Bitterroot was, and is, in timber country, but it had been Peter’s idea to clear the valley of trees for sheep ranching—Australian merinos were what he had in mind. And he had also planned to experiment with a new breed of beef cattle that had been developed in Texas, called Santa Gertrudis, noted for their hardiness in all kinds of weather and their thrifty growth on grass feeding. That, at least, had been his plan.
The main building at Bitterroot was a comfortable, ten-room log house, all on one level, set on an open hillside above the lake. There were several other outbuildings—sheds, toolhouses, and a cottage where the ranch superintendent, Mr. Hanratty, lived with his wife. Every morning, after a breakfast cooked for them by Mrs. Hanratty, Peter would set off to fell his daily quota of trees. Each tree felled was logged in a little notebook he kept in a pocket of his denim work pants, and each evening at dinnertime he would announce his tally. “Twenty-five today” … “Thirty-one today,” and so on, and at the end of each of those three summers the daily tallies would be totaled. The totals were impressive—forty-five hundred trees one summer, forty-nine hundred the next, and so on, and so on, and clearing the forest seemed to have become almost an obsession with him, and Assaria often wondered about it. It seemed his only interest and yet it did not seem possible to her that he could ever succeed in clearing the acreage he had in mind in a lifetime of summers, particularly since he refused any outside assistance in his labors—even Mr. Hanratty’s, when it was offered. He insisted that he was going to do it all himself. “Then,” he would say, “we’re going to retire here, and raise Australian merinos and try Santa Gertrudis cattle. It won’t be too lonely, will it?”
“It’s the most beautiful country in the world,” she said. “But by then there may be more children—grandchildren, perhaps.”
To this he would say nothing.
How does one treat a lover who isn’t? How does one try to make him happy? One tries kindness, one tries congratulation. “Forty trees today! That’s a record, isn’t it? How wonderful!” How does one try to enter his remoteness, his solitary and brooding landscape, the discouragement and disappointment and determination to do nothing but wield an ax? She had felt this settling over them—felt it, but tried to dismiss it—even before they were married, and she had felt it in Switzerland, and tried to make a joke of it. Sadness, Andrea Badrutt had called it, and that was as good a word for it as any. Infinite sadness, impenetrable sadness, but what he had not detected was that it was Peter’s sadness that had somehow become encapsulated within Peter’s heart and in his mind, and that Sari, for all her attempts at gaiety, could not reach through to touch. “You don’t regret this, do you, Peter?” she would say to him. “We did the right thing, didn’t we?” “Oh, yes, of course,” he would say. And then, at times despite herself, she would lose patience with him. “You agreed to this!” she would cry. “This was what you said you wanted us to do!” “Oh, yes,” he would say. “Yes, I know.” And she would find herself asking herself: Is love important? Is it important to be in love? Perhaps not, and perhaps love is nothing more than watching the man you love, the lover who isn’t one, cutting down trees, and cheering when he recites the daily totals. Come back, she had wanted to say to him. Come back to the place we had once, to where we made love, and where you told me I was so lovely, and that you loved me. Come back, come back. But he wouldn’t come back and, instead, she would watch him, shirtless, in his slowly diminishing pine forest with his ax, and the small brown mole in the fine hairs just above his belly button would fill her with more longing and sadness than could be satisfied in even the most soaring and mountainous landscape of love, much less love at its most banal. Why is the shower bath not draining properly? she would ask herself, and with her fingers she would stoop and scoop out a small dark wad of his hair, and her eyes would fill with tears.
“Ours is not a conventional marriage,” he would sometimes say to her.
“But does that mean we couldn’t try to make it one? I thought that was what we were going to try.”
“Well …” he would say, and turn away.
“Make a life of your own,” Joanna would say. “Hard work. That’s the answer. Organization. Organize something.”
And so that is what she had tried to do.
Sometimes, those summers at Bitterroot, she would come with him and watch him as he worked, stripped to the waist and sweating while she sat wrapped in a scarf or sweater against the chilly mountain air. The sun glistened on the muscles of his back and shoulders as he swung his ax, the splinters flying into the air, the sounds of his chopping echoing in the hills. It was also this hard physical exercise that kept him in such splendid physical shape, but vanity had nothing to do with what it was that drove him.
“There’s more … to … lumbering … than just … knowing how to use an ax,” he said between swings. “It’s a very precise and mathematical art.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. For instance, before you start cutting down a tree, you have to decide exactly where you want it to fall. Then you plan your cuts accordingly. You have to take into consideration the wind direction, for example—things like that.” He wiped his dripping brow with his forearm. “Here. Let me show you. Now suppose you tell me exactly where you want this tree to fall. Exactly.”
“Let’s see,” she said, looking around. “How about over there, on top of that little flat rock. Is that too small?”
“Easy,” he said, and began to swing.
She watched him as he swung at the bole of the big pine, chipping away fat, wedge-shaped splinters.
Presently the tall trunk of the tree began to sway, its branches rustling, agitating, protesting, as though making one last plea for its life.
He stepped back and looked up at the tree. He studied it, looking into the sun, his left hand bridged across his eyes. A wind had come up, and the trunk of the tree creaked and sighed in it, the branches lifting and whispering. “One more cut,” he said. “This one’s crucial.”
He swung at the bole once more. There was a sharp crack, almost like the sound of a gunshot, as the heart of the bole snapped—Sari has often thought that when her own heart finally stops she will hear that same explosive sound—and the tree began to fall, slowly at first, then very fast. There was a crash, and it was on the ground, and its topmost branch, the finial where you would have placed an angel or a star if it had been a Christmas tree—lay precisely across the center of the small flat rock.
Assaria ran to see. “Bull’s-eye!” she cried, clapping her hands. “Bravo!”
“Nothing to it,” he said, panting and wiping his dripping brow with the back of his bare arm again.
“Let me get Melissa,” she said. “Let’s show her what her daddy can do!”
“No,” he said. “I think I’ve done enough for today.” He slipped the little spiral notebook from his pants pocket, and made a penciled notation. “That’s thirty-three.”
“She’d be so proud of you!”
“Maybe some other time.”
“I wish you’d try to spend some more time with her, Peter,” she said. “She needs more fathering, I think.”
“Well, I can’t help the way I feel,” he said.
“But try, Just try. I mean, watching you do a trick like that would thrill her!”
“I’ll try,” he said.
But he had not tried.
The summer of 1929, they had stayed at Bitterroot longer than usual, into October. The warm weather had held, and the snows had held off, and Peter had wanted to take advantage of the bonus the weather was offering to get in as much lumbering as possible. One evening in mid-October, they had both commented on the astonishing sunset. The sun had gone down huge and red in the western sky, and the snowcaps flashed with such an intense and fiery color that it seemed for a moment that the entire world had burst into flames. The next morning, they learned that, in a sense, it had. In New York, the stock market had made its first precipitous plunge, and traders who had boug
ht on margin could not cover their borrowings, and overnight thirty billion dollars of American capital had disappeared into what would be a deepening whirlpool of debt. Julius LeBaron had telephoned them that morning from San Francisco, and told them to come home immediately, where only the beginnings of the troubles they would have to face, and which you already know about, awaited them.
It would be more than a dozen years before they returned to Bitterroot again, and by then the forest Peter LeBaron had been trying to level had grown up nearly as tall and implacable as before.
“You didn’t come home last night,” Gabe Pollack said to her. “I was very worried, Sari.”
“I spent the night at my friend Joanna LeBaron’s house,” she said. “I—it was something I ate, I guess—but I got a little sick, and they let me spend the night.” She didn’t tell him that she had slept in her clothes under an army blanket on an old sofa in the LeBarons’ cellar, that she had been spirited out of the house early that morning through the kitchen and into a service alleyway, with the disapproving complicity of MacDonald, the LeBarons’ butler, and that she still had a splitting headache from the afternoon before.
“LeBaron? The wine people?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’re really moving in high society, aren’t you?”
That was a damn-fool thing for Gabe Pollack to have said, and he should have known better than to have said it. He had been working as a general-assignment reporter for the Chronicle for three years now, writing about the city’s high life as well as its low, and he should have gained a better understanding of the city’s somewhat arcane social structure, just as Sari would gain it in time. The LeBarons weren’t then, and aren’t now, members of San Francisco’s high society. They were merely rich, and by 1926 it had been decided that to be merely rich in San Francisco was not enough.
I mean, San Francisco society at that point may not have been very old, but it had already decided who it was. It had had to. By the turn of the century, everyone knew that the Crockers and Tevises and Floods and Haggins and Spreckelses were rich, but did that make them society? If so, then how did you classify all the others? That woman in furs and jewels at the opera might be a Crocker, or she might be the madam of a Barbary Coast bordello who had just gone into real estate speculation. Society had needed someone to codify it, and fortunately by the year 1900 someone had come forth to do just that, borrowing heavily, almost abjectly, from earlier established models on the East Coast. If Mrs. Astor had needed Ward McAllister to help her designate who New York’s “Four Hundred” were, so San Francisco had appointed Ned Greenway, a champagne salesman, to make a list of who counted and who did not and, in the process, to teach San Franciscans how to perform cotillion figures. For his West Coast equivalent of Mrs. Astor, Greenway had, in turn, appointed Mrs. Eleanor Martin, whose brother-in-law owned the gas company.
But it was more than to New York that San Francisco looked for social guidance. San Francisco also borrowed, deferentially, from older, more serenely established Eastern cities, such as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. Allegiance to societies of the Old South was reinforced by the fact that San Francisco was strongly pro-Confederate during the Civil War. By 1926, the year we are writing about, though Ned Greenway was long gone, membership in San Francisco high society was fixed, and fairly immutable. It didn’t matter that most of the forebears of the city’s elite had been rogues and ruffians of the worst order. It didn’t matter that the original James Flood had been a bartender, or that Old Man Crocker had stood over his Chinese coolie labor force with a horsewhip while they built his Central Pacific Railroad, and paid them in cash so he didn’t need to bother keeping books. What mattered was that the children and grandchildren of these men were considered ladies and gentlemen.
The LeBaron money was simply too new to admit them into the charmed circle, or for them to be regarded as anything more than upstarts. They hovered somewhere around the circumference of the circle, permitted to penetrate it at this point or that, but were never given unqualified membership in it. Everyone knew, for example, that Mario Barone, Julius LeBaron’s father, had been an Italian immigrant who never learned to speak or write the King’s English. Everyone knew that Constance LeBaron’s mother, for all Constance’s airs, had been a chambermaid at a downtown hotel and—or so it was said—even performed more intimate services for some of the hotel’s gentleman guests. Then there was the fact that the LeBarons were Catholics, in a city where the best people worshiped at Grace Church Episcopal. But worst of all, perhaps, was the fact that the LeBarons, though they lived in the city, were really not City People. They were Valley People, they were farmers who had made their money from the sweat of their brows and the strain of their backs in vineyards in Sonoma, Napa, Livermore, Stockton, Lodi, and Modesto. They had not gone on into respectable businesses such as banking, commerce, railroads, shipping, or the professions. They had remained essentially country bumpkins, hicks. With Prohibition, they had turned from grapes to tomatoes—but what was the difference in that? Tomatoes were just another stoop-labor crop. No, Gabe should not have confused the LeBarons with high San Francisco society, as Sari herself would learn in due course.
Here are some of the things she would overhear about the LeBarons over the years:
Much snickering about Julius’s grandiose name-change, and she would hear Julius and his son called, behind their backs, Sir Julius and Lord Peter.
She would hear them called the Wops and the Dagos.
She would hear someone say, “What was the name before it was LeBaron? I think it was Baroney or Baloney, or something like that.”
“The Dagos are having some sort of a dinner party. But do we really want to go?”
“They’re N.O.C.D.—Not Our Class, Dear.”
“LeBaron men always marry down, don’t they. They never marry up. Well, what can you expect from Dagos?”
“Mackerel-snappers …”
“The LeBarons? Oh, you mean those Valley wine people …”
“My dear, have you seen what Constance LeBaron has done with that lovely old house on California Street? All that gilt and red plush! How would you describe it? Middle European whorehouse …?”
“I’ve heard that the girl Peter LeBaron is marrying is … Jewish.”
“Well, what can you expect?”
“They say that Julius LeBaron has lost absolutely everything in the crash …”
“Well, what can you expect?”
“From rags to riches, and back to rags again, in one generation …”
“What can you expect …”
Over the years, Sari would hear these comments. She would take them with a grain of salt. They even, in a grim way, amused her.
But that night, when Gabe made his remark about the LeBarons and high society, she did not know any of this, and simply assumed that what he said was true, and was mostly impressed with the fact that he had missed her the night before. Somehow, she had thought that he would not even notice she was gone.
“I’m sorry I made you worry,” she said.
“Of course I was worried. Anything might have happened. I thought of going out to look for you, but I had no idea where to look. I was terribly worried, Sari.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I mean, you’re a big girl now, and you can do as you please, but if you’re going to be gone all night at least let someone know. At least telephone. If I’m not here, at least leave a message with Mrs. Dodge …”
And she had also thought: Why, here I am. Alone in his room with him, and it is after dinner, and he is reading in bed, and now the rest of the scenario was hers to write. She closed his bedroom door behind her, and said, “Can we talk a little bit, Gabe?”
“Of course,” he said.
She sat down on the corner of his bed. “I didn’t mean to worry you,” she said, “but something’s been worrying me.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m almost seve
nteen, and I’ll be graduating from high school in June. My friend Joanna is going to go on and be a debutante for a year, and do nothing but go to parties. But I can’t do that, of course. So what am I going to do? Joanna keeps saying that I should go to Hollywood and become a movie star, but that takes money, and I don’t have that much money, so what should I do? I’m sure Mr. Moscowitz would let me work longer hours at the Odeon—regular hours, full time—but then what?”
“I’m sure you’ll find some nice fellow and marry him,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been thinking that, too. And I think I’ve found that nice fellow, Gabe.”
“Who? Tell me about him.”
“You.”
“What?” He smiled. “Oh, no, no—”
“Yes,” she said, leaning toward him, reaching out with one hand to touch him very lightly on the chest. “I love you, Gabe. I want to marry you.”
“No, no.” He took her outstretched hand in his, and pushed it away from him. “No, you’re not serious.”
“I’ve never been so serious in my life! Let’s get married, Gabe. I’d make such a good wife to you, I promise! I’ll work for a while, and then, when our children come, we’ll have enough money for a place of our own. I know we can be happy, Gabe, because I love you. I love you so much. Please marry me, Gabe—it’s the only thing I want.”
“Listen,” he said, still holding her hand, tighter now, but at a little distance from him in the bedclothes. “Listen, I love you, too—but not that way, Sari. Do you understand?”
“No.”
He was sitting full up on the bed now. “You’ll always be my friend, Sari—I hope. You’re sort of like the daughter I’ll never have. If ever you need anything, I’ll be here, and if ever you’re in trouble I’ll do everything I can to help. But no—not marriage, Sari. Get that out of your head right now, do you understand? It’s because I can’t give a woman what a husband should give a wife in marriage. What more can I say? I can’t say anything more than that. Please try to understand.”
The LeBaron Secret Page 25
