Now he was yet only a boy, confused and conflicted, his heart aflame for reasons his mother would not know and would not learn of until that day when Mrs. Wilson would appear in her life once more, and I with her, and she would understand at last what wild beast had come to live in her son’s chest. But that day in 1942 there was only his beauty, a beauty which, his mother knew, eclipsed that of the Wilsons’ children, neither of them possessing their mother’s porcelain delicacy but instead taking the hale blandness of their father, his jug-ears, his bucktoothed grin, the boy, Jimmy, getting the worst of it. Many years later she would see a caricature of that boy in the television presence of Howdy Doody and her distress was so acute in the face of that recognition that she fled the room in alarm while her husband and Mary and Doris—both teenagers then—watched her retreat in fear and confusion.

Except in direct contrast with her mother, Helen was simply ordinary, her skin pale despite a lifetime in the sun, her cheeks blotchy, and her nose covered over with freckles, hair a thin yellow that, Kimiko had to admit, shone with gold threads by midsummer, but which tended to hang thin and lank upon her shoulders. Her mother had long since given up attempting to bring it into some kind of order. In truth, Kimiko was not generally particular about beauty, and certainly not when it came to the children, but something in the tableau before her had given her pause, given her, indeed, a sense that she was witnessing something that she would never see again. It was not that she anticipated in any tangible way that they would not return to Newcastle—although of course they would not—but rather that when they did return things would have changed, even if their absence was, as Hiro and Homer both seemed to believe, just a matter of a few weeks. They would have been removed as enemies of America, and what would that do to the children, who stood now in that clutch in some manner of earnest conversation, about what she could not guess?