The Chameleon (39 page)
When she received Harrison, it was with Sara and Six on either hand and in the blue Christian Dior, wearing Duccio's gaudy gift.
She waited for him to walk toward her down the long, vaulted hall, as if he were just emerging from a tunnel. Partially hidden behind her wide skirt, the children broke loose and ran to the man they loved best in the world. Harrison broke his stern rule of never displaying affection and gathered them up in his arms. Claire was only glad Dior had created cinched waists and voluminous skirts that season; all the better to support her spine and cover her quaking legs. If she felt like leaping into his arms along with her happy children and burying her head in his chest, it was not possible, only imaginable. Her breasts, revealed to their best advantage in the low-cut bodice falling off her shoulders, could barely disguise her palpitating heart. Only a polite handshake marked their greeting as two warm hands grasped each other before reluctantly letting go.
Harrison was relieved he was seated a dozen upscale people down from Claire so he could freely steal a glance or two. Ambassador Luce monopolized the conversation, making it easy for him to enjoy his meal. She was taking credit for the creation of
Life
magazine.
“I said to Harry, ‘Let's have a magazine with pictures. Hire me and I'll start it up. He didn't want to hire me, so he married me and got me for free.’” Their end of the table laughed, all except Fenwick Grant, owner of the rival weekly and a dozen or so newspapers, who seemed to be scrutinizing their hostess.
Harrison forked a portobello mushroom and addressed Grant. “I hope you're not planning a story on my daughter-in-law. She really prefers privacy.”
“Oh, I'd forgotten your former relationship. She's just the kind of woman my magazines celebrate.” The two men looked down the golden table to Claire, who was narrating a witty anecdote in rapid Italian to the rough-edged banker from Naples.
Mrs. Luce observed both of them eyeing their hostess. She returned the energy to her end of the table. “Harrison, don't you remember the night I pleaded with my Harry to kill Hitler? Poison was the plan. That time he flew to Berlin to interview the nasty house painter and Chamberlain? What if my hero had done it then! Only Poland would have been invaded. But Harry resisted me on moral ground, didn't you dear?”
“It was none of my affair. I didn't know how evil the man would become.”
“You, Harrison. You shoot and hunt. Would you have killed him?”
“If I had seen the future carnage in a crystal ball, of course.” The candlelight shone across his eyes and brow line.
“And Hitler would have become nothing but a historical footnote and the world saved from war.” Her eyes and earrings, the same hue in the flattering light, both sparkled.
“I won't ask you, Signóre Ansiano. They say you're in the Mafioso. But how about you, Duccio? Would you have killed to save the world?” She coyly turned her head in his direction.
“I've killed to save my wallet.” He twisted his napkin with a snap. “And as a young boy to save my goat. A man does what he must!” Breaking the startled silence in the room, he brought his fist down hard on the table and threw his head back with a crude laugh.
“You can do anything in this world if you're prepared to take the consequences, and consequences depend on character.” Clare Boothe Luce clinked Harrison's glass to hers by way of a toast. Suddenly she was bored with murder. “I'm having tea with Claire Duccio tomorrow. I think she has enormous political possibilities. Maybe I can rope her into some embassy position.”
“I can speak firsthand that she's an attribute in the political arena. FDR always thought so.”
“Franklin,” Clare Luce huffed prettily. “He never did give me credit for coining the phrase ‘New Deal.’”
The official toasts were gracious. Duccio toasted the new “ambassadress,” as he called her, the ambassadress toasted Italy's president, the president toasted his host and hostess, and Claire, on a more personal note, wished luck to her husband's latest acquisition, the SS
Andrea Doria,
the six-hundred-and-ninety-seven-foot Italian luxury liner that was the latest jewel in her husband's growing empire.
“In bocca al lupo.”
She raised her glass. “In the mouth of the wolf” was Italian slang for “Good luck,” she informed Luce.
“Let's dance!” Léonide, the star of Monte Carlo's Ballets Russes, was restless in his chair.
“Shall we adjourn to the ballroom?” Claire rose, signaling that the meal was over. She had long ago eliminated what she regarded as the sexist ritual of cigars in the library for men and ladies’ hem-line discussions in the
salone.
Dancing brought them all together. And Duccio, who had been taking his lessons diligently, danced like a twirling demon.
The old-fashioned dance rituals were observed at Palazzo Duccio even though the zestful millionaire was a very new member of Roman society. He would dance with Mrs. Luce, one of the guests of honor, while his wife danced with the other, the Honorable William Henry Harrison IV. Claire hesitated, trying to remember which excuse she had decided upon not to have to fold herself into Harrison's waiting arms. Pulled muscle, tennis elbow, eagle bite? She forgot all of them as Harrison moved toward her, put one familiar hand on the small of her back, and with the other clasped her hand in his, setting off a small burst of fireworks whose sparkles impaired her vision. The familiar scents of tweed riding jackets, Washington war briefs in damp leather, and the heady smells of love-soaked sheets in Lake Como accosted her nostrils. It was too much. She couldn't stand there and only dance.
“Excuse me, but I've got to check on the children.”
“May I come? I'd like to tell them good night.”
Claire looked down at his shoes. Hers were covered by Christian Dior's New Look billowing out from her well-angled hips.
“Is anyone noticing us?” She didn't want to look up.
“Everyone's dancing.”
Summoning her acting skills, Claire picked up her blossoming ballerina skirt and put a gracious smile on her lips. She quasi-danced around the ballroom, checking on everyone else's happiness as she always did. Nothing out of the ordinary. She stopped to speak into her husband's ear, gently touching his forearm. “I'm going to take Harrison up to say good night to his grandchildren. Do you mind?”
“Beautiful party, my dear. Shake hands with my new partner in the
Andrea Doria.
Claire can help us pick the new china and train staff like no one else.”
“Thank you, dear.” She rustled away, Harrison at her heels. They climbed the seventeenth-century winding staircase.
“This staircase is older than Charlotte Hall,” Harrison said to her back.
She turned, both of her hands full of lifted silk taffeta. “Charlotte Hall. The day I arrived there I felt I had come to Manderley.”
He looked puzzled.
“You know. Stiff and foreboding, like in
Rebecca.
”
“I'm not the romantic-novel type.”
“You're not the grandfatherly type, either.” She loosened her self-control a notch and gave him a full smile.
“Come along. The children will be thrilled to see you, if they're still awake.”
After gently pulling a book from Sara's sleeping hands, Claire and Harrison looked in on Six. He looked like a resting angel, the light from the full moon throwing a filtered beam across his finely chiseled face. One hand lay across his heart as the other fell open across a Winnie the Pooh who had crisscrossed the ocean a dozen times.
“Claire. I want to speak to you about Six's future. Is there somewhere we could speak privately?”
“Here.” She arched her worried brows and led him into the darkened sitting room she shared with her children, pushing a football out of the way.
“Ophelia and I have been talking …”
She froze. Had he come up here just to talk about his wife? Was Claire only a fuzzy memory to him? Had their great love existed in her heart alone?
“And what have you and Ophelia been speaking about?” Her ironic tone imitated Ambassador Luce's.
“That Six is gifted. That he is too, well … special to grow up without a suitable male father figure. He should be raised in America.” The words “by us”—meaning Harrison, Ophelia, Harry, and Minnie—were unspoken.
“America?”
“He could be the third Harrison president.”
“Your ambition is astonishing.” She would not back down from her anger. Claire flew at her former lover like a lioness protecting her cubs, plastering the newly redone room with hurled invectives.
“You invented this arrangement.” The teardrop sapphire in her cleavage twisted around backwards. “Honor it, dammit! Do something unselfish! Pretend you have a heart in that bloody blue skeleton of yours. Duccio has more honesty in his stubby finger than in your whole damn elegant hand.” The last three words she beat into his chest with her fists.
He caught them, at the same time turning the sapphire around. Her chest was beating hard with anger.
“I don't want your hands on me!” she lied.
“I'm sorry, Claire. I'm so sorry. I tried to be that person I'm supposed to be. But I can't. I love you too much to be away from you. I want you all back.” He took her bream away, once with his words and the second time with his lips. Their kiss was as passionate as any from years before but was now fueled by long-pent-up desires, fervent daydreams, and embers that had refused to burn out. Harrison's caress was a great salve for a long-aching wound. Like a smoke of opium for a past addict or a sip of wine for a recovering lush, there was no going back. In one hungry touch of their mouths he had forgotten his practical solution and she her bond and promise. His fingers knitted around her hair and pulled her waist into his groin, and she sighed to the tune of a thousand remembered moans. When he pressed his fingers on that place on her neck, she stopped trying to resist the perilous thing she wanted most.
She sat up alone on the couch well into dawn, hugging her knees and trying to untangle her emotions. She wasn't only playing with her life—Harrison's, her children, even Duccio's life were in her hands. She had to think of the ramifications for them, all of them. She was startled by a soft noise at the hall door. The clock showed five-thirty in the morning. She waited as if in a trance but couldn't seem to move toward the sound. She watched as an envelope was slipped under her door. Numbly she walked on her legs, moving heavily, feeling as if she were stuck in a thick New England fog. Then the American girl who had evolved into such a fine Italian lady knelt down on the floor to read the handwritten note.
Please meet me in Paris at the Ritz a fortnight from today at 8 p.m. I will wait for you in the dining room. If you can't make it I will understand. Please tell the children I'm sorry I had to leave early.
H.
Claire pondered the sun as it came up over her uncommon Italian palazzo. All of the important Harrison communications were laid down in writing, she remembered. She climbed into bed. It was early Sunday and they weren't going to mass until eleven. She lay on her bed watching the nymphs and painted centaurs playing love games on her ceiling. Her eyes circled up to a young Adonis embracing a shy beauty, her long hair covering her nakedness. They seemed so carefree. Did none of them have mother-in-laws and politically ambitious families? Didn't any of them have secrets to hide? She wondered what it would be like if she could will herself up to the fresco and join the careless lovers cavorting on powdery white clouds, the way she and Harrison had carried on in Lake Como. No, she'd rather be earthbound; whatever mistakes she'd made, she'd live with the consequences. She smiled, remembering. And hadn't it been the love begun at Lake Como that had produced her second child? She couldn't imagine life without Six. She settled back in the pillows to nap before Lorenza arrived with her morning tray. Suddenly she was aware of another person in the room.
Rubbing the sleep from his eyes with the back of his hands, Six stood in the open doorway of his mother's room. Claire invited him in with a warm smile.
“Morning, Mommy.”
Claire pulled back one corner of her coverlet and Six, wearing a wide grin and carrying his bear, climbed in.
“Good morning, Sweet William.” She hugged her son. Surely the silly nymphs overhead didn't know pleasure like this.
She hoped she had made the right decision, choosing between her brain and her heart.
The Jeweled Collar
Why have we been seduced into abandoning the timeless inner strength of woman for the temporal outer strength of man?
—
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Gift from the Sea
L
orenza brought the most coveted invitation in the world to Claire on a silver tray. The oversized envelope bore the seal of the royal house of Grimaldi, so she didn't have to be a detective to guess what was inside. Ever since it had been announced that Prince Rainier was marrying a Hollywood goddess, half of titled Europe had been jockeying for an invitation to the wedding of the decade. Lorenza was thrilled. Most of the great ladies would be taking their maids along to Monaco to coif their elaborate hairdos and pouf and steam their dresses.
Lorenza was piqued at her lady. Why would she bother to consult her calendar to see if she was free to go? Every lady she knew would have forgone an emergency appendectomy if it coincided with Grace Kelly's wedding. The other chambermaids working for Europe's richest ladies had brayed about how their mistresses had already sent extravagant engagement gifts as bribes to get themselves on the guest list. Lorenza honestly adored her mistress, who, she bragged, possessed goodness as well as
la bellezza.
She had even found fine homes in Chicago, America, for her dead sister's two youngest babies who otherwise would have gone to a paupers’ state foundling home. Now Lorenza held her breath and watched as Claire thumbed through her inch-thick 1956 agenda, rifling through her heavily scheduled calendar to make sure there was no conflict on April 18 through 20. It was one of Signódra Duccio's unbendable rules that nothing was allowed to interfere with her Eleanor House duties, or, more important, with Six's soccer schedule.