John Irving - A Son of the Circus

And although Nancy and the detective were a love story, they were unhappy. It wasn’t only that the sheer grimness of serving justice had grown to be a task, nor was it simply that Rahul had escaped unpunished. Both Mr. and Mrs. Patel assumed that a higher judgment had been made against them; for Nancy was infertile, and they’d spent nearly a decade learning the reason—and then another decade, first trying to adopt a child and finally deciding against adoption.

In the first decade of their efforts to conceive a child, both Nancy and young Patel—she called him Vijay—believed that they were being punished for dipping into the Deutsche marks. Nancy had entirely forgotten a brief period of physical discomfort upon her return to Bombay with the dildo. A slight burning in her urethra and the appearance in her underwear of an insignificant vaginal discharge had contributed to Nancy’s delay in initiating a sexual relationship with Vijay Patel. The symptoms were mild, and they overlapped, to some degree, with cystitis (inflammation of the bladder) and urinary tract infection. She didn’t want to imagine that Dieter had given her something venereal, although her memory of that brothel in Kamathipura, and how familiarly Dieter had spoken with the madam, gave Nancy good reason to be worried.

Moreover, at the time, she could plainly see that she and young Patel were falling in love with each other; she wasn’t about to ask him to recommend a suitable physician. Instead, in that well-worn travel guide, which she still faithfully carried, was an on-the-road recipe for a douche; but she misread the proper proportion of vinegar and gave herself much worse burning than she began with. For a week, there was an even yellower stain in her underwear, which she ascribed to the unwise remedy of her homemade douche. As for the abdominal pain, it closely attended the onset of her period, which was unusually heavy; she had much cramping and even a little chill. She wondered if her body was trying to reject the IUD. And then she completely recovered; she only remembered this episode 10 years later. She was sitting with her husband in the office of a fancy private venereologist, and—with Vijay’s help—she was filling out a detailed questionnaire; it was part of the infertility work.

What had happened was that Dieter had given her a dose of gonorrhea, which he’d caught from the 13-year-old prostitute he’d fucked standing up in the hall of that brothel in Kamathipura. It hadn’t been true, as the madam had told him, that there were no available cubicles with mattresses or cots; instead, it was the young prostitute’s request to have sex standing up, for her case of gonorrhea had advanced to the more uncomfortable symptoms of pelvic inflammatory disease. She was suffering from the so-called chandelier sign, where moving the cervix up and down elicits pain in the tubes and ovaries; in short, it hurt her to have a man’s weight pounding on her belly. It was better for her when she stood up.

As for Dieter, he was a fastidious young German who gave himself a shot of penicillin before he left the brothel; a medical student among his friends had told him that this worked well to prevent incubating syphilis. The injection, however, did nothing to abort the penicillinase-producing Neisseria gonorrhea . No one had told him that these strains were endemic in the tropics. Besides, less than a week after his contact with the infected prostitute, Dieter was murdered; he’d begun to notice only the slightest symptoms.

And what relatively mild symptoms Nancy had experienced before her spontaneous healing and the scarring were the result of the inflammation spreading from her cervix to the lining of her uterus and her tubes. When the venereologist explained to Mr. and Mrs. Patel that this was the cause of Nancy’s infertility, the distraught couple firmly believed that Dieter’s nasty disease—even from the hippie grave—was final proof of the judgment against them. They should never have taken a pfennig of those dirty Deutsche marks in the dildo.

In their ensuing efforts to adopt a child, their experience was not uncommon. The better adoption agencies, which kept prenatal records as well as a history of the natural mother’s health, were uncharitable on the issue of their “mixed” marriage; this wouldn’t have deterred the Patels in the end, but it prolonged the process of humiliating interviews and the swamp of petty paperwork. In the interim, while they awaited approval, first Nancy and then Vijay expressed whatever slight doubts they both felt about the disappointment of adopting a child when they’d hoped to have one of their own. If they’d been able to adopt a child quickly, they would have begun to love it before their doubts could have mounted; but in the extended period of waiting, they lost their nerve. It wasn’t that they believed they would have loved an adopted child insufficiently; it was that they believed the judgment against them would condemn the child to some unbearable fate.

They’d done something wrong. They were paying for it. They wouldn’t ask a child to pay for it, too. And so the Patels accepted childlessness; after almost 15 years of expecting a child, this acceptance came to them at considerable cost. In the way they walked, in the detectable lethargy with which they raised their many cups and glasses of tea, they reflected their own consciousness of this resignation to their fate. About that time, Nancy went to work—first in one of the adoption agencies that had so rigorously interviewed her, then as a volunteer in an orphanage. It wasn’t the sort of work she could sustain for very long—it made her think of the child she’d given up in Texas.

And, after 15 years or so, D.C.P. Patel began to believe that Rahul had come back to Bombay, this time to stay. The murders were now evenly spaced over the calendar year; in London, the killings had altogether stopped. What had happened was that Rahul’s Aunt Promila had finally died, and her estate on old Ridge Road—not to mention the considerable allowance she’d bestowed upon her only niece —had passed into the hands of her namesake, the former Rahul. He had become Promila’s heir, or—to be more anatomically correct— she had become Promila’s heiress . And the new Promila had not long to wait for her acceptance at the Duckworth Club, where her aunt had faithfully made application for her niece’s membership—even before she technically had a niece.

This niece was slow and deliberate about her entry into that society which the Duckworth Club would offer her; she was in no hurry to be seen. Some Duckworthians, upon meeting her, found her a touch crude—and almost all Duckworthians agreed that, although she must have been a great beauty in her prime, she was rather well advanced into that phase called middle age… especially for someone who’d never been married. That struck nearly everyone as odd, but before there was time for much talk about it, the new Promila Rai—with surprising swiftness, considering that hardly anyone really knew her—was engaged to be married. And to another Duckworthian, an elderly gentleman of such sizable wealth that his estate on old Ridge Road was rumored to put the late Promila’s place to shame! It was no surprise that the wedding was held at the Duckworth Club, but it was too bad that the wedding took place at a time when Dr. Daruwalla was in Toronto, for he—or certainly Julia—might have recognized this new Promila who’d so successfully passed herself off as the old Promila’s niece.

By the time the Daruwallas and Inspector Dhar were back in Bombay, the new Promila Rai was identified by her married name—actually by two names, one of which was never used to her face. Rahul, who’d become Promila, had lately become the beautiful Mrs. Dogar, as old Mr. Sethna usually addressed her.