Eagle Eye (19 page)

Even so, it’s like standing on the beach, watching the worn glass roll in along with the stones; not many spars any more but lots of paper, and often it still says something readable, and just as you can bear to wrench your eyes away from that undertow, over there’s a button someone wore last week or eighty years ago—and you tug it out—saved. Not yours, but related; nothing is lost.

Inside, the rectory feels like a trained audience. Hushed and respectful to all the sin and virtue that must come calling here. The old girl who led him into the empty study, telling him to wait, looked ready to clap for either side of it. Since he’d been summoned here, he couldn’t tell her which.

The window here was decorated for the season—cut-outs and pumpkins, on 42nd Street! Bottom remains of Hell’s Kitchen, still flowing with meat and fish and wholesale river air at the market end, working their way on up, from pimples-and-stiletto boys to that gun store just off Eighth Avenue, as it goes east. To the Main Library. And Bryant Park.

There were connections everywhere. He was finding them.

Coming out into the streets after a heady day at his console made him feel like an astronomer grounding himself, half-embarrassed at the purity of his work. Often it seemed to him that it was the computers who had the living-mindedness, and were only waiting to help the human mechanism free itself of the rote of history that held us back. He was no longer trying to record himself as the prime aim; that was the old post-uterine dream with which the psychiatrists had already grabbed off half a century. Process was the reality. No telling when—improvising one day at his keyboard—he might find another one.

He still went regularly to Cambridge, for workouts with “the boys”—as they called themselves—a group of men who had broken off from the university to form an agency for private projects, some as far-out as his, which they had housed in a ramped Bauhaus cube bought from one of the data-processors who had boomed and gone bust on Route 128. Weekdays, his hours in the office kept him from getting too rarified. Sometimes, with a weekend coming up, and when he felt his third-person sense of himself had honed itself down to the dangerline, he would give them a call: “Tell your boss, Bronstein says schizophrenia lurks—and how are
you,
Miss Cathcart?”—and whoever wanted a New York blow-out would fly down, bringing along any new material that interested them. Since he had put in a second console, more often, they sent somebody down on their own,—like kids to the boy with the most Tinker Toys. Salesmen of the infinite, he termed them privately—or in that daily-recorded realm which had once been private. Some had Radcliffe wives they were true to in the sack as well as the head; others wanted him to help them attack Sex City, in the bearded rock-style that was their Rotary. His celibacy of the moment didn’t frighten him. They were all ten years older than he. And though he was trying them out, one by one, no crony had as yet occurred; perhaps he was too old for it. Or they were too eager-beaver for him, on the commercial side of their own marvels. Since his last ploy with Buddy, he had been avoiding that. Though he knew as well as they, that every time pure science had stuck a real needle in the infinite, money for somebody had streamed out.

Sometimes, fantasy had them sending him down a girl. Though they had girls on the staff, he had never asked; the scenario required that she be sent. Some Madame Curie-to-be, though not necessarily with him—to whom, after a hard day together sifting for a new language in all the modes of expression that weren’t taken for granted any more, he could say “Allo, allo. Dos veedanya. Come close.” All the intellectual girls were gaudy beauties now, like from a new race of test-tube heroines. Meanwhile, Route 128 must now and then say what always would be said. “He’s a rich boy.”

…. Or did dos veedanya mean ‘Good-bye’? …

“L
ET ME LOOK AT
you,” Melchior said deep. “I haven’t seen you since.” He turned me to the light. “You look fine.”

He’d only seen me once. And I no longer stand for social talk. Like that language must be changed. If we’re to find the other one. “Anybody’s superior who’s alive. Even a son. You can’t help feeling it.”

He has a great stone smile, like a natural phenomenon you can drive to see every Sunday, afterwards putting a sticker on the car to say you’ve been. Underneath though, is his hugeness different?—I only saw him once. He wears the smile like it’s just given him.

First they send for you. Then they wait for you to talk.

“Thought priests had to be strictly on norm,” I said. “Size and everything.” Witkower’s uncle hadn’t made it because the joint of his little finger had been cut off.

Melchior’s hand, the right one, perches on him like a rabbit, undisturbed by his chuckles. “In Friesland, I
am
normal.”

“Friesland. I always wanted to go there.” No reindeer but sub-Arctic dreams of them, and an endless skin of sea, spring like a short, bright-green pain. And the seven-foot people, like the Houyhnhnms surely, with seven-foot spirits to match—what a way to dwarf the world. “My grandmother was born in the town where Jonathan Swift went to school.”

“Ah-h—uh?”

Meaning—if he didn’t know what I was talking about, all was still received in the name of the angels. And the burden was still on me, to speak up.

I am trying. To say what I think—daily. But it’s much harder when someone is listening personally. Or worse—theologically.

“Hear your grandmother approves of Florida, wants to settle there.”

That why I’m here?

“Not to worry. I’m taking care of it.”

Near the end of the calendar year
—Gran had written—until that date, she reminded me, I could still avoid capital gains on the sale of the flat if I bought her a house.

He raised his eyebrows. Three and a half inches, each of them. The change from ordinary scale was restful. If you had another face, Batface—should it be like this? Like a good ogre? Or a horse? “We were under the impression—that Mrs. Reeves—”

No, Batface. It shouldn’t.

“Had the money?” Poor Reeves. I didn’t want to incriminate her. “I could be wrong. But then—why would she be taking care of Gran?”

His mouth could look smaller. “We thought it was an exchange of gifts. Some of them—intangible.”

“Oy.”

“Beg pardon?”

“A Yiddish expletive. Mentioning the intangible brings out the Jew in me.”

“For it or against!”

I blew out my breath. He was hunched forward. All his lines of force. Cathedrals of them. Pointed at my little hack heart. It does make one feel valuable. “That why I’m here?”

“They did write. Asking for news of your progress.”

“They?”

“Mrs. Reeves is—taking instruction.”

“From Gran?” I started to laugh. Feeling in my pocket for Gran’s spidery witch-note. “Yeah, she has gits. Though I can’t see Reeves as a kleptomaniac.” At the Miami-Hilton especially.

“Par
don.
” He gave it the German pronunciation.

I took out the folded note. “The note from her you gave me that day. Day I came back from Wales. I stuck it away. Just came across it this morning.”

He put on square specs. “‘Taffy was a Welshman.’” That was all. He handed it back. “What does that mean?”

“A nursery rhyme. The next line is ‘Taffy was a thief.’ When I was a kid. I stole a couple of old silver spoons from her. To give to Maeve.”

The specs slid forward. “Mrs. Reeves has been taking instruction from me.” He took the slip from me and tore it up.

“Thanks. That was kind.”

“Kind?”

“To both of us … Is that religious objectivity?”

“I mean the
word,
Mr. Bronstein. I hear it at the seminary all the time. Among the younger ones.”

“Instead of ‘good,’ you mean?”

He nodded. “When an English says ‘That’s kind,’ he used to mean only ‘That’s nice.’ But now—”

“It’s got its emotion back?”

He likes to nod, and wait.

Interlocutory conversion. Two can play at it.

Couldn’t smile at his smile though. Like dropping a pebble into Melchior’s Gap. So I put my head down to what I remember. The truth sticks there. “It’s a word comes to mind when you think of animals.”

He asked me to repeat: I spoke too low.

“Like Gran stinks as a person. But think of her as a cat—she’s a howl.”

He rubbed his hands. “
That
is religious objectivity.” Rang a bell at his side. “Tea or coffee, eh? If we are going to have a dialogue.”

“Two people don’t have a dialogue. What they pick to say is only a millionth of what they could.”

“I heard you were studying those machines. Thinking ones. Do they do it better?”

“In terms of multiples. But they have to be fed by people.”

He laughed aloud. “And are you kind to them?”

“The best dialogue is between a p-person, and a—what you call a machine.”

He stared at me. When the woman came in, he said, “Mrs. McMurter. Go down to the cellar and bring us each a bottle of wine.”

We fell silent. I wondered what Friesland women were like. I smelled religion cooking. Or the creeping daily habit of it, that was set to rise like dough in the back of a bake shop, and ended every morning in a yeastly bread-image of God. “The house listens for you, doesn’t it? Even when you don’t understand things.”

“The church does.”

When the woman brought the tray, he set out the glasses, put biscuits and cheese to one side of each of us, in equal portions, like a referee, then opened the bottles—drawing each cork as smooth as I ever saw it done—and set the bottles center field table and opposite each other, like guns.

“Rhine wine,” I said. “For dueling.”

Then it struck me. He was being kind to me.

I let him pour. Then I took out the four joints I still had from El Paradiso, wrapped in foil in an old Schimmelpfennig tin. I’d known they were there all the time. But they were for safari. I held them out. “I drink your wine. You smoke my smoke.” That sounded Indian to me. Hop-hop, into the war dance.

He lumbered to the sliding door, rolled it shut, and listened. Like a turnkey, but shutting in himself. On 42nd Street, whose rumble I could still faintly hear. The ways people can shut themselves up, and still think themselves out in the street with the common man, always interest me. As if I’ve always known I was going to have to do some of that myself. Libraries, study halls. Seminaries. Offices. And all the time, the common man is doing the same thing.

“I knew a man shut himself up in a tennis club. Winters. Came into Boston once a week to give our school indoor lessons. And to play bridge with his wife.”

He sat down opposite me. “You’ve already had such a lot of experience. Worldly experience.”

“What’s the Christian for ‘Oy’?”

His laugh was enormous. “You’re a card.”

“That was last month.” But I could feel the talent coming back in me like a jaunty flower, up from the windpipe to the head again, with lesser branches for the ears. “You have to listen, to be a card.” To friends. Though it doesn’t look like it. “Where’d you learn that word?”

“We have a few, here.”

“This the seminary?”

“The building in back.”

I reached out and touched the joint he was holding. “Keep it for later, if you want—that’s okay.”

I could see the little carbuncle of greed near his eye. Better than he could see the hungry quiver at the back of my nose?

“Each to his own gormay? Why not?”

So it ended up he drank his wine, I smoked my smoke. Both of us listening. Let him think it was like in church; to me it was Indian. Once, I used to count up the cronies, like I never did with the girls. Now I did it again, in a sort of wood-touching. Ike, Witkower. Emilio from Siena. Betts. I couldn’t quite add Melchior. But he had a face like a good ogre. Or a seven-foot horse.

I slipped on my shades.

“Take it easy,” Melchior said. “I’m just a machine.”

“Yeah. But I can see the building at the back.”

He sipped, easy. “We don’t shanghai.”

“You been a sailor?”

“Padre on a troopship.”

“Which war?”

He spread his hands. “Africa.”

We tippled on. When I coughed once; he didn’t laugh. Really I was trembling, with what I had to say to him.

“Nice jacket you have. Had one like it in the Congo once.”

“Buddy got it, at Hunting World. Has as many pockets as a head. Haven’t worn it since I got back.”

“Where from?”

“London, Paris, the Low Countries. India. Wales.”

“Odd itinerary.”

“Yeah.” India sticks out.

“How did you come to do it?”

“Deferment,” I said. “How did you get to the Congo?”

“My mother was Belgian. She brought me up in her country. Where I was
not
normal.” His grin was huge. Fixed. He put wine in it.

“Orphan?”

“I had a mother.”

“Oh.” A bastard. “Thought that was a blemish too.”

“Par
don
?”

“Thought a—” The joint wasn’t getting anywhere. “—bastard couldn’t go for priest.”

He put his big rabbit-hand on the table, as if might get away.

“Sorry. Hard to rap, when there’s no frame of reference.”

“Rap?”

“Dialogue.”

“On the contrary. Only now I am the person. You are the machine.”

“Ask me a question then,” I said.

He took the cigarette from my fingers, sniffed it, put it down on the ashtray. I took his wine glass and set it away from him.

He squinted at me sideways. As if I were his wine glass now. Came close enough to peer into my shades, like an oculist. Raised one finger, wiggling at his image there. “What are the stations of the Cross?”

I jumped back. “Jesus.”

He giggled. “The Jewish for Christ?”

I was meanwhile feeling something hard against my lower back, between me and the chair. The Inquisition, maybe. “How’s Archie, by the way? He going to be the black for it?”

“Poor Archie’s left us.” He giggled again.

“For Ireland?”

“Because of it. Still a lot of patriots in the parish here, sons and grandsons of the old Hell’s Kitcheners. He said they were too militant.”

“You seven-footers, have to watch yourselves, huh. He go back to the game?”