Some Kinds of Love: Stories

The Green Tomato Marquesa’s Night of a Thousand and One Triumphs

136J The Green Tomato Marquesa’s Night of a Thousand and One Triumphs Jamil first encountered Maudelynne Arnot Dabb at the Eudora Welty Library where she was shelving books and where he was researching ways to blow up dams and poison water systems. In a volume with an unusual question for a title, Saving Louisiana ?, he was relishing a chapter that dramatized the failure of the levee system, one single lock and dam on the Mississippi River. Such mayhem unleashed, New Orleans gone, its harbor destroyed, boozy, infidel Cajuns swirling in fury, clinging to smashed mobile homes and jet skis. The lives lost, the dollars consumed numbered as stars above the Hindu Kush. The chapter blazed, a sword through moonlight, defending his arguments. Every missive he sent to his contact in New Iberia concluded that time spent by the Jackson, Mississippi, cell— which was only he for all he could tell; even his phone number of jeopardy exit likely was a Memphis area code—was a waste considering the mighty works that could be achieved just forty minutes to the west. His heart thrilled at the little book’s revelations : How great are Allah’s blessings and how mysterious are their hiding places! the green tomato marquesa’s night K137 And then the round, happy face of Maudelynne Arnot Dabb gleamed at him. “Forgive me,” she whispered. “I see you here so often, I feel I know you.” In the American Deep South, the friendly talkativeness of the infidels forced all Servants of the Path to maintain solid and consistent cover and sealed jeopardy plans of exit. Still, a year and a half after the day of high martyrdom and glory, Jamil felt no threat from Mississippi eyes. He had attained his professional engineer’s license after graduating from the University of Arkansas. A Pakistani , he bore enough Indian blood from his Rajput mother to pass for one of Jackson’s multitudinous immigrant and naturalized Indians. To his mind, Indians held all the significant jobs in architecture, engineering, medicine, and telephonics in the city. This librarian facing him was decidedly outside the caste of white Jackson Brahmin—she was heavy, freckled, and wore no makeup. Her red hair was straight and bobbed in the old flapper style, one Jamil recalled his sister adopting long ago. She might be late thirties, Jamil’s age. “I have wondered for so long what that little book is about,” she whispered. He had seen her many times watching him, and he knew her name from the elaborately-drawn, flowery tags she stuck above her right breast. The adhesive tags, a new one done each day he saw her, all had officially printed on them in blue: “Welcome to Eudora Welty Library. I am . . .” Then in her writing —magic marker, black letters, green ivy, and red roses—came the answer, “Maudelynne Arnot Dabb.” To conclude, the blue printing resumed, asking, “How may I assist?” “It’s such an elegant book to be shelved where it is. What is it about?” Jamil closed the book slowly. Chanting within, he prepared himself, fastening his mind on his lost mother’s voice, her bounding Indian accent when she chose to speak English over Urdu, Pashto, Hindi, or any dialect spoken by her Rajput warrior fathers. “In Saving Louisiana?,” Jamil began, “the author 138J the green tomato marquesa’s night effectively confronts widely held assumptions that the south Louisiana wetlands can be saved.” He gave his head a slight bob, rocking it in concentric circles as if his neck were an agitator on a happy turbine. “I see. Can they?” He had not given an instant’s consideration to saving anything in the Louisiana wetlands. And his reverie at the dramatized destruction of New Orleans was still quite intense. So, increasing his head bob, he thought a moment of the sealed plan of jeopardy exit duct-taped to the lining of his tired sport coat. Then he gave what he felt was a superbly Indian answer. “Oh. It is hard to say.” Such grand acting, his head wobbling, face smiling with knowledge not quite revealed—very Indian. It would send this librarian packing as his mother’s abrupt, impenetrable answers from behind her veil once sent away dull Imams and ravenous Chinese from his father’s mountain store. To his horror, Maudelynne Arnot Dabb smiled back and stuck out...