The Chameleon (56 page)

After that, Harrison's letters turned more formal, but they evoked just as much emotion. Particularly when he sent her a set of architect's drawings. Did she remember Isola Bella? It was the one they could see from their bed during the days of their Italian idyll. He'd purchased the villa and was modernizing it, complete with American plumbing. How like Harrison to expect precision in paradise, Claire mused, but her eyes were moist as she put the plans in her drawer along with his other letters.

The day Harrison telephoned, Lefty had gone to the doctor's office to get something stronger for the nagging pain in his gut. He kept a veritable pharmacy in a special locked lizard briefcase as it was. It had a secret combination because they didn't want Sara helping herself on one of her drop-ins to his stash of Tuinal, Seconal, phenobarbital, and Turns, mixing some sort of pharmaceutical cocktail. Although Sara seemed to be on the road to composing a quiet life for herself, there were still occasional disturbing U-turns and detours.

Harrison's voice over the phone sounded the way Claire felt. Distressed. His voice carried all the suppressed emotion it had conveyed the day she had picked him up at the airport after FDR had died. Now he had lost his second best friend, Archibald Fillmore, who, though Harrison's senior by a mere seven years, was the first contemporary of his to die. Back in New York to serve as pallbearer and trustee for the estate, he was dismally glum, not just over the lost companionship, he told Claire, but because it reminded him that his life was speeding on by, and couldn't she …

No matter how she longed to up and sail away with him, to love him on their private island instead of only in her secret heart, Lefty's car horn honking in the driveway and Sara's scribbled postcard on the kitchen counter reminded Claire of her commitments and obligations. She forced herself to cut the phone call short, almost choking as she repeated the message from Sara in front of her: “Gotta go.”

If she threw herself into her political speeches, lobbied Congress for mothers’ rights in cases of divorce, preoccupied herself with her and Lefty's clients, all the time keeping tabs on Sara, there were moments in the day when she didn't think about Harrison and all the might-have-beens. She made a stirring speech for child advocacy in front of a clearly moved state legislature in Sacramento, but the throaty catch in her voice was already there for another reason.

She even started preparing elaborate suppers, cooking fancy recipes herself so that she wouldn't have any free time at all for regrets, not that Lefty was eating much more these days than custard and chicken hash seasoned with Alka-Seltzer. He explained that if he ate only things that were the color white, he had fewer knots in his stomach.

One night Dr. Sax came to dinner—clear broth, white chicken, white toast, and tapioca—to break the news to them. Lefty was suffering from stomach cancer and there was “trouble in the colon” as well.

“She's the best goddamned nurse on the face of the planet,” Lefty boasted to Dr. Sax after several months of surgeries and chemotherapy. “She can change a catheter better than anyone at Cedars-Sinai and look cute doing it. Neither one of us minds my baldness, Doc, because I've been bald since my bar mitzvah,” Lefty joked. His spirits were unfailing.

The Lefkowitzes kept Lefty's sickness secret, Hollywood being the kind of town that would have him buried with the “Big C” before he was done with lunch. No, better to keep up appearances. The success of
A Hole in the Heart
had paid for Lefty's Chagall and a strand of real pearls for Claire. But it couldn't carry them through constant surgeries and expensive doctors if they both stopped working. So Claire shouldered the extra responsibilities of running the agency, entertaining clients at early dinners before Lefty got too tired, sometimes staging his appearance at a visible event so he could be photographed and the pictures strategically run for weeks. Like when Ronald Reagan became Governor of California and appointed Claire to oversee the California Commission on Child Welfare—their old Hollywood friend picking the girl and not her party. Before her induction, they had Sid the tailor over to the house to pad one of Lefty's suits so he would look like he had some meat on his bones after eighteen months of sickness and weeks of ingesting liquid meals through a tube.

“Think quarterback, Sid. Stuff me. And make Claire something, too. She deserves it.”

And so she held her head high and wore Lefty's pearls around her neck, medical bills mounting, and dreamed of Lake Como as she and Lorenza carried him from bedroom to living room so that he could welcome his visitors like a gentleman in his BarcaLounger, under the Chagall painting of an upside-down groom and his bride dancing in front of a laughing cow.

“See that, Toots? It's my favorite picture. But when I'm gone, sell it and buy something interesting.”

“Oh, Lefty, don't talk like that. You're not going—”

“Yeah, I am, Toots, and since you're not coming with—not for a long time—promise me you'll sell the picture and get something terrific for yourself.”

“Like what?”

“Something important … like a political career.”

Claire laughed. She'd hardly laughed in the last few months. There'd been dozens of emergency rides to the hospital, so many that Lefty had memorized the ambulance drivers’ names and kibbitzed with them even as they untangled his life-support tubes. She hadn't even answered her mail or opened Harrison's last five or six letters. She didn't think she could bear to hear about Italy right now. Romantic Lake Como. She didn't want to feel guilty betraying Lefty, even if it was only in her thoughts. If she didn't open Harrison's letters she wouldn't be tempted to long for him. But once in a while it was nice to close her eyes and dream, momentarily wiping out the smells of rubber sheets and isopropyl alcohol.

Eventually, Lefty grew too weak to be helped down the stairs, so before his oldest clients and friends began arriving for the cocktail hour, Lorenza and she helped fold a shrunken Lefty into the dumbwaiter so he could ride down.

“I'm coming down with the lamb shanks and the matzo balls,” he quipped. “Just make sure I'm riding with the good silver.”

After that he zoned in and out of consciousness. So when he told Claire that Sara had been to see him, she chalked it up to the effects of medication. But the nurse confirmed that her daughter with the wild red mane of hair had come and gone.

“What? She was here? Why didn't she stay to see me?” Claire felt betrayed. After a year of nursing Lefty in a fluorescent room filled with whirring machines and IV tubes, she needed someone to talk to.

“Listen, Toots, it was my deathbed scene. What you should be proud of is that she came. Maybe she never will be your best buddy. But the point is, there's a good person inside your demon daughter.”

Turning away her tear-stained face, she gathered up the Sunday
New York Times.
He loved it when she read to him.

“And don't forget, Toots, if I check out on some Wednesday I want you back on the block by Friday. You've been sitting shiva for a year now. Enough.”

Claire smiled and turned to Section One to read the political news. Her heart stopped as she saw the picture and read the story.

Ambassador William Henry Harrison IV of New York and Washington wed Starling Millbrook Fillmore of Tuxedo Park and Newport in the ambassador's home on Lake Como, where he is at work on Volume II of his series
The Roosevelt Years.

Claire let out such an anguished sigh while her muscles shook visibly out of control that Lefty asked Lorenza to help him up to hold his wife.

“Somebody has to console her in her grief. Might as well be me.” He rocked her gently in his arms. “C'mon, Toots. Don't lose it now. We're in the home stretch.”

She nodded through her tears. “Did I ever tell you that I love you, Lefty?”

His smile was broad. “No, but I kinda figgered. You coulda left with the big tweedy guy anytime, but you always stayed. I never did understand why. I'm sure you get points for that”

And they held each other, giving each other the gentle comfort they had always reserved only for one another.

After Lefty was buried at Hillside Memorial Park, Claire sat shiva for two nights, hosting Lefty's friends and serving his favorite deli platters from Nate ‘n’ Al's. On the third night, however, even as the guests were arriving to read prayers and pay their condolences, Claire was out the door and winging her way to Washington with a long gown in a garment bag thrown over her arms. She was headed to the black-tie Chagall retrospective at the National Gallery of Art to rearrange the place cards.

She was going to seat herself next to Fenwick Grant.

Chapter Seventeen

Party Girl

A woman's life can really be a succession of lives, each revolving around some emotionally compelling situation or challenge.

—
Wallis, Duchess of Windsor

T
he caviar canapés and sturgeon-lined baskets of quail's eggs were floating around the room on silver trays held aloft by white-gloved waiters. Quite a contrast, Claire thought, to the hospital food and gray uniformed orderlies of the past year. In the marble galleries of the museum, Claire turned heads as she beelined her way to his table. In Washington, apparently, black-gowned widows didn't barge uninvited into gala affairs.

Fenwick Grant raised one eyebrow as she deftly purloined the place card next to his and replaced it with the one in her hand.

“I figured I'd be hearing from you. Just not so soon. Sorry about Lefty.” He squared his shoulders. Grant was a hard-boiled newspaperman, and Lefty had died three days ago—yesterday's news, as far as he was concerned. He watched her as she rearranged the seating as if the National Gallery of Art were her private dining room, putting herself on Grant's left.

“I always knew you were crazy about me.”

“Don't flatter yourself. I have to file in two days if I run for Hathaway's vacant congressional seat. I want to know if I have your support. Pass the butter.”

Grant handed her his butter plate. Apparently Lefty had willed her his chutzpah.

He liked her style, the notorious air that she breezily carried around like an expensive accessory, the vanilla-like smell mixed with something musky, and her softly delivered tough talk. He noticed, though, that she was a good ten pounds thinner than the last time he'd seen her, and there were faint blue shadows under her eyes.

“I was wondering if I could meet your editorial staff in your office tomorrow morning? The from-the-horse's mouth sort of thing—just so nothing gets lost in the translation when I plead my platform. You have fifty-six or fifty-seven papers in your news empire? How about if your California dailies endorse me and cover me favorably and the others print good national coverage? Sorry to hurry you, Grant, but I need to know before dessert.”

He thought the expectant look on her face was delicious. “Why not just give me until the chicken à la king gets cold? Don't stand on ceremony or be shy. Just say what's on your mind.” His newspaperman's eyes reappraised her. “You won't quite fit in, Claire. You're too attractive. You know what I've always said: Politics is Hollywood for ugly people.”

Claire covered her laugh with a black handkerchief.

“Careful, Claire, you've got a new reputation to uphold. Congressional politics is a different game. And Washington's a pretty stodgy town.”

“That reminds me. I'd like you to fire Anita Lace in the morning. I'll be in at nine-thirty
A.M
.,
SO
why don't you break the news to the little darling at nine-fifteen?”

Grant was intrigued. “And precisely what does Grant Publications get in return?”

“Lefty's deathbed forgiveness. You'll be back in the Hollywood inner circle. Your entertainment reporters will be back in the loop. Deal?”

“Ax Lace at nine-fifteen. Smoke the peace pipe with you at nine thirty.”

Fenwick Grant felt he was being railroaded, but it promised to be an interesting ride. Each time this lady reinvented herself to fit into the changing terrain, she went all out. First a socialite, then a murderess, then a Hollywood power broker. Writing about Claire as candidate would certainly be a circulation booster. And an endorsement now, he thought to himself, didn't mean he couldn't do an expose later.

He grinned widely, smile lines extending all the way to his ears, as they shook on it.

“Do you actually have a platform, or is this some California analyst's therapy for getting over Lefty?”

“We can go over my platform point by point tomorrow in your office.” The reporter in him sensed her intentions. She would not tell him more news tonight. He shifted gears.

“Did you happen to see the Chagall exhibit as you walked in?”

“It's extraordinary. Lefty loved Chagall.”

“Winthrop Pauling underwrote the show. He and his wife are major collectors. They convinced the lender of the huge blue-and-yellow painting to sell to them. It's in the arts and style feature in Sunday's paper. Anita Lace did the story.” Grant waited for her reaction to the name. Out of all the publications in his tightly run empire he was most proud of the Washington
Herald.
Even more than
U.S. Week,
which was number two, just behind
Time
magazine. Grant leveled his gaze at this woman who had been news in the “People” section of both of them, a half-smirk on his ruggedly handsome face.

Claire smirked back. She had her own plan for dealing with her poison-pen nemesis. Now she was merely wondering if the Paulings had an early Chagall in deep reds, yellows, and blues of a bride and groom and a cow in their collection.

“Where are the Paulings?” Claire turned and craned her neck.

“Two tables over, with your Senator and Mrs. Bostwick, and Averell Harriman and his wife.” He angled his lantern jaw in the Paulings’ direction.

“Thank you, Mr. Grant. See you in the morning.” And Claire picked up her place card and moved toward the Paulings’ table.

“Oh, and let your date know, I only ate her roll. I didn't touch her silverware. I'll have the waiter tell her your ‘emergency interview’ is over.” She flashed him her best diplomatic smile, tinged with just enough Hollywood to make it interesting. “What's her name again?”