the laundry chute! Get a grip on yourself, man! Get your feet on the floor!'
He never dreamed, poor Mr. Peabody, that Van Arsdale was held fast at both ankles by two brutal linemen from the Gravesend football team; they tortured Van Arsdale daily.
So Mr. Peabody had gone home to his parents, which left the second floor free of faculty; and the Physical Education fanatic on the fourth floor-the track-and-field coach, Mr. Tubulari- was also away for Christmas, He was also a bachelor, and he had insisted on the fourth floor-for his health; he claimed to relish running upstairs. He had many female visitors; when they wore dresses or skirts, the boys loved to watch them ascending and descending the stairwell from one of the lower floors. The nights that Waterhouse Hall suffered his turn at dorm duty, the boys were very well behaved. Mr. Tubulari was fast and silent and thrived on catching boys 'in the act'-in the act of anything: shaving-cream fights, smoking in their rooms, even masturbation. Each floor had a designated common room, a butt room, so-called, for the smokers; but smoking in the dorm rooms was forbidden-as was sex in any form, alcohol in any form, and drugs that had not been prescribed by the school physician. Mr. Tubulari even had reservations about aspirin. According to Dan, Mr. Tubulari was off competing in some grueling athletic event over Christmas-actually, a pentathlon of the harshest-possible wintertime activities; a 'winterthon,' Mr. Tubulari had called it. Dan Needham hated made-up words, and he became quite boisterous on the subject of what wintertime events Mr. Tubulari was competing in; the fanatic had gone to Alaska, or maybe Minnesota. Dan would entertain Owen and me by describing Mr. Tubulari's pentathlon, his 'winterthon.'
'The first event,' Dan Needham said, 'is something wholesome, like splitting a cord of wood-points off, if you break your ax. Then you have to run ten miles in deep snow, or snowshoe for thirty. Then you chop a hole in the ice, and-carrying your ax-swim a mile under a frozen lake, chopping your way out at the opposite shore. Then you build an igloo-to get warm. Then comes the dogsledding. You have to mush a team of dogs-from Anchorage to Chicago. Then you build another igloo-to rest.'
'THAT'S SIX EVENTS,' Owen said. 'A PENTATHLON IS ONLY FIVE.'
'So forget the second igloo,' Dan Needham said.
'I WONDER WHAT MISTER TUBULARI DOES FOR NEW YEAR'S EVE,' Owen said.
'Carrot juice,' Dan said, fixing himself another whiskey. 'Mister Tubulari makes his own carrot juice.'
Anyway, Mr. Tubulari was gone. When Dan was out in the afternoons, Owen and I were in total control of the top three floors of Waterhouse Hall. As for the first floor, we had only the Brinker-Smiths to contend with, and they were no match for us-if we were quiet. A young British couple, the Brinker-Smiths had recently launched twins; they were entirely and, for the most part, cheerfully engaged in how to survive life with twins. Mr. Brinker-Smith, who was a biologist, also fancied himself an inventor; he invented a double-seater high chair, a double-seater stroller, a double-seater swing-the latter hung in a doorway, where the twins could dangle like monkeys on a vine, in close enough proximity to each other to pull each other's hair. In the double-seater high chair, they could throw food into each other's faces, and so Mr. Brinker-Smith improvised a wall between them-too high for them to throw their food over it. Yet the twins would knock at this wall, to assure themselves that the other was really there, and they would smear their food on the wall, almost as a form of finger painting-a preliterate communication among siblings. Mr. Brinker-Smith found the twins' methods of thwarting his various inventions 'fascinating'; he was a true scientist-the failures of his experiments were almost as interesting to him as his successes, and his determination to press forward, with more and more twin-inspired inventions, was resolute. Mrs. Brinker-Smith, on the other hand, appeared a trifle tired. She was too pretty a woman to look harried; her exhaustion at the hands of her twins-and with Mr. Brinker-Smith's inventions for a better life with them-manifested itself in fits of distraction so pronounced that Owen and Dan and suspected her of sleepwalking. She literally did not notice us. Her name was Ginger, in reference to her fetching freckles and her strawberry-blond hair; she was an object of lustful fantasies for Gravesend boys, both before and after my time at the academy-given the need of Gravesend boys to indulge in lustful fantasies, I believe that Ginger Brinker-Smith was seen as a sex object even when she was pregnant with her twins. But for Owen and me-during the Christmas of '-Mrs. Brinker-Smith's appearance was only mildly alluring; she looked as if she slept in her clothes, and I'm sure she did. And her fabled voluptuousness, which I would later possess as firm a memory of as any Gravesend boy, was quite concealed by the great, loose blouses she wore-for such clothes, no doubt, enhanced the speed with which she could snap open her nursing bra. In
a European tradition, strangely enlarged by its travel to New Hampshire, she seemed intent on nursing the twins until they were old enough to go to school by themselves. The Brinker-Smiths were big on nursing, as was evidenced by Mr. Brinker-Smith's demonstrative use of his wife in his biology classes. A well-liked teacher, of liberal methods not universally favored by the stodgier Gravesend faculty, Mr. Brinker-Smith enjoyed all opportunities to bring 'life,' as he called it, into the classroom. This included the eye-opening spectacle of Ginger Brinker-Smith nursing the twins, an experience-sadly-that was wasted on the biology students of Gravesend, in that it happened biefore Owen and I were old enough to attend the academy. Anyway, Owen and I were not fearful of interference from the Brinker-Smiths while we investigated the boys' rooms on the first floor of Waterhouse Hall; in fact, we were disappointed to see so little of the Brinker-Smiths over that Christmas- because we imagined that we might be rewarded with a glimpse of Ginger Brinker-Smith in the act of nursing. We even, occasionally, lingered in the first-floor hall-in the faraway hope that Mr.
