Philosophy Made Simple

by Robert Hellenga

  Rudy nodded. “One more drink,” he said. “The penúltimo trago.”

  But Medardo shook his head. He and his cousin were on their way to Reynosa for a cultural Friday

  The form for the will was, in fact, the same one Rudy’d gotten for Helen when she’d decided to make out her will. He’d been working on the side porch, tearing up the flooring so he could replace the sagging joists. It was 1960. Helen had less than a month left to live and had been making some tapes. Rudy played the guitar and did a little recording himself on an Ampex portable stereo recorder with a built-in amplifier, and he’d bought a punch-in/out switch so that Helen could start and stop the recorder with a click of a button. When he took a break and brought her a cup of tea, she told him she wanted to make out her will. She’d been recording, but she stopped when he came in. The microphones on their booms hovered over the bed like hummingbirds. She held the punch-in/out switch in her hand. She’d just finished a tape. Rudy held the iced tea for her so she could drink it through a straw, and then he put the tape in a box and threaded a new one in the tape recorder.

  “You shouldn’t be working so hard in this wet weather,” she said. “This old house, it’s like it’s in motion. Every year you tear part of it down and rebuild it. Like Grandfather’s hammer. The head’s been replaced, and the handles been replaced, but it’s still the same hammer. And it’s still the same house. It’s like an enduring form, a center, a place that will hold our family for a while.”

  “I’m going to use treated wood for the joists,” Rudy said. “It’s expensive, but they’ll last forever. Do you want me to rub your back?”

  “Dyings harder than I thought it was going to be,” she said. She had trouble rolling over so that he could reach her back. “I mean, I thought death was something that just happened to you, not something you had to do. I don’t want to do it, but I don’t want to miss it either. I feel the way I used to feel at my piano recitals: stage fright.”

  Rudy moved a microphone aside and sat down on the edge of the hospital bed he’d rented for her. “Oh, Helen.”

  “When I was a little girl,” she went on, “my mother kept individual scrapbooks for my brother and me. She put everything in them: report cards, school programs, vital statistics, birthday parties, piano recitals, snapshots. We had a record of everything. I always meant to do that for the girls, Rudy, but somehow I never got around to it. My life has always been such a jumble, just like my mind is now, so when you listen to these tapes you’ll just have to forgive me.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive, Helen. You don’t have to worry about that.” Even at that point he couldn’t ask her about Bruni. He didn’t want to confront her in a hostile way, but oh, just, he didn’t know, maybe get things out in the open. He wondered if she’d say anything about him on the tapes.

  “I know that, Rudy, but I worry anyway. That’s why I want to make a will, get everything in order. Maybe you could help me do that, Rudy. I’d ask one of the girls, but …”

  “You mean get a lawyer?”

  “No, I don’t need a lawyer. You can get a standard form of some kind. I think they sell them at that place next to the deli.”

  He had no idea what she wanted to put in her will since everything they owned was held jointly. But he got the form for her, and the next afternoon he typed up the bequests on Helen’s office Remington as she dictated to him. The form was still there in the box with all Helen’s papers: “Last Will & Testament.” He hadn’t looked at it in years, but he got it out now. It was in a folder with her birth certificate, the letters she’d written to him when she was a senior at DePaul and he was working on the market on the other side of town, her diplomas, her teaching awards from Edgar Lee Masters, and a letter from Bruno Bruni that he’d found after her death in her desk drawer. It was written in Italian and Rudy’d never been able to read it, though he looked at it every once in a while.

  I, HELEN ANNA HARRINGTON, a resident of the City of Chicago. Cook County. Illinois, being of sound and disposing mind and memory, do hereby make, publish, constitute, and declare this instrument to be my Last Will & Testament, hereby intending to dispose of all the property, both real and personal, that I may own or to which I may be entitled at the time of my death, and by this instrument, hereby revoking all former Wills and Codicils thereto by me heretofore made.

  FIRST: I hereby direct that my Executor shall pay all of my just debts, funeral expenses, the expenses of the administration of my estate, and any estate or inheritance taxes from my residuary estate, without apportionment or right of reimbursement from any beneficiary or transferee of property

  SECOND: I give and bequeath the following property and amounts to the following named persons:

  Fra Lippo Lippi’s Madonna and Child to my oldest daughter, Meg, as her absolute property, because she’s going to be such a wonderful mother;

  Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s Dance of the Nudes to my second daughter, Molly, as her absolute property, because she dances so beautifully and is destined to have many adventures;

  Donatello’s David to my youngest daughter, Margot, as her absolute property, because from the back there’s such a remarkable resemblance, though she probably doesn’t know it. It’s hard to see your own backside;

  Piero della Francesca’s portrait Federigo da Montefeltro to my husband, Rudy, as his absolute property, because he’s as handsome as Federigo.

  “Oh, Rudy,” she said as he pulled the finished form from the typewriter. “I wish you’d wear that red hat I bought for you, from the Abruzzi. Then you’d look just like Federigo.”

  “I think it’s up in the attic somewhere. I didn’t throw it away.” “I know, Rudy. You’ve never thrown anything away.”

  They were looking at a reproduction of one of de Kooning’s untitled abstracts when the notary came that evening to notarize the will. Ribbons of bright color. Rudy was beginning to understand, or at least to get over his fear that there was something to understand that he didn’t understand. When he heard Meg answer the door downstairs he adjusted Helen’s head scarf — she’d lost all her hair — and her face seemed to grow clearer, almost translucent.

  He helped her sign the will with her fountain pen — una cosa di bellezza — and the notary, one of the secretaries from Rudy’s office, stamped it with the official seal of the state of Illinois. And then he held up the recent New Yorker — with a picture of a man walking through leafy trees in Central Park on the cover, at least he thought it was Central Park — and turned the pages so she could look at the cartoons.

  When he went up to bed that night, he stood outside the bed room door and listened. He didn’t want to go in if she was talking into the tape recorder, because she wouldn’t record anything if someone else was in the room. He could hear her voice, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. And he never did find out, because the tape recorder had malfunctioned. The tapes had been blank.

  At the thought of the tapes, which he kept on the shelf at the back of his desk, Rudy’s chest tightened up. He put one of his nitroglycerin tablets under his tongue and sat at the desk till the pain went away

  A Cultural Friday

  Estrella Princesa was tucked away on a side street, like a small, old-fashioned hotel. There was no sign, only a bronze plaque on the wall, the sort of plaque on which you expect to find the name of a famous person who’d lived in this place a long time ago. A traffic cop in a brown uniform stood under the dark green awning, as if he were a doorman, and men were getting in and out of green taxicabs. Rudy and Medardo passed under a low colonial arch into a courtyard where parrots roosted in neatly trimmed flowering trees and a fountain bubbled and Peruvian flutes lilted softly, a. pleasant contrast to the raucous mari-achi music of the Plaza Morelos.

  In the lobby, comfortable chairs were arranged around small tables that were cluttered with glasses and colorful plates. Rudy’s idea of Mexican food was chips and salsa, beans and rice, tacos and burritos filled with ground beef, which is what you got at t
he Mexican restaurants in Mission, but a buffet by the bar offered a wonderful array of tempting hors d’oeuvres: marinated shellfish and abalone, barbecued meats, fresh shrimps, pickled hot pep pers, plates of little turnovers. Everyone — the old men, the young women, the waiters, the musicians — seemed happy to see Medardo, who was dressed in a chocolate-colored pin-striped linen suit and a pale yellow shirt with French cuffs, and who had an engaging smile on his broad face.

  At first Rudy felt out of place in his old, all-purpose sport coat — inelegant, awkward, not at all like the men sitting in the comfortable chairs with amiguitas, their little friends, by their sides. Most were men his own age, but they were nothing like the pale-faced golfers pictured in the Golden Age Digest he’d looked through on the plane on his first flight down to Texas. These were men whom the sun had burnished to the color of the fine cigars they were smoking, men who looked as if they had left all their cares behind them and were looking forward to whatever pleasures the evening might hold in store. The amiguitas were truly beautiful. Did they really want to become secretaries and dental hygienists?

  Medardo spoke briefly to a man who’d come out of the adjacent card room to greet him, his playing cards fanned out in his hand, and then ordered a glass of champagne at the bar. Rudy hesitated between a Cinzano and a Campari — he could never remember which it was that Helen had liked — and ordered Campari. “Con sifón?” the barman asked. Rudy nodded. He listened indifferently to the hum of conversations and the slap of playing cards and the click of the balls that came from the billiard room. He thought of slipping away, but Medardo held him by the arm and introduced him to one patron after another, men who greeted him with soft Mexican handshakes and who seemed to know him, or rather to know that he had had a heart attack recently and had been lifted into the back of a pickup truck by an elephant. The story, with the photo of Norma Jean, had run in El Mañana, the Reynosa paper, as well as in the Monitor.

  Maria Gracia, the woman who specialized in older men with heart conditions, had just bought a flower shop — a floresteria — with a small inheritance, but she was still meeting some clients at Estrella Princesa, including a wealthy art dealer who flew down from San Antonio once a week just to see her. Rudy noticed her as soon as she came through the door in a black spaghetti-strap dress and began exchanging greetings with people. Everyone knew her; everyone was glad to see her, as they’d been glad to see Medardo. It took her twenty minutes to angle her way across the room and join them at the bar. Once she reached them, she began to rummage in her purse for a package of cigarettes. Rudy, his heart accelerating, lit her cigarette for her — an Embajador — and took one for himself. She pulled the smoke deep into her lungs and then exhaled with obvious pleasure.

  “Well,” she said, in English. “Now we can talk.” She kissed Medardo and held out her hand to Rudy, who shook it.

  “So,” Medardo said, also in English, “how is your book coming?” He touched Rudy’s arm and explained: “Maria’s writing a book about her adventures. She’s got everyone very worried.”

  It was the first time Rudy had heard Medardo speak English. His slight accent was charming. Rudy wondered if his own accent was charming when he spoke Spanish. Somehow he doubted it.

  Maria laughed.

  “Are you going to be in it?” Rudy asked Medardo.

  “No, but you might. Just be careful, and keep your nitroglycerin pills handy.”

  “I only say I’m writing a book,” Maria said, “so that everyone will be nice to me.”

  Medardo left them and they smoked their cigarettes.

  “Medardo warned me not to fall in love with you,” Rudy said. This was the same advice that the Italians who worked for Becker had given him at the Casino, on Roosevelt Road, before he’d gone upstairs for his first time, with a girl named Shirley, who later became the mistress of a prominent politician. But he’d fallen in love with Shirley anyway That was the summer before he’d met Helen.

  “That’s probably good advice,” Maria said. “When you’re in love you’re defenseless. And,” she went on, “Medardo told me that you’re a pensador, a filósofo, a lover of wisdom. Men like you are greatly admired in Mexico.” She adjusted one of the straps of her dress. “Why don’t you say something wise and then we’ll go into the dining room.”

  “Something wise?” Rudy said. “I don’t know …”

  “A pensador, a filósofo … you must have plenty of wisdom.”

  “How about this?” Rudy said, holding his hand up and crooking his finger.

  “Is this a secret signal, Rudy?”

  “No,” he said. “But it shows how little we know How can the mind, which is immaterial, move the finger, which is material? That’s Descartes, and that’s just the beginning. Have you ever heard of Bishop Berkeley?”

  “An American?”

  “No, he was a British philosopher. Two hundred years ago. From Ireland, actually.”

  “Oh,” she said. “And this Bishop Berkeley?”

  “If Bishop Berkeley is right,” Rudy went on, “we can’t even be sure the finger exists. Outside the mind.” He crooked his finger again, and Maria crooked her finger too. “We don’t know anything, Maria. And if we can’t understand how we crook our fingers, all the big questions … love, death, beauty …”

  She put her cigarette down in the ashtray and touched his hand. “Let’s eat,” she said. “I can’t think when I’m hungry.”

  “Tell me something,” she said when they’d been seated in the dining room, a bottle of white wine open on the table between them, “that you’ve never told anyone before.”

  Rudy filled her glass. He hesitated for a moment — he was too old for this — but then he let himself go: “My wife fell in love with Italy,” he said, filling his own glass and setting the bottle down. “And she fell in love with an Italian.”

  Maria added a splash of jalapeño sauce to her abalone cocktail and passed the bottle to Rudy. “Here’s all the Italian I know,” she said, when she’d finished chewing, and she used her index finger to pull down on the cheekbone under her right eye. “How about you?”

  Rudy shook his head. “The problem was,” he said, lifting his glass and then putting it down again without drinking, “that she had this way of talking about Florence — Helen did, my wife, after she got back — that always bothered me. She talked as if just to be in Florence were enough to make a person happy. As if you didn’t need anything else. Just to be there. And she ate like an Italian, scraping her food onto her fork with her knife and raising it to her mouth with her left hand. For a while, after she got back, she answered the phone in Italian, as if she were still in Florence — I’d call home and she’d say ‘Pronto’ — and she dated her checks in Italian, with the day of the month first and then the name of the month, in Italian, and then the year. She made her ones like sevens and put a crossbar through her sevens so no one would mistake them for ones. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem wasn’t mistaking sevens for ones but ones for sevens, which happened all the time, and caused a lot of grief with the bank. It was silly.”

  “But that’s the way you’re eating, Rudy,” Maria said. “That’s the way I’m eating.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Not maybe, Rudy. That’s the way you’re eating right now.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” he said. “I can’t figure it out. It permanently altered her, made her into a different woman.”

  “More confident, more sure of herself?”

  Rudy nodded.

  “Livelier in bed?”

  Rudy nodded again. “Then at the end, just before she died, she made these tapes for me. For the family. I’ve got them in my study out at the grove. But something went wrong with the tape recorder. The punch-in/out switch that I bought so she could turn the recorder on and off from the bed was activating the tape recorder without activating the recording heads.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve always thought she must have said something abou
t Bruno Bruni; that was her lover’s name. About what happened. Some explanation. I don’t know what. But something. Something I could hang on to. The truth.”

  “I’ll tell you what the truth is, Rudy She wanted a little aven-tura. Every woman does. It’s human nature. And all by herself in Italy …”

  “A little aventura,” he said as the waiter served their seafood enchiladas. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Now tell me about your daughters,” Maria said, cutting off one end of an enchilada with her fork and lifting it to her lips.

  He told her about his daughters, and when he was through she said, “Look at me, señor. I’m not a young woman anymore. But I’m still beautiful. This is why you’re here. Can you put aside everything else and enjoy this evening? Now, this Bishop Berkeley,” she said, smiling. “I’m sorry Rudy, but I have to smile when you tell me that you can only experience things in the mind …” She crooked her finger at him and laughed. He touched the little bottle of nitroglycerin tablets in his shirt pocket.

  “It’s more complicated than that,” Rudy protested. He took a bite of his enchilada, which was filled with creamy seafood, like something you’d find in a French restaurant.

  She shook her head. “No, Rudy. No, it’s not. Don’t drive yourself crazy with these questions. Look at Medardo. He’s happy, you’re not happy. Why is that?”

  Rudy didn’t answer.

  “Seriously Rudy. Answer me. Why is Medardo happy and you’re not happy?”

  Rudy’d already given some thought to this question. “I think,” he said, “it’s because he’s got the right touch on life. I think the Italians on the market in Chicago had it. Maybe all Italians. Certainly Bruno Bruni. Maybe that’s what Helen was looking for.”

  “The ‘right touch on life,’ “ she repeated. “Alegria.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That sounds right. That’s a musical term, isn’t it.”

  “Let me tell you something,” she said, still leaning forward, “that I think you already know. So your wife took a lover in Italy — it doesn’t really matter. What if she fell in love with him? A little aventura, that’s all. Does it matter now? She came home. That’s what matters. Look right at me.”