The Chameleon (13 page)
In unison, the Aunties and Celine gasped in awe.
“A work of art.”
“A fairy-tale dress.”
“A dress that will shower you in magic.”
“And confidence.” Violet unfastened the velvet sash and silk buttons of the Valentina, gently pulling off the suddenly very second-rate gown.
“Fit for a princess.” Celine stood back, entwining her fingers together into a steeple, before returning to the back room to prepare for the next day's onslaught.
Claire eyed the delicate eggshell-colored masterpiece appreciatively. She just knew its beauty would shield her from snubs and whirl her into an enchanted evening. Even if it was for just
one
enchanted evening.
As the Aunties slipped the party dress over her head, piled up her hair, and hung a string of costume pearls around her neck, Claire slipped into the mood. She only hoped she could live up to the exquisite dress's expectations.
“Ah Paris, Paris. Just a rustle of satin and I am transported back to the Avenue George the Fifth. Paris, the city of romance.” Slim heaved a sudden sob, arching her small shoulders so high they brushed her golden dangle earrings, sending them twirling and spinning crazily like little Ferris wheels.
Wren handed Slim her handkerchief in anticipation of the tears that would be flowing from the woman still in the throes of back-street love and the fall of Paris.
“Take it” Wren pushed the wadded-up hanky into Slim's hands.
“No, no.” Slim waved the hanky away. “Let these tears flow. These are tears of joy. Pure joy. You see, Cyrus has proposed. He is finally going to marry me.”
Wren spilled all the straight pins from Celine's box onto the floor.
“Oh, no, here we go again,” she wailed, wringing her hands as she knelt down to pick up the pins.
“C'est vrai.
It's true.” Real tears flowed down Slim's white, powdery cheeks. “He's leaving that old dragon right after Cilla's debut. We'll be man and wife by Valentine's Day.”
Wren looked at her woefully, shaking her head in doubt.
“No, really. Why would I lie?” Slim's eyes shone in all sincerity beneath her straight bangs.
Suddenly, three pairs of widened pupils were riveted on Slim, who was draped elegantly across the satin chaise and dabbing theatrically at her moist eyes. She looked vulnerable and fragile in the pink dressing-room light, real tears streaking mascara down her heart-shaped face.
“It's true.” An astonished Wren sank to her knees. They rushed to Slim's side.
Wren took Slim's hand as much in comfort as feeling around for a diamond ring.
“Oh girls,
mes soeurs,
come close.” She motioned them toward her. “I've been dying to tell you but I wanted to wait until we were all together.” She exhaled weeks of secrecy and gazed victoriously at their dumbfounded faces, stopping to pull Claire's palm softly to her cheek.
“And it's so right that it should be here at Field's, in this place”—her eyes rolled up to where the Tiffany dome would be—“where we first became a family.”
“But how did it happen? Why is this happening now?” Claire hoped she was being delicate.
“Cyrus has always told me that it was his intention to stay with Millicent only until his last daughter was launched.” She swung her arm as if she were launching a cruise ship with a champagne bottle. “Cyrus is a man of his word. I never reminded him of his promise nor expected him to keep it. You know, it's not in my nature to be demanding. I was resigned to live for a moment here, an evening there. Just a little romance. But two weeks ago he asked me if I would still have him. If I would be his wife.” The width of her grin could have landed her in
Ripley's Believe It or Not.
There was a moment of silence as they all sniffed into their perfumed handkerchiefs. No one spoke until Violet cleared her throat.
“Oh, we're thrilled for you, dear. It's just that it comes as such a surprise.”
“Oh, Auntie Slim. I'm so happy for you.” Claire extended her long arms around Slim's petite shoulders. “And here I am hogging the limelight and standing in what is definitely a wedding dress. Cream lace, satin, pearls, and all.” She planted a kiss on both of Slim's cheeks, in the French way, just as she had been taught “You should have this gown.”
“No, dear.” Slim brightened, her eyes sparkling. “I have a little Mainbocher evening suit tucked away in the back.”
“Just like the duchess of Windsor.” Miss Wren clapped her happy hands together. “That
other
American girl who married up. Well, everything's starting to look up around here for our little clan, isn't it?”
Violet, her composure returned, suddenly moved into action. “Here, let's have some music to celebrate Slim's good fortune.” She reached behind her to snap on the radio. “And Wren, run up to Gourmet and bring back some bubbly.”
Added to the reassuring music of infectious laughter came the strains of Artie Shaw's band in an upbeat melody.
“Oh, it's Artie Shaw himself. Lana Turner's new husband.”
The swing music wafted across the satin-tufted dressing room, and Claire, still dressed in the elegantly understated Chanel, gleefully danced Auntie Slim around the floor as Auntie Wren passed a silver tray of fluted champagne glasses from the eighth floor filled to the brim with Moët & Chandon. Even Violet got into the festive mode, removing her silken violet corsage and placing it in Slim's hands like a bridal bouquet.
Suddenly the middle-aged women appeared as young and full of hope as they had that very day seventeen years ago when Claire entered the world on Five.
“Just think, finally, a wedding in the family.”
“Our first.”
“But not our last.” Slim raised her glass, glowing.
“To Slim.” They raised their glasses.
“To love.” Slim crooned as the band played.
“Toujours l'amour.”
The music was suddenly interrupted as the urgent voice of an announcer broke in.
“Japanese bombers have just attacked the U.S. naval forces at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Heavy casualties have been sustained. The attack planes may be on their way to the mainland. We will stay tuned for a message from President Roosevelt. A declaration of war is expected. Repeat: The U.S. has been attacked. We are at war, Mr. and Mrs. America,”
One by one the shocked ladies solemnly set their celebration glasses back onto the silver tray. Each of them tried to make sense of what she had just heard.
Slim worried that she might be a war widow again. Surely Cyrus would be asked to lead a battalion.
Wren said a heartfelt prayer for Mrs. Roosevelt and her four sons, all of military age.
Violet moved immediately to embrace her daughter and hold her next to her heart.
For Claire, the world was at war and all its social snobberies and rules were suddenly shelved, crumbling topsyturvy, opening up unheard-of opportunities for the shop girls’ daughter. Claire was about to be thrust into circles inaccessible even to the daughters of social privilege who snubbed her. The world would never be the same. Nor would Claire.
The War Bride
Last year, time was no object … to Dine, to Dance, to Meet, to Marry. This year, time is of the essence. A soldier's Leave is reckoned in Days, Hours, Minutes. Dates are timed to the split second and girls no longer keep boys waiting. Are you free next Wednesday from 4:30 to 8
P.M.
? I've special Leave. Can you lunch today? I'm being shipped overseas. Can you marry me tomorrow?
—Vogue,
1941
T
here were two stupendous news flashes that filtered through the Pettibone manse on Lake Forest's Green Bay Road, setting off a flurry of telexes, cables, telephone calls, and a good measure of tears and hand-wringing. One was the December 8, 1941, radio address to Congress by President Franklin Roosevelt condemning the “unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan” that had now plunged the American nation into war. Cyrus spent the frenetic morning cloistered in his walnut-paneled study talking to his business associates, Board of Trade economists, and after a lengthy private but revelatory conversation with his friend William Harrison IV, he put his personal plans, sex life, and Slim on the back burner in a vigorous surge of patriotism.
The other bitter piece of news coursing through the sacheted upstairs parlors and bedrooms and sending the maids and daughters into a swoon was the sinking of Cilla's party dress. The USS
Coolidge
had been torpedoed one hundred and twenty-five nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland, sending the seed-pearled and lace-embroidered gown slowly sinking past the surprised sole, salmon, and roughy to settle at the bottom of the icy North Atlantic. The sinking of the Chanel by a German torpedo caused as much havoc in the floral carpeted corridors and upstairs boudoirs of the household as the sinking of the Pacific Fleet was stirring up at the Pentagon.
“Those selfish Nazis,” Cilla wailed. “What am I going to wear now? It's my coming-out party and I can't wear just anything.”
“Oh, good gracious, first Pearl Harbor and now this!” Millicent was beside herself. “Why,
Town and Country
is covering my baby's ball. What to do? What to do?” Frownies hung from Millicent's face in disarray, making her look like a heavily bandaged war casualty. The antiwrinkling sleeping adhesives had come unstuck and were swinging precariously as she frowned herself into a frenzy. All the movie stars used these press-on overnight patches to stave off crow's-feet and facial lines, or so the Field's salesgirl had promised her. In Millicent's case, she was also trying to stave off an aggressive mistress. If only Field's sold something for that.
“Oh, where is Violet? She'll know what to do.” She clasped her hands to her bosom. “Somebody find Violet. I'm having a nervous collapse.” She pushed her pink satin eye-shades over her head like a headache band with both bright-pink manicured fists. “I can actually feel myself aging, I'm so upset. And where is your father at a terrible time like this? Jean Marie, take these Frownies off my face!”
Jean Marie, her ladies’ maid, flew out of the room sobbing. She also had received bad news, a letter informing her that her father and uncles in France had been rounded up by the Germans in a random act of retaliation after partisans in their hometown had attempted to assassinate one of the occupying Germans. It was presumed in the letter that they and the other town leaders were being shipped off to a camp somewhere in Poland. Jean Marie's cries were heard all the way down the hall and echoed ominously from the back stairs to the kitchen.
“Oh, somebody stop that wailing! You'd think we beat the help around here.” Millicent put her hands to her forehead and rubbed distractedly. “Oh, why does everything always have to happen to me? Why did they have to torpedo Cilla's dress? Couldn't they have waited until after the party?” She was waving her hat pin dangerously like a sword in her hand, putting everyone in the room on her best field-hockey guard. “Even if we'd had torpedo insurance, the Chanel is irreplaceable. Where are we going to find a suitable dress now?”
Sally Pettibone Lambrecht, lounging on the edge of her mother's rumpled bed, took a sip from her brandy-laced morning tea and dramatically pointed to the drapes.
“That is
so
mean,” said Cilla, recognizing the reference to Scarlett O'Hara's postwar wardrobe.
“Sally, have some sympathy for your sister. She's trying to come out.” With one last shove and a heave, she was in her dress without the help of Jean Marie. “You've already had your big debut, and two husbands, too. Look, you've made Cilla cry.” She turned to her youngest daughter, who was sobbing and nervously popping buttered breakfast muffins into her mouth.
“Don't worry, my pet.” She brushed the crumbs from Cilla's chin. “We won't let a war get in the way of your future. Violet will know what to do. She always does.”
Six-eighty Green Bay Road was ablaze with twinkling lights and glitter. The house shone like a beacon of faerie light for miles around in the clear, wintry night. Six months of intense preparation had paid off. Chicago in winter had been transformed into Venice in summer, and Cyrus Pettibone's pseudo-Normandy castle had been extravagantly made over into a doge's palace.
An army of stylists from Field's display department had fashioned and tented the five main salons with heavy Scalamandré silk and covered the walls with tapestries and hand-painted murals depicting Tintoretto-inspired vistas of a starlit Venice. A real Canaletto had been purchased through Field's Art Department and hung in the main library. They had even erected a ten-foot plaster-of-Paris
Santa Maria delta Salute
outside on the terrace, the dome dramatically illuminated by floodlights borrowed from Wrigley Field. The lightbulbs’ hue had been changed to pink, just for the Pettibones’ pleasure. And with Mrs. Wrigley's full consent. The chewing-gum heiress was coming to dinner, of course. All the place cards had been penned in Field's Calligraphic Department and were even, at this last second, being rearranged to satisfy the somebodies over the nobodies.
The sunporch had festively been turned into the Lido Beach, complete with striped awnings and lounges, while a miniature Grand Canal ran around the house in a refurbished, heated drainpipe. An authentic Venetian gondola stood rocking in the watery enclosure should any hearty furclad guests or those too drunk on champagne to feel the chill choose to take a canal ride. Millicent had spared none of Cyrus's money.
Dozens of chandeliers festooned in pale orchids and orange blossoms languidly dripped their petals onto the floors buffed for dancing Viennese waltzes and the “Conga Chain” as well as Glenn Miller's swing tunes. In keeping with the theme, a string quartet from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, their heads topped in tricorns, played Vivaldi under the torchlit, tented entryway to welcome the guests and set the mood, even as the young people were singing along with the skinny crooner belting out “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” around the Venetian-bannered bandstand in the Winter Garden Pavilion where Lester Lanin was playing, a concession to Cilla's crowd.
The only thing missing were the flocks of pigeons from St. Mark's Square. Millicent had declared pigeons too “filthy and ordinary” for her daughter's ball and so the exhausted party planners substituted a last-minute dule of doves. But the birds were presently stashed away in the greenhouse since no one could figure out what to do with their guano, as her Peruvian gardener called the doves’ unpredictably aimed droppings.