Lookaway, Lookaway (26 page)

“Goodbye Annie,” he said. And to annoy her, “I’ll pray for you.”

“Like George W. Bush, put by God into the White House for his Christian goodness and ready to enact God’s divine plan for civilian death in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the big U.S. blank-check plan for Israel too, I guess, since the Jews are scheduled to be converted by the Second Coming of Jeeeezus before too much longer.”

“I’m leaving.”

“It’s just typical of you—the whole thing.”

He stopped walking toward his car. “What’s typical? Being a minister is the very last thing one might have thought I would do.” Bo Johnston, valedictorian, scholarship to Duke University, following in his father’s footsteps, law school applications at one time in the mail, maybe an elected office as his father attained.

He would never forget that look Annie had perfected: of simultaneous disgust and barely contained laughter. “Oh Bo, I grew up with you. You cleaned up the abandoned lot with your troop of Webelos—it was in the paper. You made Eagle Scout—call the
Observer
. You wrote some dumb essay about how much you loved being an American and you won some VFW-sponsored fellowship, which got you in the paper. All our life you needed attention and approval. You got to Mecklenburg Country Day, you ran for class president and won. You played lacrosse and had to be team captain, too. You go to Duke and then find the Lord and you just can’t say, ‘Ah well, religion will shape and focus my life.’ Nope. You’ve got to be religious
in front
of everyone, you need the grandstand of the pulpit. No one can be your minister, you have to be everyone else’s minister, in control, dishing out God where everyone can see you doing it. Have you ever done anything that you didn’t try to get some kind of public adulation for? If you did something wonderful, like work quietly at men’s shelters or go abroad with the Red Cross, but you didn’t get an article written about you, would you self-destruct? Would it be worth your while to do good without the cameras running?”

He had replayed that speech a number of times and he knew what he should have said. That being a minister was precisely the humbling that his overachieving, Duke grad, law-school-bound self needed. Ministry was a thousand small humiliations and failings a day as you could do nothing better for people than simply hold their hand, or pray for them, or spout bromides in the face of life’s real tragedies. There were sermons that fell flat. There were reachings-out to the lost souls that were rejected, community projects that fell apart, moments of leadership that proved faint and insufficient to the crisis. Hours at old folks’ homes and in hospitals and with tragic teenagers, abandoned wives, broken men, and the legions, legions vast and innumerable, of the lonely-in-life … so much imperfect service at their behest and none of it, Annie, none of it, known to anyone but God.

*   *   *

A Johnston family Christmas tradition was goose for Christmas Dinner. Everyone wanted goose hot from the oven, bits of seared fatty skin and velvety dark breast or wing … but no one had ever wanted goose the next day. Goose casserole, chipped goose à la king, goose surprise, all inevitably scraped into the trash bag under the sink. So an edict went out unto all the family from Caesar—er, Jerene—that for Christmas 2007 there shalt be no leftovers. The refrigerator would evince no signs of there ever having been a 7,000-calorie-per-person Christmas feed of goose, an auxiliary glazed ham, five vegetables, a congealed salad, trays of pickles and chutneys and condiments, black pumpernickel rolls (irresistible, and a recipe passed down from the German Jarvis ancestors), and too many lard-enriched pies, chocolate chess, mincemeat, German chocolate-coconut, cheeses, petits fours, everything but the Roman slave holding a basin to throw everything up into. There was a bottle of champagne to begin the meal but after that temperance ruled.
We’re not going to drink our way through the holidays,
was Jerene Johnston’s edict on that.

“Hm, tell that,” Kate noted to her husband, “to your Uncle Gaston.”

It used to be Annie was the sole advocate for wine throughout the meal, Presbyterian continence be damned, but in recent years Jerilyn and Skip Baylor, now newlyweds, were equally devoted to the cause (Skip would bring a flask, so they had been cheating); Joshua and Dorrie seemed to be mildly inebriated already when they arrived, and they, too, had joined the chorus for wine throughout the meal. Bo wondered aloud to his mother if maybe this year they should accompany at least the goose with red wine, if only for health reasons—

“Beauregard, we end up fighting and saying horrible things to each other most years without aid of wine,” she said. “I fear what would become of us fueled by demon alcohol.”

Last year there were so many leftovers, a gallon of brown-sugared yams, a barely touched cauldron of collard greens, halves of uneaten pies, so this year Bo and Kate were bringing a variety of Tupperware containers to take away all the leftovers for the Five Churches Soup Kitchen. Bo carried an ice chest from the garage and met Kate in the driveway who was carrying a cardboard box filled with empty Tupperware bowls and lids, run through the dishwasher that morning, likely none of them matching up.

Bo noticed that his wife had chosen to wear a man’s red dress shirt and dark denims—perfect for the soup kitchen and the menial labor to come, but terrible for the impression it would make on Bo’s mother. He could have said
Are you wearing that to Jerene Johnston’s house?
And she might have gone inside and changed but … why should she change? Kate had a pageboy haircut, honey brown going gray, and her usual costume was tomboy wear, always had been. For church she had a sleeveless black frock which was just formal enough, but at most church functions, she wore a Duke sweatshirt and jeans. The youth group loves her; they barely detect an age difference. There is the fantasy fueled by afternoon women’s TV shows that if you fancy someone up, do a makeover, find the right dress and personal style, they can be a fashion knockout. Not Kate. He had seen her fixed up, makeup and beauty-parlor hair, a lovely dress from one of the better stores, and she always looked like the fourteen-year-old tomboy forced into her Sunday clothes. But still, not to make an effort … It would be entered in Jerene’s silently compiled list of grievances.

“We don’t have to go, you know,” Kate said, a few miles from the Johnston residence.

“We have to.”

“We have the perfect excuse. We’re ministering to the homeless, helping them know the love of Christ on the weekend before his birthday.
When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you—”

“You want to use Jesus to hide behind?”

“Minister’s—and minister’s wife’s—prerogative.”

They would take the Stalling Presbyterian Church van. Last year they picked up Joshua and Dorrie, then swung by for Aunt Dillard, then went by Bo’s grandmother, Mrs. Jarvis. This year was a Gaston year so Mrs. Jarvis would be staying put in the Lattamore Acres Retirement Community, by mutual consent. As they drove to the house, he wondered why no one this year wanted a ride. Kate knew: “After last year’s donnybrook, everybody’s driving their own cars so they can
escape
.”

Bo sighed. “I asked Mom to sit us down near Uncle Gaston and Norma and Dad. Annie will be up on Mom’s end.”

“Last year I had Annie on one side of me reviewing Richard Dawkins’s atheism book, point by point, and Jerilyn on the other side of me, sitting there like a lump. Oh good God, we’re first,” Kate muttered as they rounded the hilltop curve of Providence Road. As Bo turned for the driveway, she cried, “Park in the street! Park in the street!”

“All right, all right.”

“You went to Duke and Davidson and you aren’t smart enough…” She was smiling now. “… not smart enough to keep us from getting blocked in the driveway?”

“And here’s Annie,” he noted.

Annie’s unmistakable fire-engine-red BMW cruised up the hill of Providence, and she turned at speed into the driveway, the brakes squealing to a stop.

“Wonder what that car costs,” Kate muttered, preparing to carry their box of Tupperware inside.

“She must be doing well. Guess I went into the wrong line of work.”

She kissed his cheek. “You deal in
spiritual
real estate.”

It took a moment for Annie to raise her bulk out of her car, but once up on her feet, with her blouse and skirt smoothed down, she just about matched her billboards. Her hair was lustrous, Annie’s brown was lightening a shade with each trip to the salon—blonder than he’d ever seen it, which was amazing given all her teenage rants against blondes and their innate evils.

“Her face is different,” whispered Kate, before calling out hello. “Hello, Annie! You look great. You’ve … lost weight, maybe?”

Annie came over to carry one of their Tupperware stacks. She started right in on Bo: “You don’t look much like Dad or Mom. You’re five inches taller than the rest of us, right? Do you think there’s a chance we’re adopted? I don’t look like either of them.”

“Dad and I are both six-three,” he said. “And you look like Grandma.”

“Ow, thanks for that—she’s a gargoyle.”

“When she was younger. You have the same eyes.”

“I’ve heard of families where they adopt and then before they can discuss it with the kids, the mom gets pregnant so they end up with adopted and nonadopted kids, so they don’t want one group to feel they’re different so they don’t say anything.”

“I have a church of a thousand congregants, probably two thousand when you count non-regular attenders, and I’ve heard of every social situation in the world and I’ve never heard of that.” Bo got the ice chest from the back of the van with a groan. “This is the second time you’ve floated this theory. Why don’t you want to be related by blood to our family?”

“That question doesn’t explain itself?”

Skip and Jerilyn arrived next. Skip, Bo thought, was his usual party-boy collegiate self, coming at Reverend Johnston with a series of hip-hop handshakes that Bo had no clue how to respond to. “Are you my new sister-in-law, Kate?” he asked Bo’s wife. “Or is it just the sister of my wife that’s my sister-in-law?”

“We’re all brothers and sisters in Christ,” Annie said, a foretaste of the religious ridicule ahead.

Christmas Dinner à la Jerene Jarvis Johnston was elaborate and Bo was never unimpressed when he entered the dining room and saw his childhood dinner table expanded to its maximum, transformed to something out of a home décor magazine. Christmas china at each place setting (not to be eaten on, those plates would be substituted with other fine china when the meal started coming out in stages), polished silver cutlery, crystal glasses for iced tea and a champagne flute, a central array of pine boughs, holly with red berries (grown in the backyard), red and green Christmas ornaments arranged tastefully up and down the table, between six silver candlesticks, all candles lit, the smell of goose roasting, and something with cinnamon, Alma and Jerene taking pies out of the oven to cool, and something maternal and homey, bread baking …

“Don’t get any ideas,” Kate whispered to Bo, “that I’m taking this over one day.” Kate was a functional cook, made a few things well, but she had had a childhood utterly devoid of womanly training, graces, niceties. He knew his wife felt vaguely guilty wallowing in this hospitality, this gilded bower she had married into. “What expense,” she sighed.

“Gone to, let me remind you, because my mom working on this meal for a solid week is her way of saying she loves us.”

She found her husband’s hand. “Among other things.”

Aside from the long table, there was an antique server from which the diners would help themselves to the first course, which was buffet style. Chafing dishes of sausages in croissant dough, warm copper pans with stuffed mushrooms, German meatballs, soft cheese straws, plates of dates and sweetmeats, red and green miniature heirloom tomatoes piled in a mound like cannonballs, red-skin peanuts and peeled pistachios (red and green!), rind pickles, dilled cornichons, bread-and-butter pickle slices, marinated turnips and radishes (from the Middle Eastern store), spring onion and celery sprigs for dipping into Alma’s famous pimento cheese (yes, with green and red pepper flecks)—talk about your Proustian memories. Bo nearly hugged himself; how many familiar beloved tastes were assembled here from childhood.

Everyone heard the familiar noise of a car in the drive. First, Aunt Dillard was through the door looking festive (a knit sweater starring a sequined Santa Claus with his arm around a fuzzy-woolly Snowman) but afflicted in her person. Gaston had brought her and he was getting something from the trunk, while Dillard made the twenty-yard, slightly inclined commute from the driveway.

“Oh Lordy,” she said, panting. “Can’t do your Mount Everest anymore.”

Jerene rushed to deposit her sister in a plush armchair in the living room.

“I can get you aspirin, Tylenol, Advil…”

“Next Christmas, if I come, if I’m still alive—”

“Hush!”

“I’ll arrange to come especially early and be dropped two inches from the door. No, Jerene, save your medicine cabinet, I’m already medicated to a fare-thee-well. But I will hold out for some of what Gaston is bringing.”

“Oh dear, he’s not bringing wine, is he?”

A cheer went up from Annie, Jerilyn and Skip, with a quiet
Hear, hear
from a traitorous Mr. Johnston. Bo and Kate looked at each other with relief. Then Gaston lumbered through the door, carrying a cloth bottle bag that held nine bottles, arranged like a tic-tac-toe with separators to keep the bottles from clinking. “Now, Jerry,” he said, heaving the contraband onto a table in the foyer, “this includes two 1996 Meursault-Genevrières, three 2000 Lafite-Rothschilds, Sauternes for the dessert course. I will not live long enough to finish off my cellar so we’re going to start drinking it down right here.”