Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  A lifetime of parsimony was instantly corrected by Gaston’s new wardrobe. Gaston was put through a round of exacting measuring and fittings at Tate-Brown in uptown Charlotte (back in the days when such stores existed in uptown), and three suits, two blazers, a score of shirts and slacks, were the result. “I won’t have those Yankee blue bloods looking down their Semitic noses at a Jarvis,” said his father, who had a talent for mingling any positive development with something hateful.

  The only time his father set foot on Duke campus was to see Gaston off, see what kind of room he had been assigned, wonder whether he should raise hell on behalf of his son. He didn’t want his son associating with the hippies or war protestors or radical professors (Duke had its share of all). It went without saying that drugs were forbidden, but it would be good, his father said, to learn how to drink. Men drank, and would always drink—drink to make deals, drink after golf, drink to charm women, and these four years could be a time to practice and refine that skill. Gaston Jarvis Sr. suggested he only date women from good backgrounds, find a nice coed at Duke, leave the town hussies alone. He speculated loudly, surely within earshot of the other boys and boys’ parents moving into the dorm rooms, that there was many a tramp in town that would like to latch on to a future lawyer or banker. “Screw ’em if you have to, but don’t get caught in a pregnancy scam.” Those hours of unpacking were among the longest of Gaston Jr.’s life. His new life would begin, as if out of a chrysalis, the second his father returned to his brand-new Lincoln Continental, which Gaston believed was also bought just for the drive up to Durham, lest anyone form any meager notion of Jarvis patrimony.

  Gaston could have portrayed himself as another privileged Southern kid at Duke; he could have joined a fraternity and played a sport, been rowdy, drank and caroused through his money and goaded his father to send more, which—now that the measure of his father’s love of appearances had been taken—would likely have been sent, no matter the misbehavior. But Gaston already was in his habit of silent observation, hyper-carefulness in social affairs. He longed to make true friends, escape into rooms filled with worthy people, go home with someone else’s son for Christmas and Thanksgiving, erase steadily and resolutely his own unhappy family. His mother, suddenly sentimental about his departure, pressed some family photos in nice frames into his luggage, but upon reaching his assigned room in Craven Hall, he confined them to a bottom desk drawer. His sisters looked pretty and some of the fellows might well ask as to their marital status or whether dates were possible, and that thread would lead back to his family.

  His mother, now without any of her children in the house, probably guilty for all the violence she oversaw or pretended not to see, wrote him flowery letters of affection—he read one or two. After a month, he began to toss them into the trash unopened; she was writing them more for her own boredom and to cast herself as martyr and hero, and he never answered a one. After a year, the letters stopped. Gaston fantasized about being able to sell a story of being an orphan on a trust fund … he never risked this fiction, but he dwelled on it at night.

  But Arcadia! Et in Arcadia ego … Gaston could even now remember the precise details of how he, a lowly freshman, had been admitted into Arcadia, the heart of the university’s social world. It must have been Henry, his hallmate back in Craven Hall. “Oh you’ve got to meet Johnston, and the whole group at Arcadia,” Henry said, brandishing a bottle of single-malt scotch. You could not buy such a treasure in nearly dry North Carolina at that time, but Henry had taken it from his own father’s stash, some overstocked beach-cottage pantry on Long Island. “I think this is Duke’s favorite,” said Henry, showing Gaston the staid Balvenie label.

  “Should I bring a bottle, too?” Gaston asked.

  “Oh they won’t care,” his friend said of the Arcadian revelers, all but taking him by the hand and running across campus, by the grand cathedral-like bell tower (that would make you think Duke University was immemorially old rather than a faux–Ivy League creation of tobacco money in the 1930s), through the autumn woods along Alexander Street to the many-eaved Victorian house from which a joyous Louis Armstrong record was playing.

  “Well done, Henry,” said Duke, holding the Balvenie whiskey to the window, letting the golden liquid catch the afternoon light. “You boys will join me in a wee dram?”

  Henry said yes, and Gaston, like some kind of mute, stray dog, followed the men into the heart of Arcadia, past the packed rooms of celebrants, past the young pipe-smoking profs and dashiki-clad black students, debutantes and jocks and one young man perched on a sofa arm wearing eye makeup!

  Duke waited until Gaston had tried the Balvenie. “Suitable?”

  Gaston nodded, and managed to bring out, “Quite nice.” There was a half-second pause where Gaston felt the need to keep talking, make a mark on the moment. “More of a bourbon man, myself.”

  “Really?” said Duke. “Oh thank God—me too. My peers here would have us drowning in scotch. What’s your favorite?”

  Gaston had maybe sampled bourbon no more than three times in his life; the truth was it was always bourbon on his father’s breath when the beatings and abuses were in the offing. Somehow, across the miles, he saw the label on the bottles his father had left out. “Well, Maker’s Mark and Wild Turkey of course, but at the house we … my father, a lawyer, he has a special thing sent from Lexington, something called Dunlap’s Hundred—”

  “Oh yes, I know it!” Duke smiled and transformed the entire room, giving off light. “It’s impossible to get. I have just a bit of it, upstairs.”

  “I’ll be happy to bring you a bottle,” Gaston said, awfully pleased with himself. His determination not to have a father had failed—indeed, his father had made for his sole social victory, but he could live with it, in the approving gaze of Duke Johnston.

  “You will find yourself on the permanent invitation list, I think. Heavens, a million apologies, I don’t know your name yet.”

  “Gaston Jarvis.”

  They shook hands and Duke did not let go, pulling him along toward the door. “Duke Johnston,” he reported, in that Southern baritone that could not have been more soothing and rich had he drunk all the whiskey in Scotland and smoked all of North Carolina’s cigarettes. “Come upstairs.”

  Duke’s own attic bedroom under the eaves was tidy, with law books and dictionaries, pictures of family, a saber over a long-closed-off fireplace, and two Civil War–era pistols in a display box, propped on the mantel. Gaston thought how disgraceful his own ill-kept room was back in Craven Hall. Duke must never see it.

  Duke opened a closet door and, rather than clothes, there were ten constructed shelves, an array of bottles, scotch, gin, vodka, bourbons, old dusty-labeled wines, ports, sherries, libation for all occasions. There was a clinking and tinkling of bottles colliding as he rummaged, before producing a bottle of Dunlap’s Hundred with about two shots’ worth of honey-brown liquid left in the bottle.

  There was a young woman there who had been Miss North Carolina her junior year, had gone to Atlantic City to compete for Miss America. There were football buddies demanding Duke come down to the front lawn and referee a game of touch football, directing and officiating with his glass-knobbed walking stick, now a campus trademark. There were two female exchange students from France who looked as if they had walked in from a Paris runway; they took over the turntable and played a Françoise Hardy LP and sang along to the lyrics while the rest of the party’s males looked on adoringly and the females sulked. All of these and more, interrupting Gaston and Duke, begging Duke to come downstairs and join the party, to bestow a small unit of attention on them … and yet that night, Duke sat drinking with Gaston, for some reason finding in his young acquaintance someone he could trust and confide in.

  And from there on, Gaston’s social accomplishment at Duke was secure; he was a regular at Arcadia. He joined the newspaper and the college literary magazine. His witty reviews, his editorials, all popular, all noticed—but he only wrote t
hem to shine reflected glory on Duke, to win Duke’s praise. He loved Duke. He would drop anything, if Duke (always so busy with law school and exams and social calendars) called. Life was only where Duke existed and noticed, and what he disparaged or thought boring, Gaston thought worthless, too. Duke dated quite a lot, beautiful women, smart women, odd and talented women—he liked female company but not for very long, it seemed. Gaston would get a call in his dorm: “The girls are gone, and not a soul ’round here to have a drink with, wouldn’t you know.” And it wouldn’t have mattered if Gaston had an exam the next day or was attempting a date himself late that evening, it would all be flung aside in order to garner precious audience up in Duke’s room, to sample some new miraculous brew brought forth from the cupboard.

  The friendship with Duke had faded, Gaston thought, sitting in his empty room with his laptop, but he had kept faith with the drinking. What had soured their friendship? As far as Duke was concerned, Gaston was still a friend. It was all Gaston’s doing, the deterioration between them. Was it that he resented Duke for marrying his sister? Was he supposed to choose a lifetime of solitary drinking with Gaston over marriage and children with Jerene? Duke had once pulled him close and said, charmingly, with an intimate catch in his voice, “Marrying your sister sets us up nicely, Gaston,” he said. “We don’t have to do without our talks and our nightcaps—I’ll always be close by. Thank God, you had a lovely sister or two—I’d have had to marry you otherwise.” Yes, it was said to be charming, but he meant it at some level.

  So what went wrong? That was a question fit for a rainy September night, his laptop’s cursor blinking, waiting for him to do something. No, he did not mind Duke marrying Jerene. It was very strange, of course, weird to think of Duke screwing his sister. Jerene had been with that boor Beckleford Baylor, heir to a sock fortune. Then Jerene had dated Duke’s housemate Darnell McKay, who went on to be a rich tax lawyer … and then Duke—the one out of the three who had squandered rather than made a fortune. No, that was not the source of the resentment.

  Gaston could always replay in his mind the night, two months into their friendship, when it was two in the morning and they had been at it, discussing Flags in the Dust and Absalom, Absalom!, the peculiar burdens of sons from great families or, at least, from families with fathers who had pretensions of greatness, military greatness, Southern greatness, wealth and a family name with status, when Duke looked squarely at him and asked outright: “You hate your father, don’t you?”

  Gaston had talked with Duke about everything but this.

  “I know you do. You don’t have to say it. I know because I hate mine, too.”

  Major Bo Johnston, decorated hero of Patton’s African campaigns, then Sicily, then mainland Italy, the vanguard of every Veteran’s Day parade for twenty years.

  “My father was traumatized by the war,” Duke pressed on. “It exposed him to terrible things—I can only imagine. There was nowhere to put that anger, that violence when he came home, so he let us have it…” Duke shot back the rest of the bourbon in his glass. “… his sons, me and my brother Carry. It would have made an absurd documentary film, had it been filmed. This little angry man, five-nine, maybe 180 pounds, gone to seed in fact, unathletic, unsteady on his feet, whaling upon his oversized boys. Carrington’s six-five, I’m six-three. We just let him do it. Put our heads down into the pillow and let him satisfy himself with his belt, like we owed it to him. In some twisted way, maybe we did owe it to him. All that we were, all that we had, was because of him.”

  Gaston’s heart was in his throat. He had survived to this point with only his family knowing what went on, and even that was a silent acknowledgment with his sisters, briefly held eye contact, sighs, a shake of the head when the house fell quiet again.

  “I’m presuming, of course,” Duke said, having refilled his glass with Dunlap’s Hundred. “But I recognized it in you early on. That you know, more or less, what I’m talking about.”

  In time, Gaston, months later, would speak candidly about his abusive alcoholic father, as Gaston became his own person, gaining fame as a writer, as an Arcadia regular; slowly without any epiphany or joyous single moment, Gaston Jarvis Sr. began to seem powerless, dismissable, a failed life, a sad life, a failed sad life that wasn’t even original or damned in some special way but just the common mean old drunk way.

  But that shared endurance of fathers only bound them closer! No, why had Gaston sabotaged their friendship, why had he ruined what was so necessary once upon a time …

  “Lookaway, Dixieland,” Gaston said out loud.

  Lookaway, Dixieland. The book. They had been talking about it for at least a year, planning it out, arguing over the plot points.

  “I prefer Lookaway, Lookaway,” said Duke. They had been raiding the lyrics of “Dixie” hoping to drop the perfect title. Gaston loved these sessions, up late until three or four, running out for more ice for the bourbon, or lying on Duke’s famous leather sofa—a relic of the Divinity School, put out to trash, hauled by four men to Duke’s room.

  “That scans better,” said Gaston. “But it needs ‘Dixieland’ in the title.”

  It was almost their book; Duke’s passion for it often seemed to exceed Gaston’s own. Faulkner, Duke declared, had masterfully written about the post-Reconstruction South—there was no need to ever visit any of that again, for a white writer, at any rate. But what of the way we live now? But Gaston imagined setting a book before, during and after the Civil War, which had always been a historical fascination.

  “Why not write a contemporary book?” Duke asked, perhaps weighed down by his illustrious ancestors, weary of all things Civil War.

  “What’s interesting about the New South?” Gaston insisted. “Nothing. The New South sinking into the monoculture of the United States, deracinated. No, it needs the grandeur of the earlier era.”

  While Duke mused as to the grand overarching idea of the book, Gaston knew it had to be about a Southern family. They would start from nothing, rise to great heights, then lose it all … the essential Irish-inherited doomedness of the South. Fortunes were always temporary below the Mason-Dixon because they were based on commodities. Families rich because of hemp, of tar, of cotton—

  “Of gold,” Duke reminded Gaston. North Carolina had boasted the nation’s first gold rush; Charlotte owed its pre-War population spike to gold.

  “Yes, gold or whatever. If the whims of the market didn’t finish off the great families, then there was the Civil War, and if a family had survived that, then they were bust due to holding Confederate money, and after that, Northern predations during Reconstruction and countless panics.”

  Duke egged them both on. “Yet through it all such a sense of … of honor and family survival, all of it so precarious.”

  “One scandal could ruin a family’s name.” And that scandal always arrived fatefully, inexorably. Gaston’s plan would be to have a book divided into smaller books, like a Walter Scott or Anthony Trollope epic, as a great family fights to hold its fortune for a final generation before the collapse and ruin. Book One: Scandal Averted. Book Two: Scandal Regained …

  “They must not simply rise and fall,” Duke had said. “They have to embody the central conundrum of the South.”

  “You mean, race?”

  “There’s something fatal from what the slave trade fostered, a kind of barbarism side by side with the civility.”

  Southerners. Such literate, civilized folk, such charm and cleverness and passion for living, such genuine interest in people, all people, high and low, white and black, and yet how often it had come to, came to, was still coming to vicious incomprehension, usually over race but other things too—religion, class, money. How often the lowest elements had burst out of the shadows and hollers, guns and torches blazing, galloping past the educated and tolerant as nightriders, how often the despicable had run riot over the better Christian ideals … how often cities had burned, people had been strung up in trees, atrocities had been permi
tted to occur and then, in the seeking of justice for those outrages, how slippery justice had proven, how delayed its triumph. Oh you expect such easily obtained violence in the Balkans or among Asian or African tribal peoples centuries-deep in blood feuds, but how was there such brutality and wickedness in this place of church and good intention, a place of immense friendliness and charity and fondness for the rituals of family and socializing, amid the nation’s best cooking and best music … how could one place contain the other place?

  Gaston had published a shelf of books now yet he had never felt more like a writer than on those nights in Duke’s room, dreaming of what was to come, what he would yet write, bourbon in his glass, a Lucky Strike consuming itself in the ashtray. Of course, his first breakthrough short story, published at twenty-two, was in The New Yorker, “A Brother’s Warning,” a sentimental but beautifully written piece, two brothers, one ready to ship out to Vietnam. Gaston took a larger than usual gulp of bourbon—if he were honest, the brother in the story was none other than Duke, and the story a projection of what it would have been to lose him to the Vietnam War meat grinder, if not for his football accident. Then came a story accepted by The Atlantic, “In the Pines, In the Pines,” taking a cue from the Leadbelly song which always was a late-night favorite on Duke’s turntable. That story was pure Southern gothic, woods and backwoods types, a town with too many secrets … maybe if James Dickey’s Deliverance movie hadn’t come out that year, he would never have gotten such an accidentally derivative piece published.

  But 1972 was also the first novel, The Rapeseed Field, which was hailed as a short, brutal masterpiece. It was, in fact, a short story that got carried away to novella length and thankfully Alfred A. Knopf knew how to puff the thing out to an elegant 210 pages. As the too obvious title implied, there was a rape of a servant girl at the hands of a villainous patriarch. Gaston lifted his glass in a pretend toast to his father: they didn’t have a servant girl but if they had, his father might likely have done it. The villain was an homage to his father, featuring blistering, abusive quotes his family could privately recognize as their father’s repartee. The other characters gang up on Dad and kill him in secret, bury him in the yellow field of rapeseed beyond the homeplace. Gaston took another swig as if to wash the title from his mind—way too obvious, the whole book immature, too grotesque, too hysterical … yet, the critics saw promise, declared it a permanent addition to the canon of Southern Lit.