Five Minutes in Heaven (16 page)

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.

J
UDE 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.

W
AITING 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.

S
ANDY 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.