The Ancient Nine

by Ian K. Smith, M. D.

  “Good morning, Mr. Collins,” Ms. Kilcourse said. She never called us by our first names. “What brings you into the library so early in the morning?”

  “A little research,” I said. “Figured things would be quiet around here this time of the morning.”

  She responded with a suspicious lift of her eyebrows. Her loose skin was covered with tiny moles except for one big pedunculated growth underneath the right side of her chin that seemed to be growing by the week.

  “I need to find out more about Harvard’s history,” I said, purposely resting my backpack on her meticulous desk and watching the back of her jaw clench.

  “Harvard history?” she said, almost as if I had offended her. “That’s a lot of ground to cover. Three hundred and fifty years. We have plenty of resources, but without a more directed search, you’ll have your hands plenty full. Can you be a little more specific about what you’re looking for?”

  “I’d like to find out about the final clubs,” I said.

  Ms. Kilcourse wrinkled her brow. “Is this a serious request?” she said.

  “Very.”

  “And this is related to your course work?”

  “Does it have to be?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “But I’m afraid you have your work cut out for you.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because dealings of the final clubs have never been a matter of public record.”

  “But after all these years, there must be something written about them.”

  “There is, but very little that’s accessible and nothing with much depth.”

  “Is there anything here?”

  “We have a couple of old texts that might be of some help,” she said, pushing back from her desk. “They’re in the reading room.”

  I followed her to a small rectangular room lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a long rectangular table surrounded by deep cushioned chairs. She pulled the rolling ladder along its track, then climbed to its highest point and went directly to a thin, small book with a faded black jacket. She then descended a couple of rungs and reached toward a lower shelf, pulling out a thick book with a bland manila cover that had been wrapped in thick plastic.

  “Happy hunting,” she said, handing me the books. “This second book really is just a manuscript. It was never published. Professor Waldmeier died before he was able to submit it to publishers. But don’t get your hopes up. You’re certainly not the first who’s been on this hunt. The others quickly learned that there’s not much here.”

  After she left, I spread my notebook and the two books across the table. I decided to start with the big book, Harvard: Making of the World’s Premier Institution. I figured more pages likely meant more material on the clubs. I combed through the table of contents, but didn’t find any mention of the clubs. I searched through the index and still didn’t see anything listed. So, I opened my notebook to the names of the nine clubs that Dalton had given me. I checked each one against the index entries, and it wasn’t until I reached the last name on the list when I got my first hit. The article originally had been written in The Cambridge Tribune on July 26, 1902.

  THE PORCELLIAN CLUB

  A Word About This Famous and Exclusive Harvard Organization

  The club of Porcellians is hardly known except by name ever in Cambridge itself, says the Sunday Post. Although it calls itself “of Harvard University,” no non-member is permitted to enter its sacred and secret precincts except as an invited guest, “personally conducted” by a member for a very brief visit.

  So exclusive is this aristocratic club of millionaires that in some years three men only have been added to it.

  During the period that the clubmen are college undergraduates, they are called “immediate” members, and bear all the expense of the considerable cost of running the club.

  Since all the surroundings are of the greatest luxury and lavish outlay of money is made in frequent repairs, the addition of new furniture and the wages of servants, who during term time provide the “dollar dinner” to such as subscribe from day to day for this fare, it will be seen that the limited membership must provide funds liberally.

  This fact, in connection with the generally accepted statement that the initiation fee is $1,000, and the periodical dues in sums proportionate to an initiation fee of such magnitude, easily leads to the conclusion, which is not gainsaid, that the Porcellian club comprises only the very innermost circle of scions of family and wealth, and that they are the exclusive faction of such part of the “400” as Harvard holds, and form its very cream.

  After graduating from college the Porcellians are known as “associate members.” but continue actively to partake of the club functions and privileges, although perhaps not bearing any share in the settling of the current expenses.

  The handsome building on Massachusetts avenue, just opposite the Harvard Yard, is their clubhouse, and all except the ground floor is occupied for club purposes. The Porcellian library of 15,000 volumes is one of the most symmetrical collections of miscellaneous books that could be comprised in that number of books, and the best of it is that a large proportion of them are the productions of the brains and pens of its own members.

  The earlier and more valuable books are mainly the first editions of our own American authors and the first publications in this country of Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens, and others. Modern books are fully represented.

  In the rear of the clubhouse is a spacious court, where “squash” engages a good deal of the leisure of the athletically inclined members, and the banquet room, which occupies the entire top floor of the building, is as luxuriously appointed as one could wish. The fittings are in oak, with the bare rafters showing, as in old English manors.

  The fireplace is large enough to hold Yule logs, and its woodwork and the movable furniture are of mahogany, with the boar’s head, and the letters “P. C.” carved upon them, each chair here and about the various rooms being of the same pattern and the gifts of individual members.

  So the “Porcellian Club of Harvard University” is its present name, although at its foundation the young sprigs of American aristocracy forming the club called themselves the “little pigs,” of which “Porcellian” is only the adjective equivalent in the dignified Latin as more appropriate to a club attached to a university.

  But the pig idea persists, and everything in the nature of bric-a-brac, paintings, bronzes, china, and such like is sedulously sought out and finds a final resting place in the club rooms, and the collection is large and varied. There is a glass cabinet with some hundreds of effigies of pretty pigs, big and little in all conceivable materials in which casts and sculptures are made. There is even a capacious punch bowl in the similitude of a boar’s head, and the walls are embellished with the mounted heads of the monarchs of the Black Forest.

  The carvings on the keystones of the arches of the dull building and on the gate contributed by them to the new fence also bear the typical pig, and their present book plate is in the style of the coat of arms of Great Britain except instead of a lion and unicorn it bears two wild boars “rampant.” The club motto is “Dum vivimus, vivimus.”

  A portion of its fame is that the president of the United States, “Colonel” Theodore Roosevelt, is a member, and was once the librarian of the club.

  The club was founded in 1792 by the Rev. Joseph McKean, of the class of 1794, and while the impression which obtains among the few who have been privileged only to a superficial knowledge of it that it was a place of too convivial habits, others of the reverend clergy besides its founder, have been members, with no qualms of conscience as an aftermath.

  In 1812, the order of the Knights of the Square Table was founded, and the two—the Porcellian club and the “Knights”—were distinct organizations until 1831, when the latter was merged with the former.

  I searched through the rest of the book, looking for more references to the Porcellian or any of the other clubs, and found one more sm
all mention.

  While rules insisted that non-members were not allowed into the clubhouse, there had been rare exceptions. Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower were granted the courtesy, but the honor was on a one-time-only basis, and when President Eisenhower asked if he could come back a second time he was refused. The list of known Porcellian members while difficult to obtain, includes celebrated architect H. H. Richardson, Civil War hero Robert Gould Shaw (leader of the black 54th Regiment), Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, President Theodore Roosevelt (his younger cousin FDR was rejected), and internationally acclaimed writer George Plimpton.

  It’s been widely believed that the Porcellian began when an undergraduate, Joseph McKean, Class of 1794, served a group of friends a dinner of roast pig. Its original name was the Pig Club, but this was soon changed to the more genteel, Latin-derived Porcellian.

  The gate located at the entrance to the Yard between Wadsworth House and Boylston Hall was completed in 1901 and is called the McKean Gate. The money to build it was donated by the Porcellian Club to honor its founder, who later served (1808–1818) as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at the college.

  There was no other mention of the other clubs, so I turned my attention to the smaller book. It was titled Memoirs of My Harvard Years. I opened the jacket and discovered the name of the author, K. Christolph. There was no table of contents or index, just seven small chapters loosely organized in no apparent order.

  “What are you looking for?” a voice said, interrupting my thoughts.

  I practically jumped out of my seat. I looked up into the sallow face of Gilbert Henning. He stood at the other side of the table, a beanstalk of a man who in his own way had become a Harvard legend. At fifteen years and one month, Gil had once been the youngest student accepted into Harvard. He was the son of Swedish immigrants—his father was a mathematics professor and his mother a prima ballerina. Gil had been a star in the Harvard community, a physics genius who had worked out complicated new proofs to old theorems that had mystified some of the greatest physics minds in the world. Then one afternoon in broad daylight, Gil ran down Mass Ave and into the Square completely naked. Many had thought it was a prank, but when the university police finally subdued him, Gil insisted in fluent Russian, his sixth language, that the spies were coming to get him, and the world was coming to an end. And so ended the illustrious academic career of one of Harvard’s most precocious minds, now the assistant in the Lowell House Library.

  “I’m doing some research on the final clubs,” I said.

  “And how is it going?” Gil asked in his typically monotone voice.

  “Not great. I’ve just looked at two books, and together they barely had one page worth of information.”

  “May I ask how you found the books?” Gil asked.

  “Ms. Kilcourse found them for me.”

  Gil nodded his head and stared blankly at me. He did this often. It was almost as if he were sleeping with his eyes open. But typically, it meant he had something to say and was just waiting to be prompted. Gil might’ve become withered and withdrawn after his nervous breakdown, but his mind was still as strong and robust as ever, and his photographic memory completely intact.

  “Do you know where else I can find information about the clubs, Gil?” I asked.

  He looked over his shoulder nervously and started biting the remnants of his thumbnail.

  “Gil, it would really help if you tell me if there’s more information on these clubs,” I said. “This is very important.”

  He nodded his head slowly. “There were quite a few books written in the 1930s that included several chapters about them,” he whispered. “One was an exposé and it even listed the names of some of the members and the rituals they performed inside the clubs.”

  This was exactly what I was looking for. “Where are they?” I asked.

  Gil looked over his shoulder again, then stepped closer to me. “Gone,” he whispered with widened eyes.

  “What do you mean, ‘gone’? As in they’re checked out?”

  Gil shook his head. “Every book that mentioned the final clubs was stolen from the entire campus library system fifty years ago. No one knows who took them, but I heard a professor say that some of the members from the different clubs got together and decided to purge the system of any information related to their existence. The only two books that remained were the two you have now, and that’s because the night they came to steal them, they were sitting under lock and key in Master Tressob’s personal residence. We didn’t come into possession of them until after he died in 1954. He left them to the university in his will.

  4

  BY THE TIME I had made it back to Lowell from basketball practice, there were only fifteen minutes left of dinner service. For all my efforts—racing over the river and jumping down a flight of courtyard steps—I was rewarded with a Salisbury steak that looked like a cardboard box left out in the rain. I wrestled with it for a few minutes, sawed off and swallowed a couple of bites to dull the sharpness of my hunger, then hurried to my room to take a shower. Tonight was the cocktail party at the Lily Field Mansion, and the knot in my stomach was tightening by the hour.

  I was standing half naked, getting dressed in front of the mirror when the phone rang. It was Dalton.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “I’m getting dressed.”

  “Good, so everything’s on schedule. I was worried your asshole of a coach might keep you guys longer. Remember, don’t get there too early. Fashionably late has real meaning in these situations. Fifteen, twenty minutes tops. And just play it cool when you get there. There will be enough other guys kissing the members’ asses. Showing that you’re too eager in this situation can be the kiss of death.”

  “Don’t worry, I have it all worked out,” I said. “By the time I get dressed and walk up there, I’ll be fifteen minutes late. And I think you know me well enough to know that there’s a lot I’d be willing to do, but kissing ass is definitely not one of them.”

  “That’s why you’re my man, Spense,” Dalton said. “But I also called about something else that could be really important. I think I can get proof that Uncle Randolph is a member of the Ancient Nine.”

  I had my shirt buttoned and was taking a second go at knotting my tie. The first one was too small. “What kind of proof?” I asked.

  “I saw something in his bedroom when I was a kid. One afternoon, I was hiding in his closet and I found this small wooden box. I was excited because it was a really shiny box, and I thought it might contain something like cigars, which I thought were the coolest. I loved how they smelled and watching Uncle Randolph and his buddies smoke them. His initials had been carved underneath this strange design, which I now realize were torches. So, I opened the box and found this narrow strip of cloth about eight inches long. It had all these diamonds spelling out some strange words I couldn’t even pronounce. I thought I’d discovered some lost treasure, so I brought it to Aunt Theodora. But instead of thanking me, she got really upset and told me that I must never tell anyone, not even my parents, what I had found. She made me swear my life on it.”

  “Swear your life on it?” I said. “That’s a little dramatic over some diamonds, don’t you think?”

  “It wasn’t just that,” Dalton said. “She had this look of fear in her eyes I had never seen before. I was scared that I had done something wrong and something bad was gonna happen. I cried my eyes out. I’d blocked it out of my mind all these years until late last night when I was reading a chapter on ancient Rome in one of my European history books. I recognized the same words that had been spelled out in diamonds in Uncle Randolph’s box were also carved at the base of a sculpture in the Forum. Serva Sodalitatem.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “It’s Latin for ‘protect the brotherhood,’” Dalton said.

  “There are all kinds of brotherhoods,” I said. “There’s no proof it had anything to do with the Ancient
Nine.”

  “It wasn’t just words alone,” Dalton said. “They were flanked by two nines that had also been embroidered in diamonds. Those nines had to mean something.”

  “So, you’re thinking your aunt knew about your uncle’s secret and didn’t want you to get in trouble by exposing it?”

  “It would explain why she was so serious about it all. And I have a gut feeling that tonight you’ll be meeting another member of the Ancient Nine.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I did some digging around earlier today. Stanford Jacobs and Uncle Randolph are not only very good friends, but Uncle Randolph was also the one who punched Jacobs for the Delphic. I spoke to Muriel, my uncle’s chief housekeeper. She said Jacobs has been down to Uncle Randolph’s estate a lot over the years. She said they’re really close. So, if you get a chance to spend any time alone with Jacobs tonight, you should try to impress him. He has a lot more power than the other graduate members. His endorsement could go a long way in getting you elected into the club.”

  “How am I gonna impress some seventy-something-year-old gazillionaire?” I said. “All these guys talk about is stuff like the opera, the stock market, traveling to foreign countries, things I don’t know anything about.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dalton said. “Here’s what you do. Introduce yourself, then try to get him alone for a few seconds. Pop him right away with a question about his Chinese art.”

  “Chinese art?” I laughed. “Have you lost your mind? I don’t know a damn thing about Chinese art.”