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, dustjacketed 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 Appropriate and pleasant reward if finder promptly returns to Theodore McArdle.
See if you can find daddy’s army dog tags and wear them whenever possible. It won’t kill you and he will like it.
Answer Professor Mandell’s letter when you get a chance and the patience. Ask him not to send me any more poetry books. I already have enough for 1 year anyway. I am quite sick of it anyway. A man walks along the beach and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a cocoanut. His head unfortunately cracks open in two halves. Then his wife comes along the beach singing a song and sees the 2 halves and recognizes them and picks them up. She gets very sad of course and cries heart breakingly. That is exactly where I am tired of poetry. Supposing the lady just picks up the 2 halves and shouts into them very angrily «Stop that!» Do not mention this when you answer his letter, however. It is quite controversial and Mrs. Mandell is a poet besides.
Get Sven’s address in Elizabeth, New Jersey. It would be interesting to meet his wife, also his dog Lindy. However, I would not like to own a dog myself.
Write condolence letter to Dr. Wokawara about his nephritis. Get his new address from mother.
Try the sports deck for meditation tomorrow morning before breakfast but do not lose consciousness. Also do not lose consciousness in the dining room if that waiter drops that big spoon again. Daddy was quite furious.
Words and expressions to look up in library tomorrow when you return the books—Nephritis myriad gift horse cunning triumvirate Be nicer to librarian. Discuss some general things with him when he gets kittenish.
Teddy abruptly took out a small, bullet‑shaped, ballpoint pen from the side pocket of his shorts, uncapped it, and began to write. He used his right thigh as a desk, instead of the chair arm.
Diary for October 28, 1952 Same address and reward as written on October 26 and 27, 1952.
I wrote letters to the following persons after meditation this morning.
Dr. Wokawara Professor Mandell Professor Peet Burgess Hake, Jr.
Roberta Hake Sanford Hake Grandma Hake Mr. Graham Professor Walton I could have asked mother where daddy’s dog tags are but she would probably say I don’t have to wear them. I know he has them with him because I saw him pack them.
Life is a gift horse in my opinion.
I think it is very tasteless of Professor Walton to criticize my parents. He wants people to be a certain way.
It will either happen today or February 14, 1955 when I am sixteen. It is ridiculous to mention even.
After making this last entry, Teddy continued to keep his attention on the page and his ball‑point pen poised, as though there were more to come.
He apparently was unaware that he had a lone interested observer. About fifteen feet forwardship from the first row of deck chairs, and eighteen or twenty rather sunblinding feet overhead, a young man was steadily watching him from the Sports Deck railing. This had been going on for some ten minutes. It was evident that the young man was now reaching some sort of decision, for he abruptly took his foot down from the railing. He stood for a moment, still looking in Teddy’s direction, then walked away, out of sight. Not a minute later, though, he turned up, obtrusively vertical, among the deck‑chair ranks. He was about thirty, or younger. He directly started to make his way down‑aisle toward Teddy’s chair, casting distracting little shadows over the pages of people’s novels and stepping rather uninhibitedly (considering that his was the only standing, moving figure in sight) over knitting bags and other personal effects.
Teddy seemed oblivious of the fact that someone was standing at the foot of his chair- -or, for that matter, casting a shadow over his notebook. A few people in the row or two behind him, however, were more distractible. They looked up at the young man as, perhaps, only people in deck chairs can look up at someone. The young man had a kind of poise about him, though, that looked as though it might hold up indefinitely, with the very small proviso that he keep at least one hand in one pocket. «Hello, there!» he said to Teddy.
Teddy looked up. «Hello,” he said. He partly closed his notebook, partly let it close by itself.
«Mind if I sit down a minute?» the young man asked, with what seemed to be unlimited cordiality. «This anybody’s chair?»
«Well, these four chairs belong to my family,” Teddy said. «But my parents aren’t up yet.»
«Not up? On a day like this,” the young man said. He had already lowered himself into the chair at Teddy’s right. The chairs were placed so close together that the arms touched. «That’s sacrilege,” he said. «Absolute sacrilege.» He stretched out his legs, which were unusually heavy at the thighs, almost like human bodies in themselves. He was dressed, for the most part, in Eastern seaboard regimentals: a turf haircut on top, run‑down brogues on the bottom, with a somewhat mixed uniform in between—buffcolored woolen socks, charcoal‑gray trousers, a button‑down‑collar shirt, no necktie, and a herringbone jacket that looked as though it had been properly aged in some of the more popular postgraduate seminars at Yale, or Harvard, or Princeton. «Oh, God, what a divine day,” he said appreciatively, squinting up at the sun. «I’m an absolute pawn when it comes to the weather.» He crossed his heavy legs, at the ankles. «As a matter of fact, I’ve been known to take a perfectly normal rainy day as a personal insult.
So this is absolute manna to me.» Though his speaking voice was, in the usual connotation, well bred, it carried considerably more than adequately, as though he had some sort of understanding with himself that anything he had to say would sound pretty much all right—intelligent, literate, even amusing or stimulating—either from Teddy’s vantage point or from that of the people in
the row behind, if they were listening. He looked obliquely down at Teddy, and smiled. «How are you and the weather?» he asked. His smile was not unpersonable, but it was social, or conversational, and related back, however indirectly, to his own ego. «The weather ever bother you out of all sensible proportion?» he asked, smiling.
«I don’t take it too personal, if that’s what you mean,” Teddy said.
The young man laughed, letting his head go back. «Wonderful,” he said. «My name, incidentally, is Bob Nicholson. I don’t know if we quite got around to that in the gym. I know your name, of course.»
Teddy shifted his weight over to one hip and stashed his notebook in the side pocket of his shorts.
«I was watching you write—from way up there,” Nicholson said, narratively, pointing.
«Good Lord. You were working away like a little Trojan.»
Teddy looked at him. «I was writing something in my notebook.»
Nicholson nodded, smiling. «How was Europe?» he asked conversationally. «Did you enjoy it?»
«Yes, very much, thank you.»
«Where all did you go?»
Teddy suddenly reached forward and scratched the calf of his leg. «Well, it would take me too much time to name all the places, because we took our car and drove fairly great distances.» He sat back. «My mother and I were mostly in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Oxford, England, though. I think I told you in the gym I had to be interviewed at both those places. Mostly the University of Edinburgh.»
«No, I don’t believe you did,” Nicholson said. «I was wondering if you’d done anything like that. How’d it go? They grill you?»
«I beg your pardon?» Teddy said.
«How’d it go? Was it interesting?»
«At times, yes. At times, no,” Teddy said. «We stayed a little bit too long. My father wanted to get back to New York a little sooner than this ship. But some people were coming over from Stockholm, Sweden, and Innsbruck, Austria, to meet me, and we had to wait around.»
«It’s always that way.»
Teddy looked at him directly for the first time. «Are you a poet?» he asked.
«A poet?» Nicholson said. «Lord, no. Alas, no. Why do you ask?»
«I don’t know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.»
Nicholson, smiling, reached into his jacket pocket and took out cigarettes and matches. «I rather thought that was their stock in trade,” he said. «Aren’t emotions what poets are primarily concerned with?»
Teddy apparently didn’t hear him, or wasn’t listening. He was looking abstractedly toward, or over, the twin smokestacks up on the Sports Deck.
Nicholson got his cigarette lit, with some difficulty, for there was a light breeze blowing from the north. He sat back, and said, «I understand you left a pretty disturbed bunch—»
” `Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die,’ ” Teddy said suddenly. “‘Along this road goes no one, this autumn eve.»’ «What was that?» Nicholson asked, smiling. «Say that again.»
«Those are two Japanese poems. They’re not full of a lot of emotional stuff,” Teddy said. He sat forward abruptly, tilted his head to the right, and gave his right ear a light clap with his hand. «I still have some water in my ear from my swimming lesson yesterday,” he said. He gave his ear another couple of claps, then sat back, putting his arms up on both armrests. It was, of course, a normal, adult‑size deck chair, and he looked distinctly small in it, but at the same time, he looked perfectly relaxed, even serene.
«I understand you left a pretty disturbed bunch of pedants up at Boston,” Nicholson said, watching him. «After that last little set‑to. The whole Leidekker examining group, more or less, the way I understand it. I believe I told you I had rather a long chat with Al Babcock last June. Same night, as, a matter of fact, I heard your tape played off.»
«Yes, you did. You told me.»
«I understand they were a pretty disturbed bunch,” Nicholson pressed. «From What Al told me, you all had quite a little lethal bull session late one night—the same night you made that tape, I believe.» He took a drag on his cigarette. «From what I gather, you made some little predictions that disturbed the boys no end. Is that right?»
«I wish I knew why people think it’s so important to be emotional,” Teddy said. «My mother and father don’t think a person’s human unless he thinks a lot of things are very sad or very annoying or very‑very unjust, sort of. My father gets very emotional even when he reads the newspaper. He thinks I’m inhuman.»
Nicholson flicked his cigarette ash off to one side. «I take it you have no emotions?» he said.
Teddy reflected before answering. «If I do, I don’t remember when I ever used them,”
he said. «I don’t see what they’re good for.»
«You love God, don’t you?» Nicholson asked, with a little excess of quietness. «Isn’t that your forte, so to speak? From what I heard on that tape and from what Al Babcock—»
«Yes, sure, I love Him. But I don’t love Him sentimentally. He never said anybody had to love Him sentimentally,” Teddy said. «If I were God, I certainly wouldn’t want people to love me sentimentally. It’s too unreliable.»
«You love your parents, don’t you?»
«Yes, I do—very much,” Teddy said, «but you want to make me use that word to mean what you want it to mean—I can tell.»
«All right. In what sense do you want to use it?»
Teddy thought it over. «You know what the word `affinity’ means?» he asked, turning to Nicholson.
«I have a rough idea,” Nicholson said dryly.
«I have a very strong affinity for them. They’re my parents, I mean, and we’re all part of each other’s harmony and everything,” Teddy said. «I want them to have a nice time while they’re alive, because they like having a nice time… But they don’t love me and Booper—that’s my sister—that way. I mean they don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit.
They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It’s not so good, that way.» He turned toward Nicholson again, sitting slightly forward. «Do you have the time, please?» he asked. «I have a swimming lesson at tenthirty.»
«You have time,” Nicholson said without first looking at his wrist watch. He pushed back his cuff. «It’s just ten after ten,” he said.
«Thank you,” Teddy said, and sat back. «We can enjoy our conversation for about ten more minutes.» Nicholson let one leg drop over the side of the deck chair, leaned forward, and stepped on his cigarette end. «As I understand it,” he said, sitting back, «you hold pretty firmly to the Vedantic theory of reincarnation.»
«It isn’t a theory, it’s as much a part—»
«All right,” Nicholson said quickly. He smiled, and gently raised the flats of his hands, in a sort of ironic benediction. «We won’t argue that point, for the moment. Let me finish.» He crossed his heavy, outstretched legs again. «From what I gather, you’ve acquired certain information, through meditation, that’s given you some conviction that in your last incarnation you were a holy man in India, but more or less fell from Grace-»
«I wasn’t a holy man,” Teddy said. «I was just a person making very nice spiritual advancement.»
«All right—whatever it was,” Nicholson said. «But the point is you feel that in your last incarnation you more or less fell from Grace before final Illumination. Is that right, or am I—»
«That’s right,” Teddy said. «I met a lady, and I sort of stopped meditating.» He took his arms down from the armrests, and tucked his hands, as if to keep them warm, under his thighs. «I would have had to take another body and come back to earth again anyway‑I mean I wasn’t so spiritually advanced that I could have died, if I hadn’t met that lady, and then gone straight to Brahma and never again have to come back to
earth. But I wouldn’t have had to get incarnated in an American body if I hadn’t met that lady. I mean it’s very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you’re a freak if you try to. My father thinks I’m a freak, in a way. And my mother—well, she doesn’t think it’s good for me to think about God all the time. She thinks it’s bad for my health.»
Nicholson was looking at him, studying him. «I believe you said on that last tape that you were six when you first had a mystical experience. Is that right?»
«I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that,”
Teddy said. «It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.»
Nicholson didn’t say anything.
«But I could get out of the finite dimensions fairly often when I was four,” Teddy said, as an afterthought. «Not continuously or anything, but fairly often.»
Nicholson nodded. «You did?» he said. «You could?»
«Yes,” Teddy said. «That was on the tape… Or maybe it was on the one I made last April. I’m not sure.»
Nicholson took out his cigarettes again, but without taking his eyes off Teddy. «How does one get out of the finite dimensions?» he asked, and gave a short laugh. «I mean, to begin very basically, a block of wood is a block of wood, for example. It has length, width—»
«It hasn’t. That’s where you’re wrong,” Teddy said. «Everybody just thinks things keep stopping off somewhere. They don’t. That’s what I was trying to tell Professor Peet.» He shifted in his seat and took out an eyesore of a handkerchief—a gray, wadded entity—and blew his nose. «The reason things seem to stop off somewhere is because that’s the only way most people know how to look at things,” he said. «But that doesn’t mean they do.» He put away his handkerchief, and looked at Nicholson. «Would you hold up your arm a second, please?» he asked.
Nine Stories Page 16
