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From that day on, Elena was happy, setting forth in the mornings from their apartment and walking to the Church of the Most Precious Blood on Baxter Street for the daily Mass.

The resident priest, Padre Paolo, had been in Mexico for a time and spoke some Spanish. He welcomed Elena enthusiastically into his flock and took her into the sacristy to show her a reliquary containing a fragment of the tibia of Saint Anthony of Padua, whose intercession had saved Theo from his grandfather three years before.

With the padre’s encouragement, she was able within a few weeks to overcome the language barrier sufficiently to be allowed to join the group of devout ladies that cleaned the church and arranged the tall vases of flowers that were displayed on almost every free surface. Everyone complimented Elena on her arrangements—she had a natural talent for the work, they said.

The Italians gave Elena back the sense of belonging and purpose that she had lost when she left the church community in Gramercy Park. She had thought that she would never be free of the disgrace that her husband’s suicide had brought down on her, but here she could make a fresh start with people who shared her faith.

But for Theo it was different. He did not belong. It was his mother’s religion, not his, and the Mass was an empty vessel without the spark of faith to give it life. He was grateful to the Church for reviving his mother, but that was a superficial response. Underneath, he continued to nurse a grudge against an institution that taught that those who committed suicide would rot in hell and forbade them burial in consecrated ground. He told his mother that he didn’t want to go with her to Mass and, rather to his surprise, she did not object.

Theo’s break with the Church pained Elena, but she was relieved that there was no possibility of him revealing their past history to the Italians and embarrassing her like he had done at the church in Gramercy Park. Her illness had taken a severe toll on her health, exacerbating her sense of her own fragility, and she could neither bear to lose this new, unexpected happiness she had found, nor cope with quarreling with her son, who was such a powder keg of emotions. They were getting along better now, but there was no guarantee that his anger would not burst out again, just as it had before. In the long run, she believed that time would heal Theo’s wounds and that he would return to Christ, but for now she was determined to keep hold of what she had and not rock the boat.

They spent less time together, and while Elena worshipped, Theo struggled with his demons. As the weeks passed, he was overcome by a creeping numbness, which was his body’s attempt to build a protective wall around his tortured emotions. It spread like a thin film across his consciousness, so that nothing felt fully real and his memories started to seem as if they belonged to another person.

One day he pulled out his suitcase from under his bed and took out the few objects that he had brought with him when they moved. Slowly, he turned the leaves of The Romance of King Arthur , the beautiful book that Sir Andrew had given him, and looked at Rackham’s magical pictures. What would the great illustrator have made of their filthy tenement? Theo wondered.

Across time, he heard a faint echo of Sir Andrew’s aristocratic voice, promising “ to bring you another book illustrated by our friend, Mr. Rackham. ” He remembered how angry he had been on that day at the church when his mother had slapped him and Sir Andrew had given him his handkerchief to stanch the blood. There it was in the suitcase, too, with the scripted initials ACB embroidered on the corner. Black on white. He didn’t know why he’d kept it. For the monogram perhaps: a knickknack from a distant land where men had titles and spoke English with strange nasal accents.

Theo dug down farther and found the running shoes that he was looking for at the bottom of the suitcase. He turned them over and ran his fingers over the silver spikes and across the thin white leather, remembering how he had thought in the early days that they were magic shoes, gripping the track and propelling him forward in a perfect rhythm that had felt like flying. He closed his eyes, trying to recall the sensation, but it eluded him. It had been so long now since he ran that he had forgotten what it was like.

The next morning he crossed the Bowery and went back to his old school. He had no wish to see any of his old classmates, so he went in through the back gate on the far side of the running track and crossed over to the sports pavilion. There was a man inside, sitting at a table, cleaning a baseball bat with linseed oil.

“Can I help you?” he asked, looking up at Theo standing in the doorway.

“I’m looking for Coach Eames,” said Theo diffidently.

“He’s not here anymore. I’m the coach now. Why do you want him?”

“He helped me with my running. I wanted to talk to him about that.”

“Well, I wish I could help you, but he was gone before I got here,” said the man kindly, as though sensing Theo’s disappointment. “The headmaster might know where he went, I suppose, but I doubt it, somehow. My understanding is that Eames left under a bit of a cloud, although what that cloud was, I’m not sure.”

Theo muttered his thanks and hurried away, breaking into a run as he left the gate. But he hadn’t exercised in months and he soon stopped, doubled up and winded. Then, as he was catching his breath, he realized to his surprise that his gasps were cries too. He was crying for what he had lost. That year at school, on the cinder track and in the battle bus, had been the only time Theo had felt he truly belonged anywhere. Coach Eames had given him that, and his father had taken it away.

Theo wondered now whether one of his parents had told Saint Peter’s about the coach’s politics, but he rejected the idea as soon as he thought of it. His father had said he wouldn’t, and nothing had happened since to change Theo’s belief that he’d been telling the truth. Theo thought his father had been a selfish but not a spiteful man, and he didn’t think that his mother would’ve done something so radical without her husband’s agreement or without telling her son what she’d done. The school must have found out Coach Eames was a Communist from some other source, but the result was the same. He had disappeared into the great city, gone now where Theo could not follow.

The visit to his old school left Theo restless. He needed distraction, and he found it at the movie theaters that were dotted all over the Lower East, paying a dime to sit in the cheapest seats at the back of the balcony and watch the double features. He enjoyed Bela Lugosi and the Marx Brothers, was irritated by the escapist rags-to-riches fantasies in which the boy got the girl and everything ended up hunky-dory, and returned again and again to watch the Chicago gangster movies that had become popular since the Depression hit. They paid lip service to the idea that crime doesn’t pay with their antiheroes dying in a hail of bullets at the end, but they also glorified the gangsters’ rejection of hard work in favor of brute force, and poured scorn on the American values that Theo’s father had preached.

Theo liked Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar with his vicious smile and the way he said “See!,” poking his finger or his gun into his victims’ chests to impose his will on them. But the movie he loved the most was The Public Enemy . He watched it again and again, mesmerized by James Cagney’s portrayal of the young hoodlum turned bootlegger who murdered his way to power. Even from the back of the theater, Theo experienced a visceral response to Cagney’s burning eyes and snarling voice, his merciless contempt for all weakness, and his terrifying volatility. The character’s raw rage forced Theo back in his seat, ripping through his defenses. Cagney made him feel.

Afterward, walking back, he felt cleaned out—a kind of empty contentment, ephemeral but soothing. He looked up at the blackened tenements lining the streets and laughed at the irony of his father’s tireless attempts to escape the Lower East, only to end up plunging his family back into the same cesspool, and he tipped his cap to the spire of the Chrysler Building shimmering in the distance.

However, the cinema cost money—money they did not have. And now that his mother was better, Theo began to look for work. He had low expectations and wasn’t surprised when he was turned away wherever he applied, but then to his astonishment, he was handed a job almost without asking.

Once a week, sometimes alone and sometimes with his mother, Theo went to the public bathhouse on Rivington Street, carrying a towel and a piece of soap wrapped in newspaper. Inside, he got a ticket from the attendant and sat with a crowd of men and boys on one of the long wooden benches in the waiting room. No one moved—they all had their eyes fixed on the big black hands of the clock on the back wall, counting out the minutes until the bathers emerged shiny-faced from the showers.

Then, when the attendant was ready, he shouted, “Next batch!” and the next in line stampeded through to the booths, desperate to get there first so as to avoid the showers where the faucets didn’t work properly and the water came down in all directions, soaking their clothes where they’d hung them up on the pegs.

They were allowed ten minutes before the attendant turned off the water and made his rounds, hammering on the doors with his stick, and calling out “Time’s up. Everyone out.” Then they would get dressed and emerge clean and blinking into the sunlight, while more bathers rushed past them to take their turn.

It was in one of these stampedes that Albie the attendant slipped on a bar of soap and broke his leg. Theo, who liked Albie, stopped and knelt beside him, forgoing his shower, and then went to summon help. And Albie, suitably grateful, recommended to his employers that Theo would be an excellent replacement until he could return to his duties. All Theo had to do was fill out a form and lie about his age and the job was his, at least on a temporary basis.

Theo loved the work. The bathhouse was one of the only joyful places in New York City. It delivered on its promise: men came in dirty and went out clean, and in between sang bawdy songs as the hot water splashed over them and washed away their sins. Some even left him penny tips in the saucer he was allowed to keep by the door.

The Lower East began to seem less alien, now that he had a place in it. As he walked to and from work, people recognized him and patted him on the shoulder because he was a part of the baths where many of them spent their happiest ten minutes of the week.

Only a few doors down from the baths was a brothel, providing a different kind of service to the residents, and the whores kept him a chair on the sidewalk where he ate his lunch, supplemented by bootleg beer that they kept in a zipped-up bag, concealed from official eyes. They called themselves Greta and Jean and Claudette, as if they were movie actresses, and dressed in old flowery kimonos covered with pictures of waterfalls and cherry trees and Confucian philosophers, with virtually nothing on underneath. They sprawled indolently, indifferent to passersby stumbling over their meaty legs. Occasionally they would pull at the coattails of possible customers, but most of the time they soaked up the sun and gossiped and knitted shawls. The middle of the day was not their busy time.

Theo was their mascot, just as Genesis the Goat was the mascot for Jake’s Saloon across the street—dry at ground level but one of the Lower East’s most popular speakeasies down in the cavernous basement. Genesis had gilded horns and a collar encrusted with rhinestone gems and could do no wrong, wandering the local streets and wantonly stealing food from the pushcart vendors like a sacred cow in India, while Jake, his owner, puffed on a perfecto cigar and ruled as the king of Rivington Street, protected by the cops whom he paid handsomely for the privilege.

Theo walked tall in the sunshine, feeling the jingle of coins in his pocket. Good fortune had rained down upon them in the last weeks: a church for his mother and a job for him falling from a radiant sky, and Providence still had more gifts to bestow. On a Saturday in June, Frank announced at dinner that a little money had at last come through from the Bank of United States, enough for them to be able to move to new accommodations. He had already spoken to the landlord, who had offered them an apartment facing the street on the second floor. There would be more space and light, and they would be sharing a toilet with just one other family, who were known to be the cleanest in the building.

Elena was ecstatic. She jumped up from her chair, kissed Frank on both cheeks, and told him he was their guardian angel, and went off to say a prayer of thanks at the shrine in her bedroom.

“It really seems like your luck’s changed,” said Frank, smiling and raising his glass.

“You sound like my father,” said Theo, for whom luck was a dirty word. “But, yes, I’m happy and grateful too. You’ve been a good friend to us, Frank.”

“I owe it to your father. He helped me, so it’s only right that I should try and help you. He wasn’t all bad, you know.”

“Just toward the end,” said Theo with a wry smile. “And he had Alvah to contend with then, as well as the Depression, so I guess we should make allowances.”

Theo was surprised at his own magnanimity. He wouldn’t have been able to talk about his father with any such detachment a month ago, and now here he was, making allowances. It was amazing what a job and a little good fortune could do.

“Michael loved Alvah, even though he didn’t deserve it. And I guess now, looking back, that I was jealous of that,” Frank said thoughtfully. “Alvah was part of the dream he had—”

“Like me,” said Theo, interrupting.

“Yes, like you, although he hadn’t worked out your role in the way he had with Alvah. And so it hurt him when Alvah turned on him, hurt him more than I understood at the time,” Frank said, twirling his glass. It was almost as if he was talking to himself.

“Where is Alvah?”

“He got another job in the Garment District, paying more, probably. But I don’t know if he’ll last. He’s a powerful figure in the union now, and his employers won’t like that.”

“Is he a Communist? Dad said he was. Do you remember—at the end?”

“Maybe. I don’t see him, so I don’t know. But whatever he is, it’s not because he believes it, but because he thinks it’s the best way to get people to follow him. Alvah’s what Alvah cares about.”

“Yes, you’re right,” said Theo. “It’s funny—I used to want to find him and shoot him down like in the movies, but now I don’t know when I last really thought about him.”

“You’re growing up, becoming a man. You’ve built something here, something to be proud of.”

Theo smiled and was about to reply, but at that moment his mother came back into the room and Frank got up to go. “Move-in date’s in a week,” he said. “I’ll be here to help you.”

The new apartment was a vast improvement over the old one. Like day and night. No longer were they looking out into a foul-smelling, airless vault with the neighbors’ weird son gazing at them with his vacant stare from only a few feet away. Instead, the sunlight streamed through their open windows, and outside they heard not quarreling and caterwauling but the infinitely varied noises of the street: traffic, peddlers calling out their wares, shouts, snatches of song. Theo felt its energy and even at night, when all was quiet, he sensed the living pulse of the Lower East, breathing deep like a vast creature, readying itself for the day.

The Monday after they moved was Independence Day and, in the evening, Theo walked with his mother down Essex Street to Seward Park and watched the fireworks display. Catherine wheels fizzed on gigantic poles; Roman candles popped red, white, and blue stars; and rockets flew on golden wings over the tenements. Then, at the end, everyone held sparklers in their hands and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and a few wild young Italians fired revolvers into the sky.

On the way back, Theo felt an infectious joy. “Wasn’t it wonderful?” he said.

“Yes. But sad too,” Elena replied wistfully.

“Sad! Why?”

“Because it reminds me of my home when I was young. No country does fireworks like my country. On Independence Day, on the Virgin’s Day, on all the great saints’ days, we would have castles of fire and bulls bursting into fiery colors. The church bells would ring, and the saints would go through the town like on Mulberry Street, but not like that, because there were so many people there, more than you can imagine, and all of them singing hymns, praising the Lord.”

“You make it sound beautiful,” said Theo, moved by his mother’s description. “But you can’t be happy if you’re always looking back, always comparing what you have to what you don’t have. We’re here now; not there. Isn’t that enough?”

“Yes, of course it is,” said Elena, laughing. “I promise you I’m happy here with you. Happy in our new home. Happy that God has taken me back. I shan’t have much left to pray for if the Lord keeps on giving like he has.”

She stood on her tiptoes and kissed her son on the cheek. “I love you,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

Theo nodded, too filled up with emotion to be able to respond. And they walked on without saying anything more, a small lady in black and a young man towering over her, artificially slowing his pace and reducing his stride to match her smaller dainty steps.

At home, Theo couldn’t settle, so he went out wandering the streets. It was late now, but there were still drunken revelers about, determined to extract the maximum indulgence from the few hours left of the holiday. Theo felt uneasy, remembering the revolvers in Seward Park, and turned for home.

But then, coming around the corner of a street two blocks from his apartment, he stopped dead in his tracks. There, standing on the sidewalk only a few yards away, was a man he instantly recognized, but had never expected to see again. As Theo watched, Sir Andrew went up the steps into a tenement building and disappeared from view.

After waiting a moment, Theo followed. The door was still ajar where Sir Andrew had pushed it open, and Theo put his head around the side for a moment and looked into the hallway. The pale yellow-green flame of a small gaslight in the crumbling ceiling flickered in the draft, providing a dim light, but it was enough for Theo to see that there was no one there. Cautiously, he stepped inside and went over to the foot of the staircase that spiraled up around a central well, ascending into darkness. Up above, he could faintly hear the sound of voices, although he couldn’t make out what they were saying because they were too far away.

Theo thought of leaving, but he didn’t. His curiosity was too great, and he went up as far as the first bend in the stairs. Above his head, someone else was climbing, too, going up to the third floor, and Theo followed, stopping on the landing below. A corridor with a series of closed doors on either side opened up to his right, poorly lit like the hallway.

On the floor above, there was the sound of knocking and light streamed out into the stairwell.