“Will took this freshman kid to a whorehouse. Whorehouses are against the law. They got caught there and arrested and so he got kicked out of Yale, Will did, and just in case you don’t know what a whorehouse is, li’l brother, it’s a place where women get paid to fuck men.”

“Eliot!” Drew’s hands shot to his ears. “I’m going to tell Father that you cursed.”

“ ‘Fuck’ is not a curse word, it’s a vulgarity”—Will in an instructional tone. “Calling upon the Almighty to damn someone, as in ‘goddamn you,’ is cursing.” He looked at Nathaniel. “Natters, you’re not shocked, are you?”

Wishing to appear worldly and sophisticated, Nathaniel motioned that he wasn’t. But he was distracted by the picture that flooded his imagination after Will finished his story. He saw one of Madam Zygote’s or Zagreb’s whores, lying on her side on a divan covered in the skins of wild beasts. Broad hips, lavish breasts, fleshy thighs culminating in a humid triangle of pubic hairs, and all upon a bed of zebra stripes and leopard spots, like the woman in one of the French postcards smuggled into his dormitory last year. But the face he now saw in his mind wasn’t that woman’s face; it was the face of Will’s cousin, Constance. Her face, grafted onto the alluring body of the woman in the postcard. He had never thought of Constance that way, because he wasn’t supposed to, because, with her body always locked, throat to ankle, in a vault of cotton, silk, wool, and corsets, he could no more imagine what she looked like underneath than he could her rib cage or spinal column. Now this image, bursting into his brain from out of nowhere, and with it, desire and heat, and with those, shame.

“My mother was shocked, was she ever,” Will was saying. “El presidente sent a copy of my expulsion to my parents. My dad told me she fainted, fainted when she read the words ‘moral turpitude.’ Would’ve thought I’d gone on a rampage of rape. Dad was upset, but what really got him mad was that I had made Mummy faint. But what could he do? Put me over his knee and paddle me? Put me to work instead, which was worse. Clerking for one of his law partners. I foresaw my summer, wasted inside a stuffy cubicle, no windows, lots of case law and dusty codes. Then Tony telephoned me. Would I crew for him? And here I am. I believe I have run away from home. Nineteen going on twenty may be too old to run away from home, but, better late than never, I suppose.…”

“We don’t have a home, either,” Drew blurted earnestly. “We’re orphans. Kind of. For a while.”

Herb Wheeler crossed his legs, jabbed his pipe at Drew, like a lecturing professor.