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Eames laughed. “I wish it was as simple as that,” he said. “But distance running’s about using your brain as well as your legs. I told you that before. It’s the hounds that control the race, not the hare. The front-runner cuts the wind for everyone behind him: on average it takes eight percent more energy to lead than to follow. And staying back means you can see when it’s the right time to make your move. It’s about seizing the moment but also knowing when the moment’s right.”

Theo listened and he began to win. He watched his opponents and began to develop a sixth sense about their strengths and weaknesses. And his own too. In some races it came down to who was prepared to endure more pain and who believed in themselves the most. It was a voyage of self-discovery in which Theo forged an inner strength that was to stand him in good stead in the hard years to come.

He was happy, unexpectedly happy, and the only dampener on his enthusiasm was that his parents weren’t involved in his success, although this was his own doing. Elena had been enthusiastic about the school and had been eager to attend an evening for new parents and pupils held in the main hall in the second week of the semester. She arrived early, wearing her best dress and a green silk hat adorned with a silver floral brooch that she had bought specially for the occasion, and insisted on sitting in the front row, from where she put up her hand to ask the headmaster a series of questions about the religious-instruction curriculum while Theo squirmed in embarrassment beside her.

After his experience with the O’Donnell boys, Theo’s overriding concern was to avoid anything that would draw attention to himself. It didn’t matter that his classmates weren’t present and that the headmaster seemed happy to answer his mother’s questions. He still worried that other parents would talk about the small woman with the funny accent who wouldn’t stop asking ungrammatical questions about Jesus, and that this would provide a spark for the classroom persecution to begin again.

Afterward, he said nothing to his mother but vowed to himself that he would do everything in his power to keep her away from the school henceforward. And so, when the race meets began, he said nothing about them to her or to his father.

It hurt him that other parents turned out to support their children and that his weren’t there, but he found a strange pleasure in the pain. The constraint that he’d felt with his mother ever since the encounter with Sir Andrew in the presbytery persisted, and he blamed both his parents for shutting his grandparents out of his life, even though he knew that it was his iron-willed grandfather who had begun that estrangement.

He was determined to keep the running for himself. It satisfied the need he had begun to feel for a life separate from his parents, who seemed to see him as an adjunct to themselves rather than as a person with an identity in his own right. He told himself that his mother could not relate to him outside the bounds of the claustrophobic Mexican world that she inhabited with her fellow exiles in Gramercy Park, and he knew for a fact that his father saw the school as nothing more than an irrelevant interlude needing to be filled in before Theo was old enough to join him at the factory and fulfill the family destiny that Michael had had mapped out for his son since the day he was born.

Theo was determined not to allow either of his parents to dent his new, hard-earned sense of self-worth and, as the weeks passed, he developed a growing affection for Coach Eames, who cared passionately about the success of his athletes but without seeming to want anything from them in return, other than their industry and commitment.

On a Tuesday at the end of October, there was a different kind of athletic event. Mr. Eames drove the battle bus uptown past Central Park and out into the hills beyond Harlem, where the team dismounted into a world of Gothic towers and crenellations constructed in a dazzling mix of gray schist rock and brilliant white terra-cotta.

Welcome to The City College of New York , proclaimed a sign at the entrance gate. “And it means welcome,” said Mr. Eames enthusiastically. “Welcome to Black boys and to Jewish boys—and girls, too, before long, if what I hear coming down the grapevine proves correct. This’ll be a different kind of challenge for you all today, believe me.”

“What kind of challenge?” asked Theo, running to catch up with his teammates after he had dawdled too long, gazing up at the crazy panoply of gargoyles, grotesques, and florals that seemed to cover every inch of the soaring facade.

“The boys you’ll be up against today know how to run,” said Mr. Eames with a grin. “You’ll see.”

The meet was in a stadium across the road from the campus—an echoing mausoleum full of empty seats rising in tiers up toward an overcast sky. A banner at the finish line was emblazoned with Labor Sports Union of America , and before the events began, there was a call for silence and those who were wearing hats took them off, and everyone except the boys from Saint Peter’s sang a song that sounded like a hymn but didn’t mention God.

“Arise, you prisoners of starvation! Arise you wretched of the earth.” Looking over at his coach, Theo was surprised to see him singing the words with a rare fervor at odds with his usual detachment.

“What’s the song?” Theo asked his teammates, but none of them seemed to know, and it was only years later when he heard the song being sung by strikers outside his father’s factory that he discovered it was “The Internationale.”

Before the 1,500 meters race, Coach Eames came over as he usually did to check Theo’s spikes. But he wasn’t alone. There was an older man beside him. He had a leathery face with the skin stretched tight over the bones and a pencil-thin silver mustache, and he looked Theo over from head to foot with cool gray eyes, as if taking inventory.

“This is Mr. Booker, Theo,” said Coach Eames. He sounded nervous, Theo thought with surprise. He’d always seemed so self-contained and sure of himself, and the change made Theo look at the stranger with curiosity as he put out his hand to greet him.

Booker ignored it. “You say he’s fast,” he said to Coach Eames. “But how fast? That’s the question. Is he faster than Ledley over there?”

“Maybe,” said Eames. “Maybe not—he’s just starting out. But he’s got the gift, Charlie. I know that much. He’s the first one with it that I’ve seen at Saint Pete’s since I started working there, and that’s a good four years now.”

“High praise indeed!” said the old man, looking unconvinced. “Do you believe in God, son?” he asked, speaking to Theo for the first time.

“Yes, I think so, sir,” Theo stammered, taken aback by the unexpected question.

“You don’t sound too sure,” said Booker with a harsh laugh. “But don’t worry. I’m no God-fearing man either. If anyone’s up there, I reckon he’s washed his hands of us or forgotten we exist, which amounts to the same thing.”

He paused, looking Theo up and down as if waiting for a response. But Theo said nothing. He felt as if the old man was probing him for weakness, and he was determined to give nothing away.

“You’re wondering why I’m asking, aren’t you, son?” Booker said, keeping his eyes fixed on Theo.

Theo nodded. It was exactly what he was wondering.

“Well, I’ll tell you. You see that boy over there?” The old man pointed to a tall Black boy two lanes to the right, who was kneeling on the track, although whether in prayer or readiness for the race Theo couldn’t tell. “That’s Ledley Clay, and he’s a true believer. Do you know what that means?”

Theo shook his head, confused. The old man was strange—not like anyone he’d ever met before.

“It means that when he runs, he feels the power of the Almighty in his legs and his arms—hell, in his goddamn balls, too, probably, pushing him down the track like it’s his own personal Henry Ford Model T combustion engine. And that makes him nigh on unstoppable. Do you think you can compete with that, son? With that Jesus charge?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said Theo, feeling overwhelmed by the old man’s torrent of blasphemous phrases. And then realizing he’d given the wrong answer, he quickly added as Booker was turning away: “But I’m going to try, sir. I’m going to give it all I’ve got.”

Booker kept walking, and Theo didn’t know if he’d heard him or not. He hoped he had, because at that moment there was nothing in the world Theo wanted more than to impress the cantankerous old man.

Theo ran harder and faster that race than he had ever run before, but it wasn’t enough.

Clay took the lead from the starting gun, and with an apparently effortless stride, he had soon left all his competitors except Theo behind. After each circuit of the track, he was farther ahead, but Theo refused to give in, digging down deep through searing pain into some essential part of himself where he could find the strength not to surrender. For a few minutes, it worked. He even seemed to be reeling Clay in, and at the turn he caught him looking back over his shoulder, measuring the distance between them. Theo interpreted this as a sign of weakness and drove himself forward until suddenly his legs buckled and it was all he could do to stop himself from falling. For the first time he had come up against the end of himself, and hot tears started in his eyes as Clay faded from view into a blur up ahead, and he was reduced to jogging the rest of the race.

But finish it he did, and it was only then that he heard the cheering and felt Coach Eames’s arm around his shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I tried. I tried, but—” And then he broke off because there were no words to describe what had happened at that moment when he’d reached his breaking point.

“You tried your best,” said Eames. “Just like you said you would. And it was almost enough. Clay was winded, too, and if you’d got to him then, it might have been different. Even old Book had to admit that. And next time, if you work hard, you’re going to win. I know you will. I’m proud of you, Theo,” he told him, squeezing his shoulder.

Theo felt a rush of sudden euphoria—one of those moments in life when anything seems possible. He was like a vessel long becalmed, starting forward across the sea as the long-prayed-for wind suddenly fills its sails. Looking up at his coach, he felt a profound gratitude to this man whom he had known only a few weeks, for believing in him and his talent. The real person he was and might become—flesh and blood and viscera and will—not an idea of him, like his father clung to.

Theo didn’t realize the danger he was getting into as he made this comparison, paying no heed to where such thoughts might lead.

Coach Eames drove the battle bus back down Broadway, beating out a rhythm with his free hand on the dashboard while his team sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” trampling out the vintage in high, raucous voices that hadn’t yet broken into manhood. Outside, under the blazing streetlights, girls not much older than them, with thickly painted faces, stood in lines outside the taxi-dancing ballrooms. They shivered in long, thin, three-dollar shop dresses that clung to their unformed figures as they called out invitations to the passing trade, trying to lure clerks and store assistants inside for dime-a-time dances—a squeeze and a whirl and a few moments of forgetfulness under the low lights as the band played hot Dixieland jazz without pause into the early hours.

Through the open windows of the bus, Theo thought he could faintly hear the music: the pounding of a tin-pan piano and the cry of a trumpet driving the melody, half drowned out by the shrieks of the street hawkers selling hot dogs and pretzels, and the endless horn blowing of the bustling yellow cabs trying to find a way through the snarled-up end-of-day traffic.

At Forty-Ninth Street, they came to a complete halt. It was twilight now and the sky had begun to drizzle. Eames pulled the bus off the road and got out to see what was happening. The boys followed him, snaking their way through the crowds until they got into Times Square, which was bright with neon light. All around, the big electric signs glowed, blinking at each other across the glistening wet roadway as they flashed their messages in vast white letters, advertising Turkish cigarettes and Pepsodent toothpaste, special revues and billiards, and dancing, dancing, dancing with the loveliest, prettiest girls in all the world. But no one was paying any attention; instead, the upturned eyes of everyone in the densely packed throng were fixed on the news ticker on the facade of the New York Times Building, spelling out not the end of the world but something that felt very like it:

Black Tuesday. Wall Street in Panic as Stocks Crash. Deluge of Selling Overwhelms Market ...

“They’re jumpin’ out the windows down by the Exchange,” said a fat, red-faced man in a tall trilby hat who was half blocking Theo’s view of the ticker. Even out in the open, Theo could smell the reek of cheap alcohol on his breath. “Saw ’em fall with me own eyes.”

“The wages of sin are death,” called out another onlooker standing even closer to Theo—a bareheaded octogenarian whose remaining strands of wispy hair had been pasted by the rain into thin gray lines across his white scalp. His skin had the pallor of death, but his mad black eyes gleamed in their hollowed-out sockets, defying the Grim Reaper’s scythe. “Behold, they shall be as stubble, the fire shall burn them,” he intoned, and then, staring down at Theo, he yelled: “Shall burn as an oven, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble! Malachi 4:1.”

Terrified, Theo pulled away from the fanatic and was only just caught from falling off the curb and under the rattling wheels of a trolley bus by Coach Eames’s quick-thinking intervention.

“Shut up, you old fool!” shouted the coach, but the old man paid no attention, continuing to broadcast his message of hell and damnation at the top of his voice.

“Don’t listen to him,” said Mr. Eames, setting Theo back on his feet. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Theo nodded, but he wasn’t so sure. Stocks and markets were words from a foreign language, incomprehensible and unrelated to the narrow boundaries of his daily life. But the rapt gaze of the crowd and the fear so clearly apparent on their upturned faces told a different story, filling him with a sense of foreboding that the world had indeed changed that night, leaving them all exposed and defenseless in the face of an approaching wave of destruction.

Theo’s father didn’t see it that way. He assured his wife and son that there was nothing to worry about. The crash was a just punishment for the stock market speculators who had thought they could get rich quick by treating life as a betting game. They had never done a proper day’s work in their lives and deserved to be ruined. But for those like Michael who worked hard, managed their money well, and used their initiative to get ahead, the rewards would continue to flow, just as they had been doing for him through all the years since he left his father’s sweatshop and labored night and day to set up his own business. They had to, because this was America: the land of opportunity, where you could make your dreams come true.

And Michael took comfort that the government, his government, agreed with him. He had been first in line at his local polling station to vote for Herbert Hoover the previous year and had celebrated Hoover’s election by going out to purchase a photograph of the new president in a sterling silver frame. This now hung in pride of place over the mahogany highboy radio console that Michael had bought for Elena at the time they moved. He had purchased one of the most expensive RCA radios on the market as a way of demonstrating to her his growing financial success, but she had shown little interest in the new machine once she realized that the programs were in English, and Michael now monopolized its use when he was home.

Every evening after dinner, he settled himself in his padded armchair positioned directly across from Hoover’s picture and listened to the NBC news, nodding sagely in agreement with the reassuring comments about the economy, emanating from the president and his cabinet. And then, after the news had given way to dance music, he carefully unfolded a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez spectacles onto the bridge of his nose and read snippets aloud from his copy of The New York Daily News , apparently unconcerned that neither his wife nor son were listening to him. Sometimes, indeed, he would address his remarks directly to the president’s photograph, as if he were present in the room.

“‘“Any lack of confidence in the economic future or the basic strength of business in the United States is simply foolish,” President Hoover told business leaders today,’” Michael read out. “And you’re right on the money there, Herbert,” he told the photograph, looking up. “This depression’s a temporary setback, that’s all. We’ve got to keep our heads down and not listen to those damned Communists who want to go around handing out relief because they know that that’s the way to make people dependent and break their spirit. Aren’t I right, Elena?”

“Yes, Michael,” his wife agreed, shouting across the room from the kitchen. “God preserve us from those devils!”