The LeBaron Secret (4 page)

“It's because Archie and Melissa have been seeing a bit of each other. Isn't that it?”

“Oh,” she says. “So you know about that.”

“I know they've had dinner a couple of times, yes.”

“But what does he
want
with her, Gabe? Besides her money, of course—they all want that. But what's he sniffing around her for?”

“Sniffing around? I imagine he simply finds Melissa a fascinating woman. Lots of people do.” But this is dangerous territory because Sari has been known to display signs of being jealous of her daughter and the certain special attentions Melissa receives, so Gabe decides not to pursue this line of reasoning.

“What does he see in her? She's years older than he is.”

“Archie is thirty-nine, forty.”

“Of course, it's easy to see what she sees in him. She's always liked younger men. Are they having an affair, do you think?”

“I don't know. I doubt it.” Gabe decides not to tell Sari that Archie's interest in Melissa could not be sexual—could not possibly be, unless—but never mind, he thinks, and decides to tell her what he believes is the truth. “I think Archie's interest in Melissa is purely as a journalist. I think he'd like to do a story on the LeBaron family.”

Sari claps one hand to her breast, and her look is one of horror. “But you wouldn't
allow
him to do that, would you—with some of the things you know?”

“No, I assure you I would not.”

“Thank God. There's some loyalty left in the world, at least.”

“No, rest assured I wouldn't. Not while he's working for me, anyway. So perhaps it's in our best interest that I do my best to keep him on the payroll.”

“Has he mentioned this to you—a story about us?”

“In passing, yes.”

“You see? That's exactly what I'm afraid of. And with him seeing Melissa—Melissa is so terribly unreliable. She can't be trusted, never could be. Melissa is the loose cannon in this family, Gabe.”

“I know.”

“And if she's drinking—who knows what she might try to tell him.”

“I understand.”

“You see,” she says, “I'm quite sure that there's something very funny going on. I've told you that I've been having trouble with Eric at the office—little things, things I don't need to go into here. But trouble. And I'm beginning to suspect that there may be a connection between this, and Melissa seeing this Archie person, and these—these unfavorable stories that have been appearing. I think there is a connection.”

“Some sort of conspiracy, Sari? Aren't you being a little paranoid?”

“I'm not so sure, Gabe. I'm not at all sure. There's something fishy going on. I may be a lot of things, but one thing I'm not is stupid. And I have good hunches. I've been able to build this business into what it is by playing my hunches. I have
damned
good hunches, and I have a hunch right now that something very funny is going on, and that it involves Eric, Melissa—the loose cannon—and your Mr. What's-his-name. He's good-looking, isn't he?”

“Yes, I guess you'd say so.”

“But common-looking.”

“Common?” He laughs. “I keep forgetting that you've joined the aristocracy, Sari. Have you met the man?”

“No, thank goodness. But Thomas has seen him—seen him coming to call on our Miss Cannon. Thomas says he's very common-looking. Thomas has very good hunches, too.”

“Well, Archie's a good reporter. Came to me from the
Seattle Tribune
. I'm lucky to have him.”

She throws him a sly look. “Your new little pet, Polly?”

“I'm a businessman. Businessmen don't have pets.”

“With his shoes.”

“What's all this about his shoes?”

“Thomas tells me he wears yellow shoes. Yellow—like the brand of journalism he practices!”

“Well, tell you what. I'll tell him to stop sniffing around Melissa. I'll call him off the scent.”

“I still wish he were thousands of miles away from San Francisco. You see, I'm concerned, Gabe.
Deeply
concerned.”

“Of course,” he says easily, “if you'd buy out the
Gazette
—as I've often suggested you do—you could fire whomever you pleased.”

“I don't want to buy your silly old
Gazette
,” she says. “I own enough of this town already.”

This is true. Mrs. Assaria LeBaron, widow of Peter, has fallen heir to more than she needs, more than she really wants, more than she could possibly give away if she restored a hundred Odeon Theatres to their resplendent, turn-of-the-century, gilt and red-plush glory. The carved cupids embracing above the proscenium, the great chandelier, the gold curtain, every detail. She owns too much, and it's a cliché, but it is an embarrassment of riches. One seventy-four-year-old woman should not own so much. The houses, the downtown office buildings—“Lease, don't sell,” Papa LeBaron, her father-in-law, used to say—the apartment houses in neighborhoods that even she would be afraid to visit, the baseball team that keeps losing games but offers handsome tax write-offs in lieu of victories, the two shopping malls in San Mateo County, and a large percentage—thirty-five percent, to be exact—of the shares of Baronet Vineyards, Inc., one of the last family-owned wine companies in California, and producers of America's largest-selling, popular-priced table wines, under the Baronet label. In the big White Wedding-Cake House at 2040 Washington Street—in a place of honor under Grandpa's portrait at the west end of the long central gallery that runs the length of the second floor—sits, on a crude wooden platform made of a pair of stubby-legged upturned sawhorses, the very first barrel of wine (or so it is said—who knows the truth of these things?) ever to roll out of Grandpa's little backyard winery—wine distilled from muscat grapes grown in Grandpa's backyard vineyard in Sonoma. It is said that Grandpa brought the seeds for his vines with him from Italy. Grandpa, they say, started out selling wine to his neighbors, but he kept the first barrel for himself. It is a big and blackened and ugly old thing, coopered—again, so they say—by Grandpa himself, and at first glance an old wine barrel does not seem an appropriate decorative touch in the portrait gallery of a large and otherwise formal house. But it has always been prominently displayed in one LeBaron house or another. And still legible are the words, etched into the oaken staves with a wood-burning tool:

Back of this Wine is the Vintner

And back thrugh the Years his Skil

And back of it all are the Vines in the Sun

And the Rain

And the Masters Will

M. Barone

Au. 1857

M. Barone was Grandpa, Mario Barone. It was Papa, Julius (born Giulio), who changed the names, fancified and Frenchified things. It was Julius who prepared the elaborate family tree proving, or so he claimed, that even though, by the nineteenth century, the Barones were poor Ligurian peasants, the family had originally come from France, where the name had indeed been LeBaron, and where Julius had unearthed fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ancestors who were contes and contesses, ducs and duchesses, even a roi and a reine or two. The preposterousness of all this amuses Sari, and it also amuses her to show the old wine cask to visitors, pointing out the misspelled words that betray an unlettered immigrant. Of course, Sari never knew Grandpa, who died before she was born, but she has a special fondness for the old cask, and so here it sits, a brooding presence, weighing nearly three hundred pounds, thirty-one and a half gallons of Lord knows what after all these years, for its bung has never been removed.

Only one thing is certain: It is filled with something, for wine casks, like hearts, must be kept filled to stay alive and, once emptied, they quickly shrink and crack. Oh, there have been times—at long-ago wildish parties and the like—when someone has boisterously suggested that the old wooden bung be pulled and Grandpa's wine be sampled, but this has never been permitted, thank goodness. If it had, what came out might be enough to poison them all, Sari sometimes thinks. Sari has also been warned that the cask might someday explode. Well, if it did, that would be poetic justice, wouldn't it? For everything to end in an explosion of putrefied muscatel gone green with age? But Sari doubts that this would ever happen. Sari knows a great deal about wine and the ancient, almost lost art of cooperage (Baronet wines are now aged in glass-lined metal tanks). That particular, gentle arch of a hardwood barrel stave, and the way it is bound with its fellows in hoops to form a perfect, solid cylinder, the concave ends of the staves then fitted together tightly—this was how the craftsman could guarantee that his sturdy cask would withstand the most furious internal pressures for all eternity. Get Sari LeBaron started on the history of wine making and she can go on for hours. For instance: In the ruins of Pompeii, buried for centuries under layers of lava, Vesuvian cinders, and volcanic ash, were found intact wine casks. Intact, after nearly two thousand years.

The wine cask as a decorative feature of Sari LeBaron's house is often noted by writers who come to interview her about her civic pursuits: a wine cask in the portrait gallery. How quaint! “A reminder of the family's humble beginnings,” they write. And “Clearly the LeBarons have a sense of humor.” Rubbish! Julius LeBaron had no sense of humor whatsoever. “Baronet—An Honest Wine for the Working Man”—this is one of the advertising slogans still used. And, on the sides of the big red tank trucks with their scrolly white lettering, hauling their loads to the bottling plant, a newer one: “Baronet—Simply Put: Simply Priced and Simply Delicious,” which was thought up by Sari herself, thank you very much, even though her son Eric sometimes tries to hog the credit for it. But it is true that from this humble old barrel sprang everything—the summer place at Tahoe, the winter place at Santa Barbara that belongs to Joanna LeBaron now, the ranch in Montana for anytime in between. Et cetera. Et cetera. It is an irony that Peter LeBaron's widow is not unmindful of—that the blue-collar popularity of their inexpensive wines should have bought them all these costly palaces and possessions. And all this is what is at stake. This, Sari LeBaron often thinks, is why I worked so hard. It must have been. If not, then why?

As though he is reading her thoughts—as, indeed, he often can do—Gabe Pollack says to her, “It's what you wanted, isn't it?”

“What? I was wool-gathering. What do you mean?”

“This.” He gestures around him. “All this.”

“Oh, perhaps. Perhaps. I suppose so.”

“You could have had a quite different life, you know, once upon a time.”

“Oh, I know,” she says a little crossly. “Ancient history. I could also have been a housewife in the Bronx, I suppose, if I'd wanted that.”

“You had your choices. You chose this.”

“I know.”

“Of course, I've always felt that whatever you chose to do you'd be successful at it.”

“Ha!”

He studies her face. “There's more to this, isn't there—more that you're not telling me. It's more than just Melissa, isn't it? What is it? You're frightened of something, aren't you? Can you tell me what it is? What's frightening you, Sari?”

“Nonsense!” she says. “Me—frightened? That's bull-do!” And she drums her lacquered fingernails sharply on the library tabletop.

This is a signal and Thomas, as though on cue, steps quietly into the room. It would not surprise Gabe the slightest little bit if Thomas has been standing, all the time, just outside the sitting-room door, listening to their conversation, every word. “Excuse me, Madam,” Thomas says. “Just to remind you of your ten-o'clock appointment at the office.”

“Yes, Thomas. Thank you.”

Gabe rises as Thomas withdraws. “I'll see that a follow-up story is written right away, on the Odeon,” he says. “And this one I'll write myself. An editorial, I think. And I'll speak to Archie on the other little matter we discussed.”

“Dear old Gabe,” she says, now all smiles and dark, twinkly eyes, as though she has forgotten everything they have just been talking about. “It was so good of you to come by, such a nice surprise. Just the boost I needed on a rainy day. Dear old Pollywog. Why are you always so good to me?” And she offers her hand to be kissed again.

Because, he thinks, if I weren't so good to you you'd feed me to the lions. And first you'd cancel all your ad pages in my paper. But he says nothing, and kisses the upraised hand.

If you have spent any time in the Bay Area—and certainly if, like us, you live here—you will have heard stories about Assaria LeBaron. She is something of a local legend, a character, as they say. Some of the stories are true, some not. Many of these tales are fictions. You may have heard, for example, that she was once an artist's model, and also that she was once a dancer. You may have been told that she was the bosomy young woman who posed, loosely draped, for the statue that stands atop the Dewey Monument in the center of Union Square, and you may have heard that she posed for this sculpture in the nude, and that when the statue was delivered the prudish city fathers insisted that the draperies be added. But how can any of this be true? Sari did not come to San Francisco until the 1920s, long after the Dewey Monument was completed and in place. You may also have heard that she was the model for some of the female figures that appeared, undraped, on the friezes of the old Post Office building. But put two and two together. The friezes and the Post Office went in the Great Fire of 1906. Assaria LeBaron was born in 1909. All these stories are untrue. Untrue, untrue, all of it, and remember that you read it here.

In San Francisco, Sari LeBaron has long been known as “the Tiny Terror,” and she earned that sobriquet long before it was applied to the late Truman Capote. Some of that reputation is deserved, some is not. It is true that her name is occasionally uttered in tones of dread within the boardrooms of certain banks and in certain law offices along Montgomery Street. When she is hammering out a contract for a new distributorship, for instance, she can be an absolute demon with her demands until the lawyers throw up their hands in despair and give her every article and subclause that she wants. “We are arguing, now, over pennies, Mrs. LeBaron—
pennies!
” the lawyers will cry. “Well, if it only amounts to pennies, then why not let me have them?” she will answer. Watch her, late at night, with her old-fashioned adding machine, going over the company's books, checking monthly sales figures, finding tiny discrepancies that even Messrs. Price and Waterhouse have overlooked somehow. Still, no one in this town will deny that Sari, almost single-handedly, rescued Baronet Vineyards, pulled it out of the shambles that Julius LeBaron left it in, and made Baronet what it is today. It was even she who first proposed the name Baronet Vineyards for the company's label, who suggested that the company's former designation—M. & J. LeBaron, Vintners—was unmemorable and hard to pronounce. “Vintners,” she said, “with a
t
between the two
n
's, is hard to say. ‘Vineyards' has a nice romantic sound, and ‘Baronet' gives a high-class name to what, let's face it, is a middle-class wine.” Who knows how much that small change, alone, may have had to do with the company's surge in sales during the fifties and sixties?