Jeannette was silent. She now gauged the depth of Jerene’s contempt. She had hoped, with no evidence, that Jerene was the child who was most sympathetic to her.
If she had been judgmental and shrill, there had been reasons for it, reasons grounded in her realistic fears of falling headlong out of Society and back into the peasantry, the white trash, to have once been something and then to go back to nothing again. If she had been too harsh, it was to prevent that! If Jerene and Dillard never felt the danger of decline, it was only because of the immense sacrifices Jeannette had performed to prevent it. Now it hardly matters what Jerene and Duke’s children do; the world of proprieties and respectabilities, the patina of Southern grace and elegant public bearing, all of that was nearly gone and smashed to bits. What the Yankees and the War and Reconstruction had not been able to accomplish, prosperity and time, modern mores and cable TV, had managed just fine. What a folly her whole life was, thought Jeannette, now smiling, too.
“Our whole lives,” Jerene was saying, “we have been subject to your poisonous judgment, as if we all were criminals. And … just what is so funny, Mother?”
Now Jeannette was chuckling darkly, shaking her head. “Criminals! Oh, Jerene, if you only knew.” Jeannette was feeling more steady now; she had a firm sip of unsweetened tea. “Sell one of your paintings. Come now, I won’t be alive all that much longer.”
“I don’t believe I’m hearing you say this. Mother, you all but swore me to a holy oath that nothing could ever induce us to sell them. There’ll be no more Jarvis Room in the Mint Museum if we start selling them to bail ourselves out.”
“Sell the Church, it’ll fetch the most. Never liked it anyway.”
“I will do no such thing. Whatever we can hold together for a legacy for the children is in that museum. It’s our calling card for Society—my land, I’m sounding like you now! You would have me break up the collection just so you could play canasta with women you have assured me were awful?”
“Sell them
all.
”
Jerene huffed. “And what of Adeline Bell, hiding the paintings behind the settee, praying Sherman’s men would content themselves with torching the barn.”
“That story is all nonsense, Jerene.”
“It may mean nothing to you anymore, but I feel an unbroken kinship with these Jarvis and Bell women who have held these paintings in our family for generations—”
“No! It’s nonsense. I mean, the story. Your father and I made it up.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“We stole those paintings like we stole everything we ever owned.”
Jeannette glanced at her daughter. Oh she was all ears now.
“Your daddy had a brother who died before you were born, your Uncle Demetrius. Believe me, in Waxhaw, North Carolina, the Jarvis boys were the eligible bachelors. The Jellicoes, as I told you, were an old, respectable Salisbury family but after the War we lost the mills, and in the Panic of 1907, Granddaddy lost the rest. But we covered up our indigence well, and my daddy spent his last dime on my wedding to your father.”
“Yes, Mother, I know all this—”
“Oh but Demetrius, he was … he was touched by the gods. There was not a woman, married, single, widowed or dead, who didn’t covet that man. And he married very well, into a fine family, one of those Virginia families so rarified and blue-blooded that they carried with them the genetic problems brought over from England, some inherited illness that got passed down from generation to generation. I suppose now we’d say it was some form of Huntington’s disease. It left a good quarter of that family locked away in asylums, rocking and writhing spastically until their hearts gave out, poor things. Well, that was your aunt, Helen York Jarvis. People didn’t have financial advisers in those days, instead they had lawyers, and your uncle turned to your daddy to fix things for him. What your father was to drink, your uncle was to womanizing and, I think, bastard children, black, white, brown, yellow and red, were proliferate all over the county. He had an insurance policy against accidents and, as you know, he died young.”
“Yes, I remember hearing. Died before I was born. While cleaning his gun on a hunting trip.”
Jeannette snorted. “Someone, some cuckolded husband shot him, sure as I’m sitting here. Your father patched it all up and made it look like an accident and collected the policy for Aunt Helen, several hundred thousand which was a fortune in the early 1950s. Then Helen’s mother, Mrs. York, died and left her the house in Blowing Rock and the paintings in it. Demetrius swore your father to secrecy never to let Helen know just how much money she had. Didn’t want her to get ideas about spending it.”
“I see he and Daddy were a lot alike.”
“Men liked their women helpless back then and a lot of women preferred being helpless—it made things much simpler. So she never knew quite what she was worth. And there she was fawning over your father—oh what would we do without deeeeear Gaston Jarvis, looking out for us so. Helen’s brother died of the family ailment, leaving everything to her so she could be provided for, then Helen herself came down with it. Your father saw to it that she had a companion, someone who came to be with her as she lost control of her bodily functions and her mind went. There were three paintings then. The Church and the two Inneses, all in the York family.”
“So after Aunt Helen died, we just kept her three paintings? But, counting the miniatures, we have twelve American landscapes.”
Jeannette looked at her daughter impatiently. “The story is just beginning, sweetheart. Here is a dying woman who has ended up with her entire family’s estate, plus some insurance money, plus the big mansion she lives in. All she wants is for her late sister’s child, her niece—the last York heir—to be looked after in the event she gets the disease too. They all came down with it in their early forties.”
Jerene did not bother to refute anything Jeannette said because it had the ring of truth, concerning facts she knew and what she knew about her father. “That was my cousin Patty. I barely remember her.”
Jeannette continued. “They trusted your father with everything. As Helen got sicker, your father assured Helen’s niece, Patty, that there was money there to take care of her beloved aunt. That she would get the best care and die at home where she wanted to be. Your father must have had his plan even then. Keep everything out of the public view, no state hospitals or asylums or anything that would raise attention or find its way into a record. So Aunt Helen died and then the whole York estate went to your cousin Patty.”
“Not all of it, apparently.”
“As far as Patty was concerned, the landscapes yellowing on the wall in Blowing Rock weren’t worth anything. She agreed with your father that they should sell the mountain home and its contents. I’m sure, even back then, it fetched a
fortune,
and I’m just as sure your father told Patty that it sold for half that, pocketing the rest. He liquidated the whole York estate, and where the property or stock was in Union County, your father stole liberally. He’d slap the clerk of court on the back, ask to go find something in the files after a boozy lunch or golf game, change and alter and eliminate any form or receipt he needed to cover his tracks, down at the courthouse where he had free rein. But the one thing he couldn’t do is deposit the money in a bank. A sudden surfeit of money would alert the authorities. He kept it in cash, in a burlap sack in the basement.”
Jerene put down her teacup. Her face was showing signs of recognition; Jeannette saw, at last, that Jerene believed her.
Jerene said, “I see now why we were forbidden going in the basement. You told me it had something to do with deadly spiders.”
“Well, there were fearsome spiders down there, too. Even your father was wary! Hated going down there. Once there was a spider with a body as big as a pepper shaker—”
“Mother, back to the story, please.”
“Yes. So, your daddy and a bunch of his law school friends headed down to Charleston, South Carolina, for drinking mainly, I suspect, and he drove down there in a rented van with the three paintings to sell them for cash in the antique stores. He came back with those three and three more. ‘Jeannie, those paintings were worth a goddam gold mine,’ he told me. Art was a perfect investment. He’d go to Broad Street in Charleston or Royal Street in New Orleans and, between living it up, whoring and drinking, he’d spend the stolen cash on art. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore … Those dealers were happy to sell for straight cash, too, and I doubt there’s a record of any of it.
“It was perfect. If Patty ever got curious and had another lawyer look into anything, your daddy was investing in art for the York estate; the paintings could be produced. If she never grew suspicious, then we had the paintings free and clear. ‘These canvases are better’n bearer bonds, Jeannie,’ he used to tell me all the time. And Patty was never curious. Your father set up a trust that paid her a very healthy monthly stipend, and she thanked and thanked him for it, oh thank-the-Lord what a savior he was.”
“And he told you everything?”
“When I would ask him about it, even if he was drinking and in one of his bragging moods, he would sober right up and get that steely look in his eye. Told me it was none of my business.”
“How’d you find out so much?”
“When he was passed out I’d look through the papers. Probably the only benefit I ever found to his alcoholism.”
As Jeannette unburdened herself of these long-kept secrets, cousin Patty came into sharper focus in her memory. A short, pale, fragile woman, unlike many of the brawny Yorks, something doomed and apologetic in her quiet manner as if she had shown up to Life without a reservation and was shamefully aware of always being a bother. “Patty confided in me once,” Jeannette said, “saying she heard of some clinic in Switzerland that had helped people carrying the gene, and maybe she could get your father to advance her some money … but then he talked her out of it, saying how he didn’t want her in debt and it wouldn’t do to chase false hopes. But she still went on about this clinic, and ordered brochures, was in contact with some German doctor. Your father ordered me to talk her out of it. She listened to me, trusted me.”
Jerene didn’t say anything, and didn’t meet her mother’s eyes.
“And that’s just what I did,” Jeannette said, having another sip of tea.
“Oh, Mother,” Jerene said simply.
“And in the meantime, your daddy looked far and wide for some heir or claimant. Helen’s family, the Yorks, were all but finished thanks to the disease. It was one of those things, some doctor told me once, that you get when brothers marry sisters, way back in the past. I felt sorry for anyone who got the disease, but that doesn’t mean I really liked Helen, my sister-in-law. She looked down her nose at me, that poor Jellicoe woman from the family who lost their money. She didn’t think I was quite on her level. But Patty I was sorry for. Sure enough, she got the disease, right on cue.”
“What did Daddy do?”
“As she got sick and more scared, he had her sign a whole bunch of papers so she could be looked after, so funds could be transferred here and there. Then when it got where she couldn’t control the spasms and tics, he had her shipped off to Butner.”
The state asylum. Jerene frowned. “Mother, couldn’t he have spared some money for a nicer place?”
“Figured it might hasten her end. I remember him saying if you slipped the Negro guards a twenty, there was one of them that would press a pillow over a patient’s head—you know—when they had a disease like that. It wasn’t about your father stealing the money; he’d already done that and tied up the loose ends, all clear and legal. It was about not wanting her to suffer.”
“Did he pay that Negro man a twenty?”
“I never asked. I never asked about a lot.” Jeannette finished her glass of tea, though it was cold and bitter in the cup.
“Do you think that’s why Dad drank? Because he was guilty?”
Jeannette was wide-eyed, even laughed. “Merciful heavens! What a thought! Your daddy wasn’t guilty for one little minute. He’d been waiting for a chance like this all his life. Your daddy drank because he was an alcoholic and that’s what they do. I was the one who felt guilty. I waited for the reckoning, too. At every cotillion, every charity dinner, every trip to Raleigh for a cousin’s debutante ball, every social occasion I waited for someone to tap the glass and clear their throat and announce that the most terrible revelations had come to light about the Jarvis family … and that some overlooked relative of the Yorks was pursuing remedies in the halls of justice. But that never happened.” Jeannette laughed again.
“What’s so funny about that?”
“Someone, sweetheart, could have made that very dreaded speech, and it wouldn’t have made one iota of difference—not down South! ‘Jeannie,’ your daddy would tell me, ‘everybody down South got rich doing something they shouldn’t have.’ I can name you the first families of the Carolinas who got rich on smuggling or selling to the British in the Revolutionary War—or the Yankees, mind you. Many of the cream of Southern society
now
were carpetbagging Northerners
then,
who came down here and bought mills and factories and deeds of land for a song from busted aristocrats whose money was tied up in Confederate scrip and were rendered penniless, and these families sit on their fortunes quite happily. The Hargett girls were here at Lattamore—Camille Hargett and her sister Leonore who, between them, simply ran everything in Charlotte for a decade. Head of the Debutante Society, over which they reigned as a ruthless fiefdom! The Hargetts made their money bootlegging—stills and moonshine. And Melissa Day Petty, who had started answering to Mrs. Day Petty rather Mrs. Petty, as if the no-account Days of pitiful old Bickettville, North Carolina, needed to be lifted up and constantly before us in her spoken name, such were their earthly glory!”
“Yes, I sent this year’s Mint by Gaslight invitation to Mrs. Day Petty to humor her.”
“They went around buying up poor people’s farms in the Depression, hiring goons to run squatters off the land, had night riders in robes and hoods burning the colored folk out of their shacks. She told me about it herself, almost proud of it. And her niece, who she goes on and on about, is going to marry a Byrd of Virginia. How many times do I have to hear about her marrying a Byrd, a Byrd of Virginia, la-de-dah. When that first family of the colonies was nearly bust they turned to slaving. Hiring the ships and the slavers themselves. It is naïve to think anybody that has money got it without doing something really bad because it is much easier to be poor—that, my girl, is the natural state of things. Money runs out, money gets spent. To have so much of it that it doesn’t run out or get spent means something … unpleasant had to happen somewhere along the way.”