I believe the others feel the same way. We rarely speak of it, but I see it in their eyes.

We are haunted, all of us, by a misunderstanding.

It happened on a crisp winter day back in '09, the sun blazing high in a sky as blue as glacial ice. Thousands of shivering spectators thronged the Capitol grounds and the Mall beyond, spilling across Constitution Avenue on the north and Independence Avenue on the south. From our vantage to the left of the Presidential grandstand, the crowd seemed to stretch away like a vast sea, its surface crisscrossed by swells and surges that broke against the security cordon below us like surf against a desert island. The Washington Monument rose in the middle distance, stately and imposing even from Capitol Hill, while at the limits of our vision gleamed the quicksilver waters of the Potomac. History was in the making that day, bearing us along like the barges on that river--but only a few of those present, I am certain, could have foreseen the black waters ahead.

A stirring march from the Marine Corps Band, seated on risers to the right of the grandstand, blared across the Mall from floating loudspeakers arrayed in a broad grid above the crowd. Our choral director, Mr. Kemmelman, tramped back and forth through the snow before our own risers in a rhythm at odds with the music, his heavy face creased in a frown. Inscrutable Secret Service agents rimmed the cordoned area like stone sentries, on occasion speaking into their wrist radios, while harried White House personnel scurried to and fro on obscure errands. Mr. Kemmelman's pacing hardly stood out amid all that organized chaos, but we in the choir sensed it keenly.

An intense, brooding cloud hung over our director. This, together with the fear, the respect, and even the love with which we regarded him, only tightened our own nerves like piano wire. "I wish he'd sit down," I whispered. "He's making me nervous."

I was squeezed onto the risers between my friends Charlie and Hughie. Charlie nodded, narrowed his dark eyes, and said, "Know what he looks like, Ben?"

"No, what?"

"A big melted candle. With legs."

He was right. We had seen old photographs hanging on the walls of Mr. Kemmelman's office, portraying a large young man with a square face, its features blunt as if hewn from stone. Dark, slightly protuberant eyes lent that young man the deceptive aspect of a droop-lidded hound, and thick curly hair the color of peanut butter matted his head. In the time since those photographs had been taken, however, age had treated the man before us as flame might treat a fat tallow candle. With his chin pressed down to his collar, his jowls lay in folds about his jaw like layered wax drippings. His heavy cheeks sagged like empty pouches, and his sad, baggy eyes seemed in danger of sliding down his face. His forehead was smooth as bone, as if scoured clean by wind and rain. The effect of all this, together with his pacing, was one of subdued urgency. I imagined him anxiously trying to finish his day's business before bubbling down into a shapeless puddle of wax.