The Chameleon Read Free Page B

Miss Slim announced.
    “Thank heavens—it's
not
a gallstone,” Miss Wren fanned Violet with her
Collier's.
    “Claire Organ!” Slim shouted out the first French name she could think of, thus christening Violet's daughter amidst the pearl necklaces, silk lingerie, high-fashion shoes, and women's fancy custom apparel directly beneath Louis Comfort Tiffany's grand mosaic dome.
    “Boil some water!” A customer scurried through the aisles on rubber soles.
    “Marshall Field's has just given birth to a baby girl!”
    Miss Slim pulled on a long pair of white opera gloves from the fake display arms on the counter and helped pull the child into the commotion on Field's fifth floor. One sales clerk rushed over with a monogrammed motor blanket while Miss Wren seized the scissors used for wrapping gifts.
    “I'll cut the cord!” Miss Slim called out as gaily as if she were cutting a holiday ribbon.
    Miss Wren took it upon herself to scurry down the back stairs to Four, where she purloined a bassinet, two swaddling blankets, and, just for good measure, a silver rattle. After all, it wasn't every day a Christmas baby was born at Marshall Field's Department Store. As soon as she turned the corner on her return sprint, she saw Miss Slim kneeling on the floor, proudly holding the loveliest, tiniest babe in her bloodied evening gloves and showing her to an astonished Violet Organ.
    “Oh joy!” Mrs. Winterbotham clasped her hands together and waddled closer for a better look, the nodding minks wrapped around her neck as a stole still in possession of their eyes and noses. “Imagine being born in this great store and having all of these wonderful layette doodads and imported baby things at one's fingertips.”
    The nurse and doctor from First Aid on Seven bundled Violet and baby off the floor and onto a stretcher, carrying the new mother away as if she had the bubonic plague. Mrs. Winterbotham hurried off to telephone her husband, who was the editor of the
Tribune,
to tell him of the wonderful miracle that had happened on the fifth floor of Field's.
    “Henry,” his wife puffed into the phone, her voice carrying the news as rapidly as one of her husband's wire services. “A mother and child born practically in the manger display. Why Henry, right in sight of the stuffed barnyard animals and women wearing jewels and garments as splendid as the Three Kings, this child was born! And to a working girl! Henry, a simple working woman whose husband is missing. Well, I don't know. In Egypt I think. Oh Henry, what if it's the Holy Land? Henry, it's a story!” Indeed. It was the
Tribune's
front-page Christmas Eve story, Field's being the
Tribune's
biggest advertiser and all.
    In her febrile state, it was Violet Organ's true belief that fate revealed her daughter's destiny that December day. The new mother somehow felt it was auspicious of great things to come that her dimpled daughter was born in the midst of luxury, even if it was only a warehouse of other people's luxuries. After all, it wasn't as if Claire had been born on the eighth floor among the toasters and vacuum cleaners.
    It was the article in the
Tribune
that saved Violet from being fired on the eve of Christmas 1923, when the not easily amused store manager, Mr. Trost, treated Violet to her own private inquisition in the bleak maternity ward of Cook County Hospital.
    “Where is the father?” he demanded to know.
    “Wandering the desert.”
    “Missing in action.”
    “Dead.” Miss Violet, Miss Slim, and Miss Wren answered in unison.
    To the next question they silently established an order of protocol.
    “Oh she's married, all right. They had a church wedding eighteen months ago. I was there.” Slim was the authority on romance.
    “Legally married.” Wren was practical as she handed over the marriage certificate.
    “It's just that he's excavating King Tut's tomb,” Violet apologized.
    “He doesn't know about the baby,” Miss Slim added helpfully. She didn't know, so