Seven

Who knows all the secrets of the wine maker’s art? Certainly not Sari LeBaron, as she would be the first to admit to you. Why is it that the nobler grapes of the finest red wines grow better in the foothills, while vines for the lesser whites and vins ordinaires thrive better on the valley floors? Some say it is because the soil in the foothills is “younger,” more vigorous and limy, while the soil of the valleys is older, more acidic, having been washed down there from the mountain slopes for centuries. But others will disagree, and tell you that it is because the morning mists linger longer in the foothills, sweetening and fattening and adding delicacy to the fruit, while down in the valleys the mists burn off more quickly, exposing the fruit longer to the sun, and producing vines with tougher stalks and grapes with thicker skin. Why do some wine makers insist that the finest wines must be aged in charred barrels made of oak from the Nevers forest in France, while just as respectable wines can be achieved when aged in barrels made of stainless steel, or even plastic? The point is that no one knows the answers to these questions with any degree of certainty. They are all a part of the mystery and romance of wine making.

But Sari LeBaron does know that a great part of the mystery and romance of wine making is also backbreaking manual labor—as she herself learned at the bottling plant, working long hours packing corked and labeled bottles into their cases, lifting filled cases off the conveyor belt and onto handcarts to be trucked away. Wine making is both an act of faith and an act of will, it is an art of stewardship and proprietorship and the ruthless use of muscle—not just a sissy sampling and tasting and talking about “body” and “bouquet.” This is something, she feels, that her sons have yet to learn. They’ve had it too easy. They have not been sufficiently toughened up. They were born to her, after all, somewhat late in life, when Baronet was once again on its merry way, with millions pouring in, with all the old debts paid off. Neither Eric nor Peeper ever knew what hard work was all about, and that is why she feels that it is not time to pass her stewardship along to them. In a business that she learned from the bottom up, she has forgotten more about the wine business than either of them ever knew.

This, at least, is what she tells herself, but of course it’s only half the truth. The full truth would acknowledge that Sari enjoys the power that she wields—relishes it, luxuriates in it, lives it, breathes it—even more, now that she is an old woman and alone and considered a phenomenon in a business that is predominantly male, more than when she was younger and her husband was alive. What will happen to her company, you may well ask, when Sari dies and the ghouls from the federal, state, and local governments swoop down to bleed her estate for taxes? I wouldn’t ask her that question, if I were you. Assaria LeBaron doesn’t plan to die.

“I have a saint’s name,” Joanna had said to her that Sunday afternoon at the Japanese Tea Garden. “Surely I shall be martyred.”

“A saint? Which saint?”

“Jeanne d’Arc. First, I want to tell you all about me. Then I want you to tell me all about you. That’s important, if we’re going to be lifelong, bosom friends, as I hope we are. First of all, my family’s in the wine business, or at least it used to be. But now, with Prohibition, the wine business is dead in California. We still grow some grapes for the table, for grape juice and raisins and jams and jellies, and things like that, and they let us put up three barrels of wine a year for our personal use—isn’t that a screech? It’s lunacy, and so mostly my father is retired and lives on his investments. We’re supposed to be rich, but don’t get me wrong, I’m not a snob, though my mother sort of is one, and I don’t care whether you’re rich or not. In fact, I’m more or less a Marxist, and I think Karl Marx is the cat’s pajamas. I believe in the equal distribution of wealth. My parents are Catholics, and my mother is very Catholic, but I’m not, though they made me get confirmed and everything. I don’t believe in organized religions. I’m a maverick, a wild horse. I’ve been a maverick since I was fourteen. That’s when I decided to be a free spirit. My absolute idol is Isadora Duncan, and I believe in free love. I think free love is the cat’s pajamas, don’t you? I went to see Isadora Duncan when she was here, and I became her absolute slave. I love that Russian man she married, the one they say may be a spy. I think he is one, don’t you? I think it’s an absolute screech that he can’t speak a word of English, and she can’t speak a word of Russian, and so the only way they can communicate is in the language of love. I absolutely adore all talented people, which was why I adored you in your play. My favorite writer is probably Sigmund Freud. I’ve read a lot of Freud, and I think most of what he says is the cat’s pajamas …”

Sari had never met anyone like this girl, with her bright, rapid-fire delivery and ability to skip nimbly from subject to subject barely without a pause for breath. At first, she simply sat there, wide-eyed, listening to Joanna talk.

“… Once a week, I fast. I eat nothing but a few sips of water. It’s good for the figure, and it also helps me think more clearly. I make all my important decisions on my fast days. It was on a fast day that I met you, and decided that I wanted you to be my friend. I have an absolutely divine brother, Peter, who you must meet. He’s twenty and divinely handsome, and you’ll adore him. He’s at Yale now, but he’ll be coming home for the summer, and that’s when you’ll meet him. Peter and I do secret things together. We have a secret club, which nobody belongs to except him and me, but maybe we’ll ask you to join it, too, if Peter approves. We’ll see. I’ve never had a sister, but of course I’ve always wanted one. What’s your sun sign?”

“Sun sign?”

“Your astrological sign. I think astrology is the cat’s pajamas. When were you born?”

“May twenty-fifth.”

“Oh, no!” she cried. “I can’t believe it! This is an absolute screech! You’re a Gemini, and so am I—June tenth. We’re a double sign, the twins, which means that each of us is really two people. We have a dark side, and a bright side. We have a face we show for the world to see, and another face that is secret, private, and that we only show to ourselves and to certain special friends. We also have very emotional relationships, and we have artistic talent, and we’re very sexual. Have you ever done ‘it’ with a man?”

“It?”

“Yes. Made love with a man.”

“No. Have you?”

“Oh, yes,” she said airily, “lots of times. I told you I believe in free love. I think sex is the cat’s pajamas. Of course, it helps if you do it with champagne. But I gather that in the Fatty Arbuckle case, that got somewhat—out of hand.”

“Really?” Sari said. “What happened, exactly?”

“Well,” Joanna said, lowering her voice to a whisper, “from what I’m told, they’d all been drinking a lot of champagne. And Fatty Arbuckle tried to put an empty champagne bottle up—you know, up inside this girl. And when they tried to pull the bottle out, some of her insides came out with it. That was how she died.”

“How awful!”

“That was the story I heard. The people who own the Saint Francis Hotel are friends of my parents, and I overheard them talking about it.” Looking at Sari she had said, “But I can’t believe that you’ve never done it.”

“Well, I haven’t.”

“The way you did that last scene in the play—when you flung yourself into the prince’s arms and told him you were seized by love—that was the sexiest scene I’ve ever seen on a stage!”

Sari giggled. “Well,” she said, “the director, Miss Simmons, kept telling me to play it that way.”

“Watching you, I was certain you were richly experienced. Well, if there’s anything you want to know about sex, just ask me, and I’ll tell you anything you need to know. If we’re going to be lifelong, bosom friends, it’s important that we tell each other everything. Is there anything?”

“Well—but no, I guess not.”

“No. Go ahead. Ask your question. We’re going to be friends, aren’t we?”

“Well,” she began hesitantly, “one thing I’ve always wondered is—how does it begin?”

“In my case,” Joanna said, “I like to begin it with a glass or two of champagne. That’s strictly personal, of course. But Daddy, being in the wine business, made sure before Prohibition started that we had enough wine to last us for years and years. We have a whole cellarful of wine, a whole roomful of champagne.”

“No, you don’t understand my question,” Sari said.

“Explique-moi.”

“I mean, that scene in the play was a seduction scene. The prince was seducing Sabrina. I’ve watched hundreds of seduction scenes in movies—Ronald Colman trying to seduce Vilma Banky in The Dark Angel, Pola Negri seducing Charles Mack in Woman of the World. But in the movies they never show you what happens next. In the play, I never knew exactly what the prince and Sabrina would do after the curtain went down.”

“Why, jumped straight into bed, of course!”

“Just like that? But, I mean—then, who starts it first? The man or the woman?”

“Makes absolutely no difference,” Joanna said with a wave of her hand. “It can happen either way. You’ve seen a man’s thing, haven’t you?”

“Oh, of course.” It had been a half-lie. Once, in the semidarkness of an early morning, through a parting of the curtain in their room, she had caught a glimpse of Gabe Pollack naked, seen a shapeless appendage, surrounded by a dark mat of hair.

“Well, it gets very big and hard, and then he—”

“But how does it start? Do you have to take off all your clothes to do it?”

“You don’t have to,” Joanna said. “But it’s better that way. I believe in the skin-to-skin method.”

“But how does it start?”

“It starts with”—and now they are both whispering, excited, giggling, their heads together over the teacups, and Sari is asking questions that she has often wanted to ask but has never found the right person to ask, and is now asking them of an almost total stranger. “It starts with—tickling.”

“Tickling? Ah. That’s what I meant.”

“He tickles you. You tickle him. Down there.”

“That’s what they don’t show in the movies!”

“He tickles you—you begin to laugh—and then—but you’ve really got to try it for yourself, you know. And it would be best to try it with an experienced man—an older, experienced man. Meanwhile, you obviously know how to do the seduction part, and that’s half the battle. You could give lessons in seduction.”

“I’ll give you lessons in seduction, and you can give me lessons in the rest of it!” Sari said.

Then, sitting back in her chair, Joanna said, “Of course, my mother says that sex should be saved for marriage, but she’s very old-fashioned. Since I believe in free love, I don’t suppose I’ll ever marry.”

And Sari realized that her new friend was ready to change the subject, and, it occurred to her, her new friend was perhaps not quite as worldly and sophisticated as she pretended to be.

“Will you get married, do you think?”

“Oh, I suppose so.”

“Who will it be?”

“Probably—Gabe Pollack.”

Joanna laughed. “Gabe Pollack. What a funny name. Is he handsome? Is he nice?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Older?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should do it with him first. That’s my opinion, anyway. Are we becoming friends?”

“You know, I really think we are.”

“My friends call me Jo.”

“And me Sari.”

“Sari.”

“Jo.”

“Then I think there’s one important thing we ought to do,” Joanna said. “I think we ought to make a pact in blood. Have you ever made a pact in blood before?”

“No.”

“Neither have I, but I know how it’s done. Here’s how we’ll do it.” The bow on Joanna’s blouse was secured with a bar pin. Undoing the clasp and removing it, she said, “First we each prick our right thumbs with the pin—just enough so there’s a little drop of blood. I’ll do it first, then you.” They pricked their thumbs. “Now we press our thumbs together hard, so our blood will mix. Now, repeat after me the oath of eternal friendship. ‘I, Assaria Latham—’”

“I, Assaria Latham—”

“‘—do solemnly swear that for now, and until the end of time, I am pledged in friendship to Joanna LeBaron, that in sickness and in health—’”

“In sickness and in health—”

“‘—each will turn to the other for aid, comfort, and assistance, wheresoever in the world we may happen to be, to be forever truthful with one another, each denying the other no secrets, in a spirit of pure and lasting sharing, for richer, for poorer, through thick and through thin—’”

“Through thick and through thin—”

“‘From this day forward, forever and ever. Amen.’”

“From this day forward, forever and ever. Amen.”

“Now you give the oath to me.”

Sari had not been able to memorize and duplicate Joanna’s oath exactly, and they had giggled over that, but it came out essentially the same, and as they sat there giggling over their empty teacups in the Japanese Tea Garden, Joanna said, “You know I feel as though I’ve known you all my life.”

“So do I!”

“You’re the sister I never had.”

“I never had a brother or a sister.”

“It’s the oath that made the difference.”

“Now,” Sari said. “Tell me something. Remember that we’ve just vowed to be truthful.”

“Of course. What is it?”

“How many times have you actually done it with a man?”

Joanna frowned and looked quickly down into her teacup, and Sari could see the color rising in her cheeks. “How many—times?”

“How many times. Forever truthful, we just said. No secrets.”

“Well,” she said finally, “I guess—twice. Twice and a half, because the other was—we’d both had too much champagne. But—” and she looked up at Sari with a grin. “Promise you’ll never tell anyone! Promise you’ll never tell any of the other girls at Burke’s!”

“I promise,” Sari said. Then they were both laughing.

“Oh,” Joanna cried suddenly. “I’ve just had an absolutely outrageous thought. You must have outrageous thoughts sometimes, don’t you? All Geminis have them.”

“What is it?”

“I’d like you to make love with my brother. And let me watch!”

Now it was Sari who, despite herself, was blushing. “That is an outrageous thought,” she said.

“Of course I’m only joking,” Joanna said quickly, “even though Sigmund Freud is absolutely full of that sort of thing. But wouldn’t that be the cat’s pajamas?”

Sitting there, in the fading afternoon, whispering, giggling, two sixteen-year-olds, they had gone on and on, talking of everything in general and nothing in particular, sharing outrageous thoughts (dreams of going to Hollywood to become a movie star, et cetera, et cetera), while Sari felt herself being drawn closer and closer into the web of Joanna LeBaron’s exaggerated charm. What was it about Joanna that drew Sari to her? Whom did Joanna remind her of? The Van Dusen Sisters, of course. Like them, she seemed a finished person. She was like them, but nicer.

Years later, it was possible to see why Joanna had gone on to become one of New York’s most glamorous and successful woman advertising executives. She was a consummate bullshit artist.

“Well, where is Mr. Pollack?” Sari is demanding of his secretary. “You realize that this is Assaria LeBaron calling.”

“Right now, Mrs. LeBaron, Mr. Pollack is on a PSA flight to Los Angeles, and obviously I have no way of reaching him. He has appointments in L.A. all afternoon.”

“What is he doing in Los Angeles, when I need him here?”

“It’s a business trip, Mrs. LeBaron. If he should happen to phone me, I’ll tell him that you’re trying to get in touch with him.”

“Well, then let me talk to that other fellow, the one who works for him, the redhead, the reporter—What’s-his-name. Oh, what is his name? You know who I mean!”

“Archie McPherson?”

“Yes. Let me talk to him.”

“Hold on, and I’ll try to connect you,” Gabe’s secretary says.

“Archie,” she says when he comes on the line, and now she is speaking in an altogether different voice, sweet and cozy and persuasive, her motherly, her grandmotherly voice. “Archie, dear, how are you? But I don’t know why I should even be calling you, because you betrayed me, didn’t you? You told Gabe that I gave you that story about Melissa paying off the rock group, and you weren’t supposed to do that, were you? That was supposed to be our secret.”

“I didn’t tell him, Mrs. LeBaron. He guessed it, and there was no way I could deny it.”

“How many times have I told you to call me Aunt Sari? Well, it doesn’t matter, Archie, and I forgive you. The story ran, and I liked it very much, and you’ll still get your check. Don’t worry.”

“Thank you, Mrs. LeBaron.”

“Please—Aunt Sari.”

“Aunt Sari.”

“Good. Now there’s one other thing you could do for me, Archie. You still see Melissa, don’t you?”

“Yes. From time to time.”

“Well, I want you to go on a little fishing expedition for me, Archie, with Melissa.”

“Fishing?”

“Yes. For information. From Melissa.”

“Tell me what sort of information you’d like to know.”

“Melissa made a very peculiar accusation to me the other night. It concerned her—parentage. She’s made these sorts of accusations before, but never so—vehemently, I guess is the word.”

“Her parentage?”

“Yes. That’s all I can tell you now. But I need to know—it’s terribly important that I know—whether Melissa has some—well, peculiar notions about me, and about her father. If you could take her out, and get her on this subject, and perhaps find out what these notions are, and how much she feels is based on fact, and how much is just—fantasy.”

“I see.”

“Then if you could relay this information to me, I’d appreciate it. This must be strictly confidential, of course, between you and me. Whatever you find out would not be for newspaper publication, you understand that.”

“I understand.”

“I consider you this town’s fact-finder par excellence.”

“Thank you.”

“If you get her a little drunk, she might open up. A few drinks might help. You see, a couple of months ago she made a completely unplanned and, unbeknownst to me until recently, trip to Switzerland, to Saint Moritz, where she was born. I’d like to find out what was behind that, if anything. If you get her a little drunk, and get her on the subject of Switzerland, she might tell you something that she’d never tell me. Do you understand?”

“Yes. I see.”

“And you’ll be well compensated for this one, Archie. Particularly if you learn anything—interesting. Have you bedded her down yet?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Have you been to bed with her? If you did, that might help, too.”

“My God, Mrs. LeBaron, I—”

“Don’t be angry. I happen to think my daughter is a very attractive woman, and you’re a very attractive man. Melissa is a few years older than you, perhaps, but most men find her attractive. People used to say she reminded them of the actress Joan Fontaine, and she’s always shown rather a preference for younger men. Her sexual appetites are perfectly normal, and you shouldn’t have any difficulties there. This is only a suggestion, of course. Unless, of course, you’re gay.”

There is a brief silence on the other end of the line. Then he says, “No, I’m not gay—not that it’s really any of your business.”

“Of course it isn’t. I only mentioned it because most of the men in this city seem to be gay. Or so they say. And I only mention it because this is nineteen eighty-four, and I wanted you to know that I’m no sexual prude—about you, or about my grown daughter.”

“Yes,” he says gruffly. “Well, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Good. And remember Switzerland.”

“I will. But I’m not promising anything.”

“Thank you, Archie.” A sigh.

She replaces the receiver in its cradle, but with the dead, dissatisfied feeling that somehow the conversation had not gone as well as it might have. Am I losing my touch? she asks herself. Am I losing control?

Somehow, this day, which had managed to start out badly, still is not going well.

Melissa, Melissa. Where did we lose sight of you? So much wrong advice along the way. Hard advice, hard taken. Come back, Melissa, come back. But how can you come back to a place you never seemed to be, never seemed to belong?

Perhaps it was being the first child, and for so many years the only child, and the fact that both mother and child had nearly died in childbirth, that had made them all too anxious with her, too much on the lookout for little signs of something that might go wrong. They had fussed over her too much, pampered her too much, indulged her too much, worried over her too much, given her too much. Perhaps that was it. In the beginning, the theory had been that this adorable child, this special child, should be given anything and everything it wanted, anything that money could buy. This had been in the 1920s, when the LeBaron fortune seemed limitless, and it had pleased Sari to shower the little girl with all the things she herself had never had, never even dreamed existed, as a child—the handmade dresses from Best’s and DePinna and Magnin’s, the dollhouse and furniture, the collection of dolls and other toys, every variety of stuffed and cuddly creature. Her nursery had been fitted out with a miniature theatre, complete with stage lights and movable sets, furniture and other props, designed for marionette performances. And in those days there had always been a nurse—a series of nurses—for Melissa.

But even as a toddler, she had been extraordinarily exigent. She would demand, for instance, that her playpen be filled with all her toys. Then, one by one, she would throw them all out, and then scream until all the toys had been returned to her, at which point the process would be repeated. Once, when one of the nurses had locked her in the nursery as punishment for something or other, she had gone to the window and thrown out all her toys. Then she had thrown out all the bedclothes from her bed, along with everything else she was able to lift and carry to the window. All of this lay festooned across the shrubbery in front of the house on Washington Street. By the age of three, Melissa’s temper tantrums had become an almost daily fact of life.

“Miss Melissa is having one of her fits,” Thomas would say. “She says she’s going to hold her breath until she dies.”

“Please don’t call them fits, Thomas,” Sari would say. “There is no epilepsy in this family. It’s just—” But what was it?

At six years old, she was still wetting her bed regularly. Doctors were consulted. “Ignore her, and let her outgrow it,” one of them had said, but it was becoming a hard problem to ignore. “Put her in a diaper and rubber pants,” another doctor, Dr. Obermark, had suggested. “When she sees she’s still being treated as an infant, that will shame her out of it.” But that hadn’t worked, either, and the minute the diaper was soaked, Melissa would scream until it was changed for her. “Have her nurse wake her up, once an hour, during the night, and sit her on the toilet—that will stop it,” another specialist recommended, but it hadn’t, and nurses did not remain long when bound to such a regimen.

“The child,” said one of the nurses, “is simply rotten spoiled, Mrs. LeBaron. She is simply a spoiled brat. If I were you, I’d let her select one toy a day to play with. Then I’d have all the other things locked away. If she can’t amuse herself with that one toy, then that’s that.”

“She’ll just cry her lungs out.”

“Let her!”

That nurse had been let go, and there had been others who were more compliant. Needing to keep their jobs, they tended to do what Sari—and Melissa—wanted.

Then had come the hard times of the 1930s, after Peter Powell LeBaron’s parents died, and all the debts had appeared, and it had been necessary for Sari and Peter and Joanna to go out into the fields themselves to help return the land to vineyards. Much of the staff of the Washington Street house had to be let go, and the only ones retained were Thomas, for the housekeeping, Cookie, and Melissa’s nurse. Perhaps that had aggravated the situation even more, because Sari had been gone all day, and it was hard to control the quality of the nurses, but someone had to look after the little girl.

At seven, the bed-wetting problem still continued, and at eight a new one had arisen: nail biting. “Mrs. LeBaron, the child’s nails are chewed down to the quick. They’re bleeding, Mrs. LeBaron!”

“Tape her nails with adhesive tape,” one doctor said. Melissa just chewed through the tape.

Another doctor prescribed a foul-tasting substance that was to be painted on the nails. But the foul-tasting substance could be washed off with soap and water.

Every day, it seemed, there was a new problem. “Mrs. LeBaron, Melissa would not get out of bed this morning. She says she’s sick, but she has no temperature.”

“She’s got to get out of bed to go to school.”

“She’s been in bed all day. She says she’s never going to get out of bed.”

Then, when she was ten, Melissa, who had never been a good eater, seemed to stop eating altogether. She began complaining of stomachaches when she sat down at the table, and dawdled over her food, pushing it around her plate without eating a mouthful, and Sari had watched with horror as the already thin child grew thinner and thinner. More specialists were consulted.

“Fill the child’s plate, and set it in front of her for exactly twenty minutes,” said Dr. Obermark, considered the finest pediatrician in the city. “If she hasn’t touched her food by then, remove the plate. When she gets hungry enough, she’ll eat.”

But that had not worked, and Dr. Obermark, after two weeks, offered another formula. “Tell her she cannot leave the table until she cleans her plate,” he had said, and so Sari had found herself sitting at the table with Melissa for hours as the child stubbornly sat at the table, staring at her uneaten food. And the more anxious Sari became, the less she ate, and soon it would be seven weeks since Melissa had taken more than a tiny morsel of food. Though her bowels rarely moved now, Sari had watched the girl shrink from ninety pounds to seventy. “Eggnogs,” decreed Dr. Obermark. “One raw egg, beaten into chocolate milk, three times a day.” But Melissa gagged over these concoctions and vomited them. “I’m going to give her liver shots,” said Dr. Obermark, but Melissa fought these so hard that twice the doctor’s hypodermic needle had broken off in her buttock.

“Melissa darling, you’ve got to eat!” Sari cried. “If you don’t eat, you’ll die.”

“I want to die.”

“Oh, Melissa, don’t say that—we all love you so!”

“You don’t love me. You only say you love me because you like to give me things.”

“That’s not true. It’s the other way around—I like to give you things because I love you.”

“Daddy doesn’t love me.”

“He loves you very much.”

“Why doesn’t he ever speak to me?”

“He’s been so busy, darling. We’ve all been so—”

“You’re not my real mother, and he’s not my real father, is he? I know that. I’m adopted, aren’t I?”

“Oh, Melissa—please don’t say things like that! Things that hurt me so!”

“I’m adopted. I don’t look like either of you.”

“You’re our darling little girl!”

From Miss Burke’s school, where Melissa was enrolled, there were the regular disturbing reports from Miss Hays, the headmistress. “Melissa is a bright child, and achieves high scores on such tests as the Stanford-Binet. She has a high I.Q., and is perfectly capable of doing the work, but she is a social and a disciplinary problem. Yesterday, for instance, she locked herself in a cubicle in the washroom, and refused to come out until the last bell …”

“Mrs. LeBaron, Melissa has developed a new habit that is very disruptive to the classroom. She sits at her desk and rubs her legs together.”

“Rubs her legs together?”

“Yes. We feel she is—masturbating, Mrs. LeBaron. It is very distracting to the other girls, and to her teachers. A very distracting habit and, we feel, an unhealthy one.”

“I’ll speak to Dr. Obermark about it right away.”

“Mrs. LeBaron, in view of the fact that Melissa is continuing to be a social and disciplinary problem at school, I wonder if you have perhaps considered a special school for her. There’s a school called Hedgerows in Pasadena, which specializes in—”

“No! I don’t want to take her out of Burke’s, and away from all her friends.”

“Mrs. LeBaron, Melissa really has no friends here …”

On the question of where Melissa would go to school, Sari knew she stood on very firm ground. Over the years, the LeBaron family had shown considerable generosity to Miss Katherine Burke’s School. She was certain the school would never expel a LeBaron daughter.

Then there was the imaginary playmate whose name, she explained to her mother, was Jober Rice. “No, not Joe Beryce. Jober Rice.”

“Is Jober Rice a boy or a girl?”

“Neither. Just Jober Rice.” Whenever she was reprimanded for anything, she would explain, “Jober Rice told me to do it.”

“She is much too old for an imaginary playmate, Sari darling,” Joanna said. “Much too old. That phase comes around age five or six. That can’t be happening.”

“But what can I do? She says Jober Rice exists.”

At ten and a half, she began to complain of headaches, dizziness, and an inability to see clearly. “I need to wear glasses,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“I want glasses to wear in hotel lobbies.”

“Hotel lobbies?” She often made bizarre statements like that.

She was taken to see a famous ophthalmologist, Dr. Heidt, who gave her a thorough examination.

“There is absolutely nothing the matter with her eyesight, Mrs. LeBaron,” Dr. Heidt said. “She has perfect twenty-twenty vision, and I can find no physiological basis for the headaches and the claims of dizzy spells. I would not prescribe corrective lenses for her.”

“But she says she wants to wear glasses.”

“You can get her some frames with ordinary window glass in them, I suppose. I imagine that’s an item you could find in the dime store.”

And so, for the next two years, Melissa had worn her dime-store glasses constantly. They gave her an owlish, bookish look, which, Sari thought, did not enhance what was otherwise becoming a pretty face. And still the complaints of headaches, dizziness, and poor vision continued.

“What’s that on my plate?”

“A lamb chop, darling.”

Staring down at it through her glasses, she would say, “But why can’t I see it? All I see is a fuzzy thing like a bear’s paw.”

At least she had started eating again, though pickily, and there were long days of hunger strikes.

“I’m afraid she’s very sick, Mrs. LeBaron,” Dr. Obermark said. “And the trouble is that she’s very uncooperative. I think we should consider sending her to a hospital.”

“A hospital?”

“There’s a very good clinic in San Rafael. There’s a possibility she might respond to electric shock.”

“Oh, no!” Sari cried.

“These electric shocks aren’t fatal, Mrs. LeBaron. In fact, after the first treatment she won’t have any idea of what’s happening to her. The treatments do not build up anxiety. In fact, they lessen it.”

“Oh, no,” Sari said. “Please, not that.”

“Her disorder is psychological, Mrs. LeBaron.”

One summer Sunday they drove out to the Colusa vineyard. Cookie had packed them a picnic lunch they planned to eat in the foothills of the Sutter Buttes, that sudden upthrust of rocky mountains that seems to rise, unbidden, from the middle of the flat Sacramento River valley floor. “Try to plan more little family outings with her,” someone had suggested. But at her first sight of the Buttes Melissa began to scream, “Why are those mountains doing that? What are they doing there? They don’t belong there! They’re looking at me as though they want to kill me!”

“Those are the Sutter Buttes, dear—mountains that some earthquake heaved up in the middle of the valley thousands of years ago. I think they’re actually quite dramatic, and quite pretty.”

“I hate them! And they hate me! They’re looking at me as if they’re going to eat me. I want to go home!”

“We can’t go home yet, darling. We haven’t had our picnic. Let’s pretend the mountains are a couple of lazy old dinosaurs, sleeping in the sun. Or a pair of camels, resting. Let’s make up a story—”

“No! They’re monsters! Take me home!”

“Now, Melissa—”

Then Melissa looked at her and said, “I’m a monster, too, aren’t I, Mother? That’s why you brought me here. So your monster could meet some other monsters.”

“Melissa, please.”

“I hate it here! I want to go home! Take me home!”

“Her disorder is psychological, Mrs. LeBaron,” Dr. Obermark repeated.

But then, before accepting this view, we must take into consideration Melissa LeBaron’s parents. There are the parental influences that the psychologist would want to know about. Would Assaria LeBaron ever admit that she had ever been anything less than a perfect mother to this difficult child?

“Pick a card, any card,” Melissa had said to her. “It’s a trick.”

Sari had picked a card, the jack of spades.

“Look at it, but don’t show it to me. Now slip it back into the deck. Now, we shuffle them—” And then Melissa had fanned out the deck, face up, on the table. “Your card was the three of hearts!”

“No, Melissa, it was the jack of spades.”

“Let me try it again.” But once more the trick had not worked. Frustrated, Melissa had said, “Let me try it one more time.” And still it had not worked.

“Melissa, why don’t you practice your trick, and when you’ve got it right, bring it back and we’ll try it. It’s important to know how to do a thing properly before you do it.”

But would a sensitive mother have said that? Should she—perhaps—instead—have pretended that the trick worked the first time and congratulated the clever child? The way, playing a board game with a child, a parent will often learn how to lose at checkers? It is too late to ask that sort of question now.

Then we must consider the influence of Melissa’s aunt Joanna, which was important in its own way. In 1927, a year after Sari had married her brother, Joanna suddenly married a young doctor named Rod Kiley, and moved with him to Santa Barbara. Less than six months later, however, this marriage was over, though Joanna was four months pregnant with Rod Kiley’s child. “A mistake, a mistake!” Joanna cried cheerfully to Sari, announcing the failed marriage. “I knew I should have stuck with free love!” By the time Lance was born, Joanna was divorced, had resumed her maiden name, and had moved back to San Francisco. During the hard period of the 1930s, when all of them were working to get the vineyards back into production and the debts paid off, Joanna and her son occupied a suite of rooms on the top floor of the big White Wedding-Cake House at 2040 Washington Street. This was a matter of practicality, a matter of money. There was plenty of room, and the two small families, it was supposed, could live comfortably and independently under the same roof. And yet it was perhaps inevitable that certain problems should have arisen with this arrangement.

To Joanna’s credit, she tried not to interfere with her sister-in-law’s private life. And yet—and yet—there were times when it was almost impossible for Joanna not to voice an opinion about all the difficulties with Melissa. Little things:

“Sari darling, her temper tantrums are cries for help. You can’t ignore them …”

“Dr. Obermark says …”

“I think Dr. Obermark is right. She should see a psychiatrist. I know the name of a wonderful man—”

“But not electric shocks! Not that!”

“It’s the very latest technique, Sari.”

“No, no.”

“Sari, Melissa says that she and her friend Jober Rice are going to murder someone! I thought you ought to know.”

And Sari, at the breaking point, crying out, “Jo, will you please stop trying to tell me how to raise this child! I’ll either do it my way, with my own experts, or I won’t!”

You see what I mean.

And it did not help matters one little bit that Joanna’s little Lance was growing up to be a sturdy, clean-limbed little boy, normal in every way.

Which brings us to Melissa’s father, Peter Powell LeBaron.

Peter LeBaron had many talents, but one cannot say that fatherhood was one of them, and one cannot say that he was a close or loving or demonstrative father with any of his three children. It was as though he erected an invisible distance, or shadow, between himself and them. Whenever any of his children entered a room where their father happened to be, you could sense and almost see that shadow falling, like a cloud passing across the sun. It was strange, but the gaiety and boyishness that had been part of his exuberant charm as a younger man seemed to have disappeared when he became a father. Where was the old playful, irreverent Peter? Sari often wondered. His old self had gone into hiding somewhere beneath this shell of quiet, withdrawal, and reserve.

There are several explanations for this, of course. One could argue that he was required to tackle fatherhood when he was too young, only twenty-one, and was unprepared for its demands. Or you could say that, in a sense, it was because he was forced to marry Assaria, though forced is the wrong word, because he seemed eager to marry her at the time. But you could say that he was also too young for marriage, not ready for it. Even during their engagement and the early months of their marriage, Sari had begun to feel it, though at first she would not admit it, this sense of a shadow, of a distance, falling across what was supposed to be her love and his.

Having breakfast in their suite at the hotel in Saint Moritz that fall of 1926, waiting for Melissa to be born, he had been reading the Paris Herald Tribune, and she had said to him, “Are you happy, Peter?”

Outside, the day was bright, and the sun was shining on the lake and on the pine trees along the shore, and sparkling on the distant snow-capped alpine peaks, and from below there was the soft plop … plop … plop of balls being lobbed back and forth across the tennis courts.

“Happy?” he said without looking up from his paper. “Of course I’m happy, darling.”

“I want us to be happy,” she said. “I’m going to work so hard to make ours a happy marriage, and to be a good wife.”

“Why shouldn’t we be happy? We’re going to have everything in the world we want. Father is building us the house on Washington Street. You’re going to have a staff of eleven servants at your beck and call.”

“Eleven servants! It’s just that I don’t know how good I’ll be at becking and at calling.”

“Mother is selecting them, so you can be sure they’ll be excellent.”

“It’s just—it’s just that I want us to have more than just material things, Peter. I want us to have experiences together, to see things and learn things together. I want us to travel. I’d like it if we could go to China. I want us to walk the Great Wall, visit the Forbidden City, see the Palace of the Great Mogul. And then I’d like us to learn some foreign language, and then visit some little villages in faraway countries, and see whether we could talk to them in their own language, and whether we could understand them, and learn about their lives, and—that’s the sort of thing I mean.”

“We’ll have everything in the world we want,” he said.

“Everything, except—except, Peter, I don’t know how to say this, but sometimes I feel so mixed up. Sometimes I wonder if we did the right thing. Did we do the right thing, Peter, getting married?”

He smiled. “A little late to ask that question now, isn’t it?”

“That’s not an answer, Peter.”

“Of course we did the right thing.”

“If you ever thought it wasn’t the right thing, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course I would, but I’m sure I’ll never need to.”

But what she couldn’t tell him was that, despite his being her husband, she still felt that she was living with a stranger, that somehow, in agreeing to marry him, she had allowed herself to become a prisoner, a prisoner with a life sentence that could never be commuted, a permanent possession of the LeBaron family, like one of the pieces of heirloom silver that her mother-in-law had explained were to be passed on from generation to generation.

Lifting the coffeepot, he said, “More coffee, darling?”

“Thank you, Peter.”

He filled her cup. “Cream and sugar?”

“No,” she said, and laughed. “I know I shouldn’t mind, I know a bride shouldn’t mind that she’s been married nearly three months, and her husband still doesn’t remember that she takes her coffee black.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Now, can I get back to my paper?”

“And a bride shouldn’t mind, I know that, if her husband wants to read the paper. All men read the paper in the morning over breakfast. No, I don’t mind. But can I ask you just one more question, Peter?”

“Of course.”

“Do you love me, Peter?”

“Of course I love you. I love you very much.”

“And I love you,” she said.

Many years later, she asked Joanna about this. “You know, I think Peter loves me, Jo,” she said. “He’s never treated me with anything but kindness. But it’s just—how can I put it, Jo? It’s just that, when I first met him, there was real ardor—real passion, I guess you’d call it, between us. A thrilling, passionate kind of loving we experienced together. Then, later, it wasn’t there. If there were another woman, a mistress even, I would understand it. I could accept that. But there isn’t any.”

Joanna gave her an odd, mischievous look. “Well,” she said. “who knows? There may be another woman.”

Having just said that she could accept it if there were another woman, it was hard for Sari to know what to say next, but she said it anyway. “Then who? Who could it be?”

“My dear, I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“Is love important, Jo? Is it important to be in love?”

Joanna smiled. “In my lusty youth, I used to think so. Now I think the answer is hard work.”

How does one tell another woman, even one’s best friend, that in fourteen years of marriage to a man, there has been no sex in the marriage, no sex at all? Though there was sex before. Now it is only endearments: “I love you, Peter.” “I love you, too, Sari.”

And so, for her, the answer had been the same—work, hard work, out in the vineyards on her hands and knees alongside her husband and the Chinks and the wetbacks and the Okies from the Dust Bowl, planting and transplanting vines, chip-budding the new stalks by hand with a grafting knife, and slowly getting rich again. (“How rich are we, Grandma?” Kimmie had asked just yesterday. “It seems that all Mother and Daddy talk about is money anymore.” “Rich enough so that your Grandpa Tillinghast thinks he’d like to take over our company,” she had answered.)

Then, in 1941, when Melissa turned fifteen, Sari made a discovery that cut like a knife through her heart, that night when she and Peter and Joanna were dining at the Mural Room.

About the same time, another disturbing event had taken place. Thomas had reported it to her. “I must speak to you right away, Madam,” he had said.

“Certainly, Thomas.”

“I went down to open up the pool enclosure,” he said. “It’s such a nice day that I thought Madam might enjoy her swim in the fresh air.”

“Yes …”

“As I came to the glass door, I saw that Miss Melissa was sitting on the diving board. With Mr. Lance. They were both in a state of undress, Madam.”

“Yes.”

“And it was quite clear to me what was happening, Madam. Miss Melissa was instructing her cousin on how to perform the sexual act.”

“A boy of twelve …”

“He had an erection, Madam, if Madam will pardon the expression.”

“I see. And then what happened?”

“I made a very large noise opening the glass door, and they saw me, and they grabbed their towels and ran into the dressing rooms.”

“Into the same room?”

“He ran into the gentlemen’s, and she into the ladies’. I came immediately here.”

“I see. Well, thank you, Thomas. I’ll handle this.”

She decided, for reasons of her own, not to apprise Joanna of this episode. Instead, she immediately sent for Dr. Obermark.

Dr. Obermark’s face was very grave. “I would recommend two procedures, in light of what you’ve told me,” he said. “With her history of hysteria and intractability, and her refusal to accept any form of discipline or to conform to normal patterns of restraint, I can only see this latest symptom as a warning to us that she is about to embark upon a career of compulsive promiscuity. I recommend, therefore, that her uterus be surgically removed for her own protection. I would also recommend that she be immediately examined, and treated, by a clinical psychologist. I have an excellent woman in mind.”

Melissa was told that her appendix was inflamed, and would have to be removed. The same story, incidentally, was told to Melissa’s father. On the domestic front, Sari handled things by tactfully suggesting to Joanna that, now that things were looking up financially for Baronet, it might be appropriate for Joanna and Lance to find another house or apartment in the city.

But somehow, someone—a nurse, perhaps?—told Melissa what had happened. Or, just as likely, she simply guessed.

A few months after her operation, she said, “Was I a difficult birth, Mother?”

“You were a darling baby.”

“But I’ll never know what birth is like, will I.”

“Don’t be silly, darling.”

“Then why don’t I menstruate anymore, Mother?”

“Not all girls do, Melissa.”

“That’s a lie! All girls my age menstruate!”

“Most girls would think it a blessing not to have to menstruate—not to have to get the curse. I know I would.”

“Why do you want me to be a monster, Mother? Why do you want me to be more of a monster than I am already?”

The clinical psychologist whom Dr. Obermark recommended had the unlikely name of Dr. Lilias de Falange. She submitted Melissa to a battery of tests, followed by lengthy interviews, and at the end of that summer she sent out the following typewritten report:

Subject is an attractive, intelligent, well-dressed Caucasian female, with a tendency to underweight, age 15 yrs., 7 mos.

Interpretation of Rorschach session follows:

Considering this child’s response to Card V, we clearly have a situation of sexual obsession, as evidenced by fixation on Dd 22, the noted appendage of butterfly, which patient described as a “pulsating toothpick.” That this response is sexual, no one can doubt, but more importantly it demonstrates her conviction that penile insertion is dependent upon emaciation, and thus this shows her own bodily concerns are intimately linked to frigidity in sexual development.

Not only is this patient potentially frigid, she also has evidence of lacunae in affective responses generally noticed in absence of color remarks to cards VIII and IX. What seems to be occurring is a fear of loss of vital fluids. (Could she conceivably be frightened of the onset of menses?) But, more importantly, she seems to be showing a marked void in emotional reciprocity, resulting in a forced, rigid approach to the world, more commonly expressed as a masculine, sadistic front. In short, this child’s feelings are truncated.

Patient shows a remarkably similar developmental pattern to that of Dr. Edward Lahniers’ pioneering treatise on “vagabond youngsters,” published last year in Psychological Disturbances of Youth. In that study he noted the forward progression of a syndrome in which supposedly “loved” children became antagonistic and disorderly towards those authority figures who were responsible for them. Why, he asked, does not affection beget affection? The answer, he found, lay in misaligned allegiances. The child identifies with or takes the part of (either positively or negatively) the parent who has secrets to hide from the other parent. In other words, the child develops symptoms which prevent the parents from recognizing or working out marital problems. The result is emotional mayhem, because so long as the child was serving as a “secret agent,” chaos ruled in the home, but the chaos at least neutralized the child’s basic fear of disintegration of the family unit.

Clearly this child is trying to protect secrets. Either she learns to stop being the victim, or she succumbs to chronic hypochondria, insanity, or suicide.

Attached to the report was a bill for five thousand dollars.

Looking back, were the measures Dr. Obermark recommended too harsh, too Draconian? Or does it matter, now that it’s too late and the effects were irreversible? Looking back, does any of this matter? Does it matter that, five years later, Dr. Obermark was the same Dr. Otto Obermark, the prominent pediatrician you may have read about, who was arrested for sexually molesting an eight-year-old boy in the underground parking garage below Union Square, and was sent for two years to San Quentin? Does it matter that Dr. Lilias de Falange later ran off with a rodeo performer, moved with him to Albuquerque, and briefly made the papers when their month-old baby strangled itself in its crib, while Dr. de Falange was drinking in a saloon downstairs? Does any of this matter?

It was all years and years ago.

“Mr. Philip Dougherty is calling, Madam, from the New York Times.”

“Good Lord, has the Times gotten wind of Eric’s shenanigans already?” Sari says. “I only had Eric’s letter yesterday!”

“I believe this is about the other matter, Madam—LeBaron and Murdock resigning the Baronet account. Mr. Dougherty writes the advertising column.”

“Oh. Well, tell him I’ll have a prepared statement for him in half an hour.”

Sari has known that some sort of statement will have to be forthcoming from her end of things. It was only a matter of time. At first, she has considered some sort of angrily worded statement, repudiating Joanna and her agency. “My sister-in-law has obviously gone soft in the head,” she has thought of saying. Or, “LeBaron and Murdock didn’t resign us. We fired them for gross incompetence.” And yet, now, considering what Eric is proposing, and the fact that this, too, will eventually come to the attention of the press, the wiser tactic would be to diffuse any impression that a family feud might be brewing. One can sometimes accomplish more with honey than with vinegar, as they say. A more gently worded statement from Baronet’s president seems to be in order. In five minutes, she has composed it.

It is with genuine regret that Baronet Vineyards, Inc., announces its departure from LeBaron & Murdock, its agency for more than thirty years. “As evidence of the deep respect in which we continue to hold LeBaron & Murdock, what more powerful evidence can we hold up than the fact that, since 1952, when we first came to the agency, Baronet’s sales have risen from 150,000 cases a year to over 3,000,000 cases a year,” a Baronet spokesperson said today. “The parting of the ways comes as a result of small but persistent differences in merchandising philosophies.”

Baronet will be interviewing for new agency representation over the next few months. No new appointment will be announced until these interviews have been completed.

And now, having done that, Sari has another idea. Why not, in this new spirit of honeyed friendliness, telephone Joanna and read the press release to her, and ask her what she thinks of it? The idea appeals to her, because it contains an element of surprise. Joanna won’t be expecting to hear from Sari on a conciliatory note at this juncture. She’ll expect Sari to be mad as hell. As of course she is.

“I just wanted to see if you approved of my wording, Jo,” she says when she has her on the phone, “before I ask Miss Martino to dictate it to the Times.”

“Why, I think it reads very nicely, Sari,” Joanna says. “It’s certainly kind of you to give us all the credit for your wonderful figures. You had an awful lot to do with that yourself, you know.”

“No, I believe in giving credit where credit is due.”

“Sari, I’m really terribly touched, darling.”

“Of course, I was a little hurt that you didn’t give me any advance warning that you were doing this,” Sari says.

“But I thought I was just going through the proper channels, telling Eric. After all, Eric is your advertising director.”

“Was.”

“Oh. Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Sari. But I’m not going to tell you how to run your company.”

“I can’t have him on my payroll while he’s plotting to sell my company to someone else, can I? I presume by now you’ve had his letter to the shareholders.”

“Yes. This morning.”

“May I ask you what you think of his proposal?”

“Well, I must say I find it very tempting,” she says. “Harry’s offer seems generous, and Eric seems to think he might sweeten it by a point or two when we get into negotiations. It would “mean a lot of money for all of us, and there’s also another thing.”

“What’s that?”

“As you and I get older, Sari, it’s been on my mind. You and I are now the senior stockholders, in terms of age. With a privately owned company like Baronet, if something should happen to either of us, the government could come in and place whatever price they wanted to on the stock. Our heirs could be taxed to the moon. We’d have no control. But if we were to become part of Kern-McKittrick, that’s a publicly owned company, and the price of its stock would be established in the marketplace. We’d be providing much more security for our children, and your grandchildren. That’s the point my lawyers have been making to me. What do your lawyers say?”

“I haven’t met with them yet.”

“What I think we ought to do,” Joanna says, “even before we start listening to what lawyers think, is all of us sit down together, like civilized human beings, and talk this whole thing over. It doesn’t have to be a High Noon shoot-out. After all, we’re connected by blood as well as wine.”

“And speaking of that,” Sari says, “in any shareholder vote, we are going to have what I call a Lance problem. Or it could also be called a Melissa problem, if you remember the terms of Peter’s will.”

“Yes. I know exactly what you mean.”

“Things could get very—unpleasant, couldn’t they.”

“Yes. But that’s if there’s a High Noon shoot-out. First let’s meet and talk about it. Why don’t I clear a few things off my desk, and fly out for the weekend? How would that be? Besides, it’s been ages since I’ve seen you.”

Sari is silent for a moment. Then she says, “But what about me?”

“Hm?”

“What about me? If you and Eric and Lance all vote against me, and if Melissa finds out she’s legally entitled to vote more shares than she knows she owns, and votes it all against me—”

“Melissa must not be told. That would be—”

“But suppose I were to tell her?”

“You wouldn’t do that, Sari. You’d do a lot of things, but you wouldn’t do that.”

“I would, if I thought she’d vote on my side!”

“You’re still talking about a High Noon shoot-out. It hasn’t come to that.”

“And if she voted on my side, that would put the kibosh on you and Eric, wouldn’t it? Because I’d also have Peeper on my side.”

“Sari, we’re quarreling. Let me come out to San Francisco for the weekend, and we’ll meet and talk—like civilized—”

“Of course, Melissa could decide to vote against me. It would be just like her! Then where would I be?”

“Sari,” she hears Joanna’s voice saying, “you’ve worked so hard for the company all these years. I should think, at this point, that you’d be ready to slip out of your girdle, relax—maybe travel, take a cruise—relax, and enjoy your life.”

“This company is my life! This company is my entire life! It’s the only life I’ve ever had. You, Jo, of all people ought to know that. Jo—remember I did you a big favor once, long ago. Why don’t I hear you saying that you’ll take my side in this? Do you remember a pact made in blood? Whatever became of that, my fair-weather friend? Let me just say this—if you side with Eric in this thing, it will turn into a High Noon shoot-out, and I will tell Melissa everything she needs to know. Everything.”

“Sari dear,” Joanna says. “Please relax. I’ll come out for the weekend. We’ll talk.”