Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  For my shtip exemplifies the multiple and parallel sorties which raise our brain above the digital computer to which it is akin; the digital computer works its yes and no operations faster than the brain yet is confined to serial single-file one quest-at-a-time circuit-seeking; but the human natural Body Brain (as my Druid terms it) sends countless of these single files not one at a time but all at once circulating down the deltas, through the gorges and moving targets and (like parties of Indians—Brooklyn, Hindu, Maya, Hollywood or, as the English call the American, Red) athwart the axes of all pulsing fields.

  When the phone rings, Tessa’s father waiting at his dining-room sideboard steps away. Queenie Stone brushes her well-corseted front by me where I stand hungry and dumb at the kitchen doorway. But before she can answer the phone, Jane has come from the living room. At the first ring Tessa has turned from a pot of thick vegetable soup and she pauses at my face which has turned from her father to her; she cannot see her father.

  The third ring completes her move to the kitchen table. It wasn’t my face ringing, but the phone. Jane gives her grandfather’s number. The call is for Tessa. Tessa is lifting onto a china platter pieces of mackerel in a jellylike sweet-and-sour sauce. She tells me to tell Dudley to take the call. Across the table set for lunch, I tell Jane this. She has heard her mother.

  Leaving the dining room Jane murmurs, It’s Edinburgh.

  Will calls out from the living room, We give up!

  Jane with her strong oval face and straight hair seems older.

  Queenie Stone lays a gold-brocaded white cloth over the chala. Its crust is glossy along glazed arcs of the plaited weave which will seem to disappear when the first slice shows the inside. It is our contribution. Lorna picked it up at our Highgate bakery where the very cheerful women—one of whom is as phony as the English lower middle-class can be—have never sold us a chala before; they are very busy Saturday. Tessa’s father does not answer the phone on the Sabbath. I pull in my stomach and Queenie Stone’s bosom brushes my chest.

  Tessa’s father points at the phone receiver on the sideboard. Whoever he is, he’s talking.

  Dudley strides into the dining room and without looking at anyone reaches for the phone before it is quite within reach. Tessa’s father does turn the lights on and off on the Sabbath, but when he goes to shul or to Dr. Zeidel’s for tea on the rare Saturdays the Allotts are not here, he travels only by foot. Dudley turns his back to us and says into the phone, Yes?

  I did not see Tessa’s father place his black silk silver-brocaded yarmulka on the flat, fine hair that covers the back of his head behind the high receding forehead like a larger yarmulka silver-white. He calls toward the hall that leads to the living room but actually right into Dudley’s neck, We’re ready!

  Dudley turns his head as if he has heard something strange. Lorna is heard laughing in the living room.

  Dudley puts down the phone, comes around the dinner table to the kitchen door: It’s the chieftain, he says, from Edinburgh.

  Tessa says without looking away from the mackerel platter, I’ll call him later. Then, feeling Dudley’s tread move away, she says, It isn’t as if it’s been so long.

  Which makes him halt and turn, but he’s several feet into the dining room so it’s me he looks at, not Tessa.

  A huge green-and-blue kilt swings in a breeze of Hassidic beards dancing to bells full of wind and whiskey. I move to a place at the table and Dudley brushes me returning to the phone.

  When we are all at table, Tessa’s father blesses the bread in Hebrew he learned from Queenie after the war. We are Will, Lorna, Jane, Dudley, Jenny (who is not saying anything today), and now Queenie Stone and Tessa from the kitchen. Tessa’s father uncovers the bread and folds the white-and-gold cloth. He cuts two slices and cuts them into little pieces. He salts each and passes them one by one on the end of the serrated bread knife. We take a sip of Israel Tokay, after all of us except Jenny and Will say l’chayim.

  Tessa’s father nods at Dudley. He says, My son.

  At the end of the meal Tessa’s father recites a long grace in what sounds like precisely articulated Hebrew. Then he and Queenie, with Tessa singing some of the words, sing the end of the grace, and Lorna hums along.

  Later we find ourselves in the living room. The children are in the garden. Their fathers are non-Jews—or almost, though Dudley disputes his father-in-law’s pleasantry to me that all born New Yorkers are Jews. I am a wandering New Yorker, I say, but Tessa disputes that (with a finger on my knee): You don’t wander much.

  How would you know? says Lorna. She turns away from the window. Will turns in the middle of the front garden as if cogged to Lorna; the knees of the man who is flat on his back under his red Humber across the street don’t move. He doesn’t travel just to New York, says Lorna, and he doesn’t always have married friends to organize him.

  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.