The Ancient Nine

by Ian K. Smith, M. D.

  “So, what happens next?” I said.

  Duke laughed. “To the victor goes the spoils, but don’t worry, the day is long. There will be plenty of opportunities for us to make our victory march.”

  I could tell the moment the white team realized what awaited them, because they started throwing up their arms and whistling and shoving each other. The women heard the noise and started spreading out on the porch, still naked and still in their high-heeled shoes.

  “Let’s go,” Duke said. “They’ll be looking for us soon.”

  I took one last look at the twelve naked beauties, then turned and followed Duke back around the perimeter of the property and to the football field. Everyone was already seated at the tables, eating like they had never seen food before. Milgorn was cooking a full pig, head and all, on the spit, rotating it carefully over the fire and slapping on fresh coats of barbecue sauce. Four older women in uniform tended the eight long tables that lined the lawn. The tables were lavishly decorated with crystal vases of wildflowers, candles, and fine china. The plates had a gold rim and a picture of the farmhouse artfully sketched in the center. THE MILGORN FARM, EST. 1865 was conspicuously painted under the drawing. Platters of burgers and hot dogs had been set down, and most of the guys were already working on their second and third helpings. Enormous bowls of potato salad and coleslaw had been evenly spaced between large bottles of condiments.

  The food seemed to settle everyone, and after I had put away my third cheeseburger, I got up from the table and found my way to a big maple far enough from the eating area where I couldn’t be bothered by the noise, but close enough that I could see Milgorn slicing away at the pig and dumping the barbecued pork on the waiting plates. The first member of the white team began making his way back toward base camp. You could see his smile all the way across the field, his shirt on backwards. The rest straggled back equally disheveled and content.

  Once people had finished lunch, everyone spread out across the vast property. A few guys casually tossed the football, some went back to the stables to ride horses, but most of us found a quiet spot and succumbed to a nap. The wind blew softly, and the birds sang from their branches high in the towering trees. Jon Carderro joined me underneath the maple, and it wasn’t long before we were both asleep.

  * * *

  THE SOUND OF THE bullhorn woke me up. Carderro still stretched on the grass beside me. The clouds had broken up and the sun sat alone in the sky, providing unseasonable warmth on what had started out as a crisp day. Brimmer ordered us to take our places in the field. It was time to line up and play a game of stick races. I roused Carderro, and when we returned to the fields, we found four sticks lined up fifty yards away. The game was described like a drunkard’s version of relay races. Each team had a keg at its starting point. The object of the game was to drink a cup of beer while touching the keg with our foot. Once that had been accomplished, we had to run down to the other end of the field, pick up the sticks, plant them in the ground, place our hands on the sticks, then our foreheads on our hands. After completing ten circles around the sticks, we then had to run back to our teams and tag the next man in line.

  Once each team had figured out the order of their men, Milgorn fired a shotgun in the air to start the game. The first three guys downed their cup of beer and ran to the sticks. All of them fell, trying to maintain their balance as they circled the sticks. When they finally finished, each of them ran off in different directions as they struggled to find their way back to their respective teams. Our guy collided with the lead-off member of the red team, and both crumpled to the ground. The guy from the white team was running in the exact opposite direction, and his team was yelling at him to turn around, which he finally did after going twenty yards out of the way.

  We all laughed as they staggered back to the starting lines and collapsed. And this is how the game continued, bodies strewn about the field, lunches returned in nearby bushes, faces and shirts marked with grass stains. I fared a little better because I hadn’t had much to drink, but the ten circles around the stick threw me. I was running for a short time, when suddenly it seemed like the ground was sliding up and trying to hit me in the face. Within seconds I tasted grass, and it took several attempts before I could get back up and find my way to my team. After I crossed the finish line, I buckled into Duke’s arms and we fell to the ground together and laughed.

  We won the game because the last man on the red team got himself disqualified by completing only nine circles around the stick instead of ten. There was an immediate protest and demands for a rematch, but Duke and the other members on our team refused to hear any of it. They led us behind the barn, washed us down with hoses, then handed out clean clothes. The others kept asking what our prize would be, and Duke gave me the signal for silence. When everyone had been cleaned up and outfitted, we headed out to the back of the property. Several minutes later, I could see the stone house on the other side of the hill. The smoke still flowed from the chimney, and there was a flurry of movement in the windows. For some reason I thought of Eppsy, our no-nonsense dean of students and the rage that would fill his face if he ever heard that thirty of his “best and brightest” were trudging over hilly land in tight cotton shorts and loose T-shirts to claim their female spoils after a drunken game of stick races. The image of his contorted face and bulging neck veins brought a smile to my face.

  When we had reached a point on the hill where the stone house and its wide porch of naked beauties were visible, a chorus of cheers raced up to the heavens. We ran the rest of the way to collect our prizes.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME THE last man had made his way back to the field, everyone else was drunk again and the sun kneeled on the western horizon. Brimmer announced that it was time to head back to Cambridge. All of us to a man shook Milgorn’s hand and thanked him for his hospitality. We loaded back onto the buses, and I caught my last glimpse of the big house and the lush fields of Milgorn Farm. As the buses rolled away, I could hear the roaring silence of the fields blowing in the wind, like a long exhale of relief with our departure.

  Unlike the ride out to the country, the return trip was completely silent as those who weren’t sleeping stared at the fading mountains. I was tired, but my mind was racing with too much information to sleep. In many ways, I felt like the day had been one big dream of possibilities. Not until I thought about all the term papers, class assignments, and ornery professors waiting for us in those ivy-strangled buildings did I realize that the purpose of these outings went beyond the drunken debauchery and naked romps. Ninety guys who likely would never be together again in the same place had been given eight hours to cast aside the pressures and lofty expectations that often dogged us as Harvard students. We had been allowed to be children again, foolish and politically incorrect without penalty, all on secluded hinterlands that had released yet another class of trapped souls and allowed them to be free—even if only for that one afternoon.

  13

  THE LEGENDARY WINTHROP mansion stood on top of historic Beacon Hill underneath the shadows of the gold-domed State House and adjacent to a scattering of other weathered but important Boston landmarks. It had once been the manor house of the enormous Blaxton estate, fifty acres of wooded land and meadows, which now constituted Boston’s largest park, the Common. The Winthrop family had lived in the old brick mansion since the early 1700s, and by the looks of it, not much had changed in almost two centuries. Except for a few modern conveniences like central air and electric heat, the house was a testament to colonial Boston and the wealth of the Brahmins who occupied most of the private houses around the Hill.

  Dalton hated the mansion for its obscene display of wealth. It was one of the Emperor’s showpieces and a reminder to everyone that his had been one of Boston’s first families. But what I thought was the damnedest thing was how little time the Winthrops spent there. If I had owned a house with four floors, more than thirty thousand square feet, and an adjoining carriage house where many
of the staff lived, they’d have to drag me by my ears to get me out. But the Beacon Hill mansion was only one of six they owned around the world, and like everything else in their life, which house they occupied at any given time was planned down to the smallest detail. The Boston residence was primarily occupied between September and November. After Thanksgiving, they moved down to their oceanfront mansion in West Palm Beach, packing up and carrying servants with them like pieces of well-traveled luggage. They spent spring on the family compound in Arizona or at their château on the golf course in Palm Springs, California. Dalton quietly maintained his own apartment in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood as well as a small staff that stayed behind with him while his parents mansion-hopped around the country.

  Dalton raced his Aston Martin through the narrow, cobbled streets of Beacon Hill, turning blind corners and ducking into tight alleyways, almost meeting disaster on two occasions when other cars pulled out in front of us without warning. Dalton always drove fast, but it wasn’t meant to impress his horrified passengers. Dalton once explained that he equated speed with freedom. I was as big a proponent of freedom as he was, but I much preferred expressing it in ways other than death-defying maneuvers in a car that was barely big enough to fit both of us. But I had given up complaining a long time ago, so before the quarterly pilgrimage to the Winthrop mansion, I said my prayers, strapped in tightly, and left it in God’s hands that he would deliver me with limbs intact to the top of Beacon Hill, then back to campus.

  We slipped into the open gate along the western side of the house and entered through a side door, something that always annoyed the Emperor. That was the servants’ entrance, and it led directly into the back of the smaller of the two kitchens. The Emperor constantly scolded Dalton about using that entrance, insisting that the family and invited guests were to use the front door.

  Erma Tillman—an enormous black woman with silver hair and a deep, rumbling voice—controlled the back kitchen. She always had a ready smile planted across her face and a good story to tell if you had the time to listen. Dalton loved Erma more than he did his parents. Erma had been inherited with the house, just like the Monets and Renoirs dotting the walls, and, like the artworks, her value to the house only seemed to increase with age.

  She was standing over the oven when we walked in, her hands perched on her wide hips. “I could hear you all the way down on Acorn Street,” Erma said as Dalton walked up to her and planted a loud kiss on her cheek. “Lord knows I wish you would start driving like a child with some sense. One day you’re gonna crack that car up. Speed kills, Herbie.” Herbert was Dalton’s middle name, one that he had always despised. Erma was the only one he allowed to call him Herbie. She had been calling him that since he was an infant.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Erma,” Dalton said. “Speed doesn’t kill, bad drivers do. I’m a great driver. Right, Spense?”

  Erma cut her eyes at me and I begged off, walking up to her and kissing her on the other cheek.

  “Evening, Spenser.” Erma smiled. “If he doesn’t have enough sense to slow down, you should have enough sense not to get in that death trap with him.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Don’t worry, he’s getting better,” I said. “At least he’s stopping at red lights now.”

  “Get out of my oven!” Erma yelled. Dalton had pulled down the lid and was searching for our regular treat. Erma always baked us a pan of buttery, homemade biscuits, the recipe of which, I swear, could have made her rich. “You know better than to touch my pans without washing your hands,” she said.

  We obeyed promptly, and Erma put the hot biscuits out on the counter next to two glasses of cold apple cider.

  “Who did they drag over for dinner tonight?” Dalton asked as he stuffed half a biscuit into his mouth.

  “I’ve never seen them before,” Erma said, taking a seat on a high stool. “I think they might have some business with your father.”

  “Another thrilling night at the old homestead,” Dalton said.

  “Herbie, you mind your manners tonight,” Erma said. “Your father isn’t feeling good. He’s been fighting a cold for almost two weeks, and he’s not in the best of moods.”

  The door swung open, and in walked a young woman carrying a tray of silverware. She had white-blond hair, a mess of freckles, and a uniform that fit snugly against her compact body. Dalton and I looked at each other and exchanged our approval. Erma instructed the girl to take only the Christofle silver into the dining room and put the rest away.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” Dalton said. “I’m Dalton, the driver for old Spenser here. And you are?”

  “Sophia,” the girl said, her eyes darting between Dalton and me as she tried to make sense of what he just said.

  “And why have we never met?”

  “I just started working here a couple of weeks ago,” she said.

  “Well, I’d have come by sooner had Erma been nice enough to share the news that you’d been hired.”

  “Now, mind your manners, Herbie,” Erma said. “Sophia, this is Dalton, Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop’s son. And this here is his classmate, Spenser.”

  “Pleased to meet you both,” Sophia said before walking through another door that led to the main dining room.

  “Let me guess who hired her,” Dalton said. “At least his taste is consistent.”

  Erma shook her head. “Please behave yourself, tonight,” she said. “I don’t want any problems out of you at dinner, ya hear?”

  Dalton and I put away the last of the biscuits and headed for the door. “Me, start problems?” Dalton said. “C’mon, Erma. Never in a million years would I embarrass the Emperor.”

  Erma yelled something after us, but we were already through the door. We hiked up the back stairs to the second floor and walked to Dalton’s room at the end of the hall. Our clothes had already been laid out on the bed. A jacket and tie were requisite attire for our dinners at Winthrop House, whether it was just the four of us or a full house. Mrs. Winthrop left little to chance, so one day last year a tailor showed up at my dorm and informed me that he was there to take my measurements for a proper jacket and trousers. From that point on, I had my own closet full of appropriate dining clothes waiting for me at the Winthrop mansion.

  After changing, Dalton said, “We should just sneak downstairs and cut out of here. Jump in the car and go to Tecce’s.” Tecce’s was Dalton’s favorite restaurant, an old-style affair in the heart of Boston’s North End.

  “Your parents would kill us if we left,” I said. “Even worse, they might think I had something to do with it. Hell no, we’re going downstairs.” The last thing I wanted was to face the wrath of Aurelius Winthrop. It had already taken a great effort to get him to accept my sitting at his table. I wasn’t going to undo it all with one impulsive prank.

  “All right, we’ll stick it out,” Dalton said. “At least we get to look at Sophia all night. Did you see the wheels on her?”

  “Tremendous,” I said. “But I thought you didn’t like blondes?”

  “Where in the hell did you get that idea? I don’t like anything they drag in to arrange for me. But what makes Sophia even more delicious is that she’s his. Flirting with her will be a perfect way to piss the hell outta him.”

  As I came to spend more time with the Winthrops, I gradually learned that the Emperor, for all his stuffiness and elitism, was really a study in contrasts. He was a grade-A phony in many respects, always preaching to Dalton about responsibilities and the family reputation, then turning around and popping the help right in his own house. Most of the staff under the Winthrop employ were relics, old faithful workers who had traded in their own lives to work for one of Boston’s most prominent families. But there was a continuous rotation of young women at the house, each recruit better looking than the last. Dalton told me that once the Emperor tired of a particular girl, he quietly paid her to leave, then had another brought in to replace her. Ironically, he liked them with little in the way of ed
ucation, but lots of attitude. Dalton’s biggest revenge had been flirting and occasionally sleeping with them, knowing that not only did it annoy the hell out of the Emperor, but he also couldn’t do or say anything without risking his own exposure.

  Dressed and dabbed with cologne, we walked down the dizzying spiral stairwell and entered the front salon, a cold room with stuffed animal heads tacked to the walls and stiff, creaky wooden furniture. Dinners always started here, where the fancy hors d’oeuvres were a lot less satisfying than Erma’s biscuits. We also were allowed to drink cocktails, something that always struck me as odd, considering we were underage. But Dalton said it was completely normal. He had been drinking wine at dinner since he was thirteen. I had come to learn that it was quite common for rich people to allow their children to drink with them.

  Once we walked into the room, it was immediately evident why the guests had been invited for dinner. The girl standing by the fireplace was the most perfect country-club type you could ever imagine. I at least had to give the Winthrops credit for their eye. There was no doubt that she was a beautiful girl, but she was every bit not Dalton’s type. Tall and slender with high cheekbones, a delicate nose, and doll-like porcelain skin. She wore a long, red plaid skirt and a velvet top with a big satin bow tied about her neck. I knew instantly that Dalton wanted to run out of the room. He dug his fist into my side and whispered, “Oh shit.”

  “Evening, gentlemen,” the Emperor said. He was sitting in his favorite chair, one that had resided in the Oval Office at some point and was given to his grandfather by one of the presidents as a gift. The damn thing looked like a throne, square and wooden with a thick leather cushion that lifted him several inches above the rest of us. He was dressed in his customary charcoal gray pants, navy blue blazer, and a bright yellow ascot perfectly arranged around his eternally tanned neck. He seldom wore socks, preferring instead girly little velvet slippers with the intricate gold Winthrop crest stitched above the toe.