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Willoughby nodded apologetically.

I assumed we were about to be heaved out on our ears, but the manager said: “Well, I am so sorry again, son. I cannot apologize enough.” He turned to the waitresses. “This young man seems to be jinxed.” To us, he said, “I’ll get your sundaes,” and went off to the kitchen, pausing here and there en route to crouch down and look discreetly at the water of other diners.

The one thing Willoughby always lacked was a sense of proportion. I begged him not to push his luck, but the following week he insisted on going to Bishop’s again. I refused to sit with him, but took a table across the way and watched as he hummingly pulled from his pocket a brown paper bag and carefully tipped into his soup about two pounds of dead flies and moths that he had retrieved from the overhead light fitting in his bedroom. They formed a mound four inches high. It was a magnificent sight, but perhaps just a touch deficient in terms of plausibility.

By chance the manager was passing as Willoughby put on his light. The manager looked at the offending bowl in horror and utter dismay and then at Willoughby. I thought for a moment that he was going to faint or perhaps even die. “This is just not poss—” he said and then a giant lightbulb went on over his head as he realized that indeed it wasn’t possible for anyone to be served a bowl of soup with two pounds of dead insects in it.

With commendable restraint he escorted Willoughby to the street door, and asked him—not demanded, but just asked him quietly, politely, sincerely—never to return. It was a terrible banishment.

ALL THE WILLOUGHBYS—mother, father, four boys—were touched with brilliance. I used to think we had a lot of books in our house because of our two big bookcases in the living room. Then I went to the Willoughbys’ house. They had books and bookcases everywhere—in the hallways and stairwells, in the bathroom, the kitchen, around all the walls of the living room. Moreover, theirs were works of real weight—Russian novels, books of history and philosophy, books in French. I realized then that we were hopelessly outclassed.

And their books were read. I remember once Willoughby showed me a paragraph about farm-boy bestiality he had come across in a long article about something else altogether in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I don’t remember the details now—it’s not the sort of thing one retains for forty years—but the gist of the passage was that 32 percent of farm boys in Indiana (or something like that: I’m pretty sure it was Indiana; it was certainly a high number) at one time or another had enjoyed sexual congress with livestock.

This amazed me in every possible way. It had never occurred to me that any farm boy or other human being, in Indiana or elsewhere, would ever willingly have sex with an animal, and yet here was printed evidence in a respectable publication that a significant proportion of them had at least given it a try. (The article was a touch coy on how enduring these relationships were.) But even more amazing than the fact itself was the finding of it. The Encyclopaedia Britannica ran to twenty-three volumes spread over eighteen thousand pages—some fifty million words in all, I would estimate—and Willoughby had found the only riveting paragraph in the whole lot. How did he do it? Who reads the Encyclopaedia Britannica?

Willoughby and his brothers opened new worlds, unsuspected levels of possibility, for me. It was as if I had wasted every moment of existence up to then. In their house anything could be fascinating and entertaining. Willoughby shared a bedroom with his brother Joe, who was one year older and no less brilliant at science. Their room was more laboratory than bedroom. There was apparatus everywhere—beakers, vials, retorts, Bunsen burners, jars of chemicals of every description—and books on every subject imaginable, all well-thumbed: applied mechanics, wave mechanics, electrical engineering, mathematics, pathology, military history.