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“Where’s Booper now? I don’t want her meandering all around the deck chairs again, bothering people. If that awful man—”
“Sh
e’s all right. I gave her the camera.”
Mr. McArdle lurched up on one arm. “You gave her the cameral” he said. “What the hell’s the idea? My goddam Leica! I’m not going to have a six-year-old child gallivanting all over—”
“I showed her how to hold it so she won’t drop it,” Teddy said. “And I took the film out, naturally.”
“I want that camera, Teddy. You hear me? I want you to get down off that bag this minute, and I want that camera back in this room in five minutes—or there’s going to be one little genius among the missing. Is that clear?”
Teddy turned his feet around on the Gladstone, and stepped down. He bent over and tied the lace of his left sneaker while his father, still raised up on one elbow, watched him like a monitor.
“Tell Booper I want her,” Mrs. McArdle said. “And give Mother a kiss.”
Finished tying his sneaker lace, Teddy perfunctorily gave his mother a kiss on the cheek. She in turn brought her left arm out from under the sheet, as if bent on encircling Teddy’s waist with it, but by the time she had got it out from under, Teddy had moved on. He had come around the other side and entered the space between the two beds. He stooped, and stood up with his father’s pillow under his left arm and the glass ashtray that belonged on the night table in his right hand. Switching the ashtray over to his left hand, he went up to the night table and, with the edge of his right hand, swept his father’s cigarette stubs and ashes into the ashtray. Then, before putting the ashtray back where it belonged, he used the under side of his forearm to wipe off the filmy wake of ashes from the glass top of the table. He wiped off his forearm on his seersucker shorts. Then he placed the ashtray on the glass top, with a world of care, as if he believed an ashtray should be dead-centered on the surface of a night table or not placed at all. At that point, his father, who had been watching him, abruptly gave up watching him. “Don’t you want your pillow?” Teddy asked him.
“I want that camera, young man.”
“You can’t be very comfortable in that position. It isn’t possible,” Teddy said. “I’ll leave it right here.” He placed the pillow on the foot of the bed, clear of his father’s feet. He started out of the cabin.
“Teddy,” his mother said, without turning over. “Tell Booper I want to see her before her swimming lesson.”
“Why don’t you leave the kid alone?” Mr. McArdle asked. “You seem to resent her having a few lousy minutes’ freedom. You know how you treat her? I’ll tell you exactly how you treat her. You treat her like a bloomin’ criminal.”
“Bloomin’! Oh, that’s cute! You’re getting so English, lover.”
Teddy lingered for a moment at the door, reflectively experimenting with the door handle, turning it slowly left and right. “After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances,” he said. “I may be an orange peel.”
“What, darling?” Mrs. McArdle asked from across the cabin, still lying on her right side.
“Let’s get on the ball, buddy. Let’s get that Leica down here.”
“Come give Mother a kiss. A nice, big one.”
“Not right now,” Teddy said absently. “I’m tired.” He closed the door behind him.
The ship’s daily newspaper lay just outside the doorsill. It was a single sheet of glossy paper, with printing on just one side. Teddy picked it up and began to read it as he started slowly aft down the long passageway. From the opposite end, a huge, blond woman in a starched white uniform was coming toward him, carrying a vase of long-stemmed, red roses. As she passed Teddy, she put out her left hand and grazed the top of his head with it, saying, “Somebody needs a haircut!” Teddy passively looked up from his newspaper, but the woman had passed, and he didn’t look back. He went on reading. At the end of the passageway, before an enormous mural of Saint George and the Dragon over the staircase landing, he folded the ship’s newspaper into quarters and put it into his left hip pocket. He then climbed the broad, shallow, carpeted steps up to Main Deck, one flight up. He took two steps at a time, but slowly, holding on to the banister, putting his whole body into it, as if the act of climbing a flight of stairs was for him, as it is for many children, a moderately pleasurable end in itself. At the Main Deck landing, he went directly over to the Purser’s desk, where a good-looking girl in naval uniform was presiding at the moment. She was stapling some mimeographed sheets of paper together.
“Can you tell me what time that game starts today, please?” Teddy asked her.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Can you tell me what time that game starts today?” The girl gave him a lipsticky smile. “What game, honey?” she asked.
“You know. That word game they had yesterday and the day before, where you’re supposed to supply the missing words. It’s mostly that you have to put everything in context.”
The girl held off fitting three sheets of paper between the planes of her stapler. “Oh,” she said. “Not till late afternoon, I believe. I believe it’s around four o’clock. Isn’t that a little over your head, dear?”
“No, it isn’t . . . Thank you,” Teddy said, and started to leave.
“Wait a minute, honey! What’s your name?”
“Theodore McArdle,” Teddy said. “What’s yours?”
“My name?” said the girl, smiling. “My name’s Ensign Mathewson.”
Teddy watched her press down on her stapler. “I knew you were an ensign,” he said. “I’m not sure, but I believe when somebody asks your name you’re supposed to say your whole name. Jane Mathewson, or Phyllis Mathewson, or whatever the case may be.”
