Page 37
Story: The Briar Club
“MissHallett, is it?”
The man of the house glanced up with a smile as the housekeeper ushered Claire into the drawing room. (Once a house passed thirty thousand dollars and five thousand square feet, a den turned into a drawing room . Claire’s study of housing ads had taught her that much.) “You’ll be looking after my little man today while I take the missus out to hear the military bands and the speeches on the Mall?”
“Yes, sir.”
Only her second or third time laying eyes on him, but he’d remembered her name. She had no trouble recollecting his, but that was to be expected—you didn’t forget a name like Barrett Sutherland, Yale law, former army lieutenant, Bronze Star, fourth generation of his family to serve in Washington. Gearing up for his first run at the House of Representatives, or so the rumor went, so he’d be prepared to take over his father’s seat in the Senate someday. He wouldn’t be the handsomest man in Congress—that would be the junior senator from Massachusetts; Claire had seen the engagement photos in LIFE of John F. Kennedy and his brunette fiancée—but Mr.Sutherland was handsome in that tall, tanned, toothy way that silver-spoon boys so often seemed to be. Claire couldn’t help but think of them as boys , even when they were older than she was.
“Miss Hallett!”
Barrett Junior ran into the room: crisp shorts and buttoned shirt and a patriotic red-white-and-blue cockade just like his father’s. “C’n we go to the park?”
“Sure, kid.”
Claire wanted to ruffle his hair, which had been painstakingly combed into place. He was a nice boy, at least right now. Later he’d probably turn out just like his father, and then he’d have a loud voice and crew for Yale and talk about the Negro problem over martinis with other men just like him, so she might as well enjoy the kid while the nice stage lasted.
“Darling, I’m so sorry—”
Mrs.Sutherland rushed into the drawing room in an exquisite blue Balmain dress and pearls. “It’s come a day early, simply the worst timing. My time of the month—”
She broke off with a blush, seeing Claire in the opposite doorway. “I’m sorry, MissHallett, I didn’t see you there.”
Claire gave a polite people-like-you-never-see-people-like-me-anyway smile. Mr.Sutherland frowned. “My father will be expecting us both at his speech.”
Mrs.Sutherland lowered her voice. “You know Dr.Rock says I should lie down as much as possible during my time of the month. To optimize our chances... Why don’t you take Bear instead?”
She always called her son Bear rather than Barrett or Junior . “Father and son on Independence Day; I can’t think of a more perfect picture at your father’s speech.”
“Dad, pleeeeeeease ?”
The crease between Mr.Sutherland’s eyebrows hovered a moment, then smoothed away. “Okay, champ. Let’s go see your grandpa. Someday you’ll be watching your old man give the Independence Day speech, and someday even further down the road it’ll be you...”
A flurry, then: Mrs. Sutherland getting jackets and hats for her menfolk, fluttering about how she’d just dismissed the housekeeper for the day, Mr. Sutherland shoving a few bills at Claire (“A little extra for your trouble, sorry you came out here to babysit for nothing—”
He was always generous, she’d say that for him). Claire retrieved her pocketbook, fussed toward the door, yelped something about forgetting to leave the hat she’d picked up at Hecht’s for the missus, doubled back to the drawing room... Where she and Mrs. Sutherland stood, waiting for the sound of Mr. Sutherland’s Hudson Hornet to disappear from earshot.
“Did your time of the month really come a day early?”
Claire asked.
A big, slow grin. “No.”
Claire crooked a finger. “Come here, Sid.”
Sydney Sutherland came crashing into her arms, bending that long, long neck down like a swan so their lips could meet. That neck had been the first thing to fascinate Claire, even before the endless jet-black lashes and soft curving mouth. “You have a neck like a giraffe ,”
she’d said the first time they kissed, having to go to her tiptoes as if she were embracing a tall man. “A neck like a giraffe, and your legs come up to my shoulders—are you even real?”
Sydney Zuill of Bermuda and London, now Sydney Sutherland of Washington, D.C., had laughed that particular laugh she never let her husband, her father-in-law, or their constituents hear. “I’m very real, MissHallett.”
She was laughing that laugh now, soft and remarkably wicked, the laugh that did things to Claire’s innards. “I was hoping on Thursday that you’d pick up my hint about bringing the hat today—”
“Subtle as a train wreck, Sid.”
Working her fingers down the row of buttons on that blue Balmain dress. “You shouldn’t have begged off Fourth of July. Too important to him—”
“If I had to stand around in the hot sun all day listening to marching bands and patriotic speeches and firecrackers rather than lying in lovely cool sheets with you, I was going to go barking mad.”
Sydney dragged her lips away from Claire’s, looking disheveled and kiss-flushed and perfect. “Come upstairs. My husband won’t be home with Bear until after dark.”
Who seduced who? Looking back, Claire wasn’t sure. Always a delicate dance, looking at a woman and wondering if her eyes were willing to take a sideways wander from the male of the species. Claire had never had any trouble approaching a man she wanted; she threw out her chest and let her eyes go shiny the way they did for the camera when she climbed on a papier-maché warhead, and that was usually enough. Women, though... You could drive yourself mad, wondering Did she hold my eyes a moment too long just now? Did she linger, touching my hand just now? What did she mean just now? Knowing that if you got it wrong, if you made your move on the wrong woman, you’d retreat with your cheeks slapped and a cry of PERVERT! ringing in your ears, praying to God she wouldn’t call the cops.
“I had my eye on you from the beginning,”
Sydney claimed. “The first time I saw you in the doorway of Briarwood House when I dropped Fliss off from church—you had the coolest expression, but your hair was coming out of its pins, and your blouse was slipping a button, and it was like you were bursting out all over. All that hair, all that strawberry skin, you try to contain it but you can’t. Right from the beginning, I wanted a taste . ”
“But I’m the one who kissed you first,”
Claire protested. “The third week I was running your errands, when I came by to drop off the gloves you’d had mended, and you fell off your shoe.”
A momentary insanity; she’d been telling herself sternly that she was not to make even the smallest overture to this overelongated, overprivileged Georgetown political wife, but everything had come undone in a single instant: Sydney’s slender ankle rocking in her tall patent heel, sending her long body crashing against Claire’s; her arm coming round Claire’s shoulder for balance; her red-lipsticked mouth suddenly within reach... Claire hadn’t thought for a moment; she just dove for that mouth and found it opening under her own like a flower.
“The old fall-out-of-your-heel trick,”
Sydney said, nodding sagely. “Works every time.”
“You played me?”
Claire’s outrage was only half faked. Who conned a con as good as she was? And she knew she was good.
“Listen, Strawberry, I walked fashion shows in London for three years in four-inch pumps when I was working as a model. You think I’d ever fall off a heel unless I meant to?”
And maybe that was when Claire started getting a bit soppy about Sydney Sutherland, and not just lusting for her long legs and blooming skin. Because this overelongated, overprivileged Georgetown political wife was a con, too, in her way.
“What’s happening at Briarwood House?”
An hour of blissful rolling about on the peach satin duvet of Sydney’s rosy-walled bedroom, and now Sydney stretched those endless legs out so she could twine her ice-cold feet with Claire’s, making a little go-on motion. “Tell me everything. Is Mrs.Nilsson still refusing to send Pete back to school? Did Bea get that job scouting for the Senators?”
“Why are you so interested in my housemates?”
Claire demanded, propping herself up on one elbow in the nest of sheets. “They’re just women , completely ordinary.”
“I used to share a flat with three other models in London,”
Sydney said. “I miss those days—passing gin flasks around when someone had something to celebrate, arguing about who borrowed whose mink stole for a big date. Ever since I married it’s nothing but men: my husband and my father-in-law and all the toadies around them. Sad little kings of sad little mountains... Even Bear, nothing but little boys running all over the house when he has friends over. Most of the political wives are older than me, and the ones who aren’t, I don’t seem to have anything in common with.”
A shrug. “Anyhow, I like your Briarwood House crew.”
“You shouldn’t have come over on Decoration Day. A whole afternoon of not being able to exchange a look—how on earth was that worth it?”
Claire did not believe in across-the-room burning glances. Frankly, that whole picnic—watching Sydney slurp up long strands of spaghetti, watching her run clumsily after a sandlot baseball in Grace’s borrowed shorts—had been torture.
“Fliss invited me after church the previous week. Besides”—Sydney traced the back of Claire’s hand with one perfect, polished nail—“I wanted to see you. Not to mention all your Briar Club friends.”
“Just how many of my housemates do you know by now?”
Claire refused to call this little pinching feeling jealousy, because that would be ridiculous.
“Reka, first... She came to the house once or twice over some old matter with my father-in-law. Don’t ask; it’s her business. And because of her I met Fliss, and once I knew Fliss was a nurse she helped me with—”
A mute gesture toward her belly. “I’ll never cease owing her for that.”
“Barrett still doesn’t suspect?”
Another of the quiet little cons Claire admired Sydney for: the efficient subterfuge by which she was shutting her body off to her husband’s plan for a flotilla of little Sutherlands.
“Well, he’s starting to think Dr.Rock is a quack, considering how I’ve been back and forth to Boston for this fertility study , and no results yet.”
Sydney’s beautiful face went still for a moment. “At some point he’ll insist I go see someone else, but I’m hoping I can string it out another year.”
Claire ran her hand down the supple, endless length of Sydney’s naked back. “Well, if you want Briarwood House gossip, I can tell you Lina’s cakes really have improved,”
she said, tone deliberately light. “We all praise her extravagantly to encourage the progress. And Reka’s hopping back and forth between here and New York almost every other week now, seeing this art show and that art show—she came into some money, though she’s cagey about how. And Bea did get that job scouting for the Senators, and about half the men in the office are trying to haze her into leaving, which shows they don’t know Bea. Nora gets a huge bunch of flowers every week with a card that just says ‘X’ and she gives them away or dumps them—”
“No! Who’s sending them to her?”
“No idea. She’s MissNational Archives, all about the job. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her doll up for a date. Pete made his Swedish meatballs again for the last Briar Club meeting...”
Sydney groaned. “Don’t say meatballs to me. I haven’t eaten a gram of meat in two weeks. I have to whittle three pounds off; it’s all black coffee and chopped salads—”
“You do not need to lose three pounds!”
“Barrett says I do,”
Sydney said simply.
“Barrett can go screw himself,”
Claire snapped, but Sydney just gave her a look and she subsided. It was the silent place between them: Barrett Landry Sutherland, the small pinching bruises Claire sometimes saw on Sydney’s satin skin, the fact that she could charge exquisite clothes and expensive lunches all over town but never had more than a fifty-cent piece on her for cash. Why did you marry him? Claire had been foolish enough to ask once, maybe their second or third time together, and Sydney had given her a remarkably cynical look.
Because he was the best I could get, and I was raised to be married , Claire. Because he was very charming and very kind, and he said he’d take me away from London, which was so gray and horrible and bombed out. Because he never gave me a single smack until we’d been married six months, and by then he held all the cards.
What Claire did not ask—then or now—was What will you do? Because it was none of her business; because this thing they had only existed here, two bodies twined together on a peach satin duvet, and that was how she wanted it to stay.
Sydney was changing the subject now, asking something about Senator Smith. “—as much of a firebrand as I’ve heard?”
“Firebrand?”
Claire thought of the woman she worked for, her quick eyes and steady smile. “She’s not a firebrand. She’s just another gray-haired Republican senator.”
“I’m fond of her if only because of the headaches she gives my husband’s father.”
Sydney laughed, rolling onto one side. “You should have heard him rage when she gave her speech against McCarthy. Said she was a disgrace to the Republican Party, and he’d see she was run out of Washington tarred and feathered. He’s very much in McCarthy’s pocket, my father-in-law. Thinks he’s got the right idea about the Commies.”
Claire shrugged. She didn’t care much about Commies—who actually knew any Reds, anyway? This was Washington, not Moscow; she didn’t think for a moment that there were Marxists hiding under every rock no matter how many lists some crackpot from Wisconsin waved around. If anything about McCarthy alarmed Claire, it was the comments about lavender lads in the State Department , and sexual perverts infiltrating the government . Because everyone knew sexual perverts didn’t mean the florid family men who pinched their secretaries on the rump every day, oh no. It meant the ones like Claire and Sydney. Though thank god women had it easier hiding that kind of thing than men did. The year Claire started working for Senator Smith, everyone had been gossiping about how ninety-one queers had been forced to resign from the State Department—only two of those had been women. Claire felt badly for the eighty-nine men who had found themselves in those crosshairs, she truly did, but she wasn’t going to complain that lavender lasses had an easier time hiding than lavender lads. Women so rarely had anything easier than men, she’d take it wherever she found it.
“My father-in-law thinks McCarthy has the right idea about the queers too,”
Sydney said as if reading her mind, leaning down to kiss Claire’s freckled shoulder. “He says any man against Tail Gunner Joe is either a Communist or a cocksucker. Gets all red in the face and starts thumping the table. These deviants pose a danger to our nation’s safety every bit as lethal as the Reds —”
“I just do not understand that logic,”
Claire objected.
“Darling, you think McCarthy types are all that strong on logic?”
“No, I mean it. Exactly how is someone like me a threat to the nation’s safety? I don’t want to overthrow Congress. I want to buy a house and be able to eat breakfast in bed every morning in peace.”
“Ah, but homosexuals on Capitol Hill are more subject to blackmail and thus are targets for Russian moles,”
Sydney recited in a pompous bass. “All a Kremlin operative has to do is find out who the queers are and threaten to expose them, and they’ll just roll over and start selling state secrets.”
“Oh, seriously ...”
“Serious as a heart attack. Hopefully my father-in-law will thump and roar his way into one someday soon.”
Claire raised her eyebrows. “You’re that eager to be rid of him?”
“Can’t stand the old bastard,”
Sydney said candidly. “Forever telling me to leave off the suntan oil, darlin’, so you don’t get any darker than you already are . He has no idea I sit there at his Sunday dinner table pushing overcooked peas around my plate and daydreaming what I’ll wear to his funeral.”
Her voice was brittle under its flippancy, and Claire looked for another topic. “ Sydney ,”
she mused, plaiting her fingers through her lover’s black hair. “I don’t think I ever asked how you got a name like that, Bermuda Girl. Was your father from Australia?”
“No, London. Sydney Barclay-Jones, Esquire, a real Eton-and-Oxford type, came to Hamilton to drink gin and tonics and write his memoirs... Instead he found my mother. She named me Sydney after him—I was supposed to be a boy, Sydney Barclay-JonesII. They were both disappointed, but if he didn’t give me his surname at least he paid for me to go to school in England.”
“Is that why you sound like Princess Margaret Rose?”
“Naturally, darling,”
Sydney drawled. “My mum used to cane me across the knuckles if I let my vowels slip. She always said the voice was what would get me places, even more than my legs. A proper English voice, an educated voice, and she was right.”
Making a face. “I used to be able to switch—be the proper English miss at school, come home and slip back into my old vowels and be an island girl again. I can’t do it anymore. Mum would be proud.”
Claire twined a loop of black hair around her fingers. “Do you see her often?”
“Once a year, when Barrett takes us to the beach house outside Hamilton.”
“You have a beach house in Bermuda?”
Claire flopped on her back with a groan. “Of course you do.”
“It’s pale green and white; looks like a wedding cake sitting on the edge of the water. You’ve never seen water that blue in your life.”
Sydney’s face scrunched. “I wish I could show you... The houses are all different colors there like rainbow sherbet, lemon yellow and mint green and coral pink, but all the roofs are blinding white and stepped like stairs. And the children learn to swim there before they learn to walk, and everyone’s in and out of the ocean all summer to cool off...”
She sighed. “Barrett lets us have two weeks there every summer, at least. I always find a way to sneak off and meet my mother for coffee.”
“Why do you have to sneak to see your own mother?”
“She never thought it wise to meet Barrett,”
Sydney said matter-of-factly. “She’s darker than me... she said it would hurt my chances.”
Claire’s hand twined back into that black hair. “Sid...”
Table of Contents
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