The LeBaron Secret (52 page)

“I move—” Joanna begins.

“Excuse me,” Harry Tillinghast says, pushing back his chair. He stands up and clears his throat authoritatively. “I have something to say,” he says, “before we start balloting. I am hereby increasing my offer to fifteen shares of Kern-McKittrick common for each share of Baronet common.” He sits down abruptly.

There is a polite silence in the meeting room. Eric sits with his fingers steepled, looking pleased with himself. Obviously, this “surprise move” has been well rehearsed in advance. Then Eric says, “I move to accept.”

“Twenty-eight votes
not
to accept,” says Sari.

“Four votes not to accept,” Peeper echoes dutifully.

“Ladies—gentlemen,” says Queen Nefertiti in her regal voice, “I cannot accurately record the proceedings of this meeting with all of you talking at once. Please. One at a time.”

“Two votes to accept,” says Harry Tillinghast in an important-sounding way, as though the room should be awestruck that he is voting for his own proposal.

“Failure to vote is a negative vote,” Sari says again. “That's four more votes not to accept from Melissa.”

“Please, please—” If Bill Whitney had a gavel, he would pound it, but he has no gavel. “Will our meeting come to order—please?”

“Be sure you count Melissa's vote as
negative
,” Sari says, pounding on the table with her fist. “Negative. She's not here, she didn't show up, so it's negative.”

“Please … please,” Bill Whitney repeats, consulting his legal pad, “this poor young woman here,” indicating Nefertiti, “is trying to get all this down. Now, so far—” Nefertiti is back at her keyboard.

“Negative from Melissa!”

“So far,” he says, “I have recorded thirty-six votes against the proposal—from Mrs. LeBaron, from Mr. Peter LeBaron, and, of course, Melissa. I have heard only four votes in favor, from Eric LeBaron and Mr. Tillinghast. Joanna LeBaron Kiley, how do you vote? A simple majority of thirty-eight votes is needed to pass or fail this motion.”

Joanna sighs, and puts down the pen with which she has been scribbling, scribbling, and gives Sari a long look. The air between them becomes charged with electricity as Sari stares back at her just as hard and just as long from across the table, and then silently lets her lips carefully form the words: Peter. And you.

“Please record my twenty-eight votes against the proposal,” Joanna says at last. “And my son, Lance, voting by proxy, also casts his six votes against.”

With almost a look of relief, Bill Whitney says, “Then the motion has failed, seventy to four.”

Eric rips the sheets of yellow paper from the pad on which he has been making notes, wads them into an angry ball, and hurls this in Joanna's direction across the table. “Thanks a lot, Aunt Jo,” he says. “So much for loyalty. So much for promises. Fuck you, Aunt Jo. Fuck all of you. I've had it with this fucking family, and I've had it with this fucking company.” He pushes his chair, hard, away from the table, and starts to rise as if to go.

“Wait, Eric,” Joanna says, reaching quickly across the table to take his hand. “Don't you see why I had to do this? Whatever else she is, your mother is my oldest friend. I couldn't stand by and let this happen to her. Haven't you seen what this whole thing has been doing to her? She's become almost deranged by it.” Her throaty voice is full of little histrionic catches now. “I couldn't just stand by—and witness—your mother's destruction.”

Sari thinks, What is happening? She has still not quite recovered from the amazed discovery that she has won the battle, and won it by an overwhelming majority. But now what is happening? This was to have been her last hurrah, and now it is suddenly becoming Joanna's! Here is Joanna, talking about derangement and destruction! Sari cannot permit this! She cannot allow Joanna to make this final, grand, magnanimous, pitying gesture. Once more, Joanna has upstaged her. “Joanna,” she begins.

“Go to your mother, Eric,” Joanna says in that famous husky voice. “Make your peace with her. She loves you very much, and she's getting old. If we'd won, the family would have been divided forever. What happens to this company doesn't matter. What matters is that we be a family again, and that we love each other again.”

Huh, Sari thinks. Now she's trying to kill me with kindness.
Is love important?
No! The power of your personality!

“Go to her, Eric. Go to your mother now. Do it now.”

Eric has not moved, but Sari sees that his forceps scar has grown quite red. “Thank you, Joanna,” she says. “Thank you for your concern about my mental health, and about my age—which is the same as yours, of course—and thank you for voting on my side in this. Eric—of course I love you. Dammit, I always thought of this as simply a business disagreement between us. It's just that this has always been a family business, and I wanted to see it stay that way, at least during my lifetime. After I'm gone, I don't care what any of you do, because I won't be around to know it. Now I have an announcement to make to all of you.” Her eyes travel around the room. “I know there's been disagreement about the way this company is being run, and I know there's disagreement about what direction we should be taking. I also know I'm not getting any younger, and that I've held the post I hold for a long time. And so I would like to announce my resignation as president and chief executive officer of Baronet Vineyards effective June first of this year. I'd like to appoint, in my place, my son Eric. And I'd like to appoint my son Peter as executive vice-president, a post we've never had before. Eric and Peeper—I hope you can work together in these posts as partners, as a team, and as brothers. The way, in school, they used to do each other's homework, and take exams for each other—to the eternal confusion of their poor teachers! They never knew I knew this—but I knew. And they came through school with flying colors. They'll run this company with flying colors, too. Boys, God bless you—and success!”

Her eyes cross the table to Eric's, but his eyes are lowered, staring hard at the square of tabletop in front of him.

See? Not a dry eye in the house. Not even her own. Joanna is not the only one who can make a grandstand play.

A curtain line: “As for me,” she says, “I don't intend to die without my boots on. I will assume the position of chairman of the board.”

But of course no curtain falls and, instead, the silence that follows is disturbed only by the rustling of papers and the snapping open and shutting of lawyers' briefcases.

Finally, Bill Whitney says, “Do I hear a motion to adjourn?”

“I so move,” Joanna says.

“Seconded …”

“All in favor …?”

And Nefertiti begins dismantling and refolding her little stenographic machine.

Harry Tillinghast is the first to rise. “Well, you won,” he says to Sari. “I won't say I'm not disappointed with the outcome of this. But I will say that, by kicking yourself upstairs, I think you've done the next-best thing.”

“Will that make your little Buttercup happy?” Sari snaps. “Having her husband become the new president of Baronet? I know that she's the one who's been behind this whole thing from the beginning.”

“That's not true,” he says. “This was strictly Eric's and my idea. If you're planning revenge, Sari, leave my daughter out of it.” Then he bows slightly. “Ladies … gentlemen … good day.”

And now the four lawyers and Nefertiti and Bill Whitney have all left, and only the four of them remain—Sari, Joanna, and the twins. Only family.

“Well,” Sari says, “it's your company now, Eric and Peeper. And I suppose I know what to expect. After a suitable period of mourning for the departed president, I'll hear that the Baronet account has gone back to Joanna's agency. Right?”

“That's been discussed,” Joanna says.

“And the next thing I know I'll be seeing ads for your fancy new upscale label—Château Baronet—in magazines like
Vogue
and
The New Yorker
, and I'll be reading about the wine you can trust, and the wine you can bank on. Right?”

“It's one of the things we'd like to try,” Eric says.

“Well, I wish you luck,” she says. “As board chairman, I won't have much to say about operations, will I? So you might as well get going and start doing what you want to do right now.”

“We'd still like to be able to consult with you, Mother. We'd still like you part of the decision-making process.”

She snorts. “Decision-making! Well, I won't be counting on it. You plotted against me, Eric. You and Harry and Joanna plotted against me. Why should I believe anything you say now about decision-making?”

“You're being melodramatic again, Sari,” Joanna murmurs.

“Why did you both plot against me?”

“Well, for one thing,” Eric says, “when you took away half my job and gave it to Peeper, I was mad as hell. How did you think I'd feel when you did that?”

“But
I
was cross with
you
. For letting Harry get his big toe in the door. Without consulting me. I thought you should be—”

“Punished? Well, I simply decided not to take my punishment lying down. For a change.”

“You even tried to lure Melissa into your plot!”

“Well, when Aunt Jo told me the true facts about Melissa—”

“Aunt Jo told you—
what?
”

“When Aunt Jo told me that Melissa was her child, not yours, then naturally—”

Sari is deliberately not looking at Joanna. “So,” she says, “your aunt Jo told you this.”

“Naturally, if Melissa found out that she had a lot more shares to vote, her vote would make a big difference. It was simply something we had to take into account. We knew that if you told Melissa the truth about whose daughter she was—which you did—it would cast quite a different light on the situation.”

“I did not tell Melissa anything,” Sari says evenly.

“Oh, Sari, stop lying,” Joanna says. “Of course you did. You had nothing to lose by telling her, everything to lose by not telling her. If Melissa had been kept in the dark, our side could have claimed fifty-five percent of the stock, and you'd have been outvoted. You had to take the gamble—by telling her.”

Sari looks at Joanna now. “But that's not why you switched sides at the last minute, is it?” she says.

“I've already explained why I switched sides.”

“Look,” Peeper says, “the fight's over, isn't it? The way I see it, both sides won a little, and both sides lost a little. Didn't we come out with almost a tie score? So why are we still fighting? Can't we all shake hands now and get out of the ring?”

“I'm not so sure the fight's over,” Sari says. “There's still one thing that worries me, Eric. It's Madame Buttercup. Is she still threatening to slap a separate maintenance suit on you so fast you won't know what hit you, as she put it the other night?”

“Well,” he says, spreading his hands, “it's no secret that things haven't been so great lately between Alix and me.”

“A separate maintenance suit could cast something of a pall over the new president of the company. Is there still a Chinese lady in the picture?”

“No,” he says. “That was a mistake. It's over.”

“Good. I've never pretended to be particularly fond of Alix. But I am fond of the little girls, particularly Kimmie. I see a little bit of myself in Kimmie. I like to think that maybe, in the next generation, it will be Kimmie who will be taking over. It would be a shame if Alix tried to take Kimmie away from us.”

“Alix and I are trying to patch things up,” he says.

“Good. I also think Alix is a woman who will do what her father tells her to do. And I think her father is going to tell her not to start slapping separate maintenance suits on people. Not now that she's going to be the wife of the president of Baronet. Now, as the retiring head of Baronet—and as your mother, Eric—I have one final suggestion. Why don't you and Peeper kiss and make up? Why don't you go out now and buy yourselves a few drinks and start figuring how you're going to divide up responsibilities in this company? Why don't you both go out and get pleasantly sloshed together?”

Peeper—always the easier-natured of the pair—is the first to rise. He goes to Eric and puts his hand on Eric's shoulder. “I'm game,” he says. “What do you say, Facsi? Like old times, all for one and one for all? What do you say?”

Eric grins sheepishly, stands up, and accepts his brother's outstretched hand. And, for a few seconds, the brothers throw soft punches at each other's shoulders. Watching them, Sari is suddenly very happy. She feels she is in control again.

Then they are gone, and Sari and Joanna are alone.

“I know you have a plane to catch,” Sari says. “Don't let me keep you.”

“Oh, I have plenty of time,” Joanna says, glancing at her watch. “It's not even noon.”

“All packed?”

“All packed. You know me. Organization.”

“Yes.”

“Well.”

“Well.” Then Sari says, “Why did you break your promise and tell Eric about Melissa? That was supposed to be our secret. Yours, mine, and Peter's. We made a solemn pact.”

“And why did you break your promise, and tell Melissa about me? On the score of broken promises, I'd say we were about even.”

“Joanna—for the last time—I told Melissa nothing.”

“Sari, please don't lie anymore. Of course you told her. How else could she have found out?”

“Very simply. She found out on her own.”

“How?”

“Last winter, when she was in Paris, it seems she also went to Saint Moritz. At the Palace Hotel, she got acquainted with Andrea Badrutt, the son of the man who owned it when we were all there. She showed him a picture of me when I was young, and asked him if that was the woman who had the baby there. He wrote to her that it wasn't, that the woman who had the baby was a blonde who called herself Mrs. Mary Brown, and liked her eggs cooked exactly three and a half minutes.”