Was that it, then? Maybe. But Nathaniel’s memory told him it had been something else: the buds on the trees and the scent of the spring air and the headlines screaming WAR!, trumpeting DEWEY TRIUMPHS AT MANILA! that stirred in him an unbearable restlessness and discontent with Back Bay Boston—Back Bay not as a neighborhood but as a way of being—the restlessness and unhappiness impelling him to filch a dollar from his mother’s household petty cash and buy trolley fare to Cambridge. He had read in a newspaper that Sanders, the great Harvard quarterback, had joined the Rough Riders, and figured there must be a recruiting post on the Harvard campus. There wasn’t, but a policeman directed him to a U.S. Army recruiting station a few blocks away. There, he found himself swearing to a formidable sergeant wearing mustaches twirled and waxed into arrowtips that he was a crack shot and crack rider and seventeen years old, a claim the skeptical sergeant asked to see confirmed with a birth certificate or some other form of documentation. A page from a family Bible would do. Nathaniel’s mind struggled to produce a plausible reason why he had nothing to verify his age. He became acutely aware of everything around him—the sergeant’s hard and penetrating stare, which seemed capable of laying a man’s soul bare, of the crowd of volunteers, who also seemed to be staring at him, waiting for his answer. He felt guilty, all of a sudden, guilty of stealing, of running away from home, of lying, and guilt robbed his voice of all conviction when he blurted out that he did not have a birth certificate or page from a family Bible because he was an orphan with no knowledge of his parents or his exact date of birth. “That bein’ the case, boy-o, how in blazes do y’know yer seventeen?” asked the sergeant, and everything unraveled from there. He soon confessed to his true age, identity, and address. An hour later, after the new recruits were sworn in, the sergeant escorted him to a trolley stop and gave him a nickel for the fare. “Courtesy o’ the U.S. Army, for showin’ the right spirit,” he said. “Come see us again in three, four years and we’ll put you in blue.”

“Lucky thing you weren’t taken,” Burton said. “My father knows Ham Fish’s father, and Ham left his bones in Cuba. Darned shame. He was a first-rate oarsman at Columbia. Helluva polo player, too.”

Wheeler rattled the pipe stem against his teeth, looked off toward the sunset splashing garish colors over North Haven Island. Lamps were being lit in the casino, and a band or gramophone was playing a waltz.

“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” said Wheeler. “The Spaniards discovered the Americas, yet it was we Americans who expelled them from the Americas.”

Will said he failed to see the irony in that.