With (53 page)

When Adam first went to work for T, California wines were still cheap and undistinguished. Americans for the most part preferred sweet wines—ports and sherries—and they considered good table wine to be “sour.” Beaulieu Vineyards, under T with help from Adam, gradually changed all that. At the time Adam met him, André Tchelistcheff had already left the day-to-day winemaking business and spent most of his time in his small research lab, the Napa Valley Enological Research Laboratory, located up the road at St. Helena, conducting experiments and seeking to improve the quality of the wine. Adam was not merely a lab assistant; T taught him how to conduct experiments, chemical analysis and complicated tests upon different types of oak for the barrels, as well as different methods of “toasting” the oak. Nominally, Adam was the master cooper for
BV
, but actually he spent more time in T’s St. Helena laboratory, and he eventually became the leading expert on the composition of oak barrels. T had amassed a large library on wine and wine-making, most of it written in French, a language he insisted that Adam teach himself (with Frances’ help and with daily conversation from T, who said, “When I think about wine, I think in French, not English”). Neither T nor Adam were above mucking in the vineyards themselves, especially if frost threatened and help was needed at night setting out the smudge pots, whose kerosene smoke always reminded Adam of the fuel used in the Ozarks for illumination and starting woodstove fires.

Adam’s refined senses were constantly detecting something that reminded him of the Ozarks. Especially his sense of sight. On their rambles together, T showed Adam a one-room white clapboard building that had once been the Rutherford schoolhouse, which reminded Adam almost painfully of the Stay More school. T had a son named Dimitri, several years older than Adam, who had gone to school there. The author Nabokov also had a son named Dimitri, the same age as T’s son, although T had never read nor heard of that other marvelous Russian-American, who had many things in common with T, even the fact that they were both from aristocratic families who had lost everything in the Russian revolution, and T had also fought with the White Russian army against the Reds. Adam continued to buy and read each new book by Nabokov as it came out, until, by the time of the great writer’s death, he owned all of his novels that had been written in or translated into English. Otherwise his library consisted only of various wine books T had given him, or cast-offs from the Yountville Library that Frances had given him.

He continued living with Frances for several years. His father evicted him from his own home, not because of his relationship with Frances but because of his relationship with T, which Gabe Madewell bitterly begrudged him, since Adam was no longer obliged to his father for employment and thus Gabe could not continue his longstanding habit of criticizing everything Adam did. That habit had been the core of their father-son relationship, and breaking the habit cold turkey threw Gabe Madewell into a depression so irrational he would no longer tolerate the visits Adam tried to make occasionally to see his mother.

So Adam had moved in with Frances, and they lived as common-law man and wife (the acronym
POSSLQ
was just coming into vogue) for several years through Adam’s twenties, until Frances, nearly forty and beginning to lose her looks, insidiously stepped up her consumption not just of the splendid wines Adam brought home from work but also of more potent beverages such as vodka, rum, and scotch. For a while Adam appreciated that her regular intoxication left her completely free-spirited and uninhibited. But then she lost her library job as a result of her drinking, and while Adam could easily afford to support her so that she didn’t need to work, the absence of regular employment gave her more opportunity for drinking. Once she asked him, “Do you still want to marry me?” and he had to say in all honesty that he hadn’t given it any further thought. Whenever he came home from work, she was too far gone to speak coherently to him, let alone prepare meals or make love. He had his own car, and drove her to Napa city in the evenings to attend meetings of
A.A
., but that organization was not able to remove her thirst, which had gone beyond her control or his.

One year during his twenties, Adam was sent to France, at the expense of Beaulieu Vineyards and at the suggestion of T, who wanted him to study first-hand everything connected with the making of French wine barrels, from forest management to stave production to the actual methods of cooperage. Adam was thrilled, and not at all nervous, since he had learned to speak French so well. The problem was that Frances wanted desperately to go with him, and he couldn’t take her. Not that he (or
BV
) couldn’t afford it, but he was going as a businessman, not a tourist, and she would be in the way, and in the back of his mind he kept saying to himself
I’m giving up Frances for France
and indeed he hadn’t been in Merpins, his first stop after Paris, for two nights before he was sleeping with a tantalizing
femme
named Felise, who not only relaxed him after a busy day but began to accompany him as
aide et secrétaire
as he toured the
tonelleries
of France. Felise was his constant companion for three months as he absorbed everything there was to be learned about French cooperage, most of what was to be learned about French wine, and a good deal of what was to be learned about French lovemaking. About the latter Felise knew things that wanton Frances couldn’t have dreamed. For example, while Frances had shown him when he was only fifteen how a “French kiss” was done, Felise introduced him to
maraichinage,
the prolonged caressing of each other’s tongues, sometimes for hours, and usually to the point of orgasm. When it was time for Adam to return to America, he invited Felise to come with him; short of proposing marriage outright he made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, but she refused it, with the revelation that all along, she had been hired by a major
tonellerie
to entertain and assist him.

And when he got home, there was a note from Frances saying she’d gone back to San Francisco to live with her sister. Thereafter he dwelt alone for several years, except for occasional dates with women he met in the bars of St. Helena, until on one of his annual two-week vacations, he decided to visit San Francisco, which he had not yet seen. He had the address of Frances’ sister, and he intended to see Frances again and apologize in an effort to relieve the guilt that had been nagging him since his return from France. The sister would not let him in the door. “So you’re the famous Adam Madewell,” she said. “I have heard so awfully much about you. I thought of phoning to see if you’d want to attend the funeral, but I didn’t.” She told him which cemetery to go to and he put a dozen red roses on her grave. He wanted simply to drive on back home, but he spent a couple of nights in town, went to a Giants game, rode the street cars, visited the Palace of Fine Arts, and toured Haight-Ashbury, still inhabited by the counterculture. On a crowded sidewalk outside the Psychedelic Shop he bumped into a woman who cursed him, then grabbed him and said, “Man, you
still
smell like oakwood smoke.”

It took him too long to recognize her, with her long beribboned dirty-blonde hair, her floppy hat, the bangles and beads and all. “Well swoggle my eyes!” he exclaimed. “If it aint
Roseleen
!”

“My, my, I’d hardly know you, you’re so
tall,
and you’re even better-looking than, like, you ever was. Man, I always thought you was the best-looking feller I ever knew, you know? And I’ve loved you all my life, man.” She tried to sell him some crystals. He offered to take her to dinner. They went to an Italian restaurant, where, over the second bottle of wine, they told each other all about themselves. The reason he still smelled like oakwood smoke was that he’d been conducting a number of experiments on the optimum amount of charred “toast” on the inside of barrel staves. Roseleen had been married twice and had a daughter living with her father over in Fillmore. “It aint Stay More but its Fillmore, you know?” she said. Roseleen was “into” Zen Buddhism, if he wanted to hear about it. He didn’t. Would he like to crash at her pad? He would, if only to finally consummate the passion he’d felt for her when he first learned what passion was. As it turned out, she wasn’t spectacular, or even particularly adept, in bed. As she struggled to reach orgasm, she began to grunt, “Fuck me! Oh,
fuck
me, man!” and he suspected that the orgasm she reached was pretended. Later she said, “Man, that was like what I used to like dream of you doing to me like when we was only like ten years old, you know?”

“Me too,” was all he could say.

At breakfast the next day, she said, “Do you ever think about going back to Stay More?”

“All the time,” he said.

“But you haven’t, ever?” she said. “Me neither. I’d sure love to. Do you have a car? Let’s just like jump in your car and take off, okay? Man, let’s me and you just go like right home to Stay More.”

Oh boy, was he tempted. But whatever passion he’d felt for Roseleen Coe in their childhood was just a distant memory, indelible and remote, elusive as the fragrance of vanilla in oakwood. It made him sad to think that he’d probably changed as much as she had, maybe for the better, but still not the same Ozark boy he’d been. Frances and T had both kidded him sometimes about certain words he still used: he said “ary” and “I reckon” and “dusty dark” but for the most part his manner of speaking was much more sophisticated than it had been. Roseleen had lost all trace of her Ozark accent too but had replaced it with a kind of coarse hippie talk. “I dig but I don’t groove,” she said when Adam tried to tell her why he couldn’t take her back to Stay More.

But in the months ahead, while he was overcoming a serious case of gonorrhea he had probably contracted from Roseleen, he allowed his mind to fantasize that trip with her back home, if only just as a lark. He had been truthful in telling her that he thought constantly about going back to Stay More, but he had never admitted it, even to himself, and now that she had raised the subject, he couldn’t shake it loose. It would keep on bothering him until he did something about it.

André Tchelistcheff retired once again, as he had been doing periodically ever since Adam had met him and as he would keep on doing until he retired to that great Vineyard in the sky at the age of ninety-three. But this time, he had another reason: Beaulieu (the name means “beauteous place”) had been sold to Heublein, the liquor giant, who had also swallowed up Inglenook and Italian Swiss Colony and would eventually absorb Almaden and Glen Ellen. Heublein had bought the Regina Winery and turned it into a vinegar plant, and T loudly speculated that it might do the same to Beaulieu. “Or if we not make vinegar, what we make tastes like vinegar,” he said. He also advised Adam to get out. More than that, he offered to help Adam get set up in his own cooperage, an independent cooperage that would sell its barrels to all the Napa Valley winegrowers. Adam recalled that the top price Braxton Madewell got for a barrel was five dollars, the top price Gabe got was ten; now an American oak barrel was selling for hundreds of dollars (a French oak barrel for twice as much), with no end in sight to the rising price, the steepness of which was largely responsible for the increase in the price for a bottle of good California wine. Thus, with some backing from T and with the assurance of steady customers among the wineries of the region, Adam founded the Madewell Cooperage, whose name, it was widely assumed, boasted of the workmanship put into the product. In fact, the making of oak barrels was becoming increasingly automated, from start to finish, free from human hands, and much of Adam’s startup expenditure was for fancy machinery. Adam himself never again built a barrel from scratch at his giant cooperage. He spent most of his time at his large desk (made of oak, naturally), with paperwork or customers, or inspecting the products of his assembly line. Occasionally he sneaked away to the Napa Valley Research Laboratory, where T kept on tinkering, and where Adam could continue his own research and his search for the best possible oak and treatment thereof. Then the University of California, Davis, which operated a branch at nearby Oakville devoted to enology and viticulture, offered Adam an adjunct professorship. When they learned from his resume that he hadn’t even finished grade school, they changed the title to adjunct research specialist, but the job was the same: teaching one evening course each semester in the history, making and use of oak barrels. He certainly didn’t need the salary, and taught the course purely for pleasure. The students, including several women, were eager and hardworking, and they would go on after graduation into vineyards and cellars all over California. A few of the best Adam would hire for Madewell Cooperage. He enjoyed his students as much as they enjoyed him, and in time he would become so fond of one of them, named Linda, that he would ask her to marry him.

He was in his mid-thirties and she hadn’t quite reached her mid-twenties. Her father owned a vineyard in Sonoma County, and Adam was invited there for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and for Linda’s birthday, and he got along well with her parents and siblings. The wedding was planned as a big event for the fall to coincide with the grape harvest and be part of its celebration. But first, that summer before he tied the knot, he had a little thing he wanted to do, and he did it. He thought of it as strictly business, but he wasn’t fooling himself: somewhere in the back of his mind, homesickness was lurking. He was going to visit the Ozarks in search of the best possible oak for his barrels. He had searched the oak forests of Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for the best-grained and best-fragranced standing oak, and his cooperage used staves from all those places, but most of his staves were cut from the big river oaks along the Mississippi near Perryville, Missouri, and he maintained a constant nagging suspicion that mountain oaks would have better flavor than river oaks. In the back of his mind was even the idea of getting up to Madewell Mountain and reclaiming some of its magnificent wood.