The Palace Thief (8 page)

“It happens to be the legging worn by Willie Mays during his last season in the major leagues.”

He turned to me, although I believe he may have been feigning interest. “Where’d you get hold of it?”

“At auction.”

He held out his hand to touch it, rubbed it between his fingers like a rug merchant, exaggerated a sigh of impression, then turned back to his work. I was glad to have diverted his suspicions, although I will admit that his indifference jolted me even further, for clearly in my hand lay a piece of thin black cloth for which I had recently traded my career.

On the way home from the airport I bought the pendant for Scheherazade, although, as I acknowledged when I gave it to her, it was smaller than the one on which she had recently had her eye. Nonetheless, when I arrived home she seemed delighted. Rachel rode around the living room on my oxfords, and Abba appeared at the back door with a baseball, which we proceeded to throw around in our backyard. Only Naomi had
not yet appeared, and when the afternoon began to wane I went upstairs alone to unpack my things.

In the bedroom I set down my valise and briefcase, put on the Toscanini recording of Berlioz’s
Romeo and Juliet
, shined my oxfords, and proceeded to hang my shirts and pants and fold my underclothes. I stored the empty valise and sat down on the bed. The string crescendo of the second movement rose to its climax, and I went to my briefcase and removed the legging. I placed it in the back of my socks drawer, then removed it and set it underneath our mattress. Presently I retrieved it and hung it on a hanger in the closet, although after a time I took it out again from there and set it next to me on the bed. I thought of Willie Mays in the 1954 World Series, turning away from the plate and sprinting straight back to deep center to catch Vic Wertz’s line drive over his shoulder. I thought of him pivoting at the warning track to make the legendary throw that held the startled Indian base runner from advancing. I picked up the legging and stretched it in my hands, and I thought of Eugene Peters when he opened the dresser drawer to pack. Of course he would suspect me, although he would have no choice but to suspect Mr. Forbes as well, and without admission there would be no proof. I thought of Willie Mays in the eighth inning on April 30, 1961, hitting his fourth home run in a single game, and in the failing western light of the afternoon my own ambitions seemed suddenly paltry. I knew, and I suppose I had known for quite some time, that I would never make principal at Priebe, Emond & Farmer. The position would no doubt go to a younger man. And while this was a disappointment to me it was not a great one, for although it is embarrassing I must acknowledge that within me I have always felt the impulse for uproar and disorder.

This, of course, is a secret I have always kept from my fellow
accountants. Indeed, at the office the thought has occurred to me, more often perhaps than I ought to say, that I could just as easily have misadded columns, jumbled figures, and transposed tabulations as performed the careful work that over the years has been my trademark. Sitting on my bed, I was filled with a strange regret. This is what I had: a beautiful and capricious wife, a brooding daughter and an exuberant one, a son cut from my own cloth, a comfortable house, and a career that had proceeded reasonably well though not exactly as I might have liked. This is what I did not have: uproar and disorder, a life of music, and a future unfounded in the past.

Presently I heard steps on the stairs, and I replaced the legging in my briefcase. In a moment the door opened and Naomi entered. She did not greet me but went instead to the window, where she placed herself on the sill and looked out over the yard. I walked over and stood behind her, although I could not discern her mood and was afraid to lay my hands on her shoulders or to speak.

“You seem different, Daddy,” she said.

I went to my briefcase and removed the legging. A strange ebullience had taken hold of me. “I stole this,” I said.

She turned from the window and regarded me. I sat again on the bed, turned the legging in my hands, and recounted the story as the sun fell lower behind her. Although any man who has ever had girls might understand, others will no doubt think it sad for me to say that up until that moment I believe I had never in my life had the full attention of my daughter. It had grown darker, and her eyes, looking closely into my own, shone fiercely.

“I’m glad you did it,” she said when I had finished.

I laughed.

“I am,” she said.

“Don’t be silly,” I told her. Evening had descended quickly, and because in the presence of my daughter the darkness was suddenly embarrassing, I went to the desk and switched on the lamp. The bulb is a small one, and standing in its weak light with my daughter behind me, I was seized, as I sometimes am, with sadness. I suppose I was wondering, although it is strange for me to admit it, why, of all the lives that might have been mine, I have led the one I have just described.

I
n January of 1973, the year everything changed in our family, my older brother, Clive, competed for the mathematics championship of William Howard Taft High School, in Shaker Heights, Ohio. The championship was held in the gym, where Clive and three other finalists sat at metal desks arranged around the painted Taft Tiger at center court, working a sheet of problems. I sat in the bleachers with our parents, watching him.

Our parents had insisted I come. Clive’s best friend, Elliot, was with us also, and at our mother’s request we chose a spot ten rows back in the pine bleachers, which was close enough to see Clive’s progress on the answer sheet but high enough to be out of his line of sight in case he glanced up. Clive kept his head down. He worked his feet in his sandals, while next to me, holding her breath for long stretches, our mother did the same in hers. We watched Clive’s answer sheet darken with neat diagrams and equations, only the + ’s and = ’s clearly visible. Ten rows below us, Sandra Sorento, his girlfriend, leaned forward and fixed her gaze on him from where she sat, alone, on
the first bench. Our mother’s eyes kept wandering down to her, then snapping back up to Clive. Even from a distance I could tell Clive was doing well. He answered twice as fast as the boy on his left, and he only erased once, just before he handed in his test.

Then he came up into the bleachers to sit with us, and in a few moments Sandra ambled across the gym to the water fountain, pretended to get a drink, and then came up too. Clive didn’t say anything to her, so I tried to smile for both of us. She smiled back weakly. Then she moved over and stood next to Clive, who was showing our parents one of the problems, set in the middle of a sheet of ditto paper, in smudged, purple type:

Our mother beamed. Elliot whistled and shook his head. Sandra touched Clive’s shoulder. I looked at the problem and pretended to think about it for a while, although I did not even understand what it was asking. Our father took it into his lap and said “Elementary, my dear Watson.” He began filling in diagrams and crossing them out, tapping his feet and scratching his ears, until, a half hour later, the buzzer rang and the other contestants turned in their papers.

Later, after the winner was announced, our mother asked Clive where he wanted to go to celebrate. From the backseat
of our Plymouth station wagon, Clive said something that sounded like
“Bayosh ahdj.”
Elliot grinned.

“Pardon, honey,” said our mother.

Clive said the same thing again, Elliot stifled a laugh, and finally Sandra said, “How about the House of Pancakes, Mrs. Messerman?”

We always suspected that something was wrong with Clive, but our suspicions were muddled, especially in those days, by his brilliance. He didn’t talk much, and when he did, he used words like
azygous
and
chemism
. That afternoon, when our mother’s electric blender went dead three hours before her dinner party, he repaired it using her iron and a piece of wire from our father’s old shortwave, then went around muttering “liquefy, blend, puree, pulverize, frappe,” under his breath. He kept it up. He sang it like a little guitar lick, all the way down to the end—“grind, grate, chop”—even while our neighbors from Throckmorton Street, the Goldmans and the Cubanos, sat around the dining room table with us. Clive didn’t seem to know he was embarrassing himself; in the kitchen, where our mother had asked me to help serve the soup, she suggested I point it out to him.

In the old days our parents’ dinner parties had been quiet affairs that Clive and I listened to from the top of the stairs, but now we took part in them. We sat with the guests and were encouraged to talk with them, and before our mother served the first course we would all join hands over the quilted tablecloth to close our eyes and say a prayer for peace. We were supposed to bow our heads, but that night I caught our father looking at Mrs. Cubano, and he winked at me. I winked back. Our father had a retired navy friend, Colonel Byzantian, who
now vinted his own wines in California and sent them to us, and when the Goldmans and the Cubanos looked up from the prayer, our father took out the Colonel’s most recent note and read it aloud. “A wistful elegy of a zinfandel,” he said, deepening his voice, “a nearly human longing in a grape.” He chuckled and filled the glasses. Then, while the Cubanos and the Goldmans laughed, raised their glasses of wine, and leaned back in their chairs, I told a story about how my friend Billy DeSalz had sent the same love letter to three different girls from three different schools. Mr. Cubano laughed aloud suddenly, and his wife, who I thought was exquisitely beautiful, glanced at him. I went on: But these girls, it turned out, happened to attend the same church. Now Mrs. Cubano laughed out loud, and the story began to take shape in my mind. I lifted my glass of apple juice, leaned forward over the table, and went further and further with my tale, searching for a plot that would take me to the end, turning alternately to the Goldmans and then the Cubanos, and every now and then to my brother, who was silently eating his roast.

Later, after everyone had gone home, our mother sat on my bed and asked me questions about Clive. She asked me why he was always silent at dinner and what the girls at Taft thought of a boy who knew why mica acted as an electric diode; she asked me if at school he and Elliot ever spoke the strange language they spoke in our house. Then, touching her temple, she asked me to multiply 3,768, our address on Throckmorton, by 216, our area code. “You can’t do that, right?” she said, her eyebrows raised, as if there were a real possibility I could. “It’s not normal to be able to do that without pencil and paper, is it?” She tilted her head to look at me, and when I shook my own, she smiled.

“Mom,” I said, “I made up most of that business about Billy DeSalz.”

She looked at me, quizzically. “I know that, honey,” she whispered. “But at least
you
talk to girls in English.”

It was not that Clive was mean, or dangerous, or particularly delinquent; it was just that he didn’t know how to act like the other kids. As a junior, he had scored two 800s on his SAT’s, while as a senior, when it counted, Mr. Sherwood called to say that he had scored two 200s. “It takes a profusion of intelligence to answer every question
in
correctly,” Clive said that night to our father, who stood in the kitchen slapping the Educational Testing Service envelope against the counter. By then our parents had become used to calls from the principal. One day that year, Clive had stood still in the hamburger line at William Howard Taft, weeping, while the crowd of students parted around him.

The next night, while I was working on a plaster-of-Paris replica of Michelangelo’s “Pieta” for my honors history class, I discovered Clive’s secret. I was in the basement, molding my statuette on a piece of plywood behind our father’s ping-pong table, copying the form from
Art Through the Ages
, when I looked up and noticed a sliver of light behind the Philco refrigerator box next to the furnace. When I looked up again the light was gone. I wet down the furled skirts of my Mary, walked to the corner, pulled back the box, and found, in the small space behind it, a cot and a candle and, dangling from hangers on the electrical conduit, girls’ clothing. The box from our old TV moved, and Sandra Sorento stepped out from behind it. “Quiet,” she whispered.