Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  Socializing with family was less avoidable but Dillard had made tactical withdrawals there, too. She had to be forcibly dragged by family, for Sunday lunch, to the Charlottetowne Country Club which she didn’t approve of, down deep, the origin of her social follies, the setting for her initial courtship with the roustabout Randy Revelle. (She remembered Joshua, her favorite of Jerene’s children, innocently asking about “Uncle Randy” and Annie piping up, asking, “‘Randy Revelle’ was really his name? Who was naming people back then, John Bunyan?” Well yes, his name alone should have foretold all that she was to endure.)

  She had two very infrequent family visitors. Gaston would sometimes be overwhelmed with fraternal feeling and stop by the house when he was headed uptown, giving no more than five minutes of warning before he appeared at the door, and rarely staying for longer than twenty. He always offered money. Gaston’s social currency was his money—he would be pointless without it. His mountain of money, she imagined, must weigh on him when he considered his little sister, left a ward of the family, her solvency subject to stray generous gestures.

  They would perform the same Edwardian parlor drama each time: her refusal to be a burden, her rejection of his latest offer, she simply couldn’t go on being such a charity case, his bluff insistence, her faint assertion that her work at Parminter’s brought in enough, his threat to go down to the bank and simply put it into her account without her permission so she might as well take the check he was dangling in his right hand. If Gaston had recently appeared at a family function drunk or had been especially nasty to everyone—he usually could not recall if he had particularly offended her among the many people he had certainly offended—then he would rise to extraordinary gestures, like paying off her home’s mortgage in 2001.

  “I’m sure,” he said, “that my agent cheats me yearly for more than this little check I am writing.” He gave each check his oversized flourished signature honed at countless book signings. “It is nothing to me except that it could bring you a little security.” He looked up, suddenly shed of his half century, suddenly the bright-eyed boy she grew up with. “And I’m sure I got walloped half as much because you were there to head Daddy off at the pass.”

  She was not in a position, in their long-playing melodrama, to actually refuse his money for reasons of pride—pride which she had dispensed with long ago. On this bit of charity she was serene: he had money, he was family. Any other avenue to money had some shame or degradation attached to it, or worse, sheer bother. Dillard had passed the age of bother, of complication.

  The second family emissary was her niece Annie the barbarian who stormed Dillard’s citadel of quiet. At first so welcome, such an unexpected youthful envoy. Annie brought laughter to the house, talking at her high boisterous volume—and food. Naturally, poor Annie, like all fat people, Dillard speculated, wanted partners in gustatory crime. Annie would have a newly discovered ice-cream flavor she had brought or a fabulous ethnic find, a Persian pastry with pistachios and honey, this Chinese cake from the Asian market, a pound cake of sorts soaked in lychee juice—in Charlotte, North Carolina! In this backwater!—always a new discovery for poor Dillard, who never gets out much, who never goes anywhere, who probably, Annie must imagine, subsists on gruel or pet food.

  “What possessed you, Annie, to think I need one bite of those cookies, let alone a hundred?”

  “I wanted to bring you something, Aunt Dillie,” she said, setting the cookies on the kitchen nook table. “You hate flowers and said not to bring you any more knickknacks or bric-a-brac.”

  “I don’t need to be brought something like some potentate of the East every time you want to come see me.” Dillard broke off half of a cookie and popped it into her mouth. “These are good, though.”

  It was a way, Dillard reflected, of Annie justifying the pig-out (since Annie always ate four fifths of what she brought over), disguising it to herself as a mission of mercy. Dillard’s house had become a no-comment zone for eating, no scolding, no consequences, just us girls and our secret chocolate. Maybe she thought calories eaten in the service of keeping poor old Aunt Dillard company didn’t even count.

  Last month her niece was desperate to confess her difficulties with her third husband, Chuck—oh what was she now? Annie Johnston Costa Winchell Arbuthnot, my goodness. A presumptuous solidarity with Aunt Dillard who made the bad marriage just as she had, the two reckless romantic outcasts against the rest of the family—that seemed to be the gist. Dillard did not accept this retelling of the myth. Annie had arisen in an age of complete freedom from social constraint and societal inquisition, where girls tried out their men pre-maritally, where they took themselves off to Europe for the summer and discovered all there was to know about sex and related misadventures. Annie, unlike sheltered naïve Dillard, who was seduced handily by Randy her junior year at Salem and was instantly pregnant, Annie had no excuse for her bad choices. Annie had followed one bad marriage with two others! At least Dillard had held it to the one. Another thing, Annie was always floating some disparagement of her mother, longing for her aunt to join in and be an ally with her against Jerene, who she feels is a perpetual outrage, some monster. Her visits were becoming a nuisance.

  Among the younger generation, Dillard wished Joshua would visit more. Dear Joshua, so soft and sweet she continually wanted to hug him. How odd that the world had destroyed her rugged, athletic, hale and hearty son but had spared tender Joshua with his permanent look of bullied hurt on his face. Bo came by a year ago, and what a plodding sincere thing he was—though his wife is a firecracker. She wished she could get to know Kate better, but Kate was in motion continually, inexhaustible, dawn to midnight, doing church things, world-saving things. Kate had even taken over Dillard’s chair at the Jarvis Trust for American Art meetings—surely as a kindness, since what could she care about paintings and the rich-lady gossip of Jerene’s handpicked circle of sycophants. Yes, that too Dillard had quietly removed herself from. “You’re not to become a cat lady,” Jerene had said, rather than begging her to stay on the board. “You may not get strange and eccentric past a certain point, Dillard—I won’t have it.”

  So few, so very few visitors in recent years. She had not encouraged people to look in on her or trouble themselves. Perhaps the shrine, as Jerene had termed it, had scared off her acquaintances. It had begun as five or six framed pictures of Christopher as a boy, leaving out his ragamuffin teenage years, his drugged-out twenties. He was such a fair-skinned boy, so blond in coloring, that he looked in many of his later photos like he hadn’t slept, like he was glassy-eyed and on something even when he wasn’t. He was too easily marked by his abuses, creased, reddened, hardened to the point that by twenty-five his smile was permanently cynical and sneering. She had stopped keeping photos of him by then. Oh she would take them, against his will, his offering up to her a cross or compromised face; she kept taking them in hopes of capturing the angelic boy she had raised single-handedly. A year after he died, Dillard had created a chronological diorama of photographs from childhood to young adulthood. Yes, she had gotten carried away for a while, added his Little League trophies, a debating plaque or two from his middle high school years, field day second-place ribbons, a sash of merit badges. It was all tastefully done, she thought … but Jerene disapproved.

  “Dillard,” she had pronounced, surveying the mantel-shrine at its maximum growth, “I say this out of love. Take this down or move it to the bedroom—better yet his bedroom, not yours. There is too much to dwell on here, none of it happy or helpful.”

  Dillard defended her display to Jerene, but within a day she came around and dismantled it. Anyway, all of her collection, save a single school-era class photo, was in the hallway closet, easy to hand if she wished to reconstruct it and risk people thinking she was unwell. Because, of course, she was unwell. She had lost her only child. She had powerlessly watched him corrupt himself and deteriorate, her angel seeking out the gutter, beholden to people who were only too eager to drag hi
m further down into it.

  Yet there were days, after all, here in the living room, here where she spent so much time thinking and remembering, that she was very cold about Christopher and his life choices, even unforgiving: I gave you life and you threw it away. Have it your way then, Chrissy. Don’t expect me to sacrifice the rest of my life to your selfish nonsense, your inconsideration. I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you how it might be for me watching you become a methamphetamine addict. It never passed through your mind, even once—I’m sure of it—what will my poor mother think if I keep going down this path. How sad she will be, how devastated. Well, she thought, when she swept her shrine into a cardboard box, you see, don’t you, Christopher, how I am not so devastated that I cannot pack you up and put you in a closet for a little while. I can get on with things, I have moved forward and have done so in fairly admirable fashion. Yes, they say, poor thing, poor Dillard, how does she scrape through? But they also say, she suspected, that she’d made the best of it, been able to soldier on and function in the world you and your father left me.

  Sitting in her living room today, listening to the dry tick of the chestnut clock, giving just a glance to the surviving Christopher photo, she relived all her inescapable soliloquies and dialogues with … with whom? Who was “they” who were in constant commentary about how poor Dillard was doing, how she soldiered on? Charlotte society, she supposed, once upon a time, was “they.” But “they” had written her off some time ago, when she married young and stupidly. And when Christopher died and his tragedy and crimes became news for the City page (front page of the B section), the obituaries (page 43), little noticeable in the plentiful pages of the Charlotte Observer, then she found herself receiving a little more pity—oh, she hated pity!—a little more judgment. In every Charlotte family of note, in every generation, there is a black sheep or a screwup or someone solely mentioned by people as a lesson, a marker in human unhappiness, and Dillard Jarvis Revelle had fulfilled that role for her generation and her son, Christopher, for his.

  That chestnut clock. How it had accompanied her unpleasantly through life. She should sell it. Apparently it had great value, that’s why it wasn’t already destroyed—her brother was willing to take a hammer to it, but she and Jerene spared its life. But how had she ended up with it? It should be over with their mother in Lattamore Acres.

  When they were children, their mother made them dress up for dinner. Their father felt if he had to suffer the indignity of coming home for his evening supper then it should be a bit of a ceremony, and his little girls should dress up. They sat in the parlor of the homeplace, staring at the clock. Four-thirty would be the sign that they had to run upstairs and slip on a Sunday dress. And then they’d return to the parlor and wait until five when Daddy would appear. How they’d stare at the clock, and in return, how the clock would lengthen the minutes. Dillard was sure the clock was louder sometimes than other times … it couldn’t be proven of course, but sometimes the dry tenor click of the minute hand was like a stiff playing card being played upon a card table, sometimes that noise filled the whole of the room. With each passing moment that Daddy did not come home, the more everyone’s fate would darken. By six it was clear Daddy had made a detour to the country club or Harlan’s Tavern down near the Union County Courthouse to gladhand with other lawyers and judges, and it was clear that he would come home inebriated. Oh every once in a great while, he’d come in sweet and docile, kissing Mother and saying he had gotten held up and he hoped we weren’t starving, but those times were so rare as to be memorable.

  The usual routine was his coming back at nine in a fiercely bad temper—who knows what transpired to make it so. They would all be chastised for something in turn, not eating vegetables, putting a stain on a dress, or maybe he would be furious that something was cold, despite its being served so late. Father slinging a plate of mashed potatoes against the dining room wall was particularly vivid to her; usually, he would just shove things to the floor. Dillard remembered her mother, who conducted herself through all the bad behavior by not acknowledging it, running to stop him only from smashing a soup tureen to the floor: “God no, Gaston, that’s worth a fortune!” Such interference spared the tureen but got her face slapped. And Gaston Jr., her little brother, would enter into it to defend his sisters and mother, God bless him, and that got him sent to his room without dinner, and later there would be a follow-up for that backtalk with a belt. By that time, their mother would be in hiding downstairs, again, expert at that small stoic expression that nothing bad was happening, nothing need move her to intervene. She was a pure coward, Dillard reflected. Better her little boy and daughters slake her husband’s pitiless rage than herself.

  “Did you ever stop to think,” Mother would bring out mournfully, “that if you didn’t annoy your father, he wouldn’t be like this?”

  So each night we combed out our hair a little longer, tied the bows a little tighter, pulled up our white socks a little higher, learned to sit up a little more straight, as we sat there in the parlor, Dillard reflected, watching that clock keep time on our childhoods. And here that cursed thing is still astride my afternoons, preparing to tick-tock me into old age, Dillard thought calmly. Probably the last fool thing I will hear in this world. It was 4:26. She might take a hammer to that thing yet—

  Then, the doorbell.

  Dillard’s heart skipped a beat; she steadied herself and pushed her bulk out of the chair and saw, through the bay window, that Jerene’s BMW was in the drive.

  “Sorry to break in on you like this,” Jerene said, storming past the foyer and into the kitchen. Dillard simply followed her.

  “That’s all right. I can tell something’s wrong, Jerene.”

  Something was wrong because Jerene was uncharacteristically frantic, and Dillard’s sister was never frantic. Jerene paced the dining nook, circled the kitchen island, rustling the shopping lists and newspaper clips on Dillard’s small bulletin board, then, declining all the while Dillard’s offers of coffee, iced tea, a Diet-Rite cola, Jerene did a circuit of the living room, her kelly-green swing coat sweeping around her like an impresario’s cape. Jerene held a sealed manila envelope.

  “Would you like a fat-free granola bar?” Dillard asked, primarily to see Jerene’s expression of horror.

  “I hired a detective,” she said, settling on a couch.

  “For Duke?” Dillard sat in a straight-backed chair beside her.

  “Why would I hire a detective for Duke?”

  “I thought that’s why people hired detectives, to spy on their spouses.”

  “Oh what do I care what Duke does. I should have said that my lawyer hired him, Darnell McKay.”

  Dillard leaned forward to convey gentleness. “Are we pressing Darnell into service again? I know why you want him looking out for your interests, but are you sure he is up to negotiating a civil suit with Liddibelle’s pack of wolves?”

  Jerene was on her feet again, pacing toward the kitchen, still clutching the manila envelope. “Duke has left sorting out everything to me, and among Darnell’s attributes is his having detectives on his payroll.”

  Dillard, with effort again, a twinge of sciatica announcing itself, got out of her chair and followed her sister into the kitchen. “And this detective is supposed to find dirt on the Baylors?”

  “Their detective is investigating Jerilyn to make her out to be some crazed madwoman with a past full of reckless action, and there was a … some unpleasantness at Carolina, some misadventures where boys were concerned. I don’t want any of Jerilyn’s past—or my past or your past or Annie’s past—making its way to a civil suit as part of a larger attempt to suggest that the women in the family are unbalanced or hysterical and shouldn’t be in the same room as a weapon.”

  Dillard didn’t approve of dueling detectives, let alone dueling teams of lawyers, but said, “Perhaps none of us should be in the room with a weapon. I would shoot Randy Revelle between the eyes without a trace of guilt.” Dillard ope
ned the refrigerator and got herself a Diet-Rite cola; Jerene shook her head again that she didn’t want one. “Now Jerry, you simply must settle this case—have Liddibelle name a price and get it over with. It can’t go to court! I thought she was a better friend to us than that.”

  “I am dealing with Liddibelle directly and I think that will put an end to it, but in the meantime, her detective can learn much that we all do not want him to learn. Darnell, as I was saying, brought in this detective…” She sighed. “… and I thought, what an opportunity to have a detective to look into various and sundry matters.”

  This couldn’t be good. “Oh Jerene…”

  Jerene sat quietly, running a manicured hand over a pleat repeatedly. “There are a number of things,” she continued slowly, “that we don’t speak of in our family and God knows I am most thankful that we don’t talk about them.”