The LeBaron Secret (13 page)

“Mother! What a thing to ask!”

“Well, you know me,” Sari says. “I believe in calling a spade a spade. I'm a Thoroughly Modern Millie, as they say. I wouldn't give a hoot—not one hoot—if you'd been to bed with an attractive man, as long as he's not a gold digger after your money, or that sort of thing. And Archie's not that sort, I can tell.”

“He's Eric and Peeper's age, for heaven's sake.”

“Well, I always thought you were attracted to younger men. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with being attracted to younger men, though I myself was always attracted to somewhat older men. Difference in tastes, that's all.”

“Well, I
haven't
been to bed with him!”

Change the subject. “By the way, I was so sad to read about what happened at your rock concert.”

“
My
rock concert?”

“Weren't you the one who arranged it?”

“Yes, but how did you know that, Mother?”

“Someone—I forget who—said that you were the one who wanted to book them into the Odeon. Anyway, it was too bad about what happened.”

“I'm sick about it,” Melissa says. She rises and moves to the bar, and splashes more whiskey in her glass. This is a bad sign—another drink, when Sari knows that Melissa has been trying to control her drinking—but there is nothing to be done about it. “I'm just sick about it,” she says, her head lowered. “And now the stupid board has voted not to pay them for the evening. For presenting offensive material. It wasn't
their
fault that the snake bit someone!”

“Very embarrassing for you, of course.”

“Not embarrassing for me—but terrible for them! To come all this way to put on a performance, and not get paid.”

“Oh, but I expect they have pots and pots of money. All those rock stars do. They have million-dollar mansions in Beverly Hills.”

“Not
this
group. They're young, they're just starting out. They've been playing little dink-donk cities like Stockton and Modesto. This was to be their first big chance, their first important engagement. And now—no money.”

“Well, after all, a snake act—”

“The audience loved them up until that point! What happened was just an accident. The audience was cheering them up to that point, Mother! It was wonderful, up until then!”

“Well, I wouldn't fret about it if I were you, Missy.” Change the subject. “Have we seen all the pictures from your trip?”

“The little lead singer—he's just a boy—the one who was bitten—called me up this afternoon. Practically in tears. My heart ached for him. I've arranged to meet with them tomorrow, to see what can be worked out. They've had expenses to come here, and now no money to pay for anything. I may end up deciding to pay them out of my own pocket.”

“Now, Missy, I hardly think that would be necessary.”

“But don't you understand? I feel responsible. Morally responsible. It was all my idea—don't you see?”

“Well, I think that's awfully nice of you,” Sari says gently. “Even though, if it were me—but never mind.”

“It's only five thousand dollars. But it means everything in the world to those poor kids right now.”

“Well, your money is yours to do with as you wish,” Sari says. “But perhaps there's a moral to be learned from all of this.”

“Moral? What moral?”

“Well,” she begins carefully, “sometimes I wish you'd consult me before undertaking some of these projects of yours, Missy, before getting so—involved. If you did, I might be able to—”

She is still standing by the bar, alternately sipping from her drink and staring into the glass. “Consult?” she says slowly. “Why should I consult you, Mother? I'm fifty-seven years old. Why should I consult you on anything?”

“Oh, just because … because … because I've had a few more years' experience in community service, Missy, and—ha-ha—a few more years' experience at living. And because I care—deeply—about you, Melissa, and hate seeing you getting into these pickles.”

“Pickles? I'm not in any pickle!”

In the distance, there is the sound of a telephone ringing. “Who could be calling at this hour, I wonder,” Sari says. And then, “Well, I've said all I intend to say, Missy. I just want you to know that I'm always here when you need me, and if you ever think you'd like my opinion or advice, you might just find that the old lady's opinions and advice aren't all that bad. That's all. Don't look so angry! Remember what your father used to say when you were little? ‘Be careful, or your face might freeze with that expression.'”

“My father never said that to me.”

“Anyway, I think it's time we both went to bed.”

But Thomas has appeared at the door in Pullman slippers. “It's Mr. Eric,” he says, “for Miss Melissa.”

“Eric!” Sari cries. “How did he know you were here?”

“Probably,” Melissa says, “because he called downstairs first, and my housekeeper told him that
here
was where I was.”

“I thought I left instructions that there were to be no calls!”

“I'm sorry, Madam,” Thomas says. “But you did not say no calls for Miss Melissa.”

Melissa throws Sari a challenging look. “I'll take it here,” she says to Thomas, and walks to the other end of the room, where the telephone sits on a stand.

And Sari turns her wheelchair in the opposite direction, pretending to shuffle through the stack of snapshots in her lap, elaborately pretending not to be listening to the conversation.

“Eric,” she hears Melissa say. “Well, I'm busy tomorrow afternoon.… Oh, I see.… Well, that would be fine. I'll see you then. 'Night, Eric.”

After a moment, in a disinterested-sounding voice, Sari says, “Well, what did Eric want at this ungodly hour?”

“He wants to have breakfast with me tomorrow before he leaves for New York.”

She spins her chair around sharply to face her. “New York! I know of no trip to New York! I've authorized no trip to New York for Eric! What's he going to New York for?”

“He didn't say, Mother. Business, I suppose.”

“He's up to something—I knew it! I knew it all along. He's up to something, and he's going to see Joanna. My hunch was right! And I know who's behind this, too!”

“Who, Mother?”

“Harry Tillinghast! I've known that ever since Eric sold him that Baronet stock of his. That, too, was unauthorized.”

“I always thought that each of us was free to sell our stock to whomever we chose, Mother.”

“I should have been consulted! Eric had no right to sell that stock without consulting me! Do you realize that that's the first time in the history of the company that a single share of Baronet has ever passed outside this family?”

“But Harry is Alix's father.”

“He's not a LeBaron! He's an oil man, and he's a slippery, wheeling-dealing conniver, and now that he's got his toe in the door he's trying to pull off some sort of deal behind my back!”

“You don't know that, Mother.”

“I know that oil and wine don't mix—they're the most poisonous combination there is—and I know I've never trusted Harry Tillinghast. He is a scoundrel and a scum!” She pauses to catch her breath. “Very well, Missy,” she says. “Here's what I want you to do. I want you to have breakfast with your brother tomorrow, and find out just as much as you can. Find out why he's suddenly going to New York, find out what he's going to do there, who he's going to see—
everything
. And then I want you to report straight back here to me. Do you understand?”

Melissa is moving slowly across the room now toward her mother's chair, and she pauses in front of the fireplace with its high carved marble mantel. “Stop,” she says finally. “Just stop. Stop giving orders. Stop giving orders to me, and to everybody else. Stop trying to control everybody. Stop trying to control where I go on my holidays, stop trying to control whom I see and what I do, and whom I sleep with, and how I spend my money.
Stop trying to control me. Just stop
.”

“I try to control you because you can't control yourself!”

“Then tell me who my mother is!”

“Oh, Melissa, please—not again.”

“Tell me who my mother is! It isn't you, I know that.”

“Now
you
stop. We've—”

“It couldn't be you. No mother who cared about her daughter would have done what you've done to me—turned me into a lonely, neutered, neurotic spinster!”

“You've had too much to drink!”

“A lonely, neutered, neurotic, alcoholic spinster!” There is a Baccarat millefiori paperweight on a low table just beside the fireplace, and Melissa seizes this and, all in the same motion, hurls it hard against the marble hearth, where it explodes with a flash of fire. “Tell me who my mother is!”

There is a long silence, and the thousands of tiny shards of colored glass glitter on the marble hearth in the lamplight like the lights from the bridge, and from Marin County in the distance behind them, tiny lights of pale green, gold, and bright red.

Finally, Assaria LeBaron says in a dead voice, “I loved that little piece, but of course you knew that. It was quite old, nearly as old as you are. Your father bought it for me in Paris. I'm sorry you did that, Melissa.”

“Then tell me who my mother is.”

Alone in his bedroom in Burlingame, Eric LeBaron cannot sleep. The brandies after dinner should have done the trick, but they have not. He has a full day of work and travel ahead of him in the morning, and he knows he must sleep, but still he cannot. His mind is racing, racing full of thoughts. “You are talking about driving a wedge between the members of my family,” he had said to Alix's father. Harry had replied, “The wedge is already driven. Assaria is the wedge.”

Alix has gone off to bed in her own room in some sort of snit. What it is about, Eric cannot imagine. He had thought the evening went reasonably well. All the people whom Alix had wanted to be there were there. But on the doorknob of her bedroom door she has hung her little needlepoint pillow by its pink velvet loop. On the pillow, in needlepoint, are depicted a snoozing bunny and the words P
WEASE DO NOT DISTURB
. I'
M WESTING
. So that was where she was, in whatever sort of snit she was in. Sooner or later he will find out what it is all about. He is really in no great hurry to know.

In the darkness now he is trying to think what it was that first made him fall in love with Alix, where the turning point came between Alix as a pleasant dinner partner, companion, and date, and Alix as the woman he would ask to marry. There was her beauty, of course. The
Chronicle
had crowned her “Deb of the Year,” or something like that, that year, her debutante year, sixty-five or sixty-six, whatever it was. But then, he remembers, he had also found her funny and cute—fey. I'
M WESTING
. The baby-talk bit.
Do you like butter? Does-ums?

Yes, he remembers them sitting in the grass on a hilltop overlooking Half Moon Bay, and she had reached down and picked a buttercup and held the blossom under his chin. “Do you like butter?” she had said. And then, “Oooh—you don't like butter!”

“What in God's name are you talking about?”

“Look—hold it under my chin. Now, do you see the yellow reflection on my skin? That's how you tell whether a person likes butter. If a person
likes
butter, you'll see the yellow reflection from the buttercup. If they don't like butter, there's no reflection. You don't give off any reflection, Eric. So.”

“That's about the silliest damn thing I ever heard of. I do happen to like butter.”

“My daddy taught me that little trick. He calls me his little Buttercup.”

No, the best way to deal with Mother, he has decided, is absolutely straight from the hip, absolutely straight on, absolutely open and above board. Mother expects deviousness, tricks, secrets, plots, conspiracies, whispered conferences behind closed doors, tapped telephones, that sort of thing. She is the Richard Nixon of the business world. Her logic is often Byzantine in its complexity. She is unaccustomed to—indeed, often completely thrown by—total candor and honesty. I have nothing to hide from you, Mother, and so I'm laying my cards on the table, face up. I am trying to put together enough stockholder votes from the other members of this family to take over this company and, yes, Harry Tillinghast is behind me all the way. It's as simple as that. If you want to call it a battle, then call it one, but it's going to be a battle that's fought right out in the open, no secret deals, no double-crosses, just a good, old-fashioned fight for control, with everyone deciding just where he or she wishes to side in the matter. The matter will be decided in the only fair way, in the only democratic way, at the ballot box, one vote per share. If I lose, I lose, but I'm going to do my damnedest to win, and I'm going to fight a clean fight. No behind-the-door or under-the-table deals, no blackmail or bribes or secret payoffs. At least, that's how
I'm
going to fight for this thing, Mother. Of course, how
you
choose to fight it is up to you, and may the best man win. Yes.

If she won't see me, or come to the phone for me, I'll put it to her as straightforwardly as possible in a letter. A registered letter. Return receipt requested. And the same registered letter to all the others. And one to myself, which I will leave unopened, as proof of my good faith and fair intent and whatever and whatever, for we are dealing with Eric, the good little Boy Scout, here. I'll get the lawyers to draft the letter. Yes. Make a mental note of that, he tells his racing mind.

At some point, the press may have to be brought in on it, and here Gabe Pollack might be of some use, but maybe not. Make a mental note of that also.