Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  “It was perfect. If Patty ever got curious and had another lawyer look into anything, your daddy was investing in art for the York estate; the paintings could be produced. If she never grew suspicious, then we had the paintings free and clear. ‘These canvases are better’n bearer bonds, Jeannie,’ he used to tell me all the time. And Patty was never curious. Your father set up a trust that paid her a very healthy monthly stipend, and she thanked and thanked him for it, oh thank-the-Lord what a savior he was.”

  “And he told you everything?”

  “When I would ask him about it, even if he was drinking and in one of his bragging moods, he would sober right up and get that steely look in his eye. Told me it was none of my business.”

  “How’d you find out so much?”

  “When he was passed out I’d look through the papers. Probably the only benefit I ever found to his alcoholism.”

  As Jeannette unburdened herself of these long-kept secrets, cousin Patty came into sharper focus in her memory. A short, pale, fragile woman, unlike many of the brawny Yorks, something doomed and apologetic in her quiet manner as if she had shown up to Life without a reservation and was shamefully aware of always being a bother. “Patty confided in me once,” Jeannette said, “saying she heard of some clinic in Switzerland that had helped people carrying the gene, and maybe she could get your father to advance her some money … but then he talked her out of it, saying how he didn’t want her in debt and it wouldn’t do to chase false hopes. But she still went on about this clinic, and ordered brochures, was in contact with some German doctor. Your father ordered me to talk her out of it. She listened to me, trusted me.”

  Jerene didn’t say anything, and didn’t meet her mother’s eyes.

  “And that’s just what I did,” Jeannette said, having another sip of tea.

  “Oh, Mother,” Jerene said simply.

  “And in the meantime, your daddy looked far and wide for some heir or claimant. Helen’s family, the Yorks, were all but finished thanks to the disease. It was one of those things, some doctor told me once, that you get when brothers marry sisters, way back in the past. I felt sorry for anyone who got the disease, but that doesn’t mean I really liked Helen, my sister-in-law. She looked down her nose at me, that poor Jellicoe woman from the family who lost their money. She didn’t think I was quite on her level. But Patty I was sorry for. Sure enough, she got the disease, right on cue.”

  “What did Daddy do?”

  “As she got sick and more scared, he had her sign a whole bunch of papers so she could be looked after, so funds could be transferred here and there. Then when it got where she couldn’t control the spasms and tics, he had her shipped off to Butner.”

  The state asylum. Jerene frowned. “Mother, couldn’t he have spared some money for a nicer place?”

  “Figured it might hasten her end. I remember him saying if you slipped the Negro guards a twenty, there was one of them that would press a pillow over a patient’s head—you know—when they had a disease like that. It wasn’t about your father stealing the money; he’d already done that and tied up the loose ends, all clear and legal. It was about not wanting her to suffer.”

  “Did he pay that Negro man a twenty?”

  “I never asked. I never asked about a lot.” Jeannette finished her glass of tea, though it was cold and bitter in the cup.

  “Do you think that’s why Dad drank? Because he was guilty?”

  Jeannette was wide-eyed, even laughed. “Merciful heavens! What a thought! Your daddy wasn’t guilty for one little minute. He’d been waiting for a chance like this all his life. Your daddy drank because he was an alcoholic and that’s what they do. I was the one who felt guilty. I waited for the reckoning, too. At every cotillion, every charity dinner, every trip to Raleigh for a cousin’s debutante ball, every social occasion I waited for someone to tap the glass and clear their throat and announce that the most terrible revelations had come to light about the Jarvis family … and that some overlooked relative of the Yorks was pursuing remedies in the halls of justice. But that never happened.” Jeannette laughed again.

  “What’s so funny about that?”

  “Someone, sweetheart, could have made that very dreaded speech, and it wouldn’t have made one iota of difference—not down South! ‘Jeannie,’ your daddy would tell me, ‘everybody down South got rich doing something they shouldn’t have.’ I can name you the first families of the Carolinas who got rich on smuggling or selling to the British in the Revolutionary War—or the Yankees, mind you. Many of the cream of Southern society now were carpetbagging Northerners then, who came down here and bought mills and factories and deeds of land for a song from busted aristocrats whose money was tied up in Confederate scrip and were rendered penniless, and these families sit on their fortunes quite happily. The Hargett girls were here at Lattamore—Camille Hargett and her sister Leonore who, between them, simply ran everything in Charlotte for a decade. Head of the Debutante Society, over which they reigned as a ruthless fiefdom! The Hargetts made their money bootlegging—stills and moonshine. And Melissa Day Petty, who had started answering to Mrs. Day Petty rather Mrs. Petty, as if the no-account Days of pitiful old Bickettville, North Carolina, needed to be lifted up and constantly before us in her spoken name, such were their earthly glory!”

  “Yes, I sent this year’s Mint by Gaslight invitation to Mrs. Day Petty to humor her.”

  “They went around buying up poor people’s farms in the Depression, hiring goons to run squatters off the land, had night riders in robes and hoods burning the colored folk out of their shacks. She told me about it herself, almost proud of it. And her niece, who she goes on and on about, is going to marry a Byrd of Virginia. How many times do I have to hear about her marrying a Byrd, a Byrd of Virginia, la-de-dah. When that first family of the colonies was nearly bust they turned to slaving. Hiring the ships and the slavers themselves. It is naïve to think anybody that has money got it without doing something really bad because it is much easier to be poor—that, my girl, is the natural state of things. Money runs out, money gets spent. To have so much of it that it doesn’t run out or get spent means something … unpleasant had to happen somewhere along the way.”

  “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

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