The LeBaron Secret

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Oh, Gabe, please! Make love to me, and you’ll see.”

  “No.” His voice was very firm now. “I can’t give you what you want. It’s that simple. It would be unfair to you even to try. A husband and a wife should be—but I can’t be that to you. I used to think, perhaps—but no. I know myself, Sari, and I know you. You’ll find someone, of course, but not me.” He released her hand. “So go to bed now, dear Sari. And let’s both try to forget this conversation ever happened. Good night, Sari. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Oh!” she sobbed. “You don’t love me one little bit!”

  His face was sad now. “It has nothing to do with love. It’s me.”

  She ran out of his room and down the hall into her own, and flung herself across the bed—confused, hurt, bewildered, and finally angry. Never had she been so angry in her life, and at so many things and so many people—angry at him, of course, and angry at Joanna for giving her all the wrong directions and advice, and finally and most bitterly furious at herself, ashamed of herself and hating herself for having behaved so foolishly, thinking: How can I have been so stupidly foolish and naive? Of course, that was not the way to seduce a man! Even the stupid character she had pretended to be in the play had been smart enough to know that! Sabrina Van Arsdale had not got her Russian prince by throwing herself at his feet, by throwing herself across his bed. She had run away, and let him chase her across the face of Europe—to Paris, to Capri, to the doge’s palace on the Grand Canal. She would run away, too, to Hollywood, to New York, to the ends of the earth, to the moon, and then he would see how much he would miss her, how much he would worry about what might have happened to her, how many nights he would lie awake wondering where she had gone, wandering the night streets in search of her, sick with worry, wondering where she was … and then … and then … “Mr. Moscowitz, I want you to give me the names of all the top producers in Hollywood, all the top ones!” And then, when she had gone there and become a famous movie star with a white Rolls-Royce and a chauffeur and a butler of her own, and a mansion on Sunset Boulevard, Gabe would see her name in lights on all the marquees, and her face in all the movie magazines, and Gabe would know where she was and come, with his hat in his hand, to her house to find her. And her butler would answer the door—leaving it on the chain, of course, for Gabe would try to burst in—and say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Pollack, but Miss Latham cannot see you.” And the door would close in his face.

  She rolled over in the bed, staring straight upward at the ceiling with tear-filled eyes, thinking: Is love important? Is it important to be in love?

  Sometime later she would remember a friend of his, another young reporter from the paper, David Somebody, with whom he often spent evenings, having dinner and playing cards, he said, and she would have to ask herself if they also played at other things as well … but she could not even think about that.

  Is there a point at which one needs to be in love, must fall in love, in order to fill some sort of vacuum?

  In any case, three weeks later none of this seemed to matter because, by then, she had fallen in love with Peter LeBaron.

  “We’re going out on the Baroness C on Sunday. Can you join us?” It was Joanna LeBaron calling her on the telephone.

  “On the Bering Sea?”

  “No, silly. The Baroness C. It’s our boat. Can you come with us?”

  “Who is ‘us’?”

  “Peter and I, of course. We’re going to pack a lunch, and go for a sail.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” she said.

  “Good. We’ll pick you up at ten o’clock on Sunday morning.”

  The Baroness C turned out to be a thirty-two-foot sloop with a gleaming mahogany hull and a spanking white enameled deck that had been designed and built by the great Nathaniel Herreshoff himself, Joanna explained to her, even though Sari had until that point never heard of the famous Rhode Island yacht-builder. From the marina at the foot of the Embarcadero, they were ferried out in a dinghy to where the Baroness C was moored, and Peter scrambled aboard first, then helped the two girls and the heavy picnic hamper up onto the rocking deck.

  “Mother thinks the Baroness C was named after her,” Joanna said.

  “But it wasn’t,” Peter said. “It just happens to be the third sailboat our father’s owned. The first was Baroness A, the second was Baroness B, and so on.”

  While Peter moved efficiently about the boat, casting off the mooring, setting lines, and hoisting sails, Joanna explored the contents of the picnic hamper. “MacDonald’s put together the most scrumptious goodies for us,” she said. “Jellied eggs. Crabmeat sandwiches. Stuffed artichoke hearts. Aren’t we lucky—”

  “To have a butler we can blackmail,” Peter said with a wink.

  It was a habit they had, Sari had begun to notice, of finishing each other’s sentences.

  Soon they were under sail, gliding out across the Bay under a clear blue Sunday sky.

  “I’ve never been on a sailboat before,” Sari said.

  “There’s only one rule. Peter is the skipper, and you and I have to do everything he tells us to.” But with Peter lolling at the tiller, and the boat gliding northward, its sails full in a good breeze, there seemed now very little to do except admire the morning and the distant green and wooded hills. There was no bridge across the Golden Gate, of course, in those days, and the northern suburbs of Marin County had not been developed. Sausalito was still a sleepy fishing village, and Belvedere and Tiburon were still virtually uninhabited, accessible only by boat. Soon the city was just an outline on the horizon behind them, and the shore of the upper bay—San Pablo Bay—was a wilderness reaching down into the water. “We’ve got to see that you get some proper sailing gear,” he said to her.

  She had hoped they wouldn’t notice. Both Peter and his sister were wearing khaki shorts, loose, short-sleeved shirts, and canvas shoes, and Sari, in her middy blouse and skirt, had felt a little overdressed for this outing. “Well, I wasn’t sure—” she began.

  “Kick off those silly shoes,” he said.

  She did as she was told and kicked off her black patent-leather pumps.

  “And take off those silly stockings.”

  Obediently, she rolled down her white, knee-length hose, and now she was barefoot.

  “Now take that silly bow out of your hair,” he said.

  She removed the bow and shook her hair loose.

  “Now that’s more like it,” he said.

  “Our skipper isn’t always so mean and bossy,” Joanna said. But Peter wasn’t looking mean and bossy. He was smiling at Sari, and his smile was wonderfully warm, and she smiled back at him a little shyly.

  “Jo says you want to join our little club,” he said. “The notorious California Street Wine Cellar Club.”

  “I’m afraid I’ll need to learn the rules for that, too,” she said.

  “The only rule—” Joanna began.

  “Is that there are no rules,” he finished. And there was something in the way he said this that sounded so—what? Abandoned, almost, and Sari suddenly had the excited feeling that she was being invited into a loose and careless world of sensuous pleasures and no responsibilities. The very ease with which Peter LeBaron lay back across the stern of the sailboat, one bare arm resting on the tiller, seemed to suggest this, and so did the stillness and ease with which the Baroness C cut through the water. From her only other journey across the water, Sari remembered the endless churning of engines below the deck, night and day. But here the motion was effortless and smooth and still, and the only sounds were the gentle lapping of water against the boat’s hull and the sigh of the wind and the occasional snap of the sails. Putting her head back, and letting her loose hair fly in the breeze, she had thought: I could sail on like this forever.

  As though she had been reading her thoughts, Joanna said, “Let’s try to do this every Sunday for the rest of the summer.”

  “Of course, I’m afraid our first meeting wasn’t very auspicious,” Peter
said.

  “No. I’m afraid I’d drunk much too much champagne.”

  “My fault,” Joanna said. “Bad bartending.”

  “And I’d just been booted out of Yale.”

  “What happened, anyway?” Sari asked.

  “A gross miscarriage of justice,” Joanna said. “Too furious-making, really.”

  “A misunderstanding—” Peter began.

  “On the part of Yale University!” Joanna finished for him. “A university that should be stripped of its credentials!”

  “Well, that’s putting it a little strongly, Jo,” he said.

  “It isn’t! Tell her! Tell her what happened.”

  Peter shrugged. “It was nothing, really, but what happened was—” And he had begun a rather rambling explanation of what had occurred in New Haven earlier that spring.

  What it all amounted to, it seemed, was a misunderstanding between Peter and his department head. He was majoring in chemistry because, he explained, as soon as Prohibition was repealed—and it was bound to be before too much longer—the family would probably go back into wine production, and science was going to play an important part in the future of California wine making. Wine making was becoming more and more a science, yet it would always also remain an art. How else to explain why the most brilliant scientists at U.C. Davis could apply all their knowledge and come up with an inferior wine? And why could the most ignorant farmer create a wine that was superb? These were questions that might never be answered.

  “Isn’t Peter brilliant?” Joanna interrupted.

  But that had nothing to do with the misunderstanding between Peter and his department head, he continued. Three days a week, in chemistry class, there was a two-hour lab period, and in these lab periods each man was assigned a lab partner. Peter’s partner was a chap named Walters, who happened to be a wisenheimer whom nobody liked.

  “Wisenheimer is too good a word for him,” Joanna put in. “The man is a total and utter creep.”

  Anyway, in this one experiment that they had been assigned to do, Peter had performed all the right procedures. And yet, for some damned reason or another, he had not been able to produce the proper result. And so, after the class was over, Peter had simply opened Walters’s desk and copied the results off Walters’s paper. The department head had challenged this. “You could not possibly have come up with this result using these procedures,” the department head had said. They had called it cheating, but it wasn’t cheating, was it?

  “Absolutely not,” Joanna said.

  Not when you got your result from the guy who was your own lab partner, even if he was a wisenheimer. Weren’t partners supposed to help each other out?

  “Absolutely yes,” said Joanna.

  Anyway, Peter had denied everything, and so the department head had asked him to repeat the experiment in the presence of a faculty member, and he still hadn’t been able to produce a result that matched his procedure, and so they kicked him out. And so that was all it was, a misunderstanding.

  “Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you ever heard?” Joanna said. “Who gives a rat’s rear end about a silly old chemistry experiment, anyway?”

  To Sari’s untrained ears, it all sounded rather complicated, but she also agreed that it sounded pretty unfair.

  “It was, no doubt about it,” Peter said. “Anyway, Pop’s working on getting me into some other college in the fall. I’ll probably finish up at Stanford.”

  “Which is actually—” Joanna began.

  “A much better school,” Peter finished.

  “Meanwhile, Daddy’s being very stiff-necked about it,” Joanna said. “It seems that Yale had to go and write him this silly letter. That was what made me see the most violent shade of red—that letter. All about how Peter ‘fails to regard the consequences of his actions.’ Did you ever hear of anything so ridiculous? Peter—of all people.”

  Peter laughed. “Well, it’s all water over the dam now,” he said.

  “Yes, darling boy, and now you have a whole extra month of summer vacation,” Joanna said.

  “Pop wants me to look for a job.”

  “That’s ridiculous, too. Aren’t parents a bore, Sari?”

  “It’s been so long since I’ve had any that I’ve forgotten,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot. But maybe you’re lucky. Parents can really be a terrible bore at times.”

  Peter still leaned back against the tiller, a dreamy look in his eyes. Then, with his free hand, he fished into his shirt pocket and produced a harmonica, and began to play “I Want to Be Happy.”

  “Now, the most important thing we have to do is find the absolutely perfect spot for our picnic lunch,” Joanna said, her eyes scanning the shoreline. “It has to be absolutely perfect and secluded.” The shore ahead of them was rugged now, lined with large rocks that descended in a steep cascade into the water. “There—” Joanna pointed. “There’s a little beachy stretch between the rocks. Let’s drop anchor over there.” Peter hugged the tiller closer to him, and the boat responded, and when they were perhaps twenty yards from the beachy stretch, he lowered the anchor and began furling the sails.

  “Before we eat, a swim,” Joanna said.

  “Oh, dear,” Sari said. “I didn’t bring a swimsuit.”

  “Who needs one? We swim in the buff. It’s healthier, and there isn’t a prying eye for miles and miles.”

  “You mean we wear—nothing?”

  “Of course. Au naturel. Don’t tell me you’re shy, or something!”

  “But Peter is—”

  “Don’t be a goose. Peter is my brother, and you’re my best friend. Remember what we swore—no secrets.”

  Peter lowered a rope ladder from the side of the boat, and now he and Joanna were nonchalantly shedding their clothes, and so what was there for Sari to do but try to imitate their nonchalance and start removing her skirt and blouse and dropping these garments, as Joanna was doing, in a little pile on the deck? But when Sari undressed, she still could not quite bring herself to look at the other two.

  “Last one in is a rotten egg!” Peter cried, and dove into the Bay. Joanna and Sari followed him, together.

  “There’s a sea serpent here who sucks girls under the water,” Peter shouted, and ducked, his bare feet surfacing briefly above the water, and Sari felt his hand grip her ankle and tug her under. She came up sputtering and laughing. He did this to Joanna next, and soon they were all doing it to one another, and the water, which had seemed icy cold at first, began to seem less so. Then they were clambering up the ladder and into the boat again.

  “We don’t even have to dress for lunch,” Joanna said, shaking her wet hair. “We wear sarongs like they do in the Islands.” She handed Sari a large beach towel. “And look,” she said, opening the picnic hamper, “MacDonald has even included a bottle of wine.”

  “Aren’t we lucky—” Peter said.

  “To have a butler we can blackmail,” Joanna said.

  And, after lunch, as the three of them lay on their stomachs on the deck in the sun that was beginning to lower through the Golden Gate, Sari decided that she was getting used to these wild and indifferent and irresponsible new friends who lived surrounded by this golden haze of money. Peter was cradling his harmonica against his mouth again, playing snatches of show tunes, but Sari could still not bring herself to look at him.

  Then, when it was time to lift anchor and sail back across the Bay, there was a problem. The mainsail would not feed into its channel on the mast properly. A line was fouled at the head of the mast. “Nothing to do but shinny up the mast and straighten it out,” Peter said, and, from the corner of her eye, she saw him expertly starting up the mast.

  When he reached the top, she finally allowed her eyes to travel upward to him, where he worked on the fouled line. With her left hand, she bridged her eyes to watch him as, naked and gleaming, he clung to the swaying masthead like a panther clinging to the trunk of a slender tree, the sun behind him, framed in t
he bright sunlight.

  She realized that Joanna’s eyes were reaching in the same direction. “Peter really is a kind of genius,” Joanna murmured. “He’s afraid of nothing. He can do anything.”

  Was this when Sari decided that she was in love with him, this indistinct blur of body rocking in the afternoon sun?

  Ask her. But she won’t tell you.

  I think it was.

  The next Sunday it rained, and their second outing on the Baroness C had to be canceled, and Sari kicked the stairs and cursed the rain all the way to her room.

  Then the true summer holiday began. Sari still had her afternoon job at the Odeon, but now she had begun to think of looking for a job that would be full-time. “Oh, don’t,” Joanna said. “You don’t really need the extra money, do you? This way, we can have girly lunches together—you don’t need to be at the theatre until three. And all your evenings will be free to have fun, and in the mornings you can sleep late, late, late—the way girls our age are supposed to do!” Joanna rattled off a long list of things that the three of them would do that summer. “We’ll drive out to Stinson Beach, and Half Moon Bay. We’ll take a picnic lunch to Seal Rocks. Perhaps we’ll drive down to Carmel.… And Peter’s very keen on taking the Baroness C out to the Farallons. That will be exciting—even a little dangerous, you know, because we’ll be on the open ocean …”

  They had done some of these things, as a threesome, driving around San Francisco in Peter’s snappy little Stutz motor car, which he had painted fire-engine red (“We’re Flaming Youth!” Joanna liked to cry out to other motorists as Peter sped past them on the highway), and when he and Joanna dropped Sari at the theatre, it was sometimes possible for her to sneak them in, free, to see whatever movie happened to be playing. When she did this—between her chores of showing patrons to their seats with her flashlight—Sari would come and sit with them.

  But, increasingly, outside obstacles began to interfere with Peter and Joanna’s summer plans.

  The proposed trip to the Farallon Islands, for instance, never came to pass. “Daddy’s had the marina lock up the Baroness C’s sails and tackle, and ordered her into drydock,” Joanna said. “Really, Daddy’s just being too beastly to poor Peter.”