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“Ah, yes. City College,” said Michael. “That’s in Harlem, isn’t it?”

“Overlooking Harlem.”

“And they have Black athletes there, don’t they?”

“Yes. They have everyone. That’s how you find out who’s the best.”

“So I’m assuming Mr. Booker must have watched our son to form his assessment of his capabilities. Would you mind telling me where he did that, Mr. Eames?”

“At City College.”

“How many times?”

“Twice, I think.”

“And that’s something Saint Peter’s knows about, is it? That you’ve been taking their kids over to Harlem to compete?”

“No, I don’t need to ask them. It’s left up to me to design the athletics program,” said Eames, starting to sound defensive.

“Well, I think it’s something we would have liked to know about. Don’t you agree, Elena?”

Theo’s mother nodded, a frozen expression on her face. One Hundred Tenth Street was a boundary between two countries as far as she was concerned. Anyone who went north of there was risking their life, and Michael knew full well that she would be appalled that Eames had taken their son to such a dangerous place.

“Now, Mr. Eames, you can see how shocked my wife is,” said Michael. “And you may be wondering why I’m not too? I can assure you it’s not because I approve.”

Eames said nothing, but Theo could see from the rigidity of his pose that he was holding himself in.

“Let me explain,” said Michael. “When Theo told me about these ideas you’ve been filling his head with, I thought I should make some inquiries.”

“Inquiries!” repeated Eames angrily. “Have you been spying on me?” He put his iced tea down, and Theo could see that his fists were balled up and his face had gone red.

“I wouldn’t want to call it that,” said Michael. “I just wanted to know who I was dealing with. That’s all. I make no apologies. I think any father would have done the same when their son’s future is at stake. And I’m glad I did do some digging, because some of what I heard back worried me. I was about to talk to Theo and Elena about it, but then when I heard you were coming over, I thought I’d wait and let you give your side of the story.”

“What story?” asked Eames, speaking through clenched teeth.

“The story about you and Mr. Booker both being signed-up members of the Labor Sports Union of America. Do you deny that, Mr. Eames?”

Eames said nothing and Theo’s father laughed. “Well, there’s not much point in you pretending it’s not true. Two months ago, you wrote an article for their magazine, Sport and Play , about the next Olympics. I’ve got it over there in my bureau. I congratulate you, Mr. Eames—it was very well written, full of interesting ideas.”

“I don’t understand, Michael,” said Elena, looking confused. “What is this Sports Union?”

“It’s an organ of the United States Communist Party,” said Michael. “And the Olympics Mr. Eames is wanting to train our son for isn’t the Olympics you know about, Elena; it’s the Workers’ Counter-Olympics. The next one’s in Chicago. He’s training our son up to be a Red. That’s what he’s doing, and the joke is that Theo doesn’t even know it.”

But now Theo did. He remembered the big banner across the finish line the first time they went to City College and the song they’d sung before the races, echoing around the empty stadium, and how Coach Eames had looked—the fire in his eyes as he sang. It was all true, what his father was saying. Every bit of it.

“We must tell the school,” said Elena, standing up. The color had drained from her face and she was trembling.

Eames was standing, too, looking down at Theo’s father as if he was of a mind to strike him. “Is that what you intend to do?” he demanded. “Because if so, why did you have me over here? Why put us all through this ridiculous charade? Just for your own cheap amusement, is that it?”

“No, it was because I wanted my wife and son to see who they were dealing with. I wanted them to understand why Theo needs me to watch over him while I teach him my business. And, to answer your question: No, I won’t tell the school if you do what I ask.”

“Which is what?”

“Give up the Communist Party and stop seeing my son.”

“Why should I? I’ve done nothing wrong,” said Eames, blustering. “There’s nothing illegal about being a Communist.”

“No. But I don’t think the school will see it that way. Do you?”

Eames looked away, breathing deeply, and then nodded. “I’ll stop seeing your son,” he said. “But the rest is my business.”

Eames settled his hand for a moment on Theo’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This isn’t what I wanted for you.” And then, picking up his hat in the hallway, he fixed it on his head, opened the door, and was gone.

All weekend, Theo felt hope and belief leaving him like air escaping from a slowly deflating balloon. It drained him of strength, even more when he tried to resist the process.

At breakfast the next morning he had a brief confrontation with his father. He was angry with him, angrier than he had ever felt at anyone, but he was fearful of him, too, and of what he might do.

“You’re upset now,” said Michael, coolly regarding his son as he sat between his parents with his eyes fixed on the tablecloth, studiously ignoring the huevos rancheros—his favorite dish, of fried eggs on tortillas with a salsa of cilantro and tomatoes, that his mother had cooked for him specially that morning. “But one day you’ll thank me. That man was leading you astray.”

“Astray!” Elena cried. “He is a devil, a ravenous wolf!” She banged her fist on the table. “One of those that Our Lord warned us against—false prophets who come to us in sheep’s clothing. It is monstrous—we send our son to a Catholic school, and they deliver him to a Communist.”

“They didn’t know,” said Michael reasonably.

“They need to know now,” she fired back. “I’ll tell them if you won’t.”

“No!” yelled Theo. The sudden violence of his outburst, breaking his morning silence, shocked his parents into momentary silence themselves. “We made an agreement with my coach—here, last night—and we aren’t going back on it now. If you do, I’ll run away,” he said, turning furiously on his father. “I’ll do what you did to your parents.”

“Be quiet! Don’t you dare speak to me like that!” Michael shouted at his son, half rising from the table. It was the first time he’d looked shaken and Theo felt a momentary empowerment, knowing his shaft had hit home.

Michael sat back down, making a visible effort to control himself. “I think it’s best we don’t tell the school,” he said. “We can’t take Theo out until he’s fourteen, and this way there’ll be no trouble.”

“You’re going to put your faith in a Communist?” asked Elena, shaking her head in disbelief. “You fool. The first chance he gets, he’ll be pouring his poison into our son’s ear again.”

“No, he won’t. He knows what will happen if he does that. And besides, Theo won’t listen,” said Michael. “Will you, son?” He looked hard at Theo, waiting for an answer.

Theo shook his head: a quick, almost imperceptible movement that didn’t satisfy his father.

“You need to tell us you won’t talk to that man again. Yes or no: we need to hear it, Theo,” demanded his father.

“Yes! I told you I won’t if you leave him alone. He’s the only one who cares about me because of who I am. Not like you and Mama. You just want things from me,” Theo shouted as he got up from the table, pushing his uneaten food away.

On Sunday, he went to church with his mother. It felt easier to go than to say no. There was a cold, unseasonable wind blowing through the old trees in Gramercy Park, and as they passed the iron gates, a cloud of black rooks flew up over the roofs of the tall town houses, circled chaotically in the gray sky, and then settled back down into the high branches, cawing raucously to each other. Elena smiled, looking up, but Theo shivered, wishing he could throw a stone and stop their hoarse cackling.

At Mass this time, Theo forced himself to look straight into the eyes of the crucified Christ hanging down over the chancel of the church. He stared up, taking in the nails, the cruelly bent knees, the crown of thorns, and the INRI inscription scrolled across the apex of the cross. He tried to understand what his mother felt about this man who stood at the center of her world, reaching out into all she saw and touched, and wondered how she could be so certain about events that had happened nineteen hundred years ago in some distant land that she had never seen, things that made no scientific sense.

Christ lived and died. That Theo could readily accept, looking up at the cross. But then he’d risen—rolled away the stone sometime on the Saturday night or Sunday morning and walked out of the tomb. And saved the world.

But how could he believe that? People who died were dead. Like the old man with the shock of white hair who was hit by the garbage truck on Twelfth Street the year before. He’d gone out into the road without looking and slipped on the ice, and then he was lying there right in front of Theo with his limbs all out at a funny angle and his eyes staring and nothing behind them. Nothing at all—Theo had had time to see that for himself before his mother pulled him away, hurrying off down the street, shaking and crying. And he’d known then just as he knew now that there was no coming back from that. No chance.

Theo looked at his mother standing beside him in the pew with her black veil falling over her shoulders, reciting the Creed with such triumphant certainty in her voice, and he understood with sudden intuition that her faith came from her heart, formed whole and unbreakable as a diamond crystal in her earliest consciousness in that hot southern country that he had never seen. She felt Christ and he didn’t. Felt the presence of the living God in the trees and the rooks and the orioles when he saw only what he saw, nothing else. That was the difference between them—inevitable, perhaps, when she had grown up on a coffee plantation in rural Jalisco, where religion infused every facet of daily life, while he was a child of New York City, where everything was man-made, and what you saw was what you got.

And yet on this Sunday morning, Theo wanted to believe because he needed some outside power to appeal to that would intervene to stop his father from ruining his life by imprisoning him in his dreary factory manufacturing ready-to-wear women’s garments. A prison sentence without parole. And so Theo looked up at the crucified Christ and prayed.

Outside, afterward, Sir Andrew came up to them, taking off his hat as he bowed to Elena. Theo inwardly groaned—he hadn’t seen him at the Mass, so he must have been sitting somewhere behind them. And he hadn’t expected to see him either. Sir Andrew had not been at the church for several months, and Theo had privately hoped that he might be gone for good.

“You’ve grown, young man,” said Sir Andrew. “You’ll be as tall as me soon.”

Theo nodded, keeping his eyes on the ground.

“How old are you now?”

“Thirteen.”

“He’ll be fourteen in October,” said Elena, trying to make up for her son’s taciturnity.

“An important birthday,” said Sir Andrew. “I shall have to bring you another book illustrated by our friend, Mr. Rackham.”

“No, you mustn’t,” said Elena.

“Why mustn’t I?” asked Sir Andrew, playfully imitating her. “I hope Theo liked King Arthur ?”

“He loves it; looks at it almost every night, don’t you, Theo?”

Theo said nothing. He felt furious with his mother, but he couldn’t contradict her, given that what she said was true.

“So what’s the problem then?” Sir Andrew asked her, smiling.

“It’s too much. It gives him ideas when he’s got to keep his feet on the ground. He’s leaving school soon and going to work in his father’s factory.”

“At fourteen? Isn’t that a bit young? A bright lad like your son could do well with an education behind him.”

“His father knows best,” said Elena, injecting into her voice a note of finality that Sir Andrew was quick to pick up on.

“Of course,” he said, backing off. “Please forgive me, senora. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

It was too much. For a moment Theo had thought that Christ had found a way to answer his prayers. The English nobleman would make his ignorant mother see the error of her ways, and she would go back and tell her husband that Theo was staying at school because it would be a waste of his talents to be sent to the factory. And his father would have to give way because he didn’t want to cross his wife. It was for her benefit, after all, that he’d put on that charade with Coach Eames. He’d needed to get her on his side.

But the flame of hope died again as soon as it had been lit. Sir Andrew didn’t care about him. Of course he didn’t. He talked to him and flattered him and gave him books because it allowed him to engage with Theo’s mother. And her son’s presence beside her meant she could flutter her eyes behind her veil without anyone being able to accuse her of impropriety. Except Theo, of course. It was too much. He couldn’t bear it anymore.

“Stop it! Stop flirting with him,” he said viciously, finally letting go of all the anger he had pent up inside.

“What?” asked Elena, astonished. “What did you say?”

“You heard me,” said Theo defiantly.

Suddenly, without warning, she brought her left hand back and slapped her son hard across the cheek. Her wedding ring caught him on the lip, which began to bleed.

In the ringing silence that followed, Sir Andrew took a handkerchief out of his pocket and gave it to Theo. “You should apologize to your mother,” he said gravely. “What you said is beneath you.”

Theo looked Sir Andrew in the eye, refusing to be cowed. “I should have said it to you, then,” he told him. “I know what you were doing.”

Sir Andrew flushed with anger, but he had no chance to respond. People were gathered around them now, asking questions, trying to understand what had happened. Elena was crying, and Father Juan had taken her arm and was leading her toward the presbytery. Theo followed, clutching the handkerchief. He’d like to have run away, but he knew that that would only make things worse. He hated himself for what he’d done to his mother, and he hated her for what she’d done to him. Once inside, he sat down in a corner and closed his eyes, overcome by a black despair.

At home, nunlike, Elena withdrew into herself, making no reference to what had happened. She couldn’t without naming the vile allegation Theo had made, and she felt instinctively that that would be in some perverse way to acknowledge it. And she knew, too, that talking increased the risk that her husband would hear of it. She was frightened of that and worried, too, that Theo would say something to his father if she provoked him.

She had searched her conscience both alone, kneeling before the shrine in her bedroom, and with Father Juan in the confessional, and she knew she had done nothing wrong. And Father Juan had assured her that Don Andrés was guilty of nothing improper. He had just been polite and courteous—the way well-bred English gentlemen are known for being with ladies of their acquaintance.

Elena could think of nothing her son could have done that would have wounded her so deeply, and she could not understand how he could think such a thing, let alone say it in public, humiliating her in front of her countrymen, whose good opinion she cared about so much.

Father Juan had suggested that she might prefer to come to church on Wednesday evenings instead of on Sundays, at least for a while, but she would have none of it, walking up the nave to her pew with her head held high. She went alone, however, having told Theo to remain at home, excommunicating him until he had repented of his sin.

But he did not repent. He was as angry as his mother, and he cared nothing about being denied the sacrament because he was angry with God too. He had prayed to the crucified Christ and nothing had happened, and now he wanted to know if that was because God didn’t care or because he wasn’t there. Theo strongly suspected the latter and decided to make an experiment to prove his hypothesis. The fact that it would involve further punishment of his mother only served to provide him with a stronger incentive to proceed.

Two Sundays after the debacle at the church, he got his chance. His father had a meeting in the Garment District after breakfast, and when his mother left to go to Mass, he had the apartment to himself.

He went into his mother’s bedroom. The window was a little open, and a slight breeze was rustling the half-drawn drapes. The sun had risen above the rooftops, and its slanting beams shone through the gap down onto the gray rug and as far as the side of the pretty Mexican quilt drawn tightly up over the bed. Theo remembered his mother embroidering it years before, amazed in the end at how something so vibrant and colorful could come from so many hours of delicate threading.

In the shadows on the bedside table, Theo caught sight of a photograph of his grandparents: a middle-aged man with wide-awake eyes in a high collar and tie with his layered hair brushed back from his forehead, and his wife, who looked diminutive and shy and unmistakably the mother of Elena. He turned away quickly. His business was not with them.

Across from the bed, out of the light, was the shrine. Small half-burned votive candles set in brass holders stood on either side of a low altar surmounted by Christ on a wooden cross. He was much smaller here and without the horror of the hung body in the church. Below, a tall rectangular picture of the olive-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe held pride of place with a glass vase of drooping pansies picked from the garden and small pictures and statues of Elena’s favorite saints closely arrayed on either side. There was the icon of Saint Theodore holding his dragon-slaying lance, a tiny reproduction of Giotto’s picture of Saint Francis feeding the birds, a wooden Saint Anthony of Padua that she had prayed to for Theo’s safe return when he was taken by his grandfather, and, over to the side, a porcelain statue of Christ in a blue robe with a benevolent expression on his bearded face. Theo had been with his mother when she had bought this last from a street vendor on Fourteenth Street years before. She’d haggled over the price, and Theo had thought at the time how strange it was that Christ should have been standing there on the ground between piles of neckties and candy bars.

He would have preferred the cross, but it was wooden and would not break, and the Christ figure was an acceptable second best. He picked it up carefully but then half stumbled over his mother’s needlepoint kneeler as he stepped back, righted himself, and then walked over to the tiled fireplace.

Now, glancing back at the shrine, he didn’t want to carry on. He was disgusted with himself, but ironically it was his sense of the enormity of the crime he was about to commit that forced him on. If Christ existed, then he would surely find a way to punish him for smashing his effigy, and then Theo would know. Once and for all, he would have his answer.

Slowly opening his hand, he allowed the statue to fall onto the hard tile, where it broke into several pieces, but not as many as if he had thrown it on the ground as he had originally intended.

He looked down at Christ’s broken head and immediately realized the absurdity of his act. What had seemed of vital importance a moment before now felt cheap and sordid. It proved nothing except his own meanness born of his need to hurt his mother. Because why would Christ care if a boy broke a dollar statue mass manufactured somewhere over the river in New Jersey? He had infinitely worse things to worry about, with people starving and out of work. If he was up there at all, which Theo now realized he was never going to know.

What mattered was that Theo was alone. That was what he needed to understand. Nobody was going to stop him going to his father’s factory when he was fourteen and, given that he was too young to run away, he’d better get used to the prospect and learn to adapt.

He went over to the fireplace and carefully picked up the broken pieces of the statue and replaced them one by one on the altar, and then he went into the kitchen to wait for his mother. He would tell her that he’d picked Christ up and taken him over to the light to get a better look and then he’d slipped. He’d say it was an unfortunate accident and that he was sorry, and that when he went to work in his father’s factory, he would save up his earnings to buy her another statue of her Savior—even more beautiful than the one she’d lost.

On the last day of school Theo went over to the sports pavilion in the afternoon. It was a half day after prize-giving and almost everyone had gone home, so he thought he would be alone.

It was full summer now and the sun shone down hard and relentless on the cinder track, and inside the pavilion the familiar smells filled his nostrils, intensified by the heat—moist towels mildewing in half-open lockers, ankle tape and unwashed socks, decomposition. Beyond the silence, Theo fancied he could almost hear the voices of his teammates shouting encouragement to each other across the room as they got ready to go out. The sensations pained him. He’d been a fool to come.

A shadow fell across the doorway, and he instinctively backed away into a corner. But the newcomer sensed his presence immediately and stopped awkwardly just inside the threshold. Theo saw that it was Coach Eames.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Eames. “What a strange coincidence—I was thinking of you, just a moment ago as I was walking over, and now here you are. How are you, Theo?”

“I’m all right, I guess,” said Theo guardedly. “I was just looking ...” He stopped, realizing he had no real explanation for his presence in the pavilion. “Anyway, I’m going now. We’re not supposed to talk, you know.”

“I know,” said Eames, stepping aside. He looked dejected. Like a runner coming in from a defeat, Theo thought.

Theo walked out into the sunlight and started back toward the school. He felt his memories clutching at him like tentacles, and he balled his hands into fists, pushing them deep down into his pockets, repelling grief with anger. He knew that he needed to be tough now if he was going to survive, and wallowing in the past was a stupid way to begin.

Behind him, Coach Eames was calling his name. He stopped, turned around, hesitated a moment, and then walked back.

“You forgot these,” said Eames, holding out Theo’s spiked shoes. “You don’t know when you might need them again.”

Turned over in Theo’s hand, the silver pins shone in the sun and he remembered Mr. Eames holding the shoes out to him in the pavilion on that first day and how they had felt out on the track, propelling his feet forward in effortless strides.

He started to walk away, but then turned back. There was something he needed to say, but he didn’t know how to say it, and so after a moment he just held out his hand. And Eames, with a smile, took it.

“Thank you,” said Theo. “Thank you for believing in me.”

“I still do,” said Eames. “Nothing’s changed about that.”