Public school. Wouldn’t it be easier? The work less relentless? When classes and sports ended at public school he could just retreat home instead of encountering everyone in the dorm. Instead of his teachers handing back essays with all of his almost-correct sentences marked up, he’d be able to shock public school teachers with how well he could write. Everyone would admire his taste in music; he’d put on Kind of Blue in some social setting and everyone would close their eyes and nod at his sophistication. Public school girls would imagine Ben ruining formal clothes with someone’s daughter on the beach in Nantucket; he would have lost one of his grandfather’s cuff links in the sand. Public schools didn’t have squash courts.

But, now, he could stay? He could drop the worry that maybe today the final letter would appear in his PO box. He could call his father and bring up whatever he wanted, asking how business was shaping up without needing a certain answer.

Ben thought of the times in the previous weeks when he had wanted to make some joke or some trailing observation but had swallowed it instead. Back home, he had been waiting to leave exactly that reserve behind by coming to St. James.

Now he could start thinking again about college, about the inevitable course that he realized his life had recently diverged from. That course was supposed to convey him to Princeton, and then beyond into some unquestioned rightness. This had once been so axiomatic as to be beneath notice, and he had invested only lightly in the life before St. James because of his faith in this course.

But then Ben remembered watching his father play backgammon against Russell. And Ben knew that Russell, in his role on the St. James board, saw every ledger, every asset, and every liability. He audited the Annual Report line by line. Ben didn’t know which files were closed to him, if any. It was easy to picture him looking in at the names of the students on financial aid, making sure that the amount next to each name summed to the correct total. And he remembered from the Bath and Tennis: Russell had insisted that the piña coladas be marked down on his chit.

For Russell to discover that Ben’s family couldn’t pay, for Russell’s smiling eyes to look at Ben’s dad with that knowledge in them: that Harry had squandered exactly the gifts that Russell had caused to thrive so verdantly, this was out of the question. He felt some small closeness with his parents as they tried to avoid this shame together. Ben came to the end of this flood of feeling with a small whipping shudder.

“Who else knows about the tuition situation?”

“I’m sorry?” said Phelps.

“Does the Rector know? Does the board?”