The Chameleon (58 page)

“Never touch the stuff myself. But if it's to your liking, I hope you buy the California kind. It'll keep our dollars in our local economy.” She shot the reporter a Lefty look. “Cut, wrap, end of story.”

And women started to like her. There was always the gossipy fringe group that came to press the flesh of someone they had read about in the glossies for years, and to please them Claire might tell a light anecdote or two. If a little tip about the La Leche mothers’ breast-feeding method from the lovely princess of Monaco or Eleanor Roosevelt's recipe for scrambled eggs following her speech on financial parity for women or children's advocacy programs garnered her additional votes, she could handle it. After all, she had been trained to read a room and cater to it. Slowly her popularity was growing.

From her mother and, later, the duchess of Windsor, Claire had picked up the uncanny knack for making everyone else around her feel important. She locked her violet eyes on someone's face and just listened, listened like their opinion was the single solution to the cold war or would settle the Cuban problem once and for all. She cocked her head at an angle and listened until her target was exhausted from being listened to. Anyone who came under Claire's listening spell became her devoted supporter, but Claire couldn't go eye-to-eye with everyone in her congressional district, so she utilized her other skills.

She was always the first to write a thank-you note—the Aunties had taught her this courtesy—to the man who sent her five dollars as well as the lady who sent in five hundred. Sometimes she'd just pick up the telephone and call them to thank them—and sometimes reel them in as a volunteer or for an even bigger donation. Her Italian and smattering of Spanish stood her well in the California ethnic communities, and Lefty's Hollywood crowd threw star-studded political cocktail parties for her. But even with all that and Anita's bright, smart speeches, she couldn't reach the people in the middle. The ones who lived in one house with one husband and squeaky-clean children who hadn't shot their Italian stepfathers or been electroshocked at Wolford. People who quietly went about their conventional lives—the ones who had never quite accepted her—and the ones who voted.

As much as Claire would have liked to have her daughter by her side, she refused to push Sara into the searing spotlight of the press. Sara had made dramatic headway in her private world at Eleanor House. And the sensitive young professor she had married treated her as delicately as he treated his prized first edition of T. S. Eliot. When one of Claire's campaign consultants booked a newspaper interview for Claire and her daughter, Claire vetoed it.

“Pictures are fine. But Sara's not running. I am. The voters should understand mat. Cancel it.” Claire had worked too hard to bring Sara to even the low end of normalcy to let anything—even her fierce desire to sit in Congress—undermine what was even more important to her: her fragile daughter's mental health.

Anita was ecstatic that the girl wouldn't be participating. She thought Sara's unpredictability was a dangerous liability and wanted her visible only as a quiet young woman waving from a distance, hard evidence that Claire was a real woman with a womb who had given birth and was a good grandmother, but clearly out of reach of snooping reporters.

Claire insisted just as fervently on buttons and bumper stickers that simply proclaimed,
HARRISON FOR CONGRESS
, with
CLAIRE
printed in small letters at the top. If the name evoked a hundred years of patriotic Harrisons, Harrisons who had already served their country proudly with a dozen special envoys, eight ambassadors, four-star generals, and two American presidents, Claire considered it her earned right to use it, sort of a belated divorce settlement from Ophelia and Harry. It wasn't important to Claire how she got to Congress, just that she got there.

Fenwick Grant started to appear on Claire's doorstep on his drop-ins to his Los Angeles paper with almost punctual spontaneity. There they would have little strategy suppers like the new friends they were becoming. He would sit across the table from her and lift her spirits when they were sapped by events of the hard day. And she would listen intelligently, absorbing his advice. His ego needed no bolstering, but sometimes she could flatter another pro-Claire editorial out of him. If Anita was joining them, her head usually fell into her dessert of cigarettes and coffee by 10
P.M
., and Claire had to shake her awake before leading her upstairs and tucking her in.

Tonight Grant was waiting, jacket off, shirtsleeves rolled up newsroom-style, when Claire hurried back down the stairs of the house she had shared with Lefty. On the dimly lit landing she caught her breath as she realized how much this man, with his foot rakishly posed on the stairs, his old school tie loosened, silver streaking his hair, resembled Harrison.

“Do you mind if I smoke a cigar?” He threw a flirtatious glance up the stairs. His Harvard-educated accent was polite, but the arrogant way he was already lighting his illegal Havana was pure chauvinistic Grant.

“You look very comfortable.” She came down the last three steps in the same time she had taken to descend the rest of the staircase.

He had dozens of young women at his beck and call, but increasingly it was Claire's power and intellect that he could cozy up with.

“I've taken the liberty.”

“I've been in so many smoke-filled rooms today I feel like some air. Would you mind?”

“What a terrific idea. I just happen to have a convertible parked in your driveway. Top down okay? I wouldn't want to muss the candidate's hair.” His grin was appealingly boyish and matched his vulpine green-gray eyes. He left his jacket on the newel post to be retrieved later.

“Oh, I forgot to turn the outside lights on.” Fortunately Claire was blushing in the dark, where no one could see.

“I'm like one of those nocturnal predators. My vision improves at night. Here, lean on me.” His arm was tennis-server taut, his bare forearm firm and steady to her touch. Suddenly it felt comfortable to Claire to have someone to lean on again, even if it was only for the few steps to his racy car. As he opened the door for her, she caught a whiff of his unsubtle masculine smells: cigars, commingled with California sea air and a spicy aftershave.

Once in the creamy leather bucket seats, the Santa Monica mountain breezes rushing past her cheek, she felt almost girlish again. Sitting next to her, fiddling with the radio dials, was this tall and athletically built man, quite hand some in his blue and white broad-striped Turnbull and Asser shirt It was odd how she had never once before felt the pull of his good looks. His full head of hair blew back neatly in the light wind, as if he had taken two Brylcreem-ed fingers and pushed the hair in that direction.

She let her head fall back and closed her eyes, not caring where the car was pointed.

Instinctively he knew he shouldn't talk politics with her tonight “Claire, do you know how attractive you look when you're relaxed?”

Her peal of laughter was effervescent “No, tell me. I need some positive editorial.”

“Like I'd like to stop the car and take you in my arms.”

“I'm running for Congress, Grant And I'm a grandmother. Now what would a Washington A-list bachelor do with a grandmother?”

“Just off the top of my head? I could think of about fifty things to do with you.” In the moonlight supplemented by passing street lamps, she caught a flash of his polished teeth and the flecks of warmth in his eyes. He took one large hand off the steering wheel and placed it on her knee.

“It's too soon, Grant.” Claire's voice was soft but steady.

“It's been a year.”

“Just seven months. Lefty and I shared a very happy decade. Ten years of closeness and continual gladness that is very rare. And it all just rushed by.”

“You were a very good wife to him.”

“He was a very dear husband.”

“Well, I'm a rogue. But a charming one.”

“I've noticed.” The laughter was back in her voice.

“I'll try again, you realize.” He put both hands back on the wheel.

“I'd be bloody furious with you if you didn't keep trying.”

An hour later, they pulled into the darkened house on Alamedo Drive. She started to say good night in the car, but he reminded her that he had left his jacket in the foyer.

As they approached the door, the jangle of the telephone pierced the night. Lorenza hadn't spent nights at the house since Lefty died, and surely Anita was gone in an exhausted heap upstairs, probably with a cigarette stuck in her fingers. Claire frowned and picked up the phone. It was 1
A.M
. Nothing good ever came from a telephone call at 1
A.M
.

“Calling from where?” Claire raised her voice in response to the faraway static on the line. “Khartoum?”

“The Middle East.” There was trouble in the Middle East, the publisher knew, and pricked up his ears.

“What kind of mission? Harrison, can you hear me?” Grant watched her as he folded his long arms across his chest and leaned impatiently against the lemon-tree-wallpapered foyer.

“Oh, dear. Yes. Quite the delicacy in Saudi Arabia. Oh no. No. Well, I hope she's better soon.” Claire brought one delicate hand slowly down the front of her body, almost as if she were in a lover's embrace.

“But that was so dear of you. Yes, your luck matters to me. Hellooo. Hello? Harrison?” She looked both excited and disappointed as she put down the receiver.

“That was Ambassador Harrison calling from Cairo. I think. He's taken poor fragile Starling down the Nile, through Damascus and Beirut, and had her be guest of honor at the palace of the king of Saudi Arabia. You know what that means.”

The media mogul didn't know, and he didn't like not knowing.

“The guest of honor—and his escort—gets served the delicacy du jour. In this case, sheep's eyes. And Harrison's wife is suffering some intestinal distress for it.” She shook her head. ‘To travel that part of the world, you have to have a constitution like Harrison's.” She paused, and then with just a hint of something—was it female rivalry?—in her voice, added, “Or mine.”

Grant nodded with even more knowing than Claire.

“But mainly he called to wish me luck in the last debate on Tuesday. May we all have luck of the Nile gods.”

Anita blew smoke out of her ears and shuffled the pollsters’ papers. “No chance.” She shook her head. “No chance in hell. We're done for.”

“Don't polls ever lie? Surely people lie when they're polled, just to be polite.” Auntie Wren was trying to make sunshine out of gloomy statistics.

“Nope. Turns out the citizens of this district want Harriet Nelson.”

“Maybe they're not ready for a strong woman.”

“Well, dear, maybe you could pretend to be more helpless. Men don't like pushy women. You could faint or something. Don't they have the sympathy vote out here?” Auntie Slim had become a political strategist.

Sara listened silently from her cushion on the floor as she combed young Violet's strawberry shock of hair.

“The margins are just too wide. I guess if Strudel falls down drunk in Tuesday's televised debate or Claire manages to bring the World Series home, or maybe put caviar on every table in California, we might see a turnaround.”

“Never mind. However things turn out, it's been a good run. Sara, will you help prep me for the debate?”

“Can't, I have somewhere I have to go,” Sara said, but continued to stare vaguely out the window as she fussed with her daughter's silky hair.

Claire wondered, not for the first time, if the campaign had put too much strain on her daughter. Every time she thought she'd made some headway in their delicate relationship, Sara would get skittish and retreat inside herself again or, worse, turn off her phone and shut her mother out again. “All right, dear. Auntie Slim, how about you?”

“Well, I hate to take the man's part but since your debate is only three nights away, I'll just have to play along. Imagine.
Moi.
A man!” At sixty-nine years old, Slim was slimmer than ever. “When Cyrus was alive, he used to say, ‘Slim, if it's one thing you'll never be, it's a man.’” Since his death, their relationship had taken on a historical legitimacy.

The night of the debate, Claire's all-girl family turned out in force. Aunties Slim and Wren sat in the front row wearing crisp linen dresses in red, white, and blue. The ladies, both of whom collected Social Security checks, were still looking peppy and held small American flags on gold sticks in their laps, ready for the wave.

Violet and Mr. Zolla sat on the aisle. Violet's composed face hid her concern over her daughter's foray into a televised debate.

“I wish Claire had worn her white gloves. To show everyone she's a real lady,” she whispered to Anita.

Anita Lace was enveloped in a fog of Pall Mall smoke even though she had just put out her last cigarette seconds before. “She'd be better off with a pair of Everlast boxing gloves. Bill Strudel is no gentleman.”

“Oh, dear.” Violet bit her lip as she gave Claire an encouraging V-for-victory salute. She nervously wondered how long she should keep Sara's waiting chair empty.

She didn't have to wait more than a few minutes. Lana Turner tiptoed down the aisle in her dark glasses and a full-length white beaver coat, looking for any open seat, and pushed past the starstruck usher when she spied one up front and center. Anita saw the pure platinum actress wiggling down the sloped stairs of the Los Angeles P.S. 27 high school auditorium and hoped Lana was just lost. She couldn't really be walking toward Sara's seat.

“Holy shit. Let's pray the lights dim before she sits down.” Anita felt her diverticulitis acting up.

Violet graciously extended her white-gloved hand to Lana's tan leather one trimmed in turkey feathers as they pressed the fabric.

The head of the League of Women Voters cleared her thin voice and introduced the state's attorney and his Democratic challenger. Bill Strudel won the toss of the coin and began his opening speech.

“Since the age of Washington, voting for our congressional representatives, deciding who is going to speak for you good folks at home has been a sacred American ritual. One that requires soul searching and serious reflection to find the right man”—he paused for emphasis—“to represent you.” On cue, his hands went out to all the “you”s in the audience.