The only other time this year that Hal was officially summoned to the Headmaster’s waiting room had been in late August, right before Convocation and during Orientation period, when Y.D.A.U.’s new kids were coming in and wandering around clueless and terrified, etc., and Tavis had wanted Hal to take temporary charge of a nine-year-old kid coming in from somewhere called Philo IL, who was allegedly blind, the kid, and apparently had cranium-issues, from having originally been one of the infantile natives of Ticonderoga NNY evacuated too late, and had several eyes in various stages of evolutionary development in his head but was legally blind, but still an extremely solid player, which is all kind of a long tale in itself, given that his skull was apparently the consistency of a Chesapeake crabshell but the head itself so huge it made Booboo look microcephalic, and the kid apparently had on-court use of only one hand because the other had to pull around beside him a kind of rolling IV-stand appliance with a halo-shaped metal brace welded to it at head-height, to encircle and support his head; but anyway Tex Watson and Thorp had broken C.T. down over the kid’s admission and tuition-waver, and C.T. now figured the kid would need to say the least some extra help getting oriented (literally), and he wanted Hal to be the one to take him in hand (again literally). It turned out a couple days later that the kid had some kind of either family or cerebro-spinal-fluid crisis at home in rural IL and wasn’t matriculating now till the Spring term. But back in August Hal had sat in the very chair Trevor Axford is now nodding off in, very late in the day, like dusk, having had an informal exhibition match with a visiting Latvian Satellite pro go an encouraging three sets that P.M. so that he’d missed Mrs. C.’s stuffed peppers at supper, his stomach making those where’s-the-food noises from around the transverse colon, alone in the blue room, waiting, the chair bobbing reflexively, with Lateral Alice Moore gone home to her long apartment with rooms only 2 m. wide in Newton and an opaque plastic dust-thing wrapped tight over her Intel processor and intercom-console and the little red danger-light on her DANGER: THIRD RAIL plaque unlit, and the only lights besides the weak dusk outside were the hot 105W of his chairback’s creepy blue-shaded magazine-lamp, plus the multiple lamps on in Charles Tavis’s office (Tavis has a phobic thing about overhead lighting) as Tavis was doing a late-day Intake interview on impossibly tiny little Tina Echt, who just matriculated this fall at age seven. His doors were open because it was a brutal August and F. D. V. Harde had somehow rigged Lateral Alice’s air-conditioner vent in the waiting room so it really put out. Tavis’s office’s outer door opened out while the inner door opened in, which gave his little inter-door vestibule kind of a jaw-like quality, when exposed.
August Y.D.A.U. had been when Hal’s chronic left ankle had been almost the worst it’s ever been, after an erumpent but grueling summer tour of getting to at least the Quarters of just about everything, mostly on hard asphalt, 217 and he could feel his pulse in the vessels in the raw ligaments of the ankle as he sat flipping the shiny pages of a new World Tennis and watching the little ad-cards fall out and flutter; but he also couldn’t help exploiting the open-jawed view of a substantial section of Charles Tavis at his office desk, looking as usual oddly foreshortened and small and with his hands together on the massive desktop across from a partial-profile view of a girl who looked like she couldn’t be much more than five or six, preparing to receive Intake papers as she listened to Tavis. There’d been no Echt parents or guardians anywhere in view. Some kids just get dropped off. Sometimes the parents’ cars barely even stop, just slow down, throw gravel as they accelerate away. Tavis’s desk drawers have squeaky casters. Jim Struck’s folks’ Lincoln hadn’t even much slowed. Struck had been helped to his feet and taken immediately to the locker room to shower the gravel out of his hair. Hal had been in charge of his Orientation, too, when Struck transferred, booted out of Palmer Academy after his pet tarantula (named Simone — another long story) escaped and wouldn’t even have dreamed of biting the Headmaster’s wife if she hadn’t screamed and passed out and fallen right on it, Struck explained as Hal helped pick up suitcases tumbled all over the drive.
Like many gifted bureaucrats, Hal’s mother’s adoptive brother Charles Tavis is physically small in a way that seems less endocrine than perspectival. His smallness resembles the smallness of something that’s farther away from you than it wants to be, plus is receding. 218 This weird appearance of recessive drift, together with the compulsive hand-movements that followed his quitting smoking some years back, helped contribute to the quality of perpetual frenzy about the man, a kind of locational panic that it’s easy to see explains not only Tavis’s compulsive energy — he and Avril, pretty much the Dynamic Duo of compulsion, between them, sleep, in their second-floor rooms in the Headmaster’s House — separate rooms — tend to sleep, between them, about as much as any one normal insomniac — but maybe also contributes to the pathological openness of his manner, the way he thinks out loud about thinking out loud, a manner Ortho Stice can imitate so eerily that he’s been prohibited by the male 18’s from doing his Tavis-impression in front of the younger players, for fear that the littler kids will find it impossible to take the real Tavis seriously at the times he needs to be taken seriously.
As for the older kids, Stice can make them all double up now merely by shielding his eyes with his hand and assuming a horizon-scan expression whenever Tavis heaves into view, seeming to recede even as he bears down.
C.T. as Headmaster always has a number of introductory questions for matriculants, and Hal, now, in November, can’t remember which one of these Tavis opened with with Echt, but he remembers seeing the little girl’s sucker-stick sweep the air and a plastic Mr. Bouncety-Bounce 219 no-pierce earring swing wildly as she shook her head. Hal’d marvelled at her size. How high could somebody this little be ranked, even regionally, in 12’s?
And then yes the sumptuous squeak of Tavis’s big seagrass chair coming back forward as his elbows took his weight and he laced his fingers together out across meters of polymer-reinforced shale desktop, custom-designed. The Headmaster’s smile as he leaned back, though hidden from Hal because of the shadow of the office’s enormous StairBlaster, 220 was nevertheless audible because of the thing with Charles Tavis’s teeth, about which maybe the less said the better. Looking discreetly in, Hal had felt an involuntary rush of affection for C.T. His maternal uncle’s hair was straight and very precisely combed over, and his little mustache was never quite symmetrical. One eye was also set at a slightly different angle than the other, so that besides holding his hand up to scan Stice would also cock his head slightly to the side whenever C.T. came near. Hal’s involuntary grin is lopsided and only half-felt, now, remembering. The Axhandle’s sitting there slumped, with his fist to his chin, a posture that he thinks makes him look meditative but that really makes him look in utero, and Kittenplan is chewing at her knuckles’ tattoos, which is what she does instead of washing them off.
Then Ortho Stice had entered the hot waiting room, shirt wet and crew cut matted from the courts and toting his Wilsons, and made right for the AC-vent’s downdraft outside Tavis’s little vestibule. Stice’s clothes were comped by Fila and when he played any sort of match he wore all black, and at E.T.A. and on the tour was known as The Darkness. He had a crew cut and the beginnings of jowls. He and Hal exchanged the very slight sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for politeness. They had similar games, although most of Stice’s touch was at the net. Stice raised one hand to his eyes and cocked his head slightly in the direction of the office’s lamplight.
‘The little guy going to be a long time in there?’
‘You have to ask?’
Tavis was saying ‘What actually we do for you here is to break you down in very carefully selected ways, take you apart as a little girl and put you back together again as a tennis player who can take the court against any little girl in North America without fear of limitation. With a perspective unmarred by the eyelashes of whatever pockets you brought here. A li
ttle girl now who can regard the court as a mirror whose reflection holds no illusions or fear for you.’
‘Now the thing with the skull,’ Stice said. Hal had watched gooseflesh rise on Stice’s arms and legs as he stood under the cold air and faced up and breathed, hugging his gear to his chest.
‘One possible way of couching it is to choose to say that we will take apart your skull very gently and reconstruct a skull for you that will have a highly developed bump of clarity and a slight concave dent where the fear-instinct used to be. I’m doing my best to cast all this in terms the you you are right now can be comfortable with, Tina. Though I need to tell you I feel uncomfortable adjusting a presentation toward or down toward anyone in any way, since I’m terribly vain, both as a man and an educator, about my reputation for candor,’ Tavis said. The audible smile. ‘It is one of my limitations.’
Stice withdrew without even having to say goodbye to Hal. They were at complete ease with one another. It had been a bit different the year before, when Hal was still in Boys’ 16’s. Hal heard Stice say something to somebody out in the lobby. Part of C.T.’s impression of distance just past the eye’s focal length was the fact that the two sides of his face didn’t quite go together. It wasn’t as drastic as a stroke-victim’s face or a deformity; the subtlety of it was part of it, the essential vagueness about himself that Tavis fought by sort of peeling his skull back and exposing his brain to you without any sort of warning or invitation; it was part of the man’s preoccupied frenzy.
Between Ortho Stice’s exit and the Moms’s entry Hal had been flexing the ankle and watching the swelling shift slightly under the multiple socks. He stood and put his weight on the ankle experimentally a couple times and then sat back down and flexed it, watching the swelling very intently. The way he knew suddenly that he was going to go down and get high in secret in the Pump Room before showering was that it hadn’t occurred to him to ask The Darkness about making some sort of arrangements to eat together, since Stice had missed supper too. His viscera were putting out the sound of one of those teakettles that doesn’t have a whistle and so just rumbles as it boils. A competitive athlete cannot skip meals without terrific metabolic distress.
After a little while Avril Incandenza, E.T.A.’s Dean of Academic Affairs, had lowered her head under the waiting room’s jamb and come in, looking fresh and totally untouched by the heat. She had one of the Orientation packets in its customary red-and-gray binder.
The Moms always had this way of establishing herself in the exact center of any room she was in, so that from any angle she was somehow in the line of all sight. It was part of her, and so to that extent dear to Hal, but it was noticeable and kind of unsettling. His brother Orin, during a late-night round of Family Trivia, had once described Avril as The Black Hole of Human Attention. Hal had been pacing, rising up on the toes of the left foot, trying to gauge the exact level of physical discomfort he was feeling. That’s when she’d come in. Hal and the Moms always greeted each other kind of extravagantly. When Avril entered a room, any sort of pacing reduced to orbiting, and Hal’s pacing became vaguely circular around the waiting room’s perimeter as Avril rested her tailbone on the receptionist’s desk and crossed her ankles and produced her cigarette case. Her manner always became very casual and almost sort of male when she and Hal were alone in a room.
She watched him walk. ‘The ankle?’
He hated himself for exaggerating the limp even slightly. ‘Tender. Sore at the very worst. More like tender.’
‘No, now, now no need to cry,’ C.T. was exclaiming as he knelt at the side of the chair from which little legs dangled and were spasming around. ‘I didn’t mean literally break, as in break open your head, Tina. Please let me acknowledge that this is totally my fault my dear for presenting what we’ll be up to here in just exactly the wrong sort of light.’
Avril had casually produced a 100-mm. rodney from the flat brass case and tamped it on an unlined knuckle. Hal produced no lighter. Neither of them had looked toward Tavis’s office’s maw. Avril’s smock-type dress was blue cotton, with a kind of scalloped white doily around the shoulders and white stockings and painfully white Reebok cross-trainers.
‘I am horrified that I’ve made you cry like this.’ Tavis’s voice had assumed that stressed character of issuing from the end of a long corridor. ‘Just please know that a totally unthreatening lap is available if you want a lap, is all I can think of to say.’
Avril always smoked with her smoking-arm up and elbow resting in the crook of the other arm. She would frequently hold a rodney just this same way without lighting it or even putting it in her mouth. She permitted herself to smoke only in her E.T.A. office and HmH study and one or two other venues outfitted with air-filtration equipment. Her posture, that night, with her coccyx against something and looking down the length of her legs, was awfully close to the way Himself used to stand around. She indicated C.T.’s door with her head.
‘I gather he’s been in there a while.’
Hal despised even the very slight suggestion of whine that came in: ‘I’ve been waiting here coming up on an hour.’ And that he liked it a little that she looked pained for him as her tiny eyebrows (unplucked, just naturally tiny and arched) went up.
‘You’ve had nothing to eat, then, yet?’
‘I was summoned.’
Tavis’s voice in there: ‘I’ll invite you right here and now to sit in my lap and let me make such soothing sounds as There There There.’
‘Want my Mommy and Daddy.’
Avril said, ‘That’s the old tum making those sounds then, and not the air conditioner?’ with that smile that was also a kind of wince.
‘Couldn’t even start to describe the sounds coming from down there, like that whistleless kettle Himself used to leave on when —’
An apple appeared from a deep pocket in her smock. ‘Happen to have a spare Granny Smith here, to tack body to soul while we wait.’
He smiled tiredly at the big green apple. ‘Moms, that’s your apple. That’s all you’re going to eat between 12 and 23, I happen to know.’
Avril made a distended gesture. ‘Stuffed. Huge lunch with a set of parents not three hours ago. I’ve been staggering around since.’ Looking at the apple like she had no idea where it’d even come from. ‘I’ll probably pitch this out.’
‘You will not.’
‘Please,’ rising from the desk’s edge without seeming to use muscles, apple held out like something distasteful, cigarette down at her side where it would be putting a hole in the smock if lit. ‘You’d be doing us both a favor.’
‘This drives me bats. You know this drives me bats.’
Orin and Hal’s term for this routine is Politeness Roulette. This Moms-thing that makes you hate yourself for telling her the truth about any kind of problem because of what the consequences will be for her. It’s like to report any sort of need or problem is to mug her. Orin and Hal had this bit, during Family Trivia sometimes: ‘Please, I’m not using this oxygen anyway.’ ‘What, this old limb? Take it. In the way all the time. Take it.’ ‘But it’s a gorgeous bowel movement, Mario — the living room rug needed something, I didn’t know what til right this very moment.’ The special fantodish chill of feeling both complicit and obliged. Hal despised the way he always reacted, taking the apple, pretending to pretend his reluctance to eat her supper was a pretense. Orin believed she did it all on purpose, which was way too easy. He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings’ windpipe and a Glock 9 mm. to the feelings’ temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.
The Moms held the red binder out to Hal without moving. ‘Have you seen Alice’s new packets?’ The apple was good-sour but perfumy from the pocket of the Moms’s smock, and it stimulated a torrent of saliva. The binder had different little informal and action photos from the waiting-room walls, and offprints of clippings, and three rings for the packet of guidelines and Honor-Code pledges, all done up
by Moore in a Gothic ital.
Hal looked up from the binder, indicating C.T.’s office with his head. ‘You’re taking the girl around yourself?’
‘We’re encouragingly short-staffed. Thierry and Donni won their qualifying round at Hartford, so they’re staying over.’ She leaned way forward and looked in at C.T. so he could see she was out here. She smiled.
Hal followed her look. ‘The girl’s name’s Tina something and she’ll come up to about your knee.’
‘Echt,’ Avril said, looking at something on a printout.
Hal looked at her while he chewed. ‘You don’t like her already?’
‘Tina Echt. Pawtucket. Father apparently some sort of unleavened baker, mother a public relations person for the Red Sox A.A.A. baseball there.’
Hal had to wipe his chin as he smiled. ‘Triple-A. Not A.A.A.’
Avril was leaning forward at the waist with the binder to her breast the way females hold flat things, still trying to catch the Headmaster’s eye.
Hal said ‘Troeltsch finally has some competition in the repulsive-last-name department.’
‘Lord she is a small one isn’t she.’
‘I can’t see her being more than maybe five.’
‘Oh golly let’s see: age seven, high I.Q., somewhat impoverished-looking M.M.P.I., played out of Providence Racquet and Bath in East Providence. Ranked thirty-first in Eastern 12’s as of June.’
‘She can’t be much taller than her damn stick out there, when she plays. Schtitt’s going to keep her here what, twelve years?’
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