The Palace Thief by Ethan Canin Page B

man sells insurance, will you ever forgive him?”
    “I forgive you, captain.”
    He smiled. “I forgive you, too, sailor,” he said.
    Across the way, the lights in the Cubanos’ upstairs bedroom came on. Then Mrs. Cubano appeared in the window in a maroon evening dress. She looked down at us in the study, waved, and pulled the shade closed. The faint dot of a satellite labored across the heavens, and when I looked away from it I could see that our father was watching me again in the glass.
    “I just want you to know, William,” he said at last, “that grades don’t mean anything. I want you to know that. Why, I’m proud you don’t care about them.”
    “You are?”
    “They’re just an external source of approval for something you ought to be doing for yourself anyway.” He laid his hand on my shoulder. “Affirmative, sailor?”
    “Affirmative, captain.”
    The satellite had cleared the zenith now and was edging down the far dome of the sky. “In a hundred years we will never know,” he said. He pulled his hand from my shoulder and leaned closer to the window, this time looking at himself. “Sweet mercy!” he whispered. “How my very heart has bled, to see thee, poor old man. And thy grey hairs hoar with the snowy blasts.”
    “It’s not that bad.”
    He ruffled my hair again. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” he said. “
That’s
what’s important, William. Not your report card.”
    *  *  *
    The Cuyahoga County finals were held in April, in an auditorium at Oberlin College. The three regional champions sat on stage and puzzled through their problems. Both of the other contestants wore ties and jackets, and one had a yarmulke clipped into his hair; Clive’s eyes were red, his hair was tied in a leather headband, and as always, he pulled his sandals on and off as he worked. The other two boys bent to their desks and scribbled calculations while Clive gazed about, adjusted his sandals, occasionally noted something on paper, then looked up and thought some more. Mr. Woodless, Clive’s math teacher, was in the audience, along with Mr. Sherwood and the Cubanos, Elliot, and Sandra, who sat next to me. After each problem, the contestants were given a break, during which the previous problem was handed out to the onlookers.
    Mr. Cubano whistled when the first problem was passed down the row and reached him. He handed the mimeographed stack to our mother, who looked down but did not take one, and then passed it on to Mr. Woodless, who did. I took one too:
    Of twelve coins, one is counterfeit and weighs either more or less than all the others. The others weigh the same. With a balance scale, on which one side may be weighed against the other, you are to use only three weighings to determine the counterfeit.
    Next to me, Sandra’s hands were clasped together. I looked at them and considered my brother onstage, his thoughts whirling with possibilities, moving deeper and deeper into the secret area of his being where none of us could ever go. His eyesfluttered and closed, and I knew that he had answered the question. His eyes opened, and as he wrote something on his sheet Sandra’s hands opened too.
    At the end of the afternoon the judges graded the problems while the audience milled about in the hall, drinking lemonade; I tried to talk to Sandra about a Doobie Brothers concert that Billy DeSalz had gone to, pretending I had gone myself, but she was distracted; finally a bell rang, and we went back in to hear the superintendent of schools tell us that in mathematics the real winner was the mind, and the country, and the love of knowledge, but that in this particular case, today’s winner, with a perfect score, was Clive Messerman.
    The next afternoon, I filled my pockets with tangerines and knocked on the Philco box, but when it opened, Elliot, not Sandra, was standing there. Behind him, on Sandra’s bed, Clive sat holding the Plexiglas smoke bottle he had made in shop class. It was designed to conceal the