The LeBaron Secret (50 page)

Gabe Pollack is smiling. Sari is a star again.

After Peter's funeral, she had also been a star, the principal mourner, the chief recipient of the condolence letters and telegrams—from heads of industry, the mayor of San Francisco, the governor, from Chief Justice Earl Warren—all of which she would answer on embossed and monogrammed black-bordered stationery. And after all the guests had gone, and the hand-wringing and kisses and murmurs of sympathetic words were over, she and Gabe had been alone at last in the big house on Washington Street, and the Wedding-Cake House had suddenly seemed very empty, and Sari had found herself feeling very dispirited. She had draped her black mourning veil across the mirror in the drawing room.

“
Malchemuvis
.”

“Yes.”

“You loved him, didn't you, Sari?”

“Yes. No. Off and on. On and off. He was a difficult man—to get to know. For a long time, it was like living with a stranger, a shadow, or a ghost, and I couldn't find out what was haunting him, haunting us. And then I found out, and it helped me bring him back to life—for a little bit, at least. From time to time. But the ghost never really went away. It kept coming back to haunt us with what it knew. Joanna. Did you see her at the grave? What a ridiculous woman.”

“An evil woman, do you think?”

“No, not evil. Just ridiculous. Ridiculous, but very effective.”

“I still don't understand it,” he said.

“What?”

“A hunting accident. He never hunted, did he?”

“No. He chopped down trees. Back in the nineteen thirties, he used to carry a pistol, but that was just for the morale of the field hands when there were labor troubles—threats of strikes, scab labor coming in, that sort of thing. He never used it. I used to carry a pistol, too, for the same reasons, and I used my pistol more than he did, but never on a human being.”

“Then how did it happen?”

“That morning, he seemed perfectly normal. A little more withdrawn than usual, perhaps. My accident upset him terribly. He blamed himself. He told Mr. Hanratty that he was going out to hunt some rabbits. Rabbits! Rabbits were never a problem at the ranch, not that I knew of. And when they found him, it was as though he had tripped over a fallen log, and the pistol had accidentally gone off into his chest. He was lying on his face, on the other side of the fallen log. It wasn't an accident.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I found this,” she said, and wheeled her chair to the Regency games table, spun its top around, and lifted the piece of blotting paper from one of the secret compartments underneath. “Hold it up to the mirror, and you can read it,” she said.

He went to the mirror, and gingerly lifted one corner of her dark veil to expose a small triangle of glass.
I can no longer face this life
, he read.

“His handwriting. I found it on his desk. I haven't shown it to anyone else. He must have started to write a note, then changed his mind.”

“No note was found.”

“No note. Only that. It's not even addressed to anyone.”

“He destroyed the note.”

“Destroyed it. Burned it, perhaps. Who knows. But he changed his mind, and didn't finish it.”

“I wonder why.”

“Perhaps because he didn't want to place the blame on anyone. That would have been nice. But I think more likely he remembered that as a suicide he couldn't be buried in consecrated earth, as he was today. He remembered his mother and his father.”

“But why would Peter have wanted to take his own life? That's what I can't understand.”

“Oh, Gabe,” she said almost desperately then, “I don't know. Sometimes I think I don't know anything. Today, in the church, I thought I don't even know who I am. I felt I had no right to take part in what was going on, and I couldn't understand even a little bit of it. I felt I was all alone there, lost in some terrible limbo, with even a name that was made up from some Kansas towns I've never seen.
Deus noster refugium
—but we're Jews, aren't we, Gabe? The Romans persecuted us, didn't they? We're Jews, wanderers, auslanders, strangers in a strange land, aren't we? And I thought, how did I ever become a part of this? I don't belong here. I belong in some different land of milk and honey, and orange groves and cypress trees and cedars of Lebanon, but I know nothing about that land, either. But why am I here, not there, and how did I get to where I am? How did I lose everything, my faith to boot? I had no business partaking in that High Requiem Mass today, genuflecting to an image of Christ on the cross. I had no business being there, and yet I was there. Has my whole life been a deceit and a hypocrisy? How did I become nothing—nothing at all—with no feelings left, and nothing to believe in, not even myself? Is Peter in heaven now? Is Athalie? Are Julius and Constance? Where will I go? I don't know. Who am I?”

Who is she?
She had heard that question whispered, and so had Gabe, particularly in the first months after she and Peter had returned from their long, long wedding trip in Europe, with a new baby. Where did she come from? Terre Haute, they say. Terre
Haute?
And what a strange name—Assaria! And who is that man who was her guardian, Gabe Pollack? A Jew, they say. And she a Jewess? It's hard to say. From her looks, it could be either or. Were she and Gabe Pollack lovers, do you think? Hard to say, but isn't he—a bit minty, as we say? But who is
she?
And fifteen months for a honeymoon, and a baby! And that baby—it looks to me a good deal older than the LeBarons are saying it is! How old do they say? Four months? If I know anything about babies, that baby is closer to eight months old. That means, of course, that she was pregnant when she married him—and all in white! He had to marry her, of course. LeBarons always marry down. Look at Julius and Constance, for all her airs, pretending to be a real O'Brien, when the world knows.… Well, after all, what can you expect? They're Valley people. Mackerel-snappers. Cat-lickers. Dagos. Wops. Well, I'll say this for her. She caught a rich one. Caught him is right. Caught him with his pants down.

That was the way San Francisco talked when she and Peter first came home with Melissa. The past grows silent. It doesn't go away.

“Who am I, Gabe?”

“Well, I'm a member of my own little persecuted minority,” he said.

“What do you mean? Oh, you mean—
that
. At least you can consider yourself part of a
group
. I'm nothing.”

“In the final analysis, everyone is a minority of one. As God said to Moses, ‘I am that I am.'”

“But what did God mean by that? Unless it was a riddle. That's what I feel I am—just a riddle.”

“You loved Peter very much, didn't you?”

“I used to think I loved you,” she said.

“But you loved Peter, Sari. I want to hear you say that. It's important to me.”

She smiled a little absently. “Oh, we had our passionate moments,” she said. “Is love important? Is it important to be in love? How many times I've asked myself that question.”

“The answer, I think, is yes.”

“Gabe, I'm a little frightened about staying in this house alone tonight. Will you spend the night with me? It doesn't have to be anything more than that. Just spend the night here so we two outcasts and orphans can be outcasts and orphans together.”

Sixteen

And now, at last, the day has come. It is April 30, and the shareholders of Baronet Vineyards are gathered in a sixth-floor suite of the Fairmont to decide on the business at hand. The hotel has helpfully cleared one room of bedroom furniture, and replaced this with a long conference table and comfortable swivel chairs, an even dozen of them, and at each place a fresh pad of yellow legal foolscap has been set, along with a new ballpoint pen, glasses, and individual thermos carafes of ice water. In the sitting room next door, urns of coffee and tea have been set out, with cups and saucers and platters of fresh Danish pastries, croissants, and raisin buns. In what had been the bedroom, the atmosphere is all very businesslike. Outside, in the sitting room, Sari thinks, there is an almost festive party air. The hotel has even sent fresh flowers to the room, and a large basket of fresh fruit reposing in a nest of green shredded cellophane. Outside, diagonally across the, street, Sari can see the garish facade of the Standard station that occupies the site on California Street where the old LeBaron house once stood.

All these little extra frills and special touches have, of course, been arranged by Sari's office, for this is to be no ordinary stockholders' meeting. Normally, stockholders' meetings have been loose, informal affairs held in Baronet's old-fashioned boardroom, with everyone sitting around drinking Coca-Cola out of plastic cups. But Sari has chosen the Fairmont because she wants the meeting to be held on neutral territory. She has chosen this suite because it is prettier and more intimate than some of the hotel's standard meeting rooms. Not that this is expected to be a cozy little gathering of old friends. It is more like a council of war.

Assaria LeBaron is deliberately avoiding eye contact with any of the others in the room. Let them wonder, she thinks, what she will do first. Instead, she watches as the black court stenographer, who has been engaged to record the proceedings for posterity, deftly removes her little machine from its impossibly small black case, extends its slender tripod legs, and sets the machine upon the tripod. With this small gadget, with its handful of little symbols, she will record every syllable that is spoken and then, magically, transform her symbols back into written words. A small packet of white stenographic tape appears, folded accordion fashion, and is fed into the machine by the young woman's efficient, crimson-lacquered fingers, a tape that will soon be filled with impossible-to-decipher symbols—impossible, that is, for everyone but her.

She is a beauty, this black woman, with skin that has an almost purple hue, and a long, aristocratic neck, and the profile of Nefertiti. Her bearing is that of an aristocrat beyond aristocracy, an Ethiopian princess, secure in her breeding, her beauty, and her high art. This princess-priestess wears her glistening jet-black hair pulled tightly away from her face, and secured in a bun in the back. Her hair has the glossy sheen and luster of a black walnut veneer, and a clever trompe l'oeil paint job cannot be ruled out. Her high cheekbones have been blushed with the faintest persimmon color. Within this perfectly sculpted head are encapsulated all sorts of arcane transliterative powers and sciences. She frowns disdainfully at her machine, and then her nostrils flare imperiously as she seats herself in front of it, and poises her long, slender fingers above its keyboard. “May I please have,” she says, “the names and positions of everyone at the meeting, starting with the gentleman seated at the head of the table, and then moving clockwise around the table?” Her fingers are ready for the responses.

“William C. Whitney,” says Bill Whitney, the prissy little secretary of Baronet's board. “Secretary, Board of Directors, Baronet Vineyards, Incorporated.”

“Harry Boyd Tillinghast,” says Harry, who is seated on Bill Whitney's left. “Baronet shareholder of record.”

“Eric O'Brien LeBaron, shareholder,” says Eric, who is next.

“Eldridge R. Nugent, representing Mrs. Joanna LeBaron Kiley, attorney with the firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore, One Chase Manhattan Plaza, New York City,” says Joanna's lawyer, and the young black woman's fingers move noiselessly across her keyboard, her face expressionless.

“Joanna LeBaron Kiley,” says Joanna. “And I think I should add that I am known professionally as Mrs. Joanna LeBaron. I, too, am a LeBaron shareholder of record. And I'd like to put on the record here that, though my son, Lance LeBaron, cannot be present at this meeting due to the press of business, I have here my son's power of attorney and executed proxy. In any voting that should occur at this meeting, I will be voting my son's shares for him.”

“Noted,” says Bill Whitney.

Typically Joanna, Sari thinks. Can't just give her name, rank, and serial number like everybody else. Has to make a little speech.

“Jonathan Baines,” says the first of Sari's lawyers, who is seated on her right. “I am an attorney with the firm of Jacobs and Siller, San Francisco, and I represent Mrs. Assaria LeBaron.”

The responses now turn a corner of the table, and come to Sari, seated at the other head opposite Bill Whitney. She says in a clear voice, “Assaria Latham LeBaron, president and chief executive officer of Baronet Vineyards, and shareholder.”

On her left, her second lawyer says, “Simon Rosenthal, attorney, also of Jacobs and Siller, and also representing Assaria LeBaron.”

I have two lawyers to Joanna's one, Sari thinks. This ought to give me at least a psychological advantage.

“Peter Powell LeBaron, Junior,” says Peeper. “Vice-president for advertising and marketing of Baronet Vineyards, and shareholder.”

Now the responses arrive at an empty chair. No one has failed to notice that Melissa has not appeared. The meeting was called for nine o'clock, and it is past that hour now. And so the roll call skips Melissa's place, and moves to the last gentleman at the table, Melissa's lawyer, Mr. Kline, who is playing with a pencil and doing his best not to seem concerned by the situation. “I am J. William Kline, Junior,” he says, “an attorney with the firm of Bartless, Mather, Brooks and Kline. Our firm represents Miss Melissa LeBaron, shareholder, who should be arriving at any moment.”

“Do you hold Melissa LeBaron's proxy, Mr. Kline?” Bill Whitney asks him.

“No, I do not,” he says. “But when I spoke to my client last night, she assured me she would be here. I suspect—”

“Traffic,” says Sari. “There's heavy traffic on the bridge. I heard it on the radio this morning.”