Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  “I guess I’m just a faithful kind of gal,” she murmured.

  Sandy shrugged. “I used to envy you and Molly. You were like twin space aliens. When you were playing, you’d move in concert, without words, like birds in flight. But you’ve paid a very high price.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “So you say. But I knew you before, and I see you now.”

  “I’m not a child anymore.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re off in Never-Never Land with Molly Pan.”

  Jude looked at him quickly. This was the closest anyone had ever come to guessing about her vivid night life with Molly. It felt threatening, even if it was only Sandy doing the guessing.

  “I remember you at the Colonial Cotillion spring break of my senior year at Exeter, waltzing in your hoop skirt and satin heels, with kid gloves to your biceps and that ridiculous Marie Antoinette hairdo. You looked like a Stepford wife.”

  “You were supposed to be busy waltzing with Kitty Fairchild.”

  “But I was watching you. I always watched you, Jude. Around the neighborhood from the telescope in my tree house. You worried me. Your mother dead. Your father working all the time. Your grandmother off on her trips. Clementine struggling to raise you in addition to her own kids. The Commie Killers torturing you. I wanted to protect you, but I didn’t know how.”

  “But you did, Sandy. You were wonderful. You were like my older brother.”

  “When Molly came along, I was relieved to have reinforcements. But I was also jealous. Because I thought of myself as more than just your big brother.”

  Jude looked at him, surprised. “Why did you never tell me?”

  “What was the point? First there was Molly. Then that goon from the football team—Jerry. You two were like Beauty and the Beast.

  Jude smiled, remembering Jerry’s hard, muscled body and matching brain. But his brain was the organ that had interested her least.

  Beneath the doorway to her grandparents’ building, which was decorated with stone oak leaves, acorns, and squirrels, Sandy leaned over and kissed her cheek. Then he walked away fast.

  As Jude undressed and hung her clothes in the closet, she thought about the kiss, as awkward as their first attempt beneath the heating ducts in Molly’s basement during Spin the Bottle. Basically, Sandy had said he loved her. She loved him, too—as a brother, as a friend. Seeing him now was bringing it all back—his kindness and courage on her behalf. She felt at home with him as with no one else. Because of their shared childhood. Because they knew each other’s families. Because he’d known Molly. Because he’d known her when she was with Molly.

  She realized she was humming the Marschallin’s aria. “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.” She had held on tightly to Molly. She was still holding on tightly. But if you could take love lightly, was what you were feeling love? Or was it just indifference?

  Still, Molly was dead, and Jude was only twenty-three years old. Sometimes she envied the abandon with which her peers dated and dumped one another and hopped in and out of bed, foot soldiers for the sexual revolution. Maybe she and Sandy could go out some and see if anything more exotic developed. He’d said he didn’t have a girlfriend. And he was attractive, sweet, smart, fun. Besides, if Bradley arrived from Charlotte as threatened, it would be helpful to have a new boyfriend already in place to stave off his adoration. What he adored wasn’t her complicated and contradictory self, in any case. It was some ideal of purity that existed only within his addled antebellum brain.

  Climbing into her mother’s sleigh bed, she switched out the light.

  As she drifted off to sleep, Molly was there waiting for her, tubes snaking from her nostrils, bloodshot blue eyes flaring.

  “Forget about it, Jude!” she screamed as they raced their horses along the river. “You belong to me. Besides, Sandy is going to hurt you.”

  “Sandy wouldn’t hurt a flea. You know that.”

  “Everyone ends up hurting each other. It’s the law of the jungle.”

  “Nobody could ever hurt me as much as you did, Molly.”

  “It wasn’t on purpose.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  Molly lowered her head, hair writhing around her contused face like snarled blacksnakes. “So Sandy is your revenge for Ace Kilgore?”

  “No, Sandy is my chance for a normal life.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  “AS SMOKE IS DRIVEN AWAY, so drive them away,” the black-cassocked priest chanted in French.

  “As wax melts before the fire,” responded the congregation, “so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.”

  These were the same psalms, reflected Jude as she stood beside her grandmother before a carved oak pew, that had sustained the Huguenot guerrillas in the eighteenth century in their caves in the Cévennes as the Sun King’s troops chased them down like wild game.

  Behind the priest was an altar covered with a white cloth, on which sat two silver vases of white lilies and two white candles in plain silver holders. The wall in back of the altar was of opaque leaded glass. Right in the center was a Huguenot cross with a descending dove, identical to the one at her grandmother’s throat, in indigo, ruby, and gold stained glass.

  The tiny church with its polished oak beams was the epitome of austere good taste, as was the service. And the parishioners were dressed accordingly, as though for the funeral of a Fortune 500 executive. Over half a million of their ancestors had been tortured, butchered, and exiled simply because they didn’t want to clutter up their altars with crucifixes. This had been especially unfortunate for France because it left behind only those citizens whose idea of beauty was Versailles. Jude felt unworthy of such forebears. If someone had so much as mentioned thumbscrews to her, she’d have let them put anything they wanted on her altar.

  Around the walls near the ceiling hung the coats of arms of Huguenot families who had escaped the two centuries of slaughter to settle in New York City—Cresson, Robert, Runyon, Bayard, Jay, Maupin, Delancey, Perrin, three dozen others. The Sauvage coat of arms of Jude’s ancestors featured four golden manticores—human heads, lion bodies, and dragon tails—on a scarlet background. There was no motto. Jude decided it should have been: “When in doubt, get the hell out.”

  Jude pondered all the torment these people had endured to worship as they pleased, whereas she had always spent a lot of time trying to get out of going to church at all. Earlier that morning, she had wanted to stay in bed with her memories of Molly instead of crossing Central Park in the cold January air to listen to French that she couldn’t always understand. She had come along only from a wish to be amiable to her grandmother and to chat some more about her mother in the absence of her grandfather. Her grandmother had gradually become more forthcoming and now seemed even to enjoy reminiscing about her daughter, but Jude’s grandfather still preferred to suffer in silence.

  On the walk over, beneath trees iced silver in the night, Jude asked, “Did my mother used to come to this church with you?”

  “Sometimes. Especially when she was too young to refuse.”

  “Could she speak French?”

  “Enough to follow the service. Your grandfather and I spoke it at home with our Alsatian neighbors. And she had a tutor.”

  The pale winter sun hung suspended above the apartment buildings along Fifth Avenue like a blob of luminescent sugar cookie dough.

  “Frankly,” her grandmother admitted in a strained voice, “your mother was never very enthusiastic about her Huguenot heritage. All she wanted was to buy beautiful clothes and go out on dates. Of course, that’s what you’re supposed to want when you’re young. But she made her father very unhappy by insisting on being a model.”

  “Why?”

  “He thought it was tawdry. He wanted her to go to Barnard and become a classics professor. He’d groomed her for this all her life, helping her with her homework and hir
ing tutors. But that wasn’t who she was. In any case, he had also always encouraged her to look beautiful. He gave her all the money she wanted for clothes and makeup and hairdos. He even advised her himself on the art of flirtation and seduction.”

  Jude glanced at her as she fell silent. She sounded jealous of her daughter’s relationship to her husband. The idea of a daughter being more important to a father than his wife was a novel one for Jude.

  “Thank you for at least pretending to be interested in my Huguenots,” she added.

  Interrupting Jude’s protest, she said, “No, I know that this is something one gets interested in when one is older and is trying to figure out the point of it all. Young people are content to follow the dictates of their hormones.”

  “Don’t forget, I’m a history major,” said Jude. Although she didn’t say it, it also seemed possible that her hormones were less insistent than those of her peers. How else could she have endured Bradley’s regime for reestablishing her lost virginity?

  “So you are,” said her grandmother, who then proceeded to drill her on the ten Presidents of Huguenot descent, the famous writers, the Revolutionary War heros, the abolitionists and pioneers and suffragettes. And Jude had to admit that it was an impressive list. Apparently, there was nothing like terror to turn out high achievers.

  As Jude stood to sing the recessional, she counted up the generations of her mother’s family on her fingers as though saying a rosary. She realized that only two of her grandmother’s thirty-two thrice-great-grandparents had been Huguenot. Several had been Dutch, for instance. Yet these distant Huguenots were the grit around which her grandmother’s pearl of selfhood had coalesced. Similarly, only one of Jude’s father’s eight great-grandparents had been Cherokee. Yet to hear him tell it, you’d have thought he’d grown up in a tepee chipping arrowheads. They had both grabbed hold of only one thread of their DNA, clinging to it like a lifeline in a typhoon. Like Jude’s Tidewater grandmother, both mourned some lost golden age. They all lived in a dream, a mythical time long since past.

  But Jude knew she’d been doing the same thing, freeze-drying Molly in her memory. And she had decided it was time to recover from this crippling family malady. So she had accepted Sandy’s invitation to move into a room in his Riverside Drive apartment. Molly was livid. Every night for weeks, she’d performed her Medusa act. Until Jude had finally realized that, like the Wizard of Oz, Molly was all bluster.

  Walking home past the jammed skating rink, her grandmother’s gloved hand holding her arm, Jude said, “By the way, Grandma, I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time for me to move out.”

  Her grandmother looked up at her quickly. “I hope you’re not unhappy with us, my dear.”

  “Not at all. You’ve been wonderful to me. But I guess I’d like my own place. After all, I’m twenty-four years old.”

  They walked on in silence alongside the Sheep Meadow, the huge apartment buildings of Central Park West stacked before them like a child’s blocks under the sullen winter sky.

  “I know it must have been lonely for you. Your grandfather and I aren’t very much fun.”

  Jude smiled. “I feel very comfortable with you, Grandma. But I’m afraid I haven’t really gotten to know Grandpa yet.”

  All she’d succeeded in eliciting from him were the facts: His father and four brothers had fled Alsace in 1870 to avoid fighting in the German army against the French. Having owned a gristmill in a country town, they opened another mill when they reached upstate New York. Jude’s grandfather had parlayed his boyhood experience with the grain trade into a successful career on the commodities exchange.

  “Well,” said her grandmother as they passed some horse-drawn carriages waiting in front of the Tavern on the Green, “you may not realize it, but you remind us of your mother. Your grandfather was devastated when she moved south with your father. Frankly, I think he was half in love with her himself. He avoids you because it’s painful for him to remember her. I’m very sorry. I know that you need to hear whatever he could tell you about her right now. But he just can’t do it. I’m sure it would be wonderful for him if he could. It has been for me.”

  “Why do I remind him of her?” Jude asked. “Do I look like her?”

  “You’re taller, of course, but your faces are similar. Though you have your father’s eyes. Her eyes were blue. I’d say you’re a blend of the two.”

  Jude smiled. Her father had always denied any resemblance. “Why doesn’t Grandpa like my father?”

  Her face clouded. “It’s not that he doesn’t like him. We just didn’t consider him appropriate for your mother.”

  “Why not?”

  She laughed uneasily. “Well, let’s just say that we were snobs. Your father was from Appalachia. He was part Cherokee. We wished him well, but we didn’t want him in our family. I’m ashamed to admit that your grandfather used to refer to him as ‘the hillbilly. ’”

  Jude smiled, thinking about the reality of her father’s life—his mother’s huge white house and voyages around the world, his medical degree from Cornell. L’il Abner he was not.

  “Also, your father was absolutely relentless in his pursuit of your mother, practically camping out on our doorstep and trailing her around the city whenever she went out. Your grandfather felt that he didn’t leave your mother any choice in the matter. After she married him, your grandfather wouldn’t have anything to do with her, although I continued to see her while they were still living in New York and to write her in Tennessee.

  “But once you were born, your grandfather agreed to visit on our way to Florida. When your father went to France during the war, your grandfather invited your mother to move back home with you until his return. But your mother refused, which estranged them once again. And then she died, and it was too late for another reconciliation. It’s a sad and silly story. We were wrong. After all, we had struggled similarly with our own parents because I was Protestant and your grandfather was Catholic. Every generation seems to fight its own battles and then lapse into complacent bigotry.” She sighed. “By the way, have you talked to your father about living alone?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of living alone. There’s an extra room in my friend Sandy’s apartment. It’s closer to Columbia, too.”

  “You want to live with a man?” Her hand tightened on Jude’s arm.

  “It’s one of those huge old places on Riverside Drive. He has four other roommates. One is a woman. Dad says since it’s Sandy, it’s okay. I’ve known him since we were babies. He’s like my brother.”

  For the past several months, she’d seen a lot of Sandy. There seemed nothing they couldn’t say to each other. Often they lay like a long-married couple on his mattress on the floor, watching old movies on television in their sock feet. Or else he studied opera scores while she marked up her history texts with yellow Magic Marker. Occasionally, they fell asleep side by side, but Jude always had to dash out into the night to take a taxi back to her grandparents so they wouldn’t worry. If her room was just down the hall, life would be much simpler.

  As Jude hung their coats in the hall closet, her grandmother said, “Before you leave, though, Jude, I want to give you something.” She vanished into the dining room, returning with a flask about a foot high that had lion-head handles. On it was painted a scene in misty blues and golds of Atalanta, the unvanquished, stooping to pick up a golden ball just dropped by her competitor Melanion. He was sprinting past her, backed by trees and mountains. A hovering cherub, holding the victor’s laurel wreath, appeared to be trying to persuade Atalanta not to be duped by these silly golden balls into losing her first race.

  “I gave this to your mother,” her grandmother said, handing it carefully to Jude, “but she never liked it. She didn’t even take it to Tennessee. It was made by one of our Huguenot ancestors in Nevers, just before they fled France at the end of the seventeenth century. It’s almost a museum piece, so take good care of it. It was given to me by my grandmother. It seems to be true that in
terest in these things alternates generations.”

  “I love it, Grandma. Thank you.”

  “Thank you, as I said, my dear, for being interested. I had thought my poor Huguenots would end with me and be forgotten. The dead depend on the living to carry on their memory.”

  “So I gather,” said Jude a bit grimly.

  Her grandfather came out of his study and looked down from the balcony. “What’s going on?”

  “Jude is leaving us, I’m afraid, dear.”

  “So soon? Where to?” Jude was pleased to note that he sounded distressed.

  “To a room in her friend Sandy’s apartment.”

  “Ah, a young man. Then I know there is nothing I can say to persuade her to stay.”

  “No.”

  Jude felt strange being discussed in the third person, as though she’d already left. “But I’ll be only twenty blocks away, Grandpa. I’ll stop by all the time. You’ll never get rid of me.” She felt guilty, however, as though she’d relentlessly extracted from them what she needed and was now moving on.

  “I hope not,” her grandfather replied in a fatigued voice. He turned around and shuffled back toward his study, shoulders bowed, an unhappy old man who had never recovered from losing the daughter he’d loved too much. This was the dark side to graveyard love. The Marschallin might be right after all: Maybe the proper conduct of life required the ability to let go of love when the time came.

  JUDE SAT IN HER CHAIR behind the curtains, watching Samson, draped in chains, strangle a snotty Philistine prince in front of a pagan temple while a golden idol spewed flames in the background. As Delilah awaited Samson in her bedchamber, Jude sneaked over to Sandy at his switchboard, resting her hand on his shoulder while he turned the pages of his score and spoke quietly into his mouthpiece.

  Samson finally arrived, wearing a leather tunic that revealed his hairy barrel chest and tree-trunk legs.

  Delilah began weaving around him in a transparent peignoir, singing in French, “…my heart opens to your voice as a flower to the dawn…. Respond to my tenderness; fill me with ecstasy….”