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“Carrot juice,” Dan said, fixing himself another whiskey. “Mister Tubulari makes his own carrot juice.”

Anyway, Mr. Tubulari was gone. When Dan was out in the afternoons, Owen and I were in total control of the top three floors of Waterhouse Hall. As for the first floor, we had only the Brinker-Smiths to contend with, and they were no match for us—if we were quiet. A young British couple, the Brinker-Smiths had recently launched twins; they were entirely and, for the most part, cheerfully engaged in how to survive life with twins. Mr. Brinker-Smith, who was a biologist, also fancied himself an inventor; he invented a double-seater high chair, a double-seater stroller, a double-seater swing—the latter hung in a doorway, where the twins could dangle like monkeys on a vine, in close enough proximity to each other to pull each other’s hair. In the double-seater high chair, they could throw food into each other’s faces, and so Mr. Brinker-Smith improvised a wall between them—too high for them to throw their food over it. Yet the twins would knock at this wall, to assure themselves that the other was really there, and they would smear their food on the wall, almost as a form of finger painting—a preliterate communication among siblings. Mr. Brinker-Smith found the twins’ methods of thwarting his various inventions “fascinating”; he was a true scientist—the failures of his experiments were almost as interesting to him as his successes, and his determination to press forward, with more and more twin-inspired inventions, was resolute.

Mrs. Brinker-Smith, on the other hand, appeared a trifle tired. She was too pretty a woman to look harried; her exhaustion at the hands of her twins—and with Mr. Brinker-Smith’s inventions for a better life with them—manifested itself in fits of distraction so pronounced that Owen and Dan and I suspected her of sleepwalking. She literally did not notice us. Her name was Ginger, in reference to her fetching freckles and her strawberry-blond hair; she was an object of lustful fantasies for Gravesend boys, both before and after my time at the academy—given the need of Gravesend boys to indulge in lustful fantasies, I believe that Ginger Brinker-Smith was seen as a sex object even when she was pregnant with her twins. But for Owen and me—during the Christmas of ’53—Mrs. Brinker-Smith’s appearance was only mildly alluring; she looked as if she slept in her clothes, and I’m sure she did. And her fabled voluptuousness, which I would later possess as firm a memory of as any Gravesend boy, was quite concealed by the great, loose blouses she wore—for such clothes, no doubt, enhanced the speed with which she could snap open her nursing bra. In a European tradition, strangely enlarged by its travel to New Hampshire, she seemed intent on nursing the twins until they were old enough to go to school by themselves.

The Brinker-Smiths were big on nursing, as was evidenced by Mr. Brinker-Smith’s demonstrative use of his wife in his biology classes. A well-liked teacher, of liberal methods not universally favored by the stodgier Gravesend faculty, Mr. Brinker-Smith enjoyed all opportunities to bring “life,” as he called it, into the classroom. This included the eye-opening spectacle of Ginger Brinker-Smith nursing the twins, an experience—sadly—that was wasted on the biology students of Gravesend, in that it happened before Owen and I were old enough to attend the academy.

Anyway, Owen and I were not fearful of interference from the Brinker-Smiths while we investigated the boys’ rooms on the first floor of Waterhouse Hall; in fact, we were disappointed to see so little of the Brinker-Smiths over that Christmas—because we imagined that we might be rewarded with a glimpse of Ginger Brinker-Smith in the act of nursing. We even, occasionally, lingered in the first-floor hall—in the faraway hope that Mr. Brinker-Smith might open the door to his apartment, see Owen and me standing there, clearly with nothing educational to do, and therefore invite us forthwith into his apartment so that we could watch his wife nurse the twins. Alas, he did not.

One icy day, Owen and I accompanied Mrs. Brinker-Smith to market, taking turns pushing the bundled-up twins in their double-seater—and even carrying the groceries into the Brinker-Smith apartment, after a trip in such inclement weather that it might have qualified as a fifth of Mr. Tubulari’s winter pentathlon. But did Mrs. Brinker-Smith bring forth her breasts and volunteer to nurse the twins in front of us? Alas, she did not.

Thus Owen and I were left to discover what Gravesend prep-school boys kept in their rooms when t

hey went home for Christmas. We took Dan Needham’s master key from the hook by the kitchen can opener; we began with the fourth-floor rooms. Owen’s excitement with our detective work was intense; he entered every room as if the occupant had not gone home for Christmas, but in all likelihood was hiding under the bed, or in the closet—with an ax. And there was no hurrying Owen, not even in the dullest room. He looked in every drawer, examined every article of clothing, sat in every desk chair, lay down on every bed—this was always his last act in each of the rooms: he would lie down on the bed and close his eyes; he would hold his breath. Only when he’d resumed normal breathing did he announce his opinion of the room’s occupant—as either happy or unhappy with the academy; as possibly troubled by distant events at home, or in the past. Owen would always admit it—when the room’s occupant remained a mystery to him. “THIS GUY IS A REAL MYSTERY,” Owen would say. “TWELVE PAIRS OF SOCKS, NO UNDERWEAR, TEN SHIRTS, TWO PAIRS OF PANTS, ONE SPORT JACKET, ONE TIE, TWO LACROSSE STICKS, NO BALL, NO PICTURES OF GIRLS, NO FAMILY PORTRAITS, AND NO SHOES.”

“He’s got to be wearing shoes,” I said.

“ONLY ONE PAIR,” Owen said.

“He sent a lot of his clothes to the cleaners, just before vacation,” I said.

“YOU DON’T SEND SHOES TO THE CLEANERS, OR FAMILY PORTRAITS,” Owen said. “A REAL MYSTERY.”

We learned where to look for the sex magazines, or the dirty pictures: between the mattress and bedspring. Some of these gave Owen THE SHIVERS. In those days, such pictures were disturbingly unclear—or else they were disappointingly wholesome; in the latter category were the swimsuit calendars. The pictures of the more disturbing variety were of the quality of snapshots taken by children from moving cars; the women themselves appeared arrested in motion, rather than posed—as if they’d been in the act of something hasty when they’d been caught by the camera. The acts themselves were unclear—for example, a woman bent over a man for some undetermined purpose, as if she were about to do some violence on an utterly helpless cadaver. And the women’s sex parts were often blurred by pubic hair—some of them had astonishingly more pubic hair than either Owen or I thought was possible—and their nipples were blocked from view by the censor’s black slashes. At first, we thought the slashes were actual instruments of torture—they struck us as even more menacing than real nudity. The nudity was menacing—to a large extent, because the women weren’t pretty; or else their troubled, serious expressions judged their own nakedness severely.

Many of the pictures and magazines were partially destroyed by the effects of the boys’ weight grinding them into the metal bedsprings, which were flaked with rust; the bodies of the women themselves were occasionally imprinted with a spiral tattoo, as if the old springs had etched upon the women’s flesh a grimy version of lust’s own descending spiral.

Naturally, the presence of pornography darkened Owen’s opinion of each room’s occupant; when he lay on the bed with his eyes closed and, at last, expelled his long-held breath, he would say, “NOT HAPPY. WHO DRAWS A MOUSTACHE ON HIS MOTHER’S FACE AND THROWS DARTS AT HIS FATHER’S PICTURE? WHO GOES TO BED THINKING ABOUT DOING IT WITH GERMAN SHEPHERDS? AND WHAT’S THE DOG LEASH IN THE CLOSET FOR? AND THE FLEA COLLAR IN THE DESK DRAWER? IT’S NOT LEGAL TO KEEP A PET IN THE DORM, RIGHT?”

“Perhaps his dog was killed over the summer,” I said. “He kept the leash and the flea collar.”

“SURE,” Owen said. “AND I SUPPOSE HIS FATHER RAN OVER THE DOG? I SUPPOSE HIS MOTHER DID IT WITH THE DOG?”

“They’re just things,” I said. “What can we tell about the guy who lives here, really?”

“NOT HAPPY,” Owen said.

We were a whole afternoon investigating the rooms on just the fourth floor, Owen was so systematic in his methods of search, so deliberate about putting everything back exactly where it had been, as if these Gravesend boys were anything at all like him; as if their rooms were as intentional as the museum Owen had made of his room. His behavior in the rooms was remindful of a holy man’s search of a cathedral of antiquity—as if he could divine some ancient and also holy intention there.

He pronounced few boarders happy. These few, in Owen’s opinion, were the ones whose dresser mirrors were ringed with family pictures, and with pictures of real girlfriends (they could have been sisters). A keeper of swimsuit calendars could conceivably be happy, or borderline-happy, but the boys who had cut out the pictures of the lingerie and girdle models from the Sears catalog were at least partially unhappy—and there was no saving anyone who harbored pictures of thoroughly naked women. The bushier the women were, the unhappier the boy; the more the women’s nipples were struck with the censor’s slash, the more miserable the boarder.

“HOW CAN YOU BE HAPPY IF YOU SPEND ALL YOUR TIME THINKING ABOUT DOING IT?” Owen asked.

I preferred to think that the rooms we searched were more haphazard and less revealing than Owen imagined—after all, they were supposed to be the monastic cells of transient scholars; they were something between a nest and a hotel room, they were not natural abodes, and what we found there was a random disorder and a depressing sameness. Even the pictures of the sports heroes and movie stars were the same, from room to room; and from boy to boy, there was often a similar scrap of something missed from the life at home: a picture of a car, with the boy proudly at the wheel (Gravesend boarders were not allowed to drive, or even ride in, cars); a picture of a perfectly plain backyard, or even a snapshot of such a deeply private moment—an unrecognizable figure shambling away from the camera, back turned to our view—that the substance of the picture was locked in a personal memory. The effect of these cells, with the terrible sameness of each boy’s homesickness, and the chaos of travel, was what Owen had meant when he’d told my mother that dormitories were EVIL.

Since her death, Owen had hinted that the strongest force compelling him to attend Gravesend Academy—namely, my mother’s insistence—was gone. Those rooms allowed us to imagine what we might become—if not exactly boarders (because I would continue to live with Dan, and with Grandmother, and Owen would live at home), we would still harbor such secrets, such barely restrained messiness, such lusts, even, as these poor residents of Waterhouse Hall. It was our lives in the near future that we were searching for when we searched in those rooms, and therefore it was shrewd of Owen that he made us take our time.

It was in a room on the third floor that Owen discovered the prophylactics; everyone called them “rubbers,” but in Gravesend, New Hampshire, we called them “beetleskins.” The origin of that word is not known to me; technically, a “beetleskin” was a used condom—and, even more specifically, one found in a parking lot or washed up on a beach or floating in the urinal at the drive-in movie. I believe that only those were authentic “beetleskins”: old and very-much-used condoms that popped out at you in public places.

It was in the third-floor room of a senior named Potter—an advisee of Dan’s—that Owen found a half-dozen or more prophylactics, in their foil wrappers, not very ably concealed in the sock compartment of the dresser drawers.

“BEETLESKINS!” he cried, dropping them on the floor; we stood back from them. We had never seen unused rubbers in their drugstore packaging before.

“Are you sure?” I asked Owen.

“THEY’RE FRESH BEETLESKINS,” Owen told me. “THE CATHOLICS FORBID THEM,” he added. “THE CATHOLICS ARE OPPOSED TO BIRTH CONTROL.”

“Why?” I asked.