Lookaway, Lookaway (48 page)

Duke scooted closer in the bed toward his wife, squeezing her hand. “How I dreaded going to Virginia on those weekends home from university. I stopped going to Virginia altogether by my last year of law school, speeding away most Fridays to come here and be with my grandparents instead. My grandmother was a sumptuous cook.”

“Yes, I only met them once, but I liked them immensely.”

Yes, his grandparents had left him a monument, Duke reflected, a small respectable Southern estate. And Duke had fumbled it away.

Duke’s own childhood was in Caroline County, Virginia, near Fort A. P. Hill where Major Joseph Beauregard “Bo” Johnston trained soldiers in the Officer Candidate School. Major Bo had been trained there himself before deployment in North Africa with General George S. Patton. Operation Torch. Task Force A. Two Army Corps. Duke would tell his schoolmates at Hampden-Sydney these designations with pride. After his World War II service, Duke’s father had returned to A. P. Hill to train officers for the European bases until after the Korean War, when he was then part of the Engineer Officer Candidate School that prepared young officers for Vietnam.

Duke’s full name was Joseph Beauregard Johnston, too. Major Bo spent a good deal of time correcting people who wished to familiarize the name and call either of them Joe. “Never let anyone call you ‘Joe,’ son,” his father instructed. “Joe pumps your gas or fixes your sink. Joseph is the name of statesmen and generals.” Duke was glad that in college he got the nickname “Duke,” since the farther he could get from identifying with all the glorious ancestors, the better.

Duke’s younger brother’s name was Carrington, named after their Revolutionary War ancestor Lieutenant Johnston’s great friend and partner in youthful mischief, Clement Carrington. The Carringtons still existed in Charlotte and Duke knew them socially—it was their one worn-thin topic of affable conversation each and every Mint by Gaslight. By marriages, throughout the 1700s, the Johnstons married into the Henrys (of Patrick Henry fame), the Prestons, the Woods, all manner of Virginia aristocracy with sons educated at Hampden-Sydney (founded, in fact, on a parcel of land given by John Johnston in 1777); these young scions inevitably matriculated at William and Mary, UVA or West Point. The wilds of the Virginian Piedmont was where Peter Johnston and Lighthorse Harry Lee rode and camped and hunted—two military greats whose greater sons, Joseph E. Johnston and Robert E. Lee, would also be close. It was Robert E. Lee who was chosen to break the news to Joseph when his favored nephew Preston died in the assault on Contreras in the Mexican-American War. They write that Joseph fainted to the ground, had to be carried to his tent, such was his grief for the boy he had loved like a son. A photo of Preston accompanied Johnston everywhere, from the bivouac tent to his civilian offices. Perhaps that is why Joseph E. Johnston had no children of his own, Duke had always speculated.

General Joseph did, however, have nine siblings and, somewhat obscurely, there was a sibling who wandered to Tennessee, from which their corner of the Johnston clan descended. At some point, Duke’s great-grandfather moved to Charlotte, thereby avoiding a return to the bosom of family connections that was Virginia and its high-society snares. Both Virginia and South Carolina were obsessed with colonial lineages and dynastic marriages. North Carolina offered nowhere near the privileged-class blood sport of its neighbors.

Suddenly—and this was happening a lot lately as he got older—another flash from Duke’s university days unspooled to his conscious mind: an evening in his beloved Arcadia attic room, Gaston sprawled upon the leather couch that was more comfortable than any bed or bower known of before or since, Duke at his desk, a law book open and unattended.

“I suspect,” said Gaston, “that North Carolina’s lack of high society pretensions has to do with its rivers.” Gaston then quoted the famous description of North Carolina being a pleasant “vale of humility between two mountains of conceit,” the windy summits being Virginia and South Carolina.

“That’s Governor Vance, isn’t it?” Duke asked at the time.

“Some say Alexander Hamilton said it—it sounds like Hamilton. Maybe it was William Byrd, the eighteenth-century one. He didn’t have much nice to say about North Carolina. Said we were lazy.”

Duke now was sideways in his throne of a desk chair, letting his legs dangle, head dangling too, staring up at the eaves. “Lazy? What slander.”

“Said our women were of loose virtue.” Gaston swirled the ice in his glass. “I’ve regrettably not found it so.”

“I believe I have found it so, just not lately. You were saying about rivers.”

The James River and Chesapeake Bay in Virginia made for an ideal system of shoreside plantations which could get their crops to ports. Charleston in South Carolina as well, a tangle of bays and rivers, leading to prosperous plantations. A great place to get rich. And here is poor North Carolina surrounded by the Outer Banks, Cape Hatteras, the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Waters much to be avoided as the points of land would suggest: Cape Lookout, Cape Fear. Those shifting sandbars enclose the Great Dismal Swamp, as the colonists named it, dense, dark, dangerous, full of snakes and alligators, several mythical monsters including a fire-breathing giant raptor. The Old North State became the haven of escaped slaves from Virginia and South Carolina, escapees from the numerous shipwrecks off our coast. Better selling than
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
in its day was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s follow-up,
Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp
about Dred, a fugitive slave preaching uprising and revolution. (Maybe she felt a little bad about creating the passive Uncle Tom.)

“Indentured servants, debtors, petty thieves, seducers and bigamists, escaped prisoners—they all ran headlong into the swamp sanctuaries of our beloved state. They
are
our true aristocracy,” Gaston added, toasting them. “The tobacco magnates came later, of course. Just white trash made good.”

“I don’t think you should share that theory with the benefactors of this fine university,” Duke had suggested.

How was it that Gaston wished to deprive himself of their friendship? The ease and rich flow of conversation, the reading, the small investigations, the discovery of new bottled pleasures. Having dwelled in Arcadia, how could one leave? And how much longer, Duke would wonder, would they both be alive? Duke was coming up on sixty-four this very weekend, Gaston was five years behind him but looked older. Duke himself had neuropathy; his fingers and feet were often numb, he dropped and fumbled every device or medicine bottle he put his hand to. He was on a number of medications that weren’t terribly serious—for blood pressure, for cholesterol—and he had a regimen of mild blood thinners and aspirin to prevent the strokes that did in his father and led him to dementia. He could only imagine what Gaston’s ailments were, if he even went to a doctor.

“Gaston and his money were our last hope,” Duke said, sounding pitiful to himself. “And I managed to set him off again.”

“He likes being set off. If it wasn’t one thing you said, it would have been something I let slip. We were children to imagine he would follow through on that gift.”

Duke heard their downstairs phone ring again. They had not left their warm bedroom to go unplug it.

“My brother,” Jerene said calmly, “is in the late stages of alcoholism, the treatment of which is complicated by two or three personality disorders.”

“I think that’s a low estimate.”

“He likely needed counseling from the time he was fourteen, so.” It wasn’t a sentence that really needed a predicate.

“I suppose, darling, you should prepare yourself. The end of this particular downward spiral might well be quite ugly.”

“Norma will work something out,” Jerene said, out of more hope than knowledge.

They both darkly knew how it could go. He would commit a fatal hit-and-run while drunk, wake up in an emergency room with the police handcuffing him to his bed. An alcoholic coma from which he does not recover. Wandering drunkenly in front of a bus. A tumble down his foyer stairs and, as he lies there, a coronary. His esophagus so raked by acids and alcohols that it perforates and he bleeds out into his throat. That, Duke remembered, is what happened to Gaston and Jerene’s father.

Mortality, mortality. God, a birthday this Friday—how Duke hated it. He hoped it had been forgotten utterly but there’d be a dinner somewhere, some foolishness. Jerene’s hand had lost its tautness; she had fallen back asleep. He gently released her and turned over … now wide awake, of course.

The talk of bodily deterioration made Duke think about his father, Major Bo. Duke never relived the beatings, replayed any of the unsettled grievances or the constant refrain of military-themed belittlement that he and his brother endured as boys. It was a part of him he rarely accessed, half shrugged off and forgotten, half retained in some locked part of the heart. But Duke had been thinking lately of his father’s physical decline. A series of strokes that made him bedridden, and finally, left him with dementia. Duke remembered the VA Hospital in Hampton was where he and his brother, Carry, took him but he had become so aggressive with orderlies, so unpleasant, that the VA shipped him briefly to a mental institution that specialized in violent dementia. After a spell there, he was calmer. Whether that was through drugs or electric shock, Duke did not investigate.

Duke declared he had no intention of taking his invalid father into his home in Charlotte. After some soul-searching, Carry said he would at least try to take care of Dad, and moved the old man into his Maryland home. Duke, once he had broken off relations with his military father, escaped at university into fine clarets, whiskeys, the best cigars, indulgences like Civil War pistols and first-edition nineteenth-century books—the secular Southern-pagan world that beckoned with wine, women and song. Carrington escaped, too, but into a deeper religious faith and that led him to try to make a lasting peace with his father. So he moved Dad, stroke-ridden, his left side limp and useless, into his home with Rhetta and their three kids.

Two weeks later, Dad was moved out again, into the Baltimore VA hospital.

“He only had use of one side of his body,” Carry told Duke by phone, “but he managed to bloody Rhetta’s nose with the good hand. I went in to lay down the law and…”

Duke heard a catch in his brother’s voice. Duke didn’t say anything, to give Carry time to tell what he needed to tell.

“… and when the kids were at church, and Rhetta was at Circle, I went in there and said, ‘Look, you fucker. This is my house and your days of victimizing any of us are over.’ And he said some things.”

“Of course he said some things, unforgivable things. That’s who he’s always been.”

“And I punched, him, Joze. I punched my own bedridden father in the face. And it felt good enough that I did it again, and again. I think I was saying ‘How do you like that, old man?’ and…”

“Carry, I couldn’t have lasted as long as you did.”

“He just laughed at me. Anyway, he’s back at the VA.”

And that’s where Major Bo stayed until he died.

“You were braver than I was,” Carry would always say. “You committed to go to Vietnam and I was always the shirker, the soon-to-be draft dodger.”

Duke knew he wasn’t the brave one. He thought the war was being badly fought in addition to not being worth fighting but he marched dutifully toward it, not able to imagine a world where he did not do as his father commanded, or live up to his ancestors. He didn’t have the courage
not
to go to war. He was hoping, in scenarios steeped in self-contempt, that becoming an officer might lead to survival, a desk to hide behind, a small command in Europe staring down at the Russians staring back, all of it far from Southeast Asia. He lay in that hospital bed after his football injury, emerging from his coma, and he breathed an easy breath for the first time in his life:
Thank God, I am out of the war
.

Duke put on a good public show about not being able to serve his country but he was inwardly delighted. It was nothing less than spiritual liberation, a heavy door now flung open to all possibilities and unreckoned futures. He would not be a soldier, nor train to be an officer, nor be measured against his father’s heroism; he would not be killed or torn to pieces by land mines or ripped apart by grenades, nor would he have to kill anyone, for which he was almost as grateful. His life was his own. Now as a man on the eve of his sixty-fourth birthday, he wondered why he did not always see that his life was always his own. Perhaps a fatal pattern was set, though. Duty calling and an excuse presenting itself.

What he dreaded was Christmas, going home to see his beloved mother and his father, always spoiling for a fight. Christmas 1969 was his last appearance. He had met Gaston’s sister by then, Jerene Jarvis, and among her many enchantments she had forsworn ever going back home for a visit again, dating from Christmas 1965. Gaston also had boycotted return visits—they had a little parents-hating club, almost.

Solely to see his much put-upon mother, Duke summoned his will and drove to Virginia for the holidays. The year before, his father looked at Duke walking with his neck brace, his walking stick for balance when there was vertigo, and started in. “Don’t think because you fell down on a football field that you even begin to matter as much as those men who left an arm or a leg on the field of battle.”

On the last Christmas that Duke appeared at their bungalow in Fort Hill, before the schism, before he told his mother he would not be coming home as long as his father was alive, he sat through a last long dinner where his father summed up the worthlessness of his sons for the table’s benefit. And when Major Bo got around to mocking Duke’s stylish walking stick, some nineteenth-century thing bought in a Durham antiques store, saying how he shouldn’t imagine his little sufferings were anything compared to the men who left an arm or leg on the field of battle, Duke looked up and said, “Why didn’t you leave one, Dad?”

“What?”

“There was a lot of carnage in Morocco, in Sicily, right?”