Meg and Margot were going to wear identical simple long dresses for the wedding ceremony, but Molly was going to wear a red sari trimmed with gold. The grooms party—TJ and Uncle Siva and a friend of TJ’s from the University of Michigan—would gather in front of the barn, where the guests would be greeted by Norma Jean. Once the guests were assembled, TJ and the groom’s party would fetch Molly from the house, and Nandini would lead Norma Jean to the mandap, where she would lend an auspicious presence.
Fortunately no one had an idee fixe about exactly how things ought to be and must be and therefore had to be. Even the pandit, Sathyasiva Bhagvanulu, and the priest, Father Russell, who—by taking care of the marriage license and by putting the seminary at the disposal of the wedding guests—had earned the right to act as an unofficial consultant, were flexible and didn’t insist that every detail had to be precisely this way or that. So during the remaining days, Molly was content to leave the details up to Nandini, and Rudy was content to cook for everyone and to do as he was told. The result of all this activity was a sense of well-being, like the pleasant hum of a beehive, rather than anxiety.
On Tuesday morning, Siva and TJ drove over to Pharr to look for the cotton plantation where William Burroughs had lived in the forties. Rudy went into town to buy red and purple sheets to drape over Norma Jean, and then he made a second trip for a spool of a certain kind of thread; and then he made a third trip for turmeric to smear on the bride and groom just before the ceremony When he returned, Father Russell’s battered old Pontiac with white sidewall tires was parked in front of the barn next to the pandits forest green Cadillac Seville. In the barn, Meg and Margot were working on the jigsaw puzzle while the priest and the pandit conferred with Nandini and Molly about the final details. A friendly rivalry had developed between the two priests. Father Russell had brought a big sack of sweet corn from his garden at the seminary and the pandit had brought a clay idol of Lord Ganesh.
Uncle Siva and TJ had returned from Pharr without having located the plantation. “The locals don’t want to talk about Burroughs,” Siva said. “Or Kerouac. Kerouac describes the house in On the Road, you know.”
“I don’t know about that,” Rudy said, “but there are pictures of those two guys at Joe’s Place in Reynosa. One of Burroughs’s friends was killed by a lion at Joe’s, but there aren’t any lions there now.”
“Good lord,” Siva said. “We’ll have to visit. My treat.”
“Not this afternoon,” Rudy said.
They were standing in the barn doorway. Uncle Siva was smoking one of the large cigars that he carried in a special case. The smell, sweet and pungent, filled the barn. TJ was sitting at the card table with Meg and Margot, drinking tea and drawing triangles on a piece of paper. Rudy looked over his shoulder before sitting down on a bale of alfalfa next to Nandini, who was sewing a final bit of gold trim onto Molly’s wedding sari. Nandini was wearing a pair of jeans like Mollys and a white blouse, and she had three spools of special thread in her lap. An elephant-shaped raffia sewing basket—a prewedding present—sat at her feet.
Molly couldn’t sit still. The Russian’s radio was on, and she got up and stood for a minute or so in the middle of the floor with her arms hanging at her sides and then began to dance to the music. When Percy Sledge started to sing “When a Man Loves a Woman,” she asked TJ to dance with her, and then she made all the men dance with her, even Uncle Siva and Medardo, who had stopped by to see how things were going. She and Rudy danced to “Monday, Monday.” The songs were punctuated with news about a tropical storm that was developing in the Caribbean, but everyone was glad that the weather had turned cooler.
“I’m unforgivably happy,” Molly said. “I don’t care if it rains. I can’t help it. Will you forgive me?” She’d just finished dancing with Uncle Siva, who was an excellent dancer.
“What do you think?” TJ asked, looking up from the bisectors problem. “Shall we forgive her?”
“Oh, I think we are forgiving her,” Nandini said.
“What was the happiest moment in your life?” Molly asked Uncle Siva.
“I suppose it depends on what you mean by happiness. Can you give me a definition?”
“How about the first time you fell in love?”
Siva laughed. “That was probably the unhappiest day of my life.”
Molly looked around for help. Father Russell came to her aid: “I believe that our natural hunger for joy and beauty and ecstasy gives us a glimpse of the happiness we shall experience in heaven,” he said, “and that the joy and beauty and ecstasy and love that we experience imperfectly here on earth represent heaven the way the pencil marks that an artist makes on a piece of paper represent the three-dimensional world, or the way the notes that a composer makes on a piece of staff paper represent a symphony.”
The pandit was quick to disagree: “Trying to reach happiness by fulfilling your desires is like trying to reach the horizon by running toward it. True happiness is to be found not in the fulfillment of desire but escape from desire, escape from the wheel of karma, the cycle of death and rebirth, in nirvana or moksha. Deep emotional attachment, or moha, is always infected. It is the root cause of the problems of the world. Siva Singh is right to regard the first time he fell in love as the unhappiest day of his life, but I speak not only of greed and appetite and craving but also of moha toward blood relations. Very few can escape its clutches.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Rudy said.
“No, Mr. Harrington, excessive moha will destroy you. Detachment is what is called for if you wish to maintain a proper balance between the physical and the spiritual, the mundanity of outer existence and the atman within. Ganesh, you know, in his aspect as the Big-Bellied One, Mahodara, is the dispeller of moha, infatuation or delusion.”
“I think people are happiest,” Rudy said, “when they’re standing on the threshold of a new life: about to get married, or crossing the international bridge with an elephant, like the Russian, or getting ordained into the priesthood. I remember when Helen and I decided to buy the house on Chambers Street—Helen was my wife. When we walked into our house for the first time—before we bought it, it wasn’t ours yet—it was full of antique furniture, including an invalids chair that General Lafayette had brought to America during the Revolutionary War. Even the defects were charming. The parquet floors were almost black; the kitchen was a mess; the soil pipe was cracked; the knob-and-tube wiring wasn’t up to code; there was no shower. The next time we saw it, it was empty, but we filled it with love and imagination,” he said, and then stopped. He didn’t want to say any more. In the master bedroom upstairs he’d kissed Helen. They’d thought the real estate agent was downstairs. He really kissed her, lifting her skirt, just as he’d done in the Drake Hotel on their wedding night, sliding his hands down inside her panties. But the funny thing was that when the real estate agent walked in on them, she didn’t say excuse me and back out of the room; she wasn’t embarrassed at all. She understood and shared their happiness and excitement. The three of them stepped out onto the little balcony at the front of the house. The roof came down over the door, so you couldn’t open the door all the way.
“It’s like the lover on Keats’s urn,” Margot said. “My mother’s favorite poem. ‘Bold lover, never never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal.’ It’s not the kiss but the moment just before the kiss that’s the moment of real happiness.”
“That’s because the kiss,” Siva said, “entails disappointment. Always. Inevitably. Without exception. Life is a painful process. Youth grows old, love grows cold. The journey is never as liberating as we anticipate. We shuffle back and forth between boredom and anxiety.”
Rudy started to object, but Uncle Siva went on, following the current of his own thought: “Sathyasiva Bhagvanulu is right,” he said, nodding at the pandit. “In a way. What most people really do want is relief—not the fulfillment of desire, not even the renunciation of desire, but the eradication of desire. True happiness is
impossible. The little bits of happiness that we do experience only make us more miserable by contrast.”
“Most people,” Rudy said, starting to protest, but suddenly his whole mental being was jolted, the way his body was occasionally jolted when he was descending a stairway and miscalculated the number of steps. He slipped, or fell, or stumbled, into Uncle Siva’s point of view, a kind of Schopenhauerian pessimism. He suddenly understood why, on Sunday morning, a man in Wes-laco had shot and killed his wife and three children and then himself, why a woman in Pharr had sealed up the house, turned on the gas, and lain down with her sleeping children in their bedroom. It wasn’t insanity or hatred that drove them, it was that moha had become too great a burden. They wanted relief, eradication of love and desire, freedom from deep emotional attachments, from love and heartache. He saw now in his own failure to validate the visions that had brought him to Texas the first step away from wanting and toward salvation, away from moha and toward moksha. At that particular moment he could imagine no happiness greater than the sudden destruction of the world—not the Second Coming, with its attendant complications, but complete annihilation.
“What I think,” Siva said, tipping back in his chair, as if he wanted to relish the moment, “what I think is that trying to get the answers you want to life’s questions directly from someone else is like trying to cheat on an examination. You have to create your own answers. And when you have your own answers, then you’ll find that you can’t communicate them directly to other people. You can only point and say tat tvam asi. That thou art.”
Rudy took a step backward, as if stepping back from the edge of a cliff. He imagined himself standing in his driveway, looking at his old house and saying tat tvam asi. Helen and I were never disillusioned with our life on Chambers Street. Our marriage ended in death, not disillusionment. Even Helens affair with Bruni has become part of the pattern, a bright thread in the weave, a thread that I would not remove now even if it were in my power to do so. Life is good. I’ve got to get a grip on myself and not be disoriented by every twist and turn in the argument. This meditation, which couldn’t have lasted more than a second, was interrupted by piercing screams.
TJ had lifted his empty mug, which he had placed upside down on his saucer, and a mouse had run out, leaping off the saucer onto the table. Molly and Margot jumped up and screamed, putting their hands over their hearts. The mouse ran back and forth over the jigsaw puzzle, which was almost completed. The mouse looked this way and that, and then charged down the table toward the pandit, who pulled his long beard back out of harms way, spilling his tea in the process. At first he was angry, but then he began to laugh and to speak to TJ in Hindi. TJ answered, evidently explaining the friendship between this particular mouse, which he’d caught in Norma Jean’s stall, and this particular elephant, because the pandit got up to have a look at the little pile of grain Norma Jean had left by the mouse hole at the back of the stall.
“I thought elephants were afraid of mice,” Margot said.
“Lord Ganesh descends to earth on a mouse, you know,” the pandit said. “Symbolically, the mouse will carry God’s grace to every corner of the mind.”
“The pope had an elephant,” the priest said, not wanting to be outdone by the pandit. “Pope Leo. The Tenth.”
“That’s the guy,” Margot added, “who said, ‘God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it.’ Mama always liked that story.”
“I don’t know about that,” Father Russell said, “but he had an elephant named Annone, a present from the king of Portugal. Annone would dance before the pope and genuflect to him. The pope loved him and he loved the pope. Aretino refers to Annone in La Cortigiana, and Giulio Romano—”
But Father Russell was interrupted by the pandit. “What nonsense,” the pandit said, “the pope doesn’t know a thing about elephants,” and then he said something in Hindi, and then he said, “Be good, see good, do good,” and sitting down, he began to sing: “Om Sivaiah, Om Sivaiah, Shambo Shankara Om Sivaiah.” He continued to sing the same words over and over for several minutes, his face becoming more and more swollen until he started to choke. He leaned forward over the table, and Siva pounded his back. When the pandit covered his mouth with his hands, Rudy thought he was going to throw up, but then he pulled a large egg-shaped crystal, covered with blood, from his mouth. He wiped it on his napkin and placed it on the table, and Rudy saw that it was not an egg, but a bright blue lingam.
So, Rudy thought, the pandit has a few tricks of his own. This was even better than the mouse. He knew that TJ had caught the mouse earlier and kept it in his pocket, but he had no idea how the pandit had produced the lingam. Everyone was staring at the pandit and the lingam.
“What was that all about?” Rudy asked the pandit.
“The pativrata does not reveal the secrets of her connubial experiences,” the pandit said. “Nor does the good sadhak reveal the secrets of his spiritual experiences.” He put the lingam in his briefcase and left them with a blessing: Om suklambaradharam vishnum.
Om, attired in white and all-pervading,
O moon-hued, four-shouldered One
with smiling face so pleasing,
upon You we meditate
for removing all obstacles.
TJ caught the mouse, which was still running around on the jigsaw puzzle as if it were searching for the entrance to the Kalighat, and shoved it into his cupped right hand. When he opened his hand, the mouse was gone.
“When Annone got sick,” the priest said, determined to have the last word, “the pope stayed with him night and day, and when Annone died he commissioned Raphael to do a memorial fresco, only it was probably Giulio Romano who actually painted it, right at the entrance of the basilica of St. Peter. But it’s gone now.”
Rudy smoked cigars and discussed Schopenhauer and Nietzsche with Uncle Siva; he discussed the upcoming harvest with Medardo and elephant art on the phone with the dealer in San Antonio, who was going to send a photographer, after the wedding, to get some shots of Norma Jean painting. He danced and talked with his daughters in the barn. They’d become, all three of them, the women Helen would have wanted them to be: open-hearted, confident, spirited, and even wise.
He was happy, but not in any of the ways he’d been happy before. He could say to himself, not this, not that, but he couldn’t explain to himself what it was. He could only look around him and point and say: Tat tvam asi, that thou art.
The Gift of a Virgin
It was Norma Jean, not Molly, who was the center of attention. The days revolved around her, as if she were the one getting married: her morning bath in the river; her painting session in the afternoon; her pedicure after she was done painting; her breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And on Thursday afternoon after her bath she herself became a work of art, as Nandini decorated her with her own tempura paints, blue and red and purple. The Indian relatives took hundreds of flash photos, and even Detroit Auntie, a formidable old woman who dressed in beautiful yellow saris embroidered with animals and flowers and birds, and who had grown up in Assam before marrying a Bengali trader, insisted on taking her tea out in the barn.
By this time everything was beginning to happen of its own accord. The wedding was out of Rudy’s hands. No one individual was in charge—not Detroit Auntie, who agreed with the pandit that the wedding should be postponed till the following Monday, a more auspicious day; not Molly or TJ, who would have been greatly inconvenienced by any postponement; not Uncle Siva, not Nandini, not the pandit, who appeared from time to time in his saffron robe to perform various ceremonies or pujas. And yet, at the same time, Rudy couldn’t help but feel that everything that was happening was happening because he was willing it to happen, that the world was flowing through him, like water through the gate of the lateral canal.
On Thursday evening delicious curries and breads and platters of aromatic rice arrived, as if by magic, from the Taj Mahal in McAllen, and after dinner all the guests gathered in the barn to dance and talk. Late i
n the evening, when everyone was tired of dancing, Rudy got out his guitar and played quietly while the others talked.
The Indian contingent from Detroit—children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Detroit Auntie, Nandini’s mothers sister—was settled in comfortable motel rooms along Highway 83. Philip and Daniel, as they had been promised, slept out in the barn with their grandfather and Norma Jean. TJ and Mollys friends from Ann Arbor were looked after at the seminary by Father Russell, along with a few scattered Harrington relatives.
On Friday morning, the day before the wedding, the temperature dropped into the lower sixties. Rudy built a fire in the woodstove, and the Indian women gathered in the kitchen, instead of on the veranda or out in the barn, to drink their milky tea. Their husbands stood outside the barn with Uncle Siva, smoking cigars, while inside the children watched Nandini touch up Norma Jean with another coat of paint. Norma Jean fidgeted so much that Rudy had to hold her tail as Nandini walked round her, daubing here and there, painting earrings on her ears and yellow diamonds and red rubies on her forehead, a fretwork of colored flowers on her trunk, till Norma Jean was herself transformed into a bride. “I am not expert,” Nandini said, hitching up her jeans, but when she stepped back to survey her work Rudy could see that she was pleased.