Lookaway, Lookaway (34 page)

“
You
should have married Becks Baylor and you would be a right bit better off.”

“Becks was a boor. Crude and rough and a little stupid except for business. I was happy to set him up with Liddibelle. They were very happy together, before he died—and when he left her his fortune, she was even
more
happy. But speaking of money.” Jerene was unsentimental. “We come to the purpose of my visit, Mother. You have to leave Lattamore Acres.”

Jeannette said nothing. Tears would certainly not be effective, nor theatrics.

“Dillard, Duke and I can’t keep you here any longer. It’s been a huge financial drain for years now but with the lawsuit and the expenses, it’s out of the question that we should continue paying for this resort.”

“Leave Lattamore? But my whole life is here, my friendships, my … my doctors come here…”

“They can visit you in a new home, I’m sure.”

“But the attendants on call know everything about my health—which is very delicate, as you may imagine.”

“I imagine no such thing—you have proven indestructible. You are in sufficient shape to live to a hundred like a number of matriarchs in our line. No one has ever known how to die in this family and you are following in the tradition.” Jerene serenely took a sip of tea.

“Can’t Gaston—couldn’t you ask him—”

“I did ask him, and Dillard pleaded with him, too. ‘If not for your mother, then do it for us,’ we begged. He has refused and wishes you out on the street in rags, and that is the nice version of what he envisioned for you. You see now the long-term disadvantage of allowing your children to be your buffer against a brute of a husband.”

Jeannette’s hand shook as she brought her teacup to her lips. Yes, in some quarter of her mind, she knew this talk would come. “You’d think my … my own family would…”

“Do you see them here? Do you see them gathered round you like a Christmas Norman Rockwell print? You do remember our last Christmas together as a family, don’t you? What a celebration of good cheer.”

Jeannette merely pursed her lips as she always did when the children were being disagreeable.

Jerene went on, “You wouldn’t speak to Dillard for four years after she married Randy. And when her only child died you chose that moment to lecture her on child-rearing and how it was her own fault. You! You whose response to Daddy beating Gaston every time he got drunk was to blame us all for provoking our father. You could have left Daddy, but you were too…”

Jerene set down her teacup, her hands were clenched; Jeannette feared her daughter would crush the porcelain into powder.

“You were too
weak.
You cared more for your social station than whether we survived that hellish home you both made for us.” Jerene gathered her purse, unfolding the coat in her lap. “You offered us all up,” she added in cold recollection, now standing. “Better us than you. At any point, we could have gotten in the car and driven to Uncle Fred’s and he’d have taken us in and not said a word about anything. Indeed, you could have stayed married to Daddy and not lived with him, that sort of thing was done all the time. But you had appearances to keep up. Apparently you still do. Well, those appearances are no longer affordable.”

Jeannette blurted out, “We had a deal!”

Jerene seemed not to know what deal she was referring to. Then she figured what her mother meant. “Not a deal, an arrangement. I got to preside over the Jarvis Trust and we paid for you to spend the rest of your days in this palace. Did we not put you in the best possible place? This is a country club. Most people would spend their whole lives working to go on a vacation so they could live one single week like you do all the time. We chose this place so you could have a final few months of peace before what we thought—”

“I ruined everything, didn’t I, by living! That’s what you really mean!” She clasped her hands together tightly, not sure what to say or do next.

Jeannette Jarvis had been given no time at all to live in the winter of 2003. Her colon cancer was advanced. Radiation, an operation, then a follow-up operation, a colostomy, of course. Horror followed horror. She was tolerable company to the doctors who she understood were keeping her alive with all the medieval tortures, but she was awful to her family who tried dutifully to look after her. “I’m sure it would suit every one of you to a fare-thee-well if I up and died,” she declared more than once, waiting for a contradiction … which her children noticeably never provided.

Before the second operation to remove another cancerous piece of bowel, the doctors discussed that if the operation did not go well, there was little more they could do. A failure here would mean a few more weeks—weeks, mercifully—of morphia-induced delirium until the end. And there was even a chance that Mrs. Jarvis might not survive the several-hour operation to come. Would she sign over medical and financial power of attorney so her family could make decisions for her? Defeated, terrified, Mrs. Jarvis did just that. She didn’t trust Gaston not to suffocate her with a pillow at first opportunity, and she hadn’t spoken to Dillard since Christopher’s funeral, so that left Jerene who alone maintained a civil relationship and might be trusted not to pull the plug too gleefully.

After so many desperate strategems and procedures to stay alive, Jeannette came to fear a compromised survival, telling Jerene, “Don’t let them bring me back full of tubes and hooked up to machines just so I can die slowly, Jerene.”

“I won’t let them do that, Mother,” she promised.

Gaston at last came to see her, figuring it would be a final encounter. Jeannette Jarvis was not sure what response he was after. And what a sight her only son was: bloated, fat in a female way, so unhealthy looking, some of that from drink, which she supposed came to him through his father, and some from general dissipation from his decadent habits. She tried to make peace with him, looking up at him sweetly, hoping to project a moment of pathos.

“This might be the last time you see your old mother, Gaston.”

Oh she will never forget what he said and how he said it. It was just polite enough to pass in front of the nurses and doctors, but Jeannette knew just what meanness was intended when he said, “If that’s so, Mother, just think. You can be reunited with our dear father for eternity.”

Mrs. Jarvis had dwelled on that barb for years now, because no one, not even she, really thought Mr. Jarvis was anywhere other than the centermost fires of Hell.

And late, at the very end of visiting hours, came Dillard. Plump as ever! Well, none of the Jellicoe or Jarvis women except Jerene could keep the pounds off—it took cancer to do it. Jeannette needed to rest before the operation; she had been ordered to. And she knew talking had not led to much family harmony so she put out her frail hand for Dillard to hold, and Dillard took it, sighing. And there they were for ten minutes without saying a thing to each other, until Mrs. Jarvis said, “Thank you for coming, Dillie. I have to sleep now.”

“I’ll see you when you wake up, Mother.”

Jeannette was an absolute wreck after Operation Number Two and didn’t remember much—who was there, what was happening. She was slow to come out of the anesthesia, and when she surfaced she talked incoherently before lapsing into a coma, which everyone took to be the end, or the first stage of the end. But then she woke up.

And they really got all the cancer.

And here she was four, five years on, continually getting clean bills of oncological health while she piled up no end of lesser maladies—arthritis, skin ulcers, unexplained headaches, joint deterioration, varicose veins, diabetes 2. The colostomy and all its paraphernalia were deeply regrettable to a woman who had been so fastidious about appearance and presentation but then more distasteful was lying in the cold, cold ground.

Jerene’s stint with power of attorney revealed something most unpleasant: Mrs. Jarvis was nearly broke. Not just broke but living on department store credit cards, a variety of VISAs and MasterCards from several sources, a second mortgage, a home equity loan. Jeannette suspected as much but none of her mild entreaties to the bank or to the credit card companies for more credit ever went rebuffed so she figured somehow she was successfully afloat. But Jerene called Gaston and Dillard and, after a family conference, began to liquidate the worldly possessions of Mrs. Jeannette Jellicoe Jarvis. The 160-year-old family house of the Jarvises had to be sold—or, more accurately, given over to the bank to sell. With Charlotte spreading to the east so completely, a fortune, a real fortune could have been had for that house in a few more years, Jerene told her in frustration. They did net several tens of thousands of dollars which were disbursed to her creditors.

Dillard and Jerene culled through the dishware and silver and rugs and porcelain to see if there was anything they had to have. There was very little they wanted from it, these monuments to propriety safe behind china cabinets and tucked in family vaults, things that had been exalted and protected while the family itself suffered under the depredations of Mr. Jarvis. Jerene already had the
stamped plate in her possession and all the similarly initialed loot; Dillard, taking only the bone china, frankly declared most of the heirlooms too old-fashioned for her taste and for her small, already overstuffed house in Dilworth, and so the whole bundle was sent to a dealer, who gave them a good price. Or it was imagined to be a good price—who really knows with the dubious business of appraising and buying and selling desperate people’s treasures.

The doctors were still saying (that fall in 2004) that it was “touch and go,” that they “weren’t out of the woods,” all the clichés that led them all to think that she had no more than a year, a year in which she should be made comfortable. And so Lattamore Acres was the natural choice. Yes, it was more country club than retirement home. All grades of living conditions were available, from town houses with the briefest of check-ins by a nurse each morning to intensive-care beds on a hospital wing. Marble floors, a dark oak-paneled dining room, profusions of flowers in massive urns and vases and window boxes everywhere—never the smell of the hospital could be detected, nothing of age or deterioration was visible, except in the tenants themselves. You might have thought you were in a Mediterranean tennis resort. The food was remarkable, they took great care with the chefs, there were no end of amusements and activities, chartered buses to the museums, to concerts, for day trips to Salisbury for antiques shopping or Asheville for the fall colors … $3,500 a month—before medical charges—to rub shoulders with the doddering elite of Charlotte.

Jerene said, “Consider yourself lucky it lasted this long. Now. I’m going to the office and tell them that payment on your account stops this month.”

“Where do you intend to move me?”

“We’ll find another place. More affordable. Maybe a roommate is what you need.”

“You’re enjoying this! To tear me away from my home, the one place I have ever known peace, and send me to some charnel house!”

“Annie knows people in the moving business. I’ll have her set up an appointment. You can leave in the dead of night, if you like, so no one will see you depart.”

“Dillard has that house to herself…”

“She has declined to move you into it. I asked.”

“And you and Duke have such a big place.”

Jerene truly was bothered by an inability to escape; she wanted to be gone in the worst way. “Well, we were on the verge of handing it over to the bank. We took out a second mortgage to pay for Jerilyn’s wedding and to hold on to Myers Park a moment longer. But thanks to Duke’s newfound rapprochement with Gaston, Gaston has agreed to pay off that mortgage so we can sell it off free and clear.”

“That Johnston house is legendary. Why would you sell such a grand place?”

“We will sell it so we can scrape together some kind of old age. We’ll be moving to the gated community that Duke and that group of investors are building down by the Catawba River, near Fort Mill. A cozy condo, I imagine, and there won’t be room for you there either.”

Jeannette had one or two more gambits. “Where I go is the least of my concerns right now. You think me so monstrous, but it is something else that tears at my heart. That my children despise me. Now I don’t expect Gaston to recover,” Jeannette pleaded. “But Dillard and you … Mostly you, Jerene. You have never forgiven me. I couldn’t control your father! Why should I be endlessly held accountable for his misdeeds?”

Jerene thought for a moment and sank back in the chair, setting her purse on the floor. She seemed … was that a smile?

“Oh Mother, you…” Now she laughed dryly. “You think it’s because you didn’t stop Daddy from beating us about and abusing us at will—that’s really rich. He had fists, but you had your tongue. He had alcoholism as an excuse for being a monster, but what was yours?”

Jeannette drew her lips tight, hoping for a dignified mien.

“The commentary throughout our lives, the judgment. It was every bit as abusive as Daddy. At least when Daddy sobered up, he was tolerable company, and often very sorry for his behavior. He rained money and clothes and possessions down on us when he felt guilty. But when did we ever hear a kind word from you? We were too fat or too thin, ugly in some way, however we dressed. At college we were harlots or prostitutes for dating, and the boys we dated weren’t good enough. We did nothing but shame and humiliate you. And we raised our children wrong, too.” She thought a moment before going further, then she did: “Not counting the one given up for adoption forty years ago. Do I have to remind you of your commentary through all that? You’d found some low-country backwoods quack to cut it out of me. You couldn’t kill it fast enough. It’s a wonder you didn’t rip it out of me with your own hands. I arrived in Asheboro without a dime too, thanks to you. Fortunately, Dillard scraped some money together.”