Shoot the Moon

Prologue

If you ever need to discover the fundamental nature of a boy's character teach him to play Hearts. It's important to apply this test to a boy at an early age, because his nature will never change and he must learn to live with it.  

My uncle Tommy taught me to play Hearts in my tenth summer while we waited for my mother to die of cancer. There was nothing else to do: the fish weren't biting at the river and the fish weren't playing bridge at the country club. He was too well known in those parts to ever hustle a worthwhile opponent into a high stakes golf match, and so he spent the time with me. We played Hearts all afternoon and every day that week. We made up the other two hands from whoever was around, the nurse, the gardener, the cook's brother. 

I never won. 

At the end of the week Tommy announced that he was leaving. This was his busy season, after all, the time he earned enough hustling golf and cards to spend the cold winter months in sunnier climes hustling golf and cards. My mother told him to go. She would be damned if she was going to do her dying on Tommy's schedule.  

"Jack," he said, setting his calf skin suitcase out on the screened porch, "In the game of Hearts, what happens if you shoot the moon?" 

"You get no points against you and they all get a lot." 

"Why do you think the rules allow such a great reward if you shoot the moon?" 

I didn't have an answer to that. All I knew: It was the crushing blow that won the day. Why try to do anything else? I had thus far in my life found nothing more satisfying than shooting the moon. I shrugged. 

Tommy bent down to meet me eye to eye. 

"It's worth so much because it's very hard to do. It's rare. In fact, it's a sucker's bet. But you try to shoot the moon every time. That's why you always lose. Anybody holding the Ace of Hearts can bust you out whenever they choose. It's not a sure thing, ever, unless your holding the high cards. You must learn to exercise patience and judgment. There's more to the game than shooting the moon. I am afraid that this is a character trait that will not serve you well. It's the character trait of people who meet an unfortunate end. Of dead heroes. And always keep one thing in mind about dead heroes: They're dead." 

When my mother finally died (my father having disappeared when I was four years old) they sent me to my uncle Tommy who at the time was living in a hotel in Charleston. He arranged for me to board at a Jesuit school in Annapolis and luckily he had enough money from my mother's estate to pay for it.  

The Jesuits instructed me in righteousness but the lesson did not take. They succeeded, however, in teaching me the world and I learned to chop logic and rationalize at their hands. At least until I was sixteen and my uncle defaulted on the bills.  

Tommy taught me cards and the weakness of human nature. I play cards in a dull workmanlike way, it's having been a learned behavior and in no way natural. On the whole I stay in the black. I am however an expert in human weakness, having explored it extensively from the inside. 

Tommy passed away by heart attack in the summer of my seventeenth year, a half finished gin and tonic by his side in the locker room of the Murmuring Grove Golf Club near Atlanta. He was in great debt, all lines of credit exhausted, and, in a letter that he left for me (having known that his heart was killing him for some time), he sent me out to seek my fortune with one last bit of advice: "If you don't know where to turn as you start out in life, son, become a U.S. Naval Officer. People will mistake you for a gentleman and this will be of great help in getting close to those with old money and older power and not enough sense to fill a gnat's navel."  

He was right about that, too. 

And so, despite the serious campaigns to indoctrinate in me the rules of God and Man, first by the Jesuits, then by the U.S. Navy, I live by a simple code of my own. It's not a sure thing, of course, but it keeps you from throwing your money away - at least half the time: 

Only try to shoot the moon when you're holding the ace of hearts. 

At the very least, try to find out who's got it. 

Alas, the fundamental nature of a boy's character will never change. 

And that's how I happened to be in a beautiful apartment on Central Park West, married to an heiress, and reading The Woman Inside You: A User's Manual For The New Man by Sereena Daveeta Chakra (a.k.a. Karen Schulberg) when the phone rang that night.