The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  “…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, T-shirts 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 T-shirts 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.

  “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 hiring 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.