Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  “Oh no,” she said. She pulled up behind the cab who had been told to wait. She negotiated to get his bags out of the trunk, and soon Gaston emerged with a bottle of Dunlap’s Hundred. “Can’t get decent bourbon in Europe. Isn’t that odd, that there’s a Bourbon family, full of claimants to half a dozen European thrones, but you can’t get a decent bottle of the nectar named after them.”

  He let Dorrie transfer his bags to her car, and paid the taxi driver. And soon they were back on Billy Graham Parkway. Dorrie asked if he wouldn’t like some coffee; he would not. He sipped freshly from the bottle, having shredded the wax seal with his house key, raining the debris on the floor of her car.

  “I always knew something was screwy about that claim, my friend’s, my so so wonderful friend…”

  Dorrie sighed. “Not sure I understand you, Mr. Jarvis.”

  “Had a lot of time on my hands in this joint, in Switzerland. Lot of lakes over there. You go to a clinic, they wheel you out and make you look at a lake for an hour. Rest, they tell you. I mail-ordered myself a laptop and got to researching. That’s what I did.”

  “Hard at work on a book?”

  “Fuck books.”

  “I’m going to take that as a no.”

  “My research is right here. And you’ll want to see their faces when I tell them.”

  Dorrie sped her way down I-85, then turned for the Brookshire Freeway. Gaston beheld the lit-up skyline of Charlotte as if for the first time.

  “Almost pretty,” he mumbled. “When I was a boy there was none of this city stuff, none of it … All new people in this town.” Then after a cruise down Randolph from the city center, they turned for his street, and the big dark house surrounded by enormous trees.

  “Home sweet home,” said Gaston. “I see my poor relations didn’t sell off my Porsche. Might as well have, since I won’t be driving anymore. Good God, who is responsible for the lawn service—this is a jungle out here.”

  It was hard to see, since there was no porch light or streetlight; the house showed no signs of occupation, except for a dim orange glow in the living room. The Southern cacophony of insects overpowered the drone of the nearby thoroughfares beyond the ring of trees and the high brick walls.

  Dorrie had never been inside Gaston Jarvis’s house; she’d heard from Josh and others about the famous emptiness of it. She indeed saw an empty room to the left with merely a phone on a small table and a chair in it. Jerene and Duke Johnston had brought some of their furniture from the old house and filled the living room, but the furniture looked dwarfed by the high ceilings and long room; the furnishings gave out before the room did. There was a fire going in the cavernous living room’s fireplace. The house was chill, colder—if possible—than outdoors. Had Jerene and Duke fallen so far that they were struggling to heat this house?

  And then there was Jerene coming forward to give her brother a hug. Dorrie heard her say, “Oh Gaston. You reek of bourbon. I’d hoped you’d given it a rest.”

  “I did give it a rest, Jerry. That’s why you dry out, so you can soak up again, or didn’t you know that about these so-called rest clinics.”

  “How was Paris?”

  “Same old tourist trap it ever was, but with more Ay-rabs and Africans than Frenchmen these days.” He turned to Dorrie, falteringly, and said, “No offense.”

  And then there was Duke Johnston, emerging from the shadows. Well, the smile was intact. Dorrie first went over to hug him; he was a skeleton under his cardigan and cotton shirt. He leaned on an old-fashioned walking stick with a glass knob.

  “Dorrie, you look wonnerful,” he said, not entirely able to rise to the harder consonants. “Gaston, old boy! D’you recognize this?” He meant the walking stick.

  Gaston smiled. “A relic from our Arcadian evenings.” He hugged his old friend, briefly.

  “Nice to see you up and around. Recovered.”

  “I wun’t say recovuhed.”

  Gaston held the Dunlap’s Hundred aloft. “Perhaps you’ll permit me to put this in the liquor cabinet where it belongs, since I know my sister has likely poured out all my fine collection, down some drainhole of temperance.”

  “There wasn’t a bottle extant when I arrived,” Jerene said, arms crossed. “You left no drop behind, I assure you.”

  Gaston left for the kitchen, leaving the others in the foyer. The three of them were quiet. What was there to say, with a drunken Gaston Jarvis back in their lives for the first time in years? Jerene glanced knowingly at Duke and then sweetly at Dorrie. Dorrie began an explanation about his taxi ride to the ABC store, and Jerene waved it aside. “Of course, if he’s determined to drink there is nothing to be done about it. Duke, I can’t see how we can stay here if he is going back to his old ways.”

  “Certainly not, dear.”

  Dorrie saw Jerene’s worry for her husband, and a weariness—to move again, to be like a vagabond, a charity case at her age. Dorrie looked away briefly, not wanting to see something private between them, but when she raised her head, Jerene Johnston was all serenity and extending her hand to gently take Dorrie by the arm. “Let’s go into the kitchen, make some coffee, and let the boys catch up.”

  Gaston returned with a glass of bourbon with ice cubes in his hand. So much for retiring the bottle to the cabinet. “Hate to lose you, ladies, but Duke and I are going to get something straight. The big question is whether you both know it and have been faking it all these years, or whether it’s something you really don’t know.”

  Jerene’s stare was a study of regal indifference. Dorrie would deplete her life savings never to have that aimed at her. “Gaston, I hear in your tone, you wish to argue about something and may I request that whatever it is be put off until tomorrow morning?”

  “You don’t want to hear my news? My revelation? Or will it be a revelation? Heh-heh.”

  “Oh, out with it. Get it over with.”

  Gaston took a fortifying sip. “I always thought it strange. Some of the Johnstons down east. I used to see them when they came to my readings, down at the Manteo Booksellers, I’d get a big crowd down there. And I’d see, what’s her name, Mary Johnston? Maggie Johnston? Anyway, I’d always joke we were somehow connected, thanks to your marriage with Duke, but they never seemed to claim Duke. Very polite about it, considering. They never seemed to agree that he was really one of their Johnstons.” He laughed to himself, looking into his glass, swirling the ice around. “So I did a little homework. Wrote a few letters and sure enough. This Joseph E. Johnston brother who went off to Tennessee in the mid-1800s … he has nothing to do with Duke’s great-grandfather.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Jerene.

  Dorrie noticed Duke wasn’t saying anything.

  “My theory is that Duke’s great-grandfather moved to Charlotte and, with no internet or public records or library to refute him, he claimed to be related to General Joseph E. Johnston since he had the same name, Joseph. Maybe even came to believe it over time. The grandfather went along with it, and Duke’s own father, that ol’ son of a bitch, Major Bo…” He nearly swayed enough to fall forward saying the word “Bo” with such relish. “… he really ran with it, made a whole military career out of the legacy. I wonder if he ever did his own research and found out it was a lie. That he wasn’t Joseph E.’s hundredth cousin, and lived in fear that someone would expose him. Maybe that’s why he’d get tight and flail away on his boys like he did.”

  Still Duke wasn’t saying anything.

  “Are you done with your theory?” Jerene said crisply.

  “It’s not a theory, sis. I got it here.” He staggered to his lighter bag and opened the zipper on the side. He brought out some papers of different lengths and sizes, bound by a clip. “Here’s your genealogy, for you. Read it and weep, oooold boy, oooold sport, heh-heh … You gotta feel for the real Johnston family. Every trailer-trash teeth-missing clodhopper named Johnston from every red-clay fork in the road claims descent from the general. They must tire of all you pr
etenders.”

  “What pains you take with your malice, brother.”

  “Oh it was no trouble at all!” Then Gaston got giddy with the next bit, almost unable to bring it out fast enough. “And it was so fucking obvious! I mean, right in front of all of our faces: Joseph Beauregard Johnston, Reverend Bo Johnston, Major Bo…” No one understood what he meant. “Who was General Joseph E.’s archnemesis, after Jefferson Davis, of course? Huh? You know the answer, Duke.”

  Duke took a deep breath and with effort brought out, “General Beauregard, I suppose you mean.”

  “The man who took Joseph E.’s credit for Bull Run, the man who was part of the wave of promotions that, in effect, demoted Johnston, did an end run around him.”

  Duke smiled, somehow. “I do not believe they were bitter enemies.”

  “But no one in the family, the real Johnston family, would have named a child for P.G.T. Beauregard!”

  Jerene was tense. “What could any of this possibly matter to you?”

  “I’ve come back from Switzerland and Paris a new man, Jerry. Devoted to honesty and transparency. Our families are a ragtag bunch held together by the glue of secrets, and I hate secrets now. Our family’s secrets, Jerene—a mountain of them. And Duke’s family’s fraudulence. We’ve been tyrannized by these secrets.”

  Dorrie knew to keep out of it, but she flashed in her mind on Mr. Jarvis’s recourse to prostitutes. He had some nerve.

  “Better,” Gaston continued, “that I found out than had you run for governor and some reporter found out. Not that you had it in you to run for governor. That dream was right up there with my winning the National Book Award for Lookaway, Dixieland.”

  “The resort development that so offended you, Gaston,” Jerene informed him, “never was built. Bob Boatwright and those men you thrust upon us are under indictment. The title reverts to you. When shall we expect the publishing date?”

  “I think we both know my writing days are through. But we’re off topic! Just tell me, satisfy my curiosity. Did you know you weren’t related to Joseph E. or is this news to you? Oops, out of libation!”

  Gaston returned to the kitchen for a refill.

  “If you want me to go,” Dorrie offered.

  Jerene: “Absolutely not. I still want to talk to you.” Then she stood by her husband, whose stamina was nearing its end, his eyes sunken and lost. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of confirming this. I couldn’t care less, but I’ll be damned if—”

  Gaston, refueled, was back. “Be damned if you what? I’m just here a final time to learn the truth from Duke. If he’s been lying to all of us all these years. If when I sat there looking up at him worshipfully at university, like a little first-form British public school faggot at Eton, did he know he was running a scam on the state of North Carolina?”

  Still Joseph Johnston didn’t say anything.

  “In other news that may interest you both, I’ve signed over this house to you. Pretended I sold it to you for one dollar. You’ll get the papers soon—my lawyers did all the scutwork. The property taxes are your own affair, but you need a mansion and I don’t.” He sloshed another measure of bourbon into his glass of ice. “I don’t want to be in this house or this ugly, pre-fab town anymore. I’m going back to Paris and play out what’s left of my liver.” He toasted everyone, one, two, three, then sipped lightly his brimming glass. “I’ve been assured that belabored organ doesn’t have a year to go. So you stay here and play at being an old venerable family, in that old venerable Society in the old venerable South that doesn’t exist anymore except in your mind, Jerene. You play with your Civil War toys, Duke, and she can go on presiding over her little collection of mediocre boring landscape art from two-bit American nobodies, until the trumpet blows up yonder—”

  Jerene slapped his glass of whiskey out of his hand; the tumbler and its contents smashed against the wall.

  “Oh hoo hoo,” Gaston laughed, revived. “We’re gonna act like that, are we? So what’s the truth, old friend?” He braced himself against the table in the foyer, nearly knocking the oval mirror off its hook.

  Duke took another deep breath. “There may be some’sing to wha’ you say. I’ve had my suspicions, also. But I never wished to look too closely.” Another deep breath. “I’m sorry it’s important to you to take … take dis from me.”

  Dorrie couldn’t look at Mr. Johnston’s eyes. She was suddenly completely full of love and pity for him. Dorrie wondered if even Gaston saw the pathos within his triumph, the dwindling, ill man he had come to diminish further.

  For another minute all was silent, then Duke spoke:

  “I should have helped you, Gaston. You were right.”

  Gaston stared at his friend, unsure what he meant.

  “Lookaway, Dixieland.” Duke took a small step so he might lean against Jerene who, with the slightest hand on his arm, steadied him. “It was my mission to see you through your book…” Duke Johnston struggled for breath and clarity. “… only you coul’ have written it but it was always a project we both ha’ a part of.”

  Dorrie saw a change come over Gaston, a weakening.

  Duke added, “And I failed to report for duty.”

  Gaston and his old friend looked into each other’s eyes for a second, but it moved them both too much to continue. “There was dereliction,” Gaston began, barely audible. Then he found his voice too, and it seemed astonished, as if he had only realized where he was and whom he was talking to. “… enough dereliction on my part to sink us both, old friend. To sink us all.”

  Jerene, quietly, knelt down to pick up the two pieces of broken glass and dropped them with a clang into the small foyer trash bin.

  Gaston briefly turned to the oval mirror, then turned away. “My house. I’m … It’s yours. Did I tell you? The paperwork’s in the mail. You better get your tax guy on it. I’ll get Norma … no, I mean, the lawyer…” And his mind wandered off again. “I never really moved in, did I? Never liked this big old place, never really felt like home. The Nineteenth Hole and Arcadia—the only places I felt at home, and neither of them were my home.” He ran a finger along the foyer marble tabletop. “Oh well, this is the last time I’ll see this place. And I suspect the last time we’ll see each other, Duke.”

  “Having been stripped of my family his’ory, I’m not sure there is so much left to say.”

  Gaston now looked almost panicked. Dorrie wondered if he’d beg for a civil parting. “I think we’re entitled to one last good conversation. A few last points of honor. Destiny, as I think you will see, is not quite done with us yet.”

  Duke looked at his wife and nodded faintly; she turned his arm over to Gaston’s care (his left side, his bad side) and Gaston escorted him to the long living room, sparsely filled with Duke and Jerene’s refugee furniture from the old Johnston house. “I’ll get us both a glass.”

  “Joseph,” Jerene said calmly, “do not drink more than a wee dram. Your medicines will be interfered with.”

  “Of course, swee’heart.”

  After Gaston tore through the kitchen and retrieved two glasses of ice for the last splash of bourbon, Dorrie sat at the kitchen table and Jerene began to make coffee in the coffeemaker.

  “Sorry you had to be part of such a gothic drama. We’re becoming something out of Tennessee Williams around here.”

  Dorrie smiled. “I apologize for saying it to your face—I was raised better. But I’ve always thought he was a…” The serene countenance of her hostess made Dorrie soften her judgment further. “… very badly behaved, your brother.”

  “He’s what our father made him, sad to say. Dillard and I rose above it, just barely.” She made a noise close to a laugh. “He’s been dead, Daddy, thirty years. Yet he perpetuates himself, in all of us, in his way.”

  Jerene was briefly distracted making the coffee. Then she went to look in on the boys sitting by the fire with the lights off. In the interim Dorrie looked around the kitchen. Perhaps Duke and Jerene would sell the pla
ce, become flush again, find something other than this big gloomy house of outsized rooms and shadows to live in. Dorrie wanted her back in action, back in the art acquisition game. Dorrie could be a help to Mrs. Johnston now; she relished the idea of working with Mrs. J. (Wow, it was really hard to convert to “Jerene.”) What could Jerene want to talk to Dorrie about? The Trust. She suspected Jerene was going to ask her to join the Jarvis Trust for American Art. With Kate gone, and her sister Dillard passed on, there was an opening, after all.

  “Okay,” Jerene said, bringing two mugs of coffee, setting them before Dorrie and herself, taking a seat across from her. “The boys are back to playing nice, it seems. Perhaps the world won’t end if Duke has a drink. It is a night for it, I think. Now, at long last, Dorrie.” A thought flashed across her face, a small smile. “You know, I’ve never known, what is Dorrie short for?”

  Dorcas was a little flirty. “Ah now, I try not to let that secret out.”

  “You heard my brother. We’re all past secrets now.”

  “Dorcas, from the Bible. You can imagine how much I dreaded roll call in school with that name sitting there: Dorcas the Dork.” She laughed. “And I was a perfect little bookworm teacher’s-pet nerd girl, too. My middle name is Jehosopha, so there was no place to run with that, either.”

  Mrs. Johnston’s eyes were distant. “If you went by your middle name and had joined this family, you would have been Jehosopha Jourdain Johnston, wouldn’t you have been? J-J-J. Isn’t that something?”

  Dorrie smiled pleasantly, not quite seeing the wonder of it.

  Jerene pursued it. “Would you ever consider marrying my son?”

  Dorrie must have appeared dumbstruck, so Jerene continued, meeting her gaze with level sincerity.

  “I am thinking of an economic union, a tactical union, in the ways of earlier centuries. I know you both for the moment are homosexual, perhaps waiting to marry someone of your own gender under the law in North Carolina, which I don’t think is very likely for some time. But there would be many advantages to such a marriage. Stability, money, which if Gaston is telling the truth for once, we may be seeing again soon.”