The LeBaron Secret by Stephen; Birmingham Read Free Book Online Page B

that is supposed to be a secret. It isn’t, really. It is ten percent instead of the usual fifteen. Joanna married once, briefly, long ago, and then resumed the name LeBaron. From this union there was one son, Lance, who also eschews his father’s name and styles himself Lance LeBaron. He is a perfectly nice fellow. He works far from the wine business, as a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch, though his Uncle Peter left him some Baronet stock. He is two years younger than Melissa. Married. No children.
    And so you see that in the fifth generation there are only Eric’s two daughters. That is why Eric’s actions and behavior are important to his mother, why nothing must go wrong at this point. Of the two girls, Kimmie is her grandmother’s favorite. Why? Probably just because Kimmie is the prettier, livelier, more popular of the two.
    Sari would like to carve Kimmie in her own image.
    As for everything else, pay no heed to the stories you will hear, hereabouts, about the family. They have been called “rich as Croesus.” Well, how rich was Croesus, anyway? Did anyone ever count his wealth? Hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, did the ancient, ignorant, downtrodden Lydians even know their king that well? Baloney, says Sari LeBaron. Baloney and bull-do. They also like to talk here of the LeBaron “family curse.” Do we still believe in curses and witchcraft and spells? More baloney and more bull-do. Pay no heed, either, to various versions you will hear of the circumstances surrounding Sari’s crippling accident, or of the circumstances of Peter LeBaron’s death, et cetera, or that there is “something funny” about Melissa, based on Switzerland, and all that gossip that still goes on.
    There is only one truth about the way things happened, and only Sari LeBaron knows it all.
    She, and perhaps two other people.
    One of them is me.

Two
    Today is the day for the boys from Madison Avenue to come out to San Francisco, as they do twice a year, to present their advertising campaigns, the television commercials and so on, for Baronet wines. Sari has heard along the grapevine that the Madison Avenue boys live in terror of these semiannual trips, that they spend weeks beforehand not only pulling together their layouts and storyboards, but also planning what they all will wear, in order to make the best impression on the old lady. She has heard that the entire trip between La Guardia and San Francisco International is spent not only in going over notes and market-research reports, but also on straightening trouser creases, hitching up socks, and checking neckties for spots. She can imagine them, getting on the airplane, carefully turning their jackets inside out and folding them, flatly and neatly, in the overhead storage bins so that they will arrive unwrinkled.
    The boys always manage to dress much the same—in dark gray or dark blue three-button suits that bear the unmistakable stamp of Brooks Brothers, with white or pale blue button-down shirts, ties with tiny paisley patterns on them, and slip-on shoes with gold-colored bits clamped across their tops. It is the way they suppose San Francisco businessmen dress (which it really isn’t quite), and Sari is certain that they don’t dress that way back home in New York. San Francisco, they have been told, is a quiet, elegant city (which it really isn’t), where the women wear mink jackets and hats and short white gloves, even in summer (which they haven’t done for years), and where anything that would smack of Hollywood must be painstakingly eschewed. But this is all right. And it is all right, too, that they dread these San Francisco meetings. After all, there is that $20,000,000 in annual billings to take into consideration, a sum that, in Sari’s opinion, is not to be sneezed at. And even though LeBaron & Murdock might be considered something of a family agency, there would be nothing to prevent Assaria