But during that period when his interest had been riveted on art history, the prime riveter was a professor named Langston Kitteredge. Professor K, as he was known to his graduate students, was to his field what Indiana Jones had been to archeology, with the slight difference that Kitteredge was not fictional and therefore looked more like the animal on California’s state flag than like a movie star. He had a love for art that spilled over into a passion for adventure, and he made the two seem like one.
It was an adventure that Gus almost became a part of. Gus had stopped by his office to ask a question one afternoon as Kitteredge was explicating the theory behind his next research expedition in hopes of persuading some of his more promising students to come along with him. The professor, an expert in the Pre-Raphaelites and their work, had been studying a painting of Hamlet’s drowned girlfriend, Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, with particular emphasis on the setting. The picture, painted in the second half of the nineteenth century, was famous for its realistic depiction of the flora of the river and riverbank, and Kitteredge had hoped to prove that its setting was not, as was commonly believed, the banks of the Hogsmill River in Ewell but some other mysterious location. He was about to explain exactly why he found this so crucially important-and why he was particularly interested in the image of a water vole that had originally swum beside Ophelia’s corpse but had later been painted out-when his TA brought in the test scores so that Kitteredge could discover just how little promise Gus actually showed in the field.