The LeBaron Secret

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “I’m certainly going to mention the interest business to Melissa.”

  “You’re not supposed to communicate with Melissa.”

  “Oh, bull-do! Bull-do and double bull-do, Pollywog!”

  “Well,” he says a little lamely, “keep in touch.”

  “Give me a kiss,” she says, and he pecks her on the cheek. “Dear old Pollywog,” she says. And then, as he is going out the door, she calls after him, “Don’t act so glum! I know you’re worried that I’m going to use my final secret weapon. Don’t worry—it doesn’t look now as though I’m going to have to!”

  Immediately, when she is alone, she seizes a pen and stationery and writes another note to Melissa. This is against the lawyer’s instructions, of course, but Sari doesn’t give a damn. Sari has no intention of obeying lawyers whom she isn’t even paying. Dearest Melissa, she writes:

  I think your legal maneuver is absolutely brilliant! I could kick myself for not having thought of it myself, but I’ve been so preoccupied with the Tillinghast business that I haven’t been thinking clearly.

  If you pursue this matter of Lance’s dividends, be sure to ask for cumulative interest. You’re going to be richer than Gordon Getty!

  Meanwhile, I have a proposal for you. How would you like to help run Baronet—with me, as a team. We could do it, you know, with what we now know you control. I’d be prepared to offer you a very important and powerful position in the company.

  Think about this, and let me know.

  XXXX

  A.L.LeB.

  P.S. I know we’re not supposed to have “direct communication.” How about banging once on the radiator pipes if you’re interested, and twice if you’re not? Smoke signals, I’m afraid, would bring the S.F.F.D. screaming down Washington Street!

  Then she adds, as a calculated afterthought, Remember that I always loved you as though you were my own.

  Now it is night again, and the big house is silent. There have been no thumps on the water pipes, no smoke signals, no word whatsoever from downstairs. All Thomas can report is that he has not seen Melissa go out, and that Mr. Littlefield is apparently still there. He used the swimming pool, alone, for a short time this afternoon. With Melissa in the apartment, it is difficult for Thomas to search the place for clues as to what the two are up to. All Thomas can do is leave a pair of breakfast trays just inside Melissa’s door in the morning, and pick them up, outside the door, when they are finished later on. Sari has tried telephoning Melissa several times, but Cora, Melissa’s maid, who answers, will only say that Melissa is “unavailable,” or “taking a nap,” or “on her other line.” What are they doing, plotting down there? Sari tries to imagine them in an orgy of illicit drugs and sex, but that is not Melissa’s style.

  It is night, and her dinner is finished, and the guards across the street at the Russian Consulate have changed, exchanging their stiff salutes. The curtains on the Washington Street side of the house have been closed, and only the curtains on the north side, facing the Bay, have been left open to take in the famous view. Sari is alone now, and feeling a little lonely. She would like some company, but there is suddenly no one. Gabe, she got the distinct impression, was more than a little disapproving of the new stratagems she outlined this morning. Gabe, she sometimes thinks, has never really understood her. No one has. Gabe cannot understand, for instance, how a woman who has so much, so many possessions, can ever be lonely … desperately lonely.

  For company, now, there is only Thomas, and Thomas, when he has no news to impart, can be more than a little boring.

  Her secret weapon. She moves now, in her motorized wheelchair, into the portrait gallery where the secret of her secret weapon reposes. In December of 1941, the world was suddenly at war again, and Peter had tried to enlist in the navy. He was only thirty-six, but had been turned down because of high blood pressure, which he found it hard to believe he had. And that was the year and month of Melissa’s fifteenth birthday, and she had sat for her portrait in the family tradition.

  Thank heaven the artist had persuaded Melissa to pose for her portrait without the infernal glasses, and the true, fresh beauty of her face and eyes had been captured and shone through without optical impediments.

  “When did she get to be a beauty?” he had whispered when the portrait had been delivered, and she had replied, “Why, she’s always been a beauty, you silly man. You’ve just been too busy to notice. She’s got the LeBaron looks.”

  Sari had suggested hanging the portrait between Peter’s and Joanna’s portraits—the two members of the most recent generation—but suddenly and quite irritably Peter had said he did not want it there.

  “Why not? There’s such a nice resemblance to the two of you.”

  “I said I don’t want it there! I want it hung on the opposite wall. Do as I say, Sari.”

  “Well,” she had said easily, “it really doesn’t matter to me where it’s hung. We’ll hang it wherever you want it, Peter.”

  And so it had been hung on the opposite wall. But there was something about Peter’s behavior that puzzled her, disturbed her, nagged at her. It was one of her sadnesses that Peter and Melissa had never seemed able to become close to one another, that Peter had never been able to accept her as his own. Was that what it was? Was that why he wanted Melissa’s image placed as far away as possible from his own? The question nagged at her for the rest of the day.

  That evening, as it happened, they had arranged to dine with Joanna in the old Mural Room—gone now, replaced by a fancy dress shop—of the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square. It would have been an uncomfortable evening for Peter under any circumstances. One had only to look around the restaurant to see that he was one of the very few young men in the room. Already, San Francisco was becoming a city of women, of widows and waiting wives, of rowdy servicemen passing through on their way to the Pacific, and young men in civilian clothes were looked on with suspicion and distrust, as though they might be German spies. And here was handsome, healthy-looking Peter Powell LeBaron, who refused to believe that he could have high blood pressure, having dinner with his sister and his wife.

  It was supposed to have been vaguely a working dinner, and they had wanted to discuss what course the company might take now that America was at war. It was agreed that little could be decided until it was clear what direction the war was taking and, meanwhile, to see to it that supplies of Baronet wines were shipped to officers’ and servicemen’s clubs around the country.

  “We’re a working man’s wine,” Joanna said. “And who’s working harder now than our boys in the service? You might suggest that to your advertising people, Sari.”

  “Not a bad idea, Jo,” Sari said. “Not bad at all.”

  After that, Sari had tried to keep the conversation light and inconsequential, since she had noticed several women in the room had been giving Peter disapproving looks, and he himself looked unhappy. A new musical called Lady in the Dark, which had been a huge hit on Broadway and which poked gentle fun at psychoanalysis, was coming to San Francisco. Should they try to get tickets to see it? What would be the role of Soviet Russia in the war? President Roosevelt’s budget for defense was eleven billion—surely eleven billion dollars would be enough to win the war. What role would Hungary play? Yugoslavia? The Scandinavian countries?

  Then Joanna had mentioned that she had had a letter that morning from Rod Kiley, the young physician she had married briefly in 1927, following her debutante season. He had written to tell her that he had enlisted in the Army Medical Corps, and had been given a commission as a captain. He was being sent overseas, though he couldn’t say where, and was writing to explain why their son, Lance, might not be hearing from him for a while. (Four years later, he would be dead from shrapnel wounds in the Battle of Okinawa.)

  “I never understood why you didn’t stay married to him, Jo,” Peter said. “He seemed like such a—”

  “Such a nice chap, yes,” Joanna said, finishing his sentence for him. “Oh, he was certa
inly nice. Just terribly old-fashioned. You know, a Puritan Yankee New England type, with ideas about marriage that went back to the Victorian era, or even before. For instance—believe it or not—he couldn’t get over the fact that he hadn’t married a virgin. To him, I was some sort of damaged goods.”

  “But how could he have possibly known that?” he asked her.

  “Well,” she said, “it was rather obvious.”

  “But how? It isn’t really that easy—”

  “To tell? Perhaps not with some women. But in my case, it was.”

  “How?”

  She paused for a moment, looking straight at him. “Don’t you know?”

  “No.”

  She lowered her eyes. “My caesarian scar,” she said.

  He suddenly reached out—for what?—for something, and his hand struck his wineglass, knocking it over, shattering it, and red wine spread across the white tablecloth like blood. “Oh, dear!” Sari cried, reaching for a napkin, but Joanna said nothing, did nothing, but simply sat there with a small, oddly contented, curiously satisfied smile on her lips, and then, in a flash, it had come to Sari—the answer, and all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place at once. Of course, of course, Peter was Melissa’s father, of course, of course, Melissa was Peter and Joanna’s child. “Tickling …” “I’ve done a terrible thing …” “I don’t want her portrait hung there … Do as I say …” And it struck her with such suddenness and swiftness that she lost her breath, and what felt like a rush of fever surged up through her cheeks and forehead and lodged behind her eyeballs, as she looked at first one, then the other of them. Waiters appeared from all directions, dabbing at the spilled wine with napkins, picking up pieces of broken glass, and gathering up the stained tablecloth at the corners to replace it. Sari excused herself and went to the ladies’ room.

  There she washed her hands and face, reapplied her makeup, and ran a brush several times through her dark red hair. Then she studied her reflection in the mirror, thinking: I am no different, but now everything is different. “Peter fails to regard the consequences of his actions,” the president of Yale had written to his father years ago. But I love Peter. Even though Peter never loved me. All I ever wanted was someone to love me. “Can I get Madam anything else?” “No, thank you.” When she left the ladies’ room, she handed the matron an extravagantly large tip—twenty dollars. When she returned to the table, the others were ready to leave. Joanna was going on to a theatre party.

  In the car, going home, Sari reached out and rolled up the window between the back seat, where she and Peter were sitting, and their driver. She was wearing the new breath-of-spring mink coat that he had given her for Christmas, and in the ladies’ room she had splashed a great deal of My Sin on her throat and shoulders—Peter’s favorite scent, and it was Joanna’s scent!—and the back of the car was suffused with the odor of her perfume and the new furs. “I know,” she said in a low voice. “I know the secret now. You’re Melissa’s father.”

  “Stop it!”

  “No. I want you to listen to what I have to say.”

  “Stop it!” And he made a lunge toward the handle of the car door, but she seized his elbow.

  “You stop it,” she said. “What are you going to do—throw yourself out of a moving car into Powell Street? Act like a man, for God’s sake! If you thought you were man enough to try to sign up and fight a war, you can be man enough to listen to what I have to say.”

  “No … no,” he moaned.

  “Just tell me one thing. Do you still love her?”

  “Love … she’s my sister.” He sagged back into his seat. “No … no … but I’ve hurt her so terribly.”

  “You’ve hurt each other. But it seems to me she’s hurt you more than you’ve hurt her.”

  “No …”

  “Yes! Didn’t you see what she did tonight? Did you see how she manipulates you? Do you see how she still wants to possess you, to keep you obsessed and ridden with guilt? Her Caesarian section! Could it ever have been clearer to you than it was tonight, the kind of cat-and-mouse game she has been playing with you all these years? Peter, I don’t care what happened years ago. You were both young, children really, and it was the nineteen twenties, when everyone was experimenting with things, trying new things, taking chances, taking risks—”

  “It only happened when we’d both had too much to drink. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

  “I’m not interested in your excuses.” She was still gripping his elbow, and the words were pouring out of her, flooding out. “You and I took chances, too. We never thought of the consequences, and neither did you and she. I’m not saying that I forgive you, because there’s nothing to forgive. I’ve done some hard thinking in this last half hour, Peter, and what I’m talking about is what’s happening now—not what happened fifteen years ago. That’s all in the past, water over the dam, and I understand all that, I accept it. But what’s happening now is what we both saw tonight—how she uses an old mistake to own you, to keep her claim on you, to keep you forever belonging to her and from never belonging to me or to anyone else, not even to yourself! Don’t you see? That’s why she wouldn’t give up the baby. She wanted to keep the evidence—the evidence of your love—and to be able to keep flinging that evidence in your face, day after day, year after year. What kind of love is that? It isn’t love. It’s torture.”

  “Don’t hate her,” he said, covering his eyes with one hand.

  “Of course I don’t hate her. But now you can see—now we can both see—how she uses that old mistake to keep you in her power, like a kind of slave. Tonight she finally tipped her hand, and lost the game.”

  That night, in her room, she changed into a long peignoir of white silk, and splashed more My Sin on herself. Then she went to the bar, fixed nightcaps for them both, and carried their drinks to his room, where he lay in his bed in his Sulka pajamas, looking ill and exhausted. She handed him his drink, and sat on the corner of his bed with hers.

  “I just can’t believe that she told you this,” he said.

  “She didn’t. I guessed it. Tonight, when she made you spill your wine.”

  “We were just kids. We never thought—”

  “Hush. I told you the past doesn’t matter.”

  “Was it my fault? Was it? I was a nice boy, wasn’t I?”

  “That doesn’t matter, either. What matters is that you and I got married, which was what she wanted. We raised Melissa, for better or for worse, which was what she wanted. It seems to me that we’ve more than paid back any old debt you may have owed to her.”

  “In the wine cellar. We’d have too much to drink. We drank too much in those days, perhaps. And then—”

  “There you go. The past again. What matters more is the present, and the future, our future. We happen to be husband and wife, and we happen to have your daughter.”

  “I never believed Melissa would be born. I was sure something would happen, and she wouldn’t be born.”

  “But she was.”

  “Perhaps now is the time to give Melissa back to her?”

  She laughed softly. “I hardly think so,” she said. “I think Melissa has enough problems right now without being told she has a new mother. You and I made a commitment to her, and I think we’ve got to keep it, Peter. Besides, Jo doesn’t want Melissa back. She wants you. That’s what became very clear to me tonight. You know, I asked her once why our marriage was so—passionless. I asked if she could explain your—distance. Separate bedrooms. I asked her if she thought you had a mistress, and she gave me an ambiguous answer, implying that you did, implying that she knew something that I didn’t—which of course she did. So you see, that’s the way she likes to think of herself, as your mistress. Forever. Your kept woman, and you’re her kept man. What kind of love is that? Very second-best, it seems to me.”

  “I swear to you I never touched her again! Not after—”

  She had raised her finger to her lips. “That doesn’t concern me,” she sa
id. “Not now.”

  He clenched his fists and turned his head against the pillow. “It was the goddamned wine cellar!” he said. “That goddamned wine cellar, and that goddamned MacDonald letting us spend all that time there together! He must have known—”

  “What concerns me,” she went on, “is why we’ve never been a real husband and wife together. That’s what baffled me until now. Now I think I understand it maybe a little bit. Joanna’s and your secret was in the way. Because I’m your wife, and I’m a woman who loves you. I began loving you that night you had our dinner sent up to the suite in the Saint Francis, and we made love. Isn’t it funny? In the same hotel where we had dinner tonight. I even remember the number of the suite—it was suite six-oh-nine and six-eleven. After we made love, and you fell asleep, I put on your baggy Norfolk jacket, sat looking out over Union Square, ate a lamb chop, and fell in love.”

  “I remember I ordered lamb chops. And asparagus—”

  “—and rissolé potatoes. And I’ve loved you more and more over the years, Peter, loved you even more knowing that something was terribly wrong, and not knowing what it was or what I could do to help you—searching for ways to help you, and never finding them, looking for a path that would lead us … somewhere besides to our separate bedrooms. But the path was always blocked. By whom or by what I couldn’t tell. Out of this frustration, I found myself loving you even more … desperately. It’s been like a kind of … blackmail, hasn’t it, this threat that she’s held over you? But now that the secret’s out, the blackmailer can’t hurt either of us anymore, can she? We’re free. We’re free to love each other again, Peter, and we can if we want to. I want you to have a real wife, a wife who loves you, not just a blackmailing mistress. I want you to have the love you deserve, not second-best.” He reached out and covered her trailing fingers with his own.

  “It’s kind of exciting, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s like starting over with a whole new life! It’s like getting married all over again, with no secrets to hold us back!”