The Chameleon

by Sugar Rautbord

Claire reined in her horse. She was out riding the trails at HurryUp. After four years of marriage, she and Grant had settled into a pleasant routine. It was only when she was alone or in the company of an old friend like Pam that she allowed Harrison into the conversation.

  Always Harrison. She sighed to the lace frost on the December trees that lined the path.

  “Harrison's always the same,” Pamela Harriman, Claire's red-haired riding companion, echoed. “You'd think the man would have a bald spot like Averell by now or use a cane. Even have a cataract. But no, he's a silver-haired Adonis. We saw him out in New York at the Whitneys’. Starling was home with that ridiculous Nile fever, ailing as usual. Creatures like her have no genetic stamina. If she was a horse, they'd shoot her.” It was obvious that Pam had no patience for sickness. “He was quite elegant in his English bespoke suit. Dark blue with a wide chalk stripe. So very Harrison.”

  Pamela sat perfectly straight astride her horse, the top of her velvet helmet peeking over her horse's ears. She looked handsome in her tan jodhpurs, polished J. Lobb black boots that came to just below the knee, and a tweed riding coat cut to accommodate her ample bosom—the bosom that Slim half-joked had been pointed like a Holland and Holland big-game hunting rifle at the world's richest men.

  Her red flame of hair was cupped around ears that listened only selectively, and a line of freckles stubbornly crossed the delicate bridge of her nose. Some indication of the lady's own tenacity. At fifty-four, she still possessed a girlishness that glimmered through her cool, hard shell. Claire still considered Pam more of a fellow traveler than a friend, as they had very little in common except for the number of old skins they had shed.

  “Averell's putting me on the board of Braniff. He thinks I should know more about the business of money.”

  “I think you've managed very well without an M.B.A.,” Claire deadpanned, wishing that someone with a sense of irony, Auntie Slim perhaps, were along for the ride.

  Pam possessed a vague air of disconnectedness, seeming to suffer separation anxiety whenever she was even more than a foot or two away from her husband. Having finally landed her married lover from thirty years before, she held on to him as tightly as if he were a young stallion from her stables instead of a hard-of-hearing eighty-two-year-old geezer. She had practically rescued him from the grave, Claire marveled, reviving him into marriage where, in a growing collection of homes, she took such good care of him that he was miraculously invigorated and revitalized. Like an old oak that had suddenly sprouted a new branch. Pam often referred to Averell as “me Governor,” as if bestowing his old title on him elevated her a step up in the life she'd built on borrowed prestige.

  The two horses halted at a fallen tree on the trail.

  “Women with important husbands have so many hurdles to jump.” Pamela Churchill Hayward Harriman spoke from experience. She led the way over the dead wood with her high-stepping horse. She had brought her own costly thoroughbred with her for the weekend. Even though she was now married to a vastly wealthy political emissary, she still referred to herself as Winston Churchill's daughter-in-law, glowing in the reflection of history's giant hero the way other women clipped on a pair of bright earrings.

  “You're so clever, Pammie. You should write a book. Sort of a survival manual.” Advice for the Other Woman, Claire thought as she posted expertly. Claire sat as lightly in her saddle as if she had been born to it. With each new success of her own, her confidence grew.

  It amazed Claire that this woman, who had been surrounded by so many great men, had never ventured out with a career agenda of her own or been bitten by her own bug of ambition. She had settled instead for spousal or mistress duty serving gift-bearing titans of all sorts.

  “What is Grant giving you for your birthday? Averell gave me a plane,” Pam said flatly, as if receiving an aircraft was like getting a toaster. “You know, dear, you really have nothing to show for all your marriages.”

  “I have my daughter. And my politics. Not to mention my adorable grandbabies. And a very bright future.” Claire brushed off Pam's remarks like evaporating snowflakes.

  “But where are your financial assets?”

  “Oh, Pam. I don't think like you.”

  “Well, you should. Money matters.” Pam pondered this needlepoint-pillow philosophy for a minute. “A woman with property is twice as enticing. Especially as she gets a little age on her.” Pamela cleared her throat like a prim schoolteacher. “Remember the last three times you entrusted your finances to your husbands? You can't add up zeros! Put some property in your name. Especially since you're married to such a handsome scoundrel. You thought you were well off with young Harry. Not to mention Duccio. And this is a big birthday. You should become a woman of property now. You're turning fifty.” She punched the number out as if she were keeping score.

  “Thank you, Pam. I have two whole days to go before I have to deal with being half a century old.” She had winced this morning when she'd combed six new silvery hairs into her chignon.

  “You should be in crisis now. Then you'll be over it by the party.” Pragmatic Pam was humorless, but she always made Claire laugh, even if she had to giggle behind her gloved hand.

  The party was set for Saturday, and all of the Washington establishment elite was invited. Claire was using her birthday as an occasion to bronze their social status the way Sara had bronzed Dylan's baby shoes, solidifying political and journalistic alliances. The crowd was going to be stellar.

  “I'm doing the seating tomorrow. Any preferences?”

  “Just seat me with Averell. At the head table. By the way, are you having Charity Foxley?” There was a gossipy glint in Pam's eyes.

  “Why, yes. She's a neighbor out here. Grant rides with her. She's the best jumper in the country.” There was no jealousy in Claire's velvet voice.

  “So I've heard.”

  “She's an Olympic equestrienne.”

  “How patriotic of you. A ribbon winner. You're more broad-minded than I.” Pam ran her horse's reins firmly through her fingers. “Young women who hang around stables too long get very frisky. You can't have that much horse flesh between your legs all day without getting aroused.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?” Claire's baser instincts raced to the surface.

  “I wouldn't have her to my house. Or on my horse.” She raised an auburn-tinted eyebrow. “Even if Averell were a hundred and two years old. Well, I must canter off, dear, back to your guesthouse. The Governor will be awakening from his nap in a few minutes and I like to be the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes.” Her smile was quick and crisp.

  With an expert if graceless movement of her custom-booted foot, she turned her mount back to HurryUp's stables, maintaining her peculiar warmthless smile and leaving Claire alone with new doubts to add to her sudden terror about turning fifty. Claire was glad to see her go. Until Claire had had this little trail talk with Pam, she thought she and Grant were having a perfectly adequate marriage. So why should she let Pam plant a dirty seed of doubt? From where she sat, her domestic garden was all abloom.

  She made a mental list of their exterior good points.

  The Fenwick Grants were lionized by the East Coast establishment. The recklessly handsome publisher and his glamorous congresswoman wife had become the darlings of the political, social, and journalistic set in the same short time it took the Watergate burglars to bumble into Democratic National Committee headquarters. In no time at all, Claire had skillfully passed two school integration votes and co-authored a bill on affirmative action. Grant's newspapers had come in a close second to Kay Graham's Washington Post on the Watergate coverage, hard on the heels of Kay's foot soldiers Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They had both excelled in their worlds, even though Grant was growing obsessively preoccupied with catching up to the competition, often forgetting he had another wife besides his work. But that was the price of power, Claire knew. Her husband spent longer and longer hours toiling in his office, often arriving a
t one of their famous Georgetown suppers on Q Street, coat in hand, like a tardy guest At 10:45, when Grant lifted his glass to toast his guest of honor, he usually had one eye on his Cartier tank watch. As everyone inside the Beltway knew, official Washington dinner parties ended promptly at 11 P.M.

  “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 disgui
se 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.