'Teddy, did you hear me?'
Teddy was not leaning out of the porthole quite so far or so precariously as small boys are apt to lean out of open portholes--both his feet, in fact, were flat on the surface of the Gladstone--but neither was he just conservatively well-tipped; his face was considerably more outside than inside the cabin. Nonetheless, he was well within hearing of his father's voice--his father's voice, that is, most singularly. Mr. McArdle played leading roles on no fewer than three daytime radio serials when he was in New York, and he had what might be called a third-class leading man's speaking voice: narcissistically deep and resonant, functionally prepared at a moment's notice to outmale anyone in the same room with it, if necessary even a small boy. When it was on vacation from its professional chores, it fell, as a rule, alternately in love with sheer volume and a theatrical brand of quietness- steadiness. Right now, volume was in order. 'Teddy. God damn it--did you hear me?'
Teddy turned around at the waist, without changing the vigilant position of his feet on the Gladstone, and gave his father a look of inquiry, whole and pure. His eyes, which were pale brown in color, and not at all large, were slightly crossed--the left eye more than the right. They were not crossed enough to be disfiguring, or even to be necessarily noticeable at first glance. They were crossed just enough to be mentioned, and only in context with the fact that one might have thought long and seriously before wishing them straighter, or deeper, or browner, or wider set. His face, just as it was, carried the impact, however oblique and slow-travelling, of real beauty.
'I want you to get down off that bag, now. How many times do you want me to tell you?' Mr. McArdle said.
'Stay exactly where you are, darling,' said Mrs. McArdle, who evidently had a little trouble with her sinuses early in the morning.
Her eyes were open, but only just. 'Don't move the tiniest part of an inch.' She was lying on her right side, her face, on the pillow, turned left, toward Teddy and the porthole, her back to her husband. Her second sheet was drawn tight over her very probably nude body, enclosing her, arms and all, up to the chin. 'Jump up and down,' she said, and closed her eyes. 'Crush Daddy's bag.'
'That's a Jesus-brilliant thing to say,' Mr. McArdle said quietly-steadily, addressing the back of his wife's head. 'I pay twenty-two pounds for a bag, and I ask the boy civilly not to stand on it, and you tell him to jump up and down on it. What's that supposed to be? Funny?'
'If that bag can't support a ten-year-old boy, who's thirteen pounds underweight for his age, I don't want it in my cabin,' Mrs. McArdle said, without opening her eyes.
'You know what I'd like to do?' Mr. McArdle said. 'I'd like to kick your goddam head open.'
'Why don't you?'
Mr. McArdle abruptly propped himself up on one elbow and squashed out his cigarette stub on the glass top of the night table. 'One of these days--' he began grimly.
'One of these days, you're going to have a tragic, tragic heart attack,' Mrs. McArdle said, with a minimum of energy. Without bringing her arms into the open, she drew her top sheet more tightly around and under her body. 'There'll be a small, tasteful funeral, and everybody's going to ask who that attractive woman in the red dress is, sitting there in the first row, flirting with the organist and making a holy--'
'You're so goddam funny it isn't even funny,' Mr. McArdle said, lying inertly on his back again.
During this little exchange, Teddy had faced around and resumed looking out of the porthole. 'We passed the Queen Mary at three-thirty-two this morning, going the other way, if anybody's interested,' he said slowly. 'Which I doubt.' His voice was oddly and beautifully rough cut, as some small boys' voices are. Each of his phrasings was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey. 'That deck steward Booper despises had it on his blackboard.'
'I'll Queen Mary you, buddy, if you don't get off that bag this minute,' his father said. He turned his head toward Teddy. 'Get down from there, now. Go get yourself a haircut or something.' He looked at the back of his wife's head again. 'He looks precocious, for God's sake.'
'I haven't any money,' Teddy said. He placed his hands more securely on the sill of the porthole, and lowered his chin onto the backs of his fingers. 'Mother. You know that man who sits right next to us in the dining room? Not the very thin one. The other one, at the same table.
Right next to where our waiter puts his tray down.'
'Mm-hmm,' Mrs. McArdle said. 'Teddy. Darling. Let Mother sleep just five minutes more, like a sweet boy.'
'Wait just a second. This is quite interesting,' Teddy said, without raising his chin from its resting place and without taking his eyes off the ocean. 'He was in the gym a little while ago, while Sven was weighing me. He came up and started talking to me. He heard that last tape I made. Not the one in April. The one in May. He was at a party in Boston just before he went to Europe, and somebody at the party knew somebody in the Leidekker examining group--he didn't say who--and they borrowed that last tape I made and played it at the party. He seems very interested in it. He's a friend of Professor Babcock's. Apparently he's a teacher himself. He said he was at Trinity College in Dublin, all summer.'
'Oh?' said Mrs. McArdle. 'At a party they played it?' She lay gazing sleepily at the backs of Teddy's legs.
'I guess so,' Teddy said. 'He told Sven quite a bit about me, right while I was standing there. It was rather embarrassing.'
'Why should it be embarrassing?'
Teddy hesitated. 'I said `rather' embarrassing. I qualified it.'
'I'll qualify you, buddy, if you don't get the hell off that bag,'
Mr. McArdle said. He had just lit a fresh cigarette. 'I'm going to count three. One, God damn it ... Two.. .'
'What time is it?' Mrs. McArdle suddenly asked the backs of Teddy's legs. 'Don't you and Booper have a swimming lesson at ten-thirty?'
'We have time,' Teddy said. '--Vloom!' He suddenly thrust his whole head out of the porthole, kept it there a few seconds, then brought it in just long enough to report, 'Someone just dumped a whole garbage can of orange peels out the window.'
'Out the window. Out the window,' Mr. McArdle said sarcastically, flicking his ashes. 'Out the porthole, buddy,
