The LeBaron Secret

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Finally, she says, “I have something for you.” She leans over the edge of the bed and reaches for her purse, which lies near the heap of her clothes beside the bed. From an inside pocket, she fishes out the folded check and hands it to him, without comment.

  Lying on his back with his cigarette clenched between his teeth, he examines it farsightedly, at arm’s length, turning it this way and that until he can catch it in the light that remains. He whistles softly and says, “Oh, Mama!” Then he leaps to his feet, standing on the mattress, and cries, “Oh, Sugar Mama! You are my Sugar Mama! You are this boy’s Sugar Mama, yes indeed!”

  Melissa rolls off the bed, picks up her lace-trimmed bikini panties, and steps into them. She reaches for her bra. “I’m not your Sugar Mama!” she says angrily. “I’m not anything to you at all. Don’t think I’m giving you that check for letting you go to bed with me! I was going to give it to you anyway. That check was written before I left my house. That check is to compensate you for your engagement here, and nothing more. I’m giving it to you because I thought your group deserved it, and because I felt responsible. I don’t have to pay men for making love to me!”

  But he has already leaped off the bed and is in the bathroom now, urinating noisily into the bowl beyond the open door, and probably can’t even hear her.

  She snatches up her blouse and skirt. “Listen to me!” she cries. “Don’t call me your Sugar Mama! I’m paying you for a concert date, not for your lousy lovemaking! And don’t think you can come back to me for any more. I don’t pay for sex, and I don’t ask for sex! So don’t think you can come back to me and offer more sex, and get more money, or think because I’ve let you have sex with me you can come back and blackmail me! I didn’t ask for sex with you! And your sex stinks—do you hear that? Your sex stinks, and I hate you! Do you hear that? Stinks!” The only reply is the sound of the toilet flushing.

  “Stinks! You’re a rotten lover!”

  Of course this is all a far, far cry from the proposition she had thought of offering him, on her way over here in the taxi. And the only thing she is sure of now is that she will probably never see or hear from him again.

  In the house at 2040 Washington Street, Assaria LeBaron has decided that she is finished with Archie McPherson. He has betrayed her confidence, and so that will be the end of him. He has served whatever usefulness he had, and now he will be dispensed with. Probably, knowing that she and Archie have been in cahoots, Gabe will fire him anyway, and he will move on to some other part of the country, out of her life, good riddance. And yet—and yet—there is one more way in which he might prove useful, and perhaps that one avenue should be explored. But she will think about that later. Right now, there is something else to occupy her mind. Her granddaughter Kimmie has dropped by for tea. They are moving through the long picture gallery now, side by side, toward the drawing room where Thomas has set out the tea service, a tray of little sandwiches, and the fixings for Sari’s martini, which she usually prefers to tea.

  “Great-Grandpa’s wine barrel,” Kimberly LeBaron says, as they approach it.

  “Your great-great-grandpa,” Sari corrects. “In a family, it’s important to keep the generations straight. Your great-grandpa was Julius. Mario was his father, so that’s two greats to you. And look,” she says suddenly, “it’s weeping. See those tiny beads of moisture collecting between the staves? It happens in certain kinds of weather. And it means that something, some change, is going on inside. Wine, you see, never dies. It goes on growing, changing, for centuries—forever, if you let it. Someday I want to take you out to the vineyards, and give you a little wine history lesson. Count Haraszthy—everything. Would you like that?” Sari has always had a special place in her heart for this exquisite child.

  What is it about little girls in their early teens that Assaria LeBaron has always found so beguiling? Papa LeBaron must have sensed it, too, wanting the children all to have their portraits painted at that age. With Kimmie, it is that little bunched business around her cheeks and eyes and chin—traces of baby fat that she still retains—a reminder that the face has not quite finished forming itself, has not quite made up its mind what it is going to be. It gives Kimmie a questioning, questing look—a look of puzzled, but pleasant, anticipation. The nose has not yet made up its mind, either, but already there is a hint of nostrils that will one day flare imperiously when the face takes command of a situation, and issues a polite but firm order. In Kimmie, sitting there in her fresh white blouse and neatly pressed green and white kiltie skirt with her carefully cut brown bangs across her forehead, it is possible for Sari to see herself at that age. Yes, Kimmie is destined to be a beauty, and Sari is pleased to see that Kimmie has inherited her own good looks. This may sound like vanity on Sari’s part. So what? It is.

  “Count Haraszthy?”

  “Count Agoston Haraszthy—a Hungarian nobleman who came out to California with the forty-niners. He started everything. He brought with him a hundred thousand vines from Europe—hundreds of varieties—and planted them here. He had the vision. Later, he went to Nicaragua and tried the same thing, and got eaten by crocodiles for his trouble.”

  “Tell me the story, Grandma.”

  “Tell me a story,” Sari says. “Do you remember when you were a little girl, and you’d ask me to tell you a story? And I’d say I had two stories, one about a good little girl, and one about a bad little girl, and which did you want to hear?”

  “I don’t remember that, Grandma.”

  “You always wanted to hear about the bad little girl, of course!” Or was that Melissa?

  “I don’t remember that, Grandma.”

  “Well, it could have been … someone else.” Sari wheels her chair to the tea table. “Now, sit right there where I can see you, Lambchop,” she says. “And I know how you like your tea. One lump with a slice of lemon. Help yourself to sandwiches.”

  “Grandma,” Kimmie says. “Why are you and Daddy mad at each other?”

  “Why, whatever gave you that idea, Kimmie?” Sari asks.

  “I happened to hear him and Mummy talking about you the other day. And he called you a—well, it wasn’t a very nice word.”

  “Well,” Sari says easily, “your father and I are having a little business disagreement right now, that’s all it is. It’s nothing personal. I love your father very much, you know that. Business disagreements have nothing to do with family disagreements.” Or do they? How can they not when the family is the business, and the business is the family? “And now,” she says brightly, “would you like me to tell you all about Count Haraszthy? He was a very colorful figure.”

  Stirring the tea in her teacup, pressing the lemon slice against the side of the cup with the back of her spoon, Kimmie looks thoughtful. “Maybe some other time,” she says. And then, “Tell me about Great-Grandpa.”

  “Great-great, you mean?”

  “No, just plain great. Great-Grandpa and Great-Grandma, who are buried under the walnut trees out in Sonoma. Why were they buried there, and not in Saint Francis Cemetery, along with the rest of the family? You’ve always promised that someday you’d tell me that story, Grandma.”

  Sari studies her granddaughter’s face. How old is Kimmie now? Fifteen. Old enough to hear it, probably. “Now, that was a very sad story,” she begins.

  “Tell it to me, Grandma!”

  But where to begin? With Mama LeBaron interrupting the solemn raptness of the mass? Misereatur tui omnipotens, Deus et dismissis peccatis tuis.… Misereatur vestri omnipotens Deus et dismissis peccatis vestris, perducat vos ad vitam aeternam. Induligentiam, absolutionem, et remissionem … And Constance LeBaron rising drunkenly from her pew, and starting toward the altar, shouting, “Indulgence … absolution … is there any eternal life for me?” And the hands reaching out, trying to persuade the drunken woman to return to her seat, stop trying to disrupt—but no, Sari decides, she will not begin there. She will leave that part out. De mortuis. Even though that was the day it happened.
/>   “Well, to understand what happened,” she begins, “you have to put things in the context of the times. There were two very terrible periods in the history of this country, and one followed right on the heels of the other. This was long before you were born, but you may have read about them in your history books at school. The first was Prohibition, and the second was the Great Depression. Have you read about those two periods?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “The first, Prohibition, was the ruination of the wine makers. Most growers plowed their vineyards under and tried to turn them over to row crops—tomatoes, beans, almonds, walnuts, and apricots. But there is something about these valleys of ours—Sonoma, Napa, parts of the San Joaquin—a combination of soil and climate, the warm days, the cool, dry nights, that makes it seem as though God had designed them just for the growing of wine grapes, and nothing more. The new crops did poorly, nothing but wine grapes wanted to take to the soil.

  “Meanwhile, the artisans—the coopers who made our barrels, the tasters, the blenders—went off into other trades and soon forgot their art. Most of our coopers were Italians, and many of them went back to Italy. In the space of little more than a decade, wine making became a lost art. And, meanwhile, your great-grandpa, Julius LeBaron—imprudently, as it turned out—continued to live very high off the hog. In the big house on Nob Hill—that Standard station on California Street is where his house was—and the servants, and the trips to Hawaii every winter on the Lurline. He was living on his investments, he said. And then the stock-market crash came in twenty-nine, and all the investments just … disappeared. Vanished. Gone with the wind. And so—”

  “And then? Then what?”

  “He was a ruined man. One day in nineteen-thirty, one Sunday after church, he wrote a letter outlining how he and his wife wished to be buried. And then he took her by the hand and led her out into the Sonoma vineyard, or what had once been the Sonoma vineyard. They knelt, all alone, side by side among the dead grapevines, and said a little prayer, asking the Almighty for forgiveness for what they were about to do. Then he placed the barrel of his pistol—all vineyard owners carried guns, it was part of the uniform—against his wife’s temple, and fired, and then he put the gun to his own temple, and fired again. They found them there a few hours later.”

  Kimberly is silent for a moment. Then she says, “Then what did you do, Grandma?”

  “Me? Do? Your grandfather was utterly devastated. His parents’ deaths seemed like the end of the world to him. Immediately we discovered the huge debts. This house—this house he gave us as a wedding present—wasn’t even paid for. But I said to my husband, ‘Look—we still have the land. The land in Sonoma and Napa and so on.’ I said, ‘We have the land, and Prohibition’s going to end. Let’s go out there and start replanting vines. In five years, we’ll have a harvest!’ And so that’s what we did, he and I, and his sister Joanna working beside us. All day long on our hands and knees, planting vines, and then at the end of the first year, chip-budding them. You should have seen my hands, thick with calluses, covered with cuts from the grafting knives. I used to think I would never see my fingernails clean again, the dirt was down so deep underneath them. We worked right along with the field hands—the Chinks, and the wetbacks, and the Okies from the Dust Bowl. I know those aren’t nice names to call them, but that’s what they were called in those days. We were field hands ourselves. And I remember standing out there in the vineyard with the Chinks and the wetbacks and the Okies from the Dust Bowl, shouting, beating gongs, trying to frighten away the larks—thousands of insatiable birds—that were about to devastate our first harvest. And did devastate it. But we were young then, and full of piss and vinegar, and we decided not to be discouraged. So we went right on, and when the next year’s harvest succeeded, we were glad we did. And now, here we are. In this state of California, where agriculture is the number-one industry, ours is the third-largest segment of it—an eight-billion-dollar-a-year business, I read the other day in the Wall Street Journal.”

  Once more Kimberly’s face is thoughtful. Finally, she says, “That’s a wonderful story, Grandma. But there’s only one part that I don’t understand.”

  “What’s that, Lambchop?”

  “If Great-Grandpa and Great-Grandma were all alone in the vineyard that day they shot each other, how does anyone know that that’s the way it happened—that he shot her first, and that they knelt and said a little prayer?”

  “Aha!” Sari cries, sitting forward in her chair. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question! Exactly! Who knows how it happened? Maybe she shot him first! But do you know that you’re the first person in three generations to have the wit or guts to ask that simple question? You’re growing up, Kimmie! You’re growing up when you begin to question the tales your elders tell you! Good girl! All I can say is that’s the tale they like to tell, but why should you believe a word of it? But then that’s the story of this whole family, isn’t it? Tall tales … fictions … lies … deceptions.” And why, all at once, is Sari weeping—weeping like the old wine barrel in the picture gallery? “Lies … deceptions … cheats!” She fumbles at the purse in her lap, extracts a handkerchief, and dabs at her streaming eyes.

  “What’s the matter, Grandma?”

  “I don’t know. Why am I crying? The story of this family—deceptions and tall tales. Oh, what’s happening to me? What’s happening to this family, Kimmie? I just don’t know!”

  “Please don’t cry, Grandma. I love you, Grandma!”

  Her weeping will not stop. “I loved your grandfather so,” she sobs. “Why did he have to do this to me?”

  Six

  A visit from Kimmie inevitably makes Sari remember her own school days. By comparison, she thinks, Kimmie has had it very easy.

  To begin with, though Mrs. Bonkowski had succeeded in teaching her a number of English words during that first summer in Terre Haute, Sari had not learned to read the language at all. Therefore, though she was theoretically old enough to enter the third grade, she had been placed in a kindergarten class. She can remember sitting, painfully, in one of those undersize chairs, her knees crunched uncomfortably under a tiny desk in a roomful of five-year-olds, feeling awkward, foreign, and stupid while the five-year-olds recited the alphabet and spelled out simple words whose letters made no sense to her at all. Her teacher, a Miss Hazeltine, seemed a very rough and cross old lady, and when it came to Sari’s turn to recite, and Sari could not, she simply passed her by and went impatiently on to the next child. At eleven o’clock each morning, each member of Miss Hazeltine’s class was required to take a nap for half an hour. Small rugs were brought out and unrolled on the floor in rows, and each child curled up on his or her assigned rug for the nap period. But Sari was too old for these morning naps, and her rug was too small for any degree of comfort, and for her restless tossings and turnings and inability to sleep, she was scolded by Miss Hazeltine for trying to disrupt the class. “I see you’re determined to be nothing but a troublemaker,” Miss Hazeltine said to her. Meanwhile, when Sari tried to make friends with boys and girls closer to her own age in the classes above her, they treated her as though she were some sort of freak. Soon they had a jeering name for her—“Polack-Pants.” When she tried to explain to them that she was Russian and not Polish and that there was an important difference, they just laughed at her and walked away. Of course, she was too ashamed to tell Gabe Pollack or Mrs. Bonkowski about any of this, and so when either of them asked her, “How was school today?” she would try to smile, and lie, and say, “Just fine!”

  But secretly she had become convinced that she would never learn to read English. She had heard that American law required that every American boy or girl must go to school until age sixteen. The yawning, horrible eternity of eight long years of kindergarten—at her too-small desk and on her too-small nap rug—loomed miserably ahead of her, and Miss Hazeltine did nothing to dispel the accuracy of this vision.

  Then—it must have been nearly half
way through that kindergarten year—a third-grade teacher, Miss Sharp, took notice of her. Miss Sharp, despite her name, was not sharp at all. She was round and smooth and young and pretty, with a face and body that seemed to contain no corners or angles at all. Everything about her was an unbroken series of curves and gentle ellipses. Miss Sharp began keeping Sari after school to coach her with her reading, patiently and calmly. Sari remembers particularly one of Miss Sharp’s teaching techniques. She would get Sari to memorize the words of songs. She remembers:

  Come to the church in the wildwood,