The LeBaron Secret

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “No one gives advice to my mother.”

  “Or, if she were forced to sell, by a majority of other stockholders.”

  “Ha!” Eric says. “No way!”

  “Now, don’t be so defeatist, Eric. There’s always a way—that’s my motto. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

  “Not with Mother.”

  “Don’t be too sure, Eric,” Harry says. He takes a deep puff on his cigar and exhales a series of perfectly formed smoke rings. Staring at the ceiling and the dissolving rings, he says, “What would you say, Eric, if I told you that I was interested in taking over Baronet?”

  “I’d say you were crazy.”

  “Maybe so, maybe no. It’s a damned good company, and what I’m saying is that I—and by I, I mean Kern-McKittrick—am interested in taking over Baronet. And by I, I also mean you and I. I’ll need your help.”

  “Pop, there’s just no way to do it.”

  “Because my object in doing this would be to put you in the driver’s seat. Completely. Baronet would become a division of Kern-McKittrick, and you’d be head of it. Completely. You’d be at the helm, and she’d be out. What would you say to that?”

  Eric shakes his head. “I dunno, Pop. I just dunno.”

  “She’s not the majority stockholder, you know. There’s yourself, your brother, your sister, your aunt Joanna, your cousin Lance—and me. With enough votes on our side, we could get her out. And you in.”

  He shakes his head again. “Pop, I just don’t think we could ever pull it off.”

  “Look at it this way, son. Your mother owns thirty-five percent of the outstanding shares, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And your aunt Joanna owns another thirty-five percent—correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And, together, you and I own five percent. Melissa owns another five, and Peeper another five. Would Peeper and Melissa go along with us?”

  “I wouldn’t count on Peeper for too much at this point,” Eric says.

  “Then there’s your cousin Lance. Somehow, he got fifteen percent under your daddy’s will.”

  “The will was meant to be fair—fifteen percent for his kids, and fifteen percent for his sister’s kids. What happened was that Joanna only had one child.”

  “I understand that. My question to you is this: If it came to a vote, would Lance vote with his mother, or against her?”

  “With her, I guess.”

  “Yes, that would be my guess, too. He’s never shown any interest in Baronet beyond collecting dividends, has he?”

  “It’s been at least five years since he’s even come to California.”

  “So you see, Joanna is our key. With her votes and Lance’s plus yours and mine, we have a clear majority—fifty-five percent.”

  Eric considers this for a moment. “Yeah,” he says at last, “but Joanna, besides being my aunt, is also my mother’s oldest and dearest friend.”

  “Somehow, son, when big money is involved, friendship turns out not to count for much—even the oldest, dearest kind. Sounds cynical to say so, but that’s what I’ve found in business. Money talks, and the bigger it is the louder.”

  “But suppose Mother threatened to take our ad account away from Joanna’s agency unless Joanna agreed to go along with her? How would that look in the press? ‘LeBaron and Murdock lose family account.’ Pretty humiliating.”

  “If Joanna’s worried about that, she must know your mother isn’t such an old and dear friend,” Harry says.

  “No, but that’s just the sort of thing Mother might—”

  “So all we do is make that part of the deal. If Joanna will go along with us, we agree to keep the business with her agency—hell, for twenty, twenty-five years, whatever she wants. And we sweeten the deal by agreeing to pay her full commission, which she isn’t getting now.”

  Eric studies his father-in-law’s face. “You know,” he says. “I’m beginning to think it might work.”

  “Plus, I understand that this morning your mother turned down a new ad campaign that Joanna’s people had worked up. And turned it down in not a very ladylike way, or a very friendly way. Joanna won’t be too happy about that, will she?”

  “How,” Eric asks slowly, “did you hear about that?”

  “Peeper mentioned it tonight at the party. He and your mother had some sort of meeting this afternoon.”

  Peeper! That stupid horse’s ass! How much else did Peeper tell him? Probably everything, Eric thinks. But he says, “That ad campaign happened to be shit!”

  Harry spreads his hands. “That’s neither here nor there,” he says. “The point is that Joanna’s not going to be very happy when she hears about this morning’s meeting, is she? Not all that happy about the way her old, dear friend is treating her. Peeper told me that Assaria said that Joanna must be losing her marbles—right in front of Joanna’s own account exec and creative team!”

  Peeper!

  “Golly, if that goes into her people’s conference report—and it might, because I gather those boys were sore as hell—how’s that going to make Joanna feel about her old, dear friend?” Harry leans toward him. “Joanna’s our key, and this may be just the moment, boy, to make Joanna a nice fat offer of Kern-McKittrick stock if she’ll help us vote your mother out. You see, the trouble with your mother is that she doesn’t keep her promises. I think you’ve had some evidence yourself of that.”

  Suddenly Eric laughs. He has just remembered Fairy Ferris, and the call-back list. “Her call-back list,” he says.

  “What’s that?”

  “After Dad died, and Peeper and I were still pretty young, Mother told us that she was going to have to be both a mother and a father to us now. And then we were sent away to school, and we hardly ever heard from her. Once a month there was our allowance check, with a typed note from her secretary. Oh, she’d telephone us a couple of times a week, and Peeper and I’d get a message that our mother had called. But half the time she called it was either during study hall, or after lights-out, or in the middle of a soccer game, or some damn thing like that, so we didn’t get to talk to her. We’d call back, and be told that she was in conference and we’d be put on her call-back list. She never wrote us letters.

  “Hey, we used to ask ourselves, where’s this mother-and-a-father bit? And then, in the middle of our first year at Choate, Peeper and I got into big trouble—when you’re thirteen, any trouble seems like big trouble. We were scared we were going to be expelled, and so I tried to call my mother—it was about this guy we all called Fairy Ferris, who was trying to sort of blackmail us—and—” Eric sees his father-in-law stifling a yawn, and Eric stares down at his empty glass. “Anyway,” he says, “it’s a long story, and pretty boring. But when I tried to get Mother on the phone to tell her, her secretary wouldn’t put me through, even though I said it was an emergency. Her secretary said all she could do was put my name on Mother’s call-back list. There were about a hundred names on the list ahead of mine, so it was about eight hours before she returned my call, and by then—well, never mind.”

  “Well, I’ve never understood your mother,” Harry says. “She’ll say one thing and then do another. She likes to keep things stirred up. Maybe she thinks that by keeping things stirred up she gets everybody to work harder. Maybe she thinks that if people don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing from one day to the next, it’ll keep them on their toes and they won’t settle into a routine. This new plan to make Peeper co–marketing director, for instance.”

  “So Peeper told you about that, too.”

  “What’s that going to accomplish besides stirring things up between you and your brother? I say that’s no way to run a business. All that does is create divisiveness and a bunch of unhappy executives on your team.”

  “Yes,” Eric says with a sigh. “It does that.”

  “So what you’re trying to tell me, with that story about her whatchamacallit list, is that you’re sick and tired of bei
ng treated like a thirteen-year-old, right?”

  “I guess so,” he says. But it wasn’t that, not really.

  “Well, I agree. We’ve got to let you achieve your full potential. And, like I say, Joanna is our key. And I’m not saying that it’s not going to be tricky. It may be very tricky. We’ve got some rough road to cover, there’s no denying that. There’s no free lunch, as the fellow says, and it would be a good idea to get Peeper and Melissa on our side, too—”

  “Forget Peeper!”

  “Well, at least Melissa, then. And with Kern-McKittrick behind you, boy, I’m telling you it can be done!” With his free hand, he reaches out and clamps his palm firmly across Eric’s knee. “Son,” he says, “I’ve built a life, built a career, built a business worth more than eight hundred million dollars, watched myself become a rich man, done it all with just one basic philosophy—nothing is impossible. Everything is possible. If you want a thing hard enough, bad enough, big enough, the impossible is always possible. Everything I’ve done in life, I’ve done believing that. So—are you with me, son?”

  Eric looks across at him, and their eyes meet and lock. “As it happens, I’m having dinner with Joanna in New York tomorrow night,” he says.

  “Strike—while the iron is hot. Don’t tell her her campaign was shit, even if it was. Tell her that it was brilliant, and how your mother gunned it down.” Harry’s tone, now, grows sentimental, and his eyes grow moist. “I want it for my baby girl,” Harry Tillinghast says. “And I want it for my beautiful grandkids, and for your grandkids, and their grandkids, and I also want it for you, son. For you.”

  Four

  In the White Wedding-Cake House at 2040 Washington Street, atop Pacific Heights, it is ten o’clock, and Assaria LeBaron and her daughter, Melissa—who has stayed on for dinner at her mother’s suggestion—are also having a nightcap, in the north drawing room overlooking the Bay and the Golden Gate. The fog has lifted completely now, and the tops of the bridge’s towers are fully visible, and tomorrow may be crystal clear, though one cannot be sure. Often, in the hours just before dawn, the fog will come sweeping in from the ocean again, and by daybreak the city will again be enshrouded.

  On the whole, the evening has gone well to Sari’s way of thinking—giggly and intimate, the way the two so often used to be together. The evening has been a sentimental tour down memory lane, with Sari as its guide, concentrating, of course, only on the happy memories. Do you remember …? they have been asking themselves. Do you remember when you were a little girl, Melissa, five or six, and we were spending the summer at Bitterroot, and you came running into the house and said, “Mother, there’s a whole celebration of dandelions on the front lawn!” Did I say that? You did, you did, and I thought, what a wonderful expression—a celebration of dandelions! And I thought, what a wonderful imagination Melissa has! No, I don’t remember that, Mother, but I do remember the day, at Bitterroot, when the bees swarmed in your hair. Oh, yes, yes, I remember that vividly. I’d been swimming in the lake, and I was letting my hair dry in the sun. First one bee came, and I started to brush it away, and then more came, and then I saw the whole swarm coming, and I saw that the swarm intended to settle there, hanging down my back from my hair. And we were all so terrified, Mother—I remember that I screamed. We all thought you were going to be stung to death! Yes, I remember that you screamed, and I remember telling you to hush, that there wasn’t any danger. You see, even then I knew my bees. Bees in a swarm will almost never sting. I knew that all I had to do was sit very still, no sudden movements, and wait until the bees had decided where to locate their new hive. After about twenty minutes, they began to fly away, and soon they were all gone, and I wasn’t stung, not once. I was so terrified, Mother! Not I—it was a very peaceful feeling, really, almost like a religious experience—at least the closest thing I’ve ever had to one.

  The lake. Do you remember the time Father threw me off the pier, into the deep water of the lake, thinking that this would make me teach myself to swim? No! I remember no such thing! I guess I was afraid to tell you, Mother, afraid you’d think it was just another one of my crazy fantasies. But it happened. I was sitting on the edge of the pier, splashing my feet in the water, and he suddenly reached down, lifted me by the armpits, and tossed me out into the deep water. I remember myself slowly sinking, and thinking to myself, Well, so this is what it is like to drown. I am drowning now, and this is what it is like. As the water got darker around me, I made no effort to save myself, and simply let myself sink like a stone. You mean you didn’t kick your legs, move your arms …? No, and I remember my first mouthful of water. Melissa! Because, you see, I used to think Father wanted to kill me. I thought at the time: Well, my father wants me to drown, and now he is drowning me, so I will drown.

  Melissa—what a foolish, foolish thought!

  He never loved me, you know. I remember being quite surprised when I felt someone’s arms around me, pulling me to the surface, and realized he had jumped in the lake to save me.

  (Or, in your perverse way, you wanted to terrify your father, punish him by making him think he had almost drowned you, Sari thought, but she has not said this.)

  Change the subject. Do you remember the wonderful picnics we used to have, Melissa? Do you remember the day your father shot the spider? Bees I understand, but spiders have always terrified me. Suddenly, while we were having our picnic, this huge spider came crawling toward me across the grass, and this time it was I who was screaming. And your father simply reached into his belt, where he always carried his pistol, pulled the pistol out, and shot the spider! Why did he always carry a pistol, Mother? Well, remember that we are talking about the nineteen thirties, Melissa. There were lots of labor troubles in those days, trouble with the field hands. He thought it was a good idea to carry a pistol in his belt, just to let them know that he had it. To my knowledge, he never used it except that one time, to kill my spider …

  (Except—except one other time. But change the subject.)

  Do you remember …?

  Oh, oh, oh. What fun we had.

  Now, over their nightcaps, Melissa is showing her mother the snapshots from her trip to Paris, where she went for Christmas to visit galleries and museums, and Sari is paying only half-attention to the photographs. It has been a long day, and though she has accomplished much, there is still much more that remains to be accomplished. In the soft lamplight, with her hair framing her face, Melissa’s years seem to fade away, at least many of them, and her youthful beauty becomes visible. The same fine facial bones are there, and Melissa still wears her hair in a youthful style. When did she get to be a beauty? She’s always been a beauty, you silly man. It’s just—

  To Sari’s way of thinking, Melissa is too thin. But that is the way she’s always been, proud of her size-six figure, proud of her size-four shoes, which, with high heels, enhance her slender legs. Melissa is always weighing herself and measuring herself, the better to rid herself of any errant pound, any errant inch, the minute it appears on her Fairbanks scale or tape measure. Accepting the snapshots as Melissa hands them to her, one by one, Sari makes the appropriate pro forma comments. “Ah, the Palais du Louvre … I haven’t been to Paris for years, I must go back … ah, the Eiffel Tower … and Versailles … lovely … oh, look, the Christmas lights on the chestnut trees along the Champs-Elysées … the fountain at Concorde … lovely … the Place de l’Opéra … oh, I remember these places all so well, Melissa. But now where’s this?”

  “Vincennes.”

  “Oh, of course, of course.”

  “And this is me, in front of the Plaza Athenée. I had the doorman take it for me.”

  “Very pretty.… And now who’s this?” Another unfamiliar view.

  “My ski instructor.”

  “Very good-looking. But—ski instructor? Where did you ski in Paris?”

  “This wasn’t Paris. This was in Saint Moritz.”

  Sari hesitates. “Saint Moritz? You didn’t tell me you were going to Sain
t Moritz, Melissa.”

  Melissa glances at her mother. “Didn’t I?”

  “You most certainly didn’t.”

  “Well,” Melissa says, “I did. It was so close, and so I thought, why not?” She hands her mother another picture.

  “Another of the handsome ski instructor. Do I detect a romance here, Missy?”

  Melissa laughs. “No, but he helped me work on my parallel turns.”

  Taking another picture, Sari says, “And who is this gentleman?”

  “Andrea Badrutt. He owns the Palace Hotel.”

  Sari stares at the picture. “Andrea Badrutt. He was just a little boy when I first knew him. He’s an old man now.”

  “Yes, and quite lame, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Andrea Badrutt,” she repeats. “So you stayed at the Palace.”

  “Yes.”

  “And never mentioned a word of this to me. I find that quite extraordinary.”

  “I guess I just forgot,” Melissa says. “I wanted to go back and see the place where I was born.”

  “How very—odd. Whatever for?”

  “I don’t see anything odd about a person’s wanting to see the place where she was born,” Melissa says.

  “I still find it odd. I would never want to go back to see the place where I was born.”

  “Well,” Melissa says carefully, “I guess I’m a person who’s always done odd things, aren’t I, Mother?”

  “Oh, no,” Sari says quickly. “Not odd. Unconventional, perhaps. And imaginative. ‘A celebration of dandelions’—I’ll never forget that. But I do think it’s odd that you never mentioned this part of your travel plans to me. And—but never mind.” Change the subject. “Speaking of attractive young men, have you seen any more of that nice Archie McPherson lately?”

  “Not recently, no.”

  “He’s so attractive. And I think he likes you. Have you been to bed with him yet?”

  “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.”