And then.
And then!
Just two hours later, when they were driving over the Brooklyn Bridge for a second time in one night, Billy stopped speaking midsentence in order to point in the distance.
—Look! he exclaimed. The Empire State Building!
Well, that definitely belongs on the List, thought Woolly. It was the tallest building in the world. It was so tall, in fact, a plane had actually crashed into the top of it once. And yet, even though it was located right there in the middle of Manhattan, Woolly had never, ever, not even once set foot inside.
As such, when Duchess suggested they go there in order to pay a visit to Professor Abernathe, you might have expected Woolly to feel the same excitement that he’d felt when he realized they’d be driving over the Brooklyn Bridge. But what he felt was a pang of anxiety—a pang that stemmed not from the thought of riding a teeny little elevator up into the stratosphere, but from the tone of Duchess’s voice. Because Woolly had heard that tone before. He had heard it from three headmasters and two Episcopal ministers and a brother-in-law named “Dennis.” It was the tone that people used when they were about to set you straight.
Now and then, it seemed to Woolly, in the course of your everyday life, you are likely to be blessed with a notion. Say, for instance, it’s the middle of August and you’re drifting in your rowboat in the middle of the lake with the dragonflies skimming the water, when suddenly the thought occurs to you: Why doesn’t summer vacation last until the twenty-first of September? After all, the season doesn’t come to its conclusion on Labor Day weekend. The season of summer lasts until the autumnal equinox—just as surely as the season of spring lasts until the summer solstice. And look at how carefree everyone feels in the middle of summer vacation. Not only the children, but the grown-ups too, who take such pleasure in having a tennis game at ten, a swim at noon, and a gin and tonic at six o’clock on the dot. It stands to reason that if we all agreed to let summer vacation last until the equinox, the world would be a much happier place.
Well, when you have a notion like this, you have to be very careful in choosing whom you share it with. Because if certain people get wind of your notion—people like your headmaster or your minister or your brother-in-law “Dennis”—they are likely to feel it’s their moral responsibility to sit you down and set you straight. Having gestured for you to take the big chair in front of their desk, they will explain not only how misguided your notion is, but how much better a person you’re bound to be once you recognize this fact for yourself. And that was the tone that Duchess was using on Billy—the one that preceded the dispelling of an illusion.
You can just imagine the satisfaction that Woolly felt, the jubilation even, when after elevating all the way up to the fifty-fifth floor, trudging down all the corridors, and squinting at every little plaque, with only two more plaques to go, they came upon the one that read: Professor Abacus Abernathe, AbC, PhD, Lmnop.
Poor Duchess, thought Woolly with a smile of sympathy. Maybe he’s the one who will be learning a lesson tonight.
As soon as they entered the professor’s inner sanctum, Woolly could see that he was a sensitive man, a genial man. And even though he had a high-back chair in front of a big oak desk, Woolly could tell that he was not the sort who would want to sit you down and set you straight. What’s more, he was not the sort to hurry you along because time was money, or of the essence, or a stitch in nine, or what have you.
When you are asked a question—even a question that on the surface seems relatively simple and straightforward—you may have to go quite a ways back in order to provide all the little details that will be necessary for someone to make sense of your answer. Despite this, there are many inquisitors who, as soon as you start providing these essential details, will start to make a face. They’ll fidget in their seat. Then they’ll do their best to hurry you along by pressing you to leap from point A to point Z while skipping all the letters in between. But not Professor Abernathe. When he asked Billy a deceptively simple question and Billy went all the way back to the cradle in order to give a comprehensive reply, the professor leaned back in his chair and listened with the attentiveness of Solomon.
So when Woolly and Billy and Duchess finally rose to take their leave, having visited two of the city’s world-famous sites in a single night （Check! Check!）， and proven the irrefutable existence of Professor Abacus Abernathe, you might have thought that the night could not get any better.