Philosophy Made Simple

by Robert Hellenga

  Nandini and the girls spent the rest of the day closeted in the girls’ bedrooms upstairs. By late afternoon huge gray clouds had massed in the sky, like a herd of elephants about to charge, and the weather reports were not encouraging. They were forced to rethink some things. Dinner would have to be held in the house, and if it rained on Saturday, it would be impossible to proceed from the house to the mandap, which had been erected at a point equidistant from barn, house, and garage. The wedding would have to be held in the barn. The pandit would have to build the sacred fire in Rudy’s Weber grill. In the evening, the caterer’s men from the Taj Mahal—a Bengali Indian and three Mexicans—set up their own grills on the veranda.

  About six o’clock it began to rain. Rudy put on a slicker and went back and forth between the house and the barn, where Nandini, who’d darkened her eyes with kohl and put on a light blue sari for the party, was trying to calm Norma Jean, whose trumpeting heralded the storm, and who was rumbling too, deep in her chest. She had not had a bath today, and she was restless because she had not been allowed to paint. Nandini talked to her in Assamese, in a kind of gentle singsong. A horsefly that had been bothering Norma Jean earlier had disappeared.

  “We can use the rain,” Rudy said, putting a good face on things. “A nice shower. It’ll blow over. Nice to have it cooler.”

  Nandini’s blue sari, which had little mirrors embroidered in it, didn’t look warm enough. Rudy went up to the house to get her a sweater. When he got back he closed the shutters in the barn on the ground floor and then those in the loft, so it was dark in the barn. The electric lightbulbs at the front and back were not powerful enough to illuminate this darkness. From the loft he could look down on Norma Jean, who was drinking from her big water tank, which was almost empty. Nandini had moved to the door to watch the storm. He could see her in silhouette, like a figure cut out of black paper, as she adjusted the sweater over her sari and smoothed her hair. She turned to look up at him, and though he couldn’t see her face, he thought that the fact of her looking meant that she wanted to confirm their earlier unspoken understanding that there was something to be settled. The electricity went off and then came back on. Rudy wanted to tell her about Helens death. He wanted to tell her about a storm that had hit Chicago right after he’d gone to work for Becker, a storm that had knocked down one of the big awnings at the market. He wanted to tell her everything.

  A bird flew in the open door. A sparrow Out of the impending storm. It ducked under the eave, circled around, fluttered its wings, and perched on Norma Jean’s head. Norma Jean reached up with her trunk as if to greet it.

  Rudy climbed down from the loft and turned on the hose to fill the water tank. “I have to change my clothes,” he said, leaving the water running and opening a bale of alfalfa. He cut the twine with a knife so that the bale unfolded, spreading itself open, like a poker hand. Rudy knew it was dangerous to wish too hard for something. All the philosophers were agreed on that. Moderate your desires. Be satisfied with what you have. Stop wanting, craving, yearning.

  A bolt of lightning lit up the entrance to the barn. Rudy heard the thunder at the count of two. Close. How Helen had loved storms, he thought. She’d sit with the girls in the bay window behind the piano, sit on the piano bench and watch the rain bounce off the brick street. Or she’d sit out on the little balcony over the bay window The roof covered only half the balcony, so she’d get soaked anyway. Sometimes Rudy would join her.

  He asked Nandini about the monsoons in Assam, and she told him about the tremendous noise the monsoon rains made on the metal roof of the old tea-garden house, which had belonged to a British planter and which was not a proper Indian house at all. Her father had always meant to build a proper house, but had never gotten around to it.

  What would a proper Indian house be like, he wanted to know. She started to explain, but the wind picked up and tore one of the shutters loose. The banging upset Norma Jean, and Rudy drove a nail into the shutter to hold it closed.

  Norma Jean was becoming increasingly agitated, and Nandini decided to chain her to one of the heavy eyebolts on the wall at the back of her stall. Norma Jean trumpeted loudly and bumped Nandini’s chest with her trunk, but she lifted her leg and allowed Nandini to fasten Rudy’s tow chain to her metal anklet. The sparrow, which was still perched on Norma Jeans head, seemed unconcerned. It walked around and disappeared behind one ear.

  Rudy went up to the house to put on clean clothes. The house, which Maria had filled with green and yellow asters, was full of people. Uncle Siva was acting as host, ordering around the caterers men who were preparing spicy fish and kebabs on the long grills on the veranda, sampling the soups and the chutneys and the different breads. The pandit had arrived, wearing his flowing robe. Father Russell was there too, in his priests collar.

  The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started, but the wind had increased. One side of the mandap had come loose and Rudy thought they ought to take it down while they had a chance, before the wind blew it away Four of them went out—Rudy and Medardo and of two of the men from the Taj Mahal. The poles that supported the ends of the tent had collapsed and were thrashing about, but the three ridgepoles were still in place. All they could do was knock down the ridgepoles so that the tent lay flat on the ground.

  When Rudy got back to the barn, another shutter had come loose. He nailed it shut. The rain started again, and it began to thunder. A tremendous blast of lightning lit up the doorway Norma Jean let out a high-pitched scream and pulled against her chain. Nandini stood in front of her, stroking her trunk, trying to soothe her, but the elephant pushed Nandini to one side with her trunk and strained forward. The heavy eyebolt in the wall of the barn might have restrained an unruly stallion, but Norma Jean, who weighed three tons, tore it out of the old wood with a great wrench of a noise and smashed through the stall door, dragging her chain and part of the wall itself behind her. Rudy and Nandini both yelled and waved their arms: dhuth, dhuth, dhuth. The sparrow was still perched on Norma Jeans head as she disappeared through the door into the storm. There was another crack of lightning, another scream. When they reached the door they could see that Norma Jean was down on her left side on the gravel, about thirty feet from the barn, her two right legs bobbing up and down as if they were made of rubber. They ran to her. Her eyes were closed, her moving legs slowed, then stopped. Nandini felt for her pulse, her heart. She yelled something. Rudy could see her lips move but he couldn’t hear her. Rudy threw himself on Norma Jeans neck and kissed her face, and then they went back to the barn.

  “Lightning struck her leg chain,” Nandini said; “we have to get the anklet off.”

  They went back out into the pouring rain. Rudy managed to get the chain itself loose, but the leg was burned and swollen around the metal anklet. There was no way to release it.

  They were joined by Medardo, and the three of them managed to untangle the tent and drag it so that it covered Norma Jean. Medardo went up to the loft, pried open the shutter that Rudy had nailed down, and let down a rope from the window, and Rudy attached the end of the rope to the trailer hitch on the pickup. He eased the pickup forward till the rope was taut. They managed to slide the tent up the rope and then stake the outer edges to provide a sort of shelter for the elephant.

  Experience had outdistanced Rudy’s systems of explanation. He had no words to name what had happened. An accident? Accident was inadequate. Tragedy? Disaster? Omen? Rudy went from the jury-rigged tent up to the kitchen, where Meg and Margot and TJ were comforting Molly, who sat at the kitchen table and wept, and then he followed Nandini, still in her blue sari with the little mirrors in it, back out to the barn. Nandini picked up a pail and the shovel that Rudy used for Norma Jean’s leed and motioned Rudy to follow her. He followed her up the tractor path into the upper grove and then down to the river. She was after river mud and sawgrass to make a poultice for Norma Jeans leg.

  The river was flowing faster, but Rudy didn’t think there was any danger of flooding. The
excess water would drain into the floodway, and the house was on the only hill in the county. Rudy sank his shovel into the mud and grass by the cove, near the opening he’d cut in the chaparral.

  They made two trips, and under the makeshift shelter their hands touched repeatedly as they packed the mud-and-grass poultice around Norma Jeans injured leg. TJ and Molly brought down dry sweaters and blankets and a half bottle of white wine, which they drank out of paper cups. Mollys eyes were red.

  ‘The pandits saying its not an accident,” she said; “he says it’s a baadha, a bad omen, an obstacle.”

  Molly was in the kitchen when Rudy came downstairs in the morning after a short rest. He’d been up most of the night with Norma Jean. She’d told TJ everything, she said. Last night, after everyone had left. She’d “confessed.” She wanted TJ to know who she was.

  “Everything?” Rudy asked. “The trips to California? The baseball player? The men at the dance studio?”

  “Just about.”

  “That probably wasn’t a good idea.”

  “Don’t scold me, Papa.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “I think he’s in shock. He went back to the motel.”

  “You were upset,” Rudy said. “Who wouldn’t be?”

  She nodded.

  “What do you want to happen now?”

  “I want to get married.”

  “So you don’t think it was an evil omen? A baadha?”

  “I don’t know what to think, Papa. You can’t say it was a good omen, but the pandit didn’t have to upset everyone like that. It was terrible. He kept talking about the gift of a virgin, said we were trampling on the ancient ceremonies. What business is it of his whether I’m a virgin or not?”

  “That’s true,” Rudy said. “The pandit behaved badly And Father Russell wasn’t much better. The accident upset everyone. What about TJ? What does he think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because of the baadha, or because of what you told him?”

  “Either one. It doesn’t matter. I just didn’t want to get married under false pretenses.”

  The pandit had announced on Friday night that because of the baadha, or evil omen, he was no longer willing to perform the ceremony on Saturday. He had warned Rudy, he said in front of all the guests, against scheduling the wedding on an inauspicious day, but Rudy had refused to listen to him. And now look what had happened. Everyone, including Father Russell, had agreed with the pandit that under the circumstances it would be impossible to proceed, that at best the wedding would have to be postponed.

  The Starlight Motel was located on Highway 83—the “longest main street in the USA”—on the dividing line between Mission and McAllen. Rudy, who’d stayed at the Starlight on his first trip to Texas, located TJ’s rental car in front of unit 12 and parked next to it, but he didn’t get out of the cab of the pickup for a few minutes because he didn’t want to confront the possibility that TJ no longer loved his daughter. What could he say to TJ? If he could ask one philosopher to go into the motel room with him, who would it be? Plato? Aristotle? Epicurus? Descartes? Berkeley? Hume? Kant? Schopenhauer? Nietzsche? He ran through the list, but in the end he knew he had to go alone.

  He knocked on the door. TJ seemed stunned. His eyes, large and deep brown, were unfocused; his mouth was pursed, thin lips taut. His face showed that he did not understand what had to be done.

  “Did I wake you up?” Rudy asked, though he could see that he hadn’t. TJ was in his pajamas, but the TV on the dresser was on. A notebook was open on a small desk in front of the window. TJ had been writing something. Nervous, Rudy jangled his keys instead of putting them in his pocket.

  “Can I do something for you?” TJ asked.

  “Yes, you can get dressed and get in the truck. Everyone’s waiting for something to happen.”

  TJ stepped back into the semidarkness of the room.

  “I think you know how much I love my daughter,” Rudy said, “how very pleased I was when she told me about your engagement, and how happy I’ve been imagining you as my son-in-law.”

  “Mr. Harrington, I think we’ve found ourselves in a very bad situation.”

  “1 wanted…I thought we ought to talk about Molly, about this situation.”

  “I have just written a letter to her, in fact. Perhaps you would be kind enough to take it to her.” TJ handed him the letter he’d been working on at the little motel desk and sat down on the bed.

  “I’d rather not look at it right now,” Rudy said, though he glanced at it and saw the words important and necessary and impossible before putting it back down on the desk. “What I don’t know,” he said, “is how much love you have in your heart for Molly”

  “I love her enormously, Mr. Harrington, but I don’t understand how she could…” He waved his hand. “In India…”

  “Stop,” Rudy said. “Please don’t say anything else. But let me tell you something.”

  “What is it?”

  “My daughter is not a pativrata. She will not worship you as a god.”

  “No, of course not. But she’s, how shall I say—damaged goods.”

  Rudy felt light-headed, as if he were going to faint. “My wife was not a pativrata either. She fell in love with another man, in Italy This was after we were married, TJ, not before. We had three children. Molly was seventeen years old, sixteen or seventeen.”

  “But how does this apply to me?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to understand,” Rudy said. “Parallel universes. Now I want you to tell me something, TJ. What do you think people are doing in your parallel universes? They’re acting out their fantasies, don’t you think? And in this universe people are acting out the fantasies they have in some other universe.”

  “Mr. Harrington, the concept of parallel universes is a bit more complicated than that, or maybe less complicated. I never meant to suggest…”

  But Rudy interrupted him. “Then let’s just stick to this universe.”

  “Mr. Harrington, I don’t want to blame everything on her, but after a certain point it becomes impossible to forgive.”

  Rudy started to say that Molly was truly sorry and that it was never impossible to forgive; but he knew that Molly was not sorry, and that Helen had not been sorry either, and instead he said, “TJ, there’s nothing to forgive. Do you see what I mean?” He sat down beside TJ on the bed. “You said ‘damaged goods’ a little while ago. That was the expression you used. Do you know that that’s what your uncle said about your mother? Your mother, TJ. ‘Damaged goods.’ But I think your uncle was mistaken, and I think you are mistaken too. I think what you meant to say was ‘warm and open-hearted and generous.’ I think you meant to say ‘loving and kind and giving.’ Because those are Molly’s fundamental constants, TJ. Those are what you get when you lift the Veil of Molly and look beyond the world of appearances.” Rudy shook his head. “At Christmas, do you think I didn’t hear you two? The pans were rattling in the kitchen. And I was sad because I missed my wife, but I was happy for you too. I was more than happy—I was full of joy.’’

  TJ said nothing and the moment stretched out into a long silence. Rudy studied the faded flowers in the wallpaper, irises, like the ones Maria had brought on the night Uncle Siva arrived. The chatter on the TV was interrupted by the loud bray of a commercial. TJ let out a sharp, high-pitched laugh. He got up and turned off the TV and went into the bathroom. Rudy could hear him blowing his nose. When he came out he had a wad of toilet paper in his hand. “Nothing seems interesting or important,” he said, sitting back down on the bed next to Rudy.

  “Everything depends on metaphor, you know,” Rudy said. “That’s what Aristotle says. The greatest thing is to be a master of metaphor. Damaged goods? That’s the wrong metaphor.”

  “But what is the right metaphor?”

  They sat there like a couple of philosophers looking into the heart of the mystery, as if they were looking for pictures to form in the flames of a fire or from th
e stains on a garden wall.

  “I have the mangalashtak,” Rudy said finally, “that I picked for the wedding. The pandit thought I should compose one myself, but I didn’t think I’d do a very good job. This is a poem that my wife sent to me before we got married.” He took out his billfold to show TJ Helen’s letter but at first he couldn’t find it and he started to panic, the way he always did when he lost things. He remembered folding the letter and putting it in his billfold. He took everything out of his billfold and spread it out on the desk, shoving TJ’s papers aside. Several crumpled bills. Scraps of paper with addresses and notes and phone numbers. An old shopping list. A bit of dental floss wrapped in a piece of pink paper, for emergencies. Credit cards, driver’s license, social security card, a deposit slip from the bank, receipts. He closed his eyes for a moment. “I wish my wife was here. She could recite it for you. She’d know it by heart.”

  “It is not necessary. Maybe you could just tell me the idea.”

  “It’s not so simple,” Rudy said. “You need the words.” Finally he found it in one of those slots behind the hinges of the billfold, along with his emergency hundred-dollar bill.

  He unfolded the poem, the mangalashtak, and handed it to TJ, who read it silently.

  “I didn’t really understand it either,” Rudy said, “till Helen explained it to me. These first four lines are called a quatrain. See how it rhymes: blue and you, pearls and girls. The speakers a young woman. She’s telling her lover that she’s not going to love him like other girls, she’s not going to lock up her love up in a secret compartment—that’s the silver casket. She’s not going to attach all kinds of conditions to her love. She’s not going to give him all the traditional love gadgets listed in the second four lines: the lovers’ knot is a kind of ring with two pieces of metal that fit together with a secret spring for a perfume compartment. I think that kind of ring was originally used for poison.