The LeBaron Secret

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  From here, the waters of the Bay seem calm, but this is deceptive. The Bay is filled with tricky tides and dangerous crosscurrents, as prisoners who used to try to escape by swimming from Alcatraz soon discovered, and these tides and crosscurrents never sleep, and only drowned bodies ever made it to the shore.

  The south facade of the house is dark, but from the north bright lights shine from all the windows, and at times like this the house seems all eyes and ears, and there are whispers that only Sari hears. Is love important? I mean, is it important to be in love?

  In the drawing room, Thomas has filled the silver ice bucket and the Baccarat decanters, and everything is in readiness for Assaria LeBaron’s cocktail hour—the monogrammed linen napkins (ALLeB), the silver jigger, the silver martini pitcher, the long-handled silver spoon, the ice tongs. But Sari has not entered the drawing room yet, and there is no one there to admire the expanding view as the fog continues to lift, and she has not yet mixed her first cocktail. Instead, for some reason, she is still in the long central portrait gallery, where the old wine cask sits. She touches this.

  At times, though not tonight, the wine cask is warm to the touch, indicating that some sort of chemical activity, some form of fermentation, is still going on inside. The wine has not turned to vinegar but is still living, growing, changing. Also, there are times, under certain atmospheric conditions, when the wine cask will weep. Tiny beads of moisture will gather along the tight seams of the staves—more proof that Grandpa LeBaron’s wine is still very much a living, breathing thing. Sari looks for these little beads—they sometimes appear on chilly nights like this one—but finds none.

  There is another feature of the portrait gallery that some people never notice, but that others find peculiar. All the portraits on the walls, except for Grandpa’s, which is an exact duplicate of the one hanging in Sari’s office, are of children. This was Julius LeBaron’s whim. “It will make the house stay young,” he said. And so all the members of the family were painted at around age fourteen or fifteen, which Julius considered the perfect years between childhood and adulthood. It has become a family tradition, and it has been carried on. Though the clothes they wear vary according to the period, all the portraits contain certain details in common. All the boys are painted with hoops and dogs, the girls with birds and musical instruments.

  There is Sari’s husband, Peter, dressed for his first year at Thacher. And there is Sari herself, painted as the artist imagined her at that age—for she did not meet Peter until she was some years older—seated at a piano. (Sari LeBaron cannot play a note.) And there, a certain distance away from these two, is the extraordinary Joanna, in her Miss Burke’s School uniform.

  There is Melissa. “When did she get to be a beauty?” Peter once asked. She’s always been a beauty, you silly man. And there are the twins, Eric and Peeper, dressed by Robert Kirk, about to set off for Choate together. They were inseparable then, and even though Sari refused to dress them alike, they somehow always managed to do so. Athalie should be here too, but of course she isn’t. Where is Athalie?

  “Forget Athalie, Sari. Forget she ever existed.”

  But she did exist. She lived in my body for nine months. She had a name.

  A girlish portrait of Alix, Eric’s wife, is not there, for she has no business being there. She is not family. But Eric and Alix’s twin daughters are there—Kim and Sloane—twins, but so unlike. One, Kimmie, is so pretty, while the other, Sloanie, is so … not unpretty, really, but plain. The phenomenon of twinning—no one really understands it fully. It is commoner in certain countries and cultures than in others, quite a rarity among black people. At the time her own twins were born, Sari was told that her age might have had something to do with it.

  There is young Lance, Joanna’s son.

  The voices crowd in now, filling the long gallery.

  “Pick a card, any card.” This is Melissa.

  Her mother picks a card. It is 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.” Melissa shuffles the cards, then fans them out, face up. “Your card,” she cries triumphantly, “was the three of hearts!”

  “No, Melissa, it was the jack of spades.” Why hadn’t she lied and let the trick succeed? Why, in a game of checkers with Melissa, had she never let Melissa win? At best, the game would end up as a draw—a black king and a red king, endlessly pursuing each other across the board, the story of their lives.

  And now, in front of Joanna’s portrait, Sari is listening to herself and Joanna, giggling, giggling and whispering together in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park as girls. “You’ve seen a man’s thing, haven’t you?” Joanna asks.

  “Oh, of course,” Sari half-lies. “But how does it start?”

  “It starts with”—more giggling, more whispering—“it starts with—tickling.”

  “Tickling?”

  And then she hears, imagines she hears, Joanna’s throaty-husky voice, slurry from champagne: “Oh, my sweet … oh, my sweet … tickle me there … and there … and there … oh, yes … oh, my sweet.… Oh, oh, oh.… Oh, yes …”

  But this erotic fantasy is interrupted by a voice from a long-ago maid who says, “Mrs. LeBaron, it’s Mr. LeBaron senior on the telephone. He says it’s urgent.” And there is, in a secret compartment of a Regency games table in the drawing room, still a piece of green blotting paper on which, if held up to a mirror, can faintly be read the words, “I can no longer face this life …”

  All these voices and messages inhabit the picture gallery tonight. Mama LeBaron, drunk in church, cursing the Host.

  “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis …”

  Mama, staggering toward the altar, pushing aside the hands that reach out to try to restrain her, screaming, “Where is the mercy for me?”

  And then, an outside voice, from one of her many admirers: “Isn’t Sari remarkable? What she’s had to put up with from that family! Isn’t she simply wonderful? She can manage anything!”

  Except human beings. Who said that? Where did that disloyal voice come from? How dare such a statement be made in this house tonight!

  “Pick a card, any card.”

  The trick fails again. “No, Melissa …”

  They switch to a game of tic-tac-toe. No one wins it. The way Assaria LeBaron plays it, no one ever succeeds in drawing a straight line through their X’s or their O’s.

  Would it have been different, Sari asks herself, if I had not made the decision that I did long ago and once upon a time? There is no point in asking. Sari makes her way out of the portrait gallery and into the lighted drawing room with its wide view of the lighted bridge, of Alcatraz and the other islands and, beyond these, the lights of Marin; away from the voices. In the drawing room are the makings of her customary martini. This is her evening ritual.

  This house is my Alcatraz, she thinks, this house I never asked for, never said I wanted. I have been made a prisoner here, surrounded by objects I never chose. You will have eleven servants at your beck and call. But I’m not sure, Peter, how good I’ll be at becking and calling!

  Sari moves toward the drinks cart and the martini preparations. But no, first there is a small matter of business to attend to. She goes to a small French writing table, finds a sheet of her crested stationery and a pen, and writes:

  My dear Archie:

  Thank you so much for the story in this morning’s paper.

  And—ho-ho-ho!—weren’t we lucky that the snake “misbehaved”? We hadn’t expected that, but that made it “front-page stuff!” Anyway, I think this will help produce the precise results I’m after.

  Call me when you receive this note. I have another small favor to ask of you.

  Fondly, and, as always, in strictest confidence,

  A.L.LeB.

  She folds the letter, tucks it into an envelope, addresses it and seals it, then places it in a drawer for Thomas to hand-deliver in the morning.


  Then she picks up the telephone and dials. “Melissa, dear,” she says when there is an answer. “I’m about to have a cocktail. Would you like to come upstairs to join me?”

  Outside, on the dark street, the guards at the Russian Consulate are changing. Facing them, the curtained windows of the house across the street say: We are a contented house. There are no secrets here, no uneasy ghosts to rattle our sleep. We are at peace.

  Three

  In the village of Hillsborough, California, there is a curious social code, which only the initiated fully understand. Hillsborough is a very fashionable place to live, but those who understand the code know that, even if one lives there, it is not fashionable to say so. Hillsboroughites who are of the right sort always say that they live in Burlingame, which is just down the road. If you hear someone say that he or she lives in Hillsborough, you know immediately that that person is an upstart or a show-off or a climber, or all three. No one understands this code better than Alix Tillinghast LeBaron, who, though she lives in Hillsborough, is always careful to say that she lives in Burlingame. Alix LeBaron is a keen observer of all of San Francisco society’s arcane rites and rituals.

  She is also a woman who, for a ringing telephone, will drop absolutely nothing. At the moment, she is in the process of applying lacquer to her fingernails, and she has just reached the difficult part—applying the paint to the undersides of the nails, a procedure that requires great concentration and steadiness of hand, and many Kleenexes that her maid, standing beside her at her dressing table, dispenses to her, one by one, from a mirrored container. The telephone on her bedside table has rung five times now, and Alix has paid it no heed, preferring to direct her attention to the little bottle and the brush, and to the problem of the underside coating, which must go on just so, and must not be allowed to bleed over onto the flesh of the fingertips. “Damn!” she says, because that has just happened, and she reaches for a Q-Tip and the bottle of remover, for now she must start all over on that nail. The telephone rings a sixth time and a seventh.

  Finally, Alix says, “Better get that, Katie, since nobody else seems to be going to.”

  Katie goes to the telephone. “Mrs. LeBaron’s residence.” And then, “One moment, ma’am.” Covering the mouthpiece with one hand, she says, “It’s Mrs. Tobin, ma’am.”

  “Damn!” says Alix again. Katie brings the telephone to her, and Alix LeBaron takes the receiver very carefully between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, wiggling the other fingers in the air to speed the drying process. “Sweetie,” she says into the phone. “Are you coming?” And then, “Oh, divine, darling! Oh, I’m so happy … no, of course that’s no problem, darling. Bring him along. An extra man is always nice. See you in a bit, darling.” She hangs up the phone without saying good-bye. To her maid, she says, “They’re coming. Don’t you hate it when people RSVP at the last minute? And they’re bringing a friend. I’m sure he’ll be ghastly—all their friends are. I hate the Tobins. Has Mr. LeBaron come in yet?”

  “Not yet, ma’am.”

  Sitting there at her dressing table, wiggling her fingertips in the air to dry, checking the details of her makeup in the mirror, she thinks: He is, I’m certain that he is, I know he is. How do I know? I don’t know how I know, perhaps it’s woman’s intuition, but I know that I know. He is. It is not the commonplace things—the vaguely explained late evenings at the office, though there have been a few of those—not things like that. It hasn’t been any of the cliché things—the filament of long blonde hair on the shoulder of his blue suit jacket (a filament of long blonde hair could be her own), or the sudden whiff of an unfamiliar, exotic perfume, or the discovery of a stash of billets-doux. It has been nothing as precise or as incriminating as that. It is more a subtle change in his manner and attitude toward her, the occasional furtive look at her across the dinner table, a preoccupied air about him that she has noticed, and a forgetfulness. The other morning, spooning sugar into his coffee, he had for no apparent reason added a second spoonful to the cup, something she had never seen him do before. And the other night, as they were having drinks, she had noticed that he had two lighted cigarettes burning in his ashtray. It was little things like this—nothing definite to go on, to be sure—that had convinced her that her husband was getting it on with someone else. Who is it? she had almost asked him.

  And then—Wednesday, it was, of last week—she had asked him as he left for work, “Do you think the Jap would have time to address the last of these invitations for me?” It had always been their little joke, calling his Oriental secretary “the Jap.” He had referred to her as “the Jap” often, many times before. Their joke.

  “Do you mean Miss Chin?” he had said.

  “Yes—the Jap.” But he had always known who the Jap was before.

  Was it the Jap? But that would seem too much of a cliché, the obvious suspect, the secretary at the office. That was who it always was in soap operas and in comic strips, and short stories in McCall’s. Surely Eric would have better judgment, better … taste. Of course, one heard a lot about male menopause, male mid-life crisis.

  And now … tonight. He knows they are having a lot of people in for cocktails, important people—Herb Caen, the columnist, the William Crockers, the Jimmy Floods, the Tobins, and so on. And yet—where is he? It is now ten after six, and guests are invited for six-thirty.

  Her nails are dry now, inside and out, and with a soft badger brush Alix applies a touch more blush to her cheeks, blends it in, and studies her reflection in the cool glass as Katie places the choker of twisted pearls at her throat and adjusts the emerald clasp. Alix reaches for the rheostat switch and dims, just slightly, the makeup lights that frame the mirror, thereby increasing her self-allure. I haven’t held up badly, she tells herself. I’ve held up better than a lot of people I can think of. At thirty-six, I can still fit easily into the Jacques Fath I wore at my coming-out party. I’ve held up better than, for instance, Ann Getty, for all her money—Ann Getty, whom I happen to hate. I could have an affair, too, if I wanted to. If I wanted to, I could have an affair with … Peeper.

  Why not? He’d probably do it, and so would I.

  This is not a new notion of Alix’s.

  Having an affair with her husband’s twin brother is an idea that is not without a certain … piquancy. She has always wondered just how identical the twin brothers really are. Are they identical in—that way, too? Often, seeing Peeper in his swim trunks, lounging by the pool, or bouncing on the diving board, or doing a handstand on the grass—showing off—she has thought: If only he would drop his trunks for me, then I could see if they are identical in every way. Of course, it would take more than just dropping his trunks to tell. There would have to be quite a bit more than that—a lot more. His swim trunks, even those skimpy bikini kind he sometimes wears, tell her nothing at all. It would be interesting to find out. She is pretty sure she could find out, and pretty sure he wouldn’t mind.

  That would show Eric.

  Maybe tonight, she thinks, I’ll make a little move in that direction.

  “If you don’t need me for anything else, ma’am, I think I’ll see if I can help out downstairs.”

  “Thank you, Katie. You don’t think the shoulder straps of this are too narrow?”

  “You look just lovely.”

  Yes, she says to her lonely, lovely reflection in the glass, I will seduce Peeper, and I will begin tonight, and he will cooperate, and it will be only, simply fair. In her private rationale, she is entitled to an affair with Peeper. With Eric, she has always felt that she possesses only half of a matched pair, like owning a single earring, or inheriting only half of Aunt Sarah’s Spode. And instantly in the mirror the scene is transformed from her suburban dressing room to the summer moonlit terrace by the pool, where the two of them are alone. Smiling, he lets her slide the bikini briefs down the length of his body with its smooth swimmer’s muscles, and she finds him, as she knew she would, in a state of violent, stallion arousal. S
he sits on the moonlit chaise beside him, and kisses it. “You are so lovely!” he whispers, and cups one of her breasts in his hand, brushes his lips against the nipple as she studies his swollen member in her hand, so like Eric’s, and yet somehow wildly different. Alix leans forward toward the mirror, and the ivory-handled hairbrush falls into her lap, and she presses the handle against herself, just as Peeper is pressing himself against her now. In the mirror now her face is flushed with sexual excitement, which makes her beauty seem only more luminous. Between her legs, the handle of the brush presses more persistently.

  Now the second part of her fantasy begins, for Eric has joined them, and one of them has entered her from the front and the other from behind, and now she is complete, filled up with both of them. But of course this would never happen. Eric would never participate in such an outrageous, orgiastic tripling—sober, hardworking Eric and merry, carefree Peeper, the two opposing halves of that same split cell—but Alix can imagine it, anyway. In her imagination, there are no limits to the distances the three might go.

  No, she will have to settle for Eric and Peeper separately.

  And of course Eric will find out about it. She will have to confess it to him, and he will react to the news with a murderous frenzy of jealous rage—rage! But she will blame Peeper. In a torrent of tears, she will say, “But, darling, he forced me to! I must have been out of my mind to let him, but he looks so much like you I couldn’t seem to resist him—it was all so sudden, I felt so helpless! Oh, darling, forgive me—it will never happen again, I promise you!”