The Chameleon (9 page)
Claire was what the mothers referred to as “a girl with potential,” as if she could be coaxed to bloom with a little watering from a gardening can and a ton of face powder. Aloof and alone, she felt more at home among the fine pieces in the quiet Antiques Section of Field's where she worked part time than in her mother's gossip-driven all-female department. “The Bitches’ Boudoir” was what Auntie Slim called the salon. Claire wasn't “coming out,” nor was she participating in any of the cotillions like the Passavant, but she was nonetheless Cilia's guest this weekend because both mothers had separately insisted on it. Claire had read enough in the
London Times,
available in Field's Reading Room, to worry more about the turmoil in Europe than her chances of picking up either social credentials or a husband in this fast social company, and she certainly knew that Hitler was more than a crooked politician. Sometimes she wondered just what was it some of these girls learned at their snooty boarding schools anyway. Daisy Armstrong, the one tough-talking and irreverent deb Claire found rather interesting, liked to say they were sent off to learn to “mix a stiff drink, develop a stiff upper lip, and make their potential husbands stiff with desire.” Perhaps between her public school education and the lessons she'd learned at Field's, Claire hadn't done so badly after all. She sighed quietly to herself.
Snookie Cuthbert caught her sigh and fixed an analytical stare on her. She thought the out-of-place girl had a quiet, cool way about her that could beat any one of them out of the gate if only Claire had had the wherewithal to race. Luckily for them she didn't. How could anyone see those astonishing eyes if she never raised them? Snookie had seen that kind of nonchalant handsomeness before, and calculated that Claire didn't even know she had a “look.” Snookie's father had married three times, and the last two wives had that same kind of unstudied charm. Claire, feeling Snookie's eyes on her, blushed and shivered simultaneously, turning her attention back to Lily's fond memories of Munich before the war sent them home. Snookie's stares were making Claire uncomfortable, so she pulled her book up to her forehead.
“Brenda said Hitler had terrible halitosis.” Lily still held the other girls riveted.
“Well, all of Europe is at war with him now and we may soon be too, and then your whole guest list will be in uniform.”
“Yes, shooting it out while your daughter is coming out.”
“Does that mean I can't invite that Hapsburg boy we met in London?” Cilla put down her half-eaten doughnut and frowned.
“Who even knows if he's still alive?”
“Or a Nazi.”
“Well, then take him off the list. I don't want to have to change my seating arrangement at the last minute. I only want live boys. Preferably who know how to dance the rumba.” Cill Pettibone waved away that unpleasant business in Europe with a childish chubby hand, polished with dark red nail enamel—just like Brenda Frazier wore.
“Aren't any of you aware how serious this European war is?” It was Claire who spoke. “Even if we're not pulled into it, we're all affected.”
All the girls turned to stare at their companion, whose long hair was pulled back off her face in an Alice in Wonderland style. She was spoiling the mood. When Claire furrowed her brow, only Snookie noticed that it was enhanced by a widow's peak that gave shape to her square jaw and broad cheekbones. The chiseled cheeks were the scaffolding of her symmetrically constructed face. Since Claire's thick brows were left unfashionably unplucked and feathered high over her naturally dark lashes, the impact of the explosive violet eyes was diminished. The dazzling color was the only thing about Claire every girl envied, and the fact that her thick lashes were black as indigo without the benefit of Maybelline's cake mascara.
“She's the kind
fathers
find attractive, you know, with that wide-eyed dreamy look. Any modern boy is going to find her drippy,” Cilla whispered into Lily Dunworth's ear.
“She's like a spy with the sneaky way she just listens, reads, and never joins in,” Lily stage-whispered back.
“My God, she smells just like a vanilla bean.” Hadley Tipps sniffed, the tip of her nose practically brushing the white patch of skin between her eyebrows. She was referring to the vanilla-based aroma Claire had had a French perfumer touring Field's mix up for her. Claire preferred this homey brew, a reference to her Candy Kitchen girlhood, to the expensive perfumes like Quelque Fleurs and Shalimar favored by the deb set.
“I hear her evening dresses are borrowed from the store. They have to be back first thing in the morning. Like curfew.”
“But you have to admit she has a certain grace.” Daisy Armstrong's family had the largest fortune on the North Shore, so she could afford to be generous. Daisy usually tried to buffer Claire from any real cruelties, more from a sense of noblesse oblige than niceness, but Claire was thankful nonetheless. The girls’ sniping, snubbing, and ridicule hurt Claire more than they could guess.
Claire had lost much of her perkiness, Miss Wren's word for her spunky courage, as she grew older. As long as she was a small child, she was the store's pet. In the early years everyone laughed at Claire's precocious charm, admired her golden curls, or pinched her pink cheeks. Then gradually, as she grew taller, and older, her thick hair now dark and merely wavy, Claire had become a problem.
She was too small for one peg and too big for another. The mothers of more awkward debutantes among her mother's clients were jealous of Claire's well-versed talent, and of her even more evident porcelain skin, but consoled themselves with the fact that the penniless girl didn't have a social chance in hell. Suddenly, Claire Organ was out of place no matter where she was.
So she was simply ignored. Mothers and their daughters whom she had known as friendly customers all her life now looked right through her as if she were transparent, talking about things as if she wasn't standing but two feet away from them handing Madame Celine straight pins in Field's fitting rooms while their dresses were altered. It galled her to find herself being treated the same way certain careless people treated taxi drivers, waiters, the household help, or anybody else who they thought didn't matter enough to care about Only the Pettibones, the Armstrongs, and a handful of her mother's best clients remembered to include Claire at their daughters’ dances or gatherings, even though Claire disliked being there every bit as much as the girls resented having her around—although they all pretended otherwise.
“So non-us,” Lily Dunworth had described her.
Claire wished she didn't have to go to these little gatherings where part of the sport was snubbing her. And then there was her discomfort, too, of being a guest in the enemy camp, with her guilty knowledge of the five-and-a-half-year affair between Auntie Slim and Mr. Pettibone—although by now she had learned enough to keep her own secrets. Mr. Pettibone had even brought Claire back a small gift after he'd first whisked Auntie Slim off to Paris—a little French ballerina turning on her music-box stand to the strains of “Clair de Lune.” Upon their return, Slim moved out of the Windermere to the North Side, where she currently resided in a sun-filled one-bedroom apartment at the Churchill on State Parkway, decorated with a Coromandel screen and suede upholstery, just like Chanel's private quarters above her salon at 31 Rue de Cambon. A pull-out couch was set aside for Claire's weekly visits, except on the evenings when “Uncle” Cyrus might be stopping by.
Claire wondered what Cilla Pettibone would do if she knew her father had not only been to Paris with her Auntie Slim, but that the same life-sized picture of Cyrus Pettibone that hung in the vast foyer of the Lake Forest house also sat in a small silver Christofle frame on Slim's skirted bed stand.
As the debs-to-be and Brenda Frazier wanna-bes chatted on about dresses and boys and guest lists, Claire selfconsciously looked down at her fingernails, as naturally unpolished as Amelia Earhart's. She could hear Auntie Wren in her head telling her that she must be a very hardy girl, the half-moons of her fingernails being so wide and all, taking up almost one-third of her nail, a true sign of health and well-being.
She supposed she had a stronger constitution than most. In fact, the only time Claire remembered being truly sick was in July 1937, when a viral episode coincided with the first reports that Amelia Earhart's plane had gone down somewhere in the Pacific after having taken off from New Guinea.
It can't be, the devastated girl had thought then, becoming glued from that moment on to the radio, her knees pulled up to her chin as she rested fitfully on the couch listening for news of the flier's whereabouts and fate. Had the Japanese detained her, or had she been captured by savages off New Guinea? Or had the plane, more mundanely, experienced mechanical difficulties? As the world waited and speculated, Claire instinctively knew the answer. Her navigator had let her down with his geography. Just like her father. Eventually, when the search was called off, with nary a piece of wreckage or luggage having been sighted, she put away her girlish dream that one day her life would cross again with the flier's. It was a little blow absorbed and almost forgotten, much like the phantom father.
“Hitler's changing the entire geography of Europe,” Claire spoke again, leaving her private thoughts behind. Her eyes were flashing. “Any maps we have will be useless. We should be worried about that and the terrible suffering that is going on there and not about who's coming to your party.”
“That reminds me, I almost forgot the McNally boy,” Cill piped up, referring to the Chicago family that manufactured all the world's maps, globes, and atlases.
“Oh, Claire,” Lily moaned. “You're so tiresome.”
“Oh, what a bother.” Cill would go to her mother again to complain about Claire having to participate. Why did Claire Organ always have to be included? She was a nobody.
“There must be some kind of butlers’ ball with a polka contest Claire could debut at,” Daisy tittered into Lily's ear.
“Doesn't she know the reason our grandmothers invented society in the first place was so that everybody could belong to their own class?” Hadley stage-whispered back.
The girls shouted with laughter, stealing sidelong looks at the object of their scorn, who flushed hotly but kept her eyes on her book.
Claire quite agreed with the others about not belonging there. But Claire wouldn't have revealed herself in front of the Priscilla Pettibones of this world for any amount of money, even as tears now stung her eyes and her lips quivered. She couldn't wait to leave the world of women behind her. She had been in a cackling henhouse without a rooster long enough. The hens had gone berserk and were pecking her to death. A real tear slipped down her cheek in spite of her best efforts to detour it.
“So the Armour boys, Marshall Field the Fourth, and Andy Ryerson, who's at Yale. He's so utterly handsome,” Cill continued, taking no notice of Claire. “Hanky Clifford from New York, and both—”
“Is there a Rockefeller in our age group?” asked Lily. “Have him.”
“Oh, and Phipps from Oyster Bay. He's my brother's roommate at Dartmouth.”
“Don't forget Reg Dickerson the Third from Tuxedo Park. I met Dicky at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach last winter. Too divine. Maybe he'll come.”
Claire lifted her violet eyes and hastily wiped her cheek dry with her fingertips.
“Tuxedo Park. Yes, ask Harry Harrison too.” Lily was busy dabbing her toes with Debutante Pink.
“Oh, he's such a twit. He'll probably just keep his nose in a book the whole time.”
“But aren't they awfully rich, the Harrisons?”
“Of Winding Way Road?” Constance read from the blue book.
“And isn't his father an ambassador or something?”
“S'pose. But he can't dance!”
“So don't ask him.”
“I'll have to,” Cill lamented. “His father went to Princeton with Daddy.”
Claire bit her lip and wondered what kind of books Harry Harrison read, and if his father didn't have a fourteen-karat-gold dresser set from Marshall Field's & Co. The Harrisons of Tuxedo Park. Could they be the very same Harrisons who had saved her little Christmas years ago and indirectly “bought” the Amelia Earhart overnight case for her? Claire half smiled to herself and felt a twinge of excitement for the first time in months. Maybe this ball wouldn't be so terrible after all.
Family Values
There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human society, are created, strengthened and maintained.
—
Winston Churchill
W
illiam Henry Harrison IV didn't carry his ancestors around lightly. He ducked his silver gray head to avoid a summer branch as he easily took the jump over the field-stone fence that intersected the north end of his Tuxedo Park property. As usual, his son Harry was several jumps behind. Both of them cut youthful figures with their trim male bodies gracefully wedded to the horses they rode. Father and son were casually and almost identically dressed in brown leather riding boots, tan jodhpurs, white shirts, and houndstooth jackets. But then there weren't many choices for proper sartorial attire in Tuxedo Park. Only forty-odd miles from roistering Manhattan, Tuxedo Park was a rustic enclave in the Ramapo Mountains restricted to New York's most elite, well-bred WASP families, along with their deer, horses, partridges, pheasants, wild turkeys, and whiskey sours. The horsey patrician residents guarded their privacy aggressively within their slabbed-stone walls, and tried to conduct their well-ordered aristocratic lives quietly and with valor, regardless of the fact that young Griswold Lorillard had given their private park a notoriety of sorts when in 1886 he and a few of his puckish friends had daringly worn tailless dress jackets to the Tuxedo Club's autumn dance, inventing in the process the tuxedo, the gentleman's preferred formal evening attire now worn everywhere by everyone. The Lorillards held the property on the eastern boundary of the Harrison estate looking down over the lake and, like the rest of their neighbors, these pillars of Tuxedo Park society elected to preserve their privacy more than fifty years after “the little notoriety” of the birth of the tux. The Tuxedo people regarded being written up in the New York “café society” columns as akin to having mug shots published in the
Police Gazette.
But there were exceptions, like the time Ophelia's great-aunt had gone mad and shot the butler who was serving her cold tea, winging him on the ear with a pocket pistol. The family was glad to see this nasty little episode reported in “Talk of the Town” instead of on the front page of the
New York Times.