Lotto’s formidable memory revealed itself when he was two years old, and Antoinette was gratified. [Dark gift; it would make him easy in all things, but lazy.] One night Sallie read him a children’s poem before bed, and in the morning, he came down to the breakfast room and stood on a chair and bellowed it out. Gawain applauded in astonishment, and Sallie wiped her eyes on a curtain. “Bravo,” Antoinette said coolly, and held up her cup for more coffee, masking the tremble in her hand. Sallie read longer poems at night; the boy nailed them by morning. A certainty grew in him with each success, a sense of an invisible staircase being scaled. When watermen came to the plantation with their wives for long weekends, Lotto snuck downstairs, crawled in the dark under the guest dinner table. In the cavern there, he saw feet bulging out of the tops of the men’s moccasins, the damp pastel seashells of the women’s panties. He came up shouting Kipling’s “If—” to a roaring ovation. The pleasure of these strangers’ applause was punctured by Antoinette’s thin smile, her soft “Go to bed, Lancelot,” in lieu of praise. He stopped trying hard when she praised him, she had noticed. Puritans understand the value of delayed gratification.