The Palace Thief

I
am an accountant, that calling of exactitude and scruple, and my crime was small. I have worked diligently, and I do not mind saying that in the conscientious embrace of the ledger I have done well for myself over the years, yet now I must also say that due to a flaw in my character I have allowed one small trespass against my honor. I try to forget it. Although now I do little more than try to forget it, I find myself considering and reconsidering this flaw, and then this trespass, although in truth if I am to look at them both, this flaw is so large that it cannot properly be called a flaw but my character itself, and this trespass was devious. I have a wife and three children. My name is Abba Roth.

I say this as background, that is all. I make no excuses for myself, nor have I ever. The facts are as follows: We live in San Rafael, California, and I work at Priebe, Emond & Farmer, the San Francisco firm, where I have worked since the last days of the Eisenhower administration. At one time or another we have owned a Shetland pony, dug a swimming pool, leased a summer cottage at Lake Tahoe, and given generously to the Israel
General Fund, although all that we still do is lease the cottage. My wife’s name is Scheherazade, and she will not answer to Sherri, her childhood appellation, anymore. We have two daughters, Naomi and Rachel, and a son, whose name is Abba also, although I know this name is not in fashion.

Recently a man I knew as a child called me at my office, and this is how this incident began. His name is Eugene Peters and we have known each other for most of our lives. We grew up together in Daly City, California, a suburb of San Francisco that, like accounting, has become the object of some scorn by particular segments of society. A popular song has been written on the theme that all the homes in Daly City are identical, although this happens not to be correct. In reality there were any number of different architectural plans used in the neighborhood where Mr. Peters and I grew up, although by coincidence he and I did in fact grow up in houses that happened to be built from the same one. The plans, of course, had been reflected on an axis so that each house became the mirror image of the other—each contained a living room, with the kitchen set in a side bay, two bedrooms off a short hallway, a basement downstairs, and on the garage side of the front yard a palm that in our childhoods grew from a seedling to the height of the roof. His room abutted from the left of the upstairs hall, as mine did, in our own house, from the right; their bathroom was on the right of the same hall and ours was on the left, et cetera, so that it sometimes struck me as odd when the floors and walls in his house were covered with furnishings belonging to his parents and not my own. We rode bicycles together and later drove in his Plymouth convertible; later still, we double-dated, and we played on the same baseball team. I played third base and Eugene, whose father had gone to Notre Dame with our coach, played shortstop.