The LeBaron Secret by Stephen; Birmingham Page B

first cocktail. Instead, for some reason, she is still in the long central portrait gallery, where the old wine cask sits. She touches this.
    At times, though not tonight, the wine cask is warm to the touch, indicating that some sort of chemical activity, some form of fermentation, is still going on inside. The wine has not turned to vinegar but is still living, growing, changing. Also, there are times, under certain atmospheric conditions, when the wine cask will weep. Tiny beads of moisture will gather along the tight seams of the staves—more proof that Grandpa LeBaron’s wine is still very much a living, breathing thing. Sari looks for these little beads—they sometimes appear on chilly nights like this one—but finds none.
    There is another feature of the portrait gallery that some people never notice, but that others find peculiar. All the portraits on the walls, except for Grandpa’s, which is an exact duplicate of the one hanging in Sari’s office, are of children. This was Julius LeBaron’s whim. “It will make the house stay young,” he said. And so all the members of the family were painted at around age fourteen or fifteen, which Julius considered the perfect years between childhood and adulthood. It has become a family tradition, and it has been carried on. Though the clothes they wear vary according to the period, all the portraits contain certain details in common. All the boys are painted with hoops and dogs, the girls with birds and musical instruments.
    There is Sari’s husband, Peter, dressed for his first year at Thacher. And there is Sari herself, painted as the artist imagined her at that age—for she did not meet Peter until she was some years older—seated at a piano. (Sari LeBaron cannot play a note.) And there, a certain distance away from these two, is the extraordinary Joanna, in her Miss Burke’s School uniform.
    There is Melissa. “When did she get to be a beauty?” Peter once asked. She’s always been a beauty, you silly man. And there are the twins, Eric and Peeper, dressed by Robert Kirk, about to set off for Choate together. They were inseparable then, and even though Sari refused to dress them alike, they somehow always managed to do so. Athalie should be here too, but of course she isn’t. Where is Athalie?
    â€œForget Athalie, Sari. Forget she ever existed.”
    But she did exist. She lived in my body for nine months. She had a name.
    A girlish portrait of Alix, Eric’s wife, is not there, for she has no business being there. She is not family. But Eric and Alix’s twin daughters are there—Kim and Sloane—twins, but so unlike. One, Kimmie, is so pretty, while the other, Sloanie, is so … not unpretty, really, but plain. The phenomenon of twinning—no one really understands it fully. It is commoner in certain countries and cultures than in others, quite a rarity among black people. At the time her own twins were born, Sari was told that her age might have had something to do with it.
    There is young Lance, Joanna’s son.
    The voices crowd in now, filling the long gallery.
    â€œPick a card, any card.” This is Melissa.
    Her mother picks a card. It is the jack of spades.
    â€œLook at it, but don’t show it to me. Now slip it back into the deck. Now we shuffle them.” Melissa shuffles the cards, then fans them out, face up. “Your card,” she cries triumphantly, “was the three of hearts!”
    â€œNo, Melissa, it was the jack of spades.” Why hadn’t she lied and let the trick succeed? Why, in a game of checkers with Melissa, had she never let Melissa win? At best, the game would end up as a draw—a black king and a red king, endlessly pursuing each other across the board, the story of their lives.
    And now, in front of Joanna’s portrait, Sari is listening to herself and Joanna, giggling, giggling and whispering together in the Japanese Tea Garden