Behind them strolled powerful wives of industry and culture. They had determined exactly how many feet to keep between themselves and the exhaust pipes before them, and behind them were women driving motor trucks, and in each truck bed was a different tableau: a woman canning vegetables in her home’s kitchen; women holding jars of preserves marked “jam”; a field where women farmers threshed wheat and held up stalks of corn, urging conservation of the first and consumption of the latter.

Next was a careful display: the Daughters of Israel marching next to the Daughters of Arabia Petraea. Behind them were the Daughters of the Confederacy, marching with the Colored Women’s Red Cross Circle. The sight of these groups together caused, along the entire parade route, exactly the same four stages of reaction: silence, amazement, understanding of the urgency of this war, then lusty applause. Perhaps the emotions should be shaken, the spirit should allow itself to surge. When the Girl Scouts of San Francisco scattered red and white rose petals from handmade berry baskets, singing with their ragged little voices “America the Beautiful,” San Francisco was becoming convinced.

Rebecca Golod was not among the Girl Scout singers, for she had another appointment.

As for Lee, he had enough money now for an orchestra seat (seventy-five cents), and the show had begun, and he shot through the doors and past the Old Testament panels, his coat flapping behind him, and he was in the lobby of the California, wildly out of breath. He could hear the subsonic distant pipe organ, which rattled the bones of the theater.

He approached a bright-looking usher whose cap tilted jauntily. “Have the Four Minute Men gone on yet?”

“No. They’re showing the newsreel.”

The usher checked his ticket and opened the door for him. The pipe organ reached a crescendo. Onscreen, two men were duking it out, bare-knuckles-style. Their punches intercut with a woman, who had her nails to her teeth, eyes wide, as if someone had stepped on her foot. Finally, an uppercut knocked one man clear across the alley, and the woman covered her face with both hands. Lee remembered the name Percy Duncan. The blank space where his own name should have been. He felt a slender gray crack begin in some marble façade deep in his mind.

This was unusual newsreel footage—something struck him as wrong. As Lee found a seat on the aisle, he saw a close-up of one fighter, looking deranged, smeared with dirt, eyes bulging as if he were going to explode. He snarled, and the card “I’ll kill you, McShane!” came up, and Lee realized he was watching a melodrama. Not a newsreel. That was what he had known was wrong. It had been a disconcerting sensation until then, like fumbling in the dark and forcing his shoes onto the wrong feet.