“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.”
“About what? Neither one of us has time for unrealistic emotions. Claire, give me some space. There are enough bedrooms here for all of us.”
Suddenly, Claire wanted to live up to her old reputation as a hot-tempered murderess. Instead, she stormed out the screen door with a revised goal.
I want HurryUp, she thought. I want a home of my own. I'll pay the taxes, I'll fix it up, I'll restore it. And as long as he behaves, he'll be welcome to stay here. But he'll have to take his “virtues” somewhere else.
Stomping up to the house, she tried to compose herself. Her riding boots left deeper than usual imprints on the sloped winter lawn. Little Violet and Billy were on her like playful puppies, and she was glad for all their genuine hugs and kisses. Billy was Six's double, and Claire gave him an extra squeeze. Looking at his dimples and clear, sky-blue eyes framed by a halo of flaxen curls made her smile. His physical likeness to Six and his quick intelligence far beyond his four years made Claire feel there was continuity in this life. Or even that Billy had been touched in heaven by Uncle Six, as Sara's children had been taught to remember her brother.
Sara looked serious. She walked up to Claire in that fey, defiant way of hers. Her husband, Seth, was holding Dylan, who, as far as Claire could determine, resembled Harry more than any one of the three. The whiny voice of a freewheeling folk singer sang out loudly from the van's tape deck.
“Claire.” Sara hadn't called her “Mother” since Rome. “We need to talk.”
There was a confrontational tone in her voice, as if her latest shrink had advised her to have it out with her mother on this birthday weekend. “We need to hash something out” Claire thought she heard more spirit than usual in her daughter's small, high voice.
“If you want an argument, Sara, go to the gazebo,” she snapped. She was usually more careful with Sara's fragile feelings. “I'm going to my room.”
Grant never returned for the six o'clock family supper, and Claire was glad of it She had only to say “Patty Hearst” or “Deep Throat” and everyone nodded knowingly, impressed. A busy press lord had to stay on top of these things and was expected to be absent from time to time. In this year of Nixon's resignation, no one in the newspaper business ever had a quiet day. Was Ford going to pardon the disgraced president or not? Would Nixon's chief of staff go to the slammer? Was Ford up to the job?
She was relieved when he failed to arrive and removed his plate after soup. She wouldn't have wanted to spoil her mellow mood at her happy dinner table with the grandchildren, her Auntie, the Harrimans, and a few editorial page journalists all happily mixed together like jellybeans in a candy dish. They talked, interrupting each other, for hours. There was political gossip and children's prattle. Claire's country tables were always flexible: There was always room for one more and a no-show was never missed.
After the meal, Pam tugged Claire's elbow as the adults wandered into the living room filled with overstuffed armchairs and cluttered coffee tables stacked with periodicals and bird porcelains.
“Ave wants to know if Grant really knows who Deep Throat is.”
Claire, annoyed to the backbone, shot back conspiratorially, “As a matter of fact, I think Grant had a tête-à-tête with Deep Throat this afternoon. It's what waylaid him.”
“Oooh,” Pam trilled. As the anonymous source who had caused a president to resign, Deep Throat was the number one celebrity of the year. “Why don't you invite Mr. Deep Throat to your party? That would endear you to Grant. He'd be indebted to you forever.”
A lightbulb went on in Claire's brain.
Harrison's gift arrived that night by parcel from Italy: a small watercolor by John Singer Sargent, the American painter who had lived abroad. Evidendy that was how Harrison had begun to see himself. An American in exile. The sentiment inside was not the traditional birthday greeting but rather one cursory line:
Another year we're not together…
W.H.H. TV
Claire was still tossing in bed when she heard footsteps outside on the old floorboards.
“Claire, are you awake?” Sara rapped softly on her mother's door after everyone else had gone to sleep.
Claire's “Come in” was weary.
Sara, her face scrubbed, and wearing a blue quilted bathrobe with its looped belt missing, looked like the troubled teenager she had once been.
“Do you want to talk, Sara?” Even Claire's top-notch acting skills couldn't disguise the melancholy in her voice.
“Funny. That's what I was going to ask you. I didn't go through twenty years of psychoanalysi
s not to recognize a fellow soul in conflict. I knew that something wasn't right from the way you walked up the hill. Want to hash it out?” She wore her inherited lopsided grin. “I might be able to help.”
“Come over here.” Claire opened her arms to her daughter, and for once Sara stepped into them.
“You shouldn't stay away. I love you, you know.” Claire lifted her daughter's chin delicately with her fingers.
“My children love Grand Claire more than the world.” Claire had to smile. Somewhere along the line “Grandma” had been shortened to just “Grand.”
“And you?”
“Consider me the lost generation. But I'm working on it.” There was a glimmer of warmth in Sara's voice.
“May I hug you, then?”
“Of course. Mother.”
They rocked together, and suddenly whether Grant or a thousand Grants ever came back seemed utterly unimportant. Mother. She hadn't heard that word spoken to her since Six had died. She tried to disguise her joy. Maybe Sara had said it by accident.
“Billy's so bright, you know. He seems to grasp everything. You're doing a nice job with him. You're a good mother, Sara.”
“Thank you. All the kids are bright. But Billy tests right off the charts. Top of his class.”
“Does he remind you of Six, too?”
“Every day.”
“Seth is a good husband to you, isn't he?”
“He's like the Roman Colosseum. He's always there.” They both laughed. “Of course, he'd never be good enough for you. Poetry professors don't get to be stamps.”
Claire hugged her daughter tighter.
“Being there is important.” Her eyes traveled far away.
“I often think about that terrible time.” A hundred hollows filled Claire's face.
“Do you know what I remember about that day?”
“What, Sara?” The anguish was evident in Claire's voice. “What do you remember about that day?”
“Your ice-blue satin Christian Dior and pink raspberries.” She said the words into her mother's breast like she was sharing a clue-filled secret.
Claire was confused. Why would Six's death remind her of blue couture and pink fruit?
“I was hiding in your closet that day behind that voluminous big shiny gown of yours. The one Six always walked behind, completely covered up, whenever he crashed one of your fancy dress parties.”
Mother and daughter laughed softly together, both of them remembering how Six worked the party room, invisible behind the blue billowy width of his mother's skirt.
“But what about the pink raspberries?”
“I stood there shaking in your big closet, cowering behind the Dior, listening to Lorenza tell about how Duccio had struck Six in a rage. Killing him.” Years of explosive anger still stuck in her throat. And guilt undiluted by years of therapy. Claire shared her daughter's complicated emotions. All these years and they had never spoken about Six's murder. There was a silence in the room so powerful it hung there, a tangible physical presence.
“I don't remember anything else until I heard you calling my name over and over.” Sara ran the words together. Overandover.
“It was like I was asleep and awake at the same time. Your voice awakened me from a nightmare and there was the dead man on the floor and I tried to scream but I couldn't so I just watched as a deep stain of blood, shaped like a spreading raspberry, kept oozing from his chest. Growing bigger in horrible slow motion, the juice spilling across his shirt. I just watched it and then you as you performed your unselfish act of heroism.” Her pupils were pinwheels of stormy colors. “You let them think you did it.”
“I didn't want you to have to suffer, Sara.”
Sara's cheeks turned the hue of mottled red beets. “I did suffer. And I thought about it until my brain wouldn't think anymore. But if it were one of my children in trouble, I'd do the same thing you did.” Her lip was quivering, as if she couldn't decide whether to say more or to stop.
“Oh, Sara.” Claire's emotions were too deep for tears.
“Grand-mere Ophelia tried to tell me we were to consider you dead, but every school I went to, girls were reading magazines with pictures of you in party dresses, icy blue dresses, and I had to defend you.” There was no stopping her now. The dam was opened. Tears and pent-up emotions tumbled out like water over a dangerous fall. “I hated you for everything!”
“I'm so sorry, baby. I'm so sorry.” For the first time Claire mourned the lost years with Sara as well as with Six.
“At Charlotte Hall, Six's ghost walked with all the other heroic Harrisons. I knew it was my fault. I should have been protecting my little brother.” Sara's jeremiad was directed at herself. “Lorenza overheard everything. Six was so brave and he was defending your honor to the Pirate.” Sara spit out the words. Her red hair looked as if it were on fire.
“Six was destined to fight for one of us. He always defended the underdog. Even against bigger and stronger opponents. It wasn't your fault.” Claire's voice was full of uncried tears. “My dear Sara. Were there really so many ghosts at Charlotte Hall?”
“But you haunted me the most, Mother.” Sara stood and choked out the words that had to come. “You were the worst ghost because you so nobly sacrificed yourself for me, the most worthless of us all. I always had to pretend I didn't, but I loved you so much.”
“Oh, Sara. Please, baby. Don't let angry what-ifs stand between us anymore.”
Sara's head fell against Claire's body, whose breasts had stayed full of milk for this child long beyond their natural use, Ophelia having torn Sara from her mother's nurturing nipples. Instead Claire had offered them to Harrison. So many what-ifs.
She smoothed Sara's unruly waves of hair and brushed the tears away with her cool hands.
“There, Sara, there.”
“I want you to know the rest.”
“I'm not sure I can take hearing any more.” Now Claire's voice was childishly vulnerable.
“Grandpa and I defended you. But in secret. We had to whisper happy stories about you to each other in order to keep our spirits up. Whenever Grand-mère overheard us she would send me to some horrible predebutante etiquette lesson and take Grandpa's stroke therapist away. She liked him unable to speak, or walk, I think. It put her in charge of everything. It was very hard for him. We both loved you so much and yet for different reasons we were paralyzed.”
Claire closed her eyes in silent understanding.
“And neither one of us could help you when you were in Paris.”
“There was Lefty.” Claire brightened.
“I liked him,” Sara admitted.
“Me too. But I'm going to have bags under my eyes for my birthday party if we don't stop this. People will say I look fifty!”
Sara leveled one of the X-ray psychoanalyst looks she'd learned at her mother. “Do you want to keep Grant?” There was a trace of contempt when she said his name. “Anita says the Beltway scuttlebutt is that Charity Foxley is telling everyone that tomorrow night is going to be your going-away party. That's why you're glum, isn't it? Do you want to save your marriage?”
Claire sighed. “I suppose. Why?”
“Then fight for him. Dr. Newman always says that if you find out what makes a person tick, they can't hurt you.”
“All right, Dr. Sara. What do you think makes Grant tick?”
“Shower him with power.”
Claire laughed.
“Run for the Senate. The seat's open. You heard the dinner talk tonight. Piersall's retiring. I'll help. Like I did before.”
“You certainly did. You put me right over the top, you brilliant political strategist.” They hugged a last time.
“We'll talk again, won't we?”
“Of course, Mother.”
For the first time, Claire knew that-everything would be all right on this home front. A great worry lifted away from her shoulders, which had been bent low from all the day's drama. She slept dreamlessly, but somehow even in an exhau
sted sleep she heard the light breathing of her daughter on the four-poster bed beside her. And it soothed her to her core. In the first hours of morning, years of agony had been suddenly erased from Claire's face, her eyes brighter, and there was a genuine lift to her smile.
Sunday morning, Claire surveyed her closet critically before pulling out a dress.
“You can't wear that!” Auntie Slim had one bright cherry fingernail pointed at Claire's black sheath. “Wear something gay. It's your birthday.”
“Hush,” Violet scolded. “Have you heard from Grant, dear? He is coming?”
“Oh, yes. He called this morning. I think Pam was listening in on the receiver. I heard those British gasps of hers.”
“Where's Grant?” Slim, all done up in head-to-toe pistachio green Chanel, was pacing the floor under her own white cloud of smoke. “You can't have a birthday party without a host. Gotta have a man.”
“He'll be here, dears. He telephoned.” Claire spoke to all three female reflections in her mirror. The skirted dressing table she was seated at was both a cosmetics counter and a gallery—dainty bottles of replenishing creams and perfumes shared me space with an array of pictures of Six, Sara, and herself with dozens of important world leaders, and one with Grant. Suddenly she knew what was the matter with all these high-powered pictures. She was always at the elbow of influence.
“Thank God.” Slim breathed a sigh of relief and plopped into a chintz armchair emblazoned with delicate Chinese ladies holding fans. She could use a fan herself, she thought “Let me tell you, I had a fiftieth birthday without a husband and it was no picnic. Did I ever tell you about the time Cyrus—”
The Chameleon Page 49
