For years, he had had a daydream, an idée fixe. It had started early in his marriage, when he and his wife had walked one afternoon in the park, and she spoke of the children and their various needs, and he made the small noises of assent he’d learned to make. His eye fell on one man feeding the birds and another feeding the squirrels, and his mind launched a general theory of the costs of pleasure. Three cents for a bag of peanuts that attracted four squirrels, versus stale bread that had come from a five-cent loaf, which produced a careless flock of pigeons ever changing in number. It seemed that the pigeon fancier won, but it wasn’t that simple: each squirrel had more of a personality than each pigeon, and domestic gain had come of that five-cent loaf before the excess was committed to its secondary use. So a formula would have to take that into account. Multiply by how long each kind of creature stayed, but subtract the relative costs of cleaning up after them. Might someone actually anticipate needing stale bread and thus purchase day-old loaves, and might another person with a mind for the same formula purchase metric tons of peanuts to beat any pigeon feeder at this market? Only then to be undone by the costs of storage? What if you loved pigeons and purchased your own park, and kept the squirrel feeder—your rival—out? If the squirrel feeder moved to a new location, how would he travel to the next park (bus? taxi? at what fare?), and how long would it take to begin attracting squirrels in a new location? Settling in a new park might actually cause its own spiking pleasure, though the melancholy of having been exiled might outweigh it.

Each man might get married, if only the better to distribute, with his new spouse, peanuts or stale bread, and somehow to multiply the pleasure thereby gained. But if the marriage went sour, perhaps no amount of bread or peanuts could actually give any pleasure, and there had to be some variables to measure the heart’s capacity to be fulfilled by the intangible reward that money could buy. His children grew, McAdoo’s marriage continued, and it became automatic upon entering any park, even when his wife was no longer speaking to him: an ever-expanding metric to compute costs and benefits, squirrels and birds in eternal competition.

Until war was declared. Now he had a very simple question with infinite variables: how to pay for a war.

McAdoo looked with envy at the work of Enoch Crowder, the genuinely unpleasant bureaucrat who had determined that American psychology would not tolerate an outright draft, but would sprint to the army physicals by making the examiners their local aldermen and druggists. Call it “volunteering.” This had worked.