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have been had we gone to school together.” Also, there was a note addressed to my father, signed by Prowse’s father, explaining that the judge suffered from a palsy so severe that his handwriting was illegible to all but his closest relatives.
    “I hope your father wasn’t too upset with you,” I said.
    “Not too upset,” Prowse said, ruefully rubbing his backside and grinning. I was greatly relieved, though I worried that Prowse’s father might have laid it on too thick and that my father would now relent and ask to meet the judge.
    On Sunday, I brought the book back to my father, who at first seemed greatly pleased with the dedication.
    “Not condescending at all, is it?” he said. “He sounds as though he means it. ‘Friends as you and I might have been had we gone to school together.’ A very kind thing to say. A very gracious thing to say.”
    My father sat throughout my visit with the book open on his lap, staring at the dedication while I darted nervous looks at himfrom time to time, praying he was not becoming suspicious. He started asking me questions, which, I was certain, I would give myself away in answering.
    “Did you tell him Charlie Smallwood says hello?” my father asked. I hadn’t, but I assured him that I had.
    “What’s he like?” my father said.
    “He’s very old,” I said, as though that were a trait the judge had carried with him all his life.
    “Very old,” my father said, nodding, as if this conformed nicely to the image of the judge he had already formed.
    “His hands shake pretty badly,” I said, “and he has a long white beard.”
    “He never said anything about the Boot, did he?” my father said. “Did he make the connection between the name Smallwood and the Boot?” I assured him that the judge had not mentioned the Boot. “What did he say?” my father said. “Tell me everything he said.”
    “He didn’t say very much,” I said. “We didn’t stay long. He was pretty busy.”
    My father went out on the deck after I had gone to bed. When I heard him I got up and looked out the window at him. He stood with his hands on the rail and spoke as if the judge were standing just below him. “Friends. As you and I might have been had we gone to school together. You old bastard. You wouldn’t have given me the time of day.”
    The next day, I spoke to Prowse on the playing grounds before the first bell. “That inscription. And that note you included with the book,” I said. “The note to my father. Did your father really write those?” I thought I had recognized the handwriting as Prowse’s, but did not tell him so.
    “To tell you the truth, I didn’t show my father the book,” Prowse said, looking hangdog. “I would have told you, but I wasn’t sure how you’d react. Anyway, he would have killed me forbringing you to see the judge. So I wrote the inscription and the note myself. No harm done, I hope.”
    “Oh, no,” I said. “No.”
    At the mid-year evaluation of the following year, I was second of sixteen, first runner-up for the Knowling Scholarship, which Prowse won, largely on the strength of his whopping grade of three hundred and eighty-five out of five hundred for character. “Everybody knows you should have won,” Prowse said. He said he and the other boys were thinking about starting a petition, asking that the Knowling be appealed, but I talked him out of it for fear of getting into trouble.
    All my marks had gone dramatically up, except my mark for character, which had stayed at forty-five. Its being not only so low, but also fixed, never-changing, was the point. It could not change, Reeves seemed to be saying; my other marks could go up or down, as the case might be, but my character, my fundamental self, would stay the same. I might as well have had forty-five stamped on my forehead. I was what I was, my character was my fate and my fate was forty-five.
    Two days after the mid-year evaluation was released, my father showed up drunk at