ALEXANDER BARRINGTON STOOD IN front of the mirror and adjusted his red Cub Scout tie. Rather, he was attempting to adjust his Cub Scout tie, because he couldn’t take his eyes off his face, a face uncharacteristically glum. His mouth was turned down. His hands were fidgeting with the gray-and-white tie, unable to do a good job, today of all days.

Stepping away from the mirror, he looked around the small room and sighed. It wasn’t much, a wood floor, drab brown-branch wallpaper, a bed, a nightstand.

It didn’t matter about the room. It wasn’t his room. It was a rented room, a furnished rented room and all the furniture belonged to the landlady downstairs. His real room was not in Boston but back in Barrington, and he had really liked his old room and hadn’t felt the same way about any other room he had lived in since. And he had lived in six different rooms since two years ago when his father sold their house and took Alexander out of Barrington.

Now they were leaving this room, too. It didn’t matter.

Rather, that’s not what mattered.

Alexander looked in the mirror again. He came up flush to the mirror, stuck his face against the glass and breathed out deeply. “Alexander,” he whispered. “What now?”

His best friend Teddy thought it was the most exciting thing in the world, Alexander’s leaving the country.

Alexander couldn’t have disagreed more.

Through his partly open door, he heard his mother and father arguing. He ignored them. They tended to argue through stress. Presently the door opened and his father, Harold Barrington, came in.

“Son, are you ready? The car is waiting for us downstairs. And your friends are downstairs, too, waiting to say goodbye. Teddy asked me if I would take him instead of you.” Harold smiled. “I told him I just might. What do you think, Alexander? You want to trade places with Teddy? Live with his crazy mother and crazier father?”

“Yes, because my own parents are so sane,” said Alexander. Harold was thin and of medium height. His one distinguishing feature was a resolutely set chin on a broad, square-jawed face. At the age of forty-eight his light-brown, graying hair was still thick upon his head, and his eyes were intense and blue. Alexander liked it when his father was in a good mood because then the eyes lost some of their seriousness.

Pushing Harold out of the way, his mother, Jane Barrington, strolled in, wearing her best silk dress and white pillbox hat, and said, “Harry, leave the boy alone. You can see he’s trying to get ready. The car will wait. And so will Teddy and Belinda.” She smoothed out her thick, long dark hair arranged under the hat. Jane’s voice still carried traces of the lilting rounded Italian accent that she had not been able to lose since coming to America at seventeen. She lowered her voice. “I never liked that Belinda, you know.”

“I know, Mom,” said Alexander. “That’s why we’re leaving the country, isn’t it?” He watched them in the mirror. He looked most like his mother. In personality he hoped he was more like his father. He didn’t know. His mother amused him, his father confounded him. “I’m ready, Dad,” he said.

Harold came over and put his arm on Alexander’s shoulder. “And you thought Cub Scouts was an adventure.”

Cub Scouts was plenty for me. “Dad?” he asked, looking not at his father but at his own reflection. “If it doesn’t work out … we can come back, right? We can come back to—” He stopped. He didn’t want his father to hear his voice crack. Taking a steadying breath, he finished, “To America?”

When Harold didn’t reply, Jane came up to Alexander, who now stood between his parents, his mother in small heels three inches taller than his father, who was a good foot and a half taller than Alexander. “Tell the boy the truth, Harold. He deserves to know. Tell him. He is old enough.”

Harold said, “No, Alexander. We are not coming back. We are going to make the Soviet Union our permanent home. There is no place for us in America.”

Alexander wanted to say that there had been a place for him. Alexander had a place in America. Teddy and Belinda had been his friends since they were all three. Barrington was a tiny, white-shingled, black-shuttered town with three steepled churches and a short main street that ran four blocks from one end of town to the other. In the woods near Barrington, Alexander had had a happy childhood. But he knew his father didn’t want to hear it, so he said nothing.

“Alexander, your mother and I, we are absolutely sure this is the right thing for our family. For the first time in our lives, we are finally able to do what we believe in. We are no longer paying lip service to the communist ideals. It’s easy to propound change while living in absolute comfort, isn’t it? Well, now we are going to live what we believe. You know it’s what I fought for my whole adult life. You’ve seen me. And your mother, too.”

Alexander nodded. He had seen them. His father and mother arrested for their principles. Visiting his father in jail. Being unwelcome around Barrington. Being laughed at in school. Constantly getting into fights for his father’s principles. He had seen his mother stand by his father’s side, picketing and protesting with him. The three of them had gone to Washington D.C. together to parade communist pride in front of the White House. They were arrested there, too. Alexander had spent a night in a juvenile detention center when he was seven. But on the plus side, he was the only boy in Barrington who had been to the White House.

He had thought all that was sacrifice enough. And then he had thought that breaking with their family and giving up the house that had been the Barrington homestead for eight generations was sacrifice enough. He thought that living in small rented rooms in busy and dusty Boston while disseminating the socialist word was sacrifice enough.

Apparently not.

Frankly, Alexander was surprised by the move to the Soviet Union, and not happily surprised. But his father believed. His father thought the Soviet Union was the place where they would finally belong, where Alexander would not be laughed at, where they would be welcomed and admired instead of shunned and ridiculed. The place where they could build their life up from “meaningless” and make it “meaningful.” Power was to the toiling man in the new Russia, and soon the toiling man would be king. His father’s belief was enough for Alexander.

His mother pressed her painted red mouth on Alexander’s forehead, leaving a bright greasy pucker, which she then rubbed off—not well. “You know, don’t you, darling, that your father wants you to learn the right way, to grow up the right way?”

A little petulantly, Alexander said, “This is really not about me, Mom—”

“No.” Harold’s voice was adamant. His hand never left Alexander’s shoulder. “This is all about you, Alexander. You’re only eleven now, but soon you will become a man. And since you have only one life, you can be only one man. I’m going to the Soviet Union to make you into the man you need to be. You, son, are my only legacy to this world.”

“There are plenty of men in America, too, Dad,” Alexander pointed out. “Herbert Hoover. Woodrow Wilson. Calvin Coolidge.”

“Yes, but not good men. America can produce greedy and selfish men, prideful and vengeful men. That’s not the man I want you to be.”

“Alexander,” said his mother. “We want you to have advantages of character that people in America just don’t have.”

“That’s right,” said Harold. “America makes men soft.”

Alexander stepped back from his parents, never taking his eyes off his solemn reflection. That’s what he had been looking at before they came in. Himself. He was looking at his face and wondering, when I grow up, what kind of a man am I going to be? Saluting his father, he said, “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll make you proud. I’ll be ungreedy and unselfish, unprideful and unvengeful. I’ll be as hard a man as they come. Let’s go. I’m ready.”

“I don’t want you to be a hard man, Alexander. I want you to be a good man.” Harold paused. “A better man than me.”

As they were walking out, Alexander turned around and caught himself in the mirror one last time. I don’t want to forget this boy, he thought, in case I ever need to come back to him.

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