the bus home from Port Washington

The surrogate-son courtship, in a single image. On the ride home C.T. "sat way in the back with John Wayne and beamed and spoke nonstop in hushed tones to Wayne as the Canadian stared out the window" — the uncle-administrator lavishing eager, unbroken attention on the family's imported champion, the fellow-Canadian non-relation who "No Relation" Wayne, while Wayne gives him nothing back but the back of a head turned to the glass. "Charles Tavis was irrepressible," the scene notes; his courtship of Wayne is the same beaming, unstoppable, unreciprocated flow he aims at everyone, here trained on the top-ranked boy who is, tellingly, not his kin. The successor who took the founder's house works just as hard at annexing the founder's would-be heir — courting the son-surrogate who won't even turn from the window.