Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  “I ruined everything, didn’t I, by living! That’s what you really mean!” She clasped her hands together tightly, not sure what to say or do next.

  Jeannette Jarvis had been given no time at all to live in the winter of 2003. Her colon cancer was advanced. Radiation, an operation, then a follow-up operation, a colostomy, of course. Horror followed horror. She was tolerable company to the doctors who she understood were keeping her alive with all the medieval tortures, but she was awful to her family who tried dutifully to look after her. “I’m sure it would suit every one of you to a fare-thee-well if I up and died,” she declared more than once, waiting for a contradiction … which her children noticeably never provided.

  Before the second operation to remove another cancerous piece of bowel, the doctors discussed that if the operation did not go well, there was little more they could do. A failure here would mean a few more weeks—weeks, mercifully—of morphia-induced delirium until the end. And there was even a chance that Mrs. Jarvis might not survive the several-hour operation to come. Would she sign over medical and financial power of attorney so her family could make decisions for her? Defeated, terrified, Mrs. Jarvis did just that. She didn’t trust Gaston not to suffocate her with a pillow at first opportunity, and she hadn’t spoken to Dillard since Christopher’s funeral, so that left Jerene who alone maintained a civil relationship and might be trusted not to pull the plug too gleefully.

  After so many desperate strategems and procedures to stay alive, Jeannette came to fear a compromised survival, telling Jerene, “Don’t let them bring me back full of tubes and hooked up to machines just so I can die slowly, Jerene.”

  “I won’t let them do that, Mother,” she promised.

  Gaston at last came to see her, figuring it would be a final encounter. Jeannette Jarvis was not sure what response he was after. And what a sight her only son was: bloated, fat in a female way, so unhealthy looking, some of that from drink, which she supposed came to him through his father, and some from general dissipation from his decadent habits. She tried to make peace with him, looking up at him sweetly, hoping to project a moment of pathos.

  “This might be the last time you see your old mother, Gaston.”

  Oh she will never forget what he said and how he said it. It was just polite enough to pass in front of the nurses and doctors, but Jeannette knew just what meanness was intended when he said, “If that’s so, Mother, just think. You can be reunited with our dear father for eternity.”

  Mrs. Jarvis had dwelled on that barb for years now, because no one, not even she, really thought Mr. Jarvis was anywhere other than the centermost fires of Hell.

  And late, at the very end of visiting hours, came Dillard. Plump as ever! Well, none of the Jellicoe or Jarvis women except Jerene could keep the pounds off—it took cancer to do it. Jeannette needed to rest before the operation; she had been ordered to. And she knew talking had not led to much family harmony so she put out her frail hand for Dillard to hold, and Dillard took it, sighing. And there they were for ten minutes without saying a thing to each other, until Mrs. Jarvis said, “Thank you for coming, Dillie. I have to sleep now.”

  “I’ll see you when you wake up, Mother.”

  Jeannette was an absolute wreck after Operation Number Two and didn’t remember much—who was there, what was happening. She was slow to come out of the anesthesia, and when she surfaced she talked incoherently before lapsing into a coma, which everyone took to be the end, or the first stage of the end. But then she woke up.

  And they really got all the cancer.

  And here she was four, five years on, continually getting clean bills of oncological health while she piled up no end of lesser maladies—arthritis, skin ulcers, unexplained headaches, joint deterioration, varicose veins, diabetes 2. The colostomy and all its paraphernalia were deeply regrettable to a woman who had been so fastidious about appearance and presentation but then more distasteful was lying in the cold, cold ground.

  Jerene’s stint with power of attorney revealed something most unpleasant: Mrs. Jarvis was nearly broke. Not just broke but living on department store credit cards, a variety of VISAs and MasterCards from several sources, a second mortgage, a home equity loan. Jeannette suspected as much but none of her mild entreaties to the bank or to the credit card companies for more credit ever went rebuffed so she figured somehow she was successfully afloat. But Jerene called Gaston and Dillard and, after a family conference, began to liquidate the worldly possessions of Mrs. Jeannette Jellicoe Jarvis. The 160-year-old family house of the Jarvises had to be sold—or, more accurately, given over to the bank to sell. With Charlotte spreading to the east so completely, a fortune, a real fortune could have been had for that house in a few more years, Jerene told her in frustration. They did net several tens of thousands of dollars which were disbursed to her creditors.

  Dillard and Jerene culled through the dishware and silver and rugs and porcelain to see if there was anything they had to have. There was very little they wanted from it, these monuments to propriety safe behind china cabinets and tucked in family vaults, things that had been exalted and protected while the family itself suffered under the depredations of Mr. Jarvis. Jerene already had the stamped plate in her possession and all the similarly initialed loot; Dillard, taking only the bone china, frankly declared most of the heirlooms too old-fashioned for her taste and for her small, already overstuffed house in Dilworth, and so the whole bundle was sent to a dealer, who gave them a good price. Or it was imagined to be a good price—who really knows with the dubious business of appraising and buying and selling desperate people’s treasures.

  The doctors were still saying (that fall in 2004) that it was “touch and go,” that they “weren’t out of the woods,” all the clichés that led them all to think that she had no more than a year, a year in which she should be made comfortable. And so Lattamore Acres was the natural choice. Yes, it was more country club than retirement home. All grades of living conditions were available, from town houses with the briefest of check-ins by a nurse each morning to intensive-care beds on a hospital wing. Marble floors, a dark oak-paneled dining room, profusions of flowers in massive urns and vases and window boxes everywhere—never the smell of the hospital could be detected, nothing of age or deterioration was visible, except in the tenants themselves. You might have thought you were in a Mediterranean tennis resort. The food was remarkable, they took great care with the chefs, there were no end of amusements and activities, chartered buses to the museums, to concerts, for day trips to Salisbury for antiques shopping or Asheville for the fall colors … $3,500 a month—before medical charges—to rub shoulders with the doddering elite of Charlotte.

  Jerene said, “Consider yourself lucky it lasted this long. Now. I’m going to the office and tell them that payment on your account stops this month.”

  “Where do you intend to move me?”

  “We’ll find another place. More affordable. Maybe a roommate is what you need.”

  “You’re enjoying this! To tear me away from my home, the one place I have ever known peace, and send me to some charnel house!”

  “Annie knows people in the moving business. I’ll have her set up an appointment. You can leave in the dead of night, if you like, so no one will see you depart.”

  “Dillard has that house to herself…”

  “She has declined to move you into it. I asked.”

  “And you and Duke have such a big place.”

  Jerene truly was bothered by an inability to escape; she wanted to be gone in the worst way. “Well, we were on the verge of handing it over to the bank. We took out a second mortgage to pay for Jerilyn’s wedding and to hold on to Myers Park a moment longer. But thanks to Duke’s newfound rapprochement with Gaston, Gaston has agreed to pay off that mortgage so we can sell it off free and clear.”

  “That Johnston house is legendary. Why would you sell such a grand place?”

  “We will sell it so we can scrape together some kind of ol
d age. We’ll be moving to the gated community that Duke and that group of investors are building down by the Catawba River, near Fort Mill. A cozy condo, I imagine, and there won’t be room for you there either.”

  Jeannette had one or two more gambits. “Where I go is the least of my concerns right now. You think me so monstrous, but it is something else that tears at my heart. That my children despise me. Now I don’t expect Gaston to recover,” Jeannette pleaded. “But Dillard and you … Mostly you, Jerene. You have never forgiven me. I couldn’t control your father! Why should I be endlessly held accountable for his misdeeds?”

  Jerene thought for a moment and sank back in the chair, setting her purse on the floor. She seemed … was that a smile?

  “Oh Mother, you…” Now she laughed dryly. “You think it’s because you didn’t stop Daddy from beating us about and abusing us at will—that’s really rich. He had fists, but you had your tongue. He had alcoholism as an excuse for being a monster, but what was yours?”

  Jeannette drew her lips tight, hoping for a dignified mien.

  “The commentary throughout our lives, the judgment. It was every bit as abusive as Daddy. At least when Daddy sobered up, he was tolerable company, and often very sorry for his behavior. He rained money and clothes and possessions down on us when he felt guilty. But when did we ever hear a kind word from you? We were too fat or too thin, ugly in some way, however we dressed. At college we were harlots or prostitutes for dating, and the boys we dated weren’t good enough. We did nothing but shame and humiliate you. And we raised our children wrong, too.” She thought a moment before going further, then she did: “Not counting the one given up for adoption forty years ago. Do I have to remind you of your commentary through all that? You’d found some low-country backwoods quack to cut it out of me. You couldn’t kill it fast enough. It’s a wonder you didn’t rip it out of me with your own hands. I arrived in Asheboro without a dime too, thanks to you. Fortunately, Dillard scraped some money together.”

  Jeannette was silent. She now gauged the depth of Jerene’s contempt. She had hoped, with no evidence, that Jerene was the child who was most sympathetic to her.

  If she had been judgmental and shrill, there had been reasons for it, reasons grounded in her realistic fears of falling headlong out of Society and back into the peasantry, the white trash, to have once been something and then to go back to nothing again. If she had been too harsh, it was to prevent that! If Jerene and Dillard never felt the danger of decline, it was only because of the immense sacrifices Jeannette had performed to prevent it. Now it hardly matters what Jerene and Duke’s children do; the world of proprieties and respectabilities, the patina of Southern grace and elegant public bearing, all of that was nearly gone and smashed to bits. What the Yankees and the War and Reconstruction had not been able to accomplish, prosperity and time, modern mores and cable TV, had managed just fine. What a folly her whole life was, thought Jeannette, now smiling, too.

  “Our whole lives,” Jerene was saying, “we have been subject to your poisonous judgment, as if we all were criminals. And … just what is so funny, Mother?”

  Now Jeannette was chuckling darkly, shaking her head. “Criminals! Oh, Jerene, if you only knew.” Jeannette was feeling more steady now; she had a firm sip of unsweetened tea. “Sell one of your paintings. Come now, I won’t be alive all that much longer.”

  “I don’t believe I’m hearing you say this. Mother, you all but swore me to a holy oath that nothing could ever induce us to sell them. There’ll be no more Jarvis Room in the Mint Museum if we start selling them to bail ourselves out.”

  “Sell the Church, it’ll fetch the most. Never liked it anyway.”

  “I will do no such thing. Whatever we can hold together for a legacy for the children is in that museum. It’s our calling card for Society—my land, I’m sounding like you now! You would have me break up the collection just so you could play canasta with women you have assured me were awful?”

  “Sell them all.”

  Jerene huffed. “And what of Adeline Bell, hiding the paintings behind the settee, praying Sherman’s men would content themselves with torching the barn.”

  “That story is all nonsense, Jerene.”

  “It may mean nothing to you anymore, but I feel an unbroken kinship with these Jarvis and Bell women who have held these paintings in our family for generations—”

  “No! It’s nonsense. I mean, the story. Your father and I made it up.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “We stole those paintings like we stole everything we ever owned.”

  Jeannette glanced at her daughter. Oh she was all ears now.

  “Your daddy had a brother who died before you were born, your Uncle Demetrius. Believe me, in Waxhaw, North Carolina, the Jarvis boys were the eligible bachelors. The Jellicoes, as I told you, were an old, respectable Salisbury family but after the War we lost the mills, and in the Panic of 1907, Granddaddy lost the rest. But we covered up our indigence well, and my daddy spent his last dime on my wedding to your father.”

  “Yes, Mother, I know all this—”

  “Oh but Demetrius, he was … he was touched by the gods. There was not a woman, married, single, widowed or dead, who didn’t covet that man. And he married very well, into a fine family, one of those Virginia families so rarified and blue-blooded that they carried with them the genetic problems brought over from England, some inherited illness that got passed down from generation to generation. I suppose now we’d say it was some form of Huntington’s disease. It left a good quarter of that family locked away in asylums, rocking and writhing spastically until their hearts gave out, poor things. Well, that was your aunt, Helen York Jarvis. People didn’t have financial advisers in those days, instead they had lawyers, and your uncle turned to your daddy to fix things for him. What your father was to drink, your uncle was to womanizing and, I think, bastard children, black, white, brown, yellow and red, were proliferate all over the county. He had an insurance policy against accidents and, as you know, he died young.”

  “Yes, I remember hearing. Died before I was born. While cleaning his gun on a hunting trip.”

  Jeannette snorted. “Someone, some cuckolded husband shot him, sure as I’m sitting here. Your father patched it all up and made it look like an accident and collected the policy for Aunt Helen, several hundred thousand which was a fortune in the early 1950s. Then Helen’s mother, Mrs. York, died and left her the house in Blowing Rock and the paintings in it. Demetrius swore your father to secrecy never to let Helen know just how much money she had. Didn’t want her to get ideas about spending it.”

  “I see he and Daddy were a lot alike.”

  “Men liked their women helpless back then and a lot of women preferred being helpless—it made things much simpler. So she never knew quite what she was worth. And there she was fawning over your father—oh what would we do without deeeeear Gaston Jarvis, looking out for us so. Helen’s brother died of the family ailment, leaving everything to her so she could be provided for, then Helen herself came down with it. Your father saw to it that she had a companion, someone who came to be with her as she lost control of her bodily functions and her mind went. There were three paintings then. The Church and the two Inneses, all in the York family.”

  “So after Aunt Helen died, we just kept her three paintings? But, counting the miniatures, we have twelve American landscapes.”

  Jeannette looked at her daughter impatiently. “The story is just beginning, sweetheart. Here is a dying woman who has ended up with her entire family’s estate, plus some insurance money, plus the big mansion she lives in. All she wants is for her late sister’s child, her niece—the last York heir—to be looked after in the event she gets the disease too. They all came down with it in their early forties.”

  Jerene did not bother to refute anything Jeannette said because it had the ring of truth, concerning facts she knew and what she knew about her father. “That was my cousin Patty. I barely remember her.�
��

  Jeannette continued. “They trusted your father with everything. As Helen got sicker, your father assured Helen’s niece, Patty, that there was money there to take care of her beloved aunt. That she would get the best care and die at home where she wanted to be. Your father must have had his plan even then. Keep everything out of the public view, no state hospitals or asylums or anything that would raise attention or find its way into a record. So Aunt Helen died and then the whole York estate went to your cousin Patty.”

  “Not all of it, apparently.”

  “As far as Patty was concerned, the landscapes yellowing on the wall in Blowing Rock weren’t worth anything. She agreed with your father that they should sell the mountain home and its contents. I’m sure, even back then, it fetched a fortune, and I’m just as sure your father told Patty that it sold for half that, pocketing the rest. He liquidated the whole York estate, and where the property or stock was in Union County, your father stole liberally. He’d slap the clerk of court on the back, ask to go find something in the files after a boozy lunch or golf game, change and alter and eliminate any form or receipt he needed to cover his tracks, down at the courthouse where he had free rein. But the one thing he couldn’t do is deposit the money in a bank. A sudden surfeit of money would alert the authorities. He kept it in cash, in a burlap sack in the basement.”

  Jerene put down her teacup. Her face was showing signs of recognition; Jeannette saw, at last, that Jerene believed her.

  Jerene said, “I see now why we were forbidden going in the basement. You told me it had something to do with deadly spiders.”

  “Well, there were fearsome spiders down there, too. Even your father was wary! Hated going down there. Once there was a spider with a body as big as a pepper shaker—”

  “Mother, back to the story, please.”

  “Yes. So, your daddy and a bunch of his law school friends headed down to Charleston, South Carolina, for drinking mainly, I suspect, and he drove down there in a rented van with the three paintings to sell them for cash in the antique stores. He came back with those three and three more. ‘Jeannie, those paintings were worth a goddam gold mine,’ he told me. Art was a perfect investment. He’d go to Broad Street in Charleston or Royal Street in New Orleans and, between living it up, whoring and drinking, he’d spend the stolen cash on art. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore … Those dealers were happy to sell for straight cash, too, and I doubt there’s a record of any of it.