Philosophy Made Simple

by Robert Hellenga

  “And then you had a heart attack,” she said. “Oh, Pop. You’re as crazy as Mama. And tomorrow you’re getting an elephant. Remember the chicken that Mama adopted?”

  Rudy laughed. “Chicky-chick was some chicken, except she turned out to be a rooster. And Norma Jean is some elephant.”

  He turned the flashlight on again and they walked back to the house in silence. What he knew now he’d known from the beginning: that if Helen hadn’t gotten sick, hadn’t been diagnosed with leukemia right after Easter, she wouldn’t have come home. What she’d had wasn’t a little aventura. It was the real thing — ecstasy. He’d seen it in her face when he went to Italy. She was going to send Margot home in June, but she was going to stay for the summer. To do research, she said, but he knew that she wanted to stay so she could be with Bruni. He should have had it out with her then, in Italy, should have forced her to choose between him and Bruni, should have challenged Bruni to a duel, should have hunted the man down, the son of a bitch. Instead he’d backed away, let it ride. He had become a different person. He’d become the person he was now.

  Meg and Rudy drank coffee on the veranda in the morning while they waited for the Russian to arrive with Norma Jean. Molly, off in India, had left the wedding arrangements up to her father. Meg didn’t think it was right, but Rudy could see that she was glad to help out, glad to have a project.

  “All Molly wants,” she said, “is plenty of good champagne and lots of the frozen Saint-Cyrs you always made for special occasions.”

  “Don’t forget the sacred fire,” Rudy said. “And the mandap. That’s the wedding tent.”

  Meg had the brochure from the Detroit hotel, so they had something to start with. “You’re sure about this, Pop? It’d be a lot easier to do it at the hotel in Detroit. You just had a heart attack … and what do you know about Indian weddings?”

  “1 know that you need a mandap” he said, “and a sacred fire. I’ve talked to the manager of the Taj Mahal about the dinner, and I’ve got the phone number of a pandit. I’ve got his card, in fact. What more do you want? An elephant? We’ve got an elephant too. How hard can it be? I put on a terrific wedding for you, didn’t I? A hog roast? Two big turkeys?”

  “That was different. That was a Midwestern wedding.”

  Rudy shrugged his shoulders. “Here’s the Russian,” he said; “I can hear his truck.”

  The Russian pulled into the yard towing an open horse trailer behind his pickup. Norma Jean was looking over the side of the trailer.

  Meg shook her head and stood up. “This pandit,” she said, “is this the guy you were telling me about? The one who got rid of the crows?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, he must have something going for him.”

  Meg and Rudy walked down the drive and watched as the Russian pulled the ramp for Norma Jean out from under the bed of the open horse trailer. When Rudy approached, to help the Russian lock the ramp into place, the elephant reached over the side of the trailer with her trunk and grabbed his wrist. He tried to pull his arm back, but she held his wrist tightly and lifted it slowly to her mouth, as if she were going to bite his hand off.

  “Is okay,” the Russian said. “She want you should pet her tongue. Is very big honor. Is how elephants greet each other, only you don’t have no trunk. You got to use your hand. She remember how she save your life.”

  Rudy closed his eyes and let his hand rest on the huge tongue.

  “She like if you move your hand around back and forth,” the Russian said.

  Rudy stroked the elephants tongue. It was rough and smooth and slippery all at the same time, and it was attached at the front as well as at the back, so that instead of flapping up and down, like a human tongue, it undulated with a gentle, rhythmical movement, like a wave humping up over a shoal. When she’d had enough, Norma Jean took his wrist in her trunk and removed his hand from her mouth. She rumbled her appreciation and raised her foot and stomped the floor of the trailer. Rudy wiped his hand on his pants. The Russian checked the ramp and opened the gate.

  “Peachay,” he shouted, and Norma Jean began to back down the ramp. “Peachay,” the Russian repeated. “It take her a while to get used to new place,” he said to Rudy. “We take slow and easy.” Norma Jean backed off the ramp, trumpeted, and looked around. The Russian took her on a little tour, showing her the house, Rudy’s garden, the garage, the big sugar hackberries at the south end of the house, and finally the barn.

  The Russian was going to sleep in the old tack room, which still smelled of soap and leather, though it hadn’t been used in years. The three horse stalls had been extra large to begin with, so Norma Jean had plenty of room in the barn, and in the day she could stay outside in the old paddock. Rudy didn’t like the look of the three-tiered, five-thousand-volt electric fence that he and the Russian had shifted from the Russian’s paddock, but he didn’t want Norma Jean running loose, and there didn’t seem to be any alternative.

  The sight of Norma Jeans bulbous head, her big eyes, her trunk, which she waved at him, made Rudy smile, but when he stood beside her and put his hand on her shoulder and felt her strength, he experienced something close to awe. He had expected her skin to feel leathery, like a basketball, but it was soft and hairy, like the thick Pendleton blanket he’d given to Molly one year for her birthday

  “Now we inspect her new home,” the Russian said. “Agit, agit.” But Norma Jean balked when the Russian tried to lead her into the barn.

  “She know something up,” he said. He got an ankus out of the cab of the truck and tugged on the loose folds of skin along her leg. She trumpeted loudly. He tugged again, pulling harder this time with the curved hook of the ankus — “agit, agit” — and she lumbered slowly into the dark barn and into her stall, which had been covered with straw bedding.

  “Is good,” the Russian said, cutting the twine on a bale of alfalfa and spreading it out.

  Meg stood next to Rudy and watched while Norma Jean explored her stall, testing the latch with her trunk.

  “We put in a special latch,” Rudy said to Meg. “Elephant-proof.”

  Norma Jean tugged on one of the eyebolts in the back of the stall and then reached over the wall of the stall and turned on the hose. The Russian said something to her and she turned it off and then tried to unscrew a nut, but Rudy and the Russian had tightened everything with a wrench.

  “You want to pet her?” the Russian asked Meg. “You come over here. She like if you tickle her.”

  Norma Jean looked at them with amber-colored eyes. Her lashes were long and wiry. Meg approached cautiously and touched her trunk.

  “Go on ahead,” the Russian said. “Tickle her nose. Ha ha ha. Is all hairy.”

  Norma Jean pulled her trunk back and reached up under Meg’s left armpit. Meg jumped back.

  “She like tickle you too,” the Russian said, shaking with laughter. Norma Jean seemed to be laughing as well, a deep elephant chuckle.

  “I got her things in the truck,” the Russian said. He opened a sack of oranges and tossed one into the stall. Norma Jean mashed it with her foot, mixing it in with a little alfalfa before scooping it up and flipping it into her mouth. Rudy and Meg watched her while the Russian went out to the truck and came back with a soccer ball and an oversized plastic harmonica. “Maybe we take a quick look outside,” he said, “so she can see everything before she have her lunch.” A door at the far end of the barn opened into the paddock.

  Out in the paddock Norma Jean swiveled her head around, raised her trunk in the air, shot it out straight, and exhaled sharply at the Russian, who responded by blowing into the end of it.

  “She be happy here, you’ll see. You be happy too. There are elephant with good disposition and elephant with bad disposition. Norma Jean have good disposition.”

  The Russian went back to the truck to unload her easel and her paints and brushes. Norma Jean galloped over to a couple of scrubby acacia trees at far end of the paddock and pulled off a branch, which she use
d to scratch her back. Then she walked the perimeter of the paddock and came back to the barn.

  “Its a little scary to see her out there,” Rudy said, “to see how fast she can move.”

  “So, she saved your life, Pop?”

  “Lifted me right up into the bed of the truck. The Russian couldn’t have done it by himself.”

  Norma Jean ambled toward them and stopped. She lifted her trunk and touched Meg’s hair. Meg held very still. “It’s all right,” Rudy said. “It’s all right.”

  That night Rudy woke up about three o’clock, as he often did, and couldn’t get back to sleep. He went into Meg’s room and sat on the edge of her bed for a while and stroked her hair. He went back to bed and turned on the radio, which was tuned to the local station. Bob and Helen had put their failed predictions of the Second Coming behind them, though they hadn’t lost interest in the subject. Tonight they were taking calls about the pandit who had gotten rid of the crows. Where had the crows gone? callers wanted to know. What did it mean? Who was this pandit anyway? Rudy was interested. He had the man’s card in his pocket, after all.

  One caller suggested that the pandit might be the Ancient of Days, but Bob and Helen didn’t think that was likely, because the Ancient of Days wore a snow white robe, whereas the pandit’s robe was saffron colored. Another wondered if the coming of the crows and their subsequent disappearance might be a sign of the Last Days and reminded listeners that only Jesus saves — not Bob and Helen, not the Ancient of Days, not the pandit. Only Jesus. Only Jesus. A car dealer called in to say that he didn’t care who the pandit was, he’d gotten rid of the crows and now he didn’t have to wash the crow droppings off his fleet of four hundred cars every day

  Rudy turned the radio off and got up to go to the bathroom. He looked at himself in the mirror while he washed his hands. The knot of anxiety in his stomach showed in his face. He knew better than to turn on the radio in the middle of the night. He’d think he was immune to Bob and Helen, but they always managed to upset him.

  He didn’t know much about the Ancient of Days, but he could hear an old hymn ringing in his head:

  O Worship the King, all glorious above,

  O gratefully sing, his pow’r and his love,

  Our shield and defender, the Ancient of Days,

  Pavilioned in splendor, and girded with praise!

  He heard a trumpet blast from the barn. Norma Jean was awake too. He went downstairs and stepped out onto the veranda for a minute. He caught a whiff of elephant dung — fruity, not unpleasant — and sensed a throbbing phut phut phut, like the pulse of a freight train in the distance — the infrasonic sounds that elephants use to call to each other over long distances. He couldn’t actually hear these sounds, but he could sense them, and he thought that Norma Jean was trying to communicate something to him, trying to tell him that soon he would see clearly and that everything would be all right.

  Rudy took his oldest daughter out to lunch at the Taj Mahal. While they were waiting for their chicken vindaloo they sat side by side in a booth and looked through the chapter on India in Weddings of Many Lands. They wondered what TJ would say about the elephant; they talked about where to put the mandap and where to put the sacred fire, about whether the ceremony should be in the house or in the barn or outside in front of the barn; they discussed the original menu with the manager, who recommended a few changes. But they didn’t talk about Meg’s affair, or Helen’s. They’d said all they needed to say.

  “You are inviting Norma Jean elephant to this wedding?” the manager asked as they were leaving.

  Rudy nodded. “I don’t see why not.”

  The manager smiled. “Every elephant, you know,” he said, “is a manifestation of Lord Ganesh, our elephant-headed god, the remover of obstacles. He is always invoked at the beginning of any great undertaking, such as this one. If you invoke Lord Ganesh, everything is sure to be very fine indeed.”

  “Sounds like good advice to me,” Rudy said,

  “I’m sure you will be very, very happy,” the manager said to Meg.

  “No, no,” she said. “Its my sister who’s getting married. She’s in India right now with her fiance.”

  “Well then,” he said, “I’m sure your sister will be very, very happy. She is already very lucky to have a good sister like you and a good father to concern themselves with all these matters.”

  “I’m sure she will be,” Meg said, “and yes, she is.”

  The Ding an Sich

  After Meg left, Rudy spent more and more time with Norma Jean. He helped the Russian exercise her every morning. She understood more than forty commands, which the Russian barked out in the old language of the mahouts as they walked around the paddock. He was teaching them to Rudy, not Norma Jean.

  At nine o’clock the Russian would leave Norma Jean out in the paddock so that he could work on bringing his barn by the trailer park up to USDA specifications. She’d take a long drink at the big watering trough by Rudy’s barn and kick up some dirt or play with her soccer ball, which she batted around with her trunk, and her oversized plastic harmonica, which made a sound like a kazoo, before heading out to the acacia trees. Sometimes Rudy went with her, to practice his commands. He could get her to go forward (agit) and backward (peachay), to the left (chi) and to the right (chai ghoom), and to raise her trunk (oopar dhur). But he couldn’t seem to master the most important command of all: stop, or dhuth, which you were supposed to pronounce “dutch,” only without the ch sound at the end. Rudy couldn’t quite get it. On the way back to the barn he’d shout “duth,” “dutch,” “dhuth,” but she’d keep right on going until she reached the watering trough, which Rudy kept full. She’d dip her trunk in, suck up several gallons of water, and blow a fine spray over her back and on her belly and sometimes over Rudy too.

  She’d take a little snooze in the afternoon, standing up, and when the Russian came back they’d set out her paints, big cans of tempera paints — children’s finger paints that came from a school-supply wholesaler in Houston. She looked forward to these sessions and would get testy if she had to wait too long. After the painting session, Rudy and the Russian would hose her down and scrub her with two big brushes and then pumice stones, and the Russian would clean her toes.

  “Who cleans elephants’ toes out in the jungle?” Rudy asked.

  “They clean them themselves with a stick,” the Russian said, “just like they draw pictures.”

  They fed her in the morning and again in the evening: a bale of hay, a bale of alfalfa, rolled oats, specially formulated grain that the Russian bought from the zoo in Brownsville, a sack of potatoes, and ten to twenty pounds of fruit. She was very partial to potatoes and oranges. She ate the potatoes whole, but she mashed the oranges with her foot. She consumed a hundred and fifty pounds of fodder every day, half of which she deposited, like steaming loaves of bread, in the front of her stall, where it could easily be mucked out. The Russian shoveled the manure into the back of his truck and sold it to a citrus grower north of town.

  Rudy cooked for the Russian and they ate on a card table out in the barn. The Russian had been with his father when his father’d bought Norma Jean at the hathi bazaar in Sonepur, and he demonstrated how his father had bargained with the vendor, their hands under a blanket to conceal the negotiations from cu rious spectators. If the buyer pressed the first two joints of the first finger of the vendors right hand, he said, taking Rudy’s hand and pressing his finger, that would mean he was offering five thousand rupees. If the vendor wasn’t satisfied, he’d pinch the first joint of the buyer’s next finger to raise the price by five hundred rupees, and so on. After his father’s death, the Russian and Norma Jean had traveled for years with a Russian circus in eastern Europe and then in South America. He liked to reminisce about her adventures, and Rudy liked to listen to his stories: Norma Jean loose in the streets of Mexico City; Norma Jean swimming all the way across Lake La Barea, near Guadalajara; Norma Jean tapping a keg of beer on the circus train from
Chihuahua to Ciudad Obregón. Then, fifteen years ago, the circus went belly-up in Reynosa, just across the river, and the Russian had simply taken off one night and walked the elephant across the international bridge, passing out mordidas to the border guards so they’d look the other way Her Indian name had been Narmada-Jai, but he’d changed it to Norma Jean, Marilyn Monroe’s real name, because she was so beautiful. He pronounced Marilyn Monroe as one word — Marilynmonroe. What times they’d shared together, good times and bad times, but he was an old man now, he said — he didn’t know exactly how old — and he was worried about what was going to happen to her when he was gone. He offered to sell her to Rudy for five thousand dollars.

  Rudy laughed. “I can remember when her picture was on all the magazine covers at the same time. Marilyn Monroe’s picture. That was the summer Helen went to Italy for the first time and I started doing all the cooking.”

  The Russian poured a small glass of vodka for each of them and they drank.

  “I can remember the day she died too,” Rudy said. “August fifth, nineteen sixty-two. My youngest daughter had just gotten a job as a book conservator at the Newberry Library, and Molly — the one who’s getting married — was getting ready to take off for Ann Arbor to study modern dance.”

  “You can’t understand it without vodka,” the Russian said, pouring two more glasses.

  “I guess that’s true of a lot of things,” Rudy said.

  That night, as he was drifting off to sleep, Rudy could hear Norma Jean, through his bedroom window, stirring in her stall, making her presence felt — an occasional trumpet blast followed by a full-throated roar.

  Sometimes after lunch, while Norma Jean was snoozing, Rudy’d read Philosophy Made Simple out in the barn. He read and reread the chapters on Berkeley and Hume, underlining key passages with Helens fountain pen till there were no more passages left to underline, but he couldn’t find the flaws in the arguments that led, step by step, to the following conclusions: that the external world has no palpable existence apart from our perceptions; that the self itself is nothing but a bundle of these perceptions; that causality is psychological, rather than physical — a habit of mind based on the laws of association and constant conjunction.