Catherine didn’t say anything on the ride home, but the next afternoon when I got in from work, she tried to sort out her complicated feelings. “I loved Granny. I thought she and Grample were the most wonderful people on earth. I thought of them the way Harriet thinks of her brother. So how could they give Kylie Ballantine’s name to that creep Olin and then set themselves up as the biggest free speech defenders in the universe?” She was sitting on my living room floor with her good arm around Peppy.

I shifted in my chair: these same questions had been churning in my own mind. “Everyone has a different breaking point. And a different fear point. The things you can’t bear to face, I mean. The McCarthy and HUAC blacklists shattered lives. People never worked again, or never worked well. They were ostracized, they lived in terrible poverty. Some committed suicide. Many went to prison, only for their beliefs, not for anything they’d done-not in China or Iraq, but right here in America.

“You don’t race to embrace that kind of martyrdom. At the same time, your grandfather feared for the future of Bayard Publishing. Geraldine Graham’s mother was constantly threatening to give her shares in the company to Olin Taverner. If Laura Drummond had known your grandfather supported a group that she thought was a Communist front, she’d certainly

have given Olin her shares. And that would have turned Bayard into a rightwing organization. They wouldn’t publish the great magazines they do today, such as Margent, or writers like Armand Pelletier and the guy you worked with last summer, Haile Talbot.”

“So you think Grample was right to betray Kylie Ballantine and Pelletier and-whoever else he did betray? To save the press?” Her eyes blazed. “No. I don’t think it was right. I don’t believe that considering the greater good-the integrity of Bayard Publishing, in this case justifies betraying friends.”

“And now, with his mind gone, I can never ask him what he was thinking, why he did it!” she cried. “I can’t stand any of this. Seeing him sick when I loved him so much-I used to feel so smug, knowing Granny and Grample were my family, compared to the kind of people my friends have, the kind who only think about money all the time! And now-my family is thinking, maybe not about money, but they don’t think about people and how to live a principled life, like they always claimed they did.”

“You and I are judging this in the calm and safety of my living room,” I said. “We’re not facing a congressional inquiry that would use our beliefs to turn us into criminals. If that ever happens to us, then we’ll know what we’re made of. I spent a month in prison once. It was a terrible experience, one that very nearly destroyed me. If I knew I had to go to prison again, I don’t know how strong I would be in standing up for my values. I hope strong to the end, but even more, I hope I never have to find out. I’m only trying to say that what your grandfather did makes me-oh, incredibly sad, heartbroken, really. But I can’t judge him, because I haven’t been on that battlefield, looking into the mouths of those cannons. But your grandmother crossed a different river when she resorted to murder. And I want to see her pay the price she earned by killing Marcus Whitby. Which is why you should move out, instead of staying here to watch me do it.”