Varnadoe ignored the question. He took off his glasses and set them on the table.

“I’m very much looking forward to your benefactor’s speech this evening,” he said.

“Are you being sarcastic?” I asked.

“Not at all.”

“I might also have heard something about your low opinion of Jim Haltom, you know.”

Varnadoe smiled.

“I’ve sat through more than twenty-five commencements,” he said. “They can be a bit tedious. Mr. Haltom’s decision to appear in spite of recent events should make this one a bit more—memorable.”

“You hate him, don’t you?”

Varnadoe took a moment to consider his words.

“It seems these days more and more that people assume that because a man is wealthy, he should be trusted to lead, or to govern,” he said. “They overlook the fact that wealth is often acquired without discipline or principle. Plato believed that wisdom led to virtue. But one needn’t be wise to become wealthy. One certainly needn’t be virtuous. Of course, all men are flawed, aren’t they, Charlie?”

He had never called me Charlie before.

“Latet enim veritas,” he said, “sed nihil pretiosius veritate. Do you remember it?”

I’d memorized the aphorism my first year in Dean Varnadoe’s class. It was printed on yellowed paper and taped to the wall above his blackboard: a line from El Brocense—Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, a sixteenth-century Spanish philologist who three times faced the Inquisition for daring to criticize the Gospels as literature.

“Truth is hidden,” Varnadoe said, “but nothing is more beautiful than the truth.”

I nodded.

“Goodbye, Mr. Boykin,” he said. “You have all my best wishes.”

He picked up his glasses, slipped them into his breast pocket, and disappeared through the open door.

Since diplomas were distributed alphabetically, I was separated from Jamie during the ceremony and so was spared his sneering at his father’s remarks about the value of loyalty and integrity. It was a good speech and would have gone over well, I thought, if not for the embarrassing circumstances. I was too troubled by Dean Varnadoe’s words to care one way or the other. My distraction was so complete that I didn’t notice when Dr. Dodd announced me as the winner of the Art Purchase Prize. Hugh Bowling, who was sitting next to me, had to punch me in the shoulder.

“Go get your money, dumbass,” he said.

Vanessa sat off to the left, with Mrs. Haltom and her parents, who had flown in from their assisted living facility in Florida for the twins’ graduation ceremonies. My mother sat on the far right, near the faculty, with Arch and his mother. I had insisted that we invite Sunny, but she called to tell me she just couldn’t get out of work that evening. Instead, she sent me a card with a fifty-dollar bill inside.