Our father looked at both of us and said that young boys, if they know their scores and if their scores are high, will be too eager to repeat them. He pointed a shoehorn at me and said that nothing was more distasteful than this. To do this, he told me, to repeat the actual number, was as distasteful, as unbecoming to a gentlemen, as to volunteer one’s net worth in the course of general conversation. Then, having a thought, our father shook his head forlornly and said that it was his experience along these lines that men who insist on telling numbers tend to tell numbers that are nothing much to tell.

I knew all this. But I wanted to know how smart I was. I promised that I would not repeat the number, but our father did not answer. He undid his tie, then his belt, signs that Nicholas and I had been excused.

I was about to leave, but I could see that Nicholas was not. When our father’s back was turned, I saw my brother step on his own shoelaces to untie them with his feet. It did not take him any time to do it, and then he stayed in the doorway and made his face look like a little boy who could not tie his shoes.

That was the face that our father saw in the doorway when he told us we could go, and it was with that face that Nicholas looked up at our father, then down at his shoes, and said, “Teach me again, Daddy.”

Our father told me I could go. I left the room but stayed just outside. The cracking sounds I heard meant that our father had gone down on his knees to show my brother one more time how to tie a shoelace. I could picture our father on his knees at my brother’s feet, but more than that I pictured Nicholas standing over him, perhaps not even looking down to watch what our father’s hands were doing.

I had barely formed that picture when I heard my brother whisper to our father, “Daddy, what’s the number?”

When Nicholas was tested, he was not called in to our father’s dressing room. Nicholas was called in to the library, and so was our mother, and so was I.

My brother’s score did not occasion a father-son talk. My brother’s score occasioned a conference. In that conference, no number was disclosed, nor was any mention made of what was unbecoming to a gentleman. In the conference that his score occasioned, there was talk about Nicholas being as smart as any child in California.

Our mother’s version was that Nicholas’s score was so high, they did not have a score for it. Her version was that it was too astonishing to measure.

Mine apparently was not.