Chapter 2/Episode 3: The Margin of the Old Book

In The Parish Archive, A Note Nobody Has Read In Decades

St. Hedwig’s Roman Catholic Church stood in the old part of Sandstone Falls where the rowhouses pressed shoulder to shoulder up the long block from the square. Red brick that had gone darker over a century of cement-plant air. A green copper roof. A pair of carved stone shields on either side of the front doors, the cross and the eagle of Poland, and the lettering above them in the carved old Roman letters: ECCLESIA SANCTAE HEDVIGIS. The Polish parish, founded in 1907 by the second generation of cement-belt immigrants, still hanging on at half its former Mass schedule.

Father Karol Wesołowski met them in the vestibule, a man of about fifty-five in a black sweater over his clericals, with reading glasses pushed up into thick salt-and-pepper hair and the disarming smile of a priest who had decided long ago to be very glad whenever anyone walked through his door.

“Mrs. Tannenbaum. Miss Tannenbaum. I have it all ready for you.” He shook their hands. “I have to confess, your call yesterday made my afternoon. We do not get many requests in the archive these days. Come, come.”

The parish office was a low room off the side aisle that smelled of incense and old paper and the radiator under the window. He had the ledger waiting on a green felt cloth on the conference table, a tall heavy book bound in cracked black buckram, with 1946 to 1952 stamped along the spine in faded gilt. There was a pair of cotton gloves beside it. He had thought ahead.

“This was Father Bryla’s hand at the time,” he said, lifting the cover with care. “He came to St. Hedwig’s in ‘forty-seven as an assistant. The pastor was Father Janowski, God rest him. But Father Bryla kept this register because Father Janowski’s English was poor and the federal paperwork for the displaced persons was very particular. So this is, you might say, the young Father Bryla’s book.”

Lila put on the gloves. Her mother stood at her shoulder. The pages turned, and the year went by on them, baptisms and marriages and the small recurring administrative grids of a parish in a small town. November of 1948.

It was there.

A pre-printed federal sponsorship form, glued in, with the typed details filled out in the careful capitals of a young priest doing his duty in a second language. SPONSORED PERSON: Marciniak, Stefania. DATE OF BIRTH: 14 February 1930. PLACE OF BIRTH: Tarnobrzeg, Poland. LAST RESIDENCE: Displaced Persons Camp Wildflecken, Bavaria, U.S. Zone of Occupation. SPONSORING PARISH: St. Hedwig of Silesia, Sandstone Falls, Pennsylvania. SPONSORING FAMILY: Domestic placement, household of Mrs. Anna Bartos, 412 Quarry Road. EMPLOYMENT: Live-in domestic and companion. DATE OF ENTRY: 19 November 1948.

Lila held her gloved finger over the line and read it aloud, slowly, for the recorder. Beside her, her mother had gone perfectly still.

“Marciniak,” Rose said. “That was her maiden name. I knew that. Marciniak.”

“And Quarry Road.” Lila looked up at Father Karol. “Father, this address, four-twelve Quarry Road. That’s our house. That’s the Wojcik house.”

“It would have been before your grandfather bought it, Mrs. Tannenbaum.” Father Karol nodded at Rose. “Anna Bartos, I think, was a widow on that road. The parish placed several of the DP girls with widows on small properties in those years. Live-in domestic, the widow gets help, the new arrival gets a roof and a wage.” He shook his head. “Hard country to land in, with a small child.”

There it was. Lila had been waiting for it.

She turned the page. On the back of the sponsorship form, ruled into a sub-grid for dependents and accompanying persons, the careful young hand had typed: ACCOMPANIED BY: One minor child, male. NAME: Mikołaj. AGE AT ENTRY: Twelve months. BIRTH CERTIFICATE: See Bavarian camp documents.

Her mother made the smallest sound beside her, almost not a sound. Lila put her gloved hand briefly over Rose’s bare one on the edge of the table.

“There he is, Mom.”

“There he is.”

It was Father Karol who saw the margin note. He had bent over the page with reading glasses on, the better to read the cramped administrative print, and his finger tapped the white margin to the left of the dependents grid.

“This is interesting,” he said. “Here, in the side margin. This is not in Father Bryla’s printing hand. This is a script hand, smaller. Polish. Different ink. Look at the color, you see, the entries are black, this is a different black. This was added later.”

Lila bent over it with him. The pencil hand of Father Bryla had been block-printed in the federal style. The margin note was in a different person’s running script, in old-country Polish letters, very small, very neat. Three lines, the strokes a touch shakier than they might have been once.

“Can you read it, Father.”

He squinted. He moved the page under the lamp. His lips moved.

“My Polish is the New Jersey kind,” he said apologetically. “My grandmother’s Polish. This is, this is older. It is harder. I can get the gist. I would not be confident of every word, and I want to be confident, for you, of every word.” He pushed his glasses up. “Let me have a colleague look at it. Father Stachura over in Easton, he was schooled in Kraków. He will read this without thinking.”

“What can you make of it now, Father.” Rose’s voice was very low.

He looked at her. He looked at the page. He chose his words.

“It says something about the child,” he said slowly. “It says, I believe, that the child’s documents, his baptismal record, were not registered here at St. Hedwig’s. It says they are at, or with, the camp.” He hesitated. “I think the writer was making a private note to himself, a reminder of where to look if anyone ever asked. It is a careful note. The kind of note an honest man makes about a thing that needs handling carefully.”

“And this is, you think, also Father Bryla.”

“It would have to be, Mrs. Tannenbaum. Whoever made this note was at this register. There were not many people allowed at this register.”

Lila stared at the small careful script.

Father Bryla had known about Mikołaj. Of course he had known. He had typed up the federal form himself. He had registered the child in the parish books, on the back side of the page, where the federal form did not show on the open spread. And then, at some later time, in a hand that was a hand of his own working language and not the duty language of the federal paperwork, he had added a private note that pointed out of the parish and back toward the camp Stefania had come from.

A note that pointed at where the child had been born. A note that pointed at where the child’s records actually lived.

Lila straightened up. The lamp lit the green felt. The radiator clinked. Outside on the long block, somebody laid on a car horn and gave it up. Her mother had not moved. Father Karol stood very still with his glasses pushed up into his hair, watching the two of them, knowing he had stepped into the middle of a thing whose shape he could not yet see.

“Father,” Lila said quietly. “How fast can you get this margin note read by Father Stachura?”

“By tomorrow afternoon. I can drive it to Easton tonight, if it matters.”

“It matters.”

“Then I will go.” He closed the ledger with great gentleness, the way you close a thing that has been quiet a long time and is now no longer quiet.