TEDDY AT THE POOL
By Charles Deemer
In another well-known story in the collection called “Teddy,” a jealous sister pushes a child prodigy into an empty swimming pool. Here the little genius has anticipated and even welcomes his own death.
--Maxwell Geismar, “The Wise
Child and the New Yorker School of Fiction”
Salinger depends on our understanding of Teddy’s attitude to make us understand that it is Teddy who dies.
--Arthur
Mizener, “The Love Song of J.D. Salinger”
Teddy [is] the story of a strange boy who believes in Vedantic incarnation and detachment, and who vaguely foresees his death.
--Ihab
Hassan, “J.D. Salinger: Rare Quixotic Gesture”
He foresees his own death, which he regards not with Western logic as the end of his life but rather as the final fulfillment and reunion with life. The story ends with that fulfillment, precisely the way that Teddy foresaw it.
--Dan
Wakefield, “J.D. Salinger and the Search for Love”
Etc., etc. etc.
It had been five years since I’d seen Bob Nicholson. We had dated occasionally as undergraduates at the University of Massachusetts, not with any romantic inclinations but because we were friends who shared lecture notes. After graduation Bob went to Princeton, I believe, to continue his studies in education, and I went home to Boston to find employment. After an unsatisfying series of clerical and secretarial jobs, I signed on with Transatlantic Lines, feeling as if I were beginning a great adventure. Instead I found myself doing clerical work in an environment that made me claustrophobic and seasick. My early letters home were filled with regrets at having joined (as I put it) the Navy.
My situation gradually improved. I developed sea legs, and
I was appointed editor of the ship's daily newspaper. Although journalism
had been my minor at Amherst, I received the editorship because I was the
only one who wanted it. The position offered a daily challenge to fill
more than one page. For this reason, before each cruise I carefully
searched the passenger list for recognizable names, looking for the
politicians and artists and athletes who made good copy. I once met a
woman who had taken Transatlantic to Greece and back, and when she told me
about her trip, she did not emphasize Piraeus or the Parthenon but the
fact that Gary Cooper was reported to be on the cruise home. She had read
this in the ship’s daily. Naturally she spent a good portion of each day
searching the decks for him, she told me, and although she never found
him, his reported presence continued to be the highlight of her foreign
travels. I never forgot the lesson.
When I saw Bob Nicholson’s name on the
passenger list, I made only a casual note of it. The name was fairly
common, for one thing; for another, J.D. Salinger was also on the list,
and his novel The Catcher in the Rye had
caused quite a stir when I was an undergraduate. I hoped to get
an interview with him into an early edition. For the most part, the
paper was a daily announcement of the same recreational
activities, the games and contests that were upcoming, the results of
competitions that were past. The ship was run to such a rigorous
schedule, overthrown only by severe weather, that the challenge was to
find any real news at all. I felt the paper looked more respectable when I
could staple another page or two behind the first, and an interview with
Mr. Salinger would let me do just that.
I ran into Bob on our second evening at
sea. I was on ray way to Mr. Salinger’s stateroom, feeling quite nervous,
although it was early, about coming unannounced. The previous afternoon,
while crossing the Sports Deck, a steward had pointed him out to me,
adding that for a famous author he didn’t seem very sociable. He was on
the Sun Deck below us, looking out of place. Rather than sunning, he gave
the impression of being out to defy the sun, his arms crossed tightly over
a terry-cloth robe, his legs as white as chalk. He wore sunglasses
and a ridiculous broad-rimmed straw hat that couldn’t have been purchased
in England. In Mexico, perhaps, on another trip. Mr. Salinger was standing
perfectly still, apparently in deep concentration, looking straight ahead.
I finally looked out to sea, too, expecting to find whales or porpoises or
even mermaids. I saw only the endless rolling ocean. When I looked back at
Mr. Salinger, he was abruptly walking off.
"Helen?"
The voice was tentative, from behind me. I
turned in the narrow passageway and recognized him immediately.
"Then it was you!” I was delighted to
see him, and not only because I now had an excuse to postpone my visit to
Mr. Salinger.
Bob hadn’t changed much, except that his
jacket and trousers were wrinkled. At Amherst his mother often had
come up on weekends with a load of pressed laundry. We quickly tried to
bring each other up to date but found the passageway, which we were
blocking, too confining for easy conversation. Bob suggested a more
leisurely reunion over drinks in the ship’s lounge.
"I really shouldn't in uniform,"
I said.
"That’s what it is about you. You
look like a nurse. Can you change into something else?"
"I'll have something non-alcoholic.
That should be all right."
"Not much fun, though."
"I have a newspaper to get out
tonight."
The lounge was off the starboard end of
the dining room. We were not denied permission to frequent it, a certain
mixing between employees and passengers being encouraged. We were reminded
before each cruise that we represented Transatlantic Lines at all times
and should behave accordingly. Normally I went to the lounge only
when pursuing a story, where as often as not I found myself fighting off
the interviewee, who had decided, if he was an unaccompanied male, that
one pursuit deserved another.
Despite Bob’s having chosen a table away
from the crowd at the bar, my curiosity was drawn to it by a
debilitated-looking man with a deep voice. He was telling a story and had
the attention of everyone along the bar, and at the near tables as well,
as if by the sheer resonance of his narrative.
After giving the waiter our order Bob
said, "That’s Clarence McArdle. He’s a radio actor."
"Oh?" The prospect of another
interview was enough for me to forgive the man, whose loudness was already
beginning to annoy me.
"Serials, mainly. I don’t know how
talented he is. He has a son, though, who is something out of this
world."
I raised my eyebrows, as if to ask, In what way?
Bob tapped his forehead just under the hairline. "Brains, The kid's an absolute genius. I first heard about him from the Leidekker bunch in Boston. I know some of them, Bob Peet, Al Babcock. Al used to teach at Amherst, by the way. They’ve been making a study of him, along with a few other child prodigies. They interview the kid on tape and whatnot. He disturbed the boys no end with some predictions last May."
"What about?"
"The lethal one was when each of them
would die."
I smiled, "Now really, what
adult would believe that anyone, let alone a child, can predict
that?"
The waiter brought our drinks, gin (neat)
for Bob, cola (neat) for myself. Bob waited until he had gone before
continuing.
"But the fact remains that the kid
tests off the charts. It’s scary."
I asked, "How old is the
boy?"
"Teddy? Ten, as I recall. Somewhere
in that neighborhood."
I turned to look at Clarence
McArdle. His face was red as he continued the story, perhaps as much
from exertion as from too much sun or drink, for he punctuated his
language with sweeping gestures and exaggerated poses, as if the use of
his body was something delightfully new to him after all the years on
radio. He was speaking loudly enough for us to listen in, if we’d
chosen to, but I had turned not to eavesdrop but to look for a resemblance
between father and son.
Bob said, "Want me to introduce you?
I met him yesterday, I wanted to clear the air before talking to Teddy,
Some parents get panicky when strangers approach their little
darlings."
"Does the boy try to act older than
he is?"
"In a sense, I suppose," said
Bob. "But his intelligence is genuine. Why?"
"Yesterday I talked with a boy who
struck me as peculiar, to say the least. He seemed to be keeping a journal."
"Sounds like Teddy," said
Bob.
I had been on my way up to the Sports Deck
to get the names of the entrants in the ship's tennis tournament. It was
around ten and a morning fog was still burning off, keeping most of the
worshipers off the Sun Deck. A few fanatics were out but I didn’t notice
the boy until I had become interested in the girl.
She looked six or seven and had lovely
blonde hair. What struck me about her, however, was not her appearance but
the determination with which she was lugging a sand-pail full of water. I
smiled as we passed. The girl said, "He’s a creep."
I stopped and turned. The girl continued
for a few steps and then briefly lost her balance on the rolling ground of
sea, spilling water on the deck. Then she started off again. I let her put
some distance between us before following, my curiosity personal as well
as official. We were walking behind the rear row of chairs on the Sun
Deck, and when we reached the middle of its length the girl turned,
spilling water again, and started toward the front, facing the steaming
ocean.
At first I missed the boy; then I noticed
him, the only person in the immediate area, his head visible over the
backrest of a deck chair in the second row. I hurried to catch up
with the girl and reached her as she was raising the pail.
"No, you don’t,” I said, grabbing it
away from her. The water spilled between us, getting both our feet
wet.
"Booper," said the boy, who in
the meantime had escaped to the first row of chairs. He was holding
up a small notebook, as if unsure that the spraying was over. “There’s
enough moisture in the air from the fog, I don't need a
shower."
"I hate you," said the
girl. She was glaring at me.
"C'mon, Booper," said the boy,
bringing down the notebook. "You don't even know the man."
The girl said, now turning to him,
"If you swam as bad as me, I’d push you in the ocean and you'd drown
and the sharks would eat your carcass for lunch!"
She went off the way we had
cone. Turning at the last row of chairs, she started skipping.
"I'll take that if you don’t
mind," said the boy.
I handed him the sand-pail and asked,
"Is she your sister?"
"Yes. I hope her rudeness didn’t
upset you."
He moved forward to his chair but didn’t
sit down. His voice had a hoarse quality to it that suggested dissipation
more than illness, despite the contrary evidence of his age. He had a long
thin neck and small eyes: with the longish unkempt hair, he reminded me of
a photograph of Bertrand Russell I recently had seen in the London Times.
A Lord Russell. A child Lord Russell.
"She's the one who seemed
upset," I said.
He rubbed his nose with the length of a
ballpoint pen. "Booper doesn't mean anything by it. She
dislikes me, not you. She was angry with you because you stopped
her."
"Well it didn’t seem like a very
pleasant practical joke."
"I didn’t say it was a practical joke. She meant it much
more serious than that."
What I read as arrogance in his manner was catching: I heard myself say, "More seriously."
"I was modifying the it, not, the
meant. Anyway, I should thank you. I prefer not to get soaked that way, to
be honest."
"Then you're welcome," I
said.
He said, "Goodbye."
"Goodbye."
A few rows behind him I turned and saw
that he was sitting again, the unkempt head of hair sticking up over the
backrest. I returned and he looked up from the notebook, then allowed
it to close.
“Do you want something else?" he
asked.
"I couldn’t help but notice that you
were writing in the notebook."
"Yes, you could have. You could
have left."
"I'm the editor of the ship’s
newspaper." He didn't seem impressed. "A few cruises ago I
gave a girl a poetry column. She was eleven and very good at
sonnets."
He looked like an impatient parent.
"I have my swimming lesson
soon and would like to finish something first."
"Well," I said, understanding
that I was over-staying my welcome, "if you ever write anything you
want to share, I’d be happy to look at it. The girl's column was very
popular with the passengers."
"I don’t like to read poetry, so I
hardly can be expected to write it," he said. "At least not
the poetry you mean."
"I'm not saying I’m limited to
sonnets. Free verse is fine if--"
"I mean American poetry. English
poetry, poetry in the Western tradition.
Whatever gives emotions to things that don't have emotions."
"Oh, I see," I said, not sure if
he was expressing anything beyond a dislike for poetry. I wished I’d
never brought the matter up.
"No, you don’t see. Or you never
would have asked."
I said, "See you around,
smart-ass," and left.
Bob laughed, "You didn’t really
tell him that."
"I did. What I really wanted to do
was smack him one."
There was a great roar from the bar, and I
turned to find red-faced Clarence McArdle laughing along with his
audience. The woman at the stool beside him got up and headed for the
restroom, which brought her past our table. When our glances met, her eyes
briefly rolled heavenward.
Bob said, "Word is they fight like
cats and dogs."
"What was their boy's name?”
“Teddy. Theodore, actually."
"He said something yesterday about
not liking American poetry because it was emotional."
"He'd say something like
that. It all comes out of the whole Oriental, Eastern attitude he's
interested in."
"That may be. But his sister is a
very emotional, distraught little girl, I’ll tell you that. And if
his parents fight as you say, then that boy’s probably terrified to death
of emotions.''
Bob suggested another drink but I begged
off, citing my deadline for "tomorrow's paper. We made a date for
breakfast, and I left by myself. In the passageway on the way to my
stateroom, I remembered Mr. Salinger. It was too late to knock on his door
unannounced but I decided it wasn't too late to slip a note under the
door. If it was true he was not sociable, better to warn him of my
intentions. I turned into a restroom, tore a sheet of paper from the
notebook I carried in my purse and, using a shelf for support,
wrote:
Mr. Salinger,
I am the editor of the ship’s daily
newspaper. I’ll be looking you up in the next few days, hoping to arrange
an interview with you for the paper. I enjoyed your novel. Thank you.
I signed it, folded it in thirds and
started the long walk through a maize of passageways to deliver it. On Mr.
Salinger's door was also a note. It was a pronouncement really, a bold
declaration that had me crumpling my own note in my hand. It was printed
in large capitals, in crayon, childlike, but unmistakably serious: UNDER
NO CIRCUMSTANCES KNOCK! IN FACT GO AWAY!
"You missed a dozy last night,"
Bob told me over breakfast. "The cats and dogs turned into piranhas.
Blood was everywhere."
“Who won?"
“That, I think, depends on one's point of
view. For histrionics, of course the actor. He kept saying that if
there weren’t so many witnesses, he’d bust open a couple of whiskey
bottles and carve her to shreds. It was straight out of a two-bit western,
except I had the distinct impression that he was serious."
"What did she do?" I asked this
more for Bob’s benefit, for he obviously was enjoying telling me
about it. I kept thinking of the poor boy, locked up in a family of angry
actors.
“Well, that came later, after he stormed
off. He said he was going to pick up a lady steward."
"G1ad I missed him," I said. I
blew into my coffee.
"Then she played tit for
tat."
I looked up, and Bob was red.
"Why are you blushing?"
"Excuse me, I didn’t mean that as a
pun. But she did make herself available in a pretty forward way. She actually
smooched a while with one guy, that is until the bartender asked her to leave.
She called him every name in the book before she did.”
“They’ll be banned from the bar,” I said.
“The second chance is the last. The poor boy,” I thought again, but aloud. I
bit into a piece of toast.
“We’re the poor ones,” said Bob. “The
kid’s IQ is out in the stratosphere somewhere.”
“Intelligence isn’t everything. Besides,
if you ask me, he’s walking on thin ice in a family like that.”
“With is brains, he can rise above them.”
“If you could have seen the hatred in that
little girl …”
“Teddy, I mean. He’s one of a kind.”
“I should hope so.”
Bob concentrated on breakfast, and I
wondered if he thought we’d been having an argument. My answer came when he
stood up and said, “I’ll see you later.”
“What are you mad for?”
Bob took a slow audible breath, and I
thought of Clarence McArdle.
“I think Teddy deserves a little respect,”
he said. “The kid’s a genius, after all.”
“A ten-year-old genius.”
"Age has nothing to do with
it."
"There are ages, and there are
ages."
Bob looked hurt. I said, "I'm sorry,
I didn't mean to upset you."
There was a pause, during which he lit a
cigarette.
"Let’s have dinner
together." I made an effort, although I was out of practice, to
put on my most pleasant Phi Mu face. "I still haven't found out what
you’ve been up to."
Bob nodded, not exactly a
commitment.
"Oh, stop pouting,” I said, slightly
seductive.
Bob shook his head and managed to grin.
"I'm sorry. I think his parents give me the willies. Can I see you
later?"
"In the dining room this evening.
Around six?"
"Six, it is.”
“Ciao."
"Ciao."
When I had finished breakfast, I took the
forward ship stairways all the way down to E Deck, where the pool
was. The pool was reserved for employees until nine, and after
breakfast I liked to splash around in the shallow end, planning my day. At
nine the ship’s weight-reducing club, the Hearty Breathers, took over the
pool and at ten-thirty the children whose parents had decided they should have
swimming lessons, as mine had never done. I had written a story on
neither activity yet and, needing material just to fill tomorrow’s single
page, I decided to remain poolside through the Hearty Breathers and
lessons, drafting my stories on each. I had learned that the fitness
types, more than others, liked to see their names in the paper, as if this
proved what was still only tentative on the weighing-in scale.
After Charlie, the swimming coach, had the
Hearty Breathers lined up for warming-up calisthenics, he introduced
me. I told them I would be writing about their club and therefore
would need their names, for which purpose I had put sign-in sheets in each
dressing room. I would also be available between ten and ten-thirty,
if some of them would be willing to tell me why they had joined, what they
expected to accomplish, and so on. After thanking them, I carried a deck
chair a polite distance away and waited for the huffing and puffing to
begin.
After ten, I was besieged outside the
dressing rooms by a motley assembly of men end women who wanted to tell me
how much weight they planned to lose. Feeling oddly like a priest at
confession, I scribbled notes, thanked them again and removed myself
to the deck chair to do the story.
"Hi there, Booper!”
It was Charlie, and I I
looked up to see the girl approaching the pool with a trepidation I
understood very well from my own childhood.
"Come on," said Charlie.
"The water won't bite."
I returned to my story. Writing about the
Hearty Breathers was easier than about children at their swimming lessons.
So many of the latter were like Booper, there only because their parents
wanted them there.
I did not look up again until I heard the
scream. It came suddenly, a piercing screaming that didn’t stop. I
looked up and saw that Booper had fallen into the pool and was screaming
as if screaming itself would sustain her, although Charlie already had the
long lifeguard’s pole under her for support and was guiding her to him.
But Booper’s panic remained, her screams continuing to echo acoustically within
the four tiled sides above the water level of the pool.
Then I noticed Teddy. He was standing back
from the pool, opposite from where Charlie was guiding the frightened girl to
safety, but on the same side at which Booper had fallen in.
Bob Nicholson rushed up to me, asking,
“What happened?”
I thought I knew but said nothing. I stood
up as Bob, who was out of breath, continued.
“I could feel in my bones that something
was wrong. I ran across Teddy up above and was grilling him about philosophy.
He started getting pretty excited. Voice rising, speaking faster and whatnot,
like he felt backed into a corner. I had a hunch that something was wrong as
soon as he left for his lesson. I’d never seen him that way before. He was
getting pretty excited. I got down here as quick as I could.”
We approached Teddy. Across the pool,
Charlie had Booper to the edge now and was lifting her out. Her screaming had
stopped, and she was bawling.
“Teddy?” I said.
His eyes were closed. Near each leg of his
swimming trunks, a small hand formed a tight white fist. When I was close
enough to touch him, I saw that he was trembling.
“It’s all right,” I said. “She’s okay. You
scared her, is all.”
Bob asked quietly, “He pushed her in?”
I nodded.
“Teddy?”
Eyes locked tight, fists squeezing blood
from his hands, he did not heed our presence. It was as if he had seen
something that frightened him as much as water frightened his sister, as if an
act as ordinary as one child pushing another into a swimming pool had, for him,
consequences and implications of terrifying significance – as if Teddy weren’t
like an American poem at all but instead was something in which emotions
properly belonged.
/end