The Chameleon (45 page)

Before the image of him lying dead with his letter opener through his heart flashed through her mind, there was a fleeting vision of Eleanor Roosevelt's mantel with a Tiffany Christmas card from Ophelia, Harry, and Minnie next to a tasteless holiday photograph of Harrison, Claire, and the children. Ophelia clenched her jaw—she was desperate to save her situation. She would not lose her standing or Sara, whom she had raised as her own. The girl had belonged to her from the minute she was born. No. Divorce would be fought on every front. Harry would help her bring his father to his lost senses, and never,
never
would Harrison be allowed to marry Claire. The usual extraordinary allowances could be made. But there would never be another Mrs. Harrison IV.

She summoned up fifty years of good breeding. “You can have any size or color mistress you like. That way you can hold on to all your club memberships and share in our hefty financial bundle. You can keep the respect of our friends and your presidents.” Her smile was chilling. “Otherwise, you lose everything.”

“I'll lose nothing I care about. You don't seem to understand.”

“Then surely you've lost your marbles, Harrison. I understand you've been under a great deal of strain. Perhaps we could get you into a good institution? The Paine-Whitney, perhaps.”

“I'm just getting out of one.”

Her next words came out in a hiss. “Then things will get very ugly.” And with her sapphire ring pointing to their ancestors on the walls, she broke her cardinal rule of never raising her voice.

“We won't let you get away with this!” she shrieked. “I'll have you in a straitjacket!”

Over the years, the diplomat had heard every threat and histrionic hurled at him in every language. “I hope in time we can be friends. I have the highest regard for you, but I plan to take some happiness while I can.”

Ophelia waved him away with her handkerchief. If there was even a remote chance that she could get away with it, she would have preferred him dead to seeing him alive with Claire.

“I'm going to my study to collect a few things, and then I'll be leaving.” He walked into his favorite room in the house, the room where he had first met Claire. He checked his pocket watch. It would be seven hours later in Rome. She should be leaving for Paris with the children about now. He decided to check on them.

The first sharp pain seemed to come out of the telephone and shoot into his ear. It traveled down the left side of his arm with such severity he thought Ophelia might have shot him. He looked startled before he went slack-jawed. The water he had just been drinking dribbled down his chin, although he couldn't feel it on his face, and the telephone receiver fell from his suddenly useless fingers. The transatlantic call had delivered its devastating blow. Lorenza's trembling voice and the devastating message it conveyed came across the copper wires almost static-free. Six was dead. His cherished son.

In her dressing room, Ophelia had sat and composed herself until she was able to muster up the courage to negotiate again with Harrison. Surely they could come to terms. Her status in society depended on it—why, she might even be drummed out of the Social Register. Everyone welcomed a woman with an absent diplomatic husband, but nobody appreciated one abandoned for her daughter-in-law. The scandal would ruin all of their lives; none of them, including the children, would ever be received anywhere again. How could he be so selfish? She'd make him see.

She stopped in the doorwell, afraid to enter the room. Within a matter of minutes, Harrison had aged twenty-five years, white as a sheet of his Smythson's stationery, his face a ragged road map of ditches and lines. With one hand he clutched his forehead and with the other he tried to reach out to her for help. She stood there, composed, her narrow eyes squinting at him as he struggled to get his words out. His words were hard to make out, but it sounded something like “Oh my God, not my son. Tell her I'm coming.” Before Ophelia hung up the dangling phone, she heard enough of Lorenza's hysterical ravings to know that Six was dead.

As it was cocktail hour in Tuxedo, and Ophelia never liked to impose on her professional friends, she waited several hours before she telephoned Dr. Fawcett. As she told the elderly doctor afterwards, she would have called earlier, but she thought her husband was just having a nap on the floor after his long flight home. No, no, she explained, he often did that sort of thing, lying on the hard floor to support his back. And Dr. Fawcett would never think of second-guessing Mrs. William Henry Harrison IV. The doctor assured her that the stroke appeared to be a mild one but ordered absolute quiet and bed rest for a couple of weeks. The good wife obligingly complied, ordering the drapes drawn in his darkened bedroom, even having the telephone removed. She added a prescription of her own: No visitors and no newspapers, nothing that would upset her husband. “Don't worry,” she told the doctor, “I'll make sure he doesn't even listen to a radio, or do anything that might excite him. People will just have to get along without him.” And then she helped old Dr. Fawcett, who had been her mother's doctor, put his antique stethoscope back in his pocket.

Taking Dr. Fawcett's arm as she led him into the living room for a highball, she persuaded him that loving home care in the bosom of his family would be better than the latest advances of medical science in an unfriendly hospital. Dr. Fawcett, who'd received every Harrison Christmas card for the last forty years, nodded in absolute agreement.

“I'll protect him from the outside world. If someone wants to get to Harrison, they'll have to go through me.”

Later, when a bad dream awoke Claire from a restless nap, she called for Harrison again even before sipping some water to wet her parched lips. In the nightmare Six was laughing, his arms outstretched as if to embrace his mother happily, but he seemed to be moving away from her at the same time, so that no matter how fast she ran, he was always just out of her grasp. She awakened soaked with sweat, as if she really had been running. Violet was there to mop her brow.

All she wanted to do was get her daughter and granddaughter out of this pirate's hellish palace. She sensed something strange and off-kilter in this “memorial service” Duccio was conducting for his stepson. Duccio hadn't been in once to see Claire or Sara. Instead, he was downstairs receiving voluptuous opera singers in black capes, film stars with lace handkerchiefs, and other business tycoons come to pay their respects to the financier. Lorenza served as their fourth pair of eyes, running back up and down the stairs, bringing condolence notes for Claire and news of all the glitterati arriving. Each time Lorenza breathlessly flew in with a “Maria Callas is here” or “a Mr. Agnelli's just arrived,” Violet, who had arranged all kinds of gatherings for her Field's customers, some with just a day's notice, couldn't imagine who was getting out the news. Could it be that he was actually inviting these people to his stepson's service, people who had never even met Six? Was he holding a farewell party? Why were there society reporters and photographers downstairs? In her own mind she agreed with what Ophelia had warned them against, the ruthless tycoon might turn her stepson's fall from the stairs into a media event designed to garner sympathy for his next lucrative deal.

“Mother, is Harrison here yet?”

“The Harrisons are waiting for you to bring Six back to Charlotte Hall so they can bury him with family. The Aunties will meet us there. It is time to go. Sara needs you, Claire. We can take Sweet William home with us. Right after Duccio's service.” Violet frowned. She didn't have the strength to take on Duccio. If she interfered, he might hold up the body with paperwork. He had the connections and the power. They'd just have to suffer through the service and then depart swiftly.

“We'll leave Italy behind us.” She wished they could leave Tuxedo Park behind, too. Ophelia had sounded so cold about Six's death. She was his grandmother but was behaving as if she weren't even related to Six. They were a strange lot, those Harrisons. Violet couldn't understand people who prided themselves on such stiff decorum that they couldn't even express emotion at a time like this.

“Look, Claire. A shooting star. Our Six is in those little stars.

“‘He will make the face of heaven so fine

“‘That all the world will be in love with night,

“‘And pay no worship to the garish sun.’”

Violet softly quoted the lines from
Romeo and Juliet
that she had always loved but never understood until now. Her daughter mumbled the words along with her. Only Sara remained silent.

Violet tried to coax some response from Sara, even an angry word or a sob. But Sara couldn't be persuaded to speak or even move from the enclosure of Six's room.

Violet massaged her daughter's temples, until her skin was warmer for the rubbing and pinker for the increased circulation. She spoke simple words of comfort culled from all the churches they had attended during Claire's childhood, reminding Claire how all living things had a life beyond the temporal, that Six would live forever in the river beyond Charlotte Hall, the rock he loved to climb, the tree in which he'd carved the number six, in the hearts of all who loved him. That he'd only been on loan to Claire and, being too perfect for this world of ours, was invited back to Heaven. That she would negate all the goodness he had spread around like apple seeds if she wouldn't roust herself to keep his spirit alive. And Sara needed her. She needed Claire to let her know none of this was her fault.

Claire, seated numbly at her dressing table, listened to her mother. She
did
blame Sara. She couldn't help it—Six was the only joy both mother and daughter had shared, and through careless watchkeeping Sara had allowed that one joy to be dimmed forever. But mostly she blamed herself for not being there, for being with Harrison instead. She wondered what Harrison was feeling and when he was coming. Violet peered over her daughter's shoulder in the mirror and smoothed her hair. Lorenza entered carrying a sheer black veil from the house of Dior that Duccio had ordered. She laid it on the chaise next to the streamlined suit by Givenchy he had instructed her to steam for Six's service. Claire didn't give either item a glance. Her attention was drawn to her daughter, who was still curled up on Six's bed, her knees pulled up to her waist. Claire wanted to curl up in a ball like Sara and retreat from the world, too, but her mother was right: She had to hold herself together for her daughter's sake. Sara was hurting as much as she was, and now that she was Claire's only child, Sara was doubly deserving of Claire's maternal love and guidance.

“Oh, God, help me for her,” she pleaded.

Lorenza tiptoed in again to deliver a tray laden with condolence notes, and Claire seized upon the distraction.

“Look, Sara. Somebody's sent us a note with Princess Grace as a postage stamp. Come and see. They've written such nice things about your brother.” Even though Sara didn't speak, Claire was relieved that she got up from the bed and pulled Six's stamp collection down from the shelf. Claire walked over to hold her daughter, but Sara resisted, choosing to hug the stamp portfolio instead. How like a Harrison her daughter was, looking for comfort in an object instead of a human being. She vowed to bring the child back to the world of emotion before it was too late. Claire pulled Sara close in spite of the girl's resistance and rocked her only child, their separate tears running into a single river of sorrow.

The fragile trio moved hesitantly like a band of lost orphans into the palazzo's stone chapel. Claire and Violet flinched as lightbulbs flashed inches from their faces. For one terrible moment Claire thought she had blundered into a cocktail party. Scores of overdressed people swiveled around to gawk at her walking down the aisle. Were they there to see how a fashion plate mourned her child? She wished she could make them all go away and let her grieve in peace. If she had had her wits about her, she would have turned around and run, but she was too stricken to do anything but follow the service. And she wouldn't leave Six, beautiful Six, there alone in his casket. She took some solace in knowing the veil covered her face so that the strangers couldn't see her private grief.

Suddenly Duccio was at her side, as if Violet and Lorenza were giving the bride away to the waiting groom. He embraced her in a bold gesture, leaving something heavy, a large black cross, hanging around her neck. She started to fidget it away, but both her hands were taken from her as Duccio's brother and the archbishop, closing in on either side, supported her shaking elbows. She watched numbly as Duccio lifted the cross and turned it around almost proudly before he signaled the current diva from La Scala to begin her mournful aria. Claire succumbed to the soprano's beautiful dirge, in her secret heart hoping that the notes echoing off the apse might be heard by the angels ushering Six into heaven. A small smile came to her lips at the thought of angels as lovely as the
putti
on the chapel walls keeping Six company on his cloud, listening with him to Verdi's exquisite requiem. Perhaps they were accompanying the soprano on the lyre or a flute. This vision gladdened her, and her smile widened.

A second series of flashbulbs went off, catching Claire with a look on her face that was almost beatific. What was Duccio thinking, to have allowed photographers into the chapel? She brought a hand up to hide her face and snagged her glove on something sharp. She looked down for the first time since Duccio had hung the heavy cross on her. It was not one of the simple wood crucifixes from the chapel shelf, like she'd thought. With a wave of nausea she realized she was wearing a nearly priceless Romanesque treasure, part of Duccio's collection of religious icons, that had belonged to Catherine de’ Medici. The thirteenth-century enamel cross was gaudily set with rubies and emeralds on the horizontal beam, an enormous polished diamond at its center. She flipped the cross back over to its plain black side and flashed a dark look at Duccio. How could he be turning a simple service for her son into an opportunity to display his wealth? She leaned over the stout belly of Duccio's brother to hold Sara's hand. They both needed to hold on to each other as they listened to the archbishop's eulogy to Six's ten short years on this earth. Harrison decorum or no, Sara folded her fingers over her mother's as she listened to a happy anecdote from Six's last month, retold by Archbishop D'Agostini, who had been charmed by the boy ever since he had entered Duccio's home.