Lee introduced her to the judges, who were looking at their watches, and muttering to themselves about the schedule being thrown completely off. He took his mother by the arm and shuffled with her up the aisle. “Did you see me acting?”

“I did. I liked the part about the mother. And the horse.”

“Are you proud of your son?” George Barnes asked. Barnes had followed them, for he had a cameraman’s eye for mother-and-son reunions.

“Mom,” Lee said, “I found out—Percy Duncan,” he said, and looked for a reaction. “My father?”

“Oh,” she said, with an exhalation as if she’d been shoved.

“He toured the world, didn’t he?”

“Oh,” she said again. She had been preparing for one crisis, and a different one had blown to shore. “Yes, he did.”

“He’s dead. Did you know that?”

“No,” she said. “Dead?” It seemed to throw the next five things she’d planned to say out the window. “Dead?”

“It was the Kaiser who killed him.”

Emily squinted, exactly as if someone had been cooking a radish. “Did he, now? Who exactly told you this?”

“The Kaiser killed your father,” Barnes said.

“I saw Chaplin,” he added. “I also stopped a jewel robbery,” he said. “You would have liked seeing that.”

“That sounds very nice,” Emily said. “But I’m not sure about this Kaiser business.”

“You—you stopped a jewel robbery?” Barnes said. His idea for a newsreel was too small for this man. Luck had delivered something truly wonderful his way.

Self-conscious, Lee added, “Of course, this is the most important thing to happen.”

Emily nodded, wits returning. “I came to stop you.”

“Mother,” Lee said, tears back in his eyes. For he was about to discuss his father. Then he heard what she’d whispered. “What?”

“You can’t go onstage. You promised me.” She touched the stripes on her cap. “The uniform, Lee.”

He took a step backward from her. “Mom … you’re not even a real sergeant.”

“But this is your chance to be real. You’d be the first in the family to serve.”

He sensed that pointing out that his father had been a showman would not sway her in the least, and then he was going to say something about defending his death at the hands of the Kaiser, which also might go to her point about the uniform, so instead he whispered, “I’m going to serve my country.”

“Not really,” she said meekly. “This isn’t really serving your country.”