The Palace Thief (13 page)

That week spring arrived, and on Sunday Clive invited me to swim with him at the stone quarry. He, Sandra, Elliot, and I snuck underneath the chain-link fence and followed the steep path down to the water, which was filled with a fine, rocky powder that the wind had churned into an unearthly opal green. Boulders lay along the shallows and the shore. Clive, Elliot, and I stripped to the waist and lay down on them, and Sandra pulled off her T-shirt and stretched out in her white bikini on the one between Clive and me. Elliot unpacked four squares of carrot cake and passed them around. I ate mine and lay back down.

Clive held his up and examined it in the sun. “Elliot baked them,” he said.

I nodded at Elliot with my eyebrows raised to show respect. “It was good,” I said.

“Kituno gomba,”
said Clive.

“Saipen,”
said Elliot.

I nodded again and smiled. I scanned the surface for fish ripples, though it seemed certain nothing could live in these waters. I tossed in a stone. “Thanks for inviting me, you guys.”

“No problem, little brother.”

I lay back down. After a few minutes Clive came over to me and looked at my face.
“Servoos,”
he said. He smiled. “It’s a greeting.” He laid his hand on my shoulder.
“Servoos,”
he said again.

“Servoos.”

“How do you feel, little brother?”

“Great.”

“You found our dictionary, didn’t you?”

“Nope. I didn’t even look for it.”

“I told you,” Elliot said.

Clive studied me.
“Djerunk,”
he said. He studied me again.

Elliot glanced at him. “Hey,” he said. “We’re going swimming.”

“Skinny-dipping,” said Clive. Then he pointed at Sandra, who was sleeping. He leaned up close to me. “You must have tired her out,” he whispered.

Elliot grinned. “The monster eats a lot,” he said.

Then they stripped off their clothes, and by the time I had stood up they were both up to their chests in the milky green water, splashing on the rock shelf a few feet from shore and jumping off the submerged boulders into the deep. I sat there watching them, when suddenly a haze dropped over me like a blanket. For a while longer I tried to watch them closely, then I lay back on the rock again. I glanced out over the water: they were paying no attention. Next to me, Sandra was snoring. “Sleeping beauty,” I whispered in a high voice; then, in a deeper one, I said,
“Servoos.”
But she didn’t stir. I looked up at the sky, and thoughts of her began to drift over me. I could not shake them—the way she had blown smoke rings in her hideout, the way, in my bed, her hand had rested right above my heart.

I turned to watch Clive and Elliot again. Out in the deep, they had begun wrestling, pulling each other down into the water and twisting to regain the surface. They separated and then both submerged, while I watched from shore for their forms in the choppy green. They did not reappear. I sat up, and finally, near the ledge, Elliot surfaced. In a moment Clive did too, shaking his head like a dog and spitting out a rainbow. I saw the colors of it fantastically clearly, the indigo and violet
fanning out from his whirling head, hanging in the air. They splashed at each other, and again I saw little jewels of color in their wake. Then these disappeared. They went under once more. I stared out as the surface grew stiller, and then calm, and then glassy, and then they erupted in the center again.

They emerged and stood on the shore. I pretended to be asleep, and when I felt shade on my face I opened my eyes and found Clive standing over me.
“Servoos,”
he said.

“Servoos.”

“How do you feel, little brother?”

“Great.”

He looked down at me, his cheeks streaked with quarry sediment that contained the palest trace of bright opal. “I told you,
bayosh
,” he said, turning to Elliot. “You baked them too long.”

They dried themselves with their shirts, whispering a few words in their language while I listened with my eyes closed. Sandra still slept, waking now and then to turn herself over. I heard Clive and Elliot wringing out their hair and lying down on the rocks, and then the small, steady splash of pebbles being tossed into the water and Clive humming a Clapton lick between throws. Lethargy welled over me. Just before I slept I was aware of all the smallest sounds of the quarry—the tiny chime of lapping waves, my brother’s humming, the occasional groan of rock shifting in the heat and the plink of pebbles in the water. Sandra snored, just slightly. When I woke the sun was gone.

Clive and Elliot and Sandra were gone also. I stood and rubbed my eyes and looked out over the water, which had turned dark and was ruffled by wind; gusts darted across it like flocks of birds. I sauntered to the edge and looked around. They had taken their clothes with them, too. Evening was falling, and disappointment chilled me. I tossed rocks into the
water, one by one, gazing at the choppy, gray shallows as they began to go black.

“The genius in thought,” Sandra said behind me. I turned around and she was standing in her T-shirt and bikini bottom, smiling. “I was walking,” she said, “but they’re gone.”

“Where to?”

“Good question.” She stepped closer and I saw that her T-shirt was wet through. “I waited for you,” she said.

“I guess you did.”

She climbed onto a flat slab of rock and patted the spot next to her. I sat. “Tell me something,” she said. “What are you going to think of me in ten years?”

“In ten years?” I said. “In 1983?”

“Shhh,” she said.

This time her hands moved to my hips, then my belt, and at that moment I became aware of a line I had never crossed, then crossed it. I tried to remember everything so I could tell Billy DeSalz. I was also trying to work her bikini bottom down over her legs without drawing her attention to it, when she stopped, kissed me, and just like that, pulled off her T-shirt and top. Her breasts bounced into the pale light and I leaned up and kissed them.
They were like warm melons
, I decided to tell Billy. She shook the bikini bottom the rest of the way down her legs, kicking it off finally so that it flew into the air and hit on the gravel shore next to us. I moved my hands to her belly.
Her skin was like cream
. I pulled off my own shirt, stood and removed my trunks, and when she lay down again I shrugged, looked quickly at her so that I would be able to describe the sight, and then lay down alongside.

That weekend, in Columbus, Clive faced Ariel Sheshevsky for the state championship. Ariel was a slight, long-haired boy, with
a leather headband in his hair and a derisive look to his features, and as soon as I saw him I knew he would be trouble. He looked like Clive. Both of them answered every question correctly, and although the lieutenant governor of Ohio laughed about this as he stood on stage at the end, holding the bronze plaque that my brother and Ariel would have to somehow split, our mother wept openly. In a moment Mrs. Cubano did too, and then, next to me, Sandra started as well, her tears cutting trails through the tiny flecks of glitter on her cheeks.

“It’s only a math prize,” I said.

It was those tears I recalled that same night, dropping through their delicate path, as I stood in the kitchen with our mother. She was mixing batter for victory cookies. “Sandra’s living in the basement,” I said.

She stopped mixing. “Boys will be boys,” she said.

I moved in front of her. “I mean, she’s been living there all year. She doesn’t go home. Her parents don’t know where she is. They don’t care. She lives behind the furnace.”

“Poor girl.”

“She lives behind
our
furnace.”

She dipped the spoon in the bowl, twirled it, and handed it to me coated with batter. “Sweetheart,” she said, “don’t you think I know about Sandra?”

“You know about her?”

“Of course. I’m no dummy, despite what your father thinks. Besides, I think it’s kind of romantic.”

“Dad knows too?”

“No, he doesn’t. And I don’t think you should tell him, either.”

I sat down, and she went back to mixing. “I want to ask you something,” she finally said. She didn’t look up from the bowl. “She’s his girlfriend, right?”

“Clive’s?”

“Yes.”

“You mean, are they
exclusive
or something?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean. Are they boyfriend and girlfriend?”

“Well, I don’t know. I guess so.” Then I said, “yes.”

“That’s what I thought. It’s fine with me if she wants to live in our house.”

That evening, as I stood across from our father in our basement, with the ping-pong paddle in my hand, it suddenly occurred to me that all of Sandra’s attentions had been meant for nothing more than to insure her secrecy. I don’t think so now—I think it is more complicated than that—but that night, standing at one side of the cheerful green table, I did. “Service,” I said.

Our father mis-hit the return and it sailed in high to my forehand, where I leaned forward and hit the slam. I hit it too long and it missed the table, bounced once on the concrete floor, and skipped through the crack by the Philco box into her hideout. Our father put down his paddle and went after it.

If the spring of 1973 had taken place ten years later, I sometimes think, we might still have been at peace today, as we were then. Over the years my brother became a college physics professor and a dean of students, and I became a reporter and now, recently, an editor, at
The Boston Globe
. A year ago, walking on the boardwalk where I was vacationing at Cape Cod, I came upon two middle-aged women, high-cheeked and ruddy, and as I passed by I heard one of them say to the other,
“Servoos!”
; I stopped and asked what language they were speaking, and I suppose they must have assumed, from the tears that came to my eyes, that I, too, had some knowledge of Hungarian. It was difficult to explain to them that I did not. That
afternoon I searched through bookstores until I found a Hungarian dictionary, and I spent the night looking through it.

But by then it was too late. As adults my brother and I had become tender and comradely with each other, like soldiers from the same battle, and we finally grew to talk to each other in almost the way I had hoped we would. We lived in different cities, but whenever we saw each other there was an ease between us that I felt with no one else in the world; at Thanksgiving and Passover when we embraced at my door, I would hold him close for more than several seconds and breathe in his particular smell—a smell I have since, as Sandra did back then, noticed on the collars of my own shirts—and while my wife would move to the door to greet his lover—it is a word I have learned to use—he would whisper
“Servoos!”
into my ear. Although even then it was the only word of his I knew, I always whispered it back.

Things were changing so fast in 1973 that I admire my parents for trying to keep up. They were well-meaning people who were accepting what they could, one arena at a time, and I think it was a difficult period for them, especially for our father. What he found when he pulled back the Philco box in search of the ping-pong ball was my brother and Elliot, asleep on the folded blankets that were Sandra’s bed, naked, their arms entwined. For a moment nobody moved. Then they began struggling with the blankets. But suddenly Clive calmed, and presently Elliot did too, both of them straightening their backs and composing their expressions until they sat upright before us, placid and still, the way monks sat as they froze to death.

“Batorsag,”
my brother said.

“Szerelem,”
said Elliot.

Our father’s arm flashed, and Clive flew back from the
impact of the blow, hitting the wall with the loose wings of his shoulders and then crumpling. Elliot hugged his knees. Clive shook his head and let his mouth fall open, and then he turned to me standing behind our father with the ping-pong paddle in my hand. Flecks of blood streaked his tongue. Our father held his right hand in his left. Upstairs, our mother said, “Clive, William, dinner! We’re having macaroni.”

Then our father moved quickly to his knees, and though nobody in our family had ever prayed before, so far as I knew, that was what he did; he prayed, leaning forward and clasping his two hands together in the hollow of his neck, his eyes closed, on his knees on the rolled blankets; and then my brother, the genius, the dope-smoker, the disguiser of languages, my brother the faggot leaned forward too, but he did not put his hands together. He merely lowered his head, and then Elliot did the same, and I knew from their nodding that they were weeping. I recognized with something like the profundity of religion that this was a sea change in our family and the great unturning of my brother’s life, and though I moved to my knees as well and put down the paddle, I felt no tears. All I could think of was that now was the beginning of my own ascendence. For so long, I had known something was going to happen to Clive, and finally it had. The inevitability of it had always been a half-hidden secret to me, a fact that persisted just beyond where I could give it voice. Now at last, as I bowed my head, I recognized it, deep in my own character, as the fleeting ghostly shape of a wish; and for this, fifteen years later, in a stifling room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, where the doctors told me I had better come on a late-night flight to say goodbye to my brother, I wept and wept and wept.