“Wait,” Sari called after the retreating figure. “Wait—I don’t even know your name!”
“I’m Joanna LeBaron,” the girl said.
Assaria LeBaron, for the past several days and with increasing interest, has been watching the recent burst of activity in the trading of shares of the Kern-McKittrick Oil Company on the Big Board, as reported in the Wall Street Journal. Forty-six hundred shares were traded on Monday, fifty-seven hundred shares changed hands on Tuesday, and then, on Wednesday, sales of Kern-McKittrick jumped to ten thousand six hundred shares. During the course of all this, the price of a Kern-McKittrick share has risen from fifty-three dollars to fifty-nine and seven-eighths, an increase of well over ten percent. On Thursday morning, she had called Ed Neuberger, her man at E.F. Hutton and one of the few stockbrokers in town whom she can trust, and asked him about it.
“What’s going on at Kern-McKittrick?” she had demanded.
“Rumors,” he had said. “Nothing but rumors.”
“What sort of rumors?”
“That they’re about to announce a big takeover bid.”
“And who—or should I say whom?—is said to be the target of this bid?”
“So far, there’s nothing but rumors, Sari,” he had said with some hesitation. “The whole street these days is nothing but rumors.”
“Are you leveling with me, Ed? Because I’ll find out if you’re not. Because we’re not talking here about rumors, we’re talking about what smells to me very much like insider activity, which as you know is quite against the law.”
“I’m not going to accuse anyone of breaking the law, Sari.”
“Then why don’t you find out what’s going on?”
“Why don’t you ask Harry Tillinghast?” he had said. “He’s your relative.”
“He is not my relative. Just because his daughter happens to be married to my son does not make him any sort of relative of mine!” And she had slammed down the receiver in his ear.
Then, not adding to her sense of fiscal composure, had come Thursday’s letter from her sister-in-law, whom she had considered her relative and—until now—friend. In perfectly polite, but—to Sari, at least—rather cold and impersonal terms, Joanna had announced her intention to resign the Baronet Vineyards account, “due to a divergence in advertising and marketing philosophies,” and had rather patronizingly offered to help Sari find new agency representation “across the street,” as Joanna put it in her maddening advertising jargon. “So much for pacts made in blood!” Sari had said, crumpling Joanna’s letter into a ball and tossing it into the wastebasket where it belonged. Obviously, Eric’s sudden and unannounced trip to New York had had a great deal to do with this development, and Sari does not like any of it, any of it at all. To reporters from the New York Times and the advertising weeklies who have already begun calling asking for a fuller explanation, Sari has been issuing—through Thomas—a curt “No comment,” until she can think of the properly worded statement to deliver to the press.
To her gratification, however, there have also been calls from other big New York agencies—including Benton & Bowles and Young & Rubicam—soliciting the Baronet account.
Now it is Friday, and Sari is swimming in her big indoor-outdoor pool. The pool enclosure projects from the back of the house, invisible from the street, at the lowest level, a floor below the one that contains Melissa’s apartment. Most people in San Francisco do not know that the pool exists, and are unaware of its most remarkable engineering feature—a glass roof, which operates on electric motors and which can be opened to the out-of-doors in warm weather, or kept snugly closed on chillier days, such as this one. Swimming in her pool is the only sort of regular exercise Sari LeBaron is able to get these days, and she tries to do a daily stint of forty laps. Swimming is a mindless—and mind-calming—occupation, involving no more mental exertion than counting the laps as they go by, and this is one of the reasons why she enjoys it. Also, because it saves struggling in and out of a swimsuit, Sari LeBaron always swims in the nude.
Now her laps are done, and Thomas is waiting by the pool to help her out. A special lift, a sort of hydraulic breeches buoy, has been devised for this purpose, but then Thomas must help her out of this contraption, and into her chair, and cover her wet and naked body with an oversize bath towel, and then, when she has dried herself, help her into a thick terrycloth robe.
“Thank you, Thomas.”
“A registered letter has just arrived, Madam. I thought I’d better bring it to you here.”
“Ah,” she says, and he hands her the letter. She sees immediately that it is written on the letterhead of Baronet Vineyards, Inc., and she tears the letter open. Dear Mother, she reads.
This letter is being addressed to all shareholders of Baronet Vineyards, Inc., and is to advise of a purchase offer we have received from the Board of Directors of Kern-McKittrick Petroleum, Inc., for our company. In its initial proposal, Kern-McKittrick offers 12.5 shares of its common stock for each share of Baronet stock we hold. Because of the generosity of this offer, and my firm support of it, I urge that a meeting of our Board and shareholders be scheduled at the earliest convenient date for all concerned in order to consider this matter.
Sincerely,
Eric
“Aha!” she cries, in a voice that is a mixture of triumph and dismay, and hands the letter to Thomas. “Just as I suspected! War has been declared, Thomas—call out the Marines! Get my lawyers on the phone, and get them over here just as quickly as possible! Call out the National Guard! Get Gabe Pollack—I may need him, too—tell him to get here as fast as he can! Call out the Reserves! Order a freeze on any sales of Baronet stock—can I do that? Ask the lawyers! But wait—first things first! Get Eric for me—no, never mind, I’ll get him myself,” and she seizes the poolside telephone. “They’ll find out who they’re dealing with!” she cries.
“Eric?” she says when she has him on the line. “I am in receipt of your little billet-doux. Let me just say that you, as of this moment, are dismissed as an officer of this company! Do you hear me, Eric? You’re fired! Peeper has taken over full responsibilities for your job—as of this moment! Do you hear me?”
“Yes, and I’m one jump ahead of you, Mother,” he says. “Another letter is on its way to you, in which I offer my resignation from Baronet until this matter is settled.”
“Settled! Resignation? Well, I haven’t received that letter, and you can’t resign because you’re fired! I want you to clean out your desk and be out of that office and out of that building by five o’clock tonight! No—make that three o’clock this afternoon! That gives you two hours. If you’re not out by three o’clock this afternoon, I’ll call Security and have you physically removed! Do you hear me, Eric? Physically removed!”
Marylou Chin is in tears.
As if—as if!—Eric is thinking, as if I didn’t have enough on my mind right now without having to deal with a hysterical woman! He moves about his office, continuing to cram the contents of his desk and files into a large valise.
“What about me?” she sobs. “What’s going to happen to me? I’ve sat here, taking your dictation, typing your letters, watching you do this, thinking to myself all the time, does he even care, even care one tiny little bit, what’s going to happen to me? I have an aunt in a nursing home in Petaluma—I’m her sole support! What’s going to happen to her now that you’ve done this?”
“For Christ’s sake, M’lou!” he says. “You knew damn well what I was doing. You never mentioned an aunt in Petaluma.”
“Aunt Grace—her sole support—but you don’t care—no, no, not even the tiniest little bit …”
“Confront her, you said. You sat right in that chair two weeks ago and said to me, ‘Confront her.’ Your exact words. And that’s what I’ve done, dammit, and now you give me this shit! I’m sorry, M’lou, but—”
“You—yes, you—you have the luxury of confronting her. But she hardly knows I exist! I’ve spoken maybe two, three wo
rds to her in my entire life! You can confront her, but all I’ll get is a pink slip from the personnel office!”
“Listen, M’lou—I’ll hire you back. As soon as I win this thing, I’ll hire you back—you know that!”
“No, you won’t,” she sobs, “because you won’t win. You can’t win. She always wins, you know that. How stupid can you be? So—for me—it will be out with the garbage.”
“Dammit, I will win!” he shouts.
“No. No, you rich men are all alike. You can quit, resign, go home to your mansion in Burlingame and clip your coupons and collect your dividends. You can retire for life. But me—but me—”
“Goddamn it, M’lou, I’m not going to take anymore of this! As if I didn’t have enough on my mind right now!”
“You—yes, you—that’s all you think about is you! Never about me, never about Aunt Grace—”
“Never in my life have you mentioned an Aunt Grace! Aunt Grace is not my—”
“No. Of course not. Why would I? Because you wouldn’t care. And all the time you’ve been using me, and I’ve done my best to keep your dirty little secret from your wife!”
“Now, wait a minute,” he says. “Whose dirty little secret are we talking about? It’s your dirty little secret as much as it is mine.”
“Oh, yes,” she says. “Oh, yes. Who started this? Who asked me if I’d ever eaten at the Blue Fox? Who asked me to dinner with him at the Blue Fox? Whose idea was that? Who put his arm around me in the taxi and said I smelled of patchouli? Who said, ‘Your apartment isn’t far from here, is it?’ Who said, ‘Do you have a roommate?’ Who said—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he says, yanking open his desk drawer and grabbing for his checkbook. “How much do you need to tide you over? How much is the goddamned nursing home?”
“No!” she wails. “No, I don’t want any of your filthy money. You think you can buy off everybody with your filthy money. You—you’re all alike. I never want to see or hear from you again in my entire life!”
“You look like hell when you cry,” he says.
Seven
Who knows all the secrets of the wine maker’s art? Certainly not Sari LeBaron, as she would be the first to admit to you. Why is it that the nobler grapes of the finest red wines grow better in the foothills, while vines for the lesser whites and vins ordinaires thrive better on the valley floors? Some say it is because the soil in the foothills is “younger,” more vigorous and limy, while the soil of the valleys is older, more acidic, having been washed down there from the mountain slopes for centuries. But others will disagree, and tell you that it is because the morning mists linger longer in the foothills, sweetening and fattening and adding delicacy to the fruit, while down in the valleys the mists burn off more quickly, exposing the fruit longer to the sun, and producing vines with tougher stalks and grapes with thicker skin. Why do some wine makers insist that the finest wines must be aged in charred barrels made of oak from the Nevers forest in France, while just as respectable wines can be achieved when aged in barrels made of stainless steel, or even plastic? The point is that no one knows the answers to these questions with any degree of certainty. They are all a part of the mystery and romance of wine making.
But Sari LeBaron does know that a great part of the mystery and romance of wine making is also backbreaking manual labor—as she herself learned at the bottling plant, working long hours packing corked and labeled bottles into their cases, lifting filled cases off the conveyor belt and onto handcarts to be trucked away. Wine making is both an act of faith and an act of will, it is an art of stewardship and proprietorship and the ruthless use of muscle—not just a sissy sampling and tasting and talking about “body” and “bouquet.” This is something, she feels, that her sons have yet to learn. They’ve had it too easy. They have not been sufficiently toughened up. They were born to her, after all, somewhat late in life, when Baronet was once again on its merry way, with millions pouring in, with all the old debts paid off. Neither Eric nor Peeper ever knew what hard work was all about, and that is why she feels that it is not time to pass her stewardship along to them. In a business that she learned from the bottom up, she has forgotten more about the wine business than either of them ever knew.
This, at least, is what she tells herself, but of course it’s only half the truth. The full truth would acknowledge that Sari enjoys the power that she wields—relishes it, luxuriates in it, lives it, breathes it—even more, now that she is an old woman and alone and considered a phenomenon in a business that is predominantly male, more than when she was younger and her husband was alive. What will happen to her company, you may well ask, when Sari dies and the ghouls from the federal, state, and local governments swoop down to bleed her estate for taxes? I wouldn’t ask her that question, if I were you. Assaria LeBaron doesn’t plan to die.
“I have a saint’s name,” Joanna had said to her that Sunday afternoon at the Japanese Tea Garden. “Surely I shall be martyred.”
“A saint? Which saint?”
“Jeanne d’Arc. First, I want to tell you all about me. Then I want you to tell me all about you. That’s important, if we’re going to be lifelong, bosom friends, as I hope we are. First of all, my family’s in the wine business, or at least it used to be. But now, with Prohibition, the wine business is dead in California. We still grow some grapes for the table, for grape juice and raisins and jams and jellies, and things like that, and they let us put up three barrels of wine a year for our personal use—isn’t that a screech? It’s lunacy, and so mostly my father is retired and lives on his investments. We’re supposed to be rich, but don’t get me wrong, I’m not a snob, though my mother sort of is one, and I don’t care whether you’re rich or not. In fact, I’m more or less a Marxist, and I think Karl Marx is the cat’s pajamas. I believe in the equal distribution of wealth. My parents are Catholics, and my mother is very Catholic, but I’m not, though they made me get confirmed and everything. I don’t believe in organized religions. I’m a maverick, a wild horse. I’ve been a maverick since I was fourteen. That’s when I decided to be a free spirit. My absolute idol is Isadora Duncan, and I believe in free love. I think free love is the cat’s pajamas, don’t you? I went to see Isadora Duncan when she was here, and I became her absolute slave. I love that Russian man she married, the one they say may be a spy. I think he is one, don’t you? I think it’s an absolute screech that he can’t speak a word of English, and she can’t speak a word of Russian, and so the only way they can communicate is in the language of love. I absolutely adore all talented people, which was why I adored you in your play. My favorite writer is probably Sigmund Freud. I’ve read a lot of Freud, and I think most of what he says is the cat’s pajamas …”
Sari had never met anyone like this girl, with her bright, rapid-fire delivery and ability to skip nimbly from subject to subject barely without a pause for breath. At first, she simply sat there, wide-eyed, listening to Joanna talk.
“… Once a week, I fast. I eat nothing but a few sips of water. It’s good for the figure, and it also helps me think more clearly. I make all my important decisions on my fast days. It was on a fast day that I met you, and decided that I wanted you to be my friend. I have an absolutely divine brother, Peter, who you must meet. He’s twenty and divinely handsome, and you’ll adore him. He’s at Yale now, but he’ll be coming home for the summer, and that’s when you’ll meet him. Peter and I do secret things together. We have a secret club, which nobody belongs to except him and me, but maybe we’ll ask you to join it, too, if Peter approves. We’ll see. I’ve never had a sister, but of course I’ve always wanted one. What’s your sun sign?”
“Sun sign?”
“Your astrological sign. I think astrology is the cat’s pajamas. When were you born?”
“May twenty-fifth.”
“Oh, no!” she cried. “I can’t believe it! This is an absolute screech! You’re a Gemini, and so am I—June tenth. We’re a double sign, the twins, which means that each of us
is really two people. We have a dark side, and a bright side. We have a face we show for the world to see, and another face that is secret, private, and that we only show to ourselves and to certain special friends. We also have very emotional relationships, and we have artistic talent, and we’re very sexual. Have you ever done ‘it’ with a man?”
“It?”
“Yes. Made love with a man.”
“No. Have you?”
“Oh, yes,” she said airily, “lots of times. I told you I believe in free love. I think sex is the cat’s pajamas. Of course, it helps if you do it with champagne. But I gather that in the Fatty Arbuckle case, that got somewhat—out of hand.”
“Really?” Sari said. “What happened, exactly?”
“Well,” Joanna said, lowering her voice to a whisper, “from what I’m told, they’d all been drinking a lot of champagne. And Fatty Arbuckle tried to put an empty champagne bottle up—you know, up inside this girl. And when they tried to pull the bottle out, some of her insides came out with it. That was how she died.”
“How awful!”
“That was the story I heard. The people who own the Saint Francis Hotel are friends of my parents, and I overheard them talking about it.” Looking at Sari she had said, “But I can’t believe that you’ve never done it.”
“Well, I haven’t.”
“The way you did that last scene in the play—when you flung yourself into the prince’s arms and told him you were seized by love—that was the sexiest scene I’ve ever seen on a stage!”
Sari giggled. “Well,” she said, “the director, Miss Simmons, kept telling me to play it that way.”
“Watching you, I was certain you were richly experienced. Well, if there’s anything you want to know about sex, just ask me, and I’ll tell you anything you need to know. If we’re going to be lifelong, bosom friends, it’s important that we tell each other everything. Is there anything?”
The LeBaron Secret Page 18
