Rudy looked out the north window at the vacant lot next door. The house had been bought by a crazy contractor who’d knocked out so many of the supporting walls that the city condemned it and finally bulldozed the whole house and filled the basement with rubble. The contractor offered to give Rudy the lot, and he’d thought about it. He could have built a garage and put in a garden, but there were too many liens against the property and no way to untangle them.
Rudy sat down at the desk and picked up a large paperback, printed on cheap paper, that Molly had sent him from Ann Arbor. It was the fifteenth edition of a student handbook called Philosophy Made Simple and had been written by her boyfriend’s uncle, the philosopher Siva Singh. From the copy on the back Rudy learned that Siva Singh had studied at Oxford and then at Yale, that his scholarly reputation rested on his magisterial Schopenhauer and the Upanishads, and that no one was better qualified to guide the reader on “a never-ending quest to explore the profound mysteries of human existence.”
The wine was wearing off, and Rudy was depressed, hungry too, not for more turkey, but for … He wasn’t sure what to call it: knowledge, wisdom, certainty? Some sense of what it all meant? To explore the profound mysteries of human existence? He was tired, and lonely, and the house was empty. He always felt like this after the girls left. It was a kind of seasickness. He needed some Dramamine. But you have to take Dramamine before you start to get seasick. He went downstairs to see what the dogs were up to — Brownie, a German shepherd, and Saskia, part Lab, part retriever. Not much. They were getting old, arthritic, but they could still make it up the stairs at night to sleep at the foot of his bed. He liked to hear them breathing, liked their familiar smells.
He fixed himself a cup of coffee and went back upstairs to Helen’s study and opened Philosophy Made Simple. ‘There are two kinds of people,” he discovered: Platonists and Aristotelians. It didn’t take him long to figure out that he was a Platonist. Him. He. Rudy Harrington. And in a funny way he knew that he’d known it all along, at least since his geometry class in seventh grade. The circles he’d drawn with his little compass had been imperfect shadows of a real circle, a Platonic circle, a circle that existed on another plane of reality. He’d known it all along: that the world of the senses is unstable, always changing, but that there’s got to be something beyond it that stays the same, like the perfect forms: triangles and circles and squares, and ideas too, Beauty and Goodness and Love. He’d known it all along, but he’d suppressed it. Because he hadn’t wanted to look foolish.
The chapter ended with a long discussion of a famous cave that Plato wrote about in his book The Republic. It was hard to figure out at first. Rudy got a piece of typing paper and tried to sketch the cave with his fountain pen, Helen’s old green and black striped Pelikan with an inscription on the black cap: una cosa di bellezza. Rudy was sure it had been a present from Bruno Bruni, but he carried it with him at all times because even though the hand that once held it had long ago been reduced to ashes at the North Shore Crematorium, it seemed to him to contain — like a powerful totem — something of Helens spirit.
He drew a cross section of a cave. Then he added some stick people facing the opening of the cave. Then he took another sheet of paper and drew another cave and this time he put the stick people facing the back of the cave. Behind the stick people, outside the entrance of the cave, he drew some jagged lines to represent the flames of a fire. Then he drew some more stick people, passing by outside between the entrance of the cave and the fire, which acted as a sort of projector. The stick people outside the entrance carried different objects that cast shadows on the back of the cave. Rudy crosshatched the shadows.
It was a rough sketch, but he thought it captured what Plato had in mind: the stick people in the cave can see only the shadows cast by the figures that pass by outside. These shadows represent the unstable world of appearances. We are the stick people, he thought. This is what we see. But there’s another reality behind appearances. Real reality. Sometimes a person — one of the stick people — gets a glimpse of this reality. Maybe he manages to break out of the cave into the bright light of day, and then, just because he’s a little disoriented, people think he’s crazy. And if he goes back into the cave and tells the other stick people what he saw outside, they think he’s crazy. Is that what had happened to Rudy many years ago in his seventh-grade geometry class, standing at the blackboard long after the other students had returned to their seats, trying to prove — with everyone staring at him — that if the bisectors of two angles of a triangle are equal in length, the triangle is isosceles? He could see it was true. It had to be true. It couldn’t not be true. It had been true before he drew the triangle on the board, and it would be true after he erased it. It had always been true, and it always would be true. He could see this truth as clearly as he could see Miss Buck, his favorite teacher, sitting at her desk, looking over the top of her steel-rimmed glasses at a set of papers she was marking, making little ticks with her red pencil. He could see it was true, but he couldn’t prove it was true, even though he’d memorized every ax- iom and every theorem in the book. And every corollary too. All he could do was stare at the imperfect triangle, Triangle ABC, that he’d drawn on the board with a piece of chalk.
Finally Miss Buck said, “You may take your seat now, Rudy”
Reading Philosophy Made Simple, Rudy made another discovery that was perhaps equally important. He may have been a Plato-nist, but Helen, he realized, had been an Aristotelian. She’d attended DePaul University, “the little school under the El,” which is a Catholic school, but there wasn’t a religious bone in her body. She had no use for another world. Other worlds spelled trouble. The Roman Catholic Church, she maintained, was the most corrupt institution in the history of the world, and other religions weren’t far behind: “Just look around: Catholic versus Protestant; Methodist versus Free Methodist; Christian versus Jew; Jew versus Muslim; Shiite versus Sunni; Sephardic versus Ashkenazi; Hindu versus Muslim; Hindu versus Sikh. And so on.”
No, this world had been enough for Helen. She’d had no interest in another world beyond the realm of appearances. She would have dismissed Plato’s ideal forms — the real reality behind the world of appearances —just as Aristotle, according to Siva Singh, had dismissed them, saying they had no more meaning than singing la la la. Then why did she love medieval and Renaissance paintings? all those saints and madonnas and crucifixions and resurrections and epiphanies … ? All of a sudden Rudy understood: it was because she insisted on looking at them, as if they were just things, whereas he tried to look through them. It was the same with music. Bach’s B Minor Mass or “Mr. Jelly Roll Baker,” it didn’t matter. She listened to the notes; he listened through them. She heard melody and harmony and counterpoint; he heard something calling him from far, far away.
For Sale
From his office window in the back of the warehouse, Rudy could see in silhouette everything that passed by on the broad, sloping sidewalk in the front: forklifts, flat-trucks, two-wheelers, hydraulic dollies carrying pallets, skids, bushels, baskets, hampers, crates, lugs, sacks, bags, flats, potatoes and cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers, beans, nectarines, oranges, avocados, kiwis, coconuts, strawberries, apples, cantaloupes, mangoes. Sitting at his desk he wondered: are these just shadows cast upon a screen? Am I trapped in this cave, this office, unable to turn my head and look directly at the reality, at the thing itself? And he doodled a sketch of the cave on a yellow pad with Harry Becker & Son printed at the top till the phone rang — his own dedicated line — and he answered it: “Rudy here.”
And then the pressure of the holidays pushed the cave out of his mind, and he didn’t think about it again till Christmas Eve, when the beauty of this world hit him so hard it reminded him of the true beauty beyond, and his soul, like a bird, began to sprout wings.
Meg and Dan had decided to come home for Christmas after all, and Molly was coming too, bringing Tejinder, now her fiancé, she told him on the phone. The
y were getting married in the summer, and Rudy could hear that her voice was full of love and joy Everyone called him TJ, she said. He had a joint appointment in math and physics at the University of Michigan, and he’d signed up for lessons at the dance studio, and he’d really like to see an American Christmas. Instead of spending Christmas with an Indian auntie in Royal Oak, a suburb of Detroit, he was going to come with Molly to Chicago.
Rudy was relieved, like a man who’s come through a serious traffic accident without a scratch. He vacuumed up the dog hair and brought down the boxes of Christmas decorations from the attic: the crèche that Helen had brought back from Italy; the snowman candles, like skaters, skating on a pond made out of a mirror. He bought a tree and pu it up, but he didn’t decorate it, because they never decorated the tree till Christmas Eve. He got out the old ornaments that the girls had made out of baker’s clay when they were little: salt and flour and water rolled into a paste, cut with cookie cutters, baked in the oven, and then painted. And on the day before Christmas he bought two fresh capons instead of a turkey. It wasn’t till he carried the capons down to the basement in the big roaster — to keep them cool but not frozen — that he remembered the FOR SALE sign, which was still propped up against the freezer. The electric fan was still blowing on it. His first impulse was to hide it, in case one of the girls came downstairs to get something out of the freezer. But then he decided it might be a good idea to put it up, just for one night, just to shake them up, make them think. Sometimes it takes a little jolt to make us appreciate what we’ve got, to keep us from taking it for granted. That’s what he had in mind — a little jolt.
The ground was frozen too hard to drive a stake into, so he nailed the sign to the pillar of the porte cochere and turned the outside light on so you couldn’t miss it as you drove up the driveway. Then he went inside and rolled out the dough for a sour-cream apple pie, which he always made in a springform pan so that it stood, straight-sided, about four inches high. He used eight big Granny Smith apples.
He hadn’t heard from Margot since right after Thanksgiving, when he’d gotten a card saying she was staying in a convent. The card was up on the refrigerator, held by a magnet shaped like a ladybug. It was a picture of the Virgin Mary and an angel with big gold wings. He figured he’d come home from work one day and she’d be there — Margot, not the Virgin Mary — but she wasn’t. Icelandic Airlines had flights to New York on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but it was Friday, and she hadn’t come home. Rudy called Alitalia and TWA, which had direct flights from Rome to Chicago, but they wouldn’t release the passenger lists, so he had no way of finding out if she was booked on any of the flights. By Christmas Eve he’d just about given up hope.
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” Helen used to say, “it is to have a thankless child.” She was joking, but there was some truth to it too. How much trouble was it to write a postcard? Or to pick up the telephone? What was she doing for money? Was she going to become a nun? Nothing would surprise him.
Rudy’d given considerable thought to where Tejinder — which means “the embodiment of power” in Hindi — ought to sleep and had finally decided on the floor of Helen’s study. He lugged one of the extra mattresses down from the attic and made it up nicely with matching sheets and pillowcase and a Pendleton blanket. He’s probably used to sleeping on a mat on the floor anyway, Rudy told himself. But Molly carried Tejinder’s suitcase right up to her own small room, with its single bed. Rudy followed her.
“I’ve got a bed made up for him in the study” he said.
Molly plopped the suitcase down on the floor, sat on it, and looked around at the empty aquarium, the books, the portable Smith Corona on the desk, the beanbag chair.
“Wouldn’t he be more comfortable in the study?” Rudy asked.
“He might be more comfortable,” she said, “but he wouldn’t have as much fun.”
“Well,” he said. “Suit yourself, if that’s what you really want.”
When he came downstairs, Meg and Dan and the boys were bustling in the front door carrying a portable television set. “Merry Christmas,” they said. It took him a while to realize that the television set was his Christmas present.
Helen and Rudy had never had a TV With Helen it had been a matter of principle. Rudy’d never cared much one way or the other, but he’d gotten used to not having one, and he got a kick out of telling people that he didn’t have one. “Whaaaat?” they’d say “You don’t have a TV?” No one could believe him. He might as well have told them that they didn’t have indoor plumbing. Babysitters had looked around the living room in desperation. Guests at Thanksgiving couldn’t believe they were going to miss the football games.
“We just never got around to getting one,” he’d say Or, depending on his audience: “On account of the kids, you know. We’d rather they read books or played the piano.”
And now Dan was hooking the thing up in the living room. He’d brought along the sort of antenna you set on top, with two spikes sticking up, and was turning it this way and that. The TV was making a loud staticky sound. Daniel, three, and Philip, five, were waiting impatiently
“C’mon out here, you guys,” Rudy shouted from the kitchen. “I’ve got some baker’s clay here. You can make Christmas tree ornaments, like your mama used to. We’ll bake them and then you can paint them.”
But either they couldn’t hear him or they preferred to watch the snowy screen.
One Christmas was much like the next at the Harrington house, just as in the Dylan Thomas story A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and one of the things that was always the same was that one of the girls would give Rudy a copy of A Child’s Christmas in Wales — a record in a red and white jacket with a little booklet with the text. There were half a dozen of them in the record cabinet. On the other side of the record was a poem called “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” and sometimes Rudy wondered if maybe that was the real message they were sending him. He liked to think so.
For supper they ate pizzas, which Rudy had made, instead of the spaghetti alle vongole that Helen had always insisted on because that’s what they eat on Christmas Eve in Florence. Helen had liked traditions, especially Italian ones.
After supper they left the dishes to soak in the sink while they put the lights on the tree and decorated it with strings of cranberries and popcorn and the old baker’s-clay ornaments. They must have had three or four hundred of these ornaments in the attic, enough for several trees. Daniel and Philip had not forgotten about the TV, which could not be coaxed into working, much to Rudy’s satisfaction. But without a TV the boys were restless, so Rudy and TJ, who was an amateur magician, went back up to the attic and brought down a metal footlocker that held Rudy’s dads old magic tricks, many of them still packed in their original boxes. TJ entertained the boys with coins that materialized out of nowhere and silks that disappeared into nowhere, magic rings that passed through each other, ropes that mended themselves when cut in half, and Rudy fooled everyone, including TJ, with a trick he’d learned from his dad involving two hats and little wads of paper that he passed back and forth through the solid surface of the dining room table. Instead of calming the boys down, Rudy and TJ got them even more worked up, but TJ was able to reverse the process by demonstrating several yoga positions that the boys were eager to imitate: the Lotus, the Fish, the Bird, and finally the Dead Man’s Posture, which, he said, was the most difficult of all. The boys lay quietly on their backs.
“Not even your toe must twitch,” TJ warned. “Not even the tip of your finger must move.”
Rudy helped them write a note to Santa. Dan wanted a G.I. Joe, and Philip wanted an Erector set so he could build a Ferris wheel, and a magic set, and an electric train, and it struck Rudy that his life would have been totally different if he and Helen had had three sons instead of three daughters. Maybe, in a parallel universe …
The boys sat on either side of him on the living room sofa while Rudy hunched over the coffee table and wrote out t
heir lists with Helen’s fountain pen. They left them in front of the fireplace along with a glass of milk and a plate of cookies. At first Rudy hadn’t been as excited as he felt he ought to be at having grandchildren, but now it was a pleasure to read them the stories that his mother had read to him, and that he’d read to his daughters. They were a little young for The Wind in the Willows, but not for Winnie the Pooh.
The boys brushed their teeth at the little sink in Margot’s room. Rudy located The House at Pooh Corner on the bookshelves, next to one of the Italian schoolbooks Margot had brought back from the year she’d spent in Italy with Helen, and read the story about Owls house blowing down, and then the one about Pooh and Piglet taking a pile of sticks that turned out to be Eeyore’s house. The boys fell asleep halfway through the second story, but he kept on reading till he got to the end. He put the book back on the shelf next to Margot’s Italian geography book, Il nuovo libro Garzanti della Geografia.
When Rudy came downstairs, TJ was demonstrating his parallel universe thesis to Dan and the girls. They’d propped up Helens old projector on the dining room table so that the beam of light was aimed at two tiny slits in a piece of tinfoil that had been fastened with a clothespin to a makeshift frame made out of a coat hanger.
“Like Plato’s cave, Rudy, don’t you think?” TJ said. Rudy, who had drawn a new sketch of Plato’s cave while they were sitting at the kitchen table after supper, pulled up a chair and sat down.
“Right, Rudy?” TJ said. “We’re in the cave, and this little beam of light on the wall is all we can see of the reality of the world. But what can we conclude from this little band of light? That’s the question. Can we use our minds to explore the world outside the cave?”
Philosophy Made Simple Page 2
