Crooked Hearts (44 page)

“You stop. You can have everything, I’m telling you, all of it.”

“Do you love me?”

“I love you. Keep the money, all I want is—”

A deafening shot and the smash of glass made them jump apart. Henry stood in the doorway, bottle in one hand, a smoking gun in the other. “Now it’s loaded!” Taking aim, he shot another hole in the window.

“Henry!” Grace started for him, but Reuben grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back, trying to shield her.

“Where is it, Jones?” Henry hollered, drunk and wild-eyed, waving the gun in the air. “This’s gone far enough!”

Another shot. Plaster sifted down from the ceiling. Grace let out a yelp and fought Reuben’s frantic hands, struggling to get in front of him before Henry could fire off another shot. “Stop it, have you gone crazy?” she shrieked at him. Bang! Another bullet ripped a hole in the rug.

Ah You darted through the door. Henry took aim at the ceiling again, but before he could squeeze the trigger, Ah You danced under his guard and snatched the gun out of his hand. Henry roared out his fury, but stayed planted where he was, swaying, while Ah You scampered to the window and flipped the pistol out between the broken panes.

Grace sagged; Reuben held her so tight her spine cracked.

Henry stumbled to the bed and sat down hard. “Shit,” he said mournfully.

Ah You grinned nervously and cleared his throat. Everybody looked at him. “So,” he said, fidgeting. “You now okay, you two? You say love words and get mellied?
Married?”

Grace blushed, but felt better about it when she saw the same pink stain on Reuben’s cheeks. They said, “Yes,” shyly, in unison.

Henry’s mouth dropped open and he toppled over on his back, struck dumb.

Ah You laughed with delight. “Ho, good, good, then everything okay now. You be happy, make good wine, make babies.”

Reuben gave her a squeeze. She kissed him and laid her head on his shoulder.

“So.” Ah You reached into his baggy trouser pocket. “Hew is money. Good joke, huh? I borrow for a short time so clouds in mind go away, clear sky show tluth.
Truth.
Good to love each other even without money, yes?”

They started toward him menacingly, but he pranced backward, nimble and uncatchable. “We talk later,” he suggested, dropped the envelope on Grace’s dresser, and escaped. They heard his light, staccato footsteps on the stairs.

Dazed, Reuben picked up the envelope and checked the contents. Grace reached for it, but he held on. “You thought I robbed you,” he said accusingly.

“You thought I robbed you,” she echoed, deeply offended. She pulled harder, but he wouldn’t let go. They engaged in a brief tug-of-war.

“I’ll take that.” Henry loomed between them and plucked the money from their hands. “You’re both too incompetent to trust with it.” And he walked out the door.

“Wait, now—”

“Where are you going to put it?”

They got stuck in the doorway for a second, trying to get ahead of each other.

“I’ll come with you—”

“Henry, wait, let me help—”

They trotted down the stairs after him, stepping on each other’s heels.

Epilogue

All things come round to him who will but wait.—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

M
AY WAS
R
EUBEN’S FAVORITE
month. The vineyard was at its loveliest then, the vines on the hillsides crowded with the heavy young emerald-green grapes. The air smelled so sweet you could get drunk just breathing it, and the sunshine felt like a clean, pure blessing. This morning the mountains had been shrouded in a sea fog before the sun broke through. Such a light—such beauty. Reuben thought that if he could make one perfect wine, it would taste like this green valley.

He left the two new workmen clearing chaparral from the unplanted acreage on the southern hillsides, and started along the dusty path toward the house. René had said to come at noon, when the new cuvee would be ready for sampling. It was good; they already knew that from a dozen previous tastings. René said it was very good, but Reuben was afraid to say how good he thought it was. This was the final sampling, the formal one, when he and his wine master would decide whether or not the last seven years had been worth all the blood and tears.

He rounded a turn in the track and saw his house at the bottom of the hill. The rose trees almost covered it up in May, with their big, absurdly fragrant blossoms, every color in the rainbow.

“Blood and tears” was an exaggeration. There had been no blood to speak of and very few tears in the seven years he’d lived in this house, with Grace for his wife and Henry and Lucille for his in-laws. The ’89 harvest had been a disappointment, but mostly because, in his enthusiasm, he’d overplanted; and half of the cru in ’90 hadn’t met anyone’s expectations, but at least they’d learned something—the Pinot Noir grape didn’t do well on Willow Pond soil, at least not that year. Those were setbacks, and they’d been hard to take. But if that was the worst hand life could deal him, Reuben counted himself one lucky zhlob.

Grace’s garden came into view as he topped the last rise before the long descent. He shaded his eyes with his hand, searching for her among the fig and orange trees, the golden poppies and deep blue lupines, before he remembered she’d gone into town today with Ah You. But she’d said she’d be back before lunch. Even if the tasting didn’t go as well as he hoped, he had good news for her. The state viticultural commissioners had asked him to represent his district on their board next year. She’d laugh, he knew; he hadn’t gotten over it himself: he, Reuben Jones Jonah Rubinsky, Jewish Ukrainian immigrant and reformed confidence hustler, invited to advise his respectable vineyardist neighbors on wine production, taxation, and marketing strategies. Life got stranger and more wonderful every day.

She wasn’t back yet—the carriage was gone and the two chestnut bays he’d given her for her last birthday weren’t in their stalls. He saw a flutter of blue from the veranda; Lucille waved to him, calling across the yard, “Henry’s in the cellar with René; they’re waiting for you!”

He waved back, and veered away toward the flagstone path that led past the house to the wine cellar. He’d won ten dollars from Grace when Lucille had married Henry; she’d given him three-to-one odds, and then she’d had the nerve to claim he’d misunderstood the terms of the wager. She tried to pull that all the time; he had to watch her like a hawk. But she’d been so sure Henry wouldn’t give up drinking—Lucille’s newest stipulation. Reuben had had a hunch, though; he’d caught Henry watching him and Grace together with poorly hidden envy once too often, and he’d just known Henry was a goner. Now they all rattled along together like family in the sprawling old house, with Ah You to look after them. Sometimes he wondered, a little fearfully, how his life could get any sweeter.

He ducked his head to descend the low-ceilinged stone steps, enjoying the sudden shock of cold and dark after the hot noonday glare. Claude Reynaud, his chief
remueur,
tipped his leather cap, and went back to turning, one at a time, the twenty thousand magnum bottles lying nose-down in racks that spread sixty feet out into the lantern-lit dimness. “Much breakage today?” Reuben asked him automatically.

His eyes gleamed behind the wire-mesh mask he wore for protection from bursting bottles. “The usual,” he answered, “four, five every hundred.”

Claude’s job drove Henry crazy. Why couldn’t they just shoot carbon dioxide into the big wine vats like everybody else did except Paul Masson, he asked about three times a day, and save two and a half years of in-the-bottle fermentation? Think of the time and money they could save! Who’d know the difference? Who would care? Excuse him, but weren’t they in this business to make money?

Reuben had stopped wasting his breath. If Henry didn’t get it, he didn’t get it; telling him the bubble wasn’t married to the wine if you injected it artificially, trying to explain the difference between effervescence and indigestion—that only made him crazier. They’d come to a prickly understanding over the years: Reuben made the wine, without interference from anyone but his wine master; and Henry ran the business, without interference from anyone but Grace.

And Henry did his job beautifully. They’d all gone to France twice in the last five years, once to Epernay and once to Reims, and both times Henry had driven hard, shrewd bargains on the finest equipment money could buy: basket presses whose delicate pressure allowed only the free-run juice, special first-corking and
dégorgement
apparatus, pupitres as elegant as artists’ palettes. He showed equally sound judgment in managing their taxes and selecting investments to build up their capital. For the first time in his life he was legitimate, and he was basking in it. Grace laughed at him and told him he was getting stuffy. He denied it, but lately Reuben had noticed he affected a dry, almost bankerly air. And he was putting more wax on his mustache than ever.

“Here he is,” Henry told René, and the two men got up from the desk in the cramped, lamp-lit office to greet him. “We’ve been waiting,” Henry grumbled, always impatient, and Reuben thought again that he was, unfortunately, temperamentally unsuited for the waiting game that fine winemaking demanded. He himself, on the other hand—who’d have thought?—was born for it.

René already had two bottles, checks against each other, cooling in a bucket of ice. In his taciturn way, the heavyset Frenchman was almost as nervous as Reuben. They’d met five years ago in Epernay, where René Morrel had been an assistant to a wine master at one of the small, fine, ancient chateaus near Avize. They’d made promises to each other before Reuben had extended, and René had accepted, the invitation to come to California and make beautiful Sonoma Valley wines. In a way, the little ceremony about to begin in the dim limestone cave-office represented the fulfillment—or not—of those promises.

René prized off the metal clamp and gently uncorked the first magnum. The smoky, whispery pop sounded just right—quietly jubilant, Reuben would’ve described it to Grace, just to get her. René poured two flutes to three-quarters full and handed him one by the stem. Over the rims, they exchanged a brief, solemn stare, and then they went to work.

“The sparkle is good.”

“High-class sparkle. And the color’s gorgeous.”

“The color is good,” René amended, always the cautious one. “We go outside later and look.” He stuck his nose in his glass.

“Dreamy,” Reuben judged, exhaling. His excitement was mounting. The smell of the very best champagne was like no other, and unbelievably tempting. This one had that special, superlative bouquet.
It had it.

“Good,” René decided at last.

“More than good?” Reuben probed; René’s mastery of English was still basic, and sometimes precise adjectives eluded him.

“Yes,” he eked out after an interminable pause. “More than good.”

Henry looked ready to explode. He didn’t say it, but “Will you just drink it?” was written all over his face.

They drank.

The ’91 cuvée had been three years in the bottle, a blend of a Napa vineyard’s Pinot Noir grapes and Willow Pond’s own Pinot Meunier and white Chardonnay. This was the first-run juice. The
méthode champenoise
was the only winemaking method Reuben allowed, and the champagne in the bottle from which they were drinking was the product of about two hundred individual handlings. He knew what he thought of it, but he was too scared to say it.

And René couldn’t be hurried. Reuben grew as restive as Henry, scouring the Frenchman’s face for a clue to his opinion, but the pursed lips and big twitching nose gave nothing away. Just when Reuben thought he’d have to shake him, the master lifted his hooded gaze and gravely pronounced his judgment. “It’s good.”

“It’s good?” Henry queried, disappointed. “That’s it?”

“How good?” Reuben asked quietly.

René smiled—something he rarely did, maybe because of the big gap between his front teeth.
“C’est magnifique, mon ami. C’est épatant
—
formidable. C’est tout.”

Henry did a little dance. “You like it?”

Reuben laughed out loud, overcome with relief. “Yes! Because it’s superb—I wish you could taste it. The finesse of the Chardonnay is incredible. The persistence of the taste on the palate—it’s
classic,
truly. It’s lively, rich—”

“Not too dry or too hard,” René put in.

“No, but not cloying—”

“No, never. A big wine, round and full. And soft, but not too soft. Full of life.
C’est joyeux
—a joyful wine, we say.”

“I’d like to call it ‘Sparkling Sonoma,’ “ Reuben said boldly. He’d named the cuvee months ago, when he first began to suspect it would be a classic, but he’d kept his hopes to himself.

“Why not?” said René, still smiling. “In my opinion, it could also be called
de luxe.”

He hadn’t dared to hope for that. “Willow Pond Sparkling Sonoma, Brut,
de luxe cuvée,
he said lovingly, picturing it written on the bottle.

“You’re
sure
you don’t want to put a French label on it,” Henry tried one last time. “I’m telling you, we could sell it for twice the price.”

Reuben rolled his eyes. All of a sudden he had to see Grace. “Henry, bring the other bottle,” he said, backing up. “Come up to the house, René, we’ll celebrate.”

“Oui,
later,” he answered, predictably; he never put pleasure before business. “I must do some things first, then I will come.”

“Okay. I’ll see you in a little while, and we’ll talk about marketing.” Impatient, he didn’t even wait for Henry, but bolted out the door, across the main keeping room, and charged up the cellar steps.

Ha! The carriage was in front of the house, and Ah You was unloading packages from the back. “Is Grace inside?” Reuben called.

“Inside!” the diminutive houseboy called back. Even from here he looked excited. How could he know about the tasting already? Reuben wondered. He couldn’t, of course. “The champagne is good!” he yelled, cupping his mouth. “It’s great! René agrees!”