“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.