“It looks like a wonderful day, papa,” Tom said. “It looks like a good stream.”
“It’s a fine stream. Look at the little curl of the whirlpools along the edge.”
“Isn’t this the same water that we have in on the beach in front of the house?”
“Sometimes, Tommy. Now the tide is out and it has pushed the Stream out from in front of the mouth of the harbor. See in there along the beach, where there is no opening, it’s made in again.”
“It looks almost as blue in there as it is out here. What makes the Gulf water so blue?”
“It’s a different density of water. It’s an altogether different type of water.”
“The depth makes it darker, though.”
“Only when you look down into it. Sometimes the plankton in it make it almost purple.”
“Why?”
“Because they add red to the blue I think. I know they call the Red Sea red because the plankton make it look really red. They have terrific concentrations of them there.”
“Did you like the Red Sea, papa?”
“I loved it. It was awfully hot but you never saw such wonderful reefs and it’s full of fish on the two monsoons. You’d like it, Tom.”
“I read two books about it in French by Mr. de Montfried. They were very good. He was in the slave trade. Not the white slave trade. The olden days slave trade. He’s a friend of Mr. Davis.”
“I know,” Thomas Hudson said. “I know him, too.”
“Mr. Davis told me that Mr. de Montfried came back to Paris one time from the slave trade and when he would take a lady out anywhere he would have the taxi driver put down the top of the taxi and he would steer the taxi driver wherever he wanted to go by the stars. Say Mr. de Montfried was on the Pont de la Concorde and he wanted to go to the Madeleine. He wouldn’t just tell the taxi driver to take him to the Madeleine, or to cross the Place de la Concorde and go up the Rue Royale the way you or I would do it, papa. Mr. de Montfried would steer himself to the Madeleine by the North Star.”
“I never heard that one about Mr. de Montfried,” Thomas Hudson said. “I heard quite a lot of others.”
“It’s quite a complicated way to get around in Paris, don’t you think? Mr. Davis wanted to go into the slave trade at one time with Mr. de Montfried but there was some sort of a hitch. I don’t remember what it was. Yes, now I do. Mr. de Montfried had left the slave trade and gone into the opium trade. That was it.”
“Didn’t Mr. Davis want to go into the opium trade?”
“No. I remember he said he thought he’d leave the opium trade to Mr. De Quincey and Mr. Cocteau. He said they’d done so well in it that he didn’t think it was right to disturb them. That was one of those remarks that I couldn’t understand. Papa, you explain anything to me that I ask but it used to slow the conversation up so much to be asking all the time that I would just remember certain things I didn’t understand to ask about sometime and that’s one of those things.”
“You must have quite a backlog of those things.”
“I’ve got hundreds of them. Possibly thousands. But I get rid of a lot of them every year by getting to understand them myself. But some I know I’ll have to ask you about. At school this year I may write a list of them for an English composition. I’ve got some awfully good ones for a composition of that sort.”
“Do you like school, Tom?”
“It’s just one of those things you have to take. I don’t think anyone likes school, do they, that has ever done anything else?”
“I don’t know. I hated it.”
“Didn’t you like art school either?”
“No. I liked to learn to draw but I didn’t like the school part.”
“I don’t really mind it,” Tom said. “But after you’ve spent your life with men like Mr. Joyce and Mr. Pascin and you and Mr. Davis, being with boys seems sort of juvenile.”