The Palace Thief

Unlike Roth, who shed his carefree tendencies after graduating from high school, the confident, freewheeling Peters appears to have no interest in responsibility or being successful. Foregoing college, he gets a job in an auto dealership. Roth says this about his friend’s choices: “He […] seemed to want nothing more than to stock gaskets and price piston rings until the short hair at his temples turned gray” (5). Peters even retains an adolescent approach to style; he is rarely seen without a baseball cap on his head.

Peters is the epitome of a charismatic, easygoing man who enjoys natural privilege because of his appearance and social manner. His type stands in sharp contrast to a self-conscious, rule-abiding man like Roth. Peters appears to succeed because he is self-assured and likeable, not because he has any definitive, measurable talent. He outpaces Roth because he never worries about losing his social status and therefore takes risks. Unfortunately for him, this likely comes at the cost of his friendship with Roth, as the latter becomes jealous of Peters’s repeated successes and lashes out.

In “Batorsag and Szerelem,” William is the second son in his family. He lives in the shadow of his genius brother, Clive, though he, along with their parents, feels that Clive is too eccentric. Because his brother makes no effort to be relatable, William does manage to bond with their father in a way that Clive cannot.

Still, William is jealous and looks for ways to distinguish himself. One of those ways is losing his virginity to Clive’s supposed girlfriend Sandra. Because he—and the reader—assumes Clive is a virgin, he feels a superiority. This does not stop him from still doubting his ability to become the favored son, which is why he reveals to their mother that Sandra has been secretly living in their basement.

William cannot imagine his parents loving their sons equally; thus, he wishes something would happen to Clive so that he would be the only son receiving their parents’ attention. When it is revealed that Clive is gay and their father disowns him, William finally gets his wish. He comes to regret this as an adult, when Clive dies, never having reconciled with their father. 

The pride of his parents, inscrutable genius Clive uses his academic prowess and penchant for speaking exclusively in Hungarian to distract his family from his sexual orientation. While his so-called girlfriend Sandra lives in the basement, Clive conducts his affairs with his real lover, Elliot. Although William claims that Clive is indifferent to their parents’ affections, there is evidence that he cares about what they think—namely, how he puts William down for having ordinary abilities and how Clive smokes a joint with their father to connect.

In some ways, being disowned is freeing for Clive. He can live his truth as a gay man in his adulthood. However, his life is tragically cut short when he dies in 1988. While the text does not specifically refer to AIDS, given its emphasis on the year in which events happen, it is likely the cause of Clive’s death. 

Clive and William’s father, Simon, a former World War II marine and current insurance provider, is anxious about keeping up with the times. He changes his faith from conservative Judaism to pacifist Quakerism and adopts the current fashion of purple ties and bellbottoms. He also replaces his practical ways with philosophical ones and smokes weed with William.

Nevertheless, while William admires his father for “trying to keep up” (115), the changes in society and in his family have taken place too fast for Simon to keep up. He regularly objectifies women, like his neighbor, while simultaneously showing disdain for their looks; he says Sandra is “a cheap kind of pretty […] that won’t last” (77). Finally, his true old-fashioned colors are revealed in his violent response to learning the truth about Clive’s sexual orientation. Overall, Simon is shown to be a confused hypocrite who pretends to be part of the modern world but is frightened by the fullness of its implications. 

Baseball devotee Wilson Kohler from “City of Broken Hearts” is aware that he prefers to live in a past where his son Brent was young and his ex-wife Abbie was still with him. However, he is ashamed of his feelings and tries to disguise them with false signifiers that he has moved on. For example, he dates women from “the pricy bars around the Common” (120) and wears “young-looking clothes” (121). Still, the truth is that “Wilson’s own life had come to a strange halt” and “nothing of importance seemed to happen to him” (125).

Wilson struggles to connect with people because almost no one is on the same page as him. The male friendships he had before his marriage became inauthentic, and Brent has such a different set of values that Wilson feels he barely knows his own son. Meanwhile, he feels excluded and put off by the fact that women’s rights and beliefs seem to be dominating modern life and altering the expectations of romantic relationships.

Despite Abbie’s treachery, Wilson hopes to find a woman exactly like her, a troubling fact that neither he nor Brent questions. Brent sets William up with Margaret, who is “smart like [Abbie] and almost as beautiful” (163). The word almost is key; it indicates that Margaret is a fair consolation prize valued not for her own virtues but because she can make Wilson relive aspects of his old life. Indeed, the problem of Wilson’s character is that he can’t forget the life he lost and pursue a new beginning.

Wilson’s son Brent is serious and sensitive with a more modern understanding of gender politics and roles than his more traditional father. Ethically minded, Brent attends a progressive college and spends his summers volunteering in homeless and women’s shelters. Unlike his father, who prefers to discuss sports and the daily grind, Brent talks about “paradigm shifts and hegemonic discourses” (125). He displays a comfort in his masculinity by wearing an earring, which older generations would see as a sign that he is gay, but in the story’s ‘90s setting, it is merely a style choice. He also has an “impressive” ability to move “among women, the way he seemed to be privy to their secret communication” (155). Arguably, Brent’s ability to see women as people is what gives him this strength.

Brent worries about his father’s state of mind. This perceived responsibility of his father’s well-being is a distinct shift of the parent-child relationship. When Wilson refutes the idea of therapy, Brent sets him up with Margaret, who he hopes will fill the rift in Wilson’s heart that Abbie left behind. Wilson and Margaret’s relationship seems to hinge on Brent, as they both maintain separate correspondences with him. 

Hundert, the protagonist of “The Palace Thief,” is a history teacher who has devoted his whole career to St. Benedict’s, an elite boys’ boarding school. Throughout the story, he is torn between his notions of honor and meritocracy and the seductive influence of grandeur and bombastic displays of power.

On one hand, he is serious about the importance of history and his vocation to turn unruly boys into upstanding citizens. He describes how he “battled their indolence with discipline, their boorishness with philosophy, and the arrogance of their stations with the history of great men before them” (169-70). On the other hand, Hundert’s fascination with “great men” (170) and pride in teaching their sons—many of whom also become rich, powerful, and corrupt—is his moral undoing. While he wishes to reward conscientious pupils like Mehta, he becomes fixated on Sedgewick Bell's powerful physicality and charisma. He eventually finds himself giving preferential treatment to Sedgewick by unfairly securing the boy’s admission to the Mr. Julius Caesar quiz and allowing him to get away with cheating twice. At the end of the story, Hundert definitively chooses honor over influence, but by then, it is too late. Sedgewick has capitalized on the advantages he was given in life and rises to prominent political status, just like his father. Still, Hundert takes pride in finally taking a stand.

Hundert’s private life and its implications regularly rise to the foreground in this story. While Hundert maintains that he “had never married nor started a family because history itself had always been enough for me” (198), his lack of a personal life and ambiguous sexuality is often used against him. Sedgewick’s father Senator Bell threatens to reveal Hundert’s true colors—the perception that he is gay—after Hundert prevents Sedgewick from winning the competition. Then, when he is running for president of St. Benedict’s school, his rival for the position, Charles Ellerby, frames him as old-fashioned and potentially gay. When Ellerby wins and forces Hundert into retirement, the latter’s reputation at the school is officially tarnished.