by Lisa Alther
“I’ll take you one night.”
“Okay, but I should remind you of how much I despised ‘The Firestone Hour’ on television when we were kids.”
He laughed. “You’ll like it. Trust me. Opera is almost as surreal as reality itself.”
“SO WHAT DID YOU do today, dear?” asked Jude’s maternal grandmother as she served something that looked like bean stew from a gray pottery bowl painted with dark blue cornflowers.
“I went to visit a boy I grew up with who lives on Riverside Drive now. I hadn’t seen him in eight years, and he’s turned into a man. It was quite a shock.”
“Then you understand how it is for us to see you,” murmured her grandfather as he poured some red wine into her glass. Wine at their table seemed to flow as freely as iced tea back home.
Jude glanced back and forth between the grandparents she’d known mostly through Christmas and birthday cards and presents—her grandfather, tall and distinguished-looking, with a full head of silver hair and piercing raisin eyes; her grandmother, in gold pince-nez, with an elaborate bun of salt-and-pepper hair that sat on her head like a puffy cushion. A couple of times, they’d stopped off to see her en route to Florida vacations, and they’d often invited her to visit them, but she’d never accepted before. She had the impression her father and they didn’t like one another. When they had picked her up at Grand Central with their driver the previous night, she had told them in the car en route to their apartment that her father sent his love (which wasn’t true). They had merely thanked her, without inquiring about him.
Jude glanced around the dining room, with its walnut wainscoting and leaded glass windows and cabinet doors, determined to locate a subject for conversation. All they had in common was a woman who had died nearly two decades earlier, but her name hadn’t yet been spoken. “How long have you lived here?” she asked her grandfather, who was carefully unfolding his linen napkin and placing it in his lap.
“Let’s see, we bought this place after I got back from the war,” he said. “In 1919, I suppose. Nearly fifty years ago. All the buildings on this block were built at the turn of the century by a group of Europeans who wanted a neighborhood. Some Alsatian friends of my father’s got us involved. We used to call this street New York’s Alsatian ghetto. I guess you could say we were an early commune.” He smiled at her in the candlelight, but his dark eyes looked remote and unhappy. He was still wearing the three-piece pinstriped suit she’d seen him in early that morning as he departed with his uniformed driver for his office on Wall Street, where he negotiated international grain deals.
“So my mother grew up here?” asked Jude, risking the unmentionable.
Her grandfather grimaced, as though with heartburn.
Her grandmother nodded. “Her bedroom was the one you’re staying in now.”
“Where did she go to school?” Jude continued mercilessly. She’d picked Columbia for her Ph.D. and agreed to stay with her grandparents partly because she wanted to get to know them and, through them, her mother. None of this would happen if she pussyfooted around the topic as she always had with her father. Her father was all wrapped up in his new family now. Her mother had no one except Jude to bear her memory into the future. Therefore, Jude needed to remember what her memories of her were. Jude had gone to Paris her junior year at Vanderbilt with some vague notion of learning about her mother, whose parents were mostly French by origin. Many of the women she’d passed in the streets had had her mother’s diminutive build and dark beauty. But she’d returned home with only an increased sense of her mother’s absence.
“She went to a private school on the East Side. Your grandfather dropped her off every morning on the way to his office and our driver picked her up—until she was old enough to walk across the park with her friends.”
“What was she like?”
Jude’s grandmother glanced at her husband, but he was concentrating on his stew. Then she surveyed the room as though searching for an escape hatch. She drew a deep breath and exhaled it. Then she looked at Jude helplessly, as though asking to be let off the hook.
“She was very…definite,” she finally replied. “She knew what she wanted, and nothing could dissuade her from having it.”
Jude’s grandfather didn’t show by so much as a twitch whether or not he agreed. They sat for a while in silence, Jude uncertain of whether her grandmother’s description was meant to be approving or not. One of the things Jude’s mother had insisted on having was Jude’s father. She poked at her stew—of beans, bacon, sausage, and pork in a tomato sauce. It was pleasant not to be eating country ham and corn bread. “This is delicious,” she finally said. “What is it?”
“Cassoulet,” her grandfather replied. “From southern France. To help you feel at home.” He smiled.
“Please,” said Jude with a laugh. “I’m so sick of southern food, I could scream—fried chicken and corn bread, barbecue and biscuits. It’s a wonder I can still digest at all.”
As the maid removed the dessert plates, Jude’s grandmother stood up and walked over to a dark, glossy armoire. Pointing out some wooden pegs, she explained to Jude how her Huguenot forebears had collapsed the chest to carry it with them when they fled France in the seventeenth century. She was genealogist for the National Huguenot Society, and Jude gathered that she spent most of her time poring over passenger lists of ships that had left European ports after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Extracting a fat, ivory-colored candle from the armoire, Jude’s grandmother set it on the dining table and lit it with a taper from the silver candelabra. “Today is St. Bartholomew’s Day,” she explained.
“Good God, Rose,” muttered her grandfather, “we’ve got company.” Tossing his napkin on the table, he pushed back his chair.
“My dear,” said Jude’s grandmother, “your lack of interest doesn’t alter the fact that on this day in 1572 your ancestors butchered mine.”
“But not enough of them, darling, because here you are.” He glanced at Jude with a faint smile.
“You can mock me all you like, Christophe. It won’t bring back the hundred thousand that your forebears slaughtered like cattle in an abattoir.”
“A hundred thousand is a mere drop in the bucket, my love,” he said, rising to his feet, silver mane reflecting the candlelight. “A hundred million have died from man-made violence in the twentieth century.”
“But not at the hands of the very people who had invited them to a wedding of their own kinsman.”
“Stalin killed twenty million of his own people. So did Mao.”
Jude studied her genteelly embattled grandparents, who seemed envigorated by this ancient religious enmity as they hadn’t been by her mention of their lost daughter. Her suave grandfather was tossing off grim statistics of disaster as though dealing with so many sacks of grain.
“Go away, Christophe,” her grandmother said, “before I add you to the body count.”
Laughing, he exited.
But Jude stayed, to be polite, and listened to her grandmother’s account, which sounded as ritualistic as an Icelandic saga. Howling Catholic mobs burst into Huguenot homes in Paris, stabbing the occupants, shooting them, hurling them from high windows to the pavement below. They tossed babies screaming for their murdered parents into the Seine to drown. Carts piled high with corpses left pathways of blood that led to a Louvre courtyard, where flies swarmed around stacks of mutilated bodies that lay festering under a hot summer sun. Giggling ladies from court inspected the genitals of a dead man suspected of impotence.
As she listened, Jude studied a medallion at her grandmother’s throat—a Maltese cross, with fleurs-de-lis in each corner. A tiny golden dove in downward flight was hanging from the bottom arm. Her grandmother, in her billowy bun and gold pince-nez, had seemed so reticent discussing her daughter earlier in the evening but was now describing with relish the rivers of France—so clogged with bloated corpses that people refused to eat fish for months afterward—and the wolve
s that crept down out of the forests to feast on the bodies that washed ashore. Jude settled comfortably into her side chair and sipped her wine, feeling at home already in the heart of New York City.
Following her recitative, Jude’s grandmother blew out the candles, kissed Jude good night, and vanished up the stairs and into her bedroom, separate from that of her husband. Jude went into the paneled den and turned on the television. Unable to find anything of interest, she switched it off. Studying the walls, she noticed Audubon prints, but no photos, no school diplomas, nothing that would testify to her mother’s existence.
She strolled into the living room, which was two stories high and had dark walnut paneling and beams. At the second-floor level, there was a balcony off which the bedrooms opened. Wandering around the shadowy room, she tried to imagine the games her mother must have played there as a child. In the dim lamplight, she noticed that the wine-colored Oriental carpet had a paisley pattern like footprints. Carefully fitting her feet into the protozoan outlines, she walked across it splayfooted. Then she turned around and jumped back across it in the opposite direction, alternating feet, sometimes landing on both, playing hopscotch.
Reaching the leaded glass windows along one wall, she studied the window seat, which was cushioned with burgundy velvet. Upon lifting the lid, she discovered an empty space within. Climbing into it, she lay down, lowered the lid, and pretended she was in a coffin. She remembered lying like this in the sunken grave back home, trapped by the Commie Killers. For a few moments, it seemed easier to continue lying there while her grandparents ransacked the apartment in search of her than to emerge and have to set up an entirely new life.
As she climbed back out of the window seat, her grandmother’s voice overhead said, “That’s exactly what your mother used to do.”
Looking up, Jude saw her standing in the shadows on the balcony. “Sorry, Grandma. I was just poking around.”
“No need to apologize, my dear. Our home is your home now.”
But Jude detected a note of tightly controlled agitation in her voice.
JUDE WRAPPED HER ARMS around Molly’s waist as the car fishtailed crazily. Then it plunged down a cliff and began to roll. As Jude clung to her, Molly was slowly dragged out the window. Sweat broke out on Jude’s forehead as she struggled to pull Molly back inside. Losing her grip, she clawed frantically at the sticky red-clay bank outside….…
“…I’ve hungered for your touch a long lonely time,” wailed the Righteous Brothers from the clock radio. “Time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much.…”
Jude opened one eye and saw the gold wallpaper striped with Prussian blue in her new bedroom at her grandparents’ apartment. The buzzer on the alarm went off.
Shutting it off, she scooted up to lean against the headboard of the mahogany sleigh bed in which her mother had slept as a girl. She blotted the sweat off her forehead with her pajama sleeve and tried to calm her jagged breathing.
Just as Molly used to insist that stars were actually tears in the night sky through which the light behind it streamed, so Jude had concluded that everyday reality was just a period of each day allotted for attending to the needs of the body so it could continue to host the dreams that constituted the real reality. Some nights, she relived this car wreck that never ended. Other nights, she lay trapped by the Commie Killers in a sunken grave, Molly’s skeletal arms dragging her down into the center of the earth.
But sometimes she and Molly sat in their cave playing Over the Moon, as the indigo Smokies outside the cave mouth vanished and reappeared in swirling autumn mists. Or they galloped their horses beside the churning river, as mauve clouds collided overhead and cast dark racing shadows on the valley floor. Or they lay in each other’s arms on a raft in the ocher river, rocking with the current, while dancing rays of summer sun licked their flesh like a thousand tiny tongues.
The buzzer on her alarm went off again. She had to go to Columbia to register for fall courses. Lying still, she listened to the city come to life around her, like a curtain lifting on a stage set. At dawn back home, lone roosters crowed one by one until the sun popped up from behind the mountains and the bird chorus commenced its concerto to daybreak. Here, a solitary siren first broke the silence, followed by a car horn, then the whirring of a truck digesting garbage in the street below. Then more sirens, the roar of a bus, schoolchildren shrieking, a helicopter pucking overhead, dogs barking on their way to Central Park. Finally, the urban oratorio at full blast.
WAITING IN THE CAVERNOUS GYM in a line of history students who also wanted the seminar on the French Revolution, Jude inspected her new classmates, a scruffy bunch in their jeans and overalls, Tshirts and work shirts, paratrooper boots and basketball shoes, especially in contrast to the cashmered coeds and tweedy fraternity boys at Vanderbilt. Several exuded the musky odor of sweat mixed with marijuana smoke. A sorority sister at Vanderbilt, whose boyfriend played Dobro in a country-and-western band, used to sneak the joints he gave her into the Kappa house, where Jude lived. They smoked them sitting on the gabled roof. The effect on Jude had always been negligible, although a few times the antics of the birds in flight over the campus had seemed more engaging than usual.
She started thinking about her grandmother’s version of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre the previous night—the marriage turned massacre, the wolves feasting on the bloated corpses. Like the evening news, everything Jude had studied in her career as a history major had focused on wars, assassinations, famines, and epidemics. No doubt the guillotine would be the star of this seminar on the French Revolution. But surely sometime, somewhere, people had merely tilled the soil and harvested their crops, year after year, until they died quietly in their own beds, bored to death, surrounded by those who loved them.
SANDY HAD PLACED A STRAIGHT-BACK chair amid a rigging of ropes and pulleys behind the maroon velvet curtains, from which Jude could see most of the stage. He was sitting at a switchboard behind her, watching the stage on a TV screen and following the music in a bound score. He wore headphones with an attached mouthpiece through which he was receiving reports and issuing instructions to technicians stationed all around the hall.
Jude, meanwhile, was bewildered by the plot. The young Count Octavian, played by a woman, was lying in bed singing sweet nothings to the Marschallin, whose husband was out of town. While the count disguised himself as a chambermaid so as to conceal their affair from the Marschallin’s approaching cousin, the Marschallin sang an aria bemoaning her knowledge that the count would eventually leave her for someone younger and more beautiful. Then the cousin, a man, became enamored of the young count-turned-chambermaid.
At intermission, Jude remained in her chair, watching as the huge platform carrying a Viennese drawing room rolled out from the wings, escorted by a team of muscled young men in Tshirts and blue jeans, with pouched leather carpenter belts around their hips and pirate-style bandannas around their heads. One with a brown ponytail and a gold hoop through his earlobe was Sandy’s roommate Tony.
During the last act, Jude tiptoed to the switchboard and stood behind Sandy, watching him turn the pages of his score. The Marschallin, aware that her young count had indeed fallen in love with a woman his own age, was struggling with herself to let him go. Finally giving him her hand to kiss for one last time, she swept bravely from the room.
Inexplicably, Jude found herself wanting to stroke Sandy’s blond hair where it curled up around his collar. She touched a curl with her fingertip. Sandy turned his head, catching a glimpse of her finger as she withdrew it. Raising his eyes to hers, he smiled.
Walking back to Jude’s grandparents’ apartment through the cool night air, Sandy and Jude savored the sudden silence, broken only by an occasional passing car or a siren down Broadway. Sandy began humming the Marschallin’s aria during which she realized that the count would leave her.
“That was really beautiful,” said Jude.
Sandy began singing it softly in German.
“What
do the words mean?”
He thought for a moment. “‘With a light heart and a light hand, we must hold and take, hold and let go. If not, life will punish us and God will have no pity.’ Something like that.”
“Do you know German?”
Sandy nodded.
“What else?”
“Just the opera languages—Italian, French, a little Spanish.”
“And East Tennesseean.”
He smiled. “Yes, and British. From Simon.”
They walked for a couple of blocks in companionable silence, pursued, overtaken, and abandoned by their own shadows as they passed through the patches of illumination laid down by the streetlights.
Finally, Sandy said, “Late at night, these side streets by the park are almost as quiet as Tidewater Estates.”
“We might just as well never have left.”
“That’s the only similarity.”
“Why did you never come back home, by the way?”
“Why would I go back? I was miserable down there. And after Molly died, even you turned into a zombie.”
“I turned into a zombie?”
“Suddenly, you were perfect in every way. Those Villager shirtwaists you used to wear, pressed as carefully as altar cloths. Student council secretary. Baptist Youth Group. Hospital volunteer. Citizenship award. First in your class. Endlessly baby-sitting your siblings. And when I’d look in your eyes, there was no one home.”
Jude studied her tassled loafers as they moved along the sidewalk through some tattered leaves that were giving off the dusty scent she would always associate with the Wildwoods in autumn, where wisps of smoke from fires in the farmers’ curing sheds had drifted past like morning mist.
“There’s still no one home, if you ask me.”
Jude said nothing, amazed to learn that she’d projected such torpor when her heart had felt like Pompeii during the lava flow. After Molly died, she’d spent her free time racing Flame along the river, howling into the wind. She’d slide off him on the ridge where she and Molly had planned to build their cabin and pound the carpet of rotting leaves with her fists.