Hal on Himself’s audience-films
who ate like a bird and smiled very politely all the time and didn’t have even a word to say to anybody, it seemed, except Avril, to whom the Oriental choreographer had cottoned right off
Context
A stranger is rented from a commercial studio to choreograph a fight scene and lodged inside the Headmaster's House, and this near-silent man who has nothing to say to anyone finds the one person he can't stay away from: Avril. It's a throwaway clause, but it's the same pattern the theme keeps logging — men brought into the house's orbit gravitating helplessly to the mother, the "endocrinologically compelling" pull that will later attach to John Wayne and the B.U. coach and half the older men she meets. Even a hired, wordless, bird-eating technician cottons to Avril "right off." The house is a system with a gravitational center, and the center is her.