Nathaniel’s one experience with alcohol had been at Andover this past spring: two swigs from a pint of whiskey smuggled into the dormitory by a senior down the hall. Two swigs were all he could take, the first scalding his throat, the second making him feel as if someone had snipped a vital nerve to his brain. Now, in the cockpit of Black Watch, in the company of two Yale men (Will and Tony Burton, whose father owned the yawl and who had commissioned his son and friends to deliver it from New York to North Haven) and two Dartmouth men (the sawed-off muscleman whom the others called Van Slyck, without making it clear if that was one name or two, and Herb Wheeler, a slender junior who liked to sit holding an unlit pipe in his mouth and look on in grave silence, giving the impression that he was a man of few words and profound intelligence), Nathaniel hoped he would not choke, gag, or otherwise betray himself as an innocent when it came to liquor. Will had served him a cocktail called a Cuba Libre, composed of white rum and Coca-Cola garnished with a slice of lime.

“I whipped this up for you because I know Colonel Roosevelt is your hero.”

“Does he drink Cuba Libres?”

And Will answered that he didn’t know what Colonel Roosevelt drank, or if he drank at all, though he assumed he did, given his reputation as a man among men; no, he had mixed the cocktail because it had been invented to mark the liberation of Cuba during the recent war in which Colonel Roosevelt had served so gallantly.

“Actually, Will, I think it was invented before that, in ’ninety-five, I think, when the Cubans rose up,” said Burton, a young man who managed to look old. At twenty or twenty-one, he had achieved a middle-aged portliness. He wore thick, black-rimmed glasses, behind which blue eyes sparkled ambiguously with a merriment that looked as if it could turn malicious in an instant. His throat bulged like a mating bullfrog’s, his cheeks were slabs of sleek pink flesh, and the overall impression of a well-fed, mature prosperousness was heightened by the cigar he puffed and waved around in the air, like an apprentice plutocrat practicing for the day when he would command a railroad, a steel mill, a brokerage house. Turning to Nathaniel, he said, “Your hero, huh? My father thinks he’s a damn cowboy.”

“Natters even tried to join the Rough Riders, did you know that?” Will said, Nathaniel wishing he would stop using that ridiculous nickname.

“How could we know it, since we didn’t know him until twenty minutes ago?” Van Slyck remarked. Then to Nathaniel: “Weren’t you a shade on the young side?”