Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  “Yeah. But girls hardly ever get in trouble,” said Molly. “Just boys, ‘cause they always say what they think. They don’t understand that nobody cares.”

  After lunch, Jude and Molly stood beside the high fence around the playground, the only girls in blue jeans, holding hands and watching the Commie Killers play softball. After the Commie Killers’ run-in with Uncle Clarence, Jude’s father had hired a bulldozer to destroy their trenches. So when they passed Jude on the sidewalk now, they called her “Public Enemy Number One.”

  Noreen’s gang was in a grassy corner, hurting one another’s feelings, then making up via networks of earnest intermediaries. Spotting Jude and Molly, Noreen sauntered over in her plaid dress, which had a black patent-leather belt to match her Mary Janes. Her stomach bulged out beneath the belt like a beach ball.

  “Why do you spend all your time with that baby first grader?” she asked Molly.

  “Because she’s my friend.” She let go of Jude’s hand.

  “When you get sick of her, you can come play with us.”

  “I’m not going to get sick of her, Noreen.”

  Jude was grinding a pebble into the dirt with the toe of her oxford. She glanced at Molly, aware of her sacrifice in being best friends with a first grader. Even though Molly’s voice was calm, her eyes were icy cold.

  “You two look like boys in those blue jeans,” said Noreen. “Wouldn’t your mothers buy you new dresses for the first day of school?”

  There was a horrified silence as Noreen remembered that Jude’s mother was dead. She whirled around and stalked away, dust coating her glossy Mary Janes.

  “Look. There’s Sandy.” Touching Jude’s shoulder, Molly pointed across the playground. He was sitting with his back to the brick wall of the building, playing chess against himself on a tiny portable set. The teacher on duty, a hunched old woman in a navy blue Brooklyn Dodgers cap, was standing over him gesticulating wildly. Sandy folded up his chess set and slipped it into his shorts pocket. Teacher hobbling at his heels, he marched to the softball diamond.

  When the Commie Killers saw him coming, they groaned as though they had stomachaches. One yelled, “Oh, no, here comes the convict!” Although Jude’s father, who had gone to high school with the president of the phone company, had gotten Sandy excused from the wiretap charges, the Commie Killers wouldn’t let him put his criminal past behind him.

  The teacher handed him a glove and directed him to right field. He stood there with one hand on his hip, the other holding out the leather glove like a skillet waiting for a flapjack. When Ace hit a fly ball, Sandy’s expression as he watched it arc and fall in his direction was one of pure terror. He missed it, and Ace converted his error into a grand-slam home run.

  During the next inning, Sandy walked up to the plate, optimistically hefting a black Louisville Slugger. Ace motioned the outfield closer, yelling, “Easy out!” Which it unfortunately was.

  After school, Jude and Molly stood toe-to-toe at the crack in the sidewalk marking the boundary between their yards. Each crossed her arms and placed her hands on the other’s shoulders. For a long time, they looked into each other’s eyes. Jude could see herself and the maple tree behind her reflected in Molly’s irises. The bright blue disks were scored with lines, like miniature blueberry pies sliced into a hundred pieces. Around each pupil was a tiny translucent golden ring like a butter rum Life Saver after you’d sucked it for a long time. Gazing into the black pupils, Jude felt suddenly dizzy, as though she were spiraling down the funnel of a whirlpool.

  They smiled gravely and patted each other’s shoulders, chanting in unison, “Best friend. Buddy of mine. Pal of pals.”

  After changing from school jeans to play jeans, Jude sat at Molly’s kitchen table, spinning a marble around the lazy Susan, pretending it was a Las Vegas roulette wheel. Molly had been mixing them cocktails from several liquids they both liked to smell—vanilla extract, Pine Sol, cherry cough syrup. But each had tasted worse than the last. Now Molly was telling a story her teacher had read that afternoon about an orphan boy who was raised by wolves and had never learned to speak. He was discovered by hunters and taken to live in a cottage on the edge of the forest.

  Molly and Jude spent the rest of the afternoon prowling through Molly’s house. Their vocabulary consisted of hand gestures and facial expressions. In the bathroom, Jude seized a comb and displayed it to a mystified Molly, who manipulated it in various ways, trying to discover its function.

  “What are you two up to now?” asked Molly’s aproned mother, lounging in the doorway in her neat blond pageboy, arms folded across her stomach. Startled, the girls stared at her with wide-open eyes.

  “What’s going on?” She gave a perplexed laugh. They dashed from the bathroom to seek shelter behind the sofa in the knotty pine den, which enclosed them much as the wolves’ lair had.

  Jude was so enchanted with this game that she continued it at supper that night, marveling over the unknown delicacies served her on a round disk by a black creature in a white uniform with a red scarf wound around her head. It was wonderful to be handed food after a lifetime of chasing moles in the forest.

  “So how was your first day of school?” asked a large, pale, hairless one at the head of the gleaming wooden table.

  Jude gazed at him as she ate with a bizarre silver twig, unable to comprehend the howls coming from his mouth.

  “What’s wrong, baby? Cat got your tongue?”

  The dark one led Jude up some steps to a pool of water and removed her soiled fur. Jude dipped her toe into the pool. The water was hot! She had known only icy forest ponds and streams. She climbed in. How delicious to float in the warm liquid while the friendly black one rubbed a small slippery stone that smelled like dried rose petals across her coat.

  “How you like school, Miss Judith?”

  Jude looked quickly at the dark one, whose mouth was making strange sounds.

  “You ain’t telling, huh?”

  “WHAT A NICE DOG,” said Mrs. Murdoch as she strolled down the aisle and peered at the picture Jude had just drawn. “I think we need to hang this one on our bulletin board up front, Jude.”

  “It’s not a dog,” said Jude, not looking up. “It’s a wolf.” The wolf was sitting in its cave in the forest, sniffing the morning air.

  “Speak up, young lady. I can’t hear you.”

  “I said it’s not a dog; it’s a wolf.”

  “A wolf? What an idea! Why is it a wolf?”

  “’Cause I like wolves. I think they’re nice.” Jude finally looked up. Mrs. Murdoch’s bright red lipstick covered an area much larger than her actual lips, and her eyebrows had been plucked out and redrawn as crooked black arches. She looked like a messy clown.

  Mrs. Murdoch laughed, chin nearly touching her nose. “You may like wolves, young lady, but they are definitely not nice. They are vicious wild animals. Think about the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood for just a moment.”

  Jude said nothing. She was thinking about the boy who got spanked in the cloakroom.

  “Well, Jude?” “Yessum.”

  “So you agree that wolves are vicious wild animals?”

  “Yessum.”

  “Now, we would not want a vicious wild animal on our bulletin board, would we? Because it would scare us all half to death and give us bad dreams at night. But your wolf could just as well be a dog, couldn’t it? And then we could hang it up and look at it without fear.”

  “Yessum.”

  “So you can practice your letters by writing D-O-G here along the bottom.”

  “Yessum,” said Jude miserably, printing D-O-G beneath her wolf. Maybe she wouldn’t be an artist when she grew up after all.

  Mrs. Murdoch sat down at her portable organ in the front of the room and began furiously pumping the foot pedals. “Rise, children!” she shrieked, gesturing upward with her palms. “And lift up your voices to the Lord!”

  “BABY, I HAVE TO GO back to the hospital after supper,” said Jude’s father
as he laid a slice of Mrs. Starnes’s German chocolate cake on a dessert plate painted with grape clusters and cantaloupe slices. He passed it to Jude. “To work on some reports. Molly’s mother said you could spend the night there. Would you mind?” He picked up his fork and studied it.

  Jude inspected his lowered face, which was turning bright red beneath his five o’clock shadow as he flicked and stroked his fork prongs. Why was he so embarrassed? He often went back to the hospital after supper if Clementine could stay late. It was no big deal. “Sure. That’s fine, Dad.”

  The next morning, Jude and Molly raced down the hall from Molly’s bedroom and into the bathroom to brush their teeth before school. Molly’s father was standing in front of the sink shaving. He was entirely covered with curly black hair, except for his white buttocks and a pale little slug that nestled in a mat of fur between his legs.

  Finally, Molly asked, “Daddy, what’s that?”

  Nicking his chin with the razor, he looked down at Molly’s pointing finger. Clutching the slug with his free hand while the shaving cream on his chin turned pink, he said, “It’s my penis, and I never want to hear you say that word again!”

  Molly and Jude crept from the bathroom, teeth unbrushed, and gathered their books from Molly’s room in silence, exchanging wolfspeak signs with their fingers that said, He’s covered with fur. Can he be a brother?

  JUDE’S GRANDMOTHER WAS SERVING garlic grits from a silver casserole dish on her Sheraton sideboard. She was using a pitted serving spoon that her own grandmother had buried in the backyard at the family farm near Fredericksburg to prevent its being stolen by the Yankees. Unable to remember where she’d buried her cache, Jude’s great-great-grandmother spent the rest of her life making her yardmen excavate the property. The week after they finally found it, she died.

  “A little girl belongs in dresses at school, Daniel,” her grandmother was saying, “not blue jeans. It’s the talk of the town.”

  “Don’t you find it sad, Momma,” said Jude’s father, loosening his striped silk Sunday tie, “that this town has nothing better to talk about than my daughter’s blue jeans?”

  “Don’t get smart with me, Daniel. You may be a big man down at the hospital, but you’re still my son.” She handed him a plate piled high with fried chicken, grits, shelly beans, and a salad of molded cherry Jell-O and shredded carrots topped with a mayonnaise rosette.

  He buttered and ate a Parker House roll while his mother continued her critique of Jude’s wardrobe.

  Jude, whose skirt was hiked halfway up her thighs as she sat with her feet hooked behind her front chair legs, fixed her gaze on the glass goddess in the middle of the table. Baby’s breath and pastel snapdragons were sprouting from her head. She clutched a bow and wore a quiver of arrows on her back. A pack of dogs was leaping up around her legs, which were laced with thongs from her sandals.

  “Thank you, Momma,” said her father. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  Jude glanced at him, scratching her neck, which was itching from her scalloped lace collar. Often he agreed with his mother to her face, then ignored her behind her back. Hopefully, this was one of those times.

  Satisfied, her grandmother resumed her account of the siege of Fredericksburg, told to her as a girl by a legless soldier at the Confederate Veterans’ Home: “As the Yankees crossed the Rappahannock, Lieutenant Stevens hid behind a stone wall to shoot at them. All of a sudden, he saw a baby girl toddling down the street chasing a rolling shell casing, with bullets whistling all around her. He ran out and grabbed her and carried her down a side street, where he came to a young woman in a dirty ripped dress who was sitting on a pile of rubble.”

  “Ma‘am,” he said, “is this here your little girl?”

  She and the child reached out for each other. “Sir,” she said, “my cow’s been shot. It’s lying in that shed over yonder. You can go butcher it and take the meat if you want to.”

  “Thank you, ma‘am,” he said, “but the Yankees is coming fast, and I surely would be honored if you’d come along with me right now.”

  “Why, thank you, sir,” she said, taking his outstretched hand with a coy smile, as though he’d just asked her to dance. “I don’t mind if I do.”

  As he led her up the street, a shell exploded beside them. He woke up to find a starving hog licking the stumps where his legs used to be. The mother and her baby were lying dead beside him. Down the hill, he could see Yankee soldiers dressed in gowns stolen from the town houses. They were drinking fine French wines from the bottle and waltzing with one another around a bonfire of Chippendale chairs.

  “There was no way in the world,” Jude’s grandmother concluded, “for our fine colonial cavaliers to prevail over that race of barbarians.”

  It was her favorite story. Although it was a good one, Jude had heard it a hundred times.

  “And another thing, Daniel,” her grandmother said as she ladled milk gravy over her fried chicken.

  He looked up, the green beans on his fork slowly dripping fat-back. “Yes, Momma?”

  “This poor child has no mother. And the way you’re behaving, running around with that floozy from intensive care at all hours of the night, now she has no father, either. It’s not going unnoticed around town that Jude is practically living at the Elkins’s while you cavort in back alleys with your concubine.”

  “Yes, Momma,” he said, chewing his beans. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “What’s a floozy?” asked Jude, studying the wallpaper over the sideboard, which featured a white columned mansion surrounded by women in hoop skirts and sunbonnets. This was what her mother’s mansion in heaven looked like. One day soon, she was going to come take Jude there. It wasn’t true that she had no mother. Just because no one else saw her didn’t mean she wasn’t real. “What’s cavort?”

  “Momma, tell us about Provence, why don’t you?” said her father.

  “Provence? Oh, Provence was lovely. You know, I believe I like Provence almost as much as I do Virginia. Except for all that funny food. And that strange language nobody understands except the French.”

  Her father laughed, running his hand over his bald spot. “I declare, Momma, you’re the only person I ever saw who travels the world searching for Virginia. Why don’t you just go to Virginia in the first place?”

  She sighed and patted her red lips with her linen napkin. “Well, you know, Virginia’s not what it used to be. Once, before that dreadful war, it was a gracious land of rolling pastures, where sleek cattle grazed and blackbirds sang.…”

  “May I please be excused?” asked Jude, laying her napkin on the damask tablecloth, desperate not to hear again about the joys of plantation living.

  “WHAT’S A FLOOZY?” Jude asked Clementine on her way out the door to school the next morning.

  Clementine paused as she mopped the redbrick kitchen linoleum with the golden liquid that smelled so good and tasted so terrible. “Where you heard that word, Miss Judith?”

  “My grandma said my daddy’s running around with a floozy.”

  Clementine grinned, leaning on her mop handle. “That a fact? Good for him.”

  “What’s a floozy?”

  “A floozy is…um, a woman who likes to have some fun.” She tucked a coil of springy hair beneath the edge of her head cloth.

  “But what about my momma in heaven?”

  “Sugar, be glad if your daddy’s found him a new woman friend. He be a good man, and he been so lonely for so long. It don’t mean he love your momma less. Fact is, I’d say he got him a graveyard love for your momma.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A graveyard love be a love that lasts till you both be dead and buried in the graveyard. Like what I expect you got with Miss Molly. A graveyard love don’t never end, no matter what.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  JUDE WAS OPERATING atop the desk in her bedroom on a doll her grandmother had just brought her from India. She had removed and set aside the red-and-gold
silk sari. Now she was carefully snipping open the cloth belly with scissors. Reaching into the aperture, she extracted the wad of stuffing that was the dead baby. Once the baby was out, she hoped the mother could be saved.

  After sewing up the incision with red thread, Jude discovered that her patient had stopped breathing. Turning her over, she administered artificial respiration, repeatedly pressing her back and lifting her elbows. But she still refused to breathe.

  Jude had never lost a patient before. Feeling her throat tighten so that she could hardly swallow, she stumbled down the carpeted hallway and into her father’s bedroom, which was painted lime green and had a gold quilted bedspread and velvet drapes. She searched the floor of his closet for a shoe box, intending to dig a grave in the backyard and make a headstone from a brick. Finally, she found a coffin, but unfortunately it was full of letters.

  Carrying the box into her room, Jude plopped down on her bed and examined the French stamps on some of the envelopes, which featured the head of a woman statue with wavy stone hair. The letters were between her mother and father while he was away at the war. She removed one from an envelope that had an American eagle stamp. The paper was light blue, and the handwriting was small and squiggly. Right in the middle of the page, Jude spotted her own name.

  Being in the top reading group now that she was in second grade, Jude used her father’s dictionary to decipher the paragraph containing her name: “Your mother and I rode the train to our nation’s capital last week. One afternoon we visited the National Cathedral. While we were looking up at the beautiful stained-glass window, we discovered that Jude, whom I was carrying on my hip, was blowing out all the votive candles in the rack beside us. Darling, I have my hands full with this marvelous child of ours! How I despise this awful war, which has taken so many men away from the wives and children who need them….”

  The letter paper smelled like her mother’s favorite perfume. Closing her eyes, Jude remembered sitting on the pale green carpet in her parents’ bedroom watching her mother get dressed for parties. She’d let Jude fasten the lacy tops of her silk stockings to her garter belt. Jude had been fascinated by the way the little padded buttons slid into the wire hooks. Then her mother would ask her to arrange the crooked seams down the backs of her legs into straight lines. After pulling on her dress, her mother would take the cut-glass vial of Narcissus perfume off her dressing table and dab her wrists and throat and behind her ears with the stopper. Jude would hold out her own wrist for a dab. After her parents’ departure, she would lie in bed with her wrist to her nose, breathing in the sweet floral fragrance of her beautiful vanished mother.