It would be pretty to be able to say that their old passion had been rekindled that night, and that their marriage had become complete, but the truth is somewhat different, even though—as the lawyers say—he returned to his spouse’s bed that night. Their marriage did not become complete because Peter was no longer complete, if he ever was. A cloud, a shadow, a distraction, would continue to fall across him at times, even during lovemaking, and his eyes would half-close, and he was miles away. It was as though the damage to him had been too profound, and the scars would not heal.
Had Peter really been in love with Joanna? Sari never asked that question. Had he ever really been in love with anyone? Certainly Sari could never bring herself to ask him that. And what had he done to satisfy his own physical, venereal yearnings, if any, during those long years—the years Sari sometimes speaks of as the arid years, the dry years, of their marriage? What hasty, panting, illicit encounters may have taken place in sordid hotel rooms, or in parked cars, or in the back rows of movie houses, or even in the gilded boudoirs of Mme. Sally Stanford’s famous San Francisco establishment, where all manner of exotic delights were served up for the randy sons of the city’s elite? Who knew? Sari never asked him, and did not want to know. She had had enough of family secrets, and did not want to find out any others.
What happened was that Peter began withdrawing more and more from the day-to-day operations of Baronet, and turning more of this over to Sari, though he retained the title of president of the company.
And what also happened was that Sari did her best to divert him when she saw the clouds across his eyes appear, and one of his dark moods descending. She found him, for example, one morning alone in his study cleaning his service pistol. “What are you doing?” she asked him.
“Just cleaning my gun,” he said.
“What for?”
“Needs cleaning.”
“That seems like a dreary thing to do on a beautiful Sunday morning! I was thinking—let’s do something we haven’t done in years. Let’s drive out to Seal Rocks, take a picnic lunch, and watch the seals.”
They had done this.
Not far from Seal Rocks, there is an oceanside amusement park with a Ferris wheel—the largest Ferris wheel in the world, it was said, when it was first put up. After their picnic lunch above the rocks, they had gone to the amusement park and bought tickets for the Ferris wheel. Up, up, and down and around they had gone on the wheel, screaming with excitement with all the other passengers as the wheel spun faster, and moaning when the wheel stopped to let passengers disembark, and their little chair was left suspended, rocking back and forth, in the sky.
But even then, though the secrets had been aired, the spirits exorcised, the ghosts put down, that cloud, that shadow, that look of dazed distraction would fall across Peter LeBaron’s face—even there, on the top of a Ferris wheel overlooking a Delft blue ocean, it would happen. She would never see that bright blur of boy swaying from the head of a mast again. Never.
“Isn’t this wonderful!” she had cried, seizing his hand.
Wonderful.
If only Joanna would move away to some distant city, Sari had begun to think, that might help things. As it turned out, such an opportunity was not far in the offing.
Let me tell you something about Peter Powell LeBaron that will perhaps help explain him to you, for I also knew him well. You may have heard from gossips in San Francisco that Peter LeBaron, for all his boyish charm and almost-Valentino looks and seeming golden promise, was not bright. I take exception to this. He was certainly not bookish, and was no intellectual, and as we know he never finished college, but he was far from stupid. On the other hand, he possessed qualities that could be exasperating, as this story illustrates.
This is a story that I doubt even Sari knows, since she was not present at the time. But she will perhaps not mind my telling it at this point, since it reveals something of his character and temperament. It was in the late twenties, 1928 or ’29, before the crash, and Peter and a companion were driving—too fast, of course—down El Camino in his red Stutz on their way to a party. They must not be late. Just outside Redwood City, a medium-size Border collie suddenly darted out from beneath a hedge and into the road. There was no time to brake, and Peter’s front wheels struck the animal. He sped on.
“Shouldn’t we stop? See if he’s hurt? See if we can find the owner?” his companion urged.
“Stray mutt,” Peter said, still speeding on.
“It was a nice little Border collie. It might have a tag—”
“No, just a stray mutt,” Peter said.
The dog might have been killed, or only slightly injured. It might indeed have been a stray, or then again, more likely, it might have been some family’s treasured pet. We’ll never know.
That was Peter LeBaron. Short-sighted. Irresponsible. Spoiled. An aging youth.
Sari made only one allusion of what she had discovered to Joanna, and that was years later, after Athalie was born, and the twins, and by that time certainly Joanna knew that Sari knew, and that Sari had won. It had been at the cemetery, after Peter’s funeral, and Joanna had been behaving very badly, very melodramatically, weeping far too much. The priest had raised his hand in the sign of the cross as the first shovelful of earth was cast into the grave, and Joanna, sobbing, had suddenly lurched forward, as though about to fling herself across her brother’s casket. This was after Sari’s accident, of course, and she was now in a wheelchair, but she nonetheless reached out and seized Joanna’s arm firmly, and whispered, “Stop this. If I can be brave, so can you.” “I’ve lost him, I’ve lost him!” Joanna sobbed. As more shovelfuls of earth fell, and the priest intoned the final words, other mourners, with Gabe Pollack at Joanna’s elbow now, led the two women away. “You lost him a long time ago,” Sari whispered fiercely. And then, looking up at her, she said, “Just tell me one thing, Jo. Did your mother ever know?” Briefly, Joanna looked at Sari, and her streaming eyes had a frightened look, like that of a treed animal. Then she lowered her eyelids, and said, “Mothers always know everything.”
And now, alone in the house, the house has begun to creak and sigh. A storm, bringing rain and fog, is blowing in across the mountains of Marin through the Golden Gate. One by one, the swagged tiers of amber lights from the bridge begin to disappear as the fog descends. The house sighs as though ghosts are taking possession of it. There are ghosts here, of course, and the ghosts and their secrets are hanging there in the portrait gallery.
Fourteen
“I’m afraid we lost the baby, Mrs. LeBaron,” the doctor said. She was still drowsy from the anesthetic. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“Lost?”
“Her lungs were filled with fluid, Mrs. LeBaron. She never started to breathe. In effect, she drowned.”
“Drowned. Athalie.” If it was a girl, they were going to call it Athalie. If it was a boy, it was to be Peter, Jr. This was in 1943.
“May I see her, please?” she said.
“Your husband is here,” the doctor said. “He’d like to have a word with you.”
“Well,” she said, trying to arrange her face in as brave an expression as possible when he came into the hospital room, “we tried, didn’t we? We did our best.”
He kissed her on the forehead.
“Ask them to bring her in to me,” she said. “I just want to look at her. Just once.”
“No, Sari.”
“Why not?” she said, pushing herself up on her elbows. “I know she’s dead, but I just want to take one look at her. I just want to say good-bye.”
“No, you won’t want to.”
“I do! Why can’t I? Why can’t I say good-bye to my baby?”
“There was much more wrong with her than what the doctor told you,” he said. “Her heart—”
“What? He said fluid—her heart—”
“I’ve ordered the casket sealed. Later, when you’re feeling better, we’ll have a little service for her.”
“He
r heart,” she said, and sank back against the pillows. It was the heart she had felt with her fingers, beating inside of her. “Athalie …”
“Forget Athalie. Forget she ever existed. That’s the best thing,” he said.
“But she did exist! She lived inside my body for nine months.”
“Forget …”
“But we’ll try again, won’t we? Tell me we’ll try again.”
“We’ll try again.”
Joanna had come to visit her in the hospital. She had not particularly wanted Joanna’s visit. She had begun to look at Joanna in a somewhat different light. She no longer trusted Joanna, pact in blood or no pact in blood. All those little suggestions on how she should raise Melissa during Melissa’s troubled childhood no longer seemed helpful and solicitous and caring. They seemed like simple interference.
“It’s nothing but a temper tantrum,” she would say to Joanna. “Ignore her, leave her alone.”
“But you can’t ignore the child, Sari darling, don’t you know that much about bringing up a child? Her temper tantrums are cries for help. Sari darling, I really think a child psychiatrist—”
“Jo, once and for all. Are you going to let me raise this child or not?”
“But Sari darling, remember that you owe me a rather large debt.”
“Debt? What debt is that?”
“Peter.”
“And, Jo, you also owe a rather large debt to me—remember that? Melissa. Isn’t the score even?”
“Sari, we made a pact. A pact in blood. Always to help each other. We should not be talking about debts.”
“No, we shouldn’t be.”
Today, instead of having that kind of a shapeless, pointless argument, Sari would probably have simply said to her, “Shut up! Mind your own business! Get out of my house. You got to have your cake and eat it, too!”
Now, standing by her hospital bed, Joanna said, “Sari darling, I’m just so terribly sorry about the baby. But in a way it’s a blessing, isn’t it? It could never have led a normal life.”
“It had a name,” she said. “Her name was Athalie LeBaron.”
“The best thing to do is forget Athalie. Forget she ever existed.”
She turned away from Joanna, her cheek against the pillow. “Was that your advice to Peter?” she said. “Athalie did exist.” But she was feeling too weak to fight.
And when, at the end of that week, she came home from the hospital, she had—out of some almost forgotten instinct or impulse—flung a scarf across the mirror above her dressing table so that Malchemuvis, the Angel of Death, would not see his handsome reflection in the glass and be tempted to visit her house again.
Then, in the spring of 1945, the twins were born—two happy, healthy, beautiful baby boys, Eric and Peter, Jr.
Joanna came to see the babies, and immediately scooped them up in her arms with, it seemed to Sari, almost too much an air of possessiveness and protectiveness. “Is this little Peter?” she said to the small, bald head that was nestled against her left shoulder.
“Yes.”
Peter had let out a small, plaintive cry.
“Oh, he cries, little Peter does, just like a little peeping frog,” Joanna exclaimed. “Should his name be Peter or Peeper, do you think?”
“My son isn’t a frog,” Sari said.
But somehow Joanna had been able to make the nickname stick. And so Joanna managed to name one of Sari’s children.
Still, with the birth of two fine twin sons, that should provide our story with a happy ending, the happy, obstetric ending. But our story doesn’t end there. Every day, right before our very eyes, under our very noses, accidents happen, mistakes are made. The newspapers are full of these stories. They fill the files of the psychologists. Years ago, in an obscure mill town in northern Ohio, a worker in a steel mill is laid off his job because of hard times. To fill his days, he whittles a crude slingshot, fastens to it a stout strip of rubber sliced from an old inner tube, and presents this plaything to his two young sons, showing them how they can use it to dispatch empty beer cans lined up on a fence rail in the backyard, much the way their father taught them to swim in the Cuyahoga River and taught them to skip flat pebbles across the surface of a pond. The two brothers are close, but they are young and excitable, and three days later the older boy aims the slingshot, playfully, at his younger brother. No harm was meant, but the younger boy’s eye is lost, and the sight of that single, bloodied eyeball, dangling by the thinnest filament of muscle tissue from his brother’s head, and the brother’s look of, at first, sheer surprise, will not go away and reappears forever in the older brother’s dreams and nightmares. The half-blinded brother becomes a priest, administering to the sick and elderly. And is it guilt over his brother’s disfigurement, that vision of the dangling eyeball that will not erase itself, that causes the older brother to become a motorcycle racer, experimenting with one daredevil feat after another, until, inevitably, he is thrown from his bike into a concrete retaining wall beside a levee in California, and his own face is left brutally scarred, with most of his lower jaw torn away? The sight of him after the accident turns his wife permanently from him. Is this why, one night sitting alone in a drive-in theatre in Texas in 1972, during a showing of Deliverance—during the famous sodomy scene, in fact—he quietly reaches for the automatic rifle on the passenger seat beside him and begins shooting at the moviegoers in their cars? Before he has finished, five lie dead—two women, a man, and two teenagers on their first date—and four others are injured. Is this why the older brother is now waiting on Death Row, while the younger, half-blinded brother has been placed in charge of an important parish in Detroit? Where, in this chain reaction, does the blame lie? Who must account for this physical and emotional carnage—the wife who would not let her husband touch her, the father who whittled the slingshot for his handsome and beloved sons, the owner of the mill that laid the father off, the producers of films like Deliverance that fill our screens with so much unnatural sex and violence, our loose gun-control laws, or our increasingly depersonalized society? You tell me.
During Sari’s pregnancy with what would turn out to be the twins, Melissa seemed even more disturbed than usual about what was going on. “Do you have to have this baby, Mother?” she asked her again.
“Have to? Well, the fact is that I’m going to,” Sari said. Though Melissa was now eighteen, Sari had been advised by the doctors and other experts whom she consulted that this appeared to be a classic case of sibling rivalry, albeit an inappropriate one for a girl of Melissa’s age. “Her place and position, as the baby in the family, are being threatened with usurpation by the new infant,” one of these experts had explained.
“Do you have to, Mother?”
“I’m very happy about it,” she said. “Don’t you think it will be fun to have a new little baby brother or sister?”
(“Try reassuring her that, as the firstborn, she will always occupy a special position in the family,” the same Expert had advised.)
“You’ll always be special, Melissa,” she said. “You’re our firstborn. In fact, I’m going to count on you for a great deal of help with this baby.”
“I don’t want you to have it!”
“Why not?”
“I’m frightened, Mother.”
“What’s there to be frightened of? The doctor says I’m perfectly healthy.”
“You’re not my real mother, are you?” Melissa said.
“Melissa, we’ve gone over this hundreds of times. Of course I am.”
“I’m adopted, aren’t I?”
“No, you are not adopted. Please, no more of this silly talk.”
“Then why am I different?”
“Different? Every person is different from every other.”
“Was I a difficult birth, Mother?”
A pause. “You were a beautiful baby,” she said. And then, “Giving birth to a baby is never exactly easy.”
“I’ll never know that, will I? If I want a baby, I’l
l have to adopt one. The way you adopted me. Adopted people only get to adopt their babies because their blood is bad. I read that.”
“Well, that’s absolute nonsense, Melissa. Now please let’s—”
“Don’t have it, Mother. I’m frightened. The Sutter Buttes.”
“What about the Sutter Buttes?”
“I’m afraid this baby is going to be a monster. Like the one I saw at the Sutter Buttes.”
“The Sutter Buttes are nothing but a bunch of brown old hills.”
(“I would recommend, Mrs. LeBaron, that when your baby is born you be very attentive when the baby is in Melissa’s presence,” the Expert had said. “She should not be permitted to be alone with it. There is a possibility that she might try to harm it.” And then, “I think I detect two heartbeats.”)
But then, when the twins were born, the Expert was proved quite wrong. Melissa was overjoyed with the babies, as overjoyed as if they had been her own. Soon she was helping to feed and dress and diaper them, taking them out for walks in their twin carriage, lifting them in and out of their cribs and playpen, and lavishing so much obvious love and attention on them that all Sari’s apprehensions quickly evaporated. In fact, the twins seemed to make Melissa happier and more relaxed than she had ever been in her entire life. It is a miracle, Sari thought, as within six months Melissa announced that she no longer wanted the various tranquilizing drugs that had over the years been prescribed for her by Experts. On her own, thanks to the advent of the twins, Melissa seemed at last to be growing up.
The only symptoms that remain of what was once diagnosed as “neurasthenia” are a certain tenseness of manner, a shortness of temper, a tendency to embrace sudden, short-lived, and sometimes inappropriate enthusiasms, and a periodic drinking problem.
Then, just before Christmas of 1945, Peter telephoned Sari at the Montgomery Street office. “Something terrible has happened,” he said in a choked voice.
“What is it?”
“Joanna. She’s just been rushed to Mercy Hospital.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
The LeBaron Secret Page 36
