Institute Read Free Page A

they’ll want to know about you—all kinds of things, like your background and whether you have what it takes to run a biographical institute—or any institute. And why shouldn’t they know? After all, how you live is part of it. On top of that, there’s you. You’re not uninteresting, you know. They wouldn’t be human if they didn’t want to know you better.”
    It seems to me now that she said quite a bit more, but I must not have had the right answers, because all of a sudden she said: “Our apartment is in East Watergate. It’s at 2500 Virginia Avenue, if you know where that is.”
    “I do. I know East Watergate.”
    It was a haughty way of saying forget about College Park and the warthog that had an apartment there. For some time we rode in silence—to Baltimore, through the tunnel, and onto the freeway to Washington. But when I took the turnoff for College Park she said nothing. I came to the Accomac, where I lived, and pulled into the parking lot back of it. I shut the motor off and, still sitting behind the wheel, spoke my piece very stiffly.
    “O.K., there is something about my apartment. It was my mother’s before she died. It was where she lived, with her son a sort of a lodger. As such, it was a beautiful place for a middle-aged woman to call home. But for the son it has caused smiles on faces that did not, not, NOT get invited back. So if you do any smiling—”
    “What is there to smile at, Lloyd?”
    “The decor, I suppose you would call it, consists of Sonny Boy’s career. Pictures of him by the dozen, by the score, maybe even by the hundred—doing everything from riding his Shetland pony to getting his Ph.D. Which was fine for Mommy’s apartment. But for Sonny Boy to call it his, that has a peculiar look. If you want to laugh, go ahead. But it will be the last time you will. I like it, the way I like the dinner jacket. And if you don’t—”
    “Calm down, Lloyd.”
    “O.K., let’s go up.”
    We got out of the car and I locked it. I said: “I usually go in the back way, through the basement and up in the freight elevator. But today, in your honor, we can go around front and make a grand entrance through the lobby.”
    “I think we should use the back way.”
    I must have looked surprised, because she explained: “We don’t know who’s in the lobby, who might remember the beautiful frog whose picture they saw in the paper.”
    “Then through the basement it is.”
    I unlocked the basement door and led to the freight elevator where I stood with her, feeling foolish while it creaked upward. At the seventh floor we got off and I unlocked the door to apartment 7A. Then I bowed her into my apartment. For a moment she was behind me as I hung up my coat in the guest closet in the vestibule. When I turned, she was under the arch between the vestibule and the living room, her mouth parted, her eyes roving around the room. At last, without looking at me, she said in a reverent whisper: “Lloyd, how could anyone laugh? How could you even imagine that I would? It’s beautiful, simply beautiful!”
    If it weren’t for the pictures, I’d have been proud of it myself. The room wasn’t as big as the drawing room of her place, but it was still pretty big, bigger than most living rooms. On three sides were bookshelves six feet high—solid on the long side where there were no windows and broken on the side with the arch and fireplace. On the fourth side of the room was a large picture window which looked out on the university campus. The view was grassy, fresh, and green.
    She moved to the middle of the room where she kept turning around. “It’s the books that make me lower my voice. They throw a hush over any room. We have what we call ‘the library’ It’s full of reference books. Who was Moody?”
    “John Moody? Financial writer, I think.”
    “Yes! Annual Report of Earnings! I never go into that room ... What are these books? Biographies?”
    “A lot of them, yes.”
    “And