“What’s she want to see me for?” Booper demanded. “I don’t want to see her.” She suddenly struck Myron’s hand, which was in the act of picking off the top shuffleboard disc from the red stack. “Hands off,” she said.
Teddy hung the strap attached to the Leica around her neck. “I’m serious, now. Take this down to Daddy right away, and then I’ll see you at the pool later on,” he said. “I’ll meet you right at the pool at ten-thirty. Or right outside that place where you change your clothes. Be on time, now. It’s way down on E Deck, don’t forget, so leave yourself plenty of time.” He turned, and left.
“I hate you! I hate everybody in this ocean!” Booper called after him.
Below the Sports Deck, on the broad, after end of the Sun Deck, uncompromisingly alfresco, were some seventy-five or more deck chairs, set up and aligned seven or eight rows deep, with aisles just wide enough for the deck steward to use without unavoidably tripping over the sunning passengers’ paraphernalia knitting bags, dust-jacketed novels, bottles of sun-tan lotion, cameras. The area was crowded when Teddy arrived. He started at the rearmost row and moved methodically, from row to row, stopping at each chair, whether or not it was occupied, to read the name placard on its arm. Only one or two of the reclining passengers spoke to him—that is, made any of the commonplace pleasantries adults are sometimes prone to make to a ten-year-old boy who is single-mindedly looking for the chair that belongs to him. His youngness and single-mindedness were obvious enough, but perhaps his general demeanor altogether lacked, or had too little of, that sort of cute solemnity that many adults readily speak up, or down, to. His clothes may have had something to do with it, too. The hole in the shoulder of his T shirt was not a cute hole. The excess material in the seat of his seersucker shorts, the excess length of the shorts themselves, were not cute excesses.
The McArdles’ four deck chairs, cushioned and ready for occupancy, were situated in the middle of the second row from the front. Teddy sat down in one of them so that—whether or not it was his intention—no one was sitting directly on either side of him. He stretched out his bare, unsuntanned legs, feet together, on the leg rest, and, almost simultaneously, took a small, ten-cent notebook out of his right hip pocket. Then, with instantly one-pointed concentration, as if only he and the notebook existed—no sunshine, no fellow passengers, no ship—he began to turn the pages.
With the exception of a very few pencil notations, the entries in the notebook had apparently all been made with a ball-point pen. The handwriting itself was manuscript style, such as is currently being taught in American schools, instead of the old, Palmer method. It was legible without being pretty-pretty. The flow was what was remarkable about the handwriting. In no sense—no mechanical sense, at any rate—did the words and sentences look as though they had been written by a child.
Teddy gave considerable reading time to what looked like his most recent entry. It covered a little more than three pages:
Diary for October 27, 1952
Property of Theodore McArdle
412 A Deck