Father Tim glanced at him, visibly disturbed, then nodded. “Yes.”
“Always?”
“Yes, always. You know that, Nick. It’s a sin against God.”
“What if you helped? What if you made someone do it? Then what?”
“You mean that poor woman,” Father Tim said quietly. “We don’t know why she did that, Nick. You mustn’t judge. It may not have anything to do with your father.”
“No, not him. I was thinking about Mr Welles.”
Father Tim looked at him in surprise. “Mr Welles?”
“They said in the papers he was pressuring her. What if-”
“I don’t think that’s true, Nick. And even if it were, we mustn’t judge. He’s only doing what he thinks is right.”
“No. I saw him. He’s-” Nick searched for a word, but it eluded him. “Bad,” he finally said, knowing it was feeble and childish.
But his inadequacy seemed to relieve Father Tim. “Not necessarily,” he said smoothly. “I know it’s hard for you to understand. I don’t condone his methods either. But Communists are godless people, Nick. Sometimes a man does the right thing the wrong way. That doesn’t make him bad.”
Nick looked at him, stunned. Tim thought his father was godless-that’s what he’d done. We mustn’t judge. But Tim had judged and now he was going to save Nick, shipping him off to the priests and a world where people didn’t hear much. Save him from his father.
“Now this won’t do, you know,” Father Tim said, catching his look. “Taking the world on your shoulders like this. They’re still pretty young shoulders, Nick. The right and wrong of things-that’s what we spend our whole lives trying to figure out. When we grow up.” He smiled. “Of course, some people never do, or I’d be out of business, wouldn’t I?”
Nick saw that he was expected to smile back and managed a nod. There was nothing more to say, and now he was frightened again. Even Father Tim was with the others.
“What you’ve got to do now,” Father Tim said with a kind of forced cheer, “is get on with your own life. Never mind about your father and his politics and all the rest of it. That’s all over. You’ve got to look after your mother now. Right?”
Nick nodded again, pretending to agree.
“You have to let go,” Father Tim said quietly, his final point.
“He’s still my father,” Nick said stubbornly.
Father Tim sighed. “Yes, he is, Nick. And you’re right to honor him. Just as I do mine. That’s what we’re asked to do.”
“Your father’s dead.”
“But your father’s gone, Nick,” he said as if Nick hadn’t interrupted. “Maybe forever.” His voice was hesitant, struggling for the right tone. “He wanted it that way, I don’t know why. You can’t hold on to something that isn’t there. No good comes of that. It just makes it harder. He’s gone. I’m not telling you to forget him. But you have to go on. He’s like my father now. It’s an awful thing. And you so young. But it would be better if-” He floundered, slowing the car at the light, then turned to face Nick, his eyes earnest and reassuring. “You have to think of him as dead.”
He reached over and placed his hand on Nick’s, a gesture of comfort. Nick stared down at it, feeling the rest of his body slip away, skidding on ice. Nobody was going to help. Ever. Tim was waiting for him to agree. His father was godless and he was gone, better for everybody. It’s what they all wanted, all the others. If he nodded, Father Tim would pat his hand, the end of the lesson, and leave him alone. You’ve got to stop fighting with him, Uncle Larry had said in the study, and his father had.
“I’ll never do that,” Nick said quietly, sliding his hand out from under, free.
Father Tim glanced at him, disappointed, and took his hand back. He sighed again as he made the turn into 2nd Street. “You will, though, you know,” he said wearily, sure of the future. “Things pass. Even this. Nothing is forever. Except God.”
And suddenly Nick knew what he would do. He would remember everything, every detail. He looked at the street, the pink-and-white blossoms, the bright marble of the Supreme Court Building catching the sun, and tried to fix them in his mind. The curly iron railing in front of Mrs Bryant’s house. Lamp-posts. The forsythia bush. Then he saw the moving van, the big packing boxes scattered all over the sidewalk in front of his house like the mess their lives had become. The prettiest girl at Sacred Heart was standing on the stoop, her vacant eyes animated now, giving directions to the movers. Crates for the china. The end tables sitting on the patch of city yard, spindly legs wrapped in protective brown paper. Two men in undershirts sweating as they heaved a couch into the van. Suitcases by the door, ready. They were really going.
In that instant, as his mother saw the car and waved to them, picking her way through the boxes to the curb with a fixed smile, he thought, finally, that his heart would break. He wondered if it could literally happen, if sadness could fill the chambers like blood until finally they had to burst from it. He wouldn’t cry. He would never let them see that. And now his mother was there, pretending to be happy, and Nora, all blubbery hugs, was handing them a thermos for the ride, and Father Tim was saying they’d better be starting. In a minute they’d be gone.
Nick said he had to go to the bathroom and raced into the house, leaving them standing at the car. He walked through the empty rooms, trying to fix them in his memory too, but it felt like someone else’s house. Maybe Father Tim was right. Things passed, whether you wanted them to or not.
He went up to his father’s study and stood at the door. His mother hadn’t taken the desk and it still sat there, just the desk and the blank walls. The window was closed, and in the stale air he thought he could still smell tobacco. His chest hurt again. Why did it have to happen? He stared at the desk. He wouldn’t cry and he wouldn’t do what Father Tim had said. He wouldn’t forget anything. His father was somewhere. But not in the empty room. There was nothing left but a trace of smoke.
He heard his mother calling and went down the stairs to the car. Nora cried, but he got into the back seat, determined not to crack. He wouldn’t even look back. But when the car turned the corner, he couldn’t help himself and swiveled in his seat toward the back window. It was then he realized, trying to remember details, that something was missing. There were no reporters. It was over. There were just the boxes being loaded into a van.
Three years later, in the summer of 1953, after the death of Stalin and the murder of Beria, Walter Kotlar at last gave a press conference in Moscow. In the chess game of the Cold War, the move was meant to dismay the West, and it did, another blow after the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Like them, Kotlar denounced Western aggression as a threat to world peace. But his remarks were limited, and he made no reference to the circumstance of his defection. His presence was the story.
Nick had waited so long for his answer that when it came, a grainy newsclip, he felt a numb surprise that it didn’t explain anything after all. It solved a puzzle, but not the one he wanted to solve. His father looked well. There was the expected storm in the papers, the events of 1950 retold as news, and for a day Nick and his mother wondered if their lives would be exploded again. But no one called. The country had moved on. And by that time Nick had a new father and a new name, and their troubles, everything that happened to them, had become just a part of history.
Part II
THE RED MENACE
Chapter 3
“Vanessa Redgrave’s supposed to show.”
