Lookaway, Lookaway (36 page)

“And Patty had no heirs?”

“Oh yes, some cousins, distant, many times removed who lit out generations ago for Missouri, the Ozarks. Why should some bumpkin come to the door of his shack and get a notification that a branch of the family has left him a million? Why not our family instead? And we weren’t even strangers. We were family by marriage.”

“If someone were to audit…”

“It’s over, sweetheart. We’re talking the fifties and sixties, in Union County, North Carolina. You don’t think your father was wily enough to cover his tracks?”

Jerene nodded, then shook her head, then stared out the window in shock, then seemed to come to. And then, perhaps, a smile played at her lips. “But Mother…”

“Yes, sweetheart.”

“I remember when I was a child, you had a fund-raiser for the Jarvis Trust at the Mint, all of Charlotte was there and you thanked Grandmother Jarvis for her decades of work with the trust, and she stood up and took a little bow as they clapped.”

Jeannette smiled back. “If you say something long enough—just like the Sherman’s bummers story—people will think it’s true. My mother-in-law was every bit the sot your father was, she just covered it better. It helps not to have much to say—no one expected her to speak at length. I pointed to her, she stood up every year, they clapped, she smiled, she sat down, she had another bourbon and ginger ale.”

“My goodness, I’ve been peddling these bald-faced lies every single year.”

“You didn’t know they were lies, Jerene. And people like those kind of lies down here. They’re good, entertaining lies—I suspect history is eighty percent those kind of lies.”

Jerene was gathering up her things again. “I hate to break it to you, Mother, but art-selling is very regulated now. To sell any of the paintings, which I have no intention of doing, I have to attest to their provenance and a museum would hire an investigator to look into where they came from. To prove they’re not forgeries, of course. I could
give
them away to a museum for a tax write-off but selling them would be a problem. It doesn’t change your situation. I’ll call Annie tonight.”

Jeannette for a moment had no idea why Annie was being mentioned. Oh yes, she and her connections with movers and moving vans. “I’m not leaving here, Jerene.” Now Jeannette stood, defiant. “I’ll make a spectacle—they’ll have to drag me out of here with the sheriff’s deputies.”

“As you wish. When my check ceases to arrive in the business office, I’m sure Lattamore Acres will deposit you on the sidewalk themselves.”

“I bet I could find those cousins! I kept some papers, in my safety-deposit box! Those Ozark hillbillies could get the paintings and where would you be then?”

Jerene slipped on her gloves, calmly, undeterred. “You strike me as not very likely to reveal that you and Father were felons, ruining the thing that has meant most to you, your reputation.” Jerene looked up, simply smiling at her mother. “Besides, you’re right, I’m sure, about Daddy. He probably made sure there isn’t a trace to connect the York money to those heirs. He was the Devil Incarnate and he never paid one small price for any of his devilment, so I don’t think this will be an exception.”

Jeannette staggered to the kitchen, yanked open a drawer and held a brown plastic pill bottle. “Do you doubt that two minutes after you leave, I will swallow every one of these heart pills—every last one of them? That will solve all your problems, won’t it? Gaston can come dance on my overdue grave! Do you doubt for a minute I will do it, hm? You will have to explain how you threatened to throw your own mother out of her home and … it will follow you, this story, throughout … What? Are you laughing at me?”

Indeed, Jerene was laughing at her. “Oh Mother. You are not going to do any such thing.” Jerene stopped buttoning her winter coat and came toward Jeannette, touching her cheek, tenderly. “You are expert at one thing, long as I’ve known you, and that is preserving yourself. You are the Queen of Self-Preservation.”

Jerene walked deliberately to the door but Jeannette had one more thing to say: “You wondered why I didn’t leave your father? Pile you kids in the car and go to Uncle Fred’s?”

Jerene didn’t say anything, but of course she was interested.

“Well, you do you want to know why?” Jeannette would make her ask for it.

“Yes, all right, why didn’t you leave him?” Jerene’s tense posture relaxed. She leaned against the door, her hand on the handle.

“Once your father and I were fighting and I said I’d had enough of the drinking and the violence—and Lord, he just slapped and shoved in those days. It was long before the real beatings. And that Christmas that just about killed us all. Anyway I said I would leave him because I was done being married to a monster. He said I could expect to live on the street because I would not see a dime of his money, and the children would starve. And I had no doubt he could figure out a way to circumvent all known laws and cut me off without a cent, despite my caring for three of his children. Which prompted me to say that if he was going to be that way, perhaps I would tell the authorities how he came by all our money, all they had to do was check into a few things … and he hit me so hard I lost a tooth. This one.” Jeannette pointed to a front tooth.

“I was on the floor and he was right on top of me and he told me that he would not think twice about killing a woman who had no more sense than to turn on her husband. I crawled away, and he got more drunk, smashing things around in the kitchen. I think he was trying to decide if he should kill me now or kill me later. After all, he was going to jail anyway if I told about the Yorks. So he decided that maybe now was the time to finish me off, and just as he was deciding that, I was thinking about the gun he kept in the top desk drawer. And who knows what would have transpired if Gaston Jr. hadn’t come home. You and Dillard, I take it, had the good sense to hunker down up in your bedroom, but there was Gaston—all of seven or eight, home from some church social or something. He saw your daddy start in on me, and he saw my missing tooth and the blood on my blouse and he just exploded and lunged for your father. Your daddy thought the spectacle of fragile little Gaston flailing and swinging away at his own father was hilarious and began to laugh and couldn’t stop. He contented himself with shoving Gaston away and your brother went headfirst into the server in the dining room, bloodying his nose. It wouldn’t stop bleeding so after Gaston Sr. passed out, I put Gaston Jr. in the car and drove to the hospital.”

Jerene, no change or softening of her stare, not a flinch or ripple in her steady gaze: made of steel, thought Jeannette, made of stone.

“Now in those days, there was no social services or the like; the nurses and doctors knew good and well what they were looking at, battered wife and battered son. But nobody said anything. Gaston Jarvis was a respectable citizen and stalwart of the county, and nobody was going to cross him. So yes, darling, I stayed. I stayed so I wouldn’t get killed, and I stayed so we wouldn’t get cut off without a cent and live like paupers, and I stayed so some good could come of Patty’s money. You went to Carolina and had nice clothes, a debut, that summer where you went abroad to France, and the Jarvis Trust and the Jarvis Room at the Mint and all the respectability you stand upon. That was poor cousin Patty’s money. Dillard went to Salem and had a trousseau and Gaston had a Duke education, and all the rest. Did you see me spend any of it on myself? I couldn’t give you a loving father but I could make it that when your daddy sobered up, and in those small windows of self-loathing and sorrow for what he’d done, I saw to it that he did the right thing and try to atone by giving you the makings of a respectable life. I could not have done that from Uncle Fred’s, now could I?”

Jerene didn’t move except to turn the door handle. Finally she said, “It’s taken me a whole lifetime, Mother, to learn how to dispense with the past. There’s been no room in my life for the past, not for years now. Not since you and Daddy, not since Asheboro.”

And she was gone, out the door in a flash.

Jeannette still held the bottle of pills. She could—oh she might just take them all. But she knew she wouldn’t. She set the bottle down.

Jeannette’s circumstances were once again dire, her hold on comfort and peace slipping through her hands yet again. Other women, some grand Southern dames in Lattamore Acres, floated through the world like a rose petal on a stream, with an extended hand always there to help her up and down the small inconvenient steps of Life—but never Jeannette. Every small permitted privilege, every safe harbor had been paid for in blood and bruises, and now even at this advanced age, it would appear her finding sanctuary was still not settled and she would be tossed back yet again to the indifferent fates. Yet strangely, dire as this turn of events was, she had heart to wonder about her daughter Jerene. Gaston felt the past so keenly he tried to drink away its memory; Dillard spent her life medicated from aches and pains that were really spiritual rather than physical. But poor Jerene. Jerene had trumped them all, having turned herself to adamantine at some useful point.

Jeannette walked to her window overlooking the staff parking lot. Jerene often parked her BMW there because it was a shorter walk to Mrs. Jarvis’s rooms from the elevator bank nearest the back. Jerene had indeed parked in the staff lot, and Jeannette watched her daughter march toward her car with measure and purpose, onto the next chore, pitching mother out of her retirement community checked off the list and now it’s time for her hair appointment or a meeting with the caterers or something more important.

And not a minute after Jerene hopped in her car and drove away, there was Pilar, dear thing, leaving work for the day. Yes, Jeannette thought, smiling, Pilar was hauling her white bag of cans to her car, slung over her shoulder like Santa Claus, sounding like him too, clanging and jingling, all the cans colliding and rubbing against one another. Pilar stopped before the four recycling bins … and what, she … she was dumping the whole trash bag of cans into the blue bin for cans and recyclable metals. She won’t get a cent that way! Why would anyone not want the two, three dollars that … Had she been disposing of every single can, for months and months? But why would she …

Jeannette steadied herself first against the windowsill and before she knew it, she was sitting on the floor, with her breathing becoming more shallow. She would probably have to be helped up when it came time to stand, she would have to call a nurse or wait for one to check on her, but she just sat there for a while, shaking a little, trying to remember one thing she knew for sure, one thing she could name that was true.

Joshua

Nonso: i dot have gay friend in lagos wey i live

JJ: There must be many gays in Lagos—it is such a big city!

Nonso: many whita gay

JJ: Really? That is surprising

Nonso: i have a whita frind 4rm holland is 59

JJ: That is good, yes? To have a boyfriend.

Nonso: he is rech bot i dot like his life n all the sexysexy

Nonso: he have 2 many gay friends

Nonso: so we brak up

JJ: Oh sorry. I think in Holland gays sleep with lots of men …

Nonso: we are no longar friend

Nonso: and i dot want 2 have a friend from nigeria

JJ: why not?

Nonso: da are all abot lay all da can see

Nonso: they tell u they love u bot all is lias

JJ: There are men like that here, too. Everywhere I think.

Nonso: But u no lik those men, yes U want reall love lik me

Joshua Johnston and Dorrie Jourdain were used to their exile, and had even come to bask in it—but only because they were along for the ride together.

For their final two years at university they had been inseparable, and then they parted for a while, worked in Charlotte and Durham respectively, and when they found themselves both in Charlotte, they re-cemented, connected like some married people never connect, lived just a block from each other. The incidents of their lives didn’t even seem to happen if the other couldn’t be the audience for them; their lesser friendships melted away and they didn’t even really miss other people. Yes, everyone thought they were an interracial couple, which wasn’t very exciting in the South anymore, except it would have been the less patronized template—black woman, white man. Occasionally they let that misapprehension stand in social situations where it made them seem like the coolest people in the room.

They both were gay and that had meant exile from the comfortable currents of high school, and university (though not so savagely, they both went to UNC–Chapel Hill where tolerance was performed nicely), and, of course, family. Josh had blurted out last Christmas that he was gay, and, dependably, not one word of follow-up, speculation, consequence, commentary or curiosity ever followed from it; all was as it ever was:
not discussed
. Dorrie told her mom after graduation from Chapel Hill (she and her mother were the whole of their family), and Mrs. Jourdain begrudgingly said it didn’t matter to her and that she loved her daughter every bit as much but she would appreciate that Dorrie’s future partner be a baptized Christian and that their kids be raised in the church. Dorrie smiled gently, knowing none of that crap—church or brats, or said brats being taken on Sunday for their weekly dose of homophobia from a black pulpit—was ever going to happen.

Their final exile was from the mainstream gay world of Charlotte. “We are bona fide race traitors,” Dorrie frequently declared.

Dorrie liked white women, older, preferably with an aura of prestige and power, think Senator Hillary Clinton (Dorrie’s beat-up Toyota was plastered with
HILLARY ’08!
stickers), think Margaret Thatcher circa 1983, full professors who were experts in their fields. It didn’t matter which field, as long as there was wisdom, probity, the eyeglasses slowly being taken off to answer a student’s question with calm and authority, a hand on the podium (hm, no wedding ring…), a knowing smile at the edge of the mouth. Josh knew Dorrie’s type well: white women who edited magazines in New York, white women in Brooks Brothers who dominated all-male boardrooms, grand High Southern white women who oversaw foundations, of which there was no shortage in the South, e.g., Jerene Jarvis Johnston, executive director of the Jarvis Trust for American Art at the Mint Museum.