The LeBaron Secret (2 page)

Gabe Pollack parks his old Dodge Omni in front of the big White Wedding-Cake House at 2040 Washington Street and, as San Franciscans do automatically, turns his right front wheel hard into the curbstone before setting the brake and turning off the ignition, even though Assaria LeBaron's house is not set on a particularly steep section of Pacific Heights. It is an automatic reaction. Bite your right front wheel hard into the curb when parking. Prevent runaway vehicles. That duty performed, Gabe Pollack, a little stiffly—his back has been giving him some trouble lately—lets himself out of the car and starts up the short drive to the porte cochere of the White Wedding-Cake House.

It is the rainy weather that is doing it, causing the back to act up. It is not his eighty-one years, he tells himself. It is another damp, chilly February morning in the city, and yesterday's rain has turned into foggy drizzle, and the city—even the White Wedding-Cake House—has a gray, swirly-smoky look. It is what the English call a silver day, though the moisture has given a crisp, shiny look to the green leaves of the lemon-tree hedge that lines Assaria LeBaron's entrance drive. Gabe Pollack's breath comes out in little silver puffs, and just before stepping under the porte cochere Gabe Pollack looks up to the second-floor windows of Assaria LeBaron's sitting room to see whether, perhaps, his arrival is being watched. And sees—or thinks he has seen—the white panel of a glass curtain fall into place, as though someone's small hand has just let it drop. But he cannot be sure he has seen this. He moves, now, under the porte cochere, up the three white marble steps to the front door, and rings the bell.

There is a little wait, and then the door is opened by Thomas, Mrs. LeBaron's majordomo, in his gray morning coat.

“Good morning, Mr. Pollack.”

“Good morning, Thomas.”

Inside, Thomas assists Gabe out of his raincoat. “Rather chilly this morning, sir.”

“San Francisco weather,” Gabe says. “Sun was actually shining when I left Palo Alto. Rain started at Daly City.”

Thomas says something that sounds like “Chuck-chuck,” and bows Gabe toward the waiting elevator.

Stepping inside, Gabe says, “Chilly morning, and I suppose I am to expect a chilly reception from your mistress.”

“I couldn't say, sir,” Thomas murmurs. He closes the elevator door. With Thomas's gray-gloved hand at the controls, the elevator, an ancient Otis hydraulic, begins its slow ascent to the floor above. Its wrought-iron cage is a wild tracery of latticework, slung with wheat-sheaves and vines, grape leaves and poppy blossoms, and it performs its assigned tasks so slowly that, as Sari herself has said, two people could consummate a love affair in the time it takes for this apparatus to make its journey from one floor to the next; there would certainly be time enough for them to become very good friends. It irritates Gabe, slightly, that Thomas makes him take the elevator whenever he comes to visit Sari. He could easily handle the stairs. All reminders that he is getting old irritate Gabe Pollack. Such as the young boy—Boy Scout?—who offered to take his elbow the other day to help him across Post Street. The other day. It was a good five years ago. I don't look old, he tells himself. In my shaving mirror I still see a young and, yes, randy fellow in his, maybe, twenties, thirties? Forties, maybe. To make conversation during their upward trek, Gabe says, “I suppose it's about the story in today's paper.”

“I wouldn't know, sir.”

“Well, I'm in the newspaper business, and my job is to print the news.”

“Oh, I'm sure of that, sir.”

“Sometimes your mistress doesn't quite understand that.”

“I wouldn't know about that, sir.”

“I'm sure she's got a bee in her bonnet.”

“I just couldn't say, sir.”

At last the elevator reaches the second floor, and Thomas opens the door and steps aside. “You're a few minutes early, sir,” he says. “Madam isn't quite ready. She asks that you wait for her in the south sitting room.”

Gabe Pollack says nothing. He does not mention that his message from Thomas's mistress has been “Come and see me as soon as possible,” and he does not ask Thomas how, when one has been asked to come as soon as possible, it can be possible to be a few minutes early. And the south sitting room is a bad sign, a sign of ill omen. It means that he is in for a session with Sari, not a visit. The south sitting room is a room Sari uses to conduct business, the closest thing to an office-away-from-the-office in her White Wedding-Cake House. The south sitting room, as its designation implies, faces south, faces the street, and has no view to provide any sort of distraction. The large, formal drawing room, with its fine French furniture, faces north, offering a view of the Golden Gate, the Bay, and everything else beyond. In the formal drawing room, he would be served coffee and one of Cookie's splendid sweet rolls. In the south sitting room, there will be none of that. Rebelliously, for a moment, Gabe thinks that he will make his way into the drawing room anyway, ignoring Thomas's instructions, but on second thought he decides he had better not. No point in irritating the old girl any more than he has already. If the south sitting room it is to be, so be it, and he crosses the hall into the designated room and takes a seat in the most comfortable chair the room provides, a stiff-backed Victorian affair by Belter decorated, like the elevator, with a great deal of carved scrollwork and fruited vines. This chair faces the long library table that Sari uses as a sort of desk, and in this position Gabe feels exactly like an errant schoolboy who has been summoned before the principal.

Now the house is strangely silent, no sound of footfalls anywhere, only the sound of the ticking of the gold and black-marble ormolu clock on the mantel.
Ping, ping
goes the clock on the mantel, above the fireplace with its fan-shaped ornamental screen of heavy, polished brass, a fireplace that Gabe Pollack has never known to contain a lighted fire. Outside, dimly, on the street, the day continues drizzly, with blowing fog. Across the street, in their sentry boxes, the two policemen who guard the Russian Consulate have put on waterproof slickers. The guards stamp their wet boots. Sari LeBaron likes to say that she is pro-Communist. The Soviets provide her house with free security.

Except for the ticking of the clock, the house is silent. The White Wedding-Cake House. It has always been called that, locally, since the beginning, and it is appropriate because the house was indeed a wedding present to Assaria LeBaron and her late husband, Peter Powell LeBaron. Architecturally, too, it resembles a wedding cake, all white marble, rising tier upon tier—three tiers in all before the crowning balustrade—Palladian in concept, if not in pure design, its facade embossed with carved stone garlands, swags, and furbelows, to make its ultimate romantic statement. No guilty conscience here, the house has always seemed to say. Nothing to be ashamed of here, despite the ugly rumors. We belong to a joyous house, the carved wreaths seem to say, the wreaths that form arched eyebrows over the windows facing Washington Street, the eyes of Capitalism gazing serenely down at the Soviets across the way. “I was born in Russia, you know,” Sari LeBaron enjoys telling her friends. “But I got out just in time, with wolves snapping at the wheels of my troika!” Sari likes to embellish tales.

The house has also been called unpleasant names. “Sixty rooms!” crowed the morning
Chronicle
when the house was completed in 1927. “Ninety rooms!” corrected the afternoon
Examiner
, the same day. Of course, both papers were lying like hell, or were just having fun indulging in hyperbole, unless they were counting all the closets and the basement storage caves. There are no more than twenty principal rooms in this house, plus servants' rooms, of course, and in its heyday this house took a full-time staff of eleven to maintain it—a butler and a footman, Peter LeBaron's valet and Sari's personal maid, a cook and a scullery maid, two housemaids, a sewing woman and a laundress, and a chauffeur-handyman. Now Sari makes do with three, plus a couple of dailies, and the laundry is sent out. Still, it is an imposing house, and there is no question but that Papa LeBaron spent a pretty penny having it built—a prettier penny, in fact, than he could quite afford. By 1931, there were liens against it, liens that had to be paid off. Where did so many liens come from? Out of the walls, like mice, the liens came, and bred and multiplied.

If these walls could talk, Gabe thinks, what secrets they could tell. “Is love important?” she had asked him here. “I mean, is it important to be
in love?
” And, “I want to go to China. I want to see the Orient. I want to walk the Great Wall, visit the Forbidden City, see the palace of the Great Mogul. Peter loved San Francisco so, he never wanted to go abroad. At best it was New York … or Bitterroot. Do you know I've never been to Los Angeles? ‘There's nothing to California south of Tehachapi,' Peter used to say. But now I want to go to China. Take me to China, Gabe.”

But today the talk would not be of love, or of distant Far Eastern voyages. Today would be all business in this room, and there would be no coffee, and none of Cookie's famous sweet rolls—coffee served with chunky crystals of brown Demerara sugar, sweet rolls filled with apple, cherry, blueberry, and peach preserves, and dusted with cinnamon. Gabe has not yet had breakfast, and his stomach is grumbling. There have been a series of Cookies, all with their own names, of course, but all called Cookie, since Sari LeBaron sees no reason to learn the names of employees with whom she has no direct contact. She and Thomas plan the menus, and these in turn are presented to whichever Cookie happens to be in the kitchen that year. If a woman can cook, and doesn't mind being known as Cookie, she can work for Sari LeBaron. There is only one qualification demanded of a Cookie. “Can she do a galantine?” Sari will ask. If the answer is yes, she will get the job, though in Gabe Pollack's memory not one of Sari's Cookies has ever been asked to prepare anything remotely resembling a galantine.

The clock ticks away, and still Gabe Pollack waits. Having been asked to come at once, he has jumped in his car and driven to the city, breaking the speed limit on the freeway, and now he has managed to arrive a little early. It is often this way, when she feels she must give him a dressing-down. She makes him wait. It is as though she is gathering her strength for the dressing-down, and there is no doubt in Gabe's mind but that today she is going to give him the sharp side of her tongue. Don't forget, he could tell her, that I can remember when you weren't so effing rich and powerful, when in fact it was I who told you what to do. Well? she would say to him. What good does remembering that do you? Looking straight at him with those extraordinary black eyes, she would say to him: Does your ability to remember when I was not so effing rich and powerful provide you with any special weaponry? If so, I'd like to have you effing demonstrate that now. Show me, Gabe, what all your effing memories will do. Make memories turn back that clock. Make memories remove the Bay Bridge and bring the ferries back. Make memories blow out a single candle on your eighty-first birthday cake.

Do you know, he replies, getting nastier, that some of the things that are said about this house are not all that pleasant? Have you heard it referred to as the Doge's Palace? Worse yet, have you heard it called the Dago's Palace? I have. Do you know that you—and your husband—are not universally loved in this city?

I am beloved
, she answers him,
because I am rich
.

Gabe shifts in the Belter chair, crosses his legs, and with one hand reaches around and rubs at the achy spot in his back. And now there is a new sound. It is the whirring sound of Assaria LeBaron's motorized wheelchair as it makes its way down the long gallery, across the carpet, toward the south sitting room.

“Is that you, Gabriel?” he hears her call. And that is another ominous sign, when she calls him by his full name. Batten down the hatches, he thinks. All the storm warnings are up from Point Reyes Station to Point Lobos.

“I'm here.”

And she swings herself through the door and into the room. “You were talking to yourself!” she says.

Rising, he says, “I wasn't.”

“Of course you were. I heard you. But don't worry, we all do it. Sit down, Gabe,” and she extends her hand to him, to be kissed.

Taking the hand, he thinks: I will now kiss the Pope's ring. “How are you, Sari?” he says, and kisses Her Holiness's hand.

“Very well,” she says brightly. “And you? I was so pleased when Thomas told me you were here. Now tell me, Gabe. What can I do for you?”

He hesitates. She may, or she may not, be playing games with him. One can never be entirely sure with Sari. Studying her, looking for a clear clue, he is struck, as always, with her smallness, her daintiness. It is hard to believe that so much strength and energy can have been encapsulated in such a single, small woman. The hands are tiny and delicate. The figure—and the wheelchair emphasizes this, of course—seems so fragile as to be almost frail. It has been said that, as we get older, we acquire the looks we deserve, and if that is the case, Assaria LeBaron must be among the most deserving of women. Though her hair is white now, and though her former Titian-haired beauty is apparent more as a shadow seen through layers of gauze, there is still that smooth, almost olive-colored skin, and those extraordinary dark eyes that can either be fierce or playful, depending on her mood, and that look quite merry now. “What can I do for you?” she repeats.

“I had a message waiting on my desk this morning that you wanted to see me.”

“Oh,” she says. “Well, I guess I did suggest that it would be nice if you stopped by.”

“There was nothing—important—on your mind?”

“Oh, I guess it seemed important at the time. It doesn't seem all that important now. What it was is all water over the dam.”