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The experiences of those tumultuous few days that had begun with the walk across the city with his grandfather and ended in Gramercy Park with his mother had a profound effect on Theo, but not one that was visible to the outside world, because he did not speak about them to anyone. Beneath the cloak of silence, however, his reactions to the events in the tenement and those at the presbytery were very different. He longed to forget the intense connection he’d witnessed between his mother and Don Andrés, and the Englishman’s words of admiration he’d overheard behind the door, but however hard he tried to bury his memory of what had happened, it still kept creeping back into his consciousness, filling him with a clinging sense of unease that felt like shame.

It made no sense because he had done nothing wrong. His only cause for guilt was that he had broken his promise to his father to forget his grandparents. Just as hard as he worked to consign Don Andrés to oblivion, he hoarded his memories of the Lower East Side, and the effort caused him not even a twinge of remorse. In bed at night, he took them out and examined them one by one, as if they were treasures: the hot, stuffy room; the photographs of another country in the old, battered book; his grandmother’s hands on his head. Touching his own hand under the coverlet, he felt the tight clasp of his grandfather’s calloused palm, and closing his eyes, he recalled the power of the old man reaching deep down into him, as if in search of his soul.

It was not necessarily a power of good. He understood that, taking just as much care to remember what his father had told him about the reasons he had become estranged from his parents. That, too, was part of his whole experience of that day, which had been his grandfather’s gift to him. “ Perhaps you will never see us again. But you will remember. What is inside your head—that no one can change. ” In the darkness, he whispered the old man’s words aloud, committing them to memory, because a sixth sense told him that they were true and that his grandparents had gone from his life.

Weeks passed, and however hard he looked, peering into the shadows, there were no tall figures waiting in the evening twilight at the end of the street. He had no way of knowing then or later whether his father had taken steps to keep his grandfather away, or whether such measures had proved unnecessary because the old man had chosen not to return, having accomplished in that one day all that he had set out to do, leaving the seed he had planted to germinate in his grandson’s head and heart.

There were a thousand questions Theo would have liked to ask his father about the Jewish world he’d glimpsed that day, but the promise he’d made in Washington Square held him back, and he avoided the subject with his mother, too, because he knew how much it upset her. He was guarded with her now, watching his words. The secret of what he had heard at the presbytery door weighed upon him, keeping them apart.

Elena, too, said nothing more to her son about el secuestro , the kidnapping—her word for what had happened—hoping that he would forget. But with her husband it was different. She was insistent that they should move. Only that way could she regain her peace of mind, she told him—with no trail left behind for his crazy, wicked father to follow.

Michael liked their home, but he didn’t like his wife’s distress. The tears in her eyes were irreconcilable with happiness and success—his vision of where they should be. And so he set to work and found a bigger apartment close to Union Square, this time on the ground floor with a patch of garden at the back. The rent was almost twice as much as before, but it was worth it to see the immediate change in Elena.

She loved the garden. It didn’t matter that it was practically the size of a postage stamp and that the high roofs of adjacent buildings meant that it got only a few hours of sunshine each day. The garden’s best feature was an old apple tree with a twisted, gnarled trunk that had survived against the odds amid the urban sprawl, and there was enough shade beneath it for two small chairs and a table where Elena could sit and drink coffee, overlooked by innumerable envious neighbors. To her delight, a pair of Baltimore orioles soon took up residence in the high branches, and she would hush Theo so they could listen to the male’s flutelike song and watch for the flash of its bright-orange markings as it flew out to forage in the bird feeder that she kept stocked with cherries and grapes.

As the summer went on and fledglings were born, Elena became terrified that a predator would find the nest, and Theo would often catch his mother looking anxiously up into the canopy of the tree. Sometimes, catching sight of danger through the open window, she would run out into the garden, waving a brush or even on one occasion a frying pan to frighten away a squirrel or one of the mangy neighborhood cats that prowled the roofs and often kept Theo awake at night with their wild caterwauling.

The fragility of the birds and their young unsettled Theo, although it was really his mother’s love for them that he found upsetting. He did not want her to be hurt, but at the same time he resented that she should allow herself to become so vulnerable. As the months passed, he longed for the ordeal of her anxiety to be over, and it was a relief when one morning she told him they were gone.

But he was unprepared for her happiness. “I saw them fly away,” she told him. “I woke up early. I don’t know why. And went to the window and it was as if they had waited for me.” She smiled, taking his hand. “And in three weeks, perhaps less, they will be home.”

“Home?”

“Yes, in Mexico. I loved the orioles when I was a girl. They came in September—I thought it was always on the same day, although of course it wasn’t. The air would be suddenly filled with their song, and I’d lie on the ground out in my father’s coffee plantation under the Inga trees, looking up to listen. I thought it was the music of heaven.”

She was silent, and Theo sensed his mother’s yearning for her homeland. “Can we go there?” he asked, embracing the sudden unexpected connection he’d felt spring up between them. “For a visit?”

“ Tal vez —perhaps,” she said, but her eyes were full of tears, and he knew she did not believe she would ever return.

After the orioles left, Theo started at a new school. It was the final installment of Elena’s determination to leave their old life behind, but unlike the house move, it was not a success, or at least not initially.

Father Juan and Don Andrés had been quite right that Theo was clever, but it wasn’t an attribute that won him any friends among his new classmates, who had known each other through grade school and were suspicious of all new arrivals, particularly when they spoke fluent Spanish and knew all the battles of the Revolutionary War and their dates.

They asked him about his weird name, and when he told them that he’d been called it after Theodore Roosevelt, they agreed he was putting on airs and needed taking down a peg or two.

And it got worse in class when Theo put his hand up to answer the teachers’ questions.

“Correct! It seems the Good Lord has chosen to cast a pearl among the swine this semester,” said Monsieur Perrin, the French teacher known throughout the school, including to the other masters, as Pompous Perrin or Old Pompo. The nickname had been cruelly bestowed on him by the class of 1912 and had stuck ever since. Perrin knew about it and was fully aware that the boys were laughing at him when his back was turned, and Theo’s cleverness presented a rare opportunity to get back at his tormentors.

His method was simple but effective. He would ask the stupidest of his students to answer difficult questions, usually involving irregular verbs, and then, after making a great show of sighing and shaking his head, would turn wearily to Theo at the front of the class. “Please put us out of our misery, Mr. Sterling. Our friend, Mr. Binns, wouldn’t know the answer even if it was staring at him on a plate. Like the head of John the Baptist!”

It didn’t matter that Theo had done nothing to cause this serial humiliation of his classmates; he still got the blame for it. Expertly fired spitballs hit his cheeks or neck as soon as the teacher’s back was turned, and glue was smeared on his chair. But the class’s chief bullies, cousins called Billy and Paddy O’Donnell, who excelled on the football field but at little else, decided that such petty revenge was not enough.

On the chosen day, they lay in wait for Theo at the lunch break—the best opportunity for attack, as all the teachers were eating too—and set upon him as he went to his locker to get his books.

Without warning, Theo felt himself violently pushed from behind and fell over. The older O’Donnell, Billy, aimed a kick at Theo’s side but only half connected as his foot scuffed over the books that had fallen out of Theo’s hand. Acting on instinct, Theo rolled away and got up. He felt a hand claw at his shoulder and heard the material of his jacket ripping as he took off down the corridor and out onto the playground.

His pursuers were right behind him as he spun his head desperately from side to side, searching for an escape route. The school gate was locked, and everywhere there were walls, doors, more walls. Except back the way he had come. He stopped and turned, letting the boys get close, and then at the last moment sidestepped, evading their outstretched flailing arms as he ran back through the main hall, down the steps, and out onto the athletic ground.

He crossed the cinder track that encircled the playing fields and then headed out onto the muddy grass, where he twice almost slipped. Now he could hear only one of the boys behind him and, looking to his right, he saw that Billy was running across to the far gate behind the goalposts to cut him off. He was going to get there first, and then Theo would be trapped. Billy saw the look of panic on Theo’s face and laughed, drawing his finger across his throat with a theatrical gesture.

Theo veered to his left, running toward the athletic pavilion, a whitewashed wooden structure with a black-creosoted, pitched roof where equipment was kept and the scorer turned the numbers on match days. But this was no refuge. The pavilion had windows but no door, and inside there would be no one to help him. What a fool he’d been to run to the loneliest place on the school grounds, he thought hopelessly as he reached the other side of the grass with his heart hammering inside his chest and sweat pouring down his face.

His side hurt from where he had been kicked, and he feared what further blows would feel like, even as he also shook with impotent rage against the two bullies. As he approached the pavilion, he thought the word please over and over again, as if he were shouting it into his own inner ears, praying for a miracle.

And then one happened. A voice close by said: “Mind where you’re going, son. You’ll hit a wall if you’re not careful.”

Theo stopped in his tracks. There, standing in front of him in the doorway of the pavilion, where just now there had been nobody, was Mr. Eames, the athletics director, dressed in a tweed jacket with colored tie, plaid pants with plus fours, and a pair of brightly shined two-toned shoes. This was his standard getup, so that he permanently looked as if he were about to play golf, even though that was not a sport offered by Saint Peter’s and Mr. Eames had never been seen in the company of a niblick or a mashie.

“Not so fast. You two come here,” said Mr. Eames. He wasn’t looking at Theo anymore but over his shoulder to where Billy and Paddy had skidded to a breathless halt in the middle of the cinder track and were about to turn tail.

“So what happened?” he asked, switching his attention back to Theo, who dropped his eyes and didn’t answer. The two bullies deserved a whipping, but that didn’t mean he was going to sneak to a teacher to get them their just deserts.

“You’re new, aren’t you?”

Theo nodded.

“And this was going to be some sort of initiation rite, is that it?” he asked, turning back to the cousins. “A good old Irish welcome to Saint Peter’s, administered inside my hut? Far from prying eyes, so that no one would be the wiser?”

They were silent, too, shifting from one foot to the other.

“Well, we’ll see about that,” he said. “You—what’s your name?”

“Theo—Theo Sterling.”

“All right, Theo Sterling, you go and sit on that bench over there,” he said, pointing to a dilapidated set of bleachers on the other side of the sports field. “I’ll be wanting to have a talk with you once I’ve finished with these two.”

Theo did as he was told. And five minutes later Mr. Eames emerged from the pavilion with Billy and Paddy in tow and walked over to where he was sitting.

“Say your piece,” Mr. Eames ordered, looking at them sternly.

Solemnly, with their eyes fixed on the ground, each one mumbled that he was sorry and then walked quickly away.

Mr. Eames sat down beside Theo and lit a cigarette, looking out across the track at their retreating backs. “They won’t bother you again,” he said, without offering any explanation of what he had done to them inside the pavilion to secure that result.

Theo nodded. His heart was still racing, and he was finding it hard to swallow. He bit his lip, frightened that he might lose control of his emotions and start to cry. He realized that he terribly didn’t want that to happen in front of Mr. Eames.

The athletics director glanced over at Theo and pulled out a small silver flask from an invisible inside pocket of his jacket, unscrewed the top, and handed it to Theo, who looked down at it uncertainly.

“Go on, drink,” said Mr. Eames. “It won’t do you any harm and it might make you feel better.”

Theo drank and snorted and swallowed some of the golden liquid, and after the initial shock to his system, it did make him feel better—warm and giddy, which was certainly an improvement over what had gone before.

“Useful in an emergency, but best kept on the q.t.,” said Mr. Eames, taking back the flask and restoring it to its hiding place. “Need-to-know basis, if you know what I mean?”

Theo nodded, even though he wasn’t quite sure he did.

“Good,” said Mr. Eames, flicking away his cigarette onto the cinder track, where it lay, sending up a straight line of blue smoke. “Now, Theo, tell me—do you know what you are?”

Theo shook his head, feeling even more confused.

“Well, I’ll tell you then. You’re a runner. That’s what. Those two knuckleheads are a disgrace to the Emerald Isle, but they’re not bad footballers, and if you can outrun them in those shoes”—he glanced down with a shake of his head at Theo’s clunky footwear—“then I’d say you’ve got the gift. What you do with it, of course, is another matter entirely. But if you’re prepared to work, I think I can make something of you. So what do you say?”

Theo nodded. At that moment, he would have agreed to almost anything Mr. Eames proposed, but the idea of making something of himself was exciting. Better that than becoming a good Catholic or a successful American or the other prepackaged destinies his parents seemed to have in mind for him. And, besides, he liked running. When he ran, he felt alive.

“Good,” said Mr. Eames. “Well, that’s settled then. You’ll start tomorrow at three o’clock. Don’t be late.”

The athletics director was as good as his word. From that day on, the bullying stopped. Theo’s enemies did not become his friends, and his classmates continued to regard him with suspicion, but he was left alone, and for Theo that was enough. As an only child, he was used to his own company, and he soon came to love the running that he practiced on the cinder track every day after school.

Mr. Eames was a good coach. His flamboyant dress belied a methodical approach to his work, which began on the first afternoon with an unexpected question.

“Are you going to run fast or long?” he asked. They were inside the pavilion and Mr. Eames had his back to Theo, rummaging among a pile of equipment.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. Dig down inside yourself and think. Sprinters run on nerves; distance athletes run on heart and guts, and on brains too. They have to measure their opponents, watching for their moment. Not too soon, not too late ...”

“Distance,” said Theo. “Definitely distance.”

“Good,” said Eames, smiling. “That’s the answer I was looking for.” He rummaged some more and turned around, holding out an old pair of running shoes, each with three spikes on the bottom.

“What are they for?” asked Theo doubtfully, pointing at the spikes.

“Traction, speed—you can’t run without them. If you were going short, there’d be more of them, because sprinters run on their toes. But for distance, you need a heel. These aren’t perfect, but they’ll do for now. Try them on.”

To Theo’s surprise, they fit beautifully, and by the end of the afternoon he had fallen in love with his new shoes. The spikes, or pins as Mr. Eames called them, gripped the old cinder track, propelling him forward, and the extraordinary lightness of the shoes allowed his feet to fly.

“Breathe with each stride; measure the exhale and the inhale so each part of your body is in tune with the rest. Breathe deeper so you can feel your diaphragm rising and falling. Up and down, in and out—whichever way you sense it. Breathing is the key, and you mustn’t ever forget it.” The instructions that Mr. Eames gave him made Theo think about his body and mind in new ways; and as he ran, he felt a vast sense of potential welling up inside him. As if he could do anything.

On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the other school athletes trained, and on alternate Saturdays, there were meets where they competed against other teams in the city’s Catholic League.

These other boys were older than Theo, but there was none of the petty jealousy that he had encountered in the classroom. They were united by a shared passion for their chosen sport and a fierce loyalty to Mr. Eames, and they welcomed the addition of a talented distance runner who increased the team’s chances of success.

On match days Mr. Eames drove the school coach, known to the boys as the battle bus , a rectangular blue vehicle with a flat roof that looked as if it dated back to the first years of the internal combustion engine. It had a sign on the side that read St Pe e ’s —the result of some forgotten wit having painted out the t and the r —and it wheezed and chugged as it rolled across the city with Mr. Eames at the wheel. But it never broke down, and inside it, bouncing up and down with his companions on the extraordinarily uncomfortable seats in which the springs were just below the leather, Theo tasted his first experience of true happiness. He was part of a team, united in doing something they loved, and striving to fulfill their potential.

In competition he learned patience: the art of biding time, watching and waiting for the right moment to take the lead. At first this had made no sense to Theo. “If I’m at the front, then surely I can leave the others behind,” he said.

“Set the pace, control the race? Is that the idea?” his coach countered.

Theo nodded.