The LeBaron Secret (26 page)

“The child,” said one of the nurses, “is simply rotten spoiled, Mrs. LeBaron. She is simply a spoiled brat. If I were you, I'd let her select one toy a day to play with. Then I'd have all the other things locked away. If she can't amuse herself with that one toy, then that's that.”

“She'll just cry her lungs out.”

“
Let her!
”

That nurse had been let go, and there had been others who were more compliant. Needing to keep their jobs, they tended to do what Sari—and Melissa—wanted.

Then had come the hard times of the 1930s, after Peter Powell LeBaron's parents died, and all the debts had appeared, and it had been necessary for Sari and Peter and Joanna to go out into the fields themselves to help return the land to vineyards. Much of the staff of the Washington Street house had to be let go, and the only ones retained were Thomas, for the housekeeping, Cookie, and Melissa's nurse. Perhaps that had aggravated the situation even more, because Sari had been gone all day, and it was hard to control the quality of the nurses, but someone had to look after the little girl.

At seven, the bed-wetting problem still continued, and at eight a new one had arisen: nail biting. “Mrs. LeBaron, the child's nails are chewed down to the
quick
. They're
bleeding
, Mrs. LeBaron!”

“Tape her nails with adhesive tape,” one doctor said. Melissa just chewed through the tape.

Another doctor prescribed a foul-tasting substance that was to be painted on the nails. But the foul-tasting substance could be washed off with soap and water.

Every day, it seemed, there was a new problem. “Mrs. LeBaron, Melissa would not get out of bed this morning. She says she's sick, but she has no temperature.”

“She's got to get out of bed to go to school.”

“She's been in bed all day. She says she's never going to get out of bed.”

Then, when she was ten, Melissa, who had never been a good eater, seemed to stop eating altogether. She began complaining of stomachaches when she sat down at the table, and dawdled over her food, pushing it around her plate without eating a mouthful, and Sari had watched with horror as the already thin child grew thinner and thinner. More specialists were consulted.

“Fill the child's plate, and set it in front of her for exactly twenty minutes,” said Dr. Obermark, considered the finest pediatrician in the city. “If she hasn't touched her food by then, remove the plate. When she gets hungry enough, she'll eat.”

But that had not worked, and Dr. Obermark, after two weeks, offered another formula. “Tell her she cannot leave the table until she cleans her plate,” he had said, and so Sari had found herself sitting at the table with Melissa for hours as the child stubbornly sat at the table, staring at her uneaten food. And the more anxious Sari became, the less she ate, and soon it would be seven weeks since Melissa had taken more than a tiny morsel of food. Though her bowels rarely moved now, Sari had watched the girl shrink from ninety pounds to seventy. “Eggnogs,” decreed Dr. Obermark. “One raw egg, beaten into chocolate milk, three times a day.” But Melissa gagged over these concoctions and vomited them. “I'm going to give her liver shots,” said Dr. Obermark, but Melissa fought these so hard that twice the doctor's hypodermic needle had broken off in her buttock.

“Melissa darling, you've got to eat!” Sari cried. “If you don't eat, you'll die.”

“I want to die.”

“Oh, Melissa, don't say that—we all love you so!”

“You don't love me. You only say you love me because you like to give me things.”

“That's not true. It's the other way around—I like to give you things because I love you.”

“Daddy doesn't love me.”

“He loves you very much.”

“Why doesn't he ever speak to me?”

“He's been so busy, darling. We've all been so—”

“You're not my real mother, and he's not my real father, is he? I know that. I'm adopted, aren't I?”

“Oh, Melissa—please don't say things like that! Things that hurt me so!”

“I'm adopted. I don't look like either of you.”

“You're our darling little girl!”

From Miss Burke's school, where Melissa was enrolled, there were the regular disturbing reports from Miss Hays, the headmistress. “Melissa is a bright child, and achieves high scores on such tests as the Stanford-Binet. She has a high I.Q., and is perfectly capable of doing the work, but she is a social and a disciplinary problem. Yesterday, for instance, she locked herself in a cubicle in the washroom, and refused to come out until the last bell …”

“Mrs. LeBaron, Melissa has developed a new habit that is very disruptive to the classroom. She sits at her desk and rubs her legs together.”

“Rubs her legs together?”

“Yes. We feel she is—masturbating, Mrs. LeBaron. It is very distracting to the other girls, and to her teachers. A very distracting habit and, we feel, an unhealthy one.”

“I'll speak to Dr. Obermark about it right away.”

“Mrs. LeBaron, in view of the fact that Melissa is continuing to be a social and disciplinary problem at school, I wonder if you have perhaps considered a special school for her. There's a school called Hedgerows in Pasadena, which specializes in—”

“No! I don't want to take her out of Burke's, and away from all her friends.”

“Mrs. LeBaron, Melissa really has no friends here …”

On the question of where Melissa would go to school, Sari knew she stood on very firm ground. Over the years, the LeBaron family had shown considerable generosity to Miss Katherine Burke's School. She was certain the school would never expel a LeBaron daughter.

Then there was the imaginary playmate whose name, she explained to her mother, was Jober Rice. “No, not Joe
Beryce. Jober Rice
.”

“Is Jober Rice a boy or a girl?”

“Neither. Just Jober Rice.” Whenever she was reprimanded for anything, she would explain, “Jober Rice told me to do it.”

“She is
much
too old for an imaginary playmate, Sari darling,” Joanna said. “
Much
too old. That phase comes around age five or six. That can't be happening.”

“But what can I do? She says Jober Rice exists.”

At ten and a half, she began to complain of headaches, dizziness, and an inability to see clearly. “I need to wear glasses,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“I want glasses to wear in hotel lobbies.”

“Hotel lobbies?” She often made bizarre statements like that.

She was taken to see a famous ophthalmologist, Dr. Heidt, who gave her a thorough examination.

“There is absolutely nothing the matter with her eyesight, Mrs. LeBaron,” Dr. Heidt said. “She has perfect twenty-twenty vision, and I can find no physiological basis for the headaches and the claims of dizzy spells. I would not prescribe corrective lenses for her.”

“But she says she wants to wear glasses.”

“You can get her some frames with ordinary window glass in them, I suppose. I imagine that's an item you could find in the dime store.”

And so, for the next two years, Melissa had worn her dime-store glasses constantly. They gave her an owlish, bookish look, which, Sari thought, did not enhance what was otherwise becoming a pretty face. And still the complaints of headaches, dizziness, and poor vision continued.

“What's that on my plate?”

“A lamb chop, darling.”

Staring down at it through her glasses, she would say, “But why can't I
see
it? All I see is a fuzzy thing like a bear's paw.”

At least she had started eating again, though pickily, and there were long days of hunger strikes.

“I'm afraid she's very sick, Mrs. LeBaron,” Dr. Obermark said. “And the trouble is that she's very uncooperative. I think we should consider sending her to a hospital.”

“A hospital?”

“There's a very good clinic in San Rafael. There's a possibility she might respond to electric shock.”

“Oh, no!” Sari cried.

“These electric shocks aren't fatal, Mrs. LeBaron. In fact, after the first treatment she won't have any idea of what's happening to her. The treatments do not build up anxiety. In fact, they lessen it.”

“Oh, no,” Sari said. “Please, not that.”

“Her disorder is psychological, Mrs. LeBaron.”

One summer Sunday they drove out to the Colusa vineyard. Cookie had packed them a picnic lunch they planned to eat in the foothills of the Sutter Buttes, that sudden upthrust of rocky mountains that seems to rise, unbidden, from the middle of the flat Sacramento River valley floor. “Try to plan more little family outings with her,” someone had suggested. But at her first sight of the Buttes Melissa began to scream, “Why are those mountains doing that? What are they doing there? They don't belong there! They're looking at me as though they want to kill me!”

“Those are the Sutter Buttes, dear—mountains that some earthquake heaved up in the middle of the valley thousands of years ago. I think they're actually quite dramatic, and quite pretty.”

“I hate them! And they hate me! They're looking at me as if they're going to eat me. I want to go home!”

“We can't go home yet, darling. We haven't had our picnic. Let's pretend the mountains are a couple of lazy old dinosaurs, sleeping in the sun. Or a pair of camels, resting. Let's make up a story—”

“No! They're monsters! Take me home!”

“Now, Melissa—”

Then Melissa looked at her and said, “I'm a monster, too, aren't I, Mother? That's why you brought me here. So your monster could meet some other monsters.”

“Melissa,
please
.”

“I hate it here! I want to go home!
Take me home!
”

“Her disorder is psychological, Mrs. LeBaron,” Dr. Obermark repeated.

But then, before accepting this view, we must take into consideration Melissa LeBaron's parents. There are the parental influences that the psychologist would want to know about. Would Assaria LeBaron ever admit that she had ever been anything less than a perfect mother to this difficult child?

“Pick a card, any card,” Melissa had said to her. “It's a trick.”

Sari had picked a card, the jack of spades.

“Look at it, but don't show it to me. Now slip it back into the deck. Now, we shuffle them—” And then Melissa had fanned out the deck, face up, on the table. “Your card was the three of hearts!”

“No, Melissa, it was the jack of spades.”

“Let me try it again.” But once more the trick had not worked. Frustrated, Melissa had said, “Let me try it one more time.” And still it had not worked.

“Melissa, why don't you practice your trick, and when you've got it right, bring it back and we'll try it. It's important to know how to do a thing properly before you do it.”

But would a sensitive mother have said that? Should she—perhaps—instead—have pretended that the trick worked the first time and congratulated the clever child? The way, playing a board game with a child, a parent will often learn how to lose at checkers? It is too late to ask that sort of question now.

Then we must consider the influence of Melissa's aunt Joanna, which was important in its own way. In 1927, a year after Sari had married her brother, Joanna suddenly married a young doctor named Rod Kiley, and moved with him to Santa Barbara. Less than six months later, however, this marriage was over, though Joanna was four months pregnant with Rod Kiley's child. “A mistake, a mistake!” Joanna cried cheerfully to Sari, announcing the failed marriage. “I knew I should have stuck with free love!” By the time Lance was born, Joanna was divorced, had resumed her maiden name, and had moved back to San Francisco. During the hard period of the 1930s, when all of them were working to get the vineyards back into production and the debts paid off, Joanna and her son occupied a suite of rooms on the top floor of the big White Wedding-Cake House at 2040 Washington Street. This was a matter of practicality, a matter of money. There was plenty of room, and the two small families, it was supposed, could live comfortably and independently under the same roof. And yet it was perhaps inevitable that certain problems should have arisen with this arrangement.

To Joanna's credit, she tried not to interfere with her sister-in-law's private life. And yet—and yet—there were times when it was almost impossible for Joanna not to voice an opinion about all the difficulties with Melissa. Little things:

“Sari darling, her temper tantrums are cries for help. You can't ignore them …”

“Dr. Obermark says …”

“I think Dr. Obermark is right. She should see a psychiatrist. I know the name of a wonderful man—”

“But not electric shocks! Not that!”

“It's the very latest technique, Sari.”

“No, no.”

“Sari, Melissa says that she and her friend Jober Rice are going to
murder
someone! I thought you ought to know.”

And Sari, at the breaking point, crying out, “Jo, will you please stop trying to tell me how to raise this child! I'll either do it my way, with my own experts, or I won't!”

You see what I mean.

And it did not help matters one little bit that Joanna's little Lance was growing up to be a sturdy, clean-limbed little boy, normal in every way.

Which brings us to Melissa's father, Peter Powell LeBaron.

Peter LeBaron had many talents, but one cannot say that fatherhood was one of them, and one cannot say that he was a close or loving or demonstrative father with any of his three children. It was as though he erected an invisible distance, or shadow, between himself and them. Whenever any of his children entered a room where their father happened to be, you could sense and almost see that shadow falling, like a cloud passing across the sun. It was strange, but the gaiety and boyishness that had been part of his exuberant charm as a younger man seemed to have disappeared when he became a father. Where was the old playful, irreverent Peter? Sari often wondered. His old self had gone into hiding somewhere beneath this shell of quiet, withdrawal, and reserve.