“Then there’s a change, you see. It’s called a volta. That means ‘a turn.’ Now she tells him what she’s going to give him: love in the open hand, cowslips in a hat, apples in her skirt. Everything’s natural, you see what I mean? And then the ending is a couplet: calling out as children do: ‘Look what I have!—And these are all for you.’
“Molly’s not a child, TJ. Love in the open hand is what she’ll bring you, apples in her skirt. That’s the metaphor you want.”
Rudy got up and went into the bathroom and ran cold water over his face. TJ’s leather dopp kit was next to the sink, zipped shut. There was nothing out on the counter. No shaving lotion, no razor, no deodorant. The towels, hanging neatly on a rack over the toilet, had not been used. Rudy took one down and dried his face.
“How’s Norma Jean?” TJ asked.
Rudy looked at himself in the mirror and smiled. “Still out cold,” he called, putting the towel down and then picking it up again. “I don’t think there’s much of a chance. The vet from the Brownsville Zoo’s coming this morning.” Rudy stayed in the bathroom, but they began to talk about the elephant, and the remarkable paintings she’d done, and the sweetness of her disposition, and how she’d set aside the little pile of grain for the mice, and how tragic her death would be.
“But who would marry us now?” TJ asked. “The pandit and the priest both said—”
“Don’t worry about those old goats,” Rudy interrupted, coming out of the bathroom, holding the towel against his face so TJ couldn’t see his expression. “You give Molly a call. I’ll round up a justice of the peace and meet you back at the house.”
“By the way, Rudy,” TJ said, “I have your proof.” He shuffled through the papers on the desk. “Here it is. In ΔABC, let ∠ABC = 2α, and ∠ACB = 2ß. Okay? And let BE and CF be the internal bisectors of the angles ABC and ACB respectively Now, suppose…”
Rudy listened to TJ’s solution to the two-bisectors problem. TJ had not proved that it was true, but he’d proved that everything else is false, a proof he called reductio ad absurdum. The proof required only a few simple steps, and Rudy was able to follow it without difficulty. The only problem, TJ said, was that some mathematicians didn’t accept reductio ad absurdum as a valid principle. But Rudy accepted it, so it didn’t matter.
The house was full of people when Rudy arrived with a justice of the peace—Medardo’s cousin from Hidalgo, the one who’d notarized his will. Uncle Siva, assuming the duties of the generous host, had already opened several bottles of Pol Roger and un~ molded several of the Saint-Cyrs. No one knew what to expect, but the mood was festive. Mollys eyes were red, but she was smiling. TJ, sitting next to her, had shaved and was wearing his wedding suit. Nandini was still outside with Norma Jean.
There was one more delay, however. Just as they’d gotten everyone arranged and the justice of the peace, standing on the third step, looking down at the wedding party, was opening his book, the vet from the Brownsville Zoo arrived—a big burly man who looked as if he was used to doctoring lions and tigers and elephants.
Siva handed him a glass of champagne and Rudy went with him to have a look at Norma Jean. Nandini, who’d put on one of Rudy’s jackets over her sari, was resting her hand on Norma Jean’s head.
The vet had never seen anything like it and wanted to put her down. Rudy agreed that this was probably the best thing, but Nandini begged them to wait. He couldn’t come again till Monday, the vet said, and warned them that by Monday Norma Jean would be suffering from muscular necrosis and would not be able to stand up even if she regained consciousness. He cut away enough dead flesh around the metal anklet on her leg so that he was able to unfasten it; he rubbed the wound with an antibiotic lotion and gave Norma Jean a shot. He left another hypodermic needle and more antibiotics with Nandini, who had had some experience with sick or injured elephants, and he volunteered to stay with Norma Jean during the ceremony.
“Estamos aquí presentes…,” the justice of the peace began, without looking up, reading from a small three-ring binder that he held open in both hands. Standing on the third step, he lowered the binder and looked down on Molly and her sisters, and on TJ and Uncle Siva, who was standing up with him. And then he turned some pages and began again in English: “We are gathered here in the sight of God, and in the face of this company, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony.”
Molly, wearing a white dress trimmed with yellow and blue lace, took TJ to be her lawfully wedded husband, and TJ, in a pale blue suit, took Molly to be his lawfully wedded wife. Ninety people filled the large living room and the broad hallway that led to the kitchen. Maria was there, in a low-cut dress, and the art dealer, who had his arm around her waist, and Uncle Siva, in his Italian silk suit, which did not seem to have been damaged by the storm. Standing next to his nephew, he was so resplendent he might have been mistaken for the groom. Rudy’s heart seized up, the way it sometimes did when he was overexcited. He was standing next to Nandini, who was wearing one of her aunt’s yellow saris. The fire in the woodstove was not the sacred fire they’d planned on, but it kept the house warm. It was all over by eleven o’clock. The catering truck from the Taj Mahal had already arrived, and the Indian chef and his Mexican sous-chefs began to prepare the wedding banquet on the veranda. Rudy put a bottle of the Pol Roger in a paper bag and hid it in the cabinet under the sink in the kitchen, and he camouflaged a Saint-Cyr in the back of the freezer by wrapping it in a sheet of newspaper, and then he took a plate of poppadoms and samosas out to Nandini, who’d gone out to check on Norma Jean. They ate the poppadoms and samosas with their fingers. They were hot and spicy.
A beautiful woman with long black hair approached Rudy as he was opening a bottle of champagne. She held out her glass and he filled it. She was about Molly’s age and looked familiar, like someone he’d known a long time ago.
“Christine Harrington,” she said. “Gary and Vivians daughter. Your brother was my grandfather.”
“Oh, for heavens sake,” Rudy said. “I saw your name on the list, but I haven’t seen you since…”
“Since I was in high school,” she said, finishing the sentence for him.
“And look at you now.”
“The invitation came to my grandmothers,” she said. “It didn’t have my name on it, but I thought I’d come anyway. Maybe reconnect.”
“Are you staying in the seminary?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, “but I’m catching a ride to the airport this afternoon with one of Mollys friends.”
“How is it?”
“The seminary? Oh, it’s very nice. Kind of spooky, though, all those crucifixes on the wall and pictures of bleeding hearts wrapped in thorns. My grandmother would have a fit.”
“How is your grandmother these days? I’ve always been sorry we lost touch.”
“She’s in a nursing home now, on old US 12, just north of the old drive-in theater.”
“Still setting an extra place for your grandfather?”
“She is, in fact. She didn’t do it for years, but when she moved into the nursing home she started up again. I thought they were going to kick her out. We finally got something worked out. They give her an extra salad plate at dinner and an extra knife and fork.”
“Whatever works.”
“She just can’t let go,” Christine said, shaking her head. “Eighty years old and she can’t let go.”
Rudy filled their glasses with more Pol Roger. “Here’s to letting go,” he said, raising his glass. Christine raised her glass and touched the edge to Rudy’s.
“To letting go.”
“Letting go is good,” Rudy said. “It’s very good. But holding on is good too.”
The photographer Rudy’d hired failed to show up, so during the festivities Meg took pictures with a new Instamatic camera: Molly and TJ cutting into a Saint-Cyr; Uncle Siva proposing a toast; the vet giving last-minute instructions to Nandini; Medardo in sandals and linen trousers and a salmon-colored shirt,
open at the collar, talking to his cousin; Dan and Meg with their arms around the bride; Philip and Daniel clowning on the stairs; the justice of the peace palming the hundred-dollar bill Rudy’d just extracted from his wallet; Margot admiring her sister; Maria and the art dealer chatting with Siva; Nandini and Rudy standing with Molly and TJ as they prepared to leave for the airport in McAllen. TJ was leaving for Ann Arbor the following morning for the beginning of the semester, Molly would be spending the night with him at a motel near the airport and coming back to Rudy’s in the morning. She was leaving for India on Monday.
As they said their good-byes, Rudy dug down as deep as he could for some final words of advice, but he couldn’t come up with anything. She wasn’t a virgin, and she wasn’t a gift. She was just Molly.
Nandini began to cry, and Rudy felt himself on the verge of tears too as he handed Molly into the rental car and kissed her goodbye. But these were pleasant tears, appropriate to the occasion, and when he and Nandini looked at each other, they both smiled.
“I would like to have a puja,” Nandini said as the car disappeared down the long drive. “We must call the pandit in the morning.”
“The pandit hasn’t been very agreeable,” Rudy said.
“Nevertheless,” said Nandini, “he is the only one who can help us now.”
Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
Though Narmada-Jai was in a coma—Nandini had begun to call her by her Indian name—they were aware of her at all times and spoke to each other in hushed tones, as if they were in the hospital room of a patient in critical condition. In the evening, Medardo came to stay with her so that Rudy and Nandini could go up to the house for a while to rest and clean up and have a bite to eat. Dan and the boys had gone back to Milwaukee on their scheduled flight, but Meg had stayed behind to be with her sisters. Meg and Margot persuaded Nandini, who was completely exhausted, to take a whirlpool bath while they went to the motel to get her things.
Rudy made up a bed for Nandini upstairs. When he was finished he sat in the kitchen and listened to the hum of the whirlpool bath while he waited for Meg and Margot to return. His happiness at being near Nandini seemed to him to be inappropriate, under the circumstances, but he couldn’t help himself. In his imagination he could see her coming out of the grove in her sari, could see her knees moving under the deep green cloth and her neck bones peeking out beneath her dark hair, could hear her scolding Narmada-Jai in her soft voice, telling the elephant to raise her leg so he and Molly could use it as a step. He could hear her questions about the grove—hectares, acres, kilograms, pounds.
That night he sat up with Narmada-Jai for a long time. He played his guitar for an hour but didn’t sing, and then he lay down on the Russians cot, which he’d moved to Narmada-Jai’s makeshift tent. He did not know what Siva had said to his sister, and now Siva had gone to New York. He would have to speak for himself. He had not said anything to the girls, but he sensed that they sensed. He knew that they loved him and wanted him to be happy, and he could see that they themselves were doing everything possible to make Nandini feel a part of the family.
Rudy tried to push her away from the center of his thoughts, but it was impossible. He thought of the Russian crossing the international bridge with Narmada-Jai in tow, of Mollys happiness, of the priests expectation of heaven, of Margot calling from Italy to say she was in love, of Meg acting out her first victory before the appellate court, and of Medardo’s face as he left for Reynosa on Friday evenings. He and Nandini were also standing at a threshold. Was this simple foolishness? Ignorance? Moha? Maya? Did he know the real woman at all, or only a puppet in his imagination—a fantasy woman who offered no more resistance to his desires than the clay idol of Lord Ganesh that the pandit had brought for the wedding? But he couldn’t help himself. This was, he realized, his last chance to experience if not beauty, then joy, even ecstasy.
He had never expected to be in love again. He had come to associate all the symptoms of love with adolescence. They got you started down the road, but then you discovered that there’s more than bed to marriage—one of life’s great truths—and had to move on to the next, more mature, phase. But his heart was open wide now He had to acknowledge that he was no longer the same man he’d been at the beginning of his philosophical quest. He felt that he could see what no one else could see, not only his own inner turmoil, but the inner feelings of others, as if he were observing them from an invisible vantage point in one of TJ’s parallel universes. What if? he asked himself. And at every what if? the universe split apart, and it would split apart again depending on what Nandini decided. In one universe Rudy and Nandini would manage the grove together. In another Nandini would go back to her tea garden in Assam. In one universe they would step into their new lives; in another, they would step back into their old ones.
The next morning Nandini spent an hour on the phone talking to the pandit, arranging a puja—some kind of ceremony for Narmada-Jai. If the puja didn’t work, they were going to call the vet and ask him to put the elephant down, but Nandini was hopeful, more than hopeful. She’d seen miracles, she said. She’d fed the statue of Ganesh in Guwahati a little spoonful of milk. All over India it had happened, she said, and in other countries too. Even in Los Angeles. The statues had drunk milk.
Medardo, who’d dropped by to see what needed to be done, was also optimistic. “Like the Virgin Mary shedding tears,” he said. “I saw that too in Monterrey, two times.”
So they were in good spirits when Molly came back from McAllen, and no longer spoke in hushed hospital tones. TJ had almost missed his flight, Molly said, smiling. They were still sitting at the breakfast table, their dirty dishes in front of them. They’d eaten eggs scrambled with the two avocados that had been sitting on the counter, which had finally begun to soften. Medardo had gone out to sit with Narmada-Jai. Nandini had both elbows on the table and was supporting her chin on her interlocked fingers.
“What are you staring at?” Molly asked.
Everyone laughed. Molly blushed. “We just wanted to see what you looked like married,” Margot said.
“How do I look?”
“Radiant.”
“Are you sure you’re actually married?” Margot asked.
Molly laughed. “There was a certain amount of confusion.”
“That pandit was a piece of work,” Margot said. “You’re lucky he didn’t perform the ceremony.”
“The priest wasn’t any better,” Molly said, “but at least the justice of the peace seemed to know what he was doing. And anyway, don’t you really marry yourselves? Legally, I mean. Even in Christianity I think that you marry yourselves. The church just sort of presides over it. At least that’s what somebody told us when we went for premarital counseling.”
“You went for premarital counseling?” Meg asked.
“Yes, we went for premarital counseling.”
“Don’t you have the license? That’s what makes it legal—a marriage license from the state of Texas, the thing you got when you went into town with Father Russell?”
Molly put her hand over her mouth. “I don’t remember.”
“Didn’t the JP ask about it? What kind of a JP was he anyway? Do you have it, even if it isn’t signed?”
Molly looked around. “He said we were married. He pronounced us man and wife.”
“Jesus Christ,” Meg said.
“Well, you didn’t think of it either.”
“I wasn’t the one getting married.”
“I feel married.”
“How does it feel?”
“Kind of tingly.”
Nandini put her hands over her eyes. Rudy was afraid she was crying, but she was laughing. “You’re married,” he said. “The JP took the certificate into town., to the courthouse.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Molly asked.
“I wanted to see if you could remember signing it,” Rudy said, looking at the second hand on the old kitchen clock he’d brought from the house in Chicago. The transp
arent front cover was missing, and part of the white plastic frame at the back had broken off. Helen had taped it together. If it had been in his power he would have stopped time at that moment, would have placed his finger on the clock face to block the second hand. He thought of the old hymn, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” They were together again as a family. Meg and Molly and Margot. And in a parallel universe it might have been, might be, Helen laughing and covering her face with her hands instead of Nandini.
Rudy had read about Zeno’s paradox in Philosophy Made Simple, and so he knew that the second hand, which was now at the six, could never reach the twelve, because first it would have to reach the halfway point, the nine, and then, having reached the nine, it would have to reach another halfway point, between the ten and the eleven. And then it would have to reach still another halfway point. No matter how close it got to the twelve, there would always be another halfway point. But the second hand did not slow down as it approached the twelve. In fact, as it swept past the twelve, through an infinite number of halfway points, it seemed to be accelerating, carrying with it what was left of the morning.
“You ever see Sandro again?” Molly asked.
Margot shook her head. “He’s moved to Rome. But I’m still living in his apartment! It belongs to his wife. She’s cut the phone off, but it’ll be forever before she can get me out of there.”
“Why don’t we have lobster tonight?” Meg said.
“All you can get here,” Rudy said, “are those frozen rock lobster tails.”
“But they’re good,” Molly said. “Have you ever had lobster, Amma?”
Nandini smiled. “Of course, but I’m sure that anything your father prepares will be very fine,” she said, putting on a jacket. “But what is ‘a piece of work? You are saying that the pandit is ‘a piece of work.’ “ She was in jeans and a sweatshirt. The temperature was still in the low sixties.
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