The newspapers became part of the spy game. The point at first was to see how many rooms he could visit without Nora’s knowing-from the kitchen up to his father’s study, then past the bedroom where she was working (this was the best part) to his mother’s dressing room, then back down the stairs (carefully now, the vacuum having gone silent) and into the club chair with the open book before she appeared again. Not that she would have cared if he’d left the room-it was just the game. Stuck in the house, cocooned against the cold outside that kept promising snow, he learned its secrets, the noisy parts, the bad floorboards, as if they were bits of Braille. He could even spy on Nora, watching through the crack in the door, crouching halfway down the stairs, until he felt he could roam the house at will, invisible. His father, he knew, could never have done this. You always knew where he was, clunking down the hall to the bathroom at night, all his weight on his heels. His mother said you could feel him a block away. It was Nick who knew how to spy. He could stand absolutely still, like one of those movie submarines with the motors off, on sonar silence, waiting to hear something.
Then one day, by accident, he finally saw his father at the hearing. Nora had taken him downtown to the movies, a My Friend Irma picture with Martin and Lewis. She crossed herself when the newsreel began with the Holy Year in Rome, long lines of pilgrims forming at the churches, some from Germany, some even from as far away as America. A crowded open-air mass. A year of new hope for a century half old. Fireworks exploded over St Peter’s. Then, abruptly, the newsreel shifted to Washington, and the announcer’s voice turned grim.