Chapter 1/Episode 8: The Gown and the Photograph

Inside The Tin, A Tiny Gown And A Face She Knows

The phone rang eight times and stopped. In the silence after it, Lila realized she had been holding her breath, and she let it out, and she made herself ignore the question of who would call a house everyone knew was being emptied. Probably the realtor. Probably a robocall about a warranty on a car she did not own. She turned back to the tin.

She lifted the lid all the way and laid it aside on the floorboards.

On top, folded with the particular reverence of a thing folded once and then never again, was white cloth. She drew it out into the light, and it unfolded itself in her hands almost on its own, the creases gone permanent with the years, and she saw what it was and her breath went out of her a second time.

A christening gown. Long the way christening gowns are long, far longer than the child, a waterfall of white lawn cotton gone the soft ivory of old piano keys, the hem worked all around in a fine scalloped lace. Tiny. The bodice of it would have fit in her two cupped hands. It was the work of weeks, of someone bent under a lamp with a needle, and it had been worn. She could see that. There was a faint shadow at the collar where a small neck had rested, a place rubbed and washed and rubbed again, the gentle wear of a real child in a real garment, and it undid her a little, kneeling there, to hold a thing so small and so loved and so carefully hidden.

The lace cap. She thought suddenly of the lace cap in the cedar chest, the one her mother had told her to bag, the one she had set aside in her KEEP box without knowing why. It would match this. Of course it would match this. They were a set. Her mother had stood over the cap and said put it in the bag, that’s just old baby things, and her mother had not known. Lila was suddenly, strangely certain of it. Whatever this was, her mother did not know either.

Under the gown, lying face down, was a photograph.

She turned it over.

It was small, with the deckled white border of its era, the image gone to the soft grays and silver of a print made before she was born. A young woman stood against a wall of pale stone, squinting a little into a hard winter sun. She wore a heavy dark coat too big for her, a refugee’s coat, a coat that had been given rather than bought, and a kerchief over her hair, and shoes that were wrong, and she was, without the smallest possibility of doubt, Stefania.

Eighteen years old. The hard pretty blue of the eyes did not come through in gray, but Lila knew it was there. The cheekbones were her grandmother’s, and the set of the mouth, and the straight unbowed back that ninety-six years had folded small but that here, at eighteen, stood proud and frightened and alive against a foreign wall.

And in her arms, wrapped against the cold in what looked like the very gown that lay across Lila’s knees, was a baby.

Lila held the photograph in the white light and did not move. The child’s face was turned up toward Stefania’s, and Stefania was looking down at it, and there was on the girl’s young face an expression that no camera should be able to hold and that this one had held for seventy-seven years: a love so total and so terrified that it stopped the breath in Lila’s chest. It was the face of a mother. There was no mistaking that face. Lila had seen it in a thousand photographs across her career, in wedding portraits and on tenement stoops and in studio cards from a hundred years dead, the particular helpless ferocity of a young woman holding her child against a hard world. Her grandmother wore it here.

Her grandmother. At eighteen. In a refugee’s coat against a stone wall in what could only be the camp, in what could only be 1948, the year before she came to this country, holding a baby in a handmade gown.

Lila’s mind did the arithmetic without her permission. Stefania married Henryk in 1957. Rose was born in fifty-eight. There had never been, in any story Lila had ever heard, in any photograph on any wall, in any word spoken at any holiday table across thirty-eight years, the smallest mention of a child before Rose. There was no older sibling. There was no aunt or uncle who had died. There was Babcia, and there was Dziadek Henryk, and there was Rose, and the family began there, in this town, in the nineteen fifties, and everything before it was a closed door behind which there was only the war, and loss, and the things one did not ask about.

But here, in Lila’s hands, in the cold empty house with the rain coming down, was the thing nobody asked about. A girl of eighteen. A baby in a christening gown. Years before her family was supposed to have begun.

She turned the photograph over, looking for a name, a date, anything, and found on the back, in pencil, in a young and careful and unmistakable hand, a single word in a language she could not read, and beneath it, in numbers anyone could read, the year.

The work light hummed. The rain came down. And Lila Tannenbaum knelt in her grandmother’s empty house holding the picture of a child who, as far as the whole living world was concerned, had never existed at all.