His mother came upstairs, again, gray-faced. “I haven’t found a trace of Nora,” she said, waiting for a lull in the sustained bellow. “Nothing. Netta said she just went.”
“She’ll be okay,” Ted answered, feeling frightened. “Trust old Nora!”
Mrs. Conner sat down on the bed, under the college pennants. Her eyes had tears in them.
She held her hands together and didn’t move all during the next crescendo of the siren. “It’s happening, isn’t it?” she said, then. “It really is!”
Ted got up, shucked off his phones, gripped his mother’s shoulders and said something, when the siren allowed it, which changed Beth. It was, under the circumstances, the right thing—and a remarkable thing for a sixteen-year-old boy to say. “Just about every other mother in America has a Nora, someplace, right now,” he told her.
The woman stood up then, looked intently at her son, nodded slowly. Her answer was blotted out by the siren; but Ted knew approximately what it was: “I’m supposed to go over to the church.”
He knew what she meant, because she smiled at him in a loving way and left the room.
He went back to his seat. His damned hands were getting slippery. The old sweat.
The limousine was moving through Pearson Square when the crescendo-diminuendo sound reached its chauffeur. He speeded up, ignoring Minerva’s rap on the glass partition. He swung the big car into the driveway. He leaped out nimbly for his age. “We better get in the cellar,” he said.
“ Nonsense!”