Lookaway, Lookaway (55 page)

Kate wasn’t all the way on board.

Jerene spoke simply. “Becks left his considerable fortune divided between his wife and sons. I had my detective check. You see—”

“You hired a detective?”

“Of course I did. Anyway, Liddibelle got the houses and property at the shore, but the portfolio, where the big bucks were, was divided evenly between Liddie and her two sons. But the language of the will directs the fortune to be divided among the ‘heirs.’”

Kate nodded. “And Liddie would have to carve out another fourth of that portfolio for this newfound heir.”

“To win a few hundred thousand from us, she would sacrifice a few million to some stranger.”

“My. What a payday for that other son living somewhere.”

“It’s a daughter. Perfectly happy where she is. There is no interest on the part of either of us to have a relation, if that’s what you’re about to ask.”

Jerene gave out the last sentiment rather quickly as if she were still convincing herself, Kate thought. Kate looked into her teacup.
Jerene Jarvis Johnston got knocked up before marriage?
This pillar of respectability … But Kate’s old instincts took over, the Kate that counseled the young girls at church about their unplanned pregnancies. It would have been the 1960s, and Jerene had been truly banished from her home, lying low in a halfway house of unwed mothers in Asheboro until it came due, then she would have handed her own child over to some state Children’s Home functionary, then have to rejoin society, race back down to Chapel Hill and the social whirl of her sophomore year with lies and subterfuge. Kate had imagined her mother-in-law constructed of ice, but back as a teenager she would have been like any other scared girl, heartbroken, coerced, made to suffer with no one having any sympathy, terrified of scandal and ruin, judged by her high-society clan and judged by herself. Suddenly, the steely woman of resolve Jerene Jarvis had become made tautological sense; she must have vowed never to let things veer out of her control ever again. Kate felt tears crowding her eyes—poor Jerene!

With a waver in her voice, Kate asked, “Who knows about this?”

“None of my children knows. Of course, my sister who went with me knows everything. Duke knows some of it, I told him when he asked me to marry him and he said it made no difference. We kept it from Gaston, too. My mother knew, who wanted me to abort it even if I got carved up like the Sunday roast. She wanted it gone and maybe me with it. My father never found out. That was our greatest fear.” Jerene reached for a butter cookie; she broke it in half but did not eat either piece. “I cannot command that you keep secrets from your husband. You have to decide whether Beauregard will be a happier person knowing or a less happy person.”

“I keep a lot of secrets from Bo. People tell me things in the church that I make a decision not to pass on to the preacher who may … feel compelled to act.” Bo and she weren’t gossips and they didn’t enjoy trading their congregants’ foolish choices and long-running miseries. Some mothers or daughters especially would plead,
Please don’t tell Reverend Bo,
and she didn’t.

Jerene stared at Kate, taking this measure. “That is one of the less commented upon wifely duties, Kate. Men are only good at duplicity when sex or money is concerned. Women grow up having to sham and artifice their way through life; we have a high tolerance for secrets, despite our reputation for gossip. We go to our graves with an encyclopedia’s worth of things we chose not to tell our husbands, our families. For the sake of tranquility.”

Kate lately was seeing the truth of that.

“And you might wonder,” Jerene began again, maybe sobered herself by the return of these topics, “the whole reason why I included you in this episode today. Well, I think that church life keeps you plenty busy but I want you to consider that one day, after I’m too old for this, that you should take over as the head of the Jarvis Trust for American Art.” Jerene, for effect, sipped the last of her tea. “I don’t think Jerilyn wishes any public pedestal in Charlotte after what’s happened. And Annie—well, we know about Annie. Josh, I am assured, is not likely to marry. And so I turn to you, Kate.”

“You should let Josh do it. I’m hopeless about art.”

“It has always been my plan to pass it down through the women of the family. I think you and Bo are the only ones likely to have children, in a normal fashion, in a loving and steady home, and perhaps one of your daughters will take it over after you.”

Kate reached over and took Jerene’s hand. “Jerene.
Mom
—you’re as close to being a mother as I’ve ever had. I am so flattered and moved by your offer. But I think I am the wrong person for this job.”

Just a small decrease of light in Jerene’s eyes. “But you’ll promise me, you’ll think it over?”

“Of course.”

“Another reason you’re here, to hear all this dirty laundry. You have to know everything about the Trust, all the detractors, the enemies, the secrets, so you won’t be caught unaware.”

Again Kate thought of the simplicity of building a health clinic in a remote jungle location. How easy it seemed beside the Jarvis Trust suddenly, abysses forming on all sides.

Jerene stood up and reached for her purse and the manila envelope. “Did Bo bring you? I can give you a ride.”

“I drove myself.”

They walked through the lobby of the Mint. Materializing from her perch or warren, Miss Maylee magically fluttered alongside them to wave farewell. “Shame about the rain,” she said.

A monsoon had established itself.

They waited a minute at the entrance hoping the rain would subside a bit. Kate watched Jerene absently deposit the manila envelope in an overly stylish chrome trash receptacle, squeezing it so it would fit through the round hole. It must have been a Xerox copy of the birth certificate inside. Funny that she didn’t care if anyone found it in the trash.
Not precisely.
What had Jerene meant by saying she didn’t tell Liddibelle outright…?

“Jerene.”

“Yes.”

“Why not just show Liddibelle the birth certificate knowing she would never notify any authority about it?” Kate laughed. “I’m sorry, but you … You don’t have to tell me but I think…”

Jerene gazed out at the marble stairway, slick with rain, the edges of the parking lot forming puddles by the storm drains.

“Was Becks’s name really on that birth certificate?”

Jerene continued her study of the rain-filled parking lot. Was that a smile, just a hint, at the corner of her mouth?

Kate resuscitated her new carefree tone. “Just a hunch, but I … I think you pulled a fast one.”

In a very dry whisper, Jerene asked, “What do you think was in my envelope?”

“My guess,” Kate said, waiting to be contradicted, “is that envelope held a blank piece of paper, the way you threw it away a moment ago. Who did you date about that time you were with Becks Baylor? The next fellow.” Another small laugh, but not so loud as to attract Miss Maylee’s attention. The family friend, dear dependable Darnell McKay, the tax lawyer who had never handled a civil suit, but the lawyer whom Jerene insisted upon hiring anyway. “Darnell McKay,” Kate brought out, marveling. “Who has been working round the clock on the case. Bo and I figured your legal bill would be very large, so we were, privately, going to offer to pay some of it for you and Dad.”

Jerene continued to stare at the lot. After a full minute, she said, “That’s very kind of you, but Mr. McKay’s fees are very reasonable, as he is an old family friend.” Kate bet they were reasonable, as in free of charge so he, too, could keep his and Jerene’s out-of-wedlock daughter a secret. So another estate and portfolio didn’t have to be divided, or a wife told the truth about a lie forty years old.

“That,” said Jerene, after another minute, “is why I thought you might be up to the challenge of managing the Trust. You have very good people instincts. You know things.” Jerene smoothed her skirt. “Let’s run to my car, and I’ll drive you to the end of the parking lot.”

That’s what they did. Jerene got to park up front near the handicapped spaces twenty yards from the front door, given her primacy at the Mint. Once inside Jerene’s warm BMW, Kate directed her to the last row near the entrance on Randolph Road. But Kate did not hop out right away, and Jerene seemed in no hurry to deposit her. Kate noticed that she was gripping the steering wheel very tightly.

“I won’t be telling Bo,” Kate concluded.

“That might be best,” said Jerene, sounding strained, the high spirits early in the day, the accomplishment of her victory, now extinguished.

Kate reasoned: Bo would want to know the older sister he never had. He would want to ask Mom about what she went through. It would turn into a Sunday sermon, a homily with many moralistic conclusions, a month of sermons. He would flog it and use it and squeeze the ministerial juice out of it just as he did his sister’s shooting of her husband; it would all be
material
. That was a terrible way to think about her husband, crass, exploitative, but it is what would happen. Did ministers really have a choice, having to cough up a life lesson every Sunday?

And Bo would feel the urge to air out this honest impulse everywhere, and Jerilyn and Josh would also soon know about their mom’s out-of-wedlock birth, and Annie—Annie who would use this very human foible as a club to bludgeon her mother with, some future Christmas dinner … which Bo would insist should include the given-away child, re-embraced and gathered up into the family bosom, whether this woman wanted that or not. Yet this revelation and all the public Christianizing wouldn’t make Bo happy, to know his mother had suffered this. He adored his mother—too much, in fact. It’s a matriarchy in the South—you can’t convince a Southern man his mother isn’t perfect if that’s what he thinks. She wouldn’t tell Bo. That was for Jerene to do. She would add that to the pile of things she wouldn’t tell her husband lately.

Like that she was contemplating really leaving him. She might choose to tell him once she got out of the country on some UNICEF project, from deep in a rain forest. She thought they were almost done with Stallings Presbyterian and were, mercifully, only a year or two away from real roll-up-your-sleeves inner-city work or a mission assignment or something true, and
without telling her
he allows his name to be put up to replace Zephora Hainey at the synod. As soon as she heard that, she understood Bo would not only get the job but he would continue climbing ever upward until … until he was the Pope of the Presbyterians. Bo would run for class president all over again—and again and again. That was not the work directed by Christ, as far as she was concerned. The work of Christ was elsewhere besides synod politics and doctrinal debates and agreed-upon articles with other less reasonable branches of the ever-divided Presbyterian population, and her husband would get lost in all of it, and Kate would be lucky to ladle one bowl at a soup kitchen with him by her side.

Another secret: she had heard from Ellen Markowitz, her former lover and former Peace Corps partner, who had shunned her when they got back to the States, who had married and pleased her Connecticut family, who had consumed heterosexuality like medicine. Ellen had written to say that she was divorced, she was an out lesbian now, she had written to beg forgiveness and make amends to Kate, and she was heading back to Central America with the Red Cross, with her nurse’s training. The mission fields. Well, that was Kate’s name for it, not Ellen’s, who was Jewish, atheistic. Right up there with Jesus in Kate’s salvation was Ellen, whose sole gospel was
feed, clothe, heal,
and there was a place for Kate in this work. If she could make an escape.

And another thing: her faith was getting stronger and more directed as Bo was losing his to church-domestication, plain and simple, and another thing: that she didn’t want to have children and he did. And also, she felt she might be happier working, living with, loving a woman. Not so much the sex thing but the consanguinity, the being on the same page, starting from the same emotional place. Oh God. Had Jerene proven contagious? Had Kate caught the Southern disease? She was now full to the brim with secrets, just as full of cover-up and turmoil as the poor congregants at Stallings Presbyterian, the cutters and the adulterers and the victimized girls.

“Jerene?”

Jerene had returned to her stony stare forward, gripping the steering wheel.

“I’m glad to hear, actually,” Kate said slowly, gently, “that Darnell McKay was the father.”

Jerene said nothing.

“Because, well, perhaps it’s a habit from my counseling, but I counted back. Back from September third. Nine months before would have been around Christmas. When you were, presumably, home.”

Jerene stared straight ahead.

“And I wondered if, from all I heard about Bo’s grandfather, who was apparently a violent man, a drunk, there might have been a possibility that
your
father was your child’s father. That he committed a violence against you.”

Except for a tightening of her hands on the wheel, Jerene stared straight ahead, her expression untroubled.

“It’s the sort of thing I have heard many times. And if that were the case, how you might need one other person to talk to.”

Kate heard nothing but the rain drumming the top of the car, the defrost whirring, keeping the windshield unfogged.

“Or, if not me, then someone.” Despite the defogger, Kate saw, the car was fogging up anyway. “But you say that the father is Darnell McKay, who you began dating soon after Becks, so that is certainly … That is…” Kate didn’t know how to wrap up. “But if it were the other thing…”

Jerene, at last, spoke. “We’ll be meeting again with the full Jarvis Trust next Tuesday, at noon. Can I count on you to be there?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

BOOK 3

Scandal Redux

2012

Dorcas

Dorrie Jourdain was proud of her family, preferring to trace the free Creole family line that ran back to New Orleans and maybe further back to Haiti although the thread became murky after that.