Chapter 2/Episode 10: The Photograph He Had Kept All Those Years

A Priest, A Grandmother, A Granddaughter, In One Small Room

The rectory smelled of beeswax and old wood and the medicinal sweetness of a hospice room. Father Karol met Lila at the side door and walked her down a hall hung with the framed faces of past pastors, and at the door of Father Bryla’s room he stopped her gently.

“He is clear, Mrs. Lila. He is very clear. But he tires fast. Let him do the talking.”

Inside the room was small. A single bed. A window with the curtain pulled back so that the November afternoon came in. A crucifix on the wall. A shelf with three or four books and an oval frame turned face down. A wheelchair pulled up beside the bed. And in the wheelchair, with the blanket tucked around her knees and her hair brushed, sat Stefania.

She was not looking at the door. She was holding the hand of the old man in the bed. He was propped up on two pillows. He was very thin. His eyes were clear.

“Lila.” Her grandmother’s voice was steady. “Come here, child. He has been waiting.”

She crossed the room and knelt by the bed where there was room to kneel.

Father Bryla turned his head. He was so old that his face had gone past wrinkle to a kind of fineness, the bone showing through. His eyes were pale blue and entirely present. He looked at her a long moment, and he smiled, small.

“You are the one,” he said. His English was faint and careful, the way an old priest’s English goes back at the end toward the language he stopped speaking in his thirties. “You are the one I have been hoping would come.”

“I’m here, Father.”

“Good.” He reached for the photograph on the blanket. It was in his hand, the small black-and-white the hospice nurse had given him. The young girl, the wall, the baby. The same image as the one Lila had in her folder, printed once more from some old negative she would never trace. “Your grandmother gave me this on Christmas Eve of ‘forty-eight. Two days after.” He looked at Stefania. “It is the only picture of him I had. I have kept it.” His thumb moved over the small wrapped shape. “I would like for you to take it, child, and put it with whatever you decide to do.”

“Yes, Father. I will.”

“There is one thing I would like to ask your grandmother.” He turned his head on the pillow. His hand tightened, just barely, on Stefania’s. “Pani Stefaniu. I have carried what you told me in this rectory for seventy-eight years. I have not said a word. I will not, even now, in any way you have not given me leave for. So I ask. May I, at last, before I go, tell your granddaughter and your daughter together what you told me that morning. May I have your leave to lift the small piece of it, only that piece, that they need in order to do what comes next. The rest will keep.”

Stefania looked at him.

A long moment. The room held it.

“You may tell them the burial, Anton,” her grandmother said quietly. “You have earned the right to tell them that, after all you have carried. The rest belongs to me to say, and I will say it when I am ready, and I will say it before I go too. We will not keep it any longer past what is needed.”

“Thank you, Pani Stefaniu.”

He turned back to Lila. He gathered himself.

“What your grandmother told me,” he said, in his careful English, with the photograph in his hand, “is the story of how she came to bury a child she loved by the bend in the quarry road in December of 1948 with Joseph Mazur’s help. She did it because she was eighteen years old and afraid of the questions the doctor and the parish and the country would ask her if she did otherwise, and she had reasons for that fear that were hers to keep, and that I will leave with her to lift when she is ready. The boy in this photograph she loved as a mother loves, and she has mourned for seventy-eight years, and there was nothing in her sin that I could not absolve, and I absolved it then, and the matter has been at rest between her soul and her Maker since the morning of December the twenty-third, 1948, in the sacristy of St. Hedwig’s. I am telling you this because you should know that whatever else you find, in the box up the road, in the camp papers, in any record that may yet come to light, you should know first that your grandmother is a woman whose conscience has been quiet for the better part of a century. Whatever else there is to know, it does not change that. It will need a kindness from you, the way she has needed a kindness from me. That is what I am asking you to remember when you find the rest.”

Lila was crying. Father Karol, by the door, was not pretending not to.

“Yes, Father.”

“There is one more thing.” He turned to Father Karol. “The strip up the road. When the family is ready, when Pani Stefaniu is ready, when the law and the parish can arrange it, the parish will receive the boy into consecrated ground at St. Hedwig’s, and we will say his name over him, and we will do for him what we could not do in ‘forty-eight. I have told Father Karol that I am putting in writing today, with the diocese, that this is a thing the parish is to do, when the family asks, without any further question or any cost to the family. Karolu.”

“It is done, Anton. The letter went last week.”

“Good.” The old man’s eyes closed a moment, and opened. “Pani Stefaniu. You will live to see him put to rest. You will. Promise me you will.”

“I promise you, Anton.”

He looked at her a long moment, and his hand stayed in hers, and the November light came in over the blanket.

They left him not long after. Stefania kissed the back of his hand before they went. He said, faint, in Polish, I will go to the Lord, child. Keep well. She said it back. Lila wheeled her out into the hall. Father Karol stayed with him. The door did not close all the way.

In the van, on the ride back to Cedar Run, Stefania was quiet. She held the small framed photograph in her lap. By the time they had her settled in her room the brightness had thinned and she was somewhere just barely with them. Lila kissed her forehead.

It was dark when Lila got back to the empty house. She did not turn on the front lights. She went to the kitchen and poured an inch of her grandfather’s apricot brandy and sat at the kitchen table with the photograph from Bryla’s bedside shelf and the photograph from the wardrobe and the slip with my son forgive me on it, all three under the overhead bulb. She had been crying off and on for hours. She was not crying now. She was sitting at the table thinking about Joseph Mazur in a barn coat at half past five in the morning of December 23rd, 1948, standing on a porch with a girl on the other side of the door, deciding the rest of his life with a single sentence.

The knock came on the kitchen door.

She was so deep in the table that for a beat it did not register as the present. She lifted her head. The kitchen door. Three small Sunday-courteous knocks.

She got up. She crossed to the door. She turned on the porch light. Through the small window the porch was yellow under the bulb, and a snow had begun to come down very fine, the first of the year, and standing on the boards in his father’s old barn coat with his cap in his hand, ninety-seven years old, very straight-backed, snow on his shoulders, was Joseph Mazur.

She opened the door.

“I heard you went up to see him,” he said. His voice was quiet. “I heard he gave her leave to tell you about that night.”

“Yes. He did.”

“Then I expect,” Joseph Mazur said, “you are going to want to hear it from the other person who was there. And there is one thing he was not party to. There is a thing I am the only one alive who knows. I have carried it since ‘seventy-three. I do not want to carry it past your grandmother.”

The snow drifted down past the porch light.

Lila stepped back from the door, and let him in.