The LeBaron Secret Page 11

  “And it wasn’t that much of an emergency. And we handled it.”

  “Yuk!”

  “Wonder whatever happened to old Fairy Ferris …”

  “Probably in prison for child molestation.”

  “No. Justice being what it is, that shithead is probably the president of the richest bank in Texas!”

  Laughing, making a joke of it, exchanging soft punches, back and forth at each other’s shoulders. At least it had been a shared experience.

  But that had been before, when they were still friends.

  “You are talking about driving a wedge between the members of my family.”

  “The wedge is already driven. Assaria is the wedge.”

  “My daddy calls me his little Buttercup.”

  Was that all it was?

  Buttercup …

  And stripping the blossom of its petals, one by one. She loves me, she loves me not …

  In her bedroom on the third floor of the house on Washington Street, Assaria LeBaron is also wide awake, though it is past eleven. The curtains have been drawn against the night, but both the bedside lamps are lighted, and Sari, in a marabou bed jacket, is sitting straight up in the center of the oversize bed, propped by many pillows of assorted sizes. All around her, on the satin bedspread, are scattered many objects—scraps of mail, newspaper clippings, a ledger book spread open, face down, pencils, ballpoint pens, an address and telephone book marked “Carnet d’Adresses,” a copy of the Social Register, many sheets of lined notepaper covered with scribbled notes, sheets of yellow legal foolscap, covered with figures, and sheets of graph paper on which she has been making pie charts. Other pieces of paper appear to be legal documents of one form or another—certificates with scrolly headings, contracts stapled between heavy covers—and at the edge of all this paperwork lie two sleeping Yorkshire terriers who live on this floor, except when Thomas walks them. The clutter on the bed also seems to consist of much, much more. On one of the bedside tables sit a glass of hot milk, untouched, and a banana, something Thomas brings her every night before retiring. With a pencil in one hand and another tucked behind her ear, Sari sits figuring and figuring, working on the pie charts.

  Control, she thinks. I try to control you because you can’t control yourself. This company is the family, and this family is the company, and that is all there is to it. If I am going to control the company, it follows that I must also control the family. I cannot control one thing without controlling the other, and so I control what I control. But, she thinks, I cannot seem to control what the pie charts inevitably reveal, no matter how I construct them. There, damnably, appears the name of Harry Tillinghast on every one of them as a minority, but unwanted, shareholder—the foot in the door with a thin slice of the pie.

  “Why,” she had demanded, “would you have sold some of your shares to that man?”

  “Quite simply, Mother,” he had said, “because I needed the money.”

  “Why? Can’t you get along on your salary and your dividends? Peeper seems to manage!”

  “Peeper,” he had said, “doesn’t have a wife. He doesn’t have two children to educate and clothe and feed and send to the orthodontist. Peeper doesn’t have a big house to keep up, with a pool and a tennis court, and a gardener to pay, and servants. Peeper doesn’t have country-club dues to pay, or riding lessons and tennis lessons to pay for, and I could go on and on. I haven’t even mentioned taxes.”

  “You’re supposed to have a rich wife!”

  “Alix and I keep our financial affairs entirely separate. We agreed to that from the beginning.”

  “You mean Alix doesn’t pay for anything?”

  “Alix believes that it’s a man’s responsibility to take care of his family, the way her father did.”

  “Well, what does she do with her money, for heaven’s sake?”

  “She invests it. Someday, of course, it will go to the twins. Sometimes she’ll buy something for herself—a piece of jewelry, that sort of thing.”

  “Look at Melissa! Melissa manages very nicely on nothing but her dividends. She doesn’t even have your nice fat salary.”

  “Melissa! She has none of the responsibilities that I have. She doesn’t even have any rent to pay—she lives in your house!”

  “Oh, but I charge Melissa rent. Melissa pays me rent.”

  “Yes—I know what Melissa pays in rent. A token hundred dollars a month for an apartment that’s as big as a city block. She pays the lowest rent of anyone in San Francisco, Mother.”

  “But if you needed money, Eric, why didn’t you come to me?”

  “Frankly, I didn’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Male pride, I suppose. Not wanting to ask for money from a woman.”

  “Bull-do! I’m your mother, as well as chief executive officer of this company.”

  “I’ve already given you my answer, Mother.”

  “But why would you sell to him, of all people? A man who hasn’t the slightest interest in—”

  “He approached me, said he was interested in owning some Baronet stock. He made me a good offer, and that was that.”

  “I suppose I’m not entitled to ask what that offer was.”

  “I’ll tell you—it was seven hundred dollars a share.”

  “Seven hundred! You sold him two thousand shares for seven hundred a share? You gave it away, you silly fool! Why, the book value alone is—”

  “I know it’s difficult to put a price on the stock. But we both did some figuring, and seven hundred was a price that seemed fair to us both.”

  “So you let him look at our books.”

  “As a stockholder, he’s entitled—”

  “You let him look at our books before he became a stockholder.”

  “Well—”

  “That stock was left to you by your father for you. Not for Harry Tillinghast. Harry is not family.”

  “He’s Alix’s father.”

  “But he’s not family. Let me ask you just one more question. Why did you do this without consulting me? No—don’t answer that. I know why, and you know why. You did it without consulting me because you knew I’d disapprove. And so you did it the sneaky way. You went behind my back.”

  And so, for what Eric did he must be punished. That is all there is to it. He must be punished, and brought under control. Divide and conquer is her theory, and so she is going to cut up his job and give part of it to Peeper.

  And yet, tonight, she is not at all sure that her strategy is working. Is her plan about to backfire? Does she have a tiger by the tail? Why else would he be going to New York, unless it was to try to get Joanna on his side?

  Nor does her strategy seem to be working well with Melissa—at least on the evidence of tonight’s performance.

  She goes back to the pie charts, and is confronted once again with what she has come to think of as the Lance Problem. The Lance Problem has always existed. She knows the terms of her husband’s will by heart, and she knows Peter intended to be fair: Fifteen percent to be divided, equally, among his living offspring … and fifteen percent “shall be divided, equally, among any and all living issue of my aforesaid sister, Joanna LeBaron.” This was Clause 6 (a) of the Last Will and Testament of Peter Powell LeBaron. But the Lance Problem created an imbalance in share ownership among the four members of that generation, and gave Lance LeBaron what could be the swing vote in any sort of … confrontation.

  Sari is on perfectly good terms with Lance LeBaron, although, in fact, she has not spoken to or laid eyes on him in several years. She is not even sure of his current address, though she could look it up right there, in the Social Register. Princeton, she thinks, is where he is living now. But the fact is that she has never really trusted Lance since that time, years ago, when she had caught him … but that is ancient history, water over the dam. That belongs to the irretrievable past, and has nothing at all to do with what seems to be threatening her now.

  Of course … of course, she thinks
, there is one solution to the Lance Problem. A very difficult and painful one, but it exists. Very painful, very hard, very sensitive, but it could be used. If it came down to the wire, in the end, in the final analysis, would she have the strength to use it and create all that pain, open up all those scars, cut into the scar tissue that has hardened into a thick cicatrix over all these years? She closes her eyes and considers this.

  “Sari, darling, remember that you owe me a rather large debt.”

  “And, Jo, you also owe a rather large debt to me.”

  “Remember, Sari—we made a pact, a pact in blood.”

  Her eyes fly open again. She tries now to make some sort of organization out of the piles of papers on her bedspread, and finally gathers them all together in one thick stack and places the stack down near the foot of the bed below the place where the two little dogs are sleeping, sleeping without a care in the world. Then, with a reach, she switches off both bedside lamps, lies back against the pile of pillows, and closes her eyes again.

  Control, she thinks. Am I finally losing control?

  “You know, Nugget, flying a plane can get kind of boring after a while.” This is George Hessler, her pilot, speaking.

  “Boring?”

  “Flying from point A to point B, and then back to point A again. There’s a certain monotony. Want to take the controls now, Nugget?”

  “Fine.”

  Secretly, he has been giving her flying lessons in the company jet, and he is an expert teacher.

  They are flying north, now, over the Golden Gate, and the hills of San Rafael are in the distance.

  She executes a wide left-hand turn now, out over the ocean and then over the Farallons, and then another left-hand turn. “Boring?” she says. “Well, let’s have some excitement. How wide is the bridge?”

  “I have no idea. Why?”

  “Never mind. Wide enough. Here we go.” And she begins her steep descent, heading for the bridge.

  “Nugget, what the hell are you doing?” he cries. But from the blaze of excitement in his eyes, she knows that he knows what she is going to do, and is not going to stop her.

  “Four-oh-five, we have lost you from our screen, sir,” says the voice from the tower at San Francisco International. “Four-oh-five, please radio your position, sir. Four-oh-five—”

  “Turn that damned thing off!” she shouts.

  Down they go—six hundred feet, five hundred feet.

  On the bridge, there is chaos as afternoon motorists see the big jet heading for them. Some cars pull up along the walkway, while others try to speed on to safety on the other side—all, no doubt, thinking of Air Florida and the crash into the Fourteenth Street Bridge in Washington.

  Three hundred feet, and the wash from the jet engines churns the water beneath them into a furious foam of whitecaps.

  Two hundred feet, and they are under the bridge, through, between the two towers, and out again. “Bull’s-eye!” Sari shouts, and they are both laughing and cheering and weeping and slapping each other on the back so hard that Sari can barely see. But she knows her plane, and begins her ascent.

  “Bull’s-eye! Bull’s-eye, Nugget!”

  On the bridge, there is panic. There is hysteria. Some motorists have stopped and got out of their automobiles on the insane theory that if the plane were going to strike the bridge, it would be better to go down bodily than encased in a car.

  But all their problems are far behind Sari now, who is heading toward Alameda.

  In control.

  The United Airlines red-eye flight from San Francisco to New York is never spoken of in the warmest terms. It leaves San Francisco at midnight, and almost immediately after takeoff, it seems, it is heading into the eastern sunrise for a seven-thirty arrival at La Guardia, and therefore sleep on the red-eye is difficult. The Madison Avenue boys, sitting three abreast in the crowded coach section, should at least have been trying to sleep. But instead, in the wake of their defeated advertising campaign, they have elected to drown their sorrows and to drink theirway across the continental United States. By now they are drunk as lords, and not on Baronet wine, either. A large collection of miniature Scotch, bourbon, and vodka bottles decorates their tray-tables.

  “Solution. Dilution. Pollution.” This is Bob Petrocelli speaking. “Dilute her—her Geritol with cyanide! A cyanide solution! A cyanide dilution!”

  “I like it! I like it!” roars Mike Geraghty, who has been ordering doubles while the others have stuck to singles. “Mix it up and bring it around!”

  Howard Friedman says nothing. For the last fifteen minutes he has been struggling in vain to control a violent case of hiccups.

  “Bull-do!” There are more roars of laughter.

  “Bull-do!” And still more laughter.

  “Hey, who am I?” says Bob Petrocelli all at once. He is the liveliest of the threesome, and is sitting in the aisle seat. “Gotta guess who I am. Ready-set-go, here I go!” He stands up, a little unsteadily, and steps into the aisle. Then he kneels on the carpeted floor of the plane and starts lumbering up the aisle on his knees. “Guess who I am! Guess who I am! Can anybody guess?”

  The others are laughing so hard now that their heads fall down into their open tray-tables, and at least a dozen little empty bottles go scattering and clattering to the floor.

  Up the aisle continues Petrocelli on his knees, crying, “Guess who! Guess who! Bull-do! Bull-do!”

  The pretty young female flight attendant, wearing an expression of great forbearance, moves down the aisle toward him from the forward section of the cabin. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to return to your seat,” she says. “We have begun our initial approach into the New York area, and the fasten-seat-belt sign has been illuminated by the captain.”

  “Bull-do!”

  In the northwest corner of the Sonoma vineyard—where more than four thousand rolling Baronet acres are under cultivation, given over to Semillons, Palominos, and Alicantes—Constance and Julius LeBaron lie sleeping in their quiet graves. They were buried here because, for obvious reasons, their bodies could not be received in consecrated earth. Also, it was Julius LeBaron’s firm wish that he and his wife be buried where they died. Just before their simplest of wooden coffins, which they had also requested, were closed and lowered into the ground in 1930, a ripe walnut was placed in each of their mouths. This is an Old World custom. It struck many people as peculiar, since Julius LeBaron was a man who, all his life, had seemed determined to rid himself of every trace of the Old World, including his name. But this was his request. And the two trees that have grown up, side by side, at the gravesite are regarded by others with varying degrees of ambivalence. Some thought that Julius and Constance’s funerary requirements were merely bizarre. Others considered them downright barbaric.

  Peter Powell LeBaron could never bear to visit the two walnut trees, the sight disturbed him so. To him, the trees seemed accusatory, admonishing. Sari’s twin sons, on the other hand, who never knew their grandparents, think little or nothing about these presences, nor does Melissa. To her, these grandparents exist only in the dimmest of early childhood memories.

  To Sari, the trees symbolize a certain grandeur and high mystery—the cycle of nature, new life springing up out of death. The pair of walnut trees bear their own fruit now, and more trees will grow, and continue to grow, generation after generation. There is even further symbolism here. In the old days, vineyardists often planted walnut trees in alternating rows between the vines. The theory was that, if one crop failed, the planter would always have another crop to harvest, and it was also supposed that the trees would provide needed shade and wind protection for the vines. The old-timers were dead wrong, of course. What happened was that, in a poor year, both crops failed. And in a good year, both crops were no more than mediocre. The practice was abandoned, and the growers went back to the only system they could really rely on, which was luck.

  Sari visits the two walnut trees often. For her, there is a sense of awe and won
der engendered by this little grove, a sense of continuity and peace. The trees are set off and protected by a sturdy grape-stake fence. Inside the gate, set into the ground between the trees, is a plaque announcing that this is where her in-laws lie. The plaque gives Julius’s and Constance’s dates, and the strange, stern imprecation he chose for their epitaph:

  Haste and escape for your lives,

  Look not behind you,

  Awake and fly from the wrath to come,

  Escape to the mountain,

  Lest ye be consumed.

  It is Sari who sees to it that the bronze plaque is always kept brightly polished.

  PART TWO

  Beginnings

  Five

  There is nothing particularly mysterious or strange or secret about Assaria LeBaron’s origins, despite the stories and the gossip you will hear. Her old friends know the real story—or as much of it as she herself remembers. Because, you see, the only fairly uncommon thing about her story is that both her parents died when she was eight years old, and she was an only child, and so grew up with no one to do her remembering for her. How much can you remember, unaided, of what you did and who you were when you were only eight? Very little, I expect. But most of us grow up with parents, or perhaps an older brother or a sister, who will help nudge the earliest memories for us, poke them, stir them up like embers in a fire, reminding us of things we did and said when we were little, who will remember the name of our first-grade teacher, whose face now is only a shadow in our mind. But Sari, orphaned at eight, had none of these, and grew up with strangers. Not in an orphanage, by the way. That’s just another of the stories. In some ways, she was uniquely suited for marriage to Peter Powell LeBaron, for the LeBarons always seemed to be trying to reconstruct their history, rewrite their past. (“A distant cousin of William S. O’Brien, the legendary Silver King,” reported the Chronicle when Constance O’Brien married Julius—baloney, as you already know.) In a sense, it was fitting that when Assaria Latham married their son she had almost no past at all—though they didn’t think so, but that’s getting ahead of the story.