At Thorn Industries, the most popular game was one of the roughest. Quarterbacking, the family skill, might have lent itself to touch football in the autumn air, but the Kennedys had co-opted that game. Basketball was essentially an indoor sport, and when you've spent a week at a desk, the last thing you feel like doing is playing indoors. And Richard, especially after that terrible argument with his late wife, was not about to set up a Hemingwayesque test of manhood by asking some young, upwardly mobile exec to do deer hunting with him. That could have degenerated into a mano-à-mano contest, the youngster deferring to his boss, which Richard, with his deeply ingrained sense of taste, would have considered gauche.

No, the Thorn game had to be ice hockey.

The fact that Lake Geneva was so close to the Canadian border undoubtedly had something to do with it. And the hard slam of bodies on the ice substituted nicely for the crunch on the line of a football field. Moreover, the skill of broken-field running pales in comparison to the triple shunts of the finest hockey players.

For all of these reasons, and more, ice hockey became known as the game to play if one wanted to rise in Thorn Industries. Richard Thorn, who considered himself, and was, in fact, an eminently fair man, would have been shocked had he known that expertise in the game was thought to be of paramount importance by the people in the lower echelons of the company. He would have been appalled had he known that status-wise young executives occasionally spent their Saturday afternoons driving over to Fond du Lac to take lessons from an aging Canadian ex-pro. As far as Richard Thorn was concerned, he was just having a good time.

And today, he was having a particularly good time, as was everyone else. The executives were out in full force; even those who were too old to play were there, braving the cold in a wide and wild variety of outdoor gear.

The wives were present too, decked out in colorful wool caps, boots, and mufflers, their hands encased in mittens, each trying to look as much as possible like the unattainable fantasy girl all young boys have seen and dreamed about at some time in their lives, whether spinning up on the ice, at Rockefeller Center or the local mill-pond.

Damien and Mark were the two captains. They 'shot fingers' to see who got first pick. Damien won, and jumped at the chance to have his foster father on his team. Richard did a funny little skip in place, showing his pleasure at having been the first to be chosen, and then skated over to where Damien was standing.

Mark picked Atherton. He was really not that good at the game, and not in shape for it, but he made up for these deficiencies by his enthusiasm. He smiled in modest appreciation and skated over to join Mark.