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.