Caravans by James A. Michener

they all went up to Dorset to meet Ellen’s folks. It must have been a real fiasco. She cameback swearing that she would rather die on the sands of the desert than marry some Dorset jerk. She left college before exams and that was the last I heard of her, except for one week end that summer. She appeared at my home in Connecticut sort of breathless. Nazrullah had gone back to Afghanistan without her, but she had a passport and a couple of hundred dollars. She needed another twelve hundred dollars, Like a fool I let her have it. I’ve never heard from her since.’”
    “Neither has anybody else,” Captain Verbruggen growled. “What did her father say?” Richardson was ready with a summary:
    “‘My name is Thomas Shalldean Jaspar. I own an important real estate and insurance business in Dorset, Pennsylvania, where my family has lived for seven generations. My wife is Esther Johnson Jaspar, and her family …’”
    “We can skip the begats,” the acting ambassador snapped, so Richardson casually discarded a page and resumed reading:
    “‘My wife and I have tried to remember anything that might explain our daughter’s behavior, but we come up with nothing. There is no explanation. She was a good girl, never gave us a bit of trouble till her sophomore year in high school, when she got fed up with everything in Dorset, including her parents.
    “‘When she reached Bryn Mawr we breathed a little easier, for she fell in with two of the nicest roommates a girl could have and also met some nice boys at Haverford College. Then everything went sour. Refused to date. Didn’t go out much, and was downright hateful when she came home,which wasn’t often. Her behavior was ridiculous.’”
    Here Richardson stopped, drew on his pipe, and observed, “I’m not going to read all of this, but one thing does strike me every time I review it. Whenever Mr. Jaspar comes up against anything unusual, unknown or unfamiliar he describes it as ridiculous. He and his wife seem to have had a rather rigorous definition of what was not ridiculous, and God help anything that fell outside their pattern.”
    “Thank you for your profound analysis,” Captain Verbruggen said. At a normal embassy such sarcasm from an acting ambassador could blight a career, but in Kabul, an irregular post at best, we worked under an irregular discipline which allowed a rather broad latitude for jokes. Verbruggen’s wisecrack was directed at himself as much as at Richardson, who laughed easily.
    “Excuse me, sir,” I interrupted, “but I think we may have the clue we’re looking for in
ridiculous.
Since Mr. Jaspar stigmatized everything out of the ordinary with that word, his daughter was compelled by an urge to outrage the system. What was the most ridiculous thing she could do? Find herself an Afghan with a turban and a red Cadillac convertible.”
    “My dear Miller,” Captain Verbruggen said slowly, “when I observed that Richardson’s analysis was profound I meant just that, because frankly, what he pointed out had missed me. Now you have made it completely obvious, and I thank you, too.”
    Richardson relit his pipe, smiled at me and suggested,“Perhaps we should get back to Mr. Jaspar, who seems to have been a completely dull gentleman. Certainly his report is.
    “‘At a well-chaperoned dance held at the Wharton School, a fine institution in Philadelphia, Ellen met a young man from Afghanistan and before we had even heard about him she had fallen in love with him. We put detectives on his trail and found that he had a Cadillac, got good grades in college, and that he had been in Germany during the early days of the war. We reported this to the F.B.I. but they said he was cleared and was not a spy. After his examinations the young man …’”
    Richardson paused and said, “You’ll notice that Mr. Jaspar refuses to use Nazrullah’s name. Probably considered it ridiculous.”
    Nur Muhammad observed, “More likely he was confused because