The LeBaron Secret (15 page)

Control, she thinks. Am I finally losing control?

“You know, Nugget, flying a plane can get kind of boring after a while.” This is George Hessler, her pilot, speaking.

“Boring?”

“Flying from point A to point B, and then back to point A again. There's a certain monotony. Want to take the controls now, Nugget?”

“Fine.”

Secretly, he has been giving her flying lessons in the company jet, and he is an expert teacher.

They are flying north, now, over the Golden Gate, and the hills of San Rafael are in the distance.

She executes a wide left-hand turn now, out over the ocean and then over the Farallons, and then another left-hand turn. “Boring?” she says. “Well, let's have some excitement. How wide is the bridge?”

“I have no idea. Why?”

“Never mind. Wide enough. Here we go.” And she begins her steep descent, heading for the bridge.

“Nugget, what the hell are you doing?” he cries. But from the blaze of excitement in his eyes, she knows that he knows what she is going to do, and is not going to stop her.

“Four-oh-five, we have lost you from our screen, sir,” says the voice from the tower at San Francisco International. “Four-oh-five, please radio your position, sir. Four-oh-five—”

“Turn that damned thing off!” she shouts.

Down they go—six hundred feet, five hundred feet.

On the bridge, there is chaos as afternoon motorists see the big jet heading for them. Some cars pull up along the walkway, while others try to speed on to safety on the other side—all, no doubt, thinking of Air Florida and the crash into the Fourteenth Street Bridge in Washington.

Three hundred feet, and the wash from the jet engines churns the water beneath them into a furious foam of whitecaps.

Two hundred feet, and they are under the bridge, through, between the two towers, and out again. “Bull's-eye!” Sari shouts, and they are both laughing and cheering and weeping and slapping each other on the back so hard that Sari can barely see. But she knows her plane, and begins her ascent.

“Bull's-eye! Bull's-eye, Nugget!”

On the bridge, there is panic. There is hysteria. Some motorists have stopped and got out of their automobiles on the insane theory that if the plane were going to strike the bridge, it would be better to go down bodily than encased in a car.

But all their problems are far behind Sari now, who is heading toward Alameda.

In control.

The United Airlines red-eye flight from San Francisco to New York is never spoken of in the warmest terms. It leaves San Francisco at midnight, and almost immediately after takeoff, it seems, it is heading into the eastern sunrise for a seven-thirty arrival at La Guardia, and therefore sleep on the red-eye is difficult. The Madison Avenue boys, sitting three abreast in the crowded coach section, should at least have been trying to sleep. But instead, in the wake of their defeated advertising campaign, they have elected to drown their sorrows and to drink theirway across the continental United States. By now they are drunk as lords, and not on Baronet wine, either. A large collection of miniature Scotch, bourbon, and vodka bottles decorates their tray-tables.

“Solution. Dilution. Pollution.” This is Bob Petrocelli speaking. “Dilute her—her Geritol with cyanide! A cyanide solution! A cyanide dilution!”

“I
like
it! I
like
it!” roars Mike Geraghty, who has been ordering doubles while the others have stuck to singles. “Mix it up and bring it around!”

Howard Friedman says nothing. For the last fifteen minutes he has been struggling in vain to control a violent case of hiccups.

“Bull-do!” There are more roars of laughter.

“Bull-do!” And still more laughter.

“Hey, who am I?” says Bob Petrocelli all at once. He is the liveliest of the threesome, and is sitting in the aisle seat. “Gotta guess who I am. Ready-set-go, here I go!” He stands up, a little unsteadily, and steps into the aisle. Then he kneels on the carpeted floor of the plane and starts lumbering up the aisle on his knees. “Guess who I am! Guess who I am! Can anybody guess?”

The others are laughing so hard now that their heads fall down into their open tray-tables, and at least a dozen little empty bottles go scattering and clattering to the floor.

Up the aisle continues Petrocelli on his knees, crying, “Guess who! Guess who! Bull-do! Bull-do!”

The pretty young female flight attendant, wearing an expression of great forbearance, moves down the aisle toward him from the forward section of the cabin. “Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to return to your seat,” she says. “We have begun our initial approach into the New York area, and the fasten-seat-belt sign has been illuminated by the captain.”

“Bull-do!”

In the northwest corner of the Sonoma vineyard—where more than four thousand rolling Baronet acres are under cultivation, given over to Semillons, Palominos, and Alicantes—Constance and Julius LeBaron lie sleeping in their quiet graves. They were buried here because, for obvious reasons, their bodies could not be received in consecrated earth. Also, it was Julius LeBaron's firm wish that he and his wife be buried where they died. Just before their simplest of wooden coffins, which they had also requested, were closed and lowered into the ground in 1930, a ripe walnut was placed in each of their mouths. This is an Old World custom. It struck many people as peculiar, since Julius LeBaron was a man who, all his life, had seemed determined to rid himself of every trace of the Old World, including his name. But this was his request. And the two trees that have grown up, side by side, at the gravesite are regarded by others with varying degrees of ambivalence. Some thought that Julius and Constance's funerary requirements were merely bizarre. Others considered them downright barbaric.

Peter Powell LeBaron could never bear to visit the two walnut trees, the sight disturbed him so. To him, the trees seemed accusatory, admonishing. Sari's twin sons, on the other hand, who never knew their grandparents, think little or nothing about these presences, nor does Melissa. To her, these grandparents exist only in the dimmest of early childhood memories.

To Sari, the trees symbolize a certain grandeur and high mystery—the cycle of nature, new life springing up out of death. The pair of walnut trees bear their own fruit now, and more trees will grow, and continue to grow, generation after generation. There is even further symbolism here. In the old days, vineyardists often planted walnut trees in alternating rows between the vines. The theory was that, if one crop failed, the planter would always have another crop to harvest, and it was also supposed that the trees would provide needed shade and wind protection for the vines. The old-timers were dead wrong, of course. What happened was that, in a poor year, both crops failed. And in a good year, both crops were no more than mediocre. The practice was abandoned, and the growers went back to the only system they could really rely on, which was luck.

Sari visits the two walnut trees often. For her, there is a sense of awe and wonder engendered by this little grove, a sense of continuity and peace. The trees are set off and protected by a sturdy grape-stake fence. Inside the gate, set into the ground between the trees, is a plaque announcing that this is where her in-laws lie. The plaque gives Julius's and Constance's dates, and the strange, stern imprecation he chose for their epitaph:

Haste and escape for your lives,

Look not behind you,

Awake and fly from the wrath to come,

Escape to the mountain,

Lest ye be consumed.

It is Sari who sees to it that the bronze plaque is always kept brightly polished.

PART TWO

Beginnings

Five

There is nothing particularly mysterious or strange or secret about Assaria LeBaron's origins, despite the stories and the gossip you will hear. Her old friends know the real story—or as much of it as she herself remembers. Because, you see, the only fairly uncommon thing about her story is that both her parents died when she was eight years old, and she was an only child, and so grew up with no one to do her remembering for her. How much can you remember, unaided, of what you did and who you were when you were only eight? Very little, I expect. But most of us grow up with parents, or perhaps an older brother or a sister, who will help nudge the earliest memories for us, poke them, stir them up like embers in a fire, reminding us of things we did and said when we were little, who will remember the name of our first-grade teacher, whose face now is only a shadow in our mind. But Sari, orphaned at eight, had none of these, and grew up with strangers.
Not
in an orphanage, by the way. That's just another of the stories. In some ways, she was uniquely suited for marriage to Peter Powell LeBaron, for the LeBarons always seemed to be trying to reconstruct their history, rewrite their past. (“A distant cousin of William S. O'Brien, the legendary Silver King,” reported the
Chronicle
when Constance O'Brien married Julius—baloney, as you already know.) In a sense, it was fitting that when Assaria Latham married their son she had almost no past at all—though they didn't think so, but that's getting ahead of the story.

She remembers a few things.

All the mirrors in the little house were covered with sheets or women's shawls, she remembers that.
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity
. And all the people in the house removed their shoes and moved about barefoot or in soft cloth slippers, and when not walking they sat on low stools or benches.
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever
. A bowl of fresh water, for the ritual of washing of hands, is placed at the feet of the twin coffins. She remembers all of that, and the mirrors covered with sheets and shawls.

Several reasons are given for this today, though they were not given to Sari at the time, nor did she ask. Some say that if you look into a mirror during this time of mourning, you will see the ghosts of the departed in it. Others say that the mourner must not be distracted from the solemn presence of the dead by a glimpse of his own reflection in the glass, and that this is why no housework, no work of any sort, must be done in this period, not even study of the Torah, and why women do not fix their hair or powder their faces, and why the men do not shave their beards, during these seven days. But still others say that the Angel of Death himself, whose name is
Malchemuvis
, is vain and puffed up with his vanity, and when he has visited a house, and if he should see his image in a mirror, he will primp and preen himself in front of it. Then he will be tempted to come back to that same house soon for another visit with its occupants, and another look at his reflection in the glass.
Malchemuvis
must not be angered or threatened or challenged. Instead, he must be quietly thwarted, frustrated, and confused as to where he is. When he cannot see his handsome reflection in a glass, he will leave, uncertain about where he has been, and will forget his way back for a long time.
All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again
.

The coffins were taken away.

The next day they were simply gone. But every day, at morning and at evening, a group of men came to the house to recite the Kaddish. “May the Almighty comfort you among the mourners for Zion and Jerusalem.” The lapels of their shirts bore short rips. There was no other conversation.

Then, Sari remembers, when that time had passed, there was talk among the others in the house, frightened talk. These would have been friends and neighbors. What is going to become of the little girl? She is all alone. Who will take her in? Who can afford to feed her, clothe her, bring her up? She has no close family, no aunts, no uncles, no grandparents, even? No. She is all alone. War is everywhere, mutinies, strikes, riots. You can smell it in the streets, the smell of death. Soon it will not be safe anywhere, anywhere in Europe. And for a child alone. Something must be decided. Something must be done, and soon.

Then Sari remembers the beginning of her own fear. How does one remember fear? She remembers fear gripping at her stomach, clutching at her with knotted fingers, fear filling her mouth with the taste of dust, fear—white fear—seeming to freeze that part of her head behind her eyeballs, fear pounding in her eardrums. Fear seemed to paralyze her, and of the next few months all she can really remember was that fear.

Later, she would be given an explanation of what had happened. She would be told that it must have been typhus, or what was called “Spanish influenza,” and she would read the statistics. This epidemic, the worst to afflict mankind since the Black Death of the fourteenth century, would kill nearly twenty-two million people, three million people in Russia alone, more than one percent of the world's entire population, while the war was killing nearly ten million more. But at the time all she knew was that one day she had had two people, a mother and a father, looking after her, and that the next day she had no one at all, except these frightened strangers who wandered in and out of the house, whispering, making incomprehensible plans. The year was 1917.

“Where are my mother and my father?”

The strangers would shake their heads sadly, but would not tell her.

Her mother's red scarf with a golden fringe—she remembered that scarf more vividly than she remembered her mother's face, because that scarf had been her mother's favorite—was taken out into the street, doused with paraffin, and burned, along with all the rest of her parents' clothing. “Why are you burning everything?” Again, they would simply shake their heads and tell her nothing. Later, she would suppose that it was assumed that her parents' clothes were infected with the typhus, and therefore must be burned, but at the time all she could remember was the horror of seeing her mother's beautiful scarf being consumed by orange flames, its golden fringe twisting into a mass of tiny, blackened worms, then unraveling into ashes.