it with a word or a gesture. But she didn't. He drew her lips closer to his, her mouth was already open. When he pulled her closer her hands instinctively circled his neck as she leaned into him, their thighs and hips pressed together with no ancillary space. It was a long, hungry kiss.

  When she opened her eyes their lips lingered. Well after midnight on the Via Collina in a city resting from war, there was no one to fault or judge their behavior. In America one kiss might have been their limit, but here in the heart of the Roman night with the smells of their clean perspiration mixed with the scents of almonds and orange blossoms filling their nostrils, the kiss only whetted their appetites.

  Claire heaved a long sigh, and pushed her arm through his and then cradled it with her other hand. Everything seemed different In this place filled with crowds of ancient ghosts and ringed with hundreds of centuries of monuments and ruins, built by a pantheon of gods who took mistresses, and deities masquerading as swans to seduce virgins, their passion for each other seemed tame; their kiss so small on the moral compass of everything that had happened around them. A warm wind rustled down from the hills, lifting the balmy, moist air. Beads of perspiration glistened on her hopeful face as they approached the hotel.

  “Buon giórno, Signóre and Signóra Harrison!” Alberto the concierge in his gold-braided uniform greeted them as if they were a couple and, in that pink and golden moment before dawn, that is what they became. It had just struck four o'clock in the morning, and in the eternal city they were now “the Harrisons.”

  “Shall I bring up to you the coffees?”

  “No, grazie.”

  “Ah.” Alberto nodded. He had often put Mussolini's mistress to bed and consoled homesick Germans. “Buona notte.”

  The sound of their shoes crossing the foyer clicked across the marble floor. The red runners had been taken out to dry-clean away all the Fascists’ footprints. Harrison gently took Claire's hand as they ascended the staircase to his suite. Dawn was blatantly sweeping into his rooms. They met it in one another's arms.

  It was as if a stiff mask had dropped from Harrison's face, revealing a warm man given to easy laughter.

  “Even foreigners begin to feel different after being in Italy for a short time,” the enterprising Alberto remarked, winking, a few mornings later as he palmed the gratuity Harrison had just given him. He glided the handful of coins fluidly into his pocket as he saw the distinguished American guest into the sedan taking him to the Quirinal Palace for the day's first session.

  Claire routinely followed a punctual hour later, after having shampooed the night's ardor out of her hair and scrubbed the look of a radiant lover off her face. While patting the lightest layer of Pond's cold cream onto her face, she saw to the “little details,” as Slim called them: arranging for Harrison's shirts to be properly laundered and hung and stocking the humidor—salvaged by Alberto “from a guest who left in a big hurry in ‘forty-four”—with Harrison's favorite cigars, procured by the resourceful concierge from black-market contacts with whom he had an excellent working relationship.

  Occasionally Claire was able to gather up a short stack of day-old English newspapers and week-late Time magazines to add to the homey mood she tried to create in the suite. Having lived with Harrison the last few years in their odd arrangement at the Willard Hotel, she knew all his habits. And having grown up at the Windermere Hotel with the Aunties, she knew exactly what was needed to turn these impersonal rooms into their private haven. A saffron-silk scarf from the Via Veneto was draped over the table lamp to cast a warmer glow; an idle ice bucket was commandeered to hold ivory-colored Banks roses, and a silver bowl was kept filled with fragrant olives on the bar table that she had set up to mix Harrison's after-work martini. Claire even persuaded the chambermaid to give them fresh bed linens daily, a luxury not available to the other guests. The knowledge that the fastidious Harrison would sleep more comfortably was well worth the special treatment.

  At the Quirinal meetings, briefcase in hand, Claire joined Harrison, taking his notes and telexing his messages, but all at a much more relaxed pace than they had kept up in Washington. The days were filled with presentations by members of the nine European delegations attending, and Claire could feel the excitement build as she began to appreciate just how ambitious the recovery program would be.

  But the moment that touched her most deeply came on the first night of the twelve-day conference when she watched the delegates, most of whom hadn't seen each other since the onset of war, embrace and weep with joy to find their friends still alive. She listened as they shared their stories, describing how they and their family members had survived blitzkriegs, buzz bombs, concentration camps, and other, unimag
inable hardships. Dinner that night was a true banquet, and afterwards they made Chianti toasts—to one another's survival, to the great Victory, and, poignantly, to those missing friends who had not lived to see it. Then these paler, thinner versions of their old selves raised their filled glasses to the future. Claire watched, not surprised but spellbound as one dignitary after another greeted Harrison—respected, as she already knew, but obviously beloved as well—grabbing his hand, pumping it up and down, hugging his straight-postured shoulders like eager children, thanking him for his exhaustive wartime efforts on their behalf and for keeping the American focus on coming to Europe's rescue. Claire watched Harrison use his handkerchief to wipe away tears from the corners of his eyes. It made her love him even more.

  For the first time since she had known him, Harrison was overcome with a surge of feelings; and when she came to him that night, slipping off her robe to press her bare skin next to his, he reached out for her and pulled her close, a man drowning in deep emotions and clinging to a buoyant life raft.

  He lifted her hair up off the nape of her slender neck, kissing the little place he had earmarked for his own. She let her head gently lean to one side and then raised her bare arms over her head in a stretch. He brought his hands down the front of her nakedness, coming to rest at the tuft of soft brown velvet below her waist. Feeling him without seeing him, her back to his chest, was an odd sensation, but she liked it and let him know. His elegant hands traveled down her body like a cellist in an unhurried overture to their lovemaking. In response to his caresses she instinctively flowered open, giving him as much awareness of herself as possible.

  She could hear her body start to sing as he ran an imaginary bow across the belly of her curved torso. To bring the rhythm of their lovemaking to a different pitch, he paused to stroke other parts of her body that men of less nuance might forget to linger over.

  Her very being was by now as tightly strung as a Stradivarius, a responsive instrument so sensitive that even the lightest feathering of his touches caused her to tremble in exquisite pleasure. He turned her over to face him and she showered him with butterfly kisses from her soft, moist lips, parting them as she continued to open herself up to receive his well-orchestrated thrusts.