His mother was the patient. She spent long stretches sitting on the couch, smoking, not saying a word. Her silence, her intense concentration on nothing at all, frightened him. At night, alone, she drank until finally, her eyes drooping, she would curl up on the couch, avoiding her bedroom, and Nick would wait until he heard her steady breathing before he tiptoed over and covered her with the afghan. In the morning, she never wondered where it had come from. She seemed to forget everything, even what had really happened. She told the police–a relief– that his father had left Sunday morning, just as Nick had said. Yes, they’d played Scrabble. No, he hadn’t seemed upset. When Uncle Larry suggested she get away for a few days until things died down, she said to him in genuine surprise, “I can’t, Larry. I have to be here, if he calls.” The secret, at least, was safe. She had begun living in Nick’s story.

“Are you all right for money?” Larry said.

“I don’t know. Walter took care of all that.”

“You have to know, Livia. Shall I go through his things? Would you mind?”

She shrugged. “It’s all in the desk. At least I suppose it is. The FBI went through it yesterday. I don’t think they took anything away.”

“You shouldn’t let them do that, Livia,” Larry said, a lawyer. “Not without a warrant.”

“What’s the difference, Larry? We don’t have anything to hide,” his mother said, and meant it.

The FBI came often now. In an unexpected seesaw of attention, as the newspapers grew bored with the story, the FBI became more interested. They went through his father’s papers, opened the wall safe, asked the same questions, and then went away, as much in the dark as before. His father had signed a power of attorney for her on Saturday, which seemed suspicious, but his mother didn’t know anything about it. And what, anyway, did they suspect? In the quiet study, everything was in order.

Nick grew quiet too. He wanted to go over things with his mother, plan what to do, but she didn’t want to talk, so he sat listening to the sounds of the house. He thought of everything that had happened, every detail, studying the Cochrane photograph to jolt him into some idea for action, but nothing came back but the creak of floorboards, a windowpane shaking back at the wind, until it seemed that the house was giving up too, disintegrating with them. He read the Hardy Boys books he had got for Christmas, with their speedboats and roadsters and mysteries that were always solved. They rescued their father in one, wily and resourceful. One day, after the snow melted, he walked down A Street to check on the drain, but the shirt was gone, and he barely paused at the corner before turning back.

It was his decision to go back to school, stifled finally by the airless house. When he opened the door that Monday, the reporters swarmed around, expecting his mother, then backed away to let him pass, like the water of the Red Sea. “Hi, Nick,” one of the regulars said, and he gave a shy wave, but they let him alone. At school, the lads backed away too, nodding with sidelong glances, deferential to his notoriety. His teacher pretended he’d been out sick and apologetically piled him with back homework. She never called on him in class. He sat quietly, taking notes, then went home and worked all evening while his mother sat smoking, still drifting. He finished all the make-up work in three days, turning in assignments that were neater and more complete than before, because now it was important to be good, to be blameless.

In the weeks that followed, nothing changed at home, but outside the reporters dwindled and at school people began to forget that anything had happened. When Welles suspended the hearings, the papers barely noticed. As Uncle Larry had predicted, things moved on. And it was Larry who brought his mother back.

“You can’t just sit in the house. I’m taking you to New York for the weekend.”

“To do what?”

“Go to a show, go out to dinner. Get dressed up and show your pretty face all over town,” he said, winking at Nick, Van Johnson again, cheerful and take-charge.

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. Livia, you can’t sit here. You’ve got to get on with things.”

“By going to New York with you?”

Larry looked at her and smiled. “For a start. We’ll take the train. I’ll pick you up here at five. Five, no later. And no buts,” he said, waving his forefinger.

Surprisingly, she went. Nora stayed the weekend and she and Nick went to the movies, treating themselves to tea at the Willard. In the long lobby of red carpets and potted palms, no one noticed them. On Sunday, when they went to meet his mother at Union Station, he glanced at the telephone booth, then averted his eyes, as if he were being watched. But his mother seemed better, the quiet around her beginning to thaw, like the melting snow.

It was only at night that it came back, the dread. It was the not knowing. Everyone acted as if his father were dead, but Nick knew he wasn’t. He was somewhere. Nick lay under the covers watching the tree branch and tried to play the cabin game. Over the years, they’d thought of a lot of places where the wind was blowing–the cabin in the mountains, a tent in the desert, that big hotel at the Grand Canyon where they’d gone one summer–but Nick couldn’t picture any of them. Instead there was the committee room, Welles glowering and accusing. A body falling in the cold. The strange walk to the telephone booth. And then, always, the back courtyard filling with snow.

I hope you die, his mother had said. But she hadn’t meant that. Nick just wanted to know, and then he could rest. It seemed to him that their lives on 2nd Street had ended without any explanation. There had to be a reason. The hearings were starting again. They were looking for more Communists. So things went on. Was that all it had been? Politics, a piece of history? The trouble with history, his father had said, is that you have to live through it. But he hadn’t meant this, half-living in a mystery. One day it will all seem like a dream. But it wouldn’t, just the same mystery. That was the dread: he would never know.

His mother ended it that spring by selling the house. They would start over in New York, where nobody cared, and Nick would go to Rhode Island, where Father Tim had arranged for a place at his old school. Tim was taking them there himself, in the big DeSoto he drove like a carriage, hands on either side of the wheel as if he were holding reins.

Nick went with him for gas while his mother finished packing–an excuse, Nick suspected, for one of Father Tim’s chats. But Tim was bubbly, as far away from homilies as a man on a picnic. They drove around the Mall, a last tour. “You’ll like the Priory,” he said. “Of course, people always say that about their schools. I suppose they’re really remembering themselves when they were young.” Nick looked over at him, unable to imagine the ruddy face over the white collar as anything but grown up. “But this time of year,” he continued, taking one hand away to gesture to the tree blossoms, “well, you won’t find a finer sight. And then you’ve got Newport down the road. All the boats. I used to love that. Hundreds of sails, all across the bay.” He stopped, aware of Nick’s silence. “You’ll like it,” he repeated. “You’ll see.”

“My father wouldn’t like it,” Nick said. “He didn’t want me to go to a Catholic school.”

Father Tim didn’t say anything to that. Nick watched him shift uncomfortably in his seat, avoiding the subject, his father’s name like a cloud over the bright day.

“Well, give it a chance,” Father Tim said. “You’ll see. But a fair chance, mind. You don’t want to be a burden to your mother. Not now. She’s had worries enough to last a lifetime. Rose isn’t as strong as she looks. It’s been a difficult time for her, you know.”