The Palace Thief (10 page)

Clive’s language had started out with a few words. One evening when our parents were out, I had come into his room while he and Elliot were playing Hendrix riffs with the volume turned up. Sandra was lying on the bed examining the palm of her hand. Clive was going off on a solo, bending his head up to the ceiling and contorting his face whenever the fingering took him high up on the neck of his Stratocaster. He pulled his mouth tight when the shrillest, warbled notes came bending out of the Heath Kit speakers on the bookshelf. His features, ordinarily thin, grew even thinner in musical rapture, and his hair bounced around his shoulders. To keep his eyes clear he wore a headband, like Hendrix himself. Elliot—like all bass players, I had come to realize—stood impassively, leaning back with his eyes closed as he plucked out the deep harmony.

“Clive,” I said from the doorway. Sandra let her hand fall. “Clive, could you turn that lower, please?”

I came into the room. Only Sandra looked at me. “Clive,” I said, “I’m doing homework.”

The guitar stopped, and after a few more bars, so did the bass. “Could you play a little softer, please?”

Clive touched Elliot on the neck.
“Aideshen sereti,”
I think he said, and they both laughed. Then Elliot said something like,
“Maiz,”
and they laughed again.

Sandra shrugged. I looked hard at her. “Don’t ask me,” she mouthed.

But soon they were speaking it more and more, at school and in the car and on the telephone, strange words that rose up suddenly out of their English conversation like jagged, prehistoric rocks.
“Kirahy,”
I heard, and
“Zenay,”
and
“Birkahoosh.”
One day in the bathroom at William Howard Taft, I heard some of the voc-ed kids talking about Clive. I was in the stall. “That Messerman kid,” one of them said, opening the shut hot-water valves with his Allen wrench, “He’s a genius. I hear he invented his own foreign language.”

But when I told our mother about this, she wrinkled her forehead. “Is this what a genius does?” she said the next afternoon when she lifted the end of Clive’s mattress and an opium pipe and a bottle of Vaseline rolled onto the floor. “Is this the start of Albert Einstein’s day?” she whispered, pulling open the window shades so that Clive finally stirred in the bright light and blinked open his eyes.
“Edj perts moolvah,”
he said.

I waited as long as I could. Finally I went downstairs and knocked lightly on the Philco box.

“I’ve been expecting you,” she said.

“I brought some oranges.”

“William of Oranges.”

“They’re tangerines, actually.”

“William of Tangerines.”

She laughed, so I did too, although I didn’t understand. I took the tangerines from my pockets, set them on the windowsill, and watched her shake a Virginia Slims from the pack. “So,” she said. “William.”

I could feel myself blushing. “Sorry about what my Dad said, Sandra. I thought it would turn out funny.”

“It didn’t.”

“I know.”

She closed her eyes, held them shut for a moment, then opened them again and looked at me. “It’s all right,” she said. Then she added, “We have the kind of love your father doesn’t understand, that’s all.” She smiled. “Tell me, William.”

“Tell you what?”

She leaned toward me and tapped her finger on my wrist. “Just tell me.”

“There’s more tangerines where these came from.”

“That’s not what I was thinking of.”

“I didn’t think it was.”

“I know what you want to tell me. I’m just waiting for you.” She looked at me and smiled. “I’m clairvoyant,” she said.

“Clive’s going to win the Cities,” I said.

“That’s not what I was thinking of either.”

“He could win the whole state if he wanted.”

“William.”

“What do you want me to say?”

She turned and looked out the window into the dusty, spiderwebbed recess below our deck. With her back to me, she said, “Is it true you think I’m beautiful?”

Our parents were trying to change with the times. During World War II our father had been stationed on the carrier
Wisconsin
in the Pacific, but now, one evening, he brought Clive and me to stand with him on the Carnegie Bridge and throw his old service revolver into the Cuyahoga. He used to tend his insurance business in the dining room, but now that we had lost our television, he tended it in the den at the back of the house, listening to radio broadcasts of the Cleveland Symphony. Our mother didn’t want insurance forms in our living room anymore. Stored away in our old TV cabinet in a black steel box that locked with a combination were the cards he kept on all his clients, and more than once, when our mother was out, he had brought me in, tapped the sides of the box, and told me not to forget that this was our house, our family, our everything—that this was twenty years. In 1973 he was forced to talk about insurance all the time.

“People
do
have to be protected,” he said that evening, rubbing his sideburns as we sat in the kitchen with the Cubanos again. They had come to celebrate Clive’s victory at the Taft math championship and his upcoming entry in the Cities. “Insurance is
primarily
a service we’re providing, and
secondarily
a task for profit.”

“Why lie to your family?” Clive suddenly said.

Our mother looked up from her Caesar salad. “It’s true, Simon,” she said. “We all know what’s going on with the military-industrial complex.”

Our father set down his fork. “Since when,” he said, “since what day exactly has an insurance salesman been part of the military-industrial complex?”

Our parents had had this argument before, and now the Cubanos looked down at their salad plates. Across the table Clive mumbled, “Grind, grate, chop, liquefy, purify.”

Finally, our father smiled. “Anchovies!” he said, slapping his thigh and digging his fork into the salad.

“It’s delicious, Rose,” said Mrs. Cubano.

“It’s a Caesar,” said our mother.

“Anchovies,” said our father, “are—if I am not mistaken—a dollar sixty a tin.” He looked around the table, feigning surprise. “Thank you, Ohio Mutual.”

Mr. Cubano laughed. Our mother stood up. “We could have eaten plain salad,” she said.

“Right on,” said Clive.

“What did you say, young man?”

Clive looked at me and nodded.

“Either part of the solution, Dad,” I said, shrugging at my brother, “or part of the problem.”

“Or dissolved in the solution,” said Clive.

Our father studied him, then me, and finally said, “Insurance is about protecting the average person.”

“Insurance is about corporate profit,” said our mother.

The Cubanos looked at each other. Our father stood up from the table, went to the window, and looked out into the yard. Clive hummed a lick and shook his pick hand near his waist. Our mother poured lemonade into all our glasses, then sat again, smoothed her pants suit, and composed her expression. “Clive,” she said at last, “William tells me they’re pretty impressed with you at school.”

“Here! Here!” said Mr. Cubano, holding up his lemonade.

“To the champion!”

“I heard that some boys said you were a genius,” said our mother.

“They know one when they see one,” said Mrs. Cubano.

“Doofuses,” said Clive.

“I believe that’s
doofi
,” said our father.

“They were voc-ed kids, Mom,” I said. I waited a beat. “Everything’s relative.”

“It certainly is
not
,” said our mother. “My two geniuses,” she whispered, smiling at us. I looked to see if the Cubanos had heard her.

“Nobody said anything about William,” said my brother.

“Clive, apologize to your brother for that.”

“Sorry, William.”

Our mother set her jaw. She swept her hand out over the kitchen, and her eyes watered. “Genius is one percent inspiration,” she said, “and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

“Thomas Edison,” said our father. He turned around from the window to look at her, then came back to the table, where he put his hand on her leg. “Geniuses
invent
,” he said, fishing an anchovy from his salad and holding it out over the table on his fork. “That’s the important thing. A genius isn’t just someone who’s learned something well. A genius is someone who’s looked at the world everyone else has looked at, and he sees a new way.”

“Or
she
,” said Mrs. Cubano.

“Or she,” said our father.

“A genius has to reinvent the world,” said our mother.

“That’s right,” said Clive, “you can’t teach a genius anything.”

“Now wait a moment,” said Mrs. Cubano, “that’s certainly not the point.”

“Geniuses study just like everybody else, young man,” said Mr. Cubano. He sold tractors for John Deere.

“Doofuses,” said Clive.

“What does that mean?” said our mother.

“Diznaw,”
he said.

She looked at me. “And what does
that
mean?”

“Good salad, Mom.”

“Thank you, William. We’re having macaroni after.” She
thought for a moment. “Though I still say we could have done without the anchovies.”

“Anchovies are brain food,” said Clive.

“The point is that we didn’t,” said our father. “The point is that we did not do without the anchovies.”

“What’s brain food?” I said.

“Something you haven’t been eating, little brother,” Clive answered, and then he winked at me.

That year was the first Clive and I went to the same school, and in the fall our mother took me aside. “You and Clive are different,” she said to me one day as we were tie-dying T-shirts in the bathroom. “You don’t have to do the things Clive did.” She dunked the knotted shirt in her mixing bowl, which was filled with yellow dye.

“How do you mean?”

“Clive’s unusual,” she said. “I just want you to know that. I’m sure your friends at Taft will be different than his. Your brother does some unusual things.”

“Which ones do you mean?”

“Maybe we should use some magenta here,” she said. “What do you think?”

I watched her wring the yellow from the cloth. “Which ones?” I said.

“Oh, ones we wouldn’t be proud of. Things
you
wouldn’t do. You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

We filled the bathtub and hung the knotted shirts on a line above it, while she filled the mixing bowl with dye. I watched the yellow drip from the shirts and spread through the water.

“You and your brother are different,” she said quietly.

“That’s all.”

I tied up another shirt. “A lot of my friends shoplift,” I said with my back turned to her. “Billy DeSalz got caught once.”

In February the Cleveland championship was held, and our parents drove Sandra and me to the city library to watch Clive. The room turned out to be too small for spectators, so we had to sit on plastic chairs in a hallway in the library basement. Behind a metal door that had a small window in it, Clive and six other students worked at a long conference table. Our mother stood at the window, looking in, until the door opened and the proctor spoke to her. Then she sat back in her chair next to our father. “Why have a window if you can’t look in?” she said. She looked at Sandra and me. “Why don’t you two run along for a while?” she said to Sandra.

Sandra and I wandered through the basement of the library. The rooms were small and musty, each one furnished with a long metal table and folding chairs, like the ones in which Clive and his rivals now sat. Some rooms held no books at all, others were crammed full. Sandra went into one that was lined by rows of identical volumes in dull green bindings, and I followed. She gazed at one of the books, so I gazed at another, a thick volume called
Thermodynamics of Liquid-Gas Phase Change
, by Walter Y. Chang. I pulled it from the shelf and looked inside.

From the corner I could smell the flowery scent of her perfume. I scanned the chapters of the book, which had not even been typeset, merely typed, with a wide margin at the binding and the page numbers written out in words at the top, but I couldn’t understand any of it. On some pages only two or three sentences were written and the rest was equations, full of symbols I had never seen. Sandra sighed. She said, “Wow,” and a drift of her scent reached me again. “Think of Clive out there,” she whispered, “doing stuff like this.”

“Some of these equations are wrong, Sandra.”

“What?”

“Some of these calculations are incorrect.”

“Come on.”

“They
are
.”

“Don’t tell me
you
understand this stuff, too, William.”

I closed my book. “It’s not that hard,” I said, “if you know the equations.”

She smiled at me and closed her book, then looked at me a long time. “My two geniuses,” she said finally. Then she laughed and disappeared into the corridor.

I waited a minute, then I sauntered after her. In front of me the hallway was empty, and I moved along it, striding purposefully into each room, glancing around inside, then going on to the next. Finally, as I neared the main corridor, at the end of which sat our parents, waiting, and Clive, calculating, the lights went off in a room ahead of me.

“Genius!” Sandra whispered from inside.

I peeked in. “What?”

“Come in here.”

“Where are you?”

“Close the door. Do you see me?”

“It’s pitch black in here, Sandra.”

“I see
you
, William.”

I strained into the dark.

“Try to find me, William.”

I stepped forward, imagining where the long table lay, struggling to see the pale shapes of the chairs. “I mean, Sandra, I just found a few small errors in some of the equations, that’s all. Probably typos.”

“Do you really think I’m beautiful, William?”

I steadied myself on the table. “Yes.”

“How beautiful?”

“Very,” I said. “Extremely.”

“You can’t even see me.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“You didn’t really understand that stuff, William.”

“Yes, I did.” I moved another step. “Okay,” I said, “you’re right. I didn’t. I pretended I did. I don’t like thinking about that stuff.”