Philosophy Made Simple (37 page)

But it wasn’t as simple as that. It was still Helen’s birthday.

Rudy sat down in his study and glanced at the copy of
Schopenhauer and the Upanishads,
which was sitting on top of
Philosophy Made Simple.
It was an imposing book, almost three inches thick. He hadn’t opened it yet, except to look at the inscription:

It was hard to believe there’d be so much to say about Schopenhauer and the Upanishads.

Rudy put the books aside and took out the file folder containing Helen’s papers. He hadn’t looked at the letter from Bruni in three or four years, and he wanted to see if he could read it, now that he had a pretty good command of Spanish. He could.
Not all of it, but most. There wasn’t much to it. Instructions about what to do with a special bottle of vinegar he’d brought back from Modena. A few drops on fresh strawberries, or on a
bistecca,
or on thin slices of Parmesan cheese.

Maybe, he thought, he’d look up Bruni when he went to visit Margot in April, challenge the man to a duel, like one of the characters in
Il saraceno.
Or maybe buy him a drink. He laughed. What he remembered most about his trip to Italy, back in March 1953, when Helen was having the affair, was that they’d gone to Venice and Bruni was supposed to be going along, but of course he hadn’t gone,
and in Venice…Helen had everything pretty well organized, and when they got on the water bus in Venice she gave each student a map with all the information about where to get off and the hotel where they were staying and how to get there, and the telephone number. Everybody had this information except Margot, who was fifteen and who wasn’t supposed to go off on her own anyway, but when they came to the first stop, just as they were pulling away from the dock, one of the students said to Rudy,
“Isn’t that your daughter getting off the
boat?” and Rudy looked up and there she was, going up the ramp from the dock up to the street, looking straight ahead, carried along by the crowd. Rudy shouted at her, but she couldn’t hear him, and by the time he found Helen, who was up in the front of the boat talking to a group of students, they were already pulling over to the next stop, so he could either chew Helen out or he could get off the boat and go back to find Margot, which is what he did, except that on the way back they met the next boat coming from the station, and there was Margot on it, leaning over the railing, but she couldn’t hear Rudy yelling,
so he got off the boat again and start running to San Zaccaria, which he could see on the map, figuring he could get there before the boat did, because the boat had to make a big loop. But two boats stopped and he didn’t see her, so he got on the next boat and just kept looking at every stop, but he still didn’t see her and pretty soon they were heading out to open sea,
right off the edge of the map. But when they finally got to the end of the line, the Lido, there she was, sitting on a bench,
like a regular park bench, waiting for him.

On the way back to San Zaccaria, she told him all about her school. It had been hard at first. Her teachers had known she was coming, she said, but they hadn’t known she didn’t speak Italian, so they made her read out loud on the first day. She just said the words the way you’d say them in English, and everybody laughed. The math was harder than it was at home, and she had to read Homer and Dante, and her teachers interrogated her in front of the class, just like the other students. She cried herself to sleep every night. It was a real horror story. But when Rudy asked her if she wanted to come home with him,
she said no.

The hotel wasn’t marked very well on Rudy’s map and they had to ask directions. They walked up to a policeman, and Rudy said something in English and showed him the map, but the policeman couldn’t understand what Rudy wanted, so Margot had to do the
talking. They chatted away for a while and Rudy couldn’t understand a word, and then she took his hand and said, “It’s okay,
Papa, I know the way,” and Rudy was thinking:
She’s reading books I’ll never read, talking a language I’ll never understand. She’s being carried away from me, just like
she was on the water bus, only to a place where I’ll never be able to go.

And he’d felt the same way about Helen. She was being carried away from him to a place where he could never go. He knew he couldn’t follow her.

That night the three of them ate in a nice restaurant down by the big lagoon. There were waiters in white coats all over the place, and the food was good, not cheap, but Helen had an expense account—the program paid for everything. There was a big family at a table not too far from theirs, and Helen kept saying that a couple of the women were giving her dirty looks, but whenever Rudy looked over, they were just laughing and having a good time. “Helen,” he said, “why on earth would they be giving you dirty looks? That’s crazy. Look, they’re just having a good time.” But in a few minutes she’d start again. He couldn’t talk her out of it, and then he figured her conscience must be bothering her, so he left it at that.

And then, at the end of May, she called to say that she had cancer and was coming home.

He looked through Helen’s record albums for
Il
saraceno.
He didn’t really care much for opera, but this was Helen’s favorite and they’d listened to it together several times when she was sick. In the last act, the Count and II saraceno encounter each other outside Isabellas window and, as they’re waiting,
each one for the other to leave, they sing a duet: “O happy men, if love, which rules the stars, rule your hearts.” Of course they sing it in
Italian, but Helen had translated it for him. Isabella appears and the two men kill each other, and then Isabella, after singing her lungs out, kills herself too. It’s very sad.

He put on the record and arranged Marias flowers in a vase while he listened to the overture and to Isabellas first aria,
but the music wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted was to listen to Helen’s tapes, which were on the shelf over his desk.
He knew they were blank, but somehow he thought that he might hear
something
if he played them one more time. He turned off the record player and put the record back in its sleeve. His old Am-pex 960,
top -of-the-line in its day, expensive, one of the very first two-track recorders on the market, was in one of the storage cabinets in the tack room. He had no idea what was available now. The little cassette players, which were everywhere, were so much more convenient. He lugged the heavy tape recorder in from the barn, cleaned the tape heads with a Q-tip dipped in alcohol, and put on one of his old tapes as a test. For several years, when the girls were young, he’d made a tape every Christmas:
talking, telling stories, playing his guitar, singing—blues and hymns. He advanced the tape for a minute or so, to make sure the fast-forward was working properly, and then stopped it and pressed the play button. He heard himself, his best song:

…
murder in the first degree,

The judges wife cried out, You got to let that man go free,

‘Cause
he’s
a jelly roll baker, bake the best jelly roll in town,

Why he’s the only man around, bake good jelly roll with his damper down.

He moved the recorder to the coffee table in front of the living room sofa, rewound the tape, put another stick of ironwood in the stove and closed the top vents partway.

He threaded the first of Helens tapes and hit the play button.
He’d recorded Helen on both channels at slow speed, 3.25 feet per second. One hour per tape. He could remember arranging the two mikes over the bed. And he remembered hooking up the defective punch-in/out switch, which he’d bought at a place on Wabash, not far from the dance place where Molly was giving lessons. He never bothered to take it back.

She’d made the tapes right after she came home from the hospital the last time. She wanted to die at home. The girls were all living at home, so they could help take care of their mother. Meg had her law degree from Northwestern. She didn’t have a job yet, but she’d already met Dan, and she was taking the Howard Street El up to Evanston two or three times a week. Molly had dropped out of Edgar Lee Masters and was giving dancing lessons down in the South Loop. Margot had apprenticed herself to a bookbinder in Hyde Park. She took the El downtown every morning and then the Jeffrey Express to the South Side.

When he leaned back, the couch creaked. He put his knees up and covered himself with a light quilt. He tried not to move around a lot. He tried to open himself to the silence, but it was hard to stay focused. He remembered embracing Maria on the couch one night when she’d come to see about the flowers for the wedding, her head propped up on the arm where his head was propped up now. Afterward she’d asked him about his childhood, and he’d told her, and she’d told him about her childhood in Matamoros.
He remembered the sound of Nandini’s sari sliding to the floor on the day alter Narmada-Jai went for her last swim. He remembered the first time he’d lifted Helen’s skirts, on their wedding night, in the Drake Hotel in Chicago, standing behind her as they looked out at the lights at the end of the breakwater. He was twenty-three years old, she was twenty-four, and Schopenhauer’s life force was flowing through them. And the last time too—in the hospital bed in their bedroom, right after
she’d finished making her tapes—as if something inside her had refused to grow old, had refused to become ill. Had this been the life force too? Afterward she broke down and cried for the first and only time during her illness, and there was nothing Rudy could do except hold her in his arms.

He tried to bring his mind back to the silence. “Like a long-legged fly upon the stream,” Helen used to say, “her mind moves upon silence.” From one of her favorite poems. Keats? Yeats? Rudy couldn’t remember, but he could almost hear her voice:

She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,

That nobody looks; her feet

Practise a tinker shuffle

Picked up on a street.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

Her mind moves upon silence.

He didn’t rewind the tape, because he didn’t think he’d ever listen to it again. He just put it back in its box.

He threaded the second tape and waited for it to start. But of course there was nothing to wait for, no sound, not even tape hiss. Just the slight rustle of the reels, turning. Chakras. Wheels. The wheel of karma. Had Helen escaped, gotten off the wheel? And if she had escaped, where had she escaped
to?
Nirvana?
Moksha?
He wanted to walk around, wanted to pee. But he held it in till the tape came to an end. His body wanted a beer but settled for a small glass of water.