The LeBaron Secret

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  A normal family, Sari thinks.

  As though reading her thoughts, Melissa adds, “A supposedly normal family, anyway. But obviously he wasn’t ready for it. I even dug out an old suit of Daddy’s for him to wear, so he’d look at least halfway decent. But he wasn’t ready. He just wasn’t up to it. Anyway,” she says, looking around the table for reassurance, “he’s my little project right now—to try to rehabilitate him, to try to get him to stay off the drugs. And it’s only because of the—I assure you—really extraordinary natural musical talent that he has, talent that it would be such a shame to see wasted. I’m going to keep trying. I’m not going to give up yet. But tonight was a mistake, and I apologize.”

  From the others at the table, she sees only looks that express varying degrees of skepticism.

  “The child has been hurt, damaged, all his life,” she says. “I can’t help it, but my heart always goes out to the damaged children of this world!” There is silence as each person at the table thinks, in his or her own way, of Melissa’s troubled childhood. “They need so much, and receive so little,” she says. “All they ask for is a little love, and faith, and kindness, and reassurance and understanding. Anyway, that’s all I’m trying to provide for this poor, lost little boy.” Then, almost defiantly, she adds, “And I don’t care what any of you think!”

  Finally, Joanna says, “Melissa and her little projects. You’ve always had them, haven’t you, dear? Well, I for one think it’s very Christian of you. I say bravo, Melissa.”

  “Anyway,” Sari says with unnecessary enthusiasm to fill the silence that follows, “let’s not let any of this spoil our dinner.”

  “Turbans of sole, with a crab stuffing,” says Thomas quietly, announcing the next course.

  By the time the dacquoise has been served, it is almost possible for Sari to believe that the peaceful, pleasant gathering she had imagined is actually occurring. But then it is Harry Tillinghast—Harry, who will not let go of a subject until he has wrestled it to the floor—who feels he must go back to his favorite topic. Remarking on the sweetness of the buttercream filling in the dessert, he finds an occasion to make a bad pun about the sweetness of his stock offer. “We all know how Sari feels about it,” he says, “but what about the rest of you?”

  “Personally, I find it quite generous,” Joanna says.

  “Dammit,” Sari says sharply, “my company is not for sale!”

  “Your company, Mother?” Eric says again.

  Sitting forward in her chair, Joanna says, “Sari dear, just tell me one thing, and then I promise we’ll get off the subject. Just tell me why you care so much about all this. I think that’s the thing that none of us quite understands.”

  “Care?” Sari says. “Why do I care? You’re a fine one to ask me that! How would you feel if someone were trying to take your ad agency away from you?”

  “Actually,” Joanna says, “I plan on retiring in another couple of years. I’m really rather looking forward to it, and I’ve got my successor all picked out.”

  “You, “Sari says. “You, of course—but you were different. You were born with a golden spoon in your mouth, but I wasn’t. I used to run twelve blocks to school to save the nickel streetcar fare! I care because this company is the only thing I’ve ever owned.”

  “But don’t you think you’re being a bit melodramatic, Sari? I mean, after all, you do own other things. You have children, grandchildren, all the money in the world, a beautiful house—”

  “Children are a duty and a responsibility. So is money, and so is a house. All those things need to be nourished and cared for. But work—work is where the nourishment comes from. It’s what keeps you alive while you take care of the other things. You—you all had your Catholic faith, which I never really understood, but which I know helped you through the bad times. This company has been like a faith to me—a spiritual support—a comfort through all the disappointments and disasters—the larks—” And now tears—real or feigned, who can tell with Sari?—have welled in her eyes, and she dabs at them with a corner of her monogrammed napkin. “I named it, you know. I named it Baronet. When the larks destroyed our first harvest in nineteen thirty-three, Peter said to me, ‘We’ve lost it. It’s gone. We’re finished.’ And I said to him, ‘We’re not finished! The grapes are gone, but not the vines! We’ll try again, we’ll take the gamble. All farming is a gamble—the rain, the sun, the elements, the birds. It’s all a gamble, but if you’re going to be a gambler you have to stay in the game to win. We’ll win,’ I said. ‘Wait and see. Let’s give ourselves a new name. Let’s call ourselves—Baronet Vineyards! Baronet! It has a lucky sound. With a new name, maybe we’ll have new luck,’ I said to him. And we did. We won. They’ve called me a tough old broad—I’ve heard them—but it’s only a life of work that’s made me tough. How can you ask me why I care? How can you ask me to give it all up without a struggle?”

  Sari LeBaron lowers her face into her cupped hands. “You see,” she says, “all I am asking is to be allowed to die with my boots on.”

  While she has been speaking, Peeper has risen from his place at the table and moved to stand behind his mother’s chair. He places his hands on Sari’s shoulders, and squeezes them tightly.

  She covers his left hand with her right one, and whispers, “Thank you, Peeper.”

  Only what you can accomplish with your personal powers of persuasion, her lawyers, Baines and Rosenthal, had said to her.

  Eric is the first to speak. He clears his throat, and then says, “Harry, I think we should call this whole thing off. It’s just not worth it, Harry. It’s not worth what it would do to our mother. Let’s call if off.”

  There is a brief silence, and then Alix LeBaron shrieks, “Call it off? You mean you’re changing your mind? You mean you’re backing out? You do that, you son of a bitch, and I’ll slap a separate maintenance suit on you so fast you won’t know what hit you!”

  “Now, Buttercup—” Harry Tillinghast begins.

  “I mean it! I’ll slap a separate maintenance suit on him so fast he won’t know what hit him! Because I know what he’s been up to! He’s been getting it on with that little bitch Jap secretary of his!”

  “That’s a goddamned lie, Alix!”

  “It’s not! I’ve got the proof! A canceled check for ten thousand bucks!”

  “That was for—”

  “Aunt Grace in the nursing home? I know all about that one, too—the old nursing-home line!”

  “Alix, you’re ruining my party,” Sari says.

  “You stay out of this, Belle-mère! This is between Eric and me.”

  “And stop calling me Belle-mère while you’re making nasty accusations to my son! I see now that it’s not your father who’s behind this whole takeover scheme—it’s you!”

  “None of this is true, Alix,” Eric says. But Sari can see that the small forceps scar on his left temple has begun to redden, which only happens when he is angry or upset. Or frightened.

  “It is true! She admitted it to me! I confronted the Jap bitch with what I knew, and she admitted it!”

  “I don’t believe you,” Eric says, but the forceps scar is now quite red, and his eyelids are twitching.

  “Tell it to the judge!” Alix screams.

  “Alix, I’m taking you home,” Eric says.

  “No!” She is sobbing now. “I don’t want to go home with you! I want to go home with Mummy and Daddy! Mummy … Daddy … please … take me home!”

  “Now, now, Buttercup …” Harry Tillinghast says, as between them he and Mildred Tillinghast support their loudly weeping daughter, and escort her to the door.

  When they have gone, Peeper turns to Sari and says, “I wouldn’t worry too much about what she says, Mother. These adultery things are damned hard to prove. I mean, unless she’s got photographs or something. She doesn’t have photographs or something, does she?”

  “Goddamn it,” Eric says, flinging his napkin on the table. “So you believe her too!” He pushes his
chair back hard and jumps to his feet. “I’m getting out of this goddamned fucking rats’ nest!” And he, too, is gone.

  Now the number at the dinner table is reduced to four—Sari and Joanna at one end, and Peeper and Melissa at another, with empty chairs separating the participants. Their dacquoise has been barely touched, nor will it be, and Sari’s Cookie will forever wonder what was wrong with it, nor will she ever prepare it in her life again for anyone.

  Thomas, who has been waiting in the vestibule just behind the kitchen door—waiting for a moment of peace to descend upon the hostess’s table—appears now to say, “Coffee is served in the drawing room, Madam.”

  “Thank you, Thomas.” And, when he has gone, she says to no one in particular, “Well, a new little wrinkle has been added to our problem.”

  Peeper looks at his uneaten dessert for a moment or two, and then mumbles, “Better be on my way, too. Early golf date in the morning.”

  “Of course,” Sari says. “Good night, Peeper. Give me a kiss.”

  And now, as the three women move toward the drawing room, and the promise of coffee and a nightcap—which Sari suddenly very much needs—Joanna, still trying to rescue something from the ruins of the evening, says, “Oh, good. A hen party! Now we can really gossip.” But her heart is clearly not in this suggestion, for she adds, “I keep wondering, if Peter were alive, would he have been able to prevent all that? He was always such a wonderful … peacemaker. I’ll never understand why Peter did what he did.”

  In the room they are now entering, right there in front of the marble fireplace, stands the little Regency games table, with a top that flips about on a swivel to reveal all sorts of little secret compartments where one could hide one’s chips, like cards up a sleeve, an early nineteenth-century device for cheaters and charlatans and crooks. And Sari could swing the tabletop open to reveal the place where a square of green blotting paper lies … And there, too, suddenly—there is no correlation—is the vision of Peter eating his breakfast roll above the tennis courts at Saint Moritz, eating his breakfast numbly and automatically, a kind of passive eating, as though there were nothing of importance left in the world to do. Peter, trying to face the consequences of his actions, but unable to do so, and responding only with emotional emptiness, the life drained out of him, a vacuum whose depths she kept trying to explore, and plumb, and fill somehow, but always—almost always—without success.

  Peter. The peacemaker? Well, hardly that, unless with peace you assume defeat. King Croesus of the Lydians consulted the oracle at Delphi, and the priestess told him, “You will cross a river, and a great nation will be defeated.” And so, when the neighboring Persians were giving him trouble, Croesus crossed the river into Persia, where his armies were totally destroyed by the enemy. When he returned to the oracle for an explanation, she replied, “I didn’t say which great nation would be defeated when you crossed the river.”

  In the drawing room, over the coffee cups, Joanna is saying, “If you retired, you could travel, Sari. You could take a cruise. You used to say you wanted to go to China. You could do all that now, things you never did because Peter hated to travel …”

  Sari says nothing. Melissa says nothing. Thomas appears to collect the finished coffee service, and to place a fresh bucket of ice on the drinks cart. Melissa goes to fix herself a drink.

  “Fix me one, too,” Sari says. “Scotch. Rather stiff, I think.”

  “Will there be anything else this evening, Madam?” Thomas asks.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, Thomas,” Joanna says, as he is about to leave the room, “you know what a stickler I am for detail. Will you remind Cookie for me that I’d like my breakfast egg cooked for exactly three and a half minutes?”

  Thomas looks quickly at his mistress, and their eyes meet, and lock briefly, and then they look—very briefly—toward Melissa before Thomas decides that this is the moment to nod to Joanna’s request, and to withdraw.

  Melissa sits back on the small Empire sofa, her legs crossed at the knees under her black sheath. A touch of ankle shows. With her drink in her left hand, she fishes with her right for a cigarette from the silver cigarette box and lights it with a small cloisonné lighter. Exhaling a thin stream of smoke, she says, “Aunt Joanna. Or should I call you Mrs. Mary Brown? Or should I call you Mother?”

  Joanna leaps to her feet. “You broke your promise!” she cries at Sari. “You broke your solemn oath! I should never have trusted you!”

  “I did not!” Sari says. “Melissa, tell her that I didn’t tell you this!”

  “She didn’t tell me,” Melissa says. “I found out. With the help of a man who remembers when I was born in Switzerland. And under the terms of the will, I believe this means I am entitled to half of Lance’s shares—not just five percent, but seven and a half percent more, or twelve and a half percent all told. ‘Fifteen percent of said shares in said company shall be divided, equally, among any and all living issue of my aforesaid sister, Joanna,’ is the way the will reads. And so, Joanna, you and Lance and Eric and Harry don’t control fifty-five percent of the vote, do you? You only control forty-seven and a half percent. The swing vote belongs to me, doesn’t it? Which way will I vote, I wonder? For one of you two bitches or the other? Of course, I will have to ask myself, how would my father have wanted me to vote?”

  The other two women say nothing.

  Twelve

  She had wanted her debutante year. It was as simple as that. To Sari, she had pretended to make light of the whole thing, pretended it wasn’t important, pretended she was merely going through the motions of it all to please her parents. But she had wanted it. She had wanted the Cotillion and the Bachelors’ Ball. She had wanted the attention, and her photograph in the papers, and she had wanted the escorts and the filling out of dance cards and the parties—the dances and the luncheons and the teas and the balls that would go on throughout all that 1926–1927 season. She had wanted every little bit of it.

  By the spring of 1926 she had ordered—from Tiffany’s in New York!—the special, engraved, white-on-blue stationery which was for answering invitations and writing thank-you notes. By July, she had received her special engagement calendar, bound in blue leather, with the words embossed in gold on the cover, “My Season—Joanna LeBaron.” The engagement book had come from Tiffany’s also. (“So much more posh, don’t you think, than something from Shreve’s?” she had said to Sari. “Everyone else is using Shreve’s.”) By the time the engraved invitations began fluttering in, she would be prepared to start making entries in the pages of this diary in her round, precise, boarding-school hand. She would be prepared to write “accept” or “regret” on the corner of each invitation, and prepared, no doubt, to pin all the invitations—the accepted and regretted—around the frame of the mirror above her dressing table on California Street, each invitation a small, private conquest and a little battle won. But of course, by the time the invitations would normally have started to come in, Joanna was otherwise engaged in another part of the world.

  Looking back, it is easy to see that she could barely contain her excitement about it all, even as she pretended to disparage it, saying things like, “Of course, it’s all a lot of nonsense, isn’t it? It’s all utter rot. I’m only doing it because Mother wants it—she’s such an utter snob.” But she had wanted it for herself, and the wardrobe of gowns and suits and afternoon dresses that every debutante had to have, and the flowers arriving from Podesta & Baldocchi, and the young men from the stag line saying, “May I cut in?” Even though, in the end, because of what happened, it was not possible for her to have all of it, she had wanted just as much of the whole ritual as she could have—if not all, then at least half of it.

  She had missed the Bachelors’, and she had missed the Cotillion, the two events for which her most important gowns had been designed, the balls her mother had labored on for years, toiling on all the right committees, seeing to it that her father gave to all the proper causes—al
l that money and effort had gone to waste. But she had made the most of what was left—the smaller parties in the city and on the Peninsula, during the spring and early summer. And, in June, her parents had given a big dinner dance for her at the Burlingame Country Club, under a blue-and-white-striped tent.

  In retrospect, it is all rather ironic because now that Joanna LeBaron is who she is, the Dragon Lady of Madison Avenue, the Medea of Media-land, she would probably never admit to having been a debutante at all. If she started talking about her debut with some of the high-powered men and women she deals with now, Sari sometimes thinks, Joanna LeBaron would be laughed right out of the Graybar Building. Such are the jokes life plays on one. “Why weren’t you honest with me?” she should have said to her. “Why didn’t you say that all you wanted was your debutante year?” Oh, but Joanna had wanted even more than that.

  Now it is midnight, and Sari LeBaron is alone. Joanna has stalked off angrily to bed, declaring that she will be taking the first plane back to New York in the morning, refusing to believe that it was not Sari who told Melissa their secret (“I knew I should never have trusted you!”). And, without another word, Melissa departed for her apartment downstairs. Attending, perhaps, to Mr. Littlefield.