The Chameleon (8 page)

As Field's child-in-residence, Claire was acting as the store's special hostess to the miniature movie star for the day, a scheme cooked up by the store's publicity department. Later, as both girls gamely posed for photographers, each holding a Shirley Temple doll, a big seller for Field's, and the star's mother urging her to “sparkle, Shirley, sparkle,” Claire tried to sparkle, too. She thought how pretty Shirley was with her cheery round face. Was it any wonder that every man in her movies wanted to be her father or adopt her? Why, she could even melt the hearts of gangsters. She was always bringing couples together in her films so that they fell in love, eventually adopting the character Shirley played. She had brought Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard together in
Now and Forever,
and in her latest film,
Curly Top,
she played matchmaker to millionaire John Boles and Rochelle Hudson, Shirley's older sister in the movie. Every Shirley Temple movie had a happy ending.

“How do you get everyone to fall in love with you?” Claire had asked in all sincerity when they were at the marble water fountain together.

“By being nice,” the little star had answered. “And by remembering to always dimple after reading my line.” She twisted a plump finger into one of the famous circles penetrating either side of her mouth.

Contemplating her present situation, Claire decided she would probably be stuck in that man's hat display forever just by being nice. Dimpling just might work. Or maybe she could try one of Auntie Slim's seductions.

“So do you come here often?” she called down to the man from her owl's lair.

The gentleman was visibly taken aback. He didn't shop by himself very often. He usually left that to his wife and daughters. He looked around before he looked up.

“And who are you, young lady? The Cheshire Cat or a talking hat?”

“Oh, neither,” Claire uncrossed and recrossed her ankles on her precarious perch. “I'm one of Field's personal shoppers. And I can help you pick out almost anything in the store. I know where everything is.” She fluttered her eyes like Shirley Temple had shown her and wished she could have extended her arm in a languid arc like she'd seen Jeanette MacDonald do in
Naughty Marietta,
but she realized if she wasn't careful she'd fall out of the hat rack and break her neck. And how could she be adorable in a cast?

“Don't you have anyone to shop for you?” she asked pointedly.

“Well, that's the problem. I have too many people shopping and charging it to me. Now it seems I need a few things for myself. Really now, can I help you out of there? You're not a circus performer or something, are you?”

“No, I'm just a working girl.” Claire paused as if she were exhaling some of Auntie Slim's cigarette smoke. “And I'd like to help you.” Her voice sizzled with what she hoped was sophistication.

The gentleman broke into a warm, friendly, fatherly laugh. He held up a hand to her.

“Allow me,” he said, “to assist you.”

Claire hung on to his hand, a nice big gruffy hand, and stepped out of the hat rack and onto a column and then down on the counter where shirts were stacked in neat rows by collar size and color.

“I notice you're buying two of everything. Was your luggage lost?”

“No.”

“Did you have a fire?”

“No.”

“Do you have a wife?”

“I'm in that gentleman's limbo somewhere between marriage and divorce,” he announced before he caught himself. There was something disarming about this girl-child.

Bingo, thought Claire. And now he was separating from his wife. Evidently Claire had caught him only on his second day out of the nest. She had no allegiances to the institution of marriage; she had never even known a real family except from storybooks and store catalogs. So now Claire concentrated on sparkling. Somehow she'd pull him into her trap, just like Shirley.

“That shirt you're buying is from last season's stock and that collar is smart but trendy. You look like a man who'd want something more conservative, that would wear from year to year.” She pitched him with one of the lines her mother always used on her lady customers.

The gentleman looked impressed.

“But what's wrong with this shirt? It's got a turn-down collar and is plain white so it can go with everything.”

“Look over here,” she said, taking him by the hand. “You'd be much handsomer in this.”

“How are you such an authority? Where are your parents?” His expression turned serious.

“My father is missing and my mother works in the store.”

“Well, shouldn't you be running along to her?” He gave a helpless look around the emptying floor. He noticed that he was the last customer. He'd purchased just what he'd needed for a few nights’ stay at his club. When he'd moved out of his house, he'd only taken his briefcase.

“Nope. My mother's at home. She's probably worried half sick. I was supposed to meet her but I got stuck in those antlers and was too embarrassed to ask for help.”

“You should never be embarrassed to ask for help.”

She lowered her lashes and looked at the buckles on her shoes.

“Would you help me get home? If you hadn't come along, why, I could have been stuck in those horns all night!” she fibbed.

“Well, I'm glad that I did. I have a driver outside and we are going to take you home, young lady. Should we telephone your mother so she doesn't worry?”

“Oh yes.” Claire looked directly into his eyes. “How gallant you are.” She repeated Auntie Slim's mantra like a parrot from the Pet Store on Eight.

“But enough about me.” Claire took his arm as they made their way to the Men's Grill with its bank of telephones. “Let's talk about you.” Wouldn't Mother and the Aunties be thrilled. She'd tell Mother to put on her prettiest blouse. She was bringing home a man for her. She was bringing home the bacon.

Chapter four

Give the Lady What She Wants

A woman is like a finely plumed bird. If she is to survive, she takes on the colors of whomever's nest she is inhabiting.

—Old Folk Proverb

C
laire's arrival with her catch at the Windermere had set off a waving of arms and tricky pirouettes worthy of the Ballets Russes. Violet and Aunt Wren reacted with elaborate body language and stunned silence in the shock of the moment. Claire had picked up a man and brought him home to Violet like a box of chocolates.

“Oh, you'll have to forgive Claire. She is only a child.” Violet colored to a high pink in embarrassment and tucked her delicate profile into the ruffles of her blouse. Wren fluttered off into the kitchen as if her exit had been choreographed, leaving Violet alone for her big solo.

“I have four daughters of my own,” the man said kindly as he introduced himself. “You've done a wonderful job raising her. Really. She's an outright delight.”

“Well, you're being very gracious, Mr. Pettibone,” Violet murmured, deliberately leaving out any reference to Mrs. Pettibone and the daughters who spent money like water slipping through their I've-simply-got-to-have-that fingers.

Mrs. Pettibone was high on Violet's list of names of ladies who handled their clothing bills like Board of Trade transactions, bartering, exchanging, and begging Violet to hold on to them until they could get their husbands “in the right mood.” The Pettibone listing of accounts due was thick in Violet's ledger. What a coincidence that Claire should bring
him
home. Claire. The child could take a cup of sugar and turn it into a three-tiered wedding cake.

Violet smiled at Claire's gentleman. Mr. Pettibone was very attractive in a reliable sort of way. Solid bearing, gentlemanly demeanor, a Patek Philippe watch cupping his wrist, he was well groomed but not handsome; Auntie Slim constantly drummed into Claire's head that the lady should be the pretty one and the man her stable foil.

Violet offered to make him a cup of herbal tea. As he sat down in one of the threadbare slipcovered armchairs, she stole a second look at him. There was a husbandly gentleness about him that came through his burly manner.

For a split second, Violet wondered what she might do if Millicent Pettibone wasn't her valued customer and if she wasn't mother confessor to her and her spoiled daughters.

She needn't have bothered. The living room door flung open and in slinked Slim, her hips moving so that Violet could practically hear the hip sockets grinding in and out. She had slipped into something “comfortable” after Claire and Mr. Cyrus Pettibone's phone call and doused herself with Paris Nights. She smiled at him with her vinyl-slick lips, boring straight into him with her kohl-lined eyes. Eyes that suggested all sorts of things that Mrs. Pettibone had probably never even heard of.

The rest was rumor.

“Hitler who?”

“Adolf Hitler.”

“Adolphe, like Adolphe Menjou?”

“Honestly, Cilia, don't you keep up on world events?” Hope Wentworth threw a gardenia at her.

“Cilia's been in a coma for the last two years.” Daisy Armstrong was putting curlers in her hair.

“Oh,
that
Hitler.” Cilla remembered the maids talking about it. Poland and France were where the household's girls came from, and the maids had been anguished when Germany invaded their homelands.

“All of Europe's at war and Adolf Hitler is the ringleader. Daddy says he's the madman leading Europe straight into a nervous breakdown.”

“Holland and Belgium were seized by Hitler too.”

Cilla Pettibone looked bereft. “Does that mean I can't get my thousands of tulips from Holland for my party?”

“Not unless you're planning to invite Hitler, kiddo.”

“Well, Hitler was just this short little mucky-muck in Munich when I was visiting my sister and Brenda Frazier at school over there. We used to see all the funny SS men in front of the opera house and the monuments. They'd parade up and down the boulevards at night with torches and we'd think, Oh what a fabulous parade!” Lily Dunworth had actually met the Führer. “My sister and Brenda got invitations all the time from him. Brenda Frazier even had lunch with him.” She gulped a giant sip of iced tea in a dramatic pause.

All the girls perked up when they heard the name of the girl who turned being a debutante into being as famous as a film star or Eleanor Roosevelt. When she “came out” in New York in 1938, her dark delicate features, powdery white skin, and liver-red mouth had even made the cover of
Life
magazine. The girls fell silent listening to Lily. Even Claire lifted her eyes from her book.

“Hitler used to invite all the English and American schoolgirls in Munich to his little teas.” Lily pulled the mint leaf out of her glass and placed it on her tongue.

“Hitler had tea dances?” Snookie Cuthbert made a face.

“No. Just tea. He and his sidekicks.”

The girls were snuggled for the night into the recently redecorated glass-roofed solarium of the Pettibone estate on Green Bay Road in Lake Forest with its pearly marble floor, cozy overstuffed couches, and majolica vases crammed with dozens upon dozens of summer roses and peonies. They were planning their participation in the annual Passavant Cotillion Ball held during Christmas break, and Priscilla Pettibone's at-home debut party. The double social whammy would tax their nerves, their parents’ bank accounts, and test the girls’ physical stamina, but they were preparing to perform their upper-class culture's rite of initiation into the adult world with committed gusto.

Claire was the invited but unwelcome guest at the girls’ weekend sleep-over at Cilia's, the youngest of the Pettibone daughters and the last to be launched out of the gilded nest. After a day of tennis, swimming, and poring over row upon row of boys’ names from the best families around the country to be invited to her debut party the night before the big cotillion, the sun-kissed girls were pruning and weeding their list like social gardeners. Green books and blue books, regional social registers with summer and winter addresses and private phone numbers, unlisted anywhere else, were scattered around the floral swirled needlepoint rugs.

It was only July, still five months away from Cilia's presentation to society, but preparations were in full swing. Lester Lanin's band had been booked, starvation diets begun, and the caterers hired, along with the invaluable Violet Organ from Field's to coordinate it all. Violet was a recognized authority on Brenda Frazier's coming-out party at New York's Ritz, as all her clients wanted to incorporate at least one “Brenda” detail into their own launches, be it the bridal-like bouquet of orchids she held in the receiving line or the four-strand pearl bracelet she wore at her wrist. To the girls’ chagrin, along with that jewel Violet came her sappy daughter. The prettiest dresses and the best balls all had Violet's practiced hands on them. And Claire Organ, perennial wallflower, was part of the “arrangement.” Of course the girls didn't understand that their mothers’ allegiances to Violet were still held in that “other” social registry, Violet's ledgers of IOUs.

Violet's little experiment in extending credit during the long Depression was paying off in social spades. In her genteel way, Violet, clad in her basic black with the bouffant bunch of long-stemmed silk violets at her shoulder, planned the social gatherings of Chicago's elite. She never raised her voice. She didn't have to; the power of her leather ledger combined with her credo of quid pro quo resonated through even the softest of whispers.

Her services were so valuable that the quiet words “It would make me so happy if my Claire could be included” were enough to propel her reluctant daughter right to the top of a party roster. Easing Claire into a world where she might find a suitable husband had become Violet's raison d’être. Little did she understand that her mission had also become Claire's bête noire.

Claire peered over her book. The slim, wholesome, pale-skinned seventeen-year-old was conspicuously out of place among these girls, some of them looking a good ten years older than they actually were with their sophisticated, tony images. She preferred bridge to boyfriend bingo, and was an avid reader as well as an ardent stamp collector. She was going to try for a college scholarship but she knew the Aunties were pushing her down a more heavily traveled road. So the serious attitude that had begun to cover her face, masking her perfectly arranged features, was rendering her solemn instead of plainly beautiful.