they suspect? In the quiet study, everything was in order.
Nick grew quiet too. He wanted to go over things with his mother, plan what to do, but she didn’t want to talk, so he sat listening to the sounds of the house. He thought of everything that had happened, every detail, studying the Cochrane photograph to jolt him into some idea for action, but nothing came back but the creak of floorboards, a windowpane shaking back at the wind, until it seemed that the house was giving up too, disintegrating with them. He read the Hardy Boys books he had got for Christmas, with their speedboats and roadsters and mysteries that were always solved. They rescued their father in one, wily and resourceful. One day, after the snow melted, he walked down A Street to check on the drain, but the shirt was gone, and he barely paused at the corner before turning back.
It was his decision to go back to school, stifled finally by the airless house. When he opened the door that Monday, the reporters swarmed around, expecting his mother, then backed away to let him pass, like the water of the Red Sea. “Hi, Nick,” one of the regulars said, and he gave a shy wave, but they let him alone. At school, the lads backed away too, nodding with sidelong glances, deferential to his notoriety. His teacher pretended he’d been out sick and apologetically piled him with back homework. She never called on him in class. He sat quietly, taking notes, then went home and worked all evening while his mother sat smoking, still drifting. He finished all the make-up work in three days, turning in assignments that were neater and more complete than before, because now it was important to be good, to be blameless.
In the weeks that followed, nothing changed at home, but outside the reporters dwindled and at school people began to forget that anything had happened. When Welles suspended the hearings, the papers barely noticed. As Uncle Larry had predicted, things moved on. And it was Larry who brought his mother back.
“You can’t just sit in the house. I’m taking you to New York for the weekend.”
“To do what?”
“Go to a show, go out to dinner. Get dressed up and show your pretty face all over town,” he said, winking at Nick, Van Johnson again, cheerful and take-charge.
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. Livia, you can’t sit here. You’ve got to get on with things.”
“By going to New York with you?”
Larry looked at her and smiled. “For a start. We’ll take the train. I’ll pick you up here at five. Five, no later. And no buts,” he said, waving his forefinger.
Surprisingly, she went. Nora stayed the weekend and she and Nick went to the movies, treating themselves to tea at the Willard. In the long lobby of red carpets and potted palms, no one noticed them. On Sunday, when they went to meet his mother at Union Station, he glanced at the telephone booth, then averted his eyes, as if he were being watched. But his mother seemed better, the quiet around her beginning to thaw, like the melting snow.
It was only at night that it came back, the dread. It was the not knowing. Everyone acted as if his father were dead, but Nick knew he wasn’t. He was somewhere. Nick lay under the covers watching the tree branch and tried to play the cabin game. Over the years, they’d thought of a lot of places where the wind was blowing-the cabin in the mountains, a tent in the desert, that big hotel at the Grand Canyon where they’d gone one summer-but Nick couldn’t picture any of them. Instead there was the committee room, Welles glowering and accusing. A body falling in the cold. The strange walk to the telephone booth. And then, always, the back courtyard filling with snow.
I hope you die, his mother had said. But she hadn’t meant that. Nick just wanted to know, and then he could rest. It seemed to him that their lives on 2nd Street had ended without any explanation. There had to be a reason. The hearings were starting again. They were looking for more Communists. So things went on. Was that all it had been? Politics, a piece of history? The trouble with history, his father had said, is that you have to live through it. But he hadn’t meant this, half-living in a mystery. One day it will all seem like a dream. But it wouldn’t, just the same mystery. That was the dread: he would never know.
His mother ended it that spring by selling the house. They would start over in New York, where nobody cared, and Nick would go to Rhode Island, where Father Tim had arranged for a place at his old school. Tim was taking them there himself, in the big DeSoto he drove like a carriage, hands on either side of the wheel as if he were holding reins.
Nick went with him for gas while his mother finished packing-an excuse, Nick suspected, for one of Father Tim’s chats. But Tim was bubbly, as far away from homilies as a man on a picnic. They drove around the Mall, a last tour. “You’ll like the Priory,” he said. “Of course, people always say that about their schools. I suppose they’re really remembering themselves when they were young.” Nick looked over at him, unable to imagine the ruddy face over the white collar as anything but grown up. “But this time of year,” he continued, taking one hand away to gesture to the tree blossoms, “well, you won’t find a finer sight. And then you’ve got Newport down the road. All the boats. I used to love that. Hundreds of sails, all across the bay.” He stopped, aware of Nick’s silence. “You’ll like it,” he repeated. “You’ll see.”
“My father wouldn’t like it,” Nick said. “He didn’t want me to go to a Catholic school.”
Father Tim didn’t say anything to that. Nick watched him shift uncomfortably in his seat, avoiding the subject, his father’s name like a cloud over the bright day.
“Well, give it a chance,” Father Tim said. “You’ll see. But a fair chance, mind. You don’t want to be a burden to your mother. Not now. She’s had worries enough to last a lifetime. Rose isn’t as strong as she looks. It’s been a difficult time for her, you know.”
What about me? Nick wanted to say, but he was quiet. Then, “Why do you call her Rose?”
Father Tim smiled. “Well, she was Rose when I first knew her. She hated ‘Livia’ in those days. Like a Roman wife, she said. You know, Calpurnia. Names like that.” He smiled again, glad to reminisce. “She was just Rose Quinn then. The prettiest girl at Sacred Heart.”
“Maybe you should have married her,” Nick said, curious to see if his father’s joke had been right.
“Well, I married the church,” Father Tim said, but he’d misunderstood Nick and looked at him, troubled. “He’s still your father, Nick. No matter what.”
This was so far from what Nick had been thinking that he didn’t know what to say. Instead, he changed the subject. “Is it a sin to wish somebody would die? To say it, I mean.”
“Yes,” Father Tim said, “a great sin.” Then, misunderstanding again, “You don’t wish that, do you? No matter what he’s done.”
“No,” Nick said. “I don’t.” But he was disconcerted. Tim had opened a different door. What did Tim think his father had done?
They stopped for a red light and Nick looked across at the Smithsonian, surrounded by flowering trees.
“Of course you don’t,” Father Tim said. “Anyway, that’s all past now. You’ll both have a fresh start.”
But not together, Nick thought. He remembered the night his father went away, his mother clinging to Nick. He’d imagined going on like that, just the two of them. Now it seemed she’d be better on her own, putting Nick behind her with everything else. Maybe it was because he looked like his father, a visual reminder of what they were all supposed to forget.
“It’s not easy making a new life,” Father Tim said, as if they’d already disposed of the old. “But she’ll have you to help her now.”
This struck Nick as unfair, coming from the man who’d arranged to send him away, but he said nothing.
“You’ll settle in before you know it,” Father Tim went on. “And it’s just a train ride from New York. You’ll make new friends. It’ll be a fresh start for you too.”
“They’ll know,” Nick said. “At school.”
Father Tim paused, framing an answer. “It’s not Washington, Nick. They’re a little out of the world up there. That’s one of the nice things about the old Priory. They don’t hear much.”
“I don’t care anyway,” Nick said, looking out the window at the Mall. They were climbing the hill now, up toward the Capitol.
“You mustn’t mind what people say, Nick,” Father Tim said gently. “We’re not responsible for what our parents do. There’d be no end to it then. God only asks us to answer for ourselves.”
Nick said nothing, staring up at the Capitol, where everything had started. The flashbulbs and microphones. Maybe the committee was meeting now, banging gavels on the broad table, driving someone else away.
“If you commit suicide, do you go to hell?”
