The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Southern men were usually off and running with their autobiographies by now. Charm Class hadn’t prepared Jude for the English. Fortunately, Sandy arrived with the tea. “Ah, Simon. I see you’ve met Jude.”

  “Yes. She’s been interviewing me. The way you Americans always do.”

  Jude glanced at him. She was merely trying to be polite.

  Sandy looked at him quizzically while setting the tea tray on a low table before the electric heater. “I’ll be mother, shall I?” he said, attempting a British accent. He sat down, picked up a crockery pitcher, and splashed milk into each mug.

  “So, Jude, why are you in New York?” Simon looked up from his cap with a sudden seizure of manners.

  “I’m a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia. I just got my master’s from Vanderbilt.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “History.”

  “Where are you living?”

  “On West Sixty-Seventh Street, near Central Park. With my grandparents—my mother’s parents.”

  Sandy handed them each a mug, then held out a jar of honey while Jude spooned some into her tea.

  “How do you like it?”

  “Fine, so far. But I’ve just arrived.”

  Simon tossed down his tea and stood up. “I’ll leave you two to reminisce over steamy nights in the slave quarters. I’ve got to change and go out. Lovely to meet you, Jude.”

  They watched him stride on long legs across the ratty maroon carpet, which smelled of mold.

  “It’s good to see you again, Sandy,” said Jude as Simon vanished down the dark hallway. “Growing up appears to agree with you.”

  “And with you. Did you drive all the Sig Eps at Vandy to despair?”

  Jude smiled. “I didn’t date much, actually.”

  “Twenty-three and never been kissed?”

  “As near as makes no difference.”

  After Molly’s death, Jude had refused even to talk to Jerry Crawford for several months, hanging up each time he phoned and sidestepping him in the corridors at school. He reminded her too much of his best friend, Ace Kilgore. Maybe Ace hadn’t killed Molly with his own hands, but he had certainly played a role in her death, like some evil incubus.

  Finally, Jude agreed to go to the movies with Jerry one night, and on her doorstep afterward, he insisted on reclaiming the yardage he’d already gained, running his hands under her sweater and pushing his tongue through her lips. She realized she’d actually missed him, especially the animal comfort of a warm body against her own. She relaxed against his chest and tentatively caressed with her fingertips the ridges of muscle that formed the valley down his spine.

  That night, she first dreamed of Molly—skull scalped and stitched with catgut, tubes snaking from her nostrils, face purple like a smashed plum. “Listen to me, Jude,” she insisted. “Don’t let this happen to you.” Ever since, whenever Jude had felt stirrings of desire for someone, Molly had appeared in this Medusa mode, mouthing warnings.

  At Vanderbilt, Jude had been pinned for three years to a KA named Bradley Caldwell, a fair-haired Ashley Wilkes type whose parents owned an antebellum mansion in Natchez that was always included on the spring garden-club tours. When Jude visited, they housed her in a remodeled slave cabin. Bradley always treated her with a respect bordering on reverence, which even Molly didn’t seem to find alarming. He wanted to marry a virgin, and he wanted that virgin to be Jude. So their definition of virginity had become as complex as a Catholic priest’s definition of celibacy.

  But the strain of being Bradley’s beloved had finally become too great. Jude had called the whole thing off and caught the next train to New York. Bradley, however, who was working at a bank in Charlotte, was currently threatening to arrange a transfer to New York.

  “They must be blind, is all I can say,” said Sandy, sipping his tea.

  “Thank you, Sandy. You may have rejected the South, but you’re stuck with the gallantry.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll find you a gallant Yankee.”

  “Isn’t that an oxymoron? Everyone seems so rushed and rude up here.”

  “Oh, there are a few gallants left. But they’re mostly from Tennessee. Speaking of gallant young men, whatever happened to Ace Kilgore?”

  “He joined the marines. He’s in Vietnam right now.”

  “So he finally gets to kill some Commies. Apparently, there is a God.”

  “Jerry Crawford is in his platoon. They’re fighting side by side, like Achilles and Patroclus.”

  Sandy grinned.

  “Did you hear that Jerry married Noreen after high school? She’s head of the Welcome Wagon now.”

  Sandy started laughing.

  The outside door hurtled open again, and a woman in knee-high mahogany boots with spike heels clattered into the room like a show horse. Her jeans were so tight that she must have needed a shoehorn to fit them over her buttocks. Her hennaed hair was shaved on one side of her head and chin length on the other.

  “Mona, meet Jude,” said Sandy, jumping to his feet like a good southern boy.

  “Enchanted,” she said distractedly, extending to Jude a clammy hand with sharp plum nails before vanishing down the hallway.

  “Who’s Mona?” asked Jude as Sandy sank back into his chair.

  “One of my roommates. She does makeup at the Met.”

  “Tell me about the others.”

  “Simon, you met. Then there’s Earl, who’s a dancer from Cincinnati. And Tony, who’s a set carpenter at the Met.”

  “Do you all eat meals together?”

  “Hardly ever. Everyone’s so busy and on different schedules. But sometimes we have group parties or holiday feasts. It’s a nice mix of independence and companionship. Besides, it’s all any of us can afford right now. How’s your dad, by the way?”

  “He’s fine. After you left, my grandmother died of a heart attack—on a cruise of the South Sea Islands. They had to store her in the freezer until they reached land.”

  “My mother told me. I’m really sorry. She was a great lady.”

  “Thanks.” They sat in silence for a moment, remembering the elegant old woman in her silk suits and spike heels, with her own unique version of the War Between the States, in which the South lost not because it had no gunpowder factories at secession but because the Yankees were not true gentlemen. Jude finally owned her Francis I silverware and her graduated pink pearls, but it definitely wasn’t a fair swap.

  “So we moved into her house,” Jude said. “Dad and Audrey have four children now.”

  “That must be weird for you.”

  “He’s happy, so I’m glad for him.”

  “It’s your old friend Sandy here, Jude. You don’t have to be so careful.” He set his teacup on the tray and lay back in his chair with his legs extended.

  “Well, I guess I did resent Audrey’s trying to take my mother’s place. But since Dad had her, it was easier on me when I left for Vanderbilt. What about you, Sandy?”

  “What about me?” He clasped his hands behind his curly blond head, elbows out.

  “What do you do for fun around here? Do you have a girlfriend, for example?”

  He blushed just as he used to as a boy, crimson rising like the gauge on a thermometer from his throat, up his freckled face, and across his forehead. It was nice to know some things never changed.

  “I’m too busy working.”

  “At the Met?”

  He nodded. “I’m a stage manager. I know that sounds like a big deal, but there are dozens of us.”

  “How did you get from astrophysics at RPI to opera?”

  “Physics was too pure for me. I like some meat on my bones.”

  “Were your parents upset when you dropped out of RPI?”

  “Not really. You know they dote on me. Besides, the opera is an honorable institution.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been.” She drained the last of her tea, which had cooled to lukewarm and was thick and sweet with honey.

  �
�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 wolves 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….…