The LeBaron Secret

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Mr. Baines begins snapping his briefcase closed. “Well, we’ve given you our best recommendations,” he says. “There’s nothing more we can say.”

  “You’ve wasted an hour of my time to tell me there’s nothing I can do.”

  “The only thing I can suggest that you do,” he says, “is what you can accomplish with your personal powers of persuasion in terms of the others in your family. Meanwhile, keep us abreast of developments.”

  When they have gone, she buzzes for Gloria Martino. “See if you can get Eric on the phone for me,” she says.

  In Burlingame, Alix LeBaron is lying under a towel on her massage table, having a pedicure performed on one end of her anatomy and a massage performed on the other. As usual, she lets the telephone ring five or six times before reaching a bare arm out from under the towel to answer it.

  “Well, Belle-mère,” she says, “I hardly expected to hear your voice. I didn’t think you were speaking to anyone in this household. Except Kimmie, of course. Kimmie’s somehow the only one in this household who’s managed to escape your wrath.”

  “I was wondering if I could speak to Eric,” Sari says.

  “Eric is playing the golf this morning, Belle-mère.” Alix is the kind of woman who always calls golf “the golf.” “May I take a—ugh!—a message for him? Forgive me if my voice sounds funny, but I’m simply being pounded to death by this brute.” She winks up at the ample, peasant face of the Swedish masseuse. She realizes that Sari doesn’t have the faintest idea what she is talking about, but doesn’t care.

  “I was calling to see whether you both could have dinner with me tomorrow night, Alix. Joanna’s coming into town, and I thought a nice little family dinner would be pleasant. Very casual. Nothing dressy.”

  “Well, this is a switch, isn’t it, Belle-mère? One minute you discharge Eric from the company, and the next minute you ask us to dinner.”

  “I just thought a little family dinner would be pleasant. See if we can perhaps iron out some of our differences.”

  “I see,” Alix says. “I can’t speak for Eric, of course, because he’s out playing the golf. But I do know that we happen to be free.”

  “Then will you come?”

  “Are—ugh!—are you inviting Daddy, too? Because this merger thing is all essentially Daddy’s idea.”

  “Well, actually, I hadn’t planned to.”

  “Daddy’s a stockholder too, Belle-mère.”

  “I know, but this isn’t to be a meeting of the stockholders, Alix. Just a little family dinner.”

  “Isn’t Daddy family? He’s my father.”

  “I know that, but—”

  “I think Eric would be much more willing to come if he knew that Daddy were going to be there.”

  “Very well. We can invite Daddy.”

  “And Mummy?”

  “Daddy and Mummy. Shall I expect you then? At seven-thirty?”

  “I’ll have to check with Eric. Call you back, Belle-mère.” With another long reach, she replaces the receiver in its cradle without saying good-bye.

  Soon she is back to her musings. Having her massage always makes her pleasantly drowsy, and from the table where she lies—on her stomach now—being kneaded, prodded, and poked by Helga, she can see a spray of red rambler roses arching just above her window sill. Roses are red, violets are blue, angels in heaven don’t get to screw. The sun is shining on the roses. In San Francisco, there is fog. She heard that on the TV this morning. That is one reason why Alix is glad she lives in Burlingame and not in the city. The fog, the fog, the soggy, soggy fog. The heat from the Valley does it. The heat from the Valley sucks in the cold fog from the ocean through the Golden Gate. Or something like that. It gets sucked in through the Golden Gate and stays there while here, barely ten miles further south, the sun is shining, which is why you get red rambler roses here, and not there, and why you also get geraniums and lemon and verbena and palm and, if you’re lucky, a banana tree. She has had a particularly satisfying morning.

  It has been, needless to say, a bit of a bore in recent days, having Eric around the house all day. I married you for better or for worse, but not for lunch, she had told him. But today, at least, he has the golf, and that is a relief, and in this morning’s mail there had been his bank statement, and she had opened it and found a check for $10,000 made out to Marylou Chin.

  She had immediately hopped into her little white Porsche and run downtown and had the check Xeroxed—both sides, of course—and then come home, put the check back into the statement, and put all his mail on his desk.

  Then she had telephoned Marylou Chin. “Miss Chin, this is Alix LeBaron speaking,” she had said.

  “Yes, Mrs. LeBaron. How are you?”

  “I’m well. Have you been sleeping with my husband?”

  There was a brief, incriminating pause, and then Miss Chin had said, “Certainly not. What a thing to say!”

  “You’re lying,” Alix had said. “I know you have. I have the proof.”

  “What sort of proof?”

  “Proof enough.”

  “Mrs. LeBaron, if you won’t tell me what you’re talking about, I’d like to terminate this conversation. Good—”

  “A check for ten thousand dollars,” Alix says, and adds, “among other things.”

  “When Mr. LeBaron was forced to leave the company, I was also terminated. Mr. LeBaron was kind enough to offer me that money to help tide me over until I could find another job. It was a loan.”

  “Rather a large sum of money, don’t you think, Miss Chin? To tide you over, as you say.”

  “I have an aunt, my aunt Grace, in a nursing home. There’s no one to take care of her but me.”

  “A likely story!” Alix had said. “The old aunt-in-the-nursing-home routine. You’re lying, and you know it.”

  “Mrs. LeBaron, I am telling you the truth. If you want, I can—”

  “How long have you been fucking my husband?”

  “Mrs. LeBaron, I am not going to listen to—”

  “Well, you’d better watch out, is all I can say. Because I have the proof, and I know you’re lying, you lying little sluttish little whoring Jap cunt.” Then she had hung up the phone, feeling thoroughly vindicated. Lying Jap cunt.

  “Helga, work a little more on that little roll of fat right around my tummy,” she says. “Really work hard on that today.”

  “Is no roll of fat. You imagine.”

  “I’m not imagining it! It’s there! I saw it in my mirror this morning.”

  And so they had come home from Bitterroot that autumn of 1929 to find Julius LeBaron’s affairs in a shambles. “What am I going to do?” he said to them in a dead voice, as though the answer lay in their blank faces. He had been heavily into the market, and had been buying on margin, and had been forced to sell it all to cover this, and now the creditors were pressing him, and the banks were calling on him for more collateral to cover loans. The brokerage house where he did the majority of his business had collapsed, and his broker was out on the street, and the banks—the Crocker Bank, the Wells Fargo Bank, the Anglo-California Bank—the same banks whose presidents had invited Julius LeBaron for lunch in their boardrooms six months ago, were now demanding more collateral, which he didn’t have. “What am I going to do?” he kept asking in that dead, bewildered voice.

  “We will pray,” Constance LeBaron had said. “We will pray to the Blessed Virgin to intercede for us. We will pray, Father, we will make a novena. Ave Maria, gratia plena …” Sari could tell that Constance LeBaron had been drinking. And the prayers went upward into the ether, into the crystalline rooms of heaven while Constance LeBaron did her beads. “Blessed Mother, Mother of Mercies, Mother of Miracles and Holy Mysteries, send me a red rose to show me my prayers are being answered …” But no red rose had appeared, and no miracle occurred.

  Later—days, weeks, because time seemed to telescope upon itself during that period when Sari and Peter spent most of their time in the Washington Street house,
still new, still unpaid for, as they would find out later, worrying and wondering what was going to happen next—a message had come for Sari. “Mrs. LeBaron, Mr. LeBaron, senior, wants to see you at once. He says it’s urgent.”

  She had gone to the California Street house, which now seemed suddenly to have become very dark, as though even the gilt and red plush had become covered with a dark patina of age and overuse. He had been sitting in the shadows in his chair, looking out the window into the fog, and she had entered the room from behind him.

  “Sari, are you strong?” he had asked her. “Are you strong enough to carry Peter, and the little girl?”

  “Carry him?” Why had there been an air of unreality, of theatricality, about this meeting with her father-in-law? It was as though losing his money had changed Julius LeBaron utterly, turned him hollow, into a walking ghost, and she had felt strangely that she was not speaking to a man she knew, but to another actor on a stage.

  “One reason why I approved this marriage while, as you know, Mother strongly opposed it, was because I believed that you were strong. Peter is not strong. Of the two of you, Peter is the weaker vessel. I have always known that. Can you carry him, Sari, when I am gone? I mean carry him, support him, back him up, be his backbone? As you know, Peter never finished college, he has no training, no profession, no capacity for hard work. What will become of him? You must help him.”

  “Physically, Peter is very strong,” she said.

  “I’m not talking about physical strength,” he said. “I’m not talking about cutting down trees. Inner strength. Courage. Gumption, guts. Will you provide those things for him, Sari? Stand behind him—carry him?”

  “I’ll try, Papa Julius.”

  “Is that a promise?”

  “I promise, Papa Julius.”

  “I’ve always tried to keep my promises to you, haven’t I, Sari?”

  “Yes, Papa Julius.”

  “Then you must keep this promise to me. Carry him. Somehow.”

  “It’s a promise, Papa Julius,” she had repeated.

  He had turned his head toward her slightly, and she had seen that there were tears in his eyes. “You’re a good girl, Sari,” he said. “If only things hadn’t—happened as they did—things might have been different. But that’s crying over spilt milk, isn’t it? That’s past. That’s water over the dam, water under the bridge, and we can’t change what’s past, no more than the leopard can change his spots. But you were good to do what you did, Sari, and I want you to know I’ll always be grateful.”

  “Thank you, Papa Julius. Please don’t cry.”

  He brushed at his eyes with the back of his left wrist. “I think Joanna’s in her room right now. Will you see if you can find her, Sari, and send her down to see me?”

  “Joanna is strong, too,” she said. “We’ll do our duty for each other. We promised to.” But once more she had felt as though she were reciting lines of dialogue, written for her by someone else.

  By the summer of 1930, after a brief, misleading rally, Wall Street prices had broken again, and begun a long decline that would last for years. With world production falling, with unemployment in the United States passing four million, and with breadlines everywhere, the harsh realities of the Great Depression had become daily facts of life. Every day, it seemed, the economic news in the newspapers was more alarming, and there was even more disturbing talk of revolution. Wealthy Americans who had come out of the crash with anything at all were moving to Europe, in fear of their lives. By now, the banks owned Julius LeBaron’s house on California Street, though they permitted him to live there until the house could be sold. But that might be never, since no buyers had appeared for the big house. And the latest threat was that the banks were considering razing the house and turning it into a parking lot.

  Every morning, now, Constance LeBaron went to mass and took communion, while her husband remained alone in the house, brooding in his chair, considering who knew what fatalistic possibilities. Constance had begun having visions. In one of these, her own mother had risen from her grave and come to confront Constance as she sat at her dinner table. Her mother had spoken to her in an alien tongue, but Constance had understood the message. The Blessed Virgin was punishing her, her mother said, for touching her private parts when she was a child. In another vision, the Blessed Virgin herself had appeared out of a gin bottle, holding a red rose high in the air, and when Constance had tried to seize the rose, the Blessed Virgin had said to her sternly, “Go to Calvary!” In still another vision, Constance herself had been bodily transported to the shrine at Lourdes, where, in the grotto, the Virgin appeared once more, and delivered the same message. It was hard to interpret what any of these experiences meant.

  Sometimes, Constance would ask Sari and Peter to accompany her to mass because Joanna, following her divorce, had been on poor terms with the Church. Sari, of course, was not a communicant, though she went through the proper motions of the mass. Before marrying Peter, Sari had gone through a brief period of religious instruction, but she really understood little of the intricacies and mysteries of the Catholic faith. In return for this, and the promise that any children would be raised as Roman Catholics, the Church had agreed to marry Sari and Peter—but in the chancel, not in the nave. And their cause had been helped by the fact that the LeBarons’ family priest, Father Quinn, had just been designated a monsignor.

  One Saturday morning in July of 1930, Constance telephoned and asked if Sari and Peter would take her to mass. When they arrived at the house, Constance explained that she had just had another vision. Her dead mother had reappeared—this time in her bathroom mirror while she was putting up her hair. Once more her mother had berated her for touching her private parts with her fingertips when she was a little girl, but this time she had added some new information. The cause of the Great Depression, Constance’s mother had explained, was Joanna. Joanna’s brief marriage three years earlier and her divorce six months later had brought all this disaster about. Not only that. “My daughter is to blame for all the sins of the world,” Constance said. “All the sins of the world. My mother told me so. In heaven, my daughter is called Satana, the whore of California Street.”

  “Now, Mama LeBaron, I wouldn’t take any of this too seriously,” Sari said.

  “In heaven, my mother has breakfast with the Blessed Virgin every Thursday. She sits on the right hand of God.”

  Sari could tell that Mama LeBaron had been drinking again. There was liquor on her breath, and her hair, perhaps because the preparation of her coiffure had been interrupted by the vision, was in disarray. How was it, she began to wonder, that at a time when there didn’t seem to be money for anything else, there was still money for gin? But she hadn’t asked that question.

  At the Church of Our Lady of the Cadillac—as the Cathedral of Saint Peter Martyr was often affectionately called, since most of its parishioners had at least once upon a time been wealthy—they arrived a little early, while Sari and Constance knelt, in prayer, at Constance’s customary pew. In her prayers, Sari also let her thoughts fly heavenward in behalf of this benighted family. Oh, Lord, she said, if there is a Lord, let Thy mercies descend upon these unhappy people who, through the years, have bestowed so much grace on Thee. Lord, if there is a Lord, let a little of Thy grace and wisdom and compassion and forgiveness shower itself upon these, Thy humble servants, in their need. Dear Lord, if there is a Lord, remember their kindness and their devotion to Thee, and let, oh, just a little bit, of Thy kindness and devotion fall upon them, and give them peace. Lord, dear Lord, if there is a Lord, give us—something!

  Then, all at once, Constance LeBaron began to shout. “Where is Peter? Where has he gone?” she cried.

  “Hush, Mama LeBaron. He’s in the confessional.”

  “But why has he been in the confessional so long? What does he have to confess about?”

  “Peter often makes long confessions, Mama.”

  “He has nothing to confess! Peter is a saint, and
we are in Saint Peter’s church! It is my daughter who is to blame for all the sins of the world, she who is called Satana, the whore—”

  “Mama, Mama, please.”

  Peter stepped, just then, into the pew beside them, and Sari gave him a worried look, and the mass was about to begin. The priest was at the altar, and made a sign of the cross as high and as wide as his arms would reach, and a great hush of worship fell over the cathedral. “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti …” But now Constance LeBaron had begun to shout again, “Where is peace for me? Indulgence … absolution … is there any eternal life for me?

  “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi—” while the other congregants in the church tried to resist turning in their seats to see what was causing this disturbance, tried to concentrate on the solemnity of the mass, and on the sanctity of the man, God’s messenger on earth, whom He had selected to perform it. And now Mama LeBaron was on her feet, moving toward the center aisle, and Sari was reaching for her sleeve to restrain her. “Where are you going, Mama?” she whispered. “To Calvary! I am going to Calvary! It is because of my impure thoughts! This is why my daughter is known in heaven as a whore! I am going to Calvary to curse the Holy Ghost who entered me and caused me to give birth to a whore!” The priest stopped the mass and was staring at Mama LeBaron as she staggered toward the altar. “Mama, please!” Sari cried, starting after her. On the altar, someone, some generous-hearted parishioner, had placed a small bouquet of red paper roses. “A red rose!” Mama had cried. “The Blessed Virgin has heard my prayers and sent me a red rose. The Blessed Virgin, who has breakfast with my mother in heaven every Thursday, and sits on the right hand of God! Give me my rose!” But, reaching out for the paper flower, she stumbled and fell against the altar rail. Beside her, both Sari and Peter helped her to her feet again. “Come, Mama,” Sari whispered gently. “Mass is over, and it’s time to go home.”

  As they moved slowly down the aisle, the priest behind them raised his arms once more, and blessed the congregation, including the departing member, and began the mass again. “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti …”