“I heard him,” Frank’s mother had told him at the end of her life, talking more and more when it was just the two of them. “I heard him calling me.” She held tight to Frank’s wrist. “He said, ‘Don’t leave, don’t leave.’”

Frank’s goal, his secret plan, had always been to go home. Home, northward—to ice and darkness, to wet sloppy springs and mild summers. He wanted to go home: his father’s birthplace, his own birthplace, not the place of his father’s death. He often sat there on his stepfather’s back porch and looked out to the woods, where Preston had what he called a root cellar, a place to keep things cool and safe. “That’s where we’d go if a big storm came,” Preston had said. At first, Frank found the thought terrifying, climbing down into what really was like a vault, a tomb with a heavy iron lid, like a cistern or a manhole with a rickety ladder, but then the spot became more and more appealing, like a clubhouse, a secret spot. And it really was incredibly cool down there at the height of summer—six feet down, room enough to have his back against the cool brick and stretch his legs. Preston saw he was claiming it as his camp, and he let him; in fact, Frank came home from school one day, and there was a brand-new ladder attached, and a little wooden chair and table and a flashlight down below. “No wonder you got so interested in tombs,” Lil had said, and laughed when he first described it to her.

It did feel like another world down there—removed from everything. When he had read about the Civil War and the Underground Railroad, he pictured tunnels growing out of a space like where he sat, the damp smell of earth and the darkness. And in later years, when people really were building fallout shelters, Preston claimed to be ready; by then, Frank was in school miles northward, the jar of flattened pennies and marbles still down there where he left them.

“We all want to leave something behind.” Frank used to begin his introductory class that way. “We all want to be remembered.” And then he asked that his students make a list of those belongings that defined them. A thousand years from now, what would it mean? A song, a sign, a secret message. Kilroy was here. Students were often too young to know the origin of Kilroy, even though they might have heard the saying, and he loved telling how some say the real Kilroy was from just south of Boston—Braintree—all roads leading back. Kilroy was here. A lot of people think that the little cartoon of Kilroy—peeping eyes—grew out of the omega symbol. The alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.