Philosophy Made Simple (14 page)

Rudy’d been out of the hospital for three weeks. He still hadn’t told the girls about the heart attack. His own brush with death hadn’t bothered him, at least that’s what he told himself, and he didn’t want it to bother them, but on Sunday he went to mass with the priest, Father Russell. He wasn’t supposed to drive yet, so Father Russell picked him up in his old Pontiac.

Rudy figured he’d blend into the congregation, stay away from people who looked as if they might try to put him on a committee,
and simply try to affirm, in the most general way possible, that our lives in this world, this universe, are not without meaning and purpose. But the nurse had been right; there was no one to blend in with: no seminarians, no congregation, no community.
Rudy was the only one in the huge seminary chapel, except for the plaster-of-paris statues that lined the walls. He waited in the chapel till he got tired of waiting, and then he wandered back to the sacristy where Father Russell was struggling to get into some complicated vestments.

“I haven’t said mass in six months,” Father Russell explained. “You have to have at least one person in the congregation to say mass.”

Rudy thought the mass was supposed to be in English, but Father Russell said it in Latin, and Rudy couldn’t understand a word till Father Russell invited him, in English, to come up and take communion. He went. He knew that this was against the
rules, but he went up anyway and knelt at the communion railing. He took the dry wafer on his tongue, but Father Russell didn’t offer him any wine. Rudy held the wafer on his tongue, let it soften, the body of Christ. He could almost feel his heart getting stronger.

Afterward he was anxious to leave, to get out of there, but the priest didn’t want him to go. Rudy could understand that.
They ate in the huge seminary kitchen. The priest didn’t know how to cook. They ate bologna and mayonnaise on white bread,
and drank sweet sherry wine.

“What’s the greatest tragedy in the history of the world?” the priest asked, pouring himself a little more sherry.

Rudy had no idea.

“Take a guess.”

“The Holocaust?”

Father Russell shook his head.

“World War II?”

Father Russell shook his head again.

“I really don’t have any idea,” Rudy said.

“The burning of the library in Alexandria,” Father Russell said.

“You mean in Egypt?”

The priest smiled.

“Are you serious?” Rudy asked.

“Mr. Harrington,” he said, “the library had the medical manuscripts of Saint Luke. Cures for cancer. Cures for heart disease.
Cures for leprosy. For everything. All lost. But I’m something of a healer too, a
curandero.
That’s how I got in trouble with the bishop.” He leaned over the table and put his hand on Rudy’s chest.

How crazy can you get?
Rudy thought.
It’s no wonder they left him all alone at the seminary
But he didn’t push the priest’s hand away.

Medardo didn’t bring the standard will form till Friday. His cousin — a justice of the peace from Hidalgo — came with him.
Rudy opened three beers and they sat at the glass-topped table on the veranda.

“I’m going to arrange something with a woman who specializes in older men like you,” Medardo said; “men with a heart condition.”

Rudy didn’t want to discuss these matters in front of a third party, but he had no choice. “How old is she?”

“Don’t worry, Rudy. This is a beautiful woman. You’ll thank me. But I’m going to stay right here and drink this beer while you fill out the will, okay?”

Rudy left everything he owned — the grove, the pickup, the two farm wagons, Creaky’s old two-ton truck with slatted sides that they’d use to take the avocados to the packing house in Hidalgo — to the three girls. The only tricky thing was the piano.
If Meg kept the piano, then each of the other girls would get five thousand dollars at the outset. Once that was taken care of, the estate would be divided three ways. Rudy signed the will and Medardo witnessed it, and Medardo’s cousin notarized it.

“Now you won’t have to worry,” Medardo said. “No fighting over who gets what. And if something should happen, God forbid,
your daughters will never know. The newspaper will say that you had a heart attack in a downtown club. That’s all. Very discreet.”

“I forgot about the chandelier,” Rudy said. “The dining room chandelier was probably worth more than we paid for the house.
It’s up in Meg’s attic right now, all packed up in newspaper.”

“It’s part of the estate,” Medardo’s cousin said. “Your daughters can sell it, or if one of them wants it they can have it appraised and settle it like the piano.”

Rudy nodded. “One more drink,” he said. “The
penúltimo trago.”

But Medardo shook his head. He and his cousin were on their way to Reynosa for a cultural Friday

The form for the will was, in fact, the same one Rudy’d gotten for Helen when she’d decided to make out her will. He’d been working on the side porch, tearing up the flooring so he could replace the sagging joists. It was 1960. Helen had less than a month left to live and had been making some tapes. Rudy played the guitar and did a little recording himself on an Ampex portable stereo recorder with a built-in amplifier, and he’d bought a punch-in/out switch so that Helen could start and stop the recorder with a click of a button. When he took a break and brought her a cup of tea, she told him she wanted to make out her will. She’d been recording, but she stopped when he came in. The microphones on their booms hovered over the bed like hummingbirds. She held the punch-in/out switch in her hand. She’d just finished a tape. Rudy held the iced tea for her so she could drink it through a straw, and then he put the tape in a box and threaded a new one in the tape recorder.

“You shouldn’t be working so hard in this wet weather,” she said. “This old house, it’s like it’s in motion. Every year you tear part of it down and rebuild it. Like Grandfather’s hammer. The head’s been replaced, and the handles been replaced, but it’s still the same hammer. And it’s still the same house. It’s like an enduring form, a center, a place that will hold our family for a while.”

“I’m going to use treated wood for the joists,” Rudy said. “It’s expensive, but they’ll last forever. Do you want me to rub your back?”

“Dyings harder than I thought it was going to be,” she said. She had trouble rolling over so that he could reach her back.
“I mean, I thought death was something that just happened to you, not something you had to
do.
I don’t want to do it, but I don’t want to miss it either. I feel the way I used to feel at my piano recitals: stage fright.”

Rudy moved a microphone aside and sat down on the edge of the hospital bed he’d rented for her. “Oh, Helen.”

“When I was a little girl,” she went on, “my mother kept individual scrapbooks for my brother and me. She put everything in them: report cards, school programs, vital statistics, birthday parties, piano recitals, snapshots. We had a record of everything. I always meant to do that for the girls, Rudy, but somehow I never got around to it. My life has always been such a jumble, just like my mind is now, so when you listen to these tapes you’ll just have to forgive me.”

“There’s nothing to forgive, Helen. You don’t have to worry about that.” Even at that point he couldn’t ask her about Bruni.
He didn’t want to confront her in a hostile way, but oh, just, he didn’t know, maybe get things out in the open. He wondered if she’d say anything about him on the tapes.

“I know that, Rudy, but I worry anyway. That’s why I want to make a will, get everything in order. Maybe you could help me do that, Rudy. I’d ask one of the girls, but …”

“You mean get a lawyer?”

“No, I don’t need a lawyer. You can get a standard form of some kind. I think they sell them at that place next to the deli.”

He had no idea what she wanted to put in her will since everything they owned was held jointly. But he got the form for her,
and the next afternoon he typed up the bequests on Helen’s office Remington as she dictated to him. The form was still there in the box with all Helen’s papers: “Last Will & Testament.” He
hadn’t looked at it in years, but he got it out now. It was in a folder with her birth certificate, the letters she’d written to him when she was a senior at DePaul and he was working on the market on the other side of town, her diplomas, her teaching awards from Edgar Lee Masters, and a letter from Bruno Bruni that he’d found after her death in her desk drawer. It was written in Italian and Rudy’d never been able to read it, though he looked at it every once in a while.

• I,
  HELEN ANNA HARRINGTON
  ,
  a resident of the City of
  Chicago
  .
  Cook County
  .
  Illinois
  , being of sound and disposing mind and memory, do hereby make, publish,
  constitute, and declare this instrument to be my Last Will & Testament, hereby intending to dispose of all the property, both real and personal, that I may own or to which I may be entitled at the time of my death, and by this instrument, hereby revoking all former Wills and Codicils thereto by me heretofore made.
  
• FIRST:
  I hereby direct that my Executor shall pay all of my just debts, funeral expenses, the expenses of the administration of my estate, and any estate or inheritance taxes from my residuary estate, without apportionment or right of reimbursement from any beneficiary or transferee of property
  
• SECOND:
  I give and bequeath the following property and amounts to the following named persons:
  
• Fra Lippo Lippi’s
  Madonna and Child
  to my oldest daughter, Meg, as her absolute property, because she’s going to be such a wonderful mother;
  
• Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s
  Dance of the Nudes
  to my second daughter, Molly, as her absolute property, because she dances so beautifully and is destined to have many adventures;
  
• Donatello’s
  David
  to my youngest daughter, Margot, as her absolute property, because from the back there’s such a remarkable resemblance, though she probably doesn’t know it. It’s hard to see your own backside;
  
• Piero della Francesca’s portrait
  Federigo da Montefeltro
  to my husband, Rudy, as his absolute property, because he’s as handsome as Federigo.
  

“Oh, Rudy,” she said as he pulled the finished form from the typewriter. “I wish you’d wear that red hat I bought for you,
from the Abruzzi. Then you’d look just like Federigo.”

“I think it’s up in the attic somewhere. I didn’t throw it away.” “I know, Rudy. You’ve never thrown anything away.”

They were looking at a reproduction of one of de Kooning’s untitled abstracts when the notary came that evening to notarize the will. Ribbons of bright color. Rudy was beginning to understand, or at least to get over his fear that there was something to understand that he didn’t understand. When he heard Meg answer the door downstairs he adjusted Helen’s head scarf — she’d lost all her hair — and her face seemed to grow clearer, almost translucent.

He helped her sign the will with her fountain pen —
una cosa di bellezza
— and the notary, one of the secretaries from Rudy’s office, stamped it with the official seal of the state of Illinois.
And then he held up the recent
New Yorker
— with a picture of a man walking through leafy trees in Central Park on the cover, at least he thought it was Central Park
— and turned the pages so she could look at the cartoons.