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upcountry.
    “The first exhibition football game is on Saturday night, Will,” he continued. “Why don’t you and Pig and Mark plan to watch it with me?” Commerce asked, aware he was being tested again in a trial by silence.
    “Tradd,” Abigail sighed, but easily, and teasing again, “I’m thinking about having your father fed intravenously during football season this year. Hook up a couple of gallons of Cutty Sark and glucose beside his easy chair.”
    “You might try to find other pursuits, Father. Other avocations. Only vulgarians and Methodists watch football games with such fanaticism.”
    “Your poor old man is a vulgarian, Tradd. No doubt about it. A goddam one hundred percent unreconstructed vulgarian. Will, I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this story, but about ten years ago I read in the paper that bowlers have the lowest IQ’s of any athletes and were generally from a socially inferior class. Well, I ran right out and joined a bowling league in North Charleston. One sixty-four average. Met the greatest guys I’ve ever met on land.”
    “How come you never invited these greatest guys on land for dinner, Father?”
    “They must have been from Spartanburg,” Abigail teased. “The upcountry.”
    “Bowling is so sweaty and uncultured,” Tradd sniffed, winking at me.
    “Culture!” Commerce screamed at the television. “I’ve had culture shoved down my throat since I was born. Do you know I’ve been going to operas since I was six, Will? Six years old and I’m listening to fat broads belting out dago songs to bald-headed fags wearing silver pants. You can take all the culture in America, tow it out to the Sargasso Sea, and set it on fire and I wouldn’t even spit once to put it out. I’m embarrassed to tell you how often I wished my name were not St. Croix but something like John Smith or John Nigger. That’s it. John Thicklipped Nigger. That’s the name I’d have chosen.”
    “Father, you certainly do overstate your case,” Tradd said, turning toward the window and facing Charleston harbor again.
    “Who wants some more iced tea?” Abigail chirped brightly.
    “I’m going to my room and let y’all literati get in some chi-chi cultural chit-chat before dinner. Will, could I see you upstairs for a minute? If you’ll excuse me, dear,” he said, rising and bowing to his wife in a quick, snapping motion like a blade returning to a jackknife.
    By the time I followed Commerce upstairs, he was moving a potted palm outside of his study. Carefully unlocking the door, he then disappeared into this forbidden sanctum for a moment, leaving me to fidget in the hallway. No one was allowed in his private study, and according to Tradd and Abigail, no one entered the room, even when Commerce was out to sea. When he came out of the room, he led me by the arm to the third-story porch. We stared out at the garden, an aromatic black sea of vegetation that breathed in the salt from the river.
    “Do you see it?” he asked.
    “See what?”
    “I put it on when I went into the room. On my hand, Will.”
    I looked down on his right hand and saw its dull shine.
    “The ring,” I said.
    “I keep it in my room. Along with everything else.”
    “Gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”
    “Books and notes. Things I’ve collected in ports around the world that Abigail thinks are junk.”
    “Why don’t you wear the ring all the time, Commerce?” I asked. “You’re the only Institute man I know who doesn’t treat the ring as if it were made from the nails of the True Cross.”
    “My years at the Institute were the happiest in my whole life, Will. But ever since Durrell came back to be president and changed the plebe system into that brutal mess, I haven’t worn the ring. It was all his ego, too, Will. When I talked to him about it, he told me he was going to make sure that the Institute had the toughest plebe system in the world. According to you and Tradd, he succeeded admirably. But it wasn’t that bad