Free The Palace Thief by Ethan Canin

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, onthe 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:
    LANCELOT and GAWAIN each antes a dollar. Then each competes for the antes by writing down a sealed bid. When the bids are revealed, the high bidder wins the antes and pays the low bidder the amount of his low bid. If the bids are equal, LANCELOT and GAWAIN split the pot. How much do you bid, LANCELOT?
    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 backseatof 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, whonow 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