Lookout Cartridge (74 page)

You are a jack of many businesses, says Tessa’s father.

His interests are diversified, says Lorna.

Maybe I am not more than she thinks.

Jane enters. She and Jenny and Will are going to Golders Hill Park. Queenie Stone hears this entering behind Jane with a tray of stacked saucers and tilted cups. Queenie has wanted to marry Tessa’s father for years. Once after Tessa had been sightseeing in New York, I speculated about her father and the firmly corseted Queenie Stone. Tessa said, Nothing in it—she plays the viola and she cooks.

Queenie purses her lips and turns down her mouth. She shakes her head at Jane: Jane doesn’t want to go to the park now, does she? Is her grandfather’s house a sinking ship that Jane and her friends have to go off when people are coming for tea? Queenie touches Jane’s cast.

I imagine (for in my time I have seen) the prams elegantly sprung like eighteenth-century carriages standing as if empty beside the green benches—the grandmothers of Golders Hill Park—privacy—three conspiring schoolboys hastening across a path. Dudley has an absent look. Queenie has gone back to the kitchen. Jenny is in charge of Will and Jane. Jane promises her grandfather not to do any running. Dudley turns a Granny Smith round, examining it. You want a knife for that? his father-in-law asks. Dudley slowly shakes his head—then as an afterthought, the quick English No thank you. I blink at an illusion that it is ’58 or ’62 or ’64 or ’68.

Tessa’s father says, You did so well the first time, you should try for another.

Tessa says she could strangle Queenie for talking like that to Jane.

Dudley says he knows she could, but it isn’t as if Queenie was drawing the kishkes out of Jane.

Tessa’s father laughs, Ah your Yiddish, it’s getting good.

It’s all Queenie’s, says Dudley, and where she got it who knows.

He takes a bite.

Tessa’s father, instead of taking issue, subsides. Lorna starts at once to tell Jane’s riddle that stumped them in this living room before lunch. This was what made Lorna laugh.

The phone is ringing. Tessa’s father leans forward in his seat as if to get up.

Tessa says Oh, and gets up and goes to the living-room door. Dudley echoes: Oh?

Queenie Stone, whose father was German, has the blood of her late invalid Polish mother in her somewhere. She opens the door from the other side as Tessa grasps the knob. Doctor Zeidel has phoned (No, don’t tell me, says Tessa’s father) to say his wife has one of her migraines, he’ll come on his own—(ah, thank goodness, says Tessa’s father). Queenie removes herself as Tessa goes to the window, but Queenie opens the door again to refuse Lorna’s offer of help, then returns presumably to the kitchen where she is doing violence to the different sets of pots and dishes and preparing the small thin sandwiches of smoked salmon, and cucumber almost liquid thin, and cream cheese, and a nice brown Hovis. She is such an overseer here that you forget until you can’t see her any more (except—in the mind’s eye—for you’ve never actually seen this except in the mind’s eye—weeding her famous garden of parallel beds four houses down from Tessa’s father across the road which is Park Way) that her blue eyes are set wide apart and are oddly touching with her faultless brown hair, but only in retrospect. She has been known to have a ham roll at the Victoria and Albert Museum, but alone with Tessa not with Tessa’s father.

There is a western all the Cartwrights are going to see tonight. Except me, for I have a business appointment.

Tessa says to her father, Why don’t you change your mind and come
with
us.

The trip to the States is discussed.

Somewhere in the deeps of the afternoon a Polish widow whose son is farming on the edge of the Negev, recalls how for a time during the war her late friend Mrs. Edelbaum had sent her husband with a cheese sandwich off to Hampstead Heath each morning in case they came looking for Germans to intern.

There is a general discussion of the Health and of when each of the elders present had a walk there recently. I observe that where we live in Highgate it’s just down our hill. Dr. Zeidel compares Central Park unfavorably to the Heath and asks me where I’m from in the States. He names three people on the upper West Side of Manhattan.

It gives me a
shtip
, says Tessa’s father, when I think of those days on the Heath. A
shtip
.

Shtip, shtip
, says Dr. Zeidel looking out the window where beyond the garden and the low wall and across the street the legs under the Humber are now stretched flat.

To be taken for a German at a time like that.

But you
were
a German, says Tessa.

A German Jew, says the Polish widow whose name I didn’t catch or can’t recall but won’t ask Lorna later, who would bawl me out for not listening.

It is no longer an interesting question, says Mr. Rivera—there are the eastern European Jews and the old Spanish Jews, and the Germans are in between somewhere.

I thought you said it wasn’t an interesting question, I say.

To be taken for a German pure and simple at a time like that, says Tessa’s father. To find a real countryside set in the middle of the greatest city in Europe—real country with hills and lakes and none of these child molesters standing in the trees—the city invisible all around you. Hills, streams, thickets.

Gemütlichkeit
, says Dudley.

Why the hell not, Lorna retorts.

Shtip
, my dear friend, says Dr. Zeidel, starting a slow cycle of finger-shakes, means first of all a push—
a shtip in di tzen
, a push in the teeth in the sense of a bribe to keep the mouth shut; then
shtip sich nit arahn
, don’t push in where you’re not wanted; and
shtip
of course in the sexual sense; and you have also
shtip un sha
when the mother says to her child at the table stuff and hush, eat and shut up.

Does that make me wrong, Zeidel? says Tessa’s father.

Lorna says quietly to Dudley, Why the hell
not
a little
gemütliclikeit?

Zeidel, you are a pedant, says Mr. Rivera.

A baker’s dozen of blue harrows like they don’t make any more turn the earth, hand-made, hand-held, furrowing parallel up over a hill. I put this room on the map. It is my closed-circuit scope. There is no occulting sweep hand. I monitor the empty distances between the bright blips—from the moment (reported to me by Tessa but also by Queenie who said he became like an Old Testament prophet) when Tessa’s father capitulated, breathless and palsied, the water twinkling still in the corners of his eyes, and said to Dudley, My daughter tells me you are circumcised—thence a decade, a cloaked decade and more, to this well-aired room and its weighty white floral molding round the ceiling and the electric heater’s parallel rows of dark coils framed by the marble fireplace itself framed by a marble mantel with a dark bust of Tessa at fifteen and photographs of Tessa and her mother, and color shots of Jane—from words about a circumcision thence to the same room years later where the blood trouble between Tessa and Dudley which threatens to spread into an indifference beyond divorce seems so far from any trouble which the blood let out of some child’s penis thirty-odd years ago could have stanched, that I see a cluster of blips between; and they say, I Cartwright of London and New York lessen these distances and bind these troubles. All is still. I see it all, I seem to protect it by seeing it my way. Scots time cogs into the slower teeth of the Jewish calendar. Lorna’s riddle joins the flow and instability of my blood to the name of my son and to my daughter’s stanched but septic arm from Kew. My princely helicopter swashes here the groping hand of Dudley, there Lorna’s pearly stretch-marks, yonder the absence of pulse in her father’s wrist, arm, breast, throat, and mouth that will gnash no more, hither the contemplative lingo of Andsworth within earshot of his French vegetable slicer with which his housekeeper is doing violence to onions, aubergines, and the great baggy red peppers Lorna buys in Highgate Village from a greengrocer who does not get on with his mother-in-law, peppers like huge rich cells. I draw all together in someone else’s house. Less like micro-stivers of bone that the dentist’s high-speed drill sprays through some lung as like as not his own. Less like the flicker-flash of radiant particles in night space that get through the capsule and the helmet and into the eye of the astronaut’s brain. More like the character of a liquid crystal. I will find a formula for (in the phrase of Boyd’s father) that Brooklyn Indian Ned Noble. Someone’s car radio rides by in the quiet street. But crystal scope or not, have I even a god’s limited control over this field of force affirmed, like a
NAND
valve’s zero, by nonforce? The street would be quiet even if it were not Saturday in Golders Green. I am omnipotent.

The phone rings.
A shtiy in hertz
, says Queenie, putting her hand there and smilng a tight theatrical smile.

Hartz
, says Zeidel.

I rise.

A heart attack, says Lorna brightly and looks to me.

A
pang
for goodness’ sake, says Tessa’s father as if from long familiarity.

I’m at the door. My interests are diversified. A new smoking device still on the drawing board which a small design-research firm of young people fresh out of Central School want to sell to an American tobacco company. I’m holding acreage in the Norfolk Broads. There are still boutiques. Boats. Liquid crystals. And now kids’ marbles, the old kind.

When did your father take his digitalis, the intern asked Lorna, and Lorna turned to her mother.

I wish to stay in Tessa’s father’s living room, but I wish to go. I have had help in my omnipotence. My hand is on the door knob.

What, says Dudley to Tessa, is
shtip
in Scots?

It doesn’t mean pushing in where you’re not wanted, says Tessa.

And then there’s
shtip a goy
, I say, and leave the room closing the door.

It is Dagger on the phone, and now with Monty on a Thursday in October I recall not wishing to speak with Dagger. He’s two hours late phoning.

He can’t make it tonight. Got to pick up a carton of stuff and take it over to Cosmo’s. It crosses my mind to tell him there’s a big market for American kids’ marbles in England, but I say nothing.

I tell Dagger Lorna’s riddle. I shorten it. A boy and his father. A terrible accident. The ambulance takes them to the hospital. The father is dead on arrival. The boy is rushed to Emergency. The surgeon takes one look at him and says, I can’t operate. He’s my son.

Dagger can’t make it tonight. Why does a stop at Cosmo’s take so long? Well, Dagger’s got to see the man he knew in the Bahamas whom he wants to fix up with an introduction at H.E.W. but who is meanwhile exploring the feasibility of an American-style alumni mag to serve the Old Boy network—oh by the way, says Dag, I gave him a couple of copies of your alumni review that Lorna let me have one quiet afternoon, did she ever mention it?

A door opens, I think the living room. The steps are familiar.

Also, Corsica is off, says Dagger.

Diversity in the other room collapses into one tiny prick of light fading.

I may have to go anyway, I find myself saying. I sound convincing.

There is a pause in which Tessa soundlessly appears at my side.

Dagger doesn’t seem to know if I’m kidding. He says slowly, by rote, You may have to go anyway.

Yes, to Corsica, I say, holding my hand out. Tessa licks my palm.

There’s more than a film in Corsica, Dag. You know me.

My scrotum tingles. I turn my palm to Tessa’s cheek—oh tell the schoolmaster from the Bahamas he can keep those alumni reviews—I hang up on Dagger who’s saying, I’ll tell him when he gets back—

When I’m halfway down the hall I hear her placing a call to her Scottish chieftain. It is much less perhaps than Dudley thinks. The front door swings in, and Will is not with the girls. They go ahead of me into the living room. Dudley has made Lorna unhappy. Jane shows Lorna the autograph of a stranger on her cast. Dudley asks me where Tessa is. Will appears, and he is furious. Lorna says, You’re bleeding.

His accent which I felt all over again at the Softball Game is so deeply London it screws around into Cockney now and then, no doubt colored by school.

It is a nasty scratch above Will’s nostril; the blood is red. Queenie Stone observes that it could be dangerous if it goes septic.

I say, without thinking, Goodbye, Mrs. Ashkenazy.

And there it is—that’s her name.

Having created a new Corsica out of anger, I might go there.

Dudley is explaining patiently that German Jews on the whole cared nothing for Yiddish; if it had depended on them Yiddish would have died. Zeidel is tense, no doubt because it is Dudley.

A tiny child scratched Will’s nose when he bent down to return the child’s ball that had rolled away. But this is not why Will is furious. Jenny is pale and the trouble is there.

But the formula?

Monty would not let me push through to a formula. A formula for mutual fields. Do you hear me peddling mutual fields up under the casements of Lincoln’s Inn lawyers? John the young man in the glasses I’d once knocked off stepped away from the bar, as if to leave.

I had to be at Sub’s in case Gilda called again; she would not let me call her in Queens.

A
shtip
in time, says an old Māyā proverb I adapt from the Hindu, may well have to be its own reward. And like a
shtip
within a
shtip
, or like teeth meshing the small and large wheels of the short and the long Maya calendars so that even Tessa’s beautiful violence of the sacred cardiectomy atop a Yucatan pyramid waits upon the mechanical program of named and numbered cogs, I was drawn by Monty and the thought of Dagger away from multiple sorties ex-emplified in my sense of that Sabbath Saturday in Golders Green, away from what you’ll by now have seen to be my fitful trip toward an emptiness in order to fall ahead to where Ned Noble would by now have been, and drawn away into the one-track trivia of a dangerous plot I was supposed to be near the heart of. But what was this
shtip
, this sense of other people’s lives? Was it not also a word in someone else’s language? And on the point of seeing if not my formula the meaning of my power, I was cut short by Monty and the thought and threat of Dagger’s letter—but suddenly thereby received a gift.