Hell Can Wait

by Theodore Judson

  “Oh, no,” laughed Mr. Worthy. “They do have a little something, for a time. Never underestimate the desperation of certain single woman over forty, my son. Stephen eventually becomes a chef in a downtown restaurant and marries Lucy the nurse.”

  “Really?”

  “Stephen came to know you were telling the truth when you told him he would learn to be good by doing good one day after another. In a year or so, he becomes something of a catch. Cecilia marries a realtor from Berthoud, Colorado,” said Mr. Worthy, helping Maternus to his feet. “A lovely man named Adelphi. They, like Lucy and Stephen, will be very happy, most of the time.”

  “What of Shen? Does he grow old alone?”

  “He continues on in his unique fashion for a time,” said Mr. Worthy. “At the age of thirty-one, he marries a former beauty queen who is the widow of a railroad tycoon. This opens the door for ever greater triumphs. By the time he is fifty, Shen is on the Forbes’ list of America’s wealthiest citizens and he is the nation’s poet laureate. Of course, that’s before he gets his own television chat show.”

  The angel had led the Roman a few steps toward the horizon while he told of the future. Upon hearing of Shen’s glorious life, Maternus stopped dead in his tracks and stared at Mr. Worthy.

  “Do I detect some envy in your expression, my friend?” said the angel.

  “I am more confused than envious. Does Shen deserve all of that?”

  “Merit is unrelated to success, at least it is down there,” said the angel and continued his progress toward the unknown place he was taking the Roman. “I told you before that in America everything that can possibly happen will happen, and most likely already has. No one among the living will be amazed by how well Shen does.”

  “Miss Austen’s books end in weddings,” said Maternus, hurrying to catch up with his companion. “Is that how my story is going to end? The people I met in Aurora, you were saying, go on to happy marriages. I am wondering—”

  “If you will,” said the angel. “Perhaps. Everything depends upon you.”

  “Did I not pass my tests?”

  “Old Banewill is a remarkable ninny,” said Mr. Worthy. “That does not mean he was incorrect when he said I was letting you win. I knew before we met that you had suffered more than you deserved and that you, at your core, are a good man. Granted, you are morally lazy, irreligious, and tend to overvalue your physical prowess — and then there is this new pride you take in your improved appearance I have already warned you about. I overlooked these faults, for the moment, because you had remedied your greatest defects, namely your uncontrolled rage and your failure to make connections with other people. You yet have much about you that stands in need of betterment, and you should consider your presence here as conditional upon the efforts you make to change yourself. Those so-called tests, including the one you failed, were created to instruct you, not to prove your worthiness.”

  “Then you did cheat.”

  “Oh no,” chuckled Mr. Worthy. “If Banewill had fudged the tests, then that would be cheating. I am, heh heh, on the side of the angels, you might say. Should I improvise as I go along, my innovations are necessarily for the greater good. No one should construe my actions as cheating.”

  A group of seven children aged somewhere between eight and nine years, dressed in bright neon clothes, came charging out of the tall grass next to Maternus; all of the little ones were laughing, and the girl in the lead was holding a small rabbit the other children were taking turns caressing. Mr. Worthy addressed the children in a strange tongue Maternus had never heard before, and yet he understood that the angel was greeting the members of the group by name and that they were telling him they were going to lie down by a nearby stream and count the butterflies they saw flying over them. “A wonderful plan on this beautiful day,” Mr. Worthy said in the alien tongue. The smiling little girl with the rabbit approached the Roman and held up the animal for him to stroke. Maternus could feel the lack of tension in the rabbit’s back when he touched it, as though the creature were entirely at ease. As swiftly as they had appeared, the seven children suddenly sprinted away and were gone over the horizon, leaving behind them peels of laughter Maternus could hear long after the group was gone from his sight.

  “What language was that?” the Roman asked.

  “Cantonese.”

  “Why did I understand it?”

  “Nothing is hidden from anyone here,” said Mr. Worthy. “You will understand everyone you meet, including the animals. They will, in turn. understand you. You have already been granted more knowledge than you are aware of.”

  “You were saying my presence here is conditional?” said Maternus, again having to run a few steps to keep up with Mr. Worthy as they went up the gentle slope of a grassy hill.

  “We have people here who have prayed for the sins of the world a dozen times a day for sixty, seventy years,” said the angel. “Others you will meet here gave themselves to caring for the poor and sick and consequently have decades of good deeds in their résumés. If merit were the only criteria we had in this existence, you would not deserve to set foot in this place. Hurt one more soul or fail to ask forgiveness for the terrible deeds you have done, and we will not hesitate to toss you back into Hell.”

  “You mean I’m not here forever?”

  “Show us a residual trace of your former brutish self, and out you will go like corn shot from a popper,” the angel promised him. “We will be monitoring your progress, of that you may be assured. However, in your case, your fate will rest primarily in Maria’s hands.”

  “Wait,” said Maternus, feeling an unfamiliar twinge of panic shoot through his ethereal body. “You are saying my remaining in Heaven depends upon pleasing a woman?”

  “As I said, in your particular case — yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t whine,” Mr. Worthy cautioned him. “I find it most irritating, especially when a grown man is doing the whining. Maria will judge your progress because you were a thug in your previous life, and she is the antithesis of all you once were and will be sensitive to your shortcomings. Furthermore, being under a woman’s supervision will mortify the vainglorious pride left within you.”

  “But, sir—”

  “I am not open to your objections, my friend,” said the angel.

  They crossed over the crest of the hill, and Maternus found himself looking down upon an enormous country villa, built in a Romanesque style he vaguely recognized. Everything he beheld, from the red tile roofs to the grounds surrounding the main house, was larger and more resplendent than any he had seen when he was alive. He gathered more than one person was living on this estate because sundry people of various colors and sizes were wandering to and from the buildings, stopping here and there to converse and to embrace one another. The garden on the near side of the villa had the encircling columns and the internal planters of a garden he had seen long ago in Germania Superior; in this idyllic spot there were also willow trees and stands of exotic bamboo and more species of flowers than the Roman Empire had held.

  “This is it,” said Mr. Worthy. “From here you go on by yourself.”

  “Maria?”

  “She’s down there. Don’t worry — it’s normal to be anxious on one’s first day in Heaven.”

  “I have so much more I want to ask you,” said Maternus. “Am I lying dead back at the apartment? Does Stephen find me on the floor?”

  “He finds a letter saying you have returned to Montana,” said Mr. Worthy. “Your actual body, along with the bodies of the other conspirators striving to slay the mad emperor, was thrown into the Tiber eighteen centuries ago. Oh, and Stephen and Shen each get an additional letter in the mail from an address in Butte, Montana. The second letters say you felt out of place in the big city, despite the friendship you received from them, etc., etc. They will believe you found work as a pipe fitter. Everything has been taken care of.”

  “Why are there so many children here?” asked Maternus.
r />   He had noticed that, as in the field they had just left, many of the souls on the villa’s grounds were those of children.

  “Tragically, children die,” said Mr. Worthy. “In earlier times, the majority of them perished before they became adults. Here we allow everyone to be whatever age they wish, if they come to us very young or very old. Some children try being adults for a time. Nearly all of them choose to be children again. I cannot say I blame them. Adulthood is very confusing at times, isn’t it? Would you like to be another age, my friend?”

  “I am content to be as I am.” said Maternus.

  “Good for you,” said Mr. Worthy, and gave the Roman one last smile. “Now go on. We will, I expect, meet again. We do have an eternity ahead of us, and who can tell what will happen if both of us keep rambling about?”

  Mr. Worthy embraced Maternus, then gave him a playful shove in the direction of the beautiful estate.

  “Has she been waiting for me throughout these many ages?” asked the Roman.

  “After a fashion.”

  “I do not know…” declared Maternus, frozen in place by his doubts.

  “If you were taught anything during the so-called tests we gave you, the one lesson you should have learned is that it doesn’t take magic to please a woman,” the angel whispered into his ear. “You only have to make the effort.”

  Maternus went down the slope a dozen paces. When he stopped and looked back, the angel had disappeared. The Roman felt an eerie vibration running from the middle of his chest down to his lower abdomen, as if his nerves in that region were being stimulated by an extra charge of electromagnetic energy. Upon remembering that he had no body in the conventional sense, the peculiar sensation became much stronger.

  While going down the hill, he passed some black children playing with a lion that was as docile as a house cat. Two of the little ones were sitting on the creature’s back while a third was underneath the lion, tickling its sagging belly, and a fourth lad had taken hold of the beast by its mane and was straining to pull the former king of the jungle to the ground. In response to the child’s aggressive horseplay, the lion merely growled and licked the boy’s face with a pink tongue as wide as a catcher’s mitt.

  A party of Navaho women were gathered at the front gate of the garden, weaving colored blankets on their looms and laughing as they gossiped in their native language. Maternus could understood what they were saying when he drew near to them and was astonished to discern they were discussing him. “This must be the one,” the eldest woman was saying. “He walks like a bulldog. Who else could he be?” The Roman gingerly worked his way through them, but before he got past the gate one of the younger women grabbed his hand.

  “Are you our Maria’s sweetheart come at last?” she asked in her people’s tongue.

  “Maybe. I guess I am,” he stammered and caused the women to laugh at his awkward answer.

  He forged on and crossed through the gate in the wall separating the formal garden from the uncultivated land surrounding it. Once he was inside, the arrays of flowers and trees appeared to be larger than they had from the hilltop only minutes before. Under the roof of the peristyle he saw there were numerous private recesses partially covered by the white columns and the tall, shady trees. Fountains in the middle of the grounds were spraying a fine mist that kept the air within the walls startlingly cool. In one niche inside the peristyle he passed a priest and a rabbi seated on a marble bench and playing chess on a board positioned between them.

  “Here’s one I made up this morning,” said the priest. “This priest and a rabbi go into a bar—”

  “’and my son is too,’” said the rabbi, who had foreseen the entire joke and its punch line.

  The two of them laughed together.

  Maternus had the revelation as he went forward that Heaven’s shapes changed with one’s perspective. Before him appeared a long hallway leading to several interior gardens, and as he proceeded into the covered passageway he passed open windows through which he espied a chamber ensemble playing Mozart and a small library in which people were silently reading amid clusters of flowers. In a third room he saw a jazz trumpeter he recognized from his own studies; this man was seated in front of some Ottoman Turks dressed in tasseled fezzes and brocaded short coats, and who had forgotten their reserved natures to applaud enthusiastically for the engaging man’s rendition of “Potato Head Blues” and for his equally endearing smile.

  At the end of the hallway he entered the inner garden and beheld the open sky framed by a square above his head. No trees grew in this private place, only row upon row of green bushes from which sprang hundreds of plump roses, each as big as a grapefruit and every one a deep shade of purple as no one had ever seen on earth. Maria was situated near the rear of the small garden, on her knees and busily aerating the soil with a hand spade. She was dressed in the plain wool gown and linen shift Maternus remembered her wearing on the day he had met her. Her long, dark hair was tied in a simple knot at the back of her head, revealing her shoulder and throat and allowing the Roman to see that although her eyes had taken note of his presence, she did not turn her head in his direction. He stepped to within a foot of her and was too overcome by the sight of her to speak immediately.

  “About time you came,” she said without looking up. “I was beginning to worry.”

  He still could not speak.

  “Come on,” she said. “Get a spade or a hoe. Help me get this ground turned over.”

  “You are so lovely,” he whispered.

  She hissed at his soft words.

  “Enough of that,” she said. “Had I wanted a talker, I would have asked for a different man. I need a worker with a strong back to help me take care of my roses. Now get a spade and get to work.”

  He took a trowel from the pile of modern tools Maria had stacked against a wall, and knelt beside her. Without speaking for the next ten minutes they dug into the rich, black soil of Heaven beneath the luxuriant rose bushes. Maternus could not stop glancing at her, at the nape of her neck and the soft brown hair gathered there, at the small, calloused hands she plowed into the dark ground, and — although he told himself he should not — he watched her breasts move beneath her layers of clothing and how her hips and bottom twitched as she threw herself into her labors.

  “You must not look at her like this,” he upbraided himself. “You are in Heaven now. She is an angel.”

  A second later he was watching her body move and again thinking the same thoughts. Disturbed by the feelings of guilt and passion he was feeling in the same moment, he did not observe that she was well aware of his attentions and was softly smiling.

  “Let’s stop for a bit,” she said, and sat on a marble bench that had suddenly appeared in the midst of the rose bushes.

  He sat beside her and was about to brush the dirt from his hands when he realized they were clean.

  “Does not one get dirty here?” he asked.

  “Only if one wishes to,” Maria told him. “There is nothing here save what is good for us. On occasion, one may wish for dirt.”

  “Roses,” said Maternus, looking at the bushes. “They did not have them in your first garden. Surely no garden ever had roses like these.”

  “Look at this one,” she said and took him to the enclosure’s rear wall where stood a single bush bearing a single rose, one that at first sight appeared to be as black as a crow’s back.

  “A black rose? Is that possible here?”

  “Not quite,” she said and gently pushed the blossom into a beam of direct light so Maternus could see it, too, was a shade of midnight purple, something close to the color of India ink when it is jostled and coats the neck of its bottle. “This is the product of two thousand generations of cross pollinations. Jet black is the goal, the mark of absolute perfection, the place I can never quite get to.”

  “Why try?”

  “Because some of us pray all day to worship God. Some help others still on earth or misplaced in the system, much a
s Mr. Worthy helped you. Still others of us strive to please God by creating beautiful things.”

  “You grow flowers?” asked Maternus.

  “If I could write poetry or make music, I would do something along those lines,” said Maria and returned to the marble bench, with Maternus following. To his surprise, he marked that she still limped. “Growing things is what I’m good at,” she said. “I would teach the same to you. The thing you’re good at won’t please anyone up here. Have you spoken to your mother yet?”

  “My mother? I have not seen my mother since I went into the army.”

  “She’s here, you know,” said Maria, and was pleased to bring him the news. “Your younger sister is here as well. Sorry about your father, Matty. He was a drunkard, a gadabout, and was as violent as you used to be, but he didn’t have your redeeming virtues, whatever those might be. I’m sure I’ll eventually find out. Would you like to meet them? In Heaven everything and everyone are always close at hand. Your mother and your baby sister are right outside.”

  The notion of meeting his mother and this sister he had barely known was more terrifying to Maternus than meeting Maria had been. His mother’s haggard face, streaked with tears on the day he had marched away to his legion, had long been an image that had haunted him during his darkest hours of despair. To see her again in his new condition would be a decidedly emotional occasion, one that would probably cause her to break into tears and might cause him to do the same. Having Maria present to witness how weak he could be would make the meeting that much more difficult.

  “I … I think my mother and this … sister you say I have—” he strove to explain.

  “They’re right here,” chirped Maria. “I’ll bring them in. Lydia! Albucia!” she called out.

  “This is not an optimum time for meetings,” objected Maternus. “Could we not turn our attention to these wonderful roses until I am more in the mood for this sort of thing? Are you going to create a flower that is entirely black?”

  “Only God can create perfection. We can only strive for it. Lydia! Albucia!” she called out again.