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Theo could see his mother long before she saw him, a small figure dressed all in black standing out in the street, looking rapidly to right and left. Her dark eyes, which Theo had inherited, were weak and she needed thick glasses to read, but she would not wear them outside, whether through vanity or defiance, and distant objects were a blur.

“Run on ahead,” Theo’s father told him, pointing up the street. “She must be worried sick.”

Theo was a fast runner, but now his legs held him back. He had longed for his mother when his grandfather took him, but now he wanted to avoid her unrestrained emotion and the inevitable interrogation that would follow once they were back inside. He had no intention or indeed capacity to simply forget his adventure as his father had instructed, but he also had a deep wish to keep what had happened to himself, to hug the experience close and keep it a secret.

His father understood none of this. “What’s wrong with you?” he said impatiently. And when Theo didn’t respond, he took hold of his son’s hand and, quickening his pace, force-marched him along the sidewalk toward their apartment building. Theo stiffened even more: the physical sensation of being pulled along reminded him of how he had felt when his grandfather had taken him through the unfamiliar eastside streets earlier in the day, and he suddenly felt an intense, aching sense of loss that brought hot tears to his eyes.

Now Elena saw them. And with a cry she hurried down the street, catching Theo and enfolding him in her arms. He smelled her familiar scent—gardenia flowers and soap—and felt her warmth, and his legs gave way beneath him.

His parents were arguing. Lying on his bed, Theo could hear their voices in the next room through the half-open door. He listened, not moving, alarmed but also fascinated, because they never quarreled. In the abridged story Theo’s father often told of his life, the accidental meeting with his future wife in Penn Station in the cold winter of 1914 was the changing moment: the day that he had first felt that sense of manifest personal destiny that had never left him since.

Theo knew the story by heart. In the first chapter, his mother, the young Elena, had arrived in New York alone and exhausted and almost penniless, on the last leg of a journey that had begun in Guadalajara a week before. She had, written down, an address of an uncle by marriage whom she’d never met, and she had hoped against hope as the train wound its way through the green hills and valleys of this new alien country that he would be there to meet her, but instead there was no one. Just the hard black platform and a great bustle of people coming and going all around her. She was invisible, stranded beside her suitcase, which contained everything she owned in the world: three dresses; her missal, Bible, and rosary; a silver hairbrush; and several faded photographs of her murdered parents.

A porter took pity on her, or perhaps just wanted to move her out of the way, and carried her bag over to a stone bench, where she sat, bewildered by the cacophony all around her: chatter and loudspeaker announcements echoing off the mighty granite walls in a language that she found hard to understand. She had learned English at school in Mexico, but it had been badly taught, and she had not applied herself to her lessons as she should have done.

She was so small and the station was so grand and vast. She had never seen anything like the girth of the huge Corinthian columns rising so gracefully up to the arching glass-and-steel roof that let in the bright November sun in a constant play of light and shadow. It dumbfounded her, this cathedral with no God. Its grand impersonal immensity dried up what hope she had left, and she bowed her head and began to cry.

Which was how Michael found her. He was hurrying across the concourse to catch his train, and the crowd parted for a moment just as she looked up, catching his eye. In a flash, he took in her perfectly shaped oval face, ghostly pale beneath a pathetically small cloche hat, dented from travel, that had drooped over to the side of her head, revealing the unruly mass of her jet-black hair, which was escaping from its pins and beginning to fall down over her shoulders. Hair that matched her luminous dark eyes, wet with tears and wide with fear of the unknown.

He wanted to stop her pain. Needed to, as if it was his own. He could feel it—a band tightening across his chest as he pushed past the people in his way, deaf to their angry protests. And when he got to her, he instinctively went down on one knee to offer her his handkerchief, reducing himself to her height while he told her over and over again that everything was going to be all right and that she didn’t need to worry anymore. Until she finally stopped crying and began to laugh instead at the crazy hand signals he’d resorted to, to try to make her understand. And her smile was like sunlight emerging from behind clouds at the end of a rainstorm. Fresh with the promise of a new beginning.

Afterward, Michael called their meeting love at first sight, and within a month they were married and set up in an apartment of their own, impervious to the anger of his estranged parents sitting shiva for him in their sweatshop tenement over by the East River.

He said that he had been hit with a bolt of lightning that day in the station, and the electrical charge stayed with him, convincing him that he was lucky, that they were lucky, destined for some kind of golden greatness. In a stroke of supreme irony, he turned his back on the chosen people because he felt chosen himself. By whom, he couldn’t say. Not God, not Christ—it was a source of lasting sadness to Elena that her husband showed no interest in her religion. America, perhaps—Michael Sterling was not a religious man, but he had an unswerving faith in his adopted country.

They never argued, because they had no reason to argue. Michael deferred to his wife in the house, treating her like a queen, and she didn’t interfere in any way with his business other than to praise him for his success.

Sometimes he called her “his little flower,” referring to her beauty but also to her fragility. Something had broken inside Elena when she left Mexico. Concealed behind a door in the hacienda, she had heard her parents cry out and die, and in New York she couldn’t truly heal. The migraines she regularly endured— las jaquecas , as she called them—were a symptom of her broken state, and Theo’s difficult birth had exacerbated her ill health. She lacked energy and rarely went out except to the Spanish church by Gramercy Park, and this suited her husband well. He had no reason to be jealous and he felt she was safe at home, surrounded by the best that money could buy: a Kelvinator refrigerator, a Westinghouse electric range, and stylish French furniture from Bloomingdale’s.

When he came home from work bearing roses or other small presents, she would take his coat and listen to the story of his day, praising and sympathizing with small clucking noises where appropriate. And later she would cook him wonderful Mexican meals with ingredients purchased at the local market that didn’t include pork or shellfish, and agree with him when he praised the government’s laissez-faire economic policies and heaped invective on the Communist Party and the unions that wanted to stop hardworking citizens like Michael Sterling from getting ahead. Elena hated the Communists even more than her husband. The godless bandits who had killed her parents had called themselves Socialists, which amounted to the same thing—a flag of left-wing convenience to justify their reign of terror.

Oftentimes, during these conversations, she would turn to Theo sitting between his parents at the table and tell him to listen closely so that he wouldn’t miss the pearls of wisdom his father was delivering. And Michael would glow, preening in the candlelight like a well-fed peacock.

They were perfectly happy with each other, but their happiness was built on a fundamental lack of connection between them. Michael knew nothing of his wife’s alternately vengeful and merciful God, who was as real to her as his factory was to him, and she had no idea of the struggle that he had gone through to climb from poverty to comparative wealth, stepping down hard on the heads and shoulders of his people to get there.

Elena had never visited her husband’s factory, and he had been to her church only once—for Theo’s baptism, when they had stood together, proud parents by the font, as Father Juan named the baby, with Michael sure that he was Theodore for the great president who perfectly embodied the unbridled energy of his adopted country, and Elena equally convinced that her son was named after the semi-mythical Saint Theodore of Amasea, who slew a dragon and was martyred in a furnace for his beliefs somewhere near the Black Sea early in the fourth century. The saint’s icon, purchased through a mail-order catalog, had pride of place in the elaborate shrine Elena kept in her room, lit by sweet-smelling votive candles, and he was as real to her as the twenty-sixth president was to her husband.

Michael knew no more than a few words of Spanish—yes, no, and a few mispronounced endearments—and she had never heard him speak Yiddish. And their son did not bridge the gap between them. Instead, he shuttled backward and forward between their two separate worlds, speaking Spanish with his mother and English with his father, listening to her endless stories of Mexico and talking baseball and Babe Ruth with his father, who had promised to take him to Yankee Stadium to see the great man on the day Theo turned thirteen and became a man (Michael didn’t let on, but he had in mind a kind of all-American secular bar mitzvah).

Michael and Elena lived in a perfectly separated alignment like two heavenly bodies orbiting each other with an equal gravity. They loved each other with a happy superficiality, and so when conflict arose, as it had now, they lacked the tools to find resolution and instead crashed against each other until they were spent.

“You do this. You. It is your fault. You see him standing there night after night and you do nothing. Nada!” Elena shouted, her voice shrill and angry and her always heavily accented English becoming confused as it often did when she was excited.

“I didn’t know he would do that. How could I?” Michael was on the defensive, but Theo could also sense exasperation in his voice.

“It’s your job. You are the father.”

“I brought Theo back, didn’t I?”

“No, you did nothing. Nada!” she spat out the word again. “It was San Antonio who brought him back. I knelt and I prayed and I begged and at last the holy saint heard me. Praise be to God! But next time we won’t be so lucky. Next time, that old devil will take him away. I know it. To Chicago or Buffalo: somewhere you won’t find him. And I will never see my son again. ?Nunca jamás! ” She was crying now, almost hysterical.

“He won’t. He can’t. He’s got no money. You should see the way they are living over there. Worse than when I was a boy.”

“You see—you are thinking of them, of being the good son again. Your heart is with them. I know it.”

“No, Elena, it isn’t. You know it isn’t. They are dead to me and I to them. You and Theo are my family. All that I need. You know that.”

There was silence then, just the sound of crying, and looking through the half-open door of his bedroom, Theo could see his father holding his mother by the shoulders as she shook, her body convulsed with sobs.

She seemed to be clinging to her husband but also beating against his chest with her fists.

The spectacle frightened Theo, and he backed away into his room.

And when his mother came in later and stood by the bed, he pretended to be asleep, ignoring her soft repetitions of his name until she gave up and left.

But afterward, he regretted letting her go.

He felt alone and panicky.

Was she right? Would his grandfather come again and take him away, for good this time? To Chicago and Al Capone—the two were forever associated in Theo’s mind since reading in his father’s newspaper about the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre back in February.

The photograph of the dead men lying with their limbs splayed out at odd angles beneath the bullet-ridden brick wall of the anonymous garage had given him nightmares for days afterward.

He tried not to think about Chicago; instead, he imagined himself Robinson Crusoe counting his stores or King Arthur naming his knights, going around the Round Table once, twice, three times.

But it was useless.

He couldn’t sleep.

The pale moon shone balefully through a gap in the drapes and the mahogany clock ticked away the hours on the mantel, until finally he fell into a half-waking dream in which he was back on the street to which his grandfather had taken him.

Just as before, the shaven-headed children were there, skipping and singing the same song in their strange language, and his grandfather was pulling him along the sidewalk past the beggars and peddlers to where the old woman, Rachel, was waiting with her perambulator.

“Buy, buy, hot and fresh!” she cried, but this time Theo’s grandfather didn’t step around her.

Instead, he stopped, pushing Theo forward as she pulled back the checkered cloth with her bony hand, and he found himself staring down not at black-eyed beans but at himself, trussed up and unable to escape.

On Sunday, Theo went with his mother—just as he always did—to the Spanish church behind Gramercy Park.

Elena held his hand tight, darting her head from side to side as they walked down Park Avenue.

Dressed in black from head to toe and wearing a mantilla veil, she stood out from the bejeweled ladies in ermine coats and high-heeled shoes, sauntering past the glamorous shopfronts with their beaux, but she had no eyes for them, only for the tall prophet-like figure of whom she was so terrified.

But there was no sign of him—just as there hadn’t been in the three days since he took Theo.

The priest, Father Juan Carlos, was Elena’s best friend in New York—not that she would ever have thought of him in that way.

He was her father confessor and spiritual guide, the appointed intermediary between her and her God.

But he also understood and liked her, and his clerical robes enabled her to relax and speak her mind when she was with him in a way that she never could with her husband.

In his early forties, he had a lean, ascetic face topped with a mass of unruly black curly hair that Elena would secretly have liked to cut and comb: a wish that she would never have admitted to anyone, least of all in the confessional.

If it hadn’t been for his lopsided nose, broken in a schoolboy fight, he would have been handsome.

He had beautiful hands, and Theo remembered how when he was young, the priest used to kneel down beside him after Mass with his cassock spread out across the floor like a pool of black water and interlace his long, tapering fingers to become the church, before he raised the index fingers in an arch for the steeple and opened his thumbs to reveal the people inside.

The simple rhyme had delighted Theo, and he had always responded by clapping his own hands and asking the priest to “do it again; do it again” until his mother intervened and told him that Father Juan had more important things to do than play games with children who should mind their manners.

Theo had gotten older and the games had stopped, but not just for that reason.

In the last two years, Father Juan had lost his sunny disposition, becoming careworn and preoccupied.

His infectious laugh was rarely heard, and his hazel eyes had a haunted look, as if they were forever straining to catch a glimpse of a far-off place that remained always just out of sight.

In the presbytery where the priest and the most loyal members of his congregation drank thick black coffee out of tiny porcelain cups after Mass and munched sweet biscuits baked lovingly by Elena in her Westinghouse oven, they talked of nothing but Mexico.

They were all exiles in a foreign land, and America only interested them to the extent of its government’s rumored complicity in the brutal war being fought in the Jalisco highlands between the Mexican army and the Cristeros, the Catholic peasantry who had risen up in rebellion against President Calles’s ruthless attempt to suppress their religion and secularize the country.

In a repeat of the violence of 1914 when Elena had lost her parents, fleeing across the open fields from the monstrous spectacle of her burning home, Catholics were being murdered and driven out of the country, and Father Juan regularly hosted refugees as they passed through New York.

Many had harrowing stories to tell, and the parishioners of the Church of the Sacred Heart, desperate for news from home, flocked to hear them.

This Sunday, there was an even larger turnout in the church than usual.

A well-known Catholic businessman had recently arrived from Mexico City and was touring the United States on behalf of the Knights of Columbus, raising money for the rebels.

Father Juan introduced him as Don Andrés, and he spoke to the congregation at the end of Mass from the lectern at the side of the altar, speaking Spanish fluently but with a trace of a foreign accent.

Don Andrés was older than Theo’s father—he had to be, because he was silver-haired with a creased, weather-beaten face, giving him the look of someone who had lived in many different climates, and yet to Theo he seemed strong, with a wiry athletic build and an air of relaxed confidence.

He looked nothing like anyone whom Theo had ever seen at the church—tall, pale, blue-eyed, and immaculately dressed in a morning suit, which was obviously tailor-made because it fit him so perfectly.

Afterward, when looking back on this first meeting, Theo remembered that his strongest first impression of Don Andrés was that he looked like a man used to getting his own way.

He spoke well—he knew how to hold his audience’s attention. He told them that Mexico had become the belly of the beast, that churches were being used as stables or even makeshift cinemas, that holy statues were used for target practice and altars for dining tables. Nothing was sacred, not even the lives of the priests.

“Have any of you heard of Father Miguel Pro?” Don Andrés asked, looking out at the congregation.

Here and there, a few people began raising their hands, and Theo felt a rising tension in the church, running like an electrical charge through the packed pews, reaching his mother. She said nothing, but he could see how she had become rigid and was twisting her hands in her lap. The compulsive movement frightened him and he put his hand on her elbow to stop her, but she pulled her arm away.

“Good,” said Don Andrés, nodding his head. “Well, then you will know he was a righteous man, possessed of an extraordinary courage. For two years he lived in hiding in Mexico City, visiting the houses of the faithful, disguised in workmen’s overalls or beggars’ rags, to marry and baptize, give communion and hear confessions. Sometimes, he even dressed as a policeman and slipped unnoticed into the prisons to bring the blessed sacrament to those condemned to die. Priests like Father Miguel are keeping the faith alive in Mexico, and that is why President Calles hates them so much.

“Many times, Father Miguel’s superiors advised him to flee, but always he refused, and the Virgin of Guadalupe watched over him. But in the end even she could not protect him, and he was arrested.”

He paused, and a woman in the front pew, clearly agitated, stood up, holding out her shaking hands: “What happened to him, senor? Please—for the love of God—tell us what happened!”

“The federales shot him like a dog in the prison yard. He refused the blindfold; he showed no fear. He blessed his executioners before they raised their rifles, holding his crucifix in one hand and his rosary in the other, and at the last moment, just before they fired, he shouted: ‘ Viva Cristo Rey .’”

As one, the congregation leaped to their feet and repeated the rallying cry of the Cristero rebels, looking up past Don Andrés to the sanctuary where their life-size Savior hung bleeding on a huge wooden cross suspended on two iron chains from the chancel ceiling. Theo had always found the cross terrifying, but he had succeeded over the years in shutting it out of his consciousness by refusing to lift his gaze to its level. Now, involuntarily, he looked up at the crucified Christ and felt a jolt of fear and revulsion, intensified by the fierce grip with which his mother had suddenly taken hold of his hand as she pulled him up to stand beside her. Turning toward her, Theo was horrified to see that she was openly crying, with thick sobs shaking her small body.

Slowly the congregation resumed their seats, waiting for Don Andrés to continue. But instead of doing that, he bent down and opened a small black doctor’s bag that was on the ground near his feet. Theo hadn’t noticed it until now, and he was surprised by how scuffed and worn it was—a contrast to its owner’s elegant clothes. Carefully, Don Andrés took out a brown manila folder from which he extracted a photograph.

“President Calles had copies of this made to frighten the faithful. But now he wants to get them back because he’s realized that the picture of Father Miguel inspires our soldiers and makes them fight harder,” said Don Andrés, coming out from behind the lectern and walking into the central aisle of the nave.

There were gasps as he passed slowly up and down between the pews, holding up the photograph for everyone to see. Turning, almost against his will, Theo saw a thin young man in a cheap suit standing in front of a wooden fence with his arms stretched out on either side, resting on two bullet-riddled dummy figures that had clearly been used for target practice by trainee firing squads. Like a clothed Christ, Theo thought.

At that moment, death seemed more real to Theo than it had ever been before. The certainty of it was monstrous and yet inescapable, and he hated his mother and this stranger for making it so tangible. He longed to be gone, to be out in the fresh morning air away from the cloying smell of incense and cut flowers, but he was trapped in the pew with no possibility of escape.

And Don Andrés had not finished. Back at the lectern, he reached down into his bag again and held up a dirty piece of cloth. “They used this at the morgue to clean Father Miguel’s body, and afterward an attendant gave it to one of the faithful. This is Father Miguel’s blood,” he said, raising his voice for the first time and pointing to several dark reddish-brown stains on the material. “Blood shed for the church, shed for Cristo Rey. Martyr’s blood!”