Lookaway, Lookaway (12 page)

Jerene, who didn’t speak passionately or ever show emotion—not since she was a girl—turned to go. “Just for my working information,” she asked, “if Duke and I have to declare bankruptcy, publicly, and with no shortage of embarrassment, would you help us then? Not Duke, but
me,
your sister who would find a bankruptcy and public ruin
very
distressing.”

“Jerene, I would write you a check for a hundred thousand dollars tonight but I know as I am sitting here you will spend it to keep our mother living like a dowager empress at Lattamore Acres and I will not let my money go to that enterprise.” He popped a pretzel into his mouth. “You could, you know, always sell one of those paintings of yours.” He had said it lightly but he felt the temperature lower as he said it.

Jerene’s place in society was amplified by managing the Jarvis Trust for American Art, an entire room in the Mint Museum devoted to American landscapes that were, by obscure methods, piled up by their ancestors. Jerene was the dictator of a little ladies-who-lunch, time-on-their-hands circle of society good old girls, most of them chosen for their sycophancy, who called themselves “trustees” and met monthly to compare shopping, children, to get tipsy at lunchtime, and play at being fund-raisers for the purchase of new art. That would be intolerable to Jerene, Gaston knew, if Duke ran out of money and she had to start selling off the precious family art pile! The Jarvis Room at the Mint … well, it might have to be called something else if the paintings passed into someone else’s hands. Maybe he could buy it up and the sacred room could be the
Gaston
Jarvis Room and it could be the
Gaston
Jarvis Trust for American Art … had a nice ring to it … Nah, screw Art. He didn’t care about it that much. Frederick Church, George Inness, bunch of haystacks and cows in fields, gleaners and hay wains, blah blah blah—like Savonarola, throw ’em on the bonfire. He turned to Jerene …

But she had gone. Well. That wasn’t a nice way to leave it. He’d make it up to her on some other occasion.

*   *   *

Alcohol was supposed to depress, to relax … but it only made Gaston more awake as night wore on. He’d fall into the bed tired enough but in a few hours he was wide awake again. No book or television show could interest him then. God knows, he had no intention of writing on the latest Cordelia Florabloom installment. But he might, in this inconsolable time of night, in just such a mood, work on a literary project long dreamt of, long threatened.

He rolled to the edge of his grand king bed and bounced his portly frame into an upright position. He padded into his slippers, found a bathrobe hanging in the bathroom, and shuffled across the hallway to a nearly unfurnished room. But there was a small desk and a laptop, which he now opened up.

So far there had only been notes, lines, musings, fragments. Somewhere amid all his things there was a box of student papers and notebooks, back from his days at Duke University, where some notes toward this literary comeback resided, youthful notions sketched out decades years ago. God only knew what immature dreck he’d written as a teenage undergraduate. But that youthful writing, whatever its faults, was before the rot set in, when he wrote from his soul, when he was insensible to the market and wouldn’t know a royalty statement from a bubble-gum wrapper. When the one reader he wished to show things to was Duke Johnston.

Duke Johnston at Duke University. “Duke” Johnston, the legend. The name was Joseph Johnston but over four years this handsome, smart, athletic student had become “Duke,” the embodiment of all that was dashing and prestigious about the university. One heard of Duke Johnston witticisms, Duke Johnston parties, Duke Johnston’s romantic exploits, although he steadily remained unattached, driving the sorority girls into frenzies. Duke Johnston, who had principled opposition to the Vietnam War—mostly about its strategy, and not so much about the need to fight Communism—but nonetheless would answer his country’s call and would enlist in the Officer Corps after finishing up his degree in 1966. Because Gaston arrived at Duke University in 1967, he got to hear, endlessly, religiously, of Duke Johnston’s athletic exploits and his most famous misfortune.

Duke was the handsome, easy-in-his-skin quarterback, his blond hair holding the late Saturday sun at Wallace Wade Stadium as he sat on the sidelines waiting for his chance at glory. He would take the field and they would chant his nickname,
Duke, Duke, Duke,
and he would oblige the crowd by a dazzling feat, an impossible threading of the needle, a completed pass the length of the field with every opponent bearing down on him. Duke University had slumped at football in recent years, though it had been the conference champion as recently as 1962; South Carolina (still then in the Atlantic Coast Conference), NC State and Clemson were the football powerhouses. But with the advent of Duke Johnston, who at his best could score against anyone, the pent-up years of university football frustration broke forth like dam waters, he was praised, loved, adored, worshipped. But in a game against Maryland, he took a terrible sack, going down hard, hitting his neck on another player’s knee while another player fell upon him with his full weight. His neck was thought to be broken; he was carried off the field immobile. That night, the local radio stations reported, he sank into a coma.

Such quiet on Duke campus—it was as if President Kennedy had been re-assassinated. Students, professors, alumni walked with heads down, everyone in dark contemplation, in premature mourning, barely muttering to one another, prayerful and hoping this young good-natured boy, this emissary from the sun, was not paralyzed. The
Durham Herald
proclaimed a week later:
FOOTBALL HERO RECOVERING
. Young Johnston was not paralyzed, but this most certainly ended his gridiron days, and his much publicized dreams of going to officer’s school at West Point, joining the Vietnam War effort. In interviews that reported how close he had come to paralysis, how long his recovery would be, how he would be afflicted with vertigo and should walk with a cane, Joseph Beauregard “Duke” Johnston, son of Major Bo Johnston, a hero of World War II, descendant of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, defender of the Carolinas against the savageries of Sherman’s army, let it be known that the loss of football was truly nothing to him, but the inability to serve his country as his ancestors had before him … alas, that was the end of a passionately held dream.

Of course, the local Democrats hoped to recruit Duke for office, there and then on the spot—and the head of the Republican Club paid him a hospital visit as well. Duke Johnston, showing up to candidate debates with his limp and his cane, handily became student body president. He got to go to Washington to shake hands with former Vice President Nixon (a Duke alum), he lunched with the governor and asked Senator Sam Erwin, who had come to Durham for a lecture, to attend one of his famous barbecues at Arcadia House—and Senator Sam said yes! What a college career, what greatness was portended … and now, in Duke Johnston’s first year at law school (Duke University forbade him from heading up north to Harvard or Yale, gave him every fellowship, threw at him every prize and scholarship not nailed down), insignificant wretch Gaston Jarvis had an invitation to a house party at the next-to-campus mansion known as Arcadia, was going to meet this philosopher king and his legendary coterie of smart, gifted young men and the gifted ladies who adored such men.

Gaston Jr. hated his father Gaston Sr., but he had to give his old man credit for allowing him to keep up appearances at Duke University. Gaston Jarvis Sr. had always been a bit sensitive about the provenance of his own law degree, so after a lifetime of belittling his son, he nonetheless was willing to pay for a Duke University education, so as better to allow a confusion, a sense that maybe son followed father to his ol’ alma mater, a few backslaps in the club, a bit of “Yes, just like the old man!” when asked how his son was getting on at Duke. Nor did he wish his son to show up as some rube with one Sunday suit.

A lifetime of parsimony was instantly corrected by Gaston’s new wardrobe. Gaston was put through a round of exacting measuring and fittings at Tate-Brown in uptown Charlotte (back in the days when such stores existed in uptown), and three suits, two blazers, a score of shirts and slacks, were the result. “I won’t have those Yankee blue bloods looking down their Semitic noses at a Jarvis,” said his father, who had a talent for mingling any positive development with something hateful.

The only time his father set foot on Duke campus was to see Gaston off, see what kind of room he had been assigned, wonder whether he should raise hell on behalf of his son. He didn’t want his son associating with the hippies or war protestors or radical professors (Duke had its share of all). It went without saying that drugs were forbidden, but it would be good, his father said, to learn how to drink. Men drank, and would always drink—drink to make deals, drink after golf, drink to charm women, and these four years could be a time to practice and refine that skill. Gaston Jarvis Sr. suggested he only date women from good backgrounds, find a nice coed at Duke, leave the town hussies alone. He speculated loudly, surely within earshot of the other boys and boys’ parents moving into the dorm rooms, that there was many a tramp in town that would like to latch on to a future lawyer or banker. “Screw ’em if you have to, but don’t get caught in a pregnancy scam.” Those hours of unpacking were among the longest of Gaston Jr.’s life. His new life would begin, as if out of a chrysalis, the second his father returned to his brand-new Lincoln Continental, which Gaston believed was also bought just for the drive up to Durham, lest anyone form any meager notion of Jarvis patrimony.

Gaston could have portrayed himself as another privileged Southern kid at Duke; he could have joined a fraternity and played a sport, been rowdy, drank and caroused through his money and goaded his father to send more, which—now that the measure of his father’s love of appearances had been taken—would likely have been sent, no matter the misbehavior. But Gaston already was in his habit of silent observation, hyper-carefulness in social affairs. He longed to make true friends, escape into rooms filled with worthy people, go home with someone else’s son for Christmas and Thanksgiving, erase steadily and resolutely his own unhappy family. His mother, suddenly sentimental about his departure, pressed some family photos in nice frames into his luggage, but upon reaching his assigned room in Craven Hall, he confined them to a bottom desk drawer. His sisters looked pretty and some of the fellows might well ask as to their marital status or whether dates were possible, and that thread would lead back to his family.

His mother, now without any of her children in the house, probably guilty for all the violence she oversaw or pretended not to see, wrote him flowery letters of affection—he read one or two. After a month, he began to toss them into the trash unopened; she was writing them more for her own boredom and to cast herself as martyr and hero, and he never answered a one. After a year, the letters stopped. Gaston fantasized about being able to sell a story of being an orphan on a trust fund … he never risked this fiction, but he dwelled on it at night.

But Arcadia!
Et in Arcadia ego
 … Gaston could even now remember the precise details of how he, a lowly freshman, had been admitted into Arcadia, the heart of the university’s social world. It must have been Henry, his hallmate back in Craven Hall. “Oh you’ve got to meet Johnston, and the whole group at Arcadia,” Henry said, brandishing a bottle of single-malt scotch. You could not buy such a treasure in nearly dry North Carolina at that time, but Henry had taken it from his own father’s stash, some overstocked beach-cottage pantry on Long Island. “I think this is Duke’s favorite,” said Henry, showing Gaston the staid Balvenie label.

“Should I bring a bottle, too?” Gaston asked.

“Oh they won’t care,” his friend said of the Arcadian revelers, all but taking him by the hand and running across campus, by the grand cathedral-like bell tower (that would make you think Duke University was immemorially old rather than a faux–Ivy League creation of tobacco money in the 1930s), through the autumn woods along Alexander Street to the many-eaved Victorian house from which a joyous Louis Armstrong record was playing.

“Well done, Henry,” said Duke, holding the Balvenie whiskey to the window, letting the golden liquid catch the afternoon light. “You boys will join me in a wee dram?”

Henry said yes, and Gaston, like some kind of mute, stray dog, followed the men into the heart of Arcadia, past the packed rooms of celebrants, past the young pipe-smoking profs and dashiki-clad black students, debutantes and jocks and one young man perched on a sofa arm wearing eye makeup!

Duke waited until Gaston had tried the Balvenie. “Suitable?”

Gaston nodded, and managed to bring out, “Quite nice.” There was a half-second pause where Gaston felt the need to keep talking, make a mark on the moment. “More of a bourbon man, myself.”

“Really?” said Duke. “Oh thank God—me too. My peers here would have us drowning in scotch. What’s your favorite?”

Gaston had maybe sampled bourbon no more than three times in his life; the truth was it was always bourbon on his father’s breath when the beatings and abuses were in the offing. Somehow, across the miles, he saw the label on the bottles his father had left out. “Well, Maker’s Mark and Wild Turkey of course, but at the house we … my father, a lawyer, he has a special thing sent from Lexington, something called Dunlap’s Hundred—”

“Oh yes, I know it!” Duke smiled and transformed the entire room, giving off light. “It’s impossible to get. I have just a bit of it, upstairs.”

“I’ll be happy to bring you a bottle,” Gaston said, awfully pleased with himself. His determination not to have a father had failed—indeed, his father had made for his sole social victory, but he could live with it, in the approving gaze of Duke Johnston.

“You will find yourself on the permanent invitation list, I think. Heavens, a million apologies, I don’t know your name yet.”