Lookout Cartridge (42 page)

My questions were not absolutely sincere. I enjoyed Mike’s imitation.

The story almost bores me too.

Yet it proved to be the key development in Corsica.

Not that I care about her family per se, a nether branch of the famous Napiers. The heart of the tale which begins in 1650 though also much earlier is the magnetic Montrose, noble Scots royalist who landed on a cold March day in the Orkney Isles. Thence with a thousand unlucky local recruits and four hundred Danish troops including a dozen from the very Faeroe Isles nearby that you Mike mentioned when we were swimming—to invade the Scottish Highlands, raise support for the restoration of Charles the would-be Second, and press the practical Presbyterian government to that end toward which they were leaning in any event.

I was for Cromwell, said Mike.

But what happened was that Montrose was taken, the man MacLeod who had the stomach to turn him in got 5000 pounds of oatmeal, and Montrose for quite other reasons than the Orkney venture was put to death.

The singer tells of a reluctant fiancée. The people at the tables are grinning. The room is warm with smoke. Dagger has moved some more. He seems to be including in a shot the girl from the fortress scene; she either doesn’t feel the lens upon her profile or doesn’t care.

Montrose was hanged and then cut in pieces. Now the story starts.

Mike looks at me without pleasure and says, History can be fun; she leaves out the political position entirely.

The fortress girl is looking at me. The door with the standees is behind her. She may have said something, her swarthy escort eyes me across the room. Dagger is chatting up a tableful of locals—not shooting.

No, Michael, they didn’t sew him back together and blow him up. His head they stuck on a pin above Edinburgh Toll Booth. His legs and arms were sent to four towns and hung up there for ten years. His trunk was interred in the common marsh graveyard.

Mike is looking about for the waiter. The Sony has fifteen minutes to run. Dagger is prowling again.

Lady Napier who revered Montrose like a god had his torso exhumed and had a surgeon named Callendar remove and embalm his heart. Pay attention, Michael. The same thing happened centuries before with Robert the Bruce who asked that his heart be taken after death to Jerusalem. (Mary’s brogue thickens.)

Dagger has come almost behind the fortress girl and is photographing the standees, some of whom are less interested in this than others, for Dagger is between them and the singer who is contorting his insides up into a harsh high-pitched tragically calling climax.

That heart sealed in some unusual glue Lady Napier placed in a steel case made from Montrose’s sword. The case she put in a gold box to be spirited off to his family in Holland where her own husband was also a refugee from Cromwell. But later the heart was lost there in the Low Countries, yet much later in a Dutch collection of curiosities this same gold filigree box was recognized by chance, for long before Lady Napier had it the Doge of Venice had given it to John Napier—and you know who
he
was?

Maybe Mary hasn’t been boring us so much as dispersing herself in some strange irrelevance felt by Mike and passed to me.

We don’t know who Napier was.

For Dagger is having words with a standee none other than the blond man from the fortress and the scuba trailer. He’s asked Dagger to move out of the way and he stands with one truculent shoulder well ahead of the other. Dagger lifts an arm in a great shrug as if to say, How do you talk to a shmoe like this. Now Dagger crouches in the aisle between the standees and the table. And I feel his focus on me—on the singer, Mike, Mary, and me like a staggered perspective expected to smile on signal.

Mary says, The inventor of logarithms. Didn’t you know?

But the blonde with the mole turns smack into the camera’s focal path, though much too close for clarity as her back view also was before. She objects. Her dark boyfriend gets up and speaks down to big Dagger who’s still crouching.

The singer halts, and the big boss, who is a Corsican and knows what can happen if you drop the polite niceties, calls Pas
ici!

Dagger elbows out the door, the burly back and black-gray hair somehow unchecked. And now as the boss picks out his intro like speedy mandolin bells lighting you into a festal and feminine harbor you’ve seen in the movies, Dagger and the Beaulieu lens appear over a modest standee shoulder, the angle is for a random moment ripe, though I am far from being close to it—the lens I’ll bet has now been switched to 50—It’s called
Lassie Go Home!
he shouts: the blonde at the table and the blond brown-eyed man ten feet in front of Dag automatically pivot: and in one through-shot whose depth of field is dubious, Dagger may just have caught them all, the two from the fort, the singer with a smoky swaggering deep breath, Mike, Mary, and (now for the second time at a circumference point oddly opposite to Dagger)
me
.

Which makes me glance behind, but there’s just the wall, and as I see above my nose the familiar poster (labeled
Charmes de la Corse
) Mike is saying, That’s too far, too far.

And Mary, calmly interested: That’s that Marie person.

Meaning the blonde, who’s pointing at us.

The blond man has gone out, it looks like after Dag. I imagine a smashed lens, dented magazines, stitches, discoloration, headlines—but I do not know their words because I do not know enough.

The singer tries again. A hush records my tape recorder’s click-stop.

She asks who my friend is in Edinburgh. I say she visits there; I name her; Mary sips her cassis, puts the glass down, and her palm where I touch it is cool.

Mike is looking, but not at the recorder.

Suppose I’ve got the Montrose heart, I say; what would it go for?

Oh cut it out, says Mike. Let’s go swimming, says Mary.

The song sounds Italian. Who here ever knew the chronicle behind the lyrics? When Corsica was bartered back to Genoa in 1559 Sampiero came back to Corsica with eight men, raised 12,000, fought the Genoese, was betrayed, and died. He was the son of a mountain shepherd. His wife had taken a Genoese lover.

Sampiero your army included a squad of women with axes. You were betrayed by your best friend now known as the Corsican Judas. You were assassinated by your in-laws after you had strangled your wife.

Lorna accepted my explanation, but then on the Saturday night following my return from France came back from a rehearsal and started up again. Why had Dagger come back two days ahead of me?

I told you I went to Chartres.

Our Lady of Chartres.

In the morning I left for Hyde Park without speaking.

Dudley hasn’t been to Corsica.

Dudley every chance he gets (though not fat) snacks on oily English peanut butter and grainy gray Scottish oatcakes in the pastel cylinders Tessa gets for him; Dudley staggers toward a sinking flyball in right field; Dudley after an emergency asthma refill at the Sunday chemist in Piccadilly stands with me watching marchers in summer ’68 going Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! as if gloating, and Dudley says flatly, By their lights I’m apolitical.

Dudley swims with me once a week at Swiss Cottage where on him the easily agitated water of the championship pool is like ballast that evens the straining cadence of his weighty limbs to a grace unlike his normal upright frame, strokes side by side with me, not racing, lazy in the kick like me—and Tessa flickers in the lane between us, though I think even at this late date he no more than Lorna or Jenny can know.

I set her to find those four lines of Burns, the bonnie winding banks, Bruce’s martial ranks and Carrick spear.

And here is Dudley in the distended tropics of this Corsican cassette beyond Jenny’s fingers on the family Royal portable (two carbons this time please), Dudley stating Montrose had German troops as well, but just might (as this woman of mine Mary said, though it was unlikely) have recruited from the Faeroe Isles, for though the Faeroes are off the main route they were Danish from the fourteenth century and by the sixteenth were often molested by English adventurers, which might but probably would not include the sober royalist Montrose who in any cassette was a Scot. I ask if drawing and quartering meant Montrose got castrated too.

Jenny, the following unfilmed untaped words have a place, believe me:

ME
: Why was Mary here to see Mike?

DAG
: To say hello from her brother.

ME
: Who’s he?

DAG
: Scottish Nationalist Party. SNP for paranoid. Thinks his mail is opened.

ME
: Don’t tell me this kid Mike’s in the SNP.

DAG
: Neither is Mary’s brother now. He was running a theater in Edinburgh last I heard.

ME
: Must have been very special news for Mary to stop here.

DAG
: She was going to Sardinia.

ME
: This isn’t the direct route.

DAG
: Got any postcards left?

ME
: I gave Melanie three to mail.

DAG
: So Mike said.

ME
: Mike?

And this too, Jenny, to explain why Corsica ends here:

Morning again. Dagger thought of Alba in his sleep. At breakfast Mike and Dagger stand at a table across the dining hall examining the Beaulieu. The girl from fortress and café—Marie—comes in and speaks to Mike; looks over the long breakfast tables; sees me. Dagger tries to talk to her but she speaks to Mike, who follows her out.

A half hour later I’m upstairs in the men’s dorm floor writing, always slowly, when Dagger comes and says, Here I was going to phone Alba to see how she was, and she’s phoned me. She had false labor. She’s kind of scared.

He thinks we have to leave.

I speak of the east side of the island, and the town where Paoli and Napoleon’s father were; and down on the coast the ghosts of those mosquitoes are lost in the growing fields the Algerian
colons
reclaimed.

11

I could not settle down. I appreciate foreign shower equipment, but I’m not quite a transient. But just as you must not worry about your breathing when you first go under with a tank on your back, so now I must act evenly. My aims had found objects.

The letter left on Aut’s desk would lead him to question Claire, who would then think of her lost and found keys and my running upstairs at Monty’s with my beard damp and coming back down with the two pages she’d seen but not really with my excuse for momentarily leaving, namely to get something upstairs to show her. On May 24 Dagger had known of the group we found Friday night, May 28. Also three moments in the May 16 Softball Game showed
certain arresting faces
. Yet Aut, Dagger said, would not
hear about our initiative
from him—so Claire was acting on her own. And to judge from Monty Graf’s hints about Claire, she wasn’t acting on her own for Aut’s sake.

I, a New York babysitter, switched on the small TV and presently a Stonehenge commercial appeared, which put me in mind of my effort all these years of London nights to dream certain preconsidered dreams when asleep, in order to explore them.

I hadn’t turned up the sound.

I got up.

I went to the kitchen. By my list of calls was a stamped envelope addressed to Rose. The calls from Monty and Claire had preceded my drink with them, so no need to phone. Gilda and the stabbing seemed so far away I felt sad. My mother’s call was as far outside my present problem as the packed envelope to Rose that Sub had overlooked when he left.

I would, however, phone June.

Lorna addresses her envelopes before writing the letters. In the late fifties she would not succeed in writing the letters. I might hear the fridge door smack open; the longer it stayed open the less likely she was to remove anything from the fridge. One night she bolted into the front hall and out of the house and when she didn’t come back in the few minutes it would take to go to the pillar box at the end of the road, I went to the kitchen and found four empty red-and-blue-edged airmail envelopes addressed to the States—to her mother, her nephew, her one-time music teacher she still had a crush on, and the Metropohtan Museum of Art, and she hadn’t written a word beyond those addresses, not even the order for Christmas cards from the museum.

I dialed June.

I hung up and returned slowly to the living room hoping to approach what had come into mind in such a way that it would not have vanished after all. But it was gone. Earlier today I’d noted only that those pages left Sunday morning on Sub’s desk when I departed for the airport were gone, and in noting this I’d never thought what had happened to the thing I’d left on top of them as a paperweight and had last thought of when I’d got up to phone the charter man and had recalled his number and so had not needed my address book which I’d put on top of those pages Saturday night.

It wasn’t anywhere.

I phoned June, who answered in the middle of the first ring. I said, You can tell them I have a list of all the addresses in that address book.

She didn’t understand. She said would I meet her at ten tomorrow morning on a subway platform two stops past the stop near Sub’s. She said she was worried. There was a pause. I heard Ruby moan, cry out; I heard covers whip, then a bump. At June’s end there were men’s voices; she said with put-on affection, OK darling the Film Archives at ten to ten, I don’t know what they’ve got on tonight, think shorts by Léger, Genet, light and lively male shorts, darling.

I said, You don’t mean tonight, do you? Of course not, darling, came June’s voice, staying so cool her strength felt warm.