This American game was the version that everyone around Ben played growing up. Ben’s dad, Harry, had been on the team at St. James in the mid-1960s and remained a fanatic, playing three times a week at his club. Manley Price started as coach after Harry graduated, and many times out loud Ben’s dad had expressed regret that he hadn’t been there for the Price era. Harry and his friends at the club wore paper slippers after the shower and cupped their privates in talcum powder and used combs lifted by a metal plunger out of the jar of Barbicide and drank Scotch and played backgammon.

Harry somehow never became true friends with the other men whose families had always belonged to clubs like this, had founded clubs like this. His real friends—and more or less the only friends he had, rather than his wife’s friends’ husbands—were Chip and Paul, the two guys he played squash with most often. Chip was an engineer from Wilmette, Illinois, and Paul was an insurance executive from Houston, and they had moved to Connecticut to work for United Technologies and Cigna, respectively. Chip and Paul had both picked up squash as adults. Late-to-the-gamers are always the most intense, and they were the only two guys at the club who played hard enough for Harry’s liking. The three of them never entered official tournaments; they just played endless winner-stay-on-court games. The three of them dove for the ball, their knees bled, they wore complicated braces, but they never missed a court time.

Even though he would have been ashamed to catch himself thinking it, Harry thought he was the social better of these two men. Partly he enjoyed their company so much because he didn’t have to impress them, and because they couldn’t accurately assess the nuances of his class and how closely he did or didn’t adhere to its rules. When he was around real WASPs, Harry sometimes had a feeling that he’d been wasting his time with Chip and Paul, but he was always relieved to see them again.

Harry used squash as his handle on St. James. It was his way of counterbalancing the influence of his brother, Russell: Russell Weeks, founder and chairman of Landreach Capital. A home at 80th and Park and one in Amagansett. Served on the St. James board, audited the school’s books each year, and co-authored the Annual Report. In 1992 Russell had given the majority gift for a major addition to the school’s observatory, including a telescope seven times more powerful than the previous one. Harry gave every year too, but he prided himself on spending time: when the SJS squash team played a school in Connecticut or southern Mass, Ben’s dad would go cheer and talk with Manley Price about strategy and training approaches.