The Chameleon (11 page)

“Incidentally, Harry.” Ophelia pronounced each syllable as though she were pinging a tuning fork against one of her hand-cut crystal goblets. “I've got a little surprise for you.” Ophelia whooed and trilled at the same time.
“Luncheon guest.”
This last was silently mouthed.

“Uh-oh.” Harry laughed. “Do I detect another prospective fiancée on the noon menu?” Ophelia's greatest ambition in life was to have her only son well married, preferably to one of the Tuxedo girls, and produce blue-blooded grandchildren to romp and grow under her watchful eye. She already had blueprints secreted away in the vault behind the portrait of her grandmother for the house she was going to build Harry as a wedding present on the four adjoining acres she would give him.

“Are you ready?” Ophelia Harrison's eyes popped even wider than any owl's. “Minnie Mortimer! Toots and Avery's daughter. You haven't seen each other for at least two years now. I know how you like your girls intelligent and all—she's been to Bryn Mawr—and she's a horsewoman too, soooo I've just gone ahead and bit the bridle, so to speak.” A tiny laugh sneaked out of her perpetually clenched lips.

Harry shuddered. He remembered Minnie Mortimer.

“Yes, Mother, she's wonderfully horsey.” The girl practically neighed. “In fact, I think she is a horse.”

If he remembered correctly, she had nearly crippled Harry several seasons ago at the Tuxedo autumn ball by stepping on him with one of her hooflike feet. With her long face, endless row of teeth, chestnut mane, and wide rump, she was about as “horsey” as a girl could get without fulfilling Preakness entry requirements. But, like a fine brood mare, Minnie Alexander Mortimer's bloodlines were impeccable and Harry knew that in his family circles, that was what counted. Since they had known one another all of their lives, naturally their parents hoped they'd one day marry, uniting both their distinguished families and their properties.

“Come now, Harry. Minnie cuts quite a handsome figure.”

Suddenly all Harry wanted to do was to escape to the estate's private grass field, climb into his single-engine plane, and take off. Instead, he looked over at his father.

“And your opinion, Father?” he asked imploringly.

“Oh, no.” Harrison chuckled as he raised both hands defensively and shook his head. “The last thing I want is to be involved in the selection of your wife.”

“I see, sir. It's one tiling for you to help decide whether a nation goes to war but when it comes to family duty, looks like Mother's commander in chief and I've just been drafted.”

“Oooh buck up, dear, she's a sporting girl. The kind we like.” Ophelia stooped down to pick a late-summer garden mum from a stone urn. She pushed it into her son's tweed riding jacket as a boutonniere. Ophelia's outdoorsy life had left her face as weatherbeaten as her husband's, but whereas time and nature had made Harrison's sculpted features even more distinguished looking, the ravages of the elements had left her face as lined as a Chinese shar-pei.

“Well then, I'd be delighted to see Minnie, Mother. Lead the way.” He sighed in surrender. He fleetingly wondered why women were not considered tough enough for war.

The three of them walked around the main house to the side terrace facing the pool pavilion where a round luncheon table beneath an enormous ancient elm had been set with colorful summer china and picnic crystal. Minnie was already standing at the table, waiting as eagerly as a filly at the starting gate raring to go.

“I had forgotten how you can see our house from this exact spot if you stand on your toes. Well, at least the chimney. Come look, everyone.” Minnie spoke out of one side of her mouth as if she had had a partial stroke. She was pointing a toned, bare arm off into the distance.

“Oh yes, dear, you're absolutely right. Come look, Harry.” Ophelia didn't move her lips at all. The Tuxedo Park ladies communicated with one another like snooty ventriloquists.

“I haven't seen you anywhere for the longest time, Harry. Not at the club or at any of the dinner dances. What have you been doing with yourself all summer for fun?” She dug at a loose brick with the toe of her shoe and lowered her head.

“Flying. Would you like to go up with me?” he asked politely.

“Heavens no. It's too high-danger for me. If I can't get there on Thunder or by the New York Central, I don't want to go at all! Umm, unless maybe it's in the adorable red roadster Daddy just gave me for winning Best in Show. Did you see it in the driveway?” she blurted out excitedly. “Why don't you come for a ride with me?” Her voice boomed out into the fresh air as if she had spent a lifetime entertaining hard-of-hearing relatives. Her hair was pulled back in the equine style she wore when she rode, a thick chestnut-colored French braid to match the mare's. At least she'd had the good sense not to wear her ribbons. The Harrisons and Minnie all took their appointed places at the table, Minnie next to Harry.

Harry closed his eyes for a moment and was caught off balance by the high whinny of Minnie's laughter at one of Ophelia's jokes. He bolted from the table, dropping his napkin to the terrace.

“Mail's just arrived and I'm expecting a letter. ‘Scuse me.” The reluctant recruit in Ophelia's army wondered if he'd be shot at dawn on the terrace, or just be sent to his room without dessert for going AWOL.

“Well, what do you think, Harry? She's something special, isn't she?” Ophelia and her son were waving Minnie down the quarter-mile-long driveway at dusk as she sped away in her red roadster through the scrolled Tudor archway into the sunset. His rude manners at luncheon had been forgiven.

“Really, dear, I wish you would be serious about your future. All this”—Ophelia indicated the house, horses, acreage, and the four million dollars she held in her own trust fund aside from what her husband was worth—“must have its proper guardian. With inherited wealth, dear, comes inherited responsibility. Best shared by two individuals from the same world.”

Harry jammed his hands into his pockets. Ophelia noticed the line of freckles running across the bridge of his nose. He looked so young.

“Aren't you rushing me, Mother? I have all the time in the world.”

“Not if you're thinking of becoming a fighter pilot, you don't,” she snapped in a way that reminded him of a crocodile clamping its jaws down hard on its unsuspecting prey. Seeing his reaction, she changed her tactics and softened.

“You know, dear, your father and I were ‘fixed up’ as you call it, and nudged into a marriage when I was only seventeen and he was just out of Princeton, and it's worked out very well indeed. Very well.” She nodded grandly.

Harry envisioned his own arranged marriage, in which Minnie would win horse ribbons and he, flying ace and war hero, would eventually settle into the family banking firm and father dozens of grandchildren for his mother. He could imagine Ophelia marching her heirs around and dictating the hour-by-hour structure of their little Harrison lives, just as his had always been planned out on his mother's Adams writing desk in the sun parlor each morning. He thought he had been free at college. Now he realized he had only been following the plan. His mother was leading him to a proper Tuxedo life with Minnie Mortimer or someone just like her. But duty and conscience were what propelled the Harrisons. Who was he to meddle in the unknown fires of passion?

“Of course, dear”—Ophelia was gleeful—“you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.”

“Don't you mean make
her
drink?” He hoped she would smile, but she prattled on about duty and family, inheritances and familial responsibility. Even the leonine stone statuary on the grounds seemed to be staring him down.

“Okay, Mother. I'll see her again if it will make you happy. But no promises.” He made an intense effort to look intractable, like one of the Harrison portraits in the Great Hall.

“Your father would like you to go to Cyrus Pettibone's daughter's debut in Chicago over the holidays. He's hoping to pull Pettibone into one of his hush-hush transactions in this European war business. But he's got to be with FDR on government affairs that weekend. Take a look around if you like. There'll be plenty of nice girls from good families, but trust me, they won't be like Minnie. I've been your mother for a long time. She'll bring out the best in you.” Ophelia's eyes twinkled. “Take your plane,” she advised, “and,” she said, conjuring up one of their presidential forebears for good measure, “don't forget to take an overcoat and keep your speech short.” They both laughed. “And Harry”—she patted him on the back—“lots of grandchildren.”

“Father, I'm sorry that I put you to the loyalty test this morning—me against the president. I know he's walking a fine line.” Harry entered the library. His still boyish voice held an edge in it. In the soft light cast by the antique American wall sconces and his father's hooded brass reading lamp, the heavily waxed dark wood floors gleamed like embers in the fireplace. As was his custom, Harrison had retired to his favorite room in the house following a quiet family dinner in the smaller of the two dining rooms.

Harrison looked up from his official documents, and, indicating the crystal decanter of brandy beside him on the desk, asked, “Won't you join me?” He seemed less intimidating to his son beneath the vastness of the two-story wood-beamed vaulted ceiling.

“Thank you, sir.”

There was a long silence.

Warmth was not Harrison's strong point, but he did put before all else his devotion to duty and God and loyalty to his friends and family. He struggled here to find the right thing to say, and to appease his son in the process.

“You'll get your chance to fly, Harry.” He stood up and poured them each a short glass of sherry. “We're moving cautiously into this dung. It's very mature of you to grasp the gravity of the situation. When you're older, you'll understand it's the big picture that needs concern us. I appreciate you trying to see the overview with me. Sit down, son. I think you'll be interested in what FDR and I were up to this August.”

“I heard you sailed up to Nantucket on the
Potomac.
”

“It wasn't aimless holiday sailing.” Harrison's thick brows knitted together into a bushy gray hedge. “We did take the presidential yacht but we made a top-secret rendezvous with some of our American warships. Harry, you've heard about this. The Joint Declaration.”

“Churchill?” Harry folded his arms and leaned on the short-lived ninth president's desk, his eyes aglow. “You were there?”

Harrison nodded, a slight smile curling his lip. “The president and I secretly transferred over to the heavy cruiser, the U.S.S.
Augusta.
Fine ship.” Harrison sipped at his sherry. “Even Eleanor and your mother weren't told where we were going.”

“Father, I had no idea. Tell me what it was like.” Harry's awe of his father was real.

“It reminded me of kindred spirits coming together. One of the most emotional moments I've ever witnessed. The world's two great leaders were as nervous to meet each other as a couple of young people on a first date.” Harrison's usually cool delivery was awash in warmth. “FDR stood straighter than he's stood in years. He wouldn't use the wheelchair or the crutches. The only assist he'd use was the support of his son Elliott, and as the navy band struck up ‘God Save the King,’ Churchill boarded. I've never seen such a look of elation cross FDR's face. He was determined to greet the legend and be standing on his own to do it. I wish you could have been there to see it.”

“And Churchill?”

“When he moved toward Roosevelt, I could swear the tough old fellow had tears in his eyes. Many of us did.”

Harry couldn't tell whether it was from the light reflecting off the glass decanter or the smoke wafting up from the lit pipe or the emotion ignited from the story that caused his father's eyes to glisten.

“Mark my words, Harry, together they will annihilate this darkness stalking the world. Mark my words.” For a moment, Harrison's voice resonated exactly like President Roosevelt's.

“Mr. Harrison, sir,” the butler interrupted them.

Both father and son spun around.

“Excuse me, sir, but there's a call for you from Hyde Park.”

Harry watched as his father crossed the room and picked up the telephone. He thought to himself what a distinguished-looking gentleman his father was. With his thick, sleek gray hair, aloof air, and trim, athletic body, Harrison looked as alert for action as a man of half his years. But his demeanor exuded concern, self-discipline, and a sense of the serious matters crowding his briefcase. Harry almost felt apologetic for bothering him with his modest problems.

Harrison put the receiver to his ear as he purposefully picked up the fountain pen from its inkwell, a plethora of Harrison presidential memorabilia and photographs crowding the desk. A nerve in his left jowl twitched.

“She was a remarkable woman. We will all feel her loss.”

Harry stood at attention.

“How is the president taking it? … I see. Yes, Mrs. Harrison and I will leave first thing in the morning. Of course. Yes. Thank you for calling.” He gently lowered the receiver back into its cradle.

“The president's mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, has passed away and Franklin's very undone,” Harrison announced. In the darkening room, dimly lit, Harrison, deep in thought, cast an unusually large shadow.

Watching his father, Harry reflected how difficult it must have been for him to succeed in the shadow of two presidential forebears and such high expectations. But he had, first on Wall Street and now as senior adviser and intimate confidant to the president of the United States.

Harry wondered if he could ever follow in those exalted footsteps. As a breeze blew in from the terrace, rustling the important papers on his father's desk, Harry suddenly felt he cast no shadow at all.

A wintry blast lifted the heavy hem of Claire's coat, blowing her snow-matted hair across her face as she sidestepped over an icy patch and into the Marshall Field's employees’ entrance. She ran up the silent and still escalator two steps at a time. It was shut off for Sunday, the store's day off but not hers—she was late. Mother and the Aunties were probably already there laying out handbags and gloves to go with evening dresses and cocktail suits. The Aunties were dying to get their busy hands on the reluctant party-goer, fix her mouth into a smile, puff up her hair, and deck her out in an evening dress required to be at once “elegant” (Mother), “sweet” (Auntie Wren), and “a head-turner” (Slim). Claire would just as soon be facing the German measles.