The Palace Thief

Abba Roth is an accountant born in Daly City, California. He has worked at the Priebe, Emond & Farmer firm in San Francisco “since the last days of the Eisenhower administration” and describes his life leading up to the great “trespass” that changed its course (1). While Roth was growing up in Daly City, he played third base on the high school baseball team, while his friend, Eugene Peters, played shortstop. While the two boys’ lives originally seemed “interchangeable,” their paths later “diverged” as Roth pursued a life of “discipline” and Peters drifted into work at an auto-parts dealership (3). In later years, Roth gets a job at the Priebe, Emond & Farmer firm, Peters sets up an auto-parts company that, three years after its founding, makes $2.3 million in gross sales. Over the years, while the buttoned-up Roth works dutifully and achieves promotions, the casual, risk-taking Peters achieves spectacular success and fame.

Roth understands the value of a career in accounting and looks forward to promotions, but he “indulged the small daydream that [he] might one day leave [his] studies and instead become a professor of music history at a small college” (4). His passion for classical music is instead channeled into taking LeAnne and Scheherazade, the two women he is dating, to the symphony orchestra on alternate weeks. Practical, level-headed LeAnne is initially the frontrunner in the contest to be Roth’s wife; however, as soon as he puts down the deposit on an engagement ring, he begins to see her “thriftiness as penury and her practical nature as mannish” (10). He therefore decides to marry emotional, spendthrift Scheherazade, who invests Roth’s increasing salary into decorating herself and their home. The couple have three children: Naomi, Rachel, and Abba. Of the three, despite her demonstrable lack of affection towards him, brooding, spendthrift Naomi is Roth’s favorite.

When Roth’s two oldest girls are teenagers, Peters proposes that Roth join him and a group of other high-status men for a weeklong trip in Scottsdale, Arizona, where they will have the opportunity to play with retired baseball stars. Roth will have to pay $4,000 for the privilege. Roth, frugal by nature and loath to spend money on himself, deliberates over the invitation. However, he eventually decides to go, judging that “if [he] did not spend the four thousand dollars on baseball for [himself], Scheherazade would spend it on Persian carpets” (27). In the end, the whole week’s costs come to $34,000, not inclusive of baseball bats. The first days of the luxury baseball camp are a delight; Roth enjoys the change of scene and playing with baseball heroes such as Willie Mays. Peters considers this is the time to ask Roth if his accounting firm will handle his own company’s books, and Roth is happy to spent hours crafting a proposal.  

In the last days of camp, Roth experiences unusual success in his baseball playing, feeling “a limberness in [his] arms and an acuity in [his] eyes that [he] had not felt for years” (41). He even receives the “specific praise” of Willie Mays, and one of his teammates toasts him as “the Most Valuable Player” (41; 44). When Mays approaches Roth later, he finds himself using the line he uses to score clients: “Say, I bet they sock you at tax time” (45). Mays is suddenly cold towards Roth, and Peters makes a charming comment that smooths over Roth’s gaffe; however, Roth still feel “a residue of embarrassment” (46) and refrains from socializing with the others for the rest of the evening. At the end of the camp, when Mays hands out the award of his leggings to the Most Valuable Player, he chooses Peters, even though the latter had not played especially well.

In the middle of the night, Peters, and a woman he brings back with him, knock on Roth’s door, and Peters mocks Roth’s saintliness. After the incident, Roth wonders if it was Peters’s attempt to “establish psychological superiority” over him (52). The next morning, Roth and Peters are due to sign the deal that will cement Priebe, Emond & Farmer’s responsibility for Peters’ accounts. When Roth enters Peters’s suite, Peters offers him a drink, then disappears for a few minutes. In this time, Roth reaches into Peters’s bedside drawer and takes Mays’s leggings. Overcome with bitterness that “the lazy scoundrel [he] knew as a boy was now a captain of industry” (55), Roth stuffs the leggings into his briefcase. When Peters re-enters the room and asks to see the proposal, Roth pretends that he has no proposal and that the heads of his firm deemed it against their interests to represent Peters.

With this act, Roth “had destroyed a reputation that had taken [him] a lifetime to build” (57) and regrets attending the camp. He realizes he will never get the role of principal at Priebe, Emond & Farmer, and though he is embarrassed by the fact, he admits that he “always felt the impulse for uproar and disorder” (61). The story ends with Roth bonding with his daughter, Naomi, and confessing about the stolen leggings. He is overcome with sadness at the way his life has turned out.