Then the forest seemed to unwind, to expel the hasty man-made things, and it became the kind of forest that people think of when they think of New England. Ben dried his palms on the front of his khaki shorts. His real life was so close, but now unexpectedly he wanted to keep driving for a few more hours, to go out into the woods with his dad and find sheets of lichen over wide granite tables. At home a few years before, they had walked through the woods and taken lichen flakes to compare with the pictures in the thick manual on the library coffee table. Since then that book had lain there, perfectly undisturbed.

The back of the Volvo station wagon was snug: two hockey duffels full of clothes and bedding; his three Prince Extender squash racquets, which Prince had just sent him; half a flat of new yellow-dot squash balls; Action Eyes glasses with white Croakies; two pair of Hi-Tec court shoes. He had Teddy’s hand-me-down stereo; a cardboard tube with a Led Zeppelin poster and an M. C. Escher poster inside; cleats, Saucony running shoes, brown Oxfords; the red Marlboro Racing hat with the Formula 1 car on it that Teddy had given him, which Ben had stuffed with two T-shirts and wrapped in a fleece so it wouldn’t get misshapen in the duffel; a Mac Classic; a schefflera tree in a wicker basket; an alarm clock; toothbrush, toothpaste, Old Spice, and shampoo-and-conditioner-in-one. A new North Face Mountain Jacket was also rolled up in his duffel bag, and Ben had cried to get it.

They kept driving now under trees whose heavy foliage blocked out the sky. Ben kept waiting for St. James’s front sign. He had come up for so many anniversary days, for squash matches where he had undergone Manley Price’s famous handshake, for Teddy’s games, for years of Parents’ Weekends.

And before that, Ben’s father had come up on the train from the old Penn Station; and his uncle; and his grandfather, who on the living room mantel laughed in black-and-white with Bobby Kennedy; and his great-uncle, whose name was on the certificate of incorporation for the Council on Foreign Relations.

And before any of that, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, then still a colony, Samuel Weeks had been a sailmaker, sewing by hand the sails for a single whaling vessel, the Vulcan. Soon he ran a thriving sail- and boatmaking enterprise, and his sons thereafter invested in shipping and importing, rising to prominent places in state government.

And so, in order to become equipped to carry on this lineage, twelve-year-old Thomas Weeks had in the fall of 1856 arrived in God’s Pocket, New Hampshire, in a surrey carriage behind two overcast-gray horses, for the first day of the first semester of St. James’s first year.