Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  In the years following the Civil War, such rural outposts as Waxhaw were subject to raids by bandits, bummers, ragtag groups of ex-Union or ex-Rebel or newly armed black soldiers who felt deprived of spoils and rapine. The family story—known to most of Charlotte, since Jerene regularly told it most years at Mint by Gaslight—was that a group of Northern bummers arrived on Adeline Bell’s doorstep when Hermann was away in town, and after hiding the paintings behind the upright piano, she then loaded her husband’s shotgun.

  Ya cain’t shoot all of us, miss, said one of the brigands.

  Yep, but I’ll get one, maybe two of you and, since you opened your mouth, you’re first, she said back.

  The men backed off with a laugh, helped themselves to well water, raided the vegetable garden and carried off a goat for that night’s stew, and let her be. And that’s how, Jerene would say, indeed Jerene would say again this very night, how Cole’s Cabin by the Lake and George Inness’s Approaching Storm, Cropsey’s Bear Mountain and Frederick Church’s A Catskill Sunset reside with all of us today, “safe from the torch or the carpetbagger, safe in our care.” It was always an applause line.

  It may have seemed to Charlotte that the Jarvis Trust was equally venerable as the family but that was a misapprehension Jerene never corrected; it was a recent notion. Her grandmother began using the art collection for social purposes back in the 1950s, reigning over a small, select, sporadic punch-and-cookies reception at the Myers Park Country Club, the details of which were obscure (despite some intensive detective work by Jerene who wanted to backdate her family’s efforts). Jerene’s mother, Jeannette Jarvis, later supervised the annual reception and enlarged the guest list to nab not only high society but the run-of-the-mill rich who came with the growth in banking in Charlotte’s boom times, and who, like cats scratching to be let in, were more than eager to plunk down money to be in the same room with the Belks and the Rankins and Mayor Gantt and board members from First Union and Bank of America. But Jeannette Jarvis had been erratic as a hostess. Some years her fund-raising event flourished, others it fizzled, with Jeannette not realizing you put it all in the well-paid caterer’s hands. Jerene remembered vividly her mother running around, fraying to a frazzle, in the hours leading up to her smallish event.

  No, it had been Jerene who had launched this annual event into the stratosphere. She had made it a lasting legacy for any of her daughters and granddaughters who would host the Mint by Gaslight for generations to come.

  “Mother, please,” Annie had said when her mother projected that Annie might one day preside over the event, “it doesn’t even make sense. Who wants to see art in bad light? And they’re oil lamps, not gaslights. And what if someone drops a lamp and burns the place down?”

  (The lamps were faux-oil lamps, with an opaque glass, running on batteries and a small lightbulb.)

  The line of succession would be skipping over her eldest daughter, Annie, who consistently threatened to sell off the art and give the proceeds to charity. As for her younger, Jerilyn, Jerene had not seen the titanium will necessary to pull off this kind of social performance, to dominate a room, to host and chat and pour and soothe, but maybe that would come. She never considered passing the trust along to Bo or Joshua—this wasn’t, in her mind, intended to be a male legacy. Men, for their part, had no need of a contrived social event to place themselves at the forefront of things. She did wish her own daughters had some appreciation of just what it was she intended to pass on. She would settle for mild, diffident interest! Annie would not be here tonight—just as well, in the event Congresswoman Myrick was around for Annie to buttonhole about her right-wing voting record. Jerilyn had already called this morning and left a message that Jerene had not listened to—likely she was apologizing for not being able to make it down from Chapel Hill, swept up in sorority nonsense.

  Her oldest son, Bo, and his wife, Kate, would be there dependably. Jerene hoped to offer Kate—cultureless but good-hearted Kate—a seat on the Jarvis Trust on the principle of keeping it all in the family.

  Her youngest son, Joshua, and his friend Dorrie would come too. Joshua loved to mingle in a crowd and Dorrie was an Art History major and could actually talk with authority about the art on the walls. Of course, there would be the predictable prying questions: are Joshua and Dorrie going to be married? You never see one without the other! Not that she isn’t just lovely, but … but are you and Duke all right with having a black daughter-in-law? Jerene was a little bit exhausted already, and the event was still ten hours away.

  And, more exhausting yet, her mother would be in attendance. Alas. Bo and Katie would pick up Mrs. Jarvis from Lattamore Acres. All night long, she would malinger in a wheelchair being pushed about, fishing for praise, taking credit for the evening as if Jerene were some sad figurehead propped up in her place, and eliciting sympathy for whatever illness, real or imagined, she was afflicted this year. Jerene would prefer not having her mother attend because that meant Gaston, who had such a following among Charlotte’s elite for his gossipy bonhomie, would not attend, since he and their mother could not be in the same room anymore “over my or her dead body, preferably hers.” Jerene would spend a percentage of tonight’s small talk explaining why Gaston didn’t come this year; some of the women would bring books for him to sign hoping that they would run into him at this party.

  Jerene would also have to lavishly thank her mother for all her work bringing the Jarvis Trust to this pinnacle. Many of the elderly women without whom any cultural fund-raiser (or Charlotte society itself) couldn’t function, sanctified Jeannette Jarvis, had paid court to her for years. Jerene would attribute vision and wisdom to her mother and there would be a round of applause wherein Jeannette would take a bow from her wheelchair (which she didn’t ever use to convey herself around Lattamore Acres, mind you!), inflating like a balloon with adulation, bringing a trembling hand with a handkerchief to her eye as if she were unexpectedly moved by all this honor due her … Oh my land, thought Jerene, unable to dwell on that tableau a moment longer.

  Aside from Yankee bummers and family indifference, threats to the Jarvis collection competed on all sides: Dr. Misra, the high-voiced, Indian-accented new curator who never glimpsed her but that he tried to interest her in the tax benefits of simply offering up the gems in her collection to the Mint as a permanent gift. There was an equally persistent Lester Fontine, a representative of Sotheby’s, who wanted her to sell the Church for a Northern collector who was a completist … and it wasn’t as if the Johnston family couldn’t use the money. And then there was the new uptown Mint, proposed for 2010, in seven years, a world-class museum space built by some post-modern architect of note, right in the heart of Charlotte, to be organized like a proper big-city museum, she imagined, with the collections mingled and her family name consigned to a little notecard beside the painting. Well, maybe that obliteration would or wouldn’t happen on schedule. In the here and now, the Mint by Gaslight would reign as the gold standard of Charlotte artmongering.

  “I don’t think there’s a thing for me to do,” Jerene said aloud.

  “I don’t think there is,” Miss Maylee said agreeably.

  “I used to be so nervous before these things that I could never eat lunch, but I think this year I could eat an entire buffet line.” She made a final unnecessary check or two, called the caterers for an update, thanked the docent again, then decided to join Duke at the Charlottetowne Country Club, where the famous Sunday spread would just have begun to be laid out.

  * * *

  “It’s like,” Charlie Brownbee faltered, “what is it called? That film we went to go see…”

  “Don’t ask me!” screamed Dollie. She turned directly to Jerene. “You get me in a movie theater and I fall asleep like that! I haven’t seen a film in years!”

  “Aw, that’s not true, baby doll. What about that Lord of the Rings film?”

  “The second time we saw it, I mostly stayed awake, that’s right. But the first time I slept like a b
aby. Same with the symphony! Something about a dark theater and I’m snoring away! Isn’t that how it is, Charlie?”

  Jerene let Dollie monopolize, marching toward the social front lines with a personality based on proudly cherished incapacities: “I couldn’t make heads or tails reading that Da Vinci Code—put me right to sleep!” And “I haven’t cooked since we hired Letisha and Charlie’s not exactly begging for me to go back in the kitchen, are you, honey?” And “I won’t go on a plane!” And why she will never be caught dead doing committee work again because she did some for the Ladies of Charlottetowne annual fund drive and she helped sponsor a luncheon for a ticket price from which some portion went to charity, and when Lurleen Hemsdale Parker said she couldn’t make the luncheon and wanted her money back, Dollie said she couldn’t have it because everything went to charity anyway and Lurleen Hemsdale Parker wanted to make a federal case out of it.

  “… and I said, you’ll get it for $39.95, including shipping and handling!” This apparently constituted a joke and Dollie threw her head back cackling at her own line. Jerene smiled politely. Dollie regained her breath long enough to interrupt Charlie, who was talking easement politics with Duke. “Charlie, Charlie—”

  Charlie: “So Riverview is planning to offer homes on the Rock Hill side of the Catawba for two hundred fifty thousand—can you believe it?”

  Dollie: “Did you hear what I said, Charlie? I was saying what I told Lurleen Parker—”

  Charlie: “… cutting down that old growth, for a bunch of middle-class condos?”

  Dollie: “Did you hear, Charlie, what I said to Lurleen Parker?”

  Charlie: “What’s that, baby doll?”

  Dollie: “I said I’d give her luncheon ticket back for $39.95 for handling.”

  Charlie: “Yeah, you told me before.”

  Dollie: “That wasn’t it…” She turned to Jerene. “What did I say?”

  Jerene managed to bring it out. “Shipping and handling.”

  “That’s it! $39.95, including shipping and handling!” And then she cackled again.

  “You’ll excuse me?” Jerene said, standing up, looking beyond the elegant Club dining room toward the restrooms; she bowed toward the Brownbees and Bob Boatwright before glancing at her husband, observing the panic in his eyes, not wanting to be abandoned. Once out of sight, Jerene veered into the Nineteenth Hole for a little hiding out, and a check of her cell phone messages. Thank goodness—no emergency flares from the caterer. Jerilyn had called twice more. Before she called her daughter back, she squinted to the end of the bar … where her brother was already drinking, 11:45 on a Sunday morning. He raised his glass as if to toast her.

  She walked over to offer the thanks she should have offered a few weeks back, if she hadn’t still been miffed. “You might as well forward your mail to this place, Gaston.”

  “They’ll make a brass monument out of it one of these days, the stool whereupon the great Southern author lowered and raised his ample posterior. I saw you in the dining room being royally entertained by Bob Boatwright and Dollie and Charlie. My, what a salon des artistes you gather about yourself.”

  “I need a sip of that,” she said, stealing the glass from his hand and taking a necessary swallow.

  “I’d be happy to buy you one.”

  “The idiotic Dollie Brownbee notwithstanding, I suppose I should thank you for putting Duke in the way of a business deal. Of course, my land, the sums I’m overhearing are in no way possible for us.”

  Gaston had a mouth full of peanuts which, in his habit, he popped into his mouth one at a time. “Umm … I don’t think they want money … They want permission to develop down by Duke’s piece of sacred earth.”

  “I’m not sure why they need Duke to do anything.” She reached for Gaston’s tumbler, but he was too quick and snatched it back.

  “Let me buy you one. And the devil you say about sweet Dollie Brownbee, the belle of Forest City.”

  “I’d say Forest City is in even sorrier shape than I thought, if that’s the standard for belledom.”

  “Oh, come on. I would have thought you were impervious to stupid women, as many committees as you serve on—all those gaggling biddies in your artsy trust you’ll be mingling with this very night. Ten minutes in a room with those women and I would hang myself by my necktie from the sturdiest-looking lighting fixture. Most women as they get older empty themselves out and get even stupider. Shopping, grandchildren, very little else to talk about—”

  “Don’t let Norma hear you talk like that.” Politely, a glass of ice water was set down half an arm’s length away from Jerene. And while she appreciated the subtlety of the bartender’s observations (that she wanted a drink of something), it also meant every word they exchanged was being heard and taken note of. She leaned closer to whisper, “Speaking of women you are fond of abusing.”

  “If Jarvis mère is in attendance tonight, I will not be—you know my policy.”

  Jerene’s phone rang again. It was Jerilyn.

  “I’ll castigate you later,” she said, drifting back from her brother to take the call privately.

  “Mom.”

  A mother knows from one syllable something is wrong. Jerene spotted a remote table near the window, out of public hearing. Jerilyn was babbling, there were false starts, and an attempt at empty small talk, before Jerene cut her off, “Now Jerilyn, you’re going to have to tell me exactly what is wrong.”

  Her daughter was vague, but confirmed certain things had transpired.

  “Did some boy do something to you?”

  Silence.

  “One of those frat boys talk you into something you wish you hadn’t done?”

  More silence, maybe a stifled sob.

  “Did you let him?” She listened. “Did you tell him no? But what? Did you have your clothes off? If you’re rolling around on top of each other naked, Jerilyn, you cannot stop a boy from doing what boys—”

  Jerilyn imparted more muddled information.

  Jerene momentarily remembered from her own Theta Kappa Theta days a blur of faces—or maybe the same face—but differing physiognomies, boys with beer guts, or short and compact, tall and gangly, vodka breath and aftershave, all with eight sets of hands, moving and taking possession of body parts through her ball gowns and knit sweaters, a legion of onslaught furiously repulsed at the vaginal redoubts. “Are you saying he…” They would have to work up to the word rape. “… are you saying he forced you?”

  More nonsense.

  “Jeriflower, he either did or he didn’t. I’m coming down. Yes, that’s right, it is the night of my thing, but that’s not important.” It was a two-three-hour drive to Chapel Hill, two-three back … plenty of time. “My land, yes, I’m coming down and we’ll sort this business out. But you have to stay put. No showers, no changing clothes. Try not to engage in any more orgies until I get there.”

  Her baby girl was in bad shape.

  “And no tears. We have to think and act with great precision about these kind of things.” Jerene and Duke had taken different cars to Charlottetowne, and Duke’s Mercedes was the nicer of the two. She decided Duke would figure out that she had taken it, and she got into the Mercedes. It might come in handy.

  * * *

  Her daughter was not back at her dorm but now at the sorority house where she went to cry herself to sleep and pass out after the unfortunate encounter. Sensing she was fragile, and possibly aware of what happened, the girls had let Jerilyn lie down in Tylerlea Bumgardner’s big room upstairs. Jerene wondered just what gossip had spread and how far.

  It was Sunday so parking was free on the street. Jerilyn pulled the Mercedes to the curb and gathered up her purse. She gave a wistful look to her former home, Thetahouse, then proceeded to step across the flagstones, past the construction toward Sigma Kappa Nu’s porch. She was aware she looked like a minor British Royal Family member, moving importantly in a conservatively cut Chanel mauve pastel with a perfectly matching Prada clutch. Jerene approac
hed a wide-open front door and was only asked once who she was and if she could be helped (“I think Jerilyn is upstairs … that is a gorgeous purse, Mrs. Johnston!”), but she had the run of the house if she wished. There was noise from the backyard, lots of whooping and hollering; she glimpsed a few Sigma Kappa Nus, all in ratty sweatshirts and gym pants. Jerene permitted herself a small tour, the dining salon, the main living area and their beaten-down barely presentable furniture, the smell of beer, perfume, Febreze carpet cleaner …

  Jerilyn was asleep when her mother knocked on the door. Jerilyn let her in and then returned to lie on a bunk bed, curled up in several blankets with Tylerlea’s teddy bear within reach. Her mother leaned against the desk, preferring to stand for the most unpleasant part of their discussion.

  “Jerilyn, darling. The worst thing in life is feeling like you have no control over things. I try to avoid those situations at all costs. It’s like my committee work.” Jerene breathed, knowing she was stalling for time. “I’d rather be president and run the whole show, even if it takes a year off my life, or do nothing at all, but I can’t abide being somewhere in between where I don’t have any power yet am supposed to do things for everyone to look at and judge.”

  Jerilyn just stared at her mother, waiting to hear something that applied to her situation.