Chris stuck out her foot. “Six and a half, I’d never even make the ball.”

Cradled in one arm Czar Kennedy carried a dark-green gold-topped bottle. He held it up now. “Champagne. Domestic, but champagne all right. We’ll have the real stuff at dinner, to celebrate, but you’re going to break this over the bow, Christine, for luck.”

Something in Chris was outraged at this. Like pinning an orchid on a raddled old woman, she thought. “You only do that when the boat is young and—and beautiful!”

“She’s better than young,” Czar said. “She’s old and rich, she rates a bottle of champagne, she’s worth her weight in gold—or silver salmon, anyway.”

Dave turned the gold frame so that the picture it enclosed faced the newcomers. He thrust it in front of them, laughing. “Look at that, will you! It was hanging in one of the state-room closets on a hook turned to the wall, can you beat that! The whole crowd of muckamucks, you’ll die!”

It was a group photograph showing a party of men and women on deck. They seemed strangely naïve in their costumes of another day. The women wore long skirts and little jackets with broad revers and floppy hats with floating veils. The mustached men wore yachting caps and tight suits. The party was toasting someone or something and the whole effect was unnautical. There was nothing domestic about the vintage look of the plump dark bottles on the table or protruding from a silver ice bucket. “Look at the date!” Dave yelled. “That’s the day the Buccaneer was launched. Look, there’s old B.T. himself, and that’s Rosalie Garrett, the actress—–” And that one and that one and that one. “They’re all dead now. Good and dead. But we ain’t. Come on, folks. We’ll take a look around and then over to the Olympic, I’m so hungry already, by God, I could eat a small boy with the measles. But first you’re going to bust this bottle over the bow, Christine.”

Clumping along in the clumsy misfitting boots Christine protested mildly. “I don’t know how. I wish somebody else—–”

“Don’t look at me. Thanks.” Dina linked an arm through Bay’s.

He extricated his arm, apparently to remove a handkerchief from his pocket. “Here, we’ll have to wrap a couple of handkerchiefs or something around the bottle and tie them. Somebody give me another. Dad?” Dave snatched a fine linen square from his pocket. For a moment the fishy dock smell was lost in a wave of spicy eau de cologne. “I don’t want any broken glass making hamburgers of Christine.”

The little party stood now looking up at the scrofulous bow of the old ship. Gingerly Chris took the bottle in one gloved hand. She seemed suddenly very small in the shadow of the structure looming above her; a trifle absurd, too, what with the clumsy boots and the blue silk dress that she had chosen as being the least tacky, and the matching blue coat that Bridie in Baranof had pronounced just the thing for Seattle August evenings; and the handkerchief-swathed bottle in her hand.