The LeBaron Secret

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  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 t
hen 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.

  There are several explanations for this, of course. One could argue that he was required to tackle fatherhood when he was too young, only twenty-one, and was unprepared for its demands. Or you could say that, in a sense, it was because he was forced to marry Assaria, though forced is the wrong word, because he seemed eager to marry her at the time. But you could say that he was also too young for marriage, not ready for it. Even during their engagement and the early months of their marriage, Sari had begun to feel it, though at first she would not admit it, this sense of a shadow, of a distance, falling across what was supposed to be her love and his.

  Having breakfast in their suite at the hotel in Saint Moritz that fall of 1926, waiting for Melissa to be born, he had been reading the Paris Herald Tribune, and she had said to him, “Are you happy, Peter?”

  Outside, the day was bright, and the sun was shining on the lake and on the pine trees along the shore, and sparkling on the distant snow-capped alpine peaks, and from below there was the soft plop … plop … plop of balls being lobbed back and forth across the tennis courts.

  “Happy?” he said without looking up from his paper. “Of course I’m happy, darling.”

  “I want us to be happy,” she said. “I’m going to work so hard to make ours a happy marriage, and to be a good wife.”

  “Why shouldn’t we be happy? We’re going to have everything in the world we want. Father is building us the house on Washington Street. You’re going to have a staff of eleven servants at your beck and call.”

  “Eleven servants! It’s just that I don’t know how good I’ll be at becking and at calling.”

  “Mother is selecting them, so you can be sure they’ll be excellent.”

  “It’s just—it’s just that I want us to have more than just material things, Peter. I want us to have experiences together, to see things and learn things together. I want us to travel. I’d like it if we could go to China. I want us to walk the Great Wall, visit the Forbidden City, see the Palace of the Great Mogul. And then I’d like us to learn some foreign language, and then visit some little villages in faraway countries, and see whether we could talk to them in their own language, and whether we could understand them, and learn about their lives, and—that’s the sort of thing I mean.”

  “We’ll have everything in the world we want,” he said.

  “Everything, except—except, Peter, I don’t know how to say this, but sometimes I feel so mixed up. Sometimes I wonder if we did the right thing. Did we do the right thing, Peter, getting married?”

  He smiled. “A little late to ask that question now, isn’t it?”

  “That’s not an answer, Peter.”

  “Of course we did the right thing.”

  “If you ever thought it wasn’t the right thing, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course I would, but I’m sure I’ll never need to.”

  But what she couldn’t tell him was that, despite his being her husband, she still felt that she was living with a stranger, that somehow, in agreeing to marry him, she had allowed herself to become a prisoner, a prisoner with a life sentence that could never be commuted, a permanent possession of the LeBaron family, like one of the pieces of heirloom silver that her mother-in-law had explained were to be passed on from generation to generation.

  Lifting the coffeepot, he said, “More coffee, darling?”

  “Thank you, Peter.”

  He filled her cup. “Cream and sugar?”

  “No,” she said, and laughed. “I know I shouldn’t mind, I know a bride shouldn’t mind that she’s been married nearly three months, and her husband still doesn’t remember that she takes her coffee black.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Now, can I get back to my paper?”

  “And a bride shouldn’t mind, I know that, if her husband wants to read the paper. All men read the paper in the morning over breakfast. No, I don’t mind. But can I ask you just one more question, Peter?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you love me, Peter?”

  “Of course I love you. I love you very much.”

  “And I love you,” she said.

  Many years later, she asked Joanna about this. “You know, I think Peter loves me, Jo,” she said. “He’s never treated me with anything but
kindness. But it’s just—how can I put it, Jo? It’s just that, when I first met him, there was real ardor—real passion, I guess you’d call it, between us. A thrilling, passionate kind of loving we experienced together. Then, later, it wasn’t there. If there were another woman, a mistress even, I would understand it. I could accept that. But there isn’t any.”

  Joanna gave her an odd, mischievous look. “Well,” she said. “who knows? There may be another woman.”

  Having just said that she could accept it if there were another woman, it was hard for Sari to know what to say next, but she said it anyway. “Then who? Who could it be?”

  “My dear, I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  “Is love important, Jo? Is it important to be in love?”

  Joanna smiled. “In my lusty youth, I used to think so. Now I think the answer is hard work.”

  How does one tell another woman, even one’s best friend, that in fourteen years of marriage to a man, there has been no sex in the marriage, no sex at all? Though there was sex before. Now it is only endearments: “I love you, Peter.” “I love you, too, Sari.”

  And so, for her, the answer had been the same—work, hard work, out in the vineyards on her hands and knees alongside her husband and the Chinks and the wetbacks and the Okies from the Dust Bowl, planting and transplanting vines, chip-budding the new stalks by hand with a grafting knife, and slowly getting rich again. (“How rich are we, Grandma?” Kimmie had asked just yesterday. “It seems that all Mother and Daddy talk about is money anymore.” “Rich enough so that your Grandpa Tillinghast thinks he’d like to take over our company,” she had answered.)

  Then, in 1941, when Melissa turned fifteen, Sari made a discovery that cut like a knife through her heart, that night when she and Peter and Joanna were dining at the Mural Room.

  About the same time, another disturbing event had taken place. Thomas had reported it to her. “I must speak to you right away, Madam,” he had said.

  “Certainly, Thomas.”

  “I went down to open up the pool enclosure,” he said. “It’s such a nice day that I thought Madam might enjoy her swim in the fresh air.”

  “Yes …”