Owning Jolene

by Shelby Hearon

  Brogan says it seems like everybody understands that the bottom has dropped out of things and that San Antone has rallied and built itself a cultural event that’s competitive with the best, and that’s the main thing. Everybody used to say Remember the Alamo, like we’d done something wonderful to all get killed; now they were going to be saying Remember the Fern Barn. Remember the time we sunk six million into some metal rods and piles of dirt and showed little d what High Art was all about, when we didn’t any of us have much more than the price of the ticket to get in the door.

  Brogan likes this idea that he’s developed, and he shouts out real loud, to laughter from all the people standing nearby: “Remember the Fern Barn!”

  So Hoyt gets into the mood of it, and, with the toe of his boot, draws a line in the dirt, which Brogan steps across, dragging an imaginary wounded leg, and all the time Glenna is getting this on film.

  Then, as if on cue, Mom, looking just like Mom, in her piano-teacher blue, with her home-perm hair, pushes through the crowd, steps over the line, and falls in a heap at her brother’s feet.

  “What in the world?” Hoyt looks down.

  “Mom.” Being next of kin, I make the identification.

  “Midge?” Glenna bends over her, making sure.

  We are all now in a half-circle, our backs turned to the curious bystanders who think maybe someone has had a heat stroke, but it isn’t that hot, or maybe had a heart attack, but, no, it’s a woman.

  I look all around me at the landscape with its copies of other landscapes dotted on it, but my feet don’t make a move, because this scene has a familiar quality to it: fishy. It’s like Dad said at Brogan’s, Some things don’t change, and one of them is Mom, who is definitely not one to commit an accident. She’s never fainted in her life and would die before she’d do it with a hundred nosy-parker people looking on. Therefore, she must be up to her old tricks again. Proving that the best way to be invisible is to be conspicuous.

  “She’s white as a sheet,” Glenna frets.

  “Her eyes have rolled back in her head.” Brogan stares at his sister in a panic.

  Cissy squats down in her aqua pantsuit and pulls up Mom’s eyelids, checking for herself. “Maybe it’s a convulsion.” She tries out that idea.

  “Looks like shock to me,” Hoyt pronounces.

  “I think it’s walking pneumonia,” Glenna decides. “Listen to her breathe; her lungs have filled up.”

  “She’s not walking so how can it be walking pneumonia?” Cissy argues.

  “It’s a figure of speech.”

  Brogan stands up and makes the decision, being the one responsible. “We’ll have to take her to the Emergency.”

  But this bothers him, because there are no hospitals in his piece of the pie and you can tell he’s racking his brain to think of where is the nearest place to turn his sister over to someone who knows what’s going on, to get her off his hands. But Hoyt and Cissy have Medicare and they know all the ins and outs. After a few minutes’ delay in which they argue over whether to make it Baptist Memorial or Humana Metropolitan, they pick the latter and soon Brogan is carrying Mom’s all-but-lifeless body out of the Botanical Gardens’ Xeriscape into his Olds.

  He puts her in the back seat with me, her head in my lap, while he follows Hoyt’s lead through the city’s empty Sunday streets, into my part of town.

  “Are you sure she’s breathing?” Glenna asks me, frantic in the front seat.

  “She’s okay,” I report, bending my head close to Mom’s face.

  “How’m I doing?” Mom whispers.

  “Never better,” I whisper back.

  “I need a rest,” she says in my ear, giving a loud, pitiful wheeze for the benefit of eavesdroppers. “Spring me in a week.”

  33

  ONE OF MOM’S RULES was that every move should provide an education.

  “Before we’re through,” she liked to say, “you’ll be a master of the geography of the state. You’ll have the flora and the fauna in the palm of your hand.”

  Everywhere we went, we did field trips to all the points of interest around our temporary homes, those near our suburbs. We saw the Big Thicket from Beauregard Heights, Lake Wright Patman from Honey Grove Hills, Guadalupe peak from Pass-of-the-Camels Park, Palo Duro Canyon from Tierra Blanca Estates, the Aransas Wildlife Preserve from Espiritu Santo Shores, but first of all, at the start of it all, we saw the Bracken Cave of Bats, from Devil’s River Bluffs.

  This was back before Mom had hit on the idea of giving piano lessons, back before she learned that Dad had the get-up-and-go to track us anywhere, back when cash was tight and whatever car we had was usually good for one round trip before it went back to the shop.

  It was when she first got the idea of picking up postcards from a bunch of little towns to send to Dad and Brogan, so we’d bought stacks from places like Baby Head, Hog Wallow, Tan Tought, Dead Man, Oat Meal, Fly Gap, circling around our final destination: our first ’burb. Really more exurb than suburb, it was a bare half hour from the San Antonio city limits.

  Mom said she didn’t want to go any farther down what she called the backside of Texas, where there was nothing between you and the Mexican border but wild horses, rattlers, vinegarones, renegade Indians, and flash-flooded creek beds.

  The night I’m remembering was back before the escape from the airport with me in the wig, back when I was just a little kid, not yet in school, back when Mom and Dad were doing a warm-up to the idea of stealing me back and forth, when they were young and new to the game. Right after the white handkerchief phase.

  Mom told me after supper, the first night in our rented house, “Get your sweater, we’re going out. It might get cool. This country around here on the backside runs hot and cold; hot in the day and cold at night. You have to stay prepared. And wear socks. Haven’t you got socks? I bought you socks. No telling what’s crawling around in the brush out in the country. Ticks and tarantulas and who knows what. This is the country where we’re going, this is not your civilization. This is not your nice safe city out here.”

  We drove away from Devil’s River Bluffs across a sort of purple hilly landscape, parked and sat outside on a bunch of rocks with maybe a hundred other people. I didn’t know what we were doing, but suddenly the sun slipped down and it was twilight and then what looked like a huge column of black smoke began to pour out of the open mouth of the cave in front of us and rise into the sky.

  Bats.

  Mom said we only sat there two hours; she said that some times it took four hours for all the bats just to fly out, there were that many of them. That they were all mommies, one million of them plus, each of them looking to eat her weight in moths for supper. She said that every single mother bat had a pink baby bat hanging by its heels from the ceiling of that cave, so that there were a million plus babies in there, all hanging upside down, looking like unborn baby puppies, and that each mommy could tell her kid from all the rest.

  She said that after the one million bat mother had eaten about a hundred and fifty tons of moths they would all come swarming back into the big old cave and each one would zoom right to her very own particular baby bat, hanging upside down waiting for her. And wasn’t that amazing, that she could find her own in a crowd that size?

  “You can’t even imagine, Jolene, how many unborn-puppy baby bats that would be, and each one being found just like that”—she snapped her fingers—“by her mom. That’s called radar. That’s what a mom has,” she said, “that no one else has got. Are you listening? I’m trying to educate you. I’m trying to educate you to the basic wonders of the natural world. What a mom has where her own kid is concerned is, don’t you forget it, full-fledged radar.”

  34

  HENRY IS MORE NERVOUS than I am before the show.

  He spends a lot of time getting us dressed. He’s in a tuxedo, but then he says that what he’s wearing is tails. And turns so I can see the tails and then explains about the white tie. I ask him why, because you expect to s
ee an artist dressed the way I saw him at the opening at the Sun Dog the night I first met him, in that faded work shirt the same way that the other painter, whose face I don’t remember any more, was dressed.

  He says there are a lot of reasons. First, because everybody will not be expecting it. Second, because his mother wants him to dress up. Third, because there will be media scrounging around wanting shots. Fourth—and when I hear this I know it is the real reason and the rest of what he’s saying is just cover—his uncle wore tails the first time he had a show of his mistress with the hand, in her cape. Henry is being his uncle for the evening, and I can understand that. It’s sort of a costume. And with his mother there, and maybe his daughter, he’ll need a costume.

  I haven’t told Brogan and Glenna about the show. I just went to an opening with them—and Hoyt and Cissy and, it turned out, Mom—and that’s enough public stuff with the Temple family for a while. Anyway, I didn’t think I could handle that, having them there, when I was concentrating on doing what Henry wants me to, and being around a crowd of people. Besides, this is Henry’s show. Except for his mother nobody will know me, and I am semi-used to her by now and how she is with me, treating me like somebody she is supposed to notice but not really noticing me.

  He wants me to wear a long black dress, real plain, with no sleeves and a round neck, and I try it on and it fits just right. After he mentions his uncle, I have the idea of what we’re doing, and ask him right out if he wants me to wear the velvet cape that his uncle’s woman wore.

  He does, and he’s already fixed it up, with a hand fastened inside the lining (by its skinlike glove) so that when I have it on, you can just see the tips of the fingers sticking out.

  He messes with my hair until he gets impatient with himself and looks at the clock. It isn’t what he wants. First he braids it and then he brushes it back out. He’s made up my face—painted it, I guess you could say—making my brows heavier and my mouth redder, which fits the black outfit.

  Finally, I figure out what I need to do. I ask him to let me see one of the photographs of his uncle’s woman.

  He hesitates, stalls around, says he hasn’t got time to hunt one up, but I know he knows where they are.

  After a few minutes, he gets out a box from a closet behind some of his paints in the studio, and hands me two. I am amazed, I have to admit, because she does look like me. She looks more like me than I do, if that makes sense. I get over that as fast as I can, because I want to help him out. So I study her, how she looks, and I study the effect until I feel like I’m the person in the pictures, and then I turn to Henry and don’t say anything but I lift my head way up like it was pulled by a string, and then drop my shoulders and push them way back, as if they were trying to touch.

  He looks very pleased and tells me that I’ve got it. Then, while I’m holding myself that way, which feels quite different and strong, he powders my neck with white powder, so, I know, it looks even longer than it does because of the way I’m standing.

  He looks back and forth from me to the picture and then he dusts some of the white powder on the sides of my nose, too. And then he is very happy. He kisses my eyelids and my paler nose and my longer neck, and I can feel him being really happy and pleased with everything.

  That makes me not as nervous, because if Henry is happy that way, if he’s fixed us up the way he wants to, then he can carry the evening off and it won’t be anything to worry about.

  He gives me a beauty mark on my cheek and then takes it off. He is still fussing around, although it’s time for us to go. He looks at the photograph and then at me again.

  I see that the mistress’s cape has a wide bow that ties it in the front, but that this one, which is either another one or the old one that’s been changed, fastens with a clasp. I tell him to go get a black ribbon, which he does, and then I have him tie it around my neck, and he likes that.

  Just when we’re about to leave he takes a white orchid out of a box and pins it on my shoulder, so that we both are dressed in black and white. And all of a sudden I feel excited, as if I had a date to a costume party and didn’t have anything to worry about and was going to have a lot of fun.

  35

  THE FINE ARTS is in the old Lone Star Brewery, the kind of unused building cities usually tear down, but the kind that lately Texans are anxious to save to show that they are being historical and cultural. Or that’s what Brogan would say.

  It is yellow brick, the old faded kind, with curved brick arches over large windows on every wall. It has two towers that are four stories high, and in the middle a two-story part that’s the entrance now. High in the air, like a circus tightrope, is a glass walkway connecting one tower with another.

  The sidewalk and yard around it are also all paved with brick and there are big welded sculptures that must be bolted to the ground so no one will steal them. Some of the windows on the back, I see, have bars, and Henry says that’s so no one can climb in and steal the museum’s prize collection, which is a lot of valuable Near Eastern bronzes and ceramics. He says that Fine Arts also owns some paintings by artists who are favorites of his—Segal, Schonzeit, Pearlstein—but that we won’t be looking at them today. Today we’ll be looking at his work only.

  We go in the back door, past a guard, and I see that all the signs are bilingual (IN THE MUSEUM / EN EL MUSEO … LOOK, ENJOY / MIRAR, DISFRUTAR …) and that reminds me of L.W. I wonder if I should have told him and Archie about the show, but am glad I didn’t. The way Henry and I are together right now, I don’t think that would be a good way to be with L.W. around. Besides, this is Henry’s show and I don’t think he ought to have to wonder what’s going on with me and anybody else.

  Mostly, I guess I didn’t tell them because I can’t do but one thing at a time, and right now what I’m doing is being with Henry.

  As soon as we step in the door, someone screams, “There he is.” And someone else calls, “Look, back there,” and then all the people, maybe a hundred, who are waiting at the front door turn around and rush at Henry.

  “Who are they?” I ask him, freezing for a minute, then remembering and raising my head and pushing my shoulders back, making my throat look long.

  “It’s a little pre-show party,” he says. “Mother’s doing.”

  Mrs. Wozencrantz comes over to us, and the women I met at the Navajo show. She says their names again and reminds Henry that Hallie is the Friends of the Fine Arts and Millie is Friends of the little museum, the Bernais. That the two of them have got their groups to put on a reception for Henry before the official opening, to which anybody can come, begins. It’s a private party, in other words, by invitation, although I see a lot of cameras everywhere.

  The women, and mostly they are women, are all dressed up in the kind of dress that goes with six strands of pearls—expensive, heavy, and to the floor. There is a scattering of men, a couple in tails like Henry, most of them in suits, and even one in a black cape like mine who raises his brows at me in a friendly way and nods his head.

  They stand in clusters, the friends, staring at Henry, who doesn’t seem to mind it. I hear my name a couple of times, carried across the stone floor in a loud whisper, Jolene, isn’t that, doesn’t she, Jolene, and that makes me get a really tight feeling and my hands begin to sweat. But then I remember about looking like the uncle’s woman and that I promised Henry I wouldn’t run away, and I calm down.

  At one point Mrs. Wozencrantz takes me to one side for a few minutes. She is talking to me in a low voice, leaning her head in very close until I can smell her breath which smells like perfume. She’s so close that I can even see thin gold crowns on her back teeth and hear the sort of click her tongue makes against her front teeth. “Henry has made your fortune as well as his own with this show.”

  “Thank you,” I answer, not knowing what else to say.

  I don’t know if she wants to know how things are with me and Henry, and I wouldn’t know what to tell her if she did. I don’t think she wants him to have
anyone closer to him than she is, and I imagine she didn’t like his wives at all, but I’m not sure I’m any closer to him than they were. We’re not measurable that way. I just pose and he paints and sometimes we are doing it or other things that connect to the painting. But that’s not something you can put into words. Anyway, not to somebody like Mrs. Wozencrantz, who is going around being the Artist’s Mother, and that’s not anything that anybody can get closer than because that’s something in her mind that shuts out anybody real, even Henry.

  In a minute he sees that I am with his mother and comes over to adjust my cape and touch my hair, the way he does when he’s about to start painting, and it reminds me about posing, that that’s what I’m doing now, and as soon as he smooths the hair behind my ear and runs his hand along my neck where the white powder is, I relax.

  One other time I get cornered during the reception. It’s almost at the end, when a few of the people waiting outside, the general public, are peering through the locked front doors, trying to see what’s going on, and some are even tapping on the heavy glass. It’s when Henry’s daughter comes walking up to me.

  She looks the same as she did when I met her, like she’d be more at home with dogs and horses, with her deep suntan and her light eyelashes and hair. She’s wearing a short pink dress and her legs are long and dark brown.

  “Hi,” she says. “Remember me?”

  “You’re Karen.”

  “You aren’t an antique dealer. I knew it. I knew you were lying.”

  “I’m a model. But your grandmother knew that all along, didn’t she?”

  “I did, too,” she says, but I don’t believe her.

  I lift my cape and show her the hand attached.

  “Yuck,” she says.

  “Your daddy pretends that I’m the woman his uncle used to photograph. I look like her. I wonder if your mother did, too.”