The LeBaron Secret Read Online Free PDF

journalism he practices!”
    â€œWell, tell you what. I’ll tell him to stop sniffing around Melissa. I’ll call him off the scent.”
    â€œI still wish he were thousands of miles away from San Francisco. You see, I’m concerned, Gabe. Deeply concerned.”
    â€œOf course,” he says easily, “if you’d buy out the Gazette —as I’ve often suggested you do—you could fire whomever you pleased.”
    â€œI 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