The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Sally returned home. Jed seemed angry or something. The following day she received in the mail a photo of the T-Bird, with the license plate that read “STUD,” parked in front of a house trailer with a sign on it that read “TENDER TOUCH MASSAGE PARLOR.” It was a Newland postmark. Her address on the envelope had been typed, and there was no return address. She wondered if Jed was responsible for this. Trying to make her jealous or something. Or maybe one of the other Mrs. Tennessee contestants in the area? Well, it was just a horrible spiteful thing to do, was all.

  Two days later Jed was supposed to be managing Joey in Peewee Boxing at the new mall. But he didn’t come home for supper. Joey cried. Sally couldn’t understand it. It wasn’t like Jed to disappoint the children. Toward midnight the highway patrol phoned to tell her Jed was dead in a car wreck with Betty Osborne in front of the Lazy Daze Motel.

  The Creech’s Funeral Home limousine pulled up to the curb in front of her parents’ house. Her father had to ride downtown with them to pick up his own car, but they were letting her off so she could rest up before neighbors and relatives started arriving to comfort her. But it was no use. There was no such thing as a widowed Mrs. Tennessee.

  She climbed out of the car and arranged her veil. On the sidewalk she saw the kids, and Raymond in his overalls. And Emily in her suit. And a tall mean-looking Negro man with wild frizzy hair and a black leather jacket, a child holding each hand. Sally saw herself through their eyes: Jed had left behind only a totaled T-Bird and an inboard he still owed money on. Here she’d quit her career for him, and where was he? Where was the only man she’d ever loved? Where was her best friend since childhood? Dead on the highway with another woman. While his own wife waited patiently and lovingly for him to come home. Every night she’d crawl into that big cold empty bed by herself.

  As she walked toward the group on the sidewalk, she sniffed and dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. She comforted herself with the thought that in a few weeks she’d call the reporter at the News who’d written “Sally Tatro at Home” and offer him an exclusive interview. He could call it something like “Portrait of a Bereaved Widow.”

  Part Five

  The

  Castle Tree

  Emily and Raymond, Matt and Joey and Laura were standing on the Princes’ sidewalk as a car pulled up to the curb. A black man in a short leather jacket with a lot of flaps and zippers and snaps got out, along with two children.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured as he approached. “I come for Grandmaw’s tree and all. But I reckon I timed it bad.”

  “Hi, Donny,” said Emily. “How are things?”

  Emily, then Raymond, extended hands to Donny, who shook them quickly.

  “Didn’t hardly recognize you,” Donny murmured to Emily. He turned to Raymond. “Heard about Jed. I’m real sorry.”

  “Yeah, it’s a big shock. These two is his kids.”

  “Used to know your daddy,” he said to the children. “He was a real fine man.” Joey and Laura stared at his bushy head with wonder.

  “How’s Ruby?” asked Emily.

  “She just fine.”

  Another limousine arrived at the curb. Sally stepped out, dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, and arranged her veil. As she walked up to them, she said in a wan voice, “Oh, how nice to see you, Donny. I didn’t recognize you at first.”

  “Real sorry about Jed.”

  “Thank you.” She sighed. “Me too, Donny. Me too.”

  As they discussed Christmas, the weather, each other’s families in the quiet polite manner they’d been trained in and had never quite managed to shed, they eyed each other. The children clung to their parents’ hands and stared at each other, half-hidden by coat sleeves. Eventually Joey stuck out his tongue at Matt. Then Nicole offered Laura a stick of Beech-Nut.

  Suddenly Joey yelled, “Last one to the top of that tree’s an old rotten egg! Everyone included!” He shot across the yard, the others chasing after him, Isaac bringing up the rear.

  The adults watched the straggly line of five stumbling children weave across the frost-stiffened grass of the neighboring yard toward the Castle Tree. A new ranch house sat behind the bare tree, in what had been Mr. Fulton’s side field. The children’s shrieks of laughter filled the still winter afternoon. Their frosty breath puffed up like Indian smoke signals. The small bodies, dark splotches against the overcast sky, began their ascent of the skeletal branches.

  “Be careful!” Emily called. “Don’t climb too fast, or you’ll fall!”

  “Nicole, watch out for Isaac!” yelled Donny.

  No one in the tree listened, as they dragged themselves from branch to branch.

  Finally assembled like crows in the branches, the children began cawing down at the adults, “Ha, ha! Yall four is rotten eggs! Rotten eggs! Rotten eggs!”

  The adults glanced at each other with faint smiles. Emily said to Donny, “Can you come in?”

  “Naw, I got to get on back home. Grandmaw’s waiting on us. But thanks.”

  “I’ll get Ruby’s stuff.” She went into the house.

  Sally asked Raymond, “Do you think it’s all right for them to be doing that at a time like this?”

  Raymond shrugged. “They’re just kids. Don’t have no idea what’s going on. Let them have some fun if they can.”

  “But what’ll the neighbors think?”

  “Fuck the neighbors.”

  Donny gave a startled guffaw.

  Emily emerged, completely hidden behind a small cedar tree on a stand and a grocery bag of gifts. She set down the tree, handed Donny the bag, and reached in her suit coat for an envelope. Handing him the envelope, she blushed and laughed. “What can I say?”

  Donny smiled. “Ain’t nothing to say.”

  “About what?” inquired Sally.

  The children lost interest in tormenting their parents and began gazing around them through the bare twisted branches at the town, spread out below them like a toy village.

  “Yonder’s my house,” pointed Joey.

  “There’s Grandmaw’s,” said Nicole.

  “Probably New York is over there,” announced Matt, gesturing to the mountain ranges that heaved and rippled off into North Carolina. “New York’s better than here.”

  “Ain’t neither,” snarled Joey.

  “Is so.”

  “Ain’t.”

  “Is so.”

  “What’s a-b-s-c-e-s-s mean?” asked Laura, who was studying the word carved into the limb beside her.

  “Let me see,” commanded Joey, scrambling on to the Throne and studying the footrest of the Couch. He ran his fingers over the swollen cuts in the bark. “Says absent,” he announced. “Like when you stay home from school.” The others nodded.

  “Look at them,” said Matt, nodding disdainfully at the landbound adults. “Couldn’t climb up here to save their lives.”

  “Big old clumsy things,” agreed Nicole.

  “Yeah,” said Joey, “we could sit up here all week, and they couldn’t do nothing about it!”

  They shouted with laughter.

  The adults looked up. “What’s so funny?” Raymond called.

  “Yall look like toy soldiers!” yelled Joey.

  “Can’t catch us, Daddy!” taunted Isaac.

  Abruptly the sun broke through the racing clouds. Shafts of sunlight pierced the bare tree. Whispers and giggles floated down from the topmost branches.

  Raymond murmured, “It’s a hell of a way to run a world, ain’t it?”

  “Gon be different for them,” announced Donny, nodding his bushy head toward the tree.

  “Damn right,” snarled Emily.

  “Lots of luck,” muttered Raymond.

  “What is?” asked Sally.

  A gust of wind swirled across the yard. The long twisted branches of the tree swayed and beckoned like fingers on the outstretched hand of a wise old witch.

  Five Minutes in Heaven

  For Jody,

  Scout,

 
and Dill

  The only victory in love is flight.

  —NAPOLEON

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  PART ONE MOLLY

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  PART TWO SANDY

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  PART THREE ANNA

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  PART FOUR JUDE

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A Biography of Lisa Alther

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER

  1

  TWO MEN LIFTED A GOAT, hooves wrapped with rope, from the trunk of a blue sedan. As they carried him across the tiled courtyard below, his bearded mouth fell open and he began to pant, eyes rolling wildly.

  The French would eat anything that couldn’t outrun them, Jude reflected, recalling the weekend market, on rue Mouffetard, near her apartment during her junior year abroad from Vanderbilt. It had featured rows of glistening kidneys, livers, hearts, and tongues in graduated sizes. An entire aviary of birds had hung by their wrung necks, feathered wings limp by their sides. Rabbits still bearing fur had been slit down their bellies and laid open for inspection. But as Simon once said of his fellow Englishmen, no nation that loves animals will ever have a great cuisine.

  Jude lit a cigarette and sank into a cushioned wicker chair in the sunlight coming through the glass doors of her sixth-floor walk-up. Still, Paris had a lot going for it. For one thing, it wasn’t New York. And having spent the past several months spooning crushed Popsicles into Anna’s mouth in her hospital bed at the Roosevelt, she welcomed the change.

  It had all begun that night on Simon’s deck near Provincetown when the wind shifted to the north, swirling the sand and frothing the surf. Anna had just died. Jude had spent the afternoon pacing the beach, studying how the hue of the sea altered in response to the sky, just as Anna’s eyes had altered according to her moods and her surroundings.

  When Jude got tired of walking, she scrambled up a dune, scooped out a hollow in the sand, and lay facedown, fitting her frame into its yielding contours as though it were Anna’s body. She lay like that for several hours, eyes shut, hands beneath her thighs, listening to the breakers crash, and the foam hiss on the damp sand, and the seagulls shriek, and the dune grasses clash like a knife fight. And remembering the time she and Anna sneaked away from a conference in Boston to race horses down the beach, pounding through the surf, then sliding off their backs to watch from atop a dune as gleaming black whales dove and spouted against the far horizon.

  As the sky turned to gore, she wandered home to Simon’s tactful chatter and fortifying supper of roast chicken and mashed potatoes. They spread the dishes across the outside table and sat facing the darkening sea. As the tepid night air stirred Simon’s black curls, they reminisced about Sandy and his operas, Anna and her poems, the delights of love, and the longing that won’t quit when it’s taken away.

  Then Jasmine arrived, wearing a turban and gold ear hoops, en route to Paris. She strode across the deck, trailed by three young assistants, two women and a man, each dressed in gleaming white trousers and Mondrian tops, as though about to board a yacht at Cannes. Jasmine was wearing a batik lavalava that made her resemble one of the exquisitely petite stewardesses on Singapore Airlines during Jude’s interminable flight to Australia a few months earlier to speak on a panel about feminist editing at the Adelaide Festival.

  While Jude subdued her urge to grab a beach towel from the railing and cover up her dingy gray gym shorts and Whale Watch T-shirt, Simon and Jasmine pressed alternate cheeks several times and gazed into each other’s eyes as though they had only ten minutes left to live. Jasmine’s father had fought with the French Resistance, and Simon’s father had been his liaison officer at British intelligence. After the war, their families had visited back and forth across the Channel, and now Simon and Jasmine sold each other translation rights to their respective firms’ books. Jude had first met Jasmine with Simon at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Since then, she’d run into her at the American Booksellers Association in Atlanta and the Feminist Book Fair in London and had spoken on a panel with her in Adelaide. She admired Jasmine’s accessories, to say nothing of her intelligence and her élan.

  Everyone sat down around Simon’s glass-topped table to drink the Veuve Clicquot Jasmine had brought and to nibble Godiva chocolates. Alternating between Jasmine’s basic English and Jude’s and Simon’s basic French, they discussed the Frenchwoman’s gift for accessorizing, whether it was innate or acquired. Jude described her own bafflement when faced with a scarf. How did Jasmine know what size to pick for which location? Did French mothers give their daughters knot-tying lessons? And what about shoes? Jude had never seen Jasmine wear the same pair twice. Either their color matched or complemented her clothing, or they had some arresting feature like silver heels or straps that crisscrossed her ankles. At that moment, she was wearing golden stack-heeled sandals with thongs between the toes.

  “Look at me,” demanded Jude, holding up her sandy bare feet with their unpainted toenails. “I’m even underdressed tonight.”

  “But my dear Jude,” said Jasmine, watching her with dark liquid eyes like melted chocolate chips, “you are famous for that. It is your trademark.”

  Jude blinked. “It is?” Her goal had always been to dress so appropriately as to pass unnoticed.

  “Yes, one admires so deeply your indifference to fashion.” Jasmine’s gaze appeared ingenuous, but her eyes wrinkled slightly at the corners with a certain ironic amusement.

  Simon was struggling to hide a smile.

  “Thank you,” said Jude uncertainly.

  The soft sea breeze had mounted to a moaning gale, and the beach towels on the railing were whipping and snapping like flags in a windstorm. They moved inside. As Simon built a fire in his fieldstone fireplace, Jude showed the others through the house, with its walls of glass looking out on the dunes and its giant hand-hewn beams from an old barn in Vermont. The guests seemed a bit embarrassed as they peered into Simon’s bathroom with its giant whirlpool tub, reminding Jude that house tours were an American phenomenon.

  As Jasmine and her entourage were about to depart in a fog of Eau de Quelquechose for their guest house in Provincetown, she rested her magenta fingertips on Jude’s forearm and offered her a job in Paris picking foreign fiction for translation. Jude was too bewildered to reply.

  “So what do you think about my going to Paris?” Jude asked Simon as they propped their feet up on the fireplace ledge to commence a postmortem. The orange flames were dancing in Simon’s neon-green eyes, converting the irises into small flaring kaleidoscopes.

  “Go, Jude,” said Simon as he munched a mousse-filled chocolate seashell. “Simon says go. But leave your corpse collection at home. Life is for the living.”

  This seemed generous of him, since Jude had been living with him and working for him in Manhattan for over a decade. But maybe he was as sick of her grief over Anna as she was.

  “What was that nasty crack concerning my wardrobe all about?” she asked.

  Simon smiled. “It means she likes you.”

  Jude gave an astonished laugh.

  “If people bore her, she ignores them. When they intrigue her, she provokes them. Like a cat toying with a mouse.”

  “Charming. And exactly why is it you think I should work for her?”

  “A change of venue would do you good. Some new faces and new neuroses might take your mind off the old ones.”

  IN ANY CASE, here she was now, trapped in the middle of a Kodachrome postcard, the city spread out below her from the dark high-rises of La Défense to the d
omed Panthéon, the Seine snaking through the center, side-winding past the feet of the Eiffel Tower. Despite her year here during college, she’d never before seen this astonishing view, having passed her days in dusty classrooms on the Left Bank listening to lectures on European history and continental philosophy, and her nights in movie theaters working on her fluency.

  In his letters to her mother during the war, which Jude had perused as a child, her father had described seeing this panorama from the square before Sacré Coeur. He had also described being driven by his sergeant through the streets of Pigalle, at the base of the butte where Jude now sat. He had been in the grip of pneumonia, lost and feverish and searching for a hospital. Gaunt women and children clamored around the jeep when his driver stopped to ask for directions. A young woman bared her breast and held it out to them in the icy wind. An urchin perched on the running board and began to scrub their combat boots with a filthy rag. Jude’s father handed them all his francs and cigarettes before desperately speeding away.

  The sun was hot. Sweat popping out at her hairline, Jude stubbed out her cigarette and threw open the glass doors, shivering in the breeze that was stirring the creamy chestnut blossoms below. She plopped back down in her chair.

  On the horizon, the Smokies formed a rolling blue rim notched with knobs like the knuckles on a fist. Down in the valley, the lazy ocher river drifted toward the mountains, carrying a leafy poplar branch on which perched five cawing crows. Wisps of cloud were floating across the summer sky, furling like breaking waves. Gradually, they assembled themselves into Molly’s features, bits of cerulean becoming her irises. She said in her voice that had always been too husky for such a small person, “You may think I’m dead, Jude, but I’m not.

  Jude jerked alert. Molly’s features were still there, projected against the silver-blue haze above the Bois de Boulogne. Apparently, Jude couldn’t escape her, even by crossing the ocean two decades later.