Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  Molly’s mother was holding Jude’s hand and crying softly. Molly’s father was pacing the room. Jude was on an ice floe at the South Pole, floating silently on a frozen silver sea.

  Ace came out on crutches, explaining to his mother, “So I tried to hold on to her. I tried to pull her back in. I had her around the waist. But then we were upside down and I lost her.…” He looked at Jude and stopped talking. She looked back at him. He swung out the door between his parents.

  Hours later, Molly was rolled out on a stretcher. Her dark, wavy hair had been shaved off, and careful catgut stitches snaked across her skull like lacing on a softball. Her face was black and purple. One arm was in a cast. Plastic tubing from her nose and hand attached to bags of liquid on a rack being pushed by a nurse.

  Jude’s father appeared in green scrub clothes stained with Molly’s blood.

  “Is she going to be okay?” asked Jude. Adults died, not kids.

  “I’ve done everything I can.” But his maroon eyes were squinty, as though seeking refuge in the caverns formed by his high cheekbones.

  Jude, her father, and the Elkinses followed the stretcher to a small room and watched orderlies transfer the body to a narrow white bed. Jude’s father routinely saved lives, or so people all over town told her. He’d save Molly.

  “Go home and have a rest,” said Molly’s mother, stroking Molly’s inert arm.

  “Good idea,” said Jude’s father. “I’m beat. We’ll be back soon.”

  While her father showered and changed, Jude put some things into a paper bag—Mademoiselle and Seventeen to read to Molly once she was awake; nail polish so she could paint Molly’s nails, which had gotten chipped during the wreck; a piece of Mrs. Starnes’s orange-blossom cake, Molly’s favorite, wrapped in foil.

  Leaving the house to wait for her father in the car, Jude discovered Sidney sitting by the back door. She squatted down and patted him. Looking up, she saw Molly standing under the mulberry tree by the garage.

  “Oh, you’re back already?” said Jude, standing up. Sidney stood up, too, staring at Molly and whimpering.

  As Jude walked toward her, she realized it wasn’t Molly after all. It was just a shadow cast by the moon through the mulberry branches. But Sidney was still staring at the shadow, trembling all over.

  WHEN JUDE AND HER father got back to the hospital, Molly was dead.

  JUDE REFUSED TO GO to the funeral. She didn’t want to hear Noreen keening by the grave as though over a lost football game. And she didn’t want to meet Ace Kilgore’s gaze. She lay on her bed eating raspberry sherbet and wondering if she’d gone on that retreat whether Molly would be lying beside her right now. Molly had once saved her from the Commie Killers, but she had not saved Molly.

  She heard Sidney howling outside. Inviting him in, she let him lie on her bed and listlessly lick sherbet from her spoon.

  She was gazing across a vast, empty snowfìeld that glistened under a merciless sun. She looked into the electric blue overhead for a cloud to carry her mother, but the sky was empty.

  Out the window, Sandy and her father, dressed in suits and ties, were returning from the cemetery alongside Aunt Audrey, who was carrying Danny zipped into a padded powder-blue snowsuit. Their breath was frosty. Her father came into the house and up to her room. He sat down on the bed and patted Sidney.

  “I don’t know what to say, Jude. Just that I know how awful you feel right now. The years roll by and life goes on and new people come along. But some people can never ever be replaced.”

  Jude kept eating her sherbet. If he had just died in the war in France, her mother would still be alive. Besides, he was a quack. He hadn’t saved Molly.

  Sometime later, Sandy appeared in her doorway, still dressed in his suit and tie. “I’m really sorry, Jude.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’ll always have your memories of Molly. No one can ever take those away.”

  Jude looked at him. “That may be all I ever had.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you think dreams are real?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve read they’re wish fulfillment. Or just random firings of neurons at rest.”

  “I thought Molly and I loved each other, but maybe I made the whole thing up.”

  “No, Jude. Molly loved you.”

  “Then why did she stop?”

  “She didn’t stop. But I think she got scared.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “Scared of being different. Scared of losing herself in you. Molly wasn’t as strong as you are.”

  Jude frowned. It didn’t make sense. Molly was older. She had usually been the leader. And Jude didn’t feel strong. She felt like crawling under her bed and never coming out.

  He patted her awkwardly on the shoulder, and when she thought to look up again, he was gone.

  That night she went down to her father’s office and found an Ace bandage. Removing her shirt and bra, she bound her new breasts so tightly that they ached. Then she let Sidney outside to pee and got some more raspberry sherbet.

  When Clementine arrived the next morning, Jude and Sidney were lying on her bed surrounded by sticky bowls of melted sherbet, even though it was a school day.

  “Sugar, I’m just so sorry,” said Clementine.

  “If Molly and I have a graveyard love, I guess we’re halfway home,” said Jude.

  “You’ll feel better by and by, I promise you.”

  Clementine stroked her back. Feeling the Ace bandage, she unbuttoned Jude’s shirt and looked down at her tightly wrapped chest and the angry chafed flesh around the edges. “What you done to yourself, Miss Judith?”

  “I don’t want to be a woman,” she said. “You become a woman, you love a man, and it destroys you.”

  “O Sweet Jesus, my poor lost lamb,” murmured Clementine, taking Jude into her arms, rocking her and humming a gospel tune about Christ gathering His flock into the fold at twilight.

  JUDE RODE HER BIKE into town. With her allowance, she bought a red-clay pot of white tulips. Holding it in one arm, she pedaled past her grandmother’s huge white house. She’d just received a card from the Great Wall saying: “The Chinese are so polite and gracious, very much like Virginians.”

  Entering the cemetery, Jude walked over to the hillock of fresh clay that now encased Molly’s bruised and broken body. As she set the clay pot among the withering wreaths from the service, Jude realized that to do anything at all, even to buy these flimsy flowers that would shrivel in the evening chill, was unnecessary. She and Molly had been dead to each other for nearly a year now.

  “Best friend. Buddy of mine. Pal of pals,” she murmured to the red-clay mound before turning away to ride back home, down the tunnel of arcing elms whose leprous limbs were coated with hoarfrost.

  PART TWO

  SANDY

  CHAPTER

  8

  “OH, MY,” said Sandy as he opened the door of his Riverside Drive apartment and discovered Jude in her cream blazer, navy-blue A-line skirt, and tassled loafers. “A coed.” He smiled whimsically. “Fancy that.”

  “And a hippie,” said Jude, studying his octagonal granny glasses, bleached overalls, and the strawberry blond hair that curled like maple shavings around his shirt collar.

  The focal point of the living room being an electric heater, they sat down before its orange glow in decrepit Danish-modern armchairs whose cushions were extruding foam. Not having seen each other for eight years, they had little to talk about except a past Sandy had repudiated, having refused to return home since leaving for college. They glanced at each other uneasily.

  “Tea!” said Sandy. “Whenever the English are at a loss for words, they make tea. I’ll make us some tea, shall I?”

  “We’re not British.”

  “No, but I worked at the National Opera in London when I was draft dodging, so I learned the drill.”

  As Sandy filled a kettle in the tiny kitchen and took tea bags from a canister on the counter, Jude stu
died his back. He’d filled out since high school, like a colt turning into a horse. He had a convex chest now and arms braided with muscles. The rumor around town was that, after dropping out of RPI, he’d been classified 4-F because of asthma. Most young men Jude had known at Vanderbilt were in ROTC, awaiting their chance to defend democracy in the Delta. When it came to fight or flight, Jude’s ancestors had usually picked the latter, so her sympathies were with Sandy. If any one of her forebears had died a hero on some distant battlefield, disrupting the evolving chain of DNA, she wouldn’t have been here.

  Where would she have been instead? she wondered as she stood up and strolled across the battered parquet floor to peer out one window into an air shaft, then out another to the murky Hudson with the roller coaster of Palisades Amusement Park scalloping the far shore. A hallway with several doors off it led from the living room, the walls of which were papered with colorful posters announcing operas at the Met—FIDELIO and DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER and THE LOVE FOR THREE ORANGES.

  The door to the outside hallway opened, and in walked a lanky young man with black curls and a drooping mustache. He wore a cracked, brown leather motorcycle jacket with a fur collar and a navy-blue Greek fisherman’s cap. Studying Jude with the greenest eyes she’d ever seen outside of the cat kingdom, he said in a British accent, “Sandy’s mate from childhood, I presume?”

  “That’s right. Jude.”

  “I’m Simon. One of Sandy’s roommates.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Four of us at the moment, I believe.” He finally smiled, as though from duty. “Please. Make yourself comfortable, if that’s possible in these collapsing chairs.”

  Both sat. Jude fiddled with a button on her blazer. Simon inspected the blue braid on the cap in his hands. Finally Jude asked, “How do you know Sandy?”

  “We met at a bar in London.”

  “You’re English?” The kettle in the kitchen began to whistle like Sandy’s father’s tannery back home at high noon.

  “Yes.”

  “From London?” Yes.

  “Have you been in the U.S. long?” A year.

  “What’s your job?”

  “I’m a book editor.”

  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.