Chapter 2/Episode 6: The Note Father Stachura Read

The Old Priest's Note Sends Lila Looking Somewhere Else

Father Karol called Lila at the empty house just after lunchtime the next day, his voice a little tight on the phone, in the manner of a man who has read something he was not expecting and is being careful how he tells it.

“Mrs. Tannenbaum. Mrs. Lila, I should say, since you said yesterday to call you that. I have Father Stachura’s translation. May I come to you. I think I should bring it to you, not say it over a telephone.”

He came in his black sweater with a yellow legal pad in a folder under his arm and stood in the empty front room of the Wojcik house among the boxes and the dust shadows where the davenport had been, and he looked at the floor a moment before he opened the folder.

“Father Stachura is sure of it,” he said. “He has read a great many Polish hands of that period. He says Father Bryla’s handwriting in the parish books from his early years is not difficult to him. So we are confident of the text.”

“What does it say, Father.”

He read from the pad. He read in English, since he was not going to ask her to take the Polish on his own pronunciation.

“Note added at later date by AB, in his own hand,” he said. “AB is Anton Bryla. He always signed the side notes that way.” He cleared his throat and read.

The line ran: “Dla pamięci. Dziecko Marcińskiej nie jest w naszej księdze chrztów. Dokumenty obozowe w Wildflecken. Sprawa rozumiana. Sumienie spokojne.”

He looked up at her.

“He used the genitive of her maiden name, the Marciniak. He says, for the record, the child of this Marciniak girl is not in our book of baptisms here. The documents are in the camp at Wildflecken. And then he adds something more, which is what gave Father Stachura pause.” His finger went down the page. “He writes, the matter is understood. The conscience is at peace.”

Lila sat down on a packing carton.

“Mrs. Lila, I am only the translator here,” Father Karol said gently. “I am not anybody who knew anything about your grandmother. But Father Stachura and I, on the phone last night, we said the same thing to each other, which is that this is a note an honest priest makes about a matter he is choosing to handle by leaving alone. He acknowledges, in writing, that the parish’s own books do not have the child’s baptism. He acknowledges where the child’s records are. And he is putting himself on the record, in his own hand, that he understands the matter and is at peace with the way he is handling it.”

“Handling what, Father.”

“That is what we cannot tell you from the page.” Father Karol’s face was kind and uncertain. “Whatever it is, he knew it. He decided about it. He left a private note in Polish, in his own working language, that an English-speaking inspector from the diocese or the federal office would have walked past in 1948 without a second look. He was protecting something.”

The room was very quiet. Through the bare window the late October light was already going thin.

“He’s still at the rectory, isn’t he, Father.”

A pause. “He is.”

“How is he.”

“Today, Mrs. Lila.” Father Karol looked down at the folder. “I went to see him this morning before I drove to Easton, because I do that on the way out of town. He is not very well. He had a fall in the night, and the nurse called me at four. He did not break anything, thank God. But he is, you understand, a hundred and four years old. There are mornings he is here with us. There are mornings he is mostly not. Today he was mostly not. The hospice nurse came at noon for the first time.” He met her eyes. “I would not wait, if I were you.”

She had been preparing for this conversation since she had first sat down with her grandmother. She had not been preparing well enough.

“Has he asked for anyone, Father.”

The priest’s face shifted. There was a small private silence in the room that had nothing to do with the empty house.

“He asked for your grandmother three weeks ago,” Father Karol said quietly. “Before the latest decline. He said to me, by the bedside, in the lucid hour after his lunch, Father, when she goes I would like to be told, I have not seen her in a long while. I said to him, Anton, she is still with us, she is at Cedar Run. He looked at me for a long moment, as if he was deciding something. And then he said, then I would like to be brought to her, before either of us goes any further, and there is one thing I would like to ask her and one thing I would like to give to her. And I said I would arrange it.” He paused. “I had not yet arranged it. I am sorry. I was going to call you tomorrow about it, even before you came to the archive.”

“Could it be arranged now, Father.”

“It could be tried. The hospice nurse is there. His mind, today, will be what it is. But the next clear hour he has, if there is one, I will call you. I think he should have the chance to see her if there is any chance to be had.”

Lila looked at the photograph on the box beside her, where she had been working with it that morning. The young proud girl. The pale wall. The baby in her arms.

“Father,” she said. “Did you ever ask him, in all the years you have known him, about my grandmother.”

“Twice.” Father Karol gave the smallest smile. “Once when I came to the parish in ‘oh-eight. He said, she is a faithful woman, do not trouble her, she has lived enough life for three women already. Once again when I had been here ten years and was asking him about the parish history. He said the same thing in different words. Mrs. Lila, in the better part of two decades of being his priest in his old age, I never asked him a third time. He had told me twice.” He set the folder down on the box. “But I will tell you this, since you are the one asking now, and since he himself said three weeks ago that he wanted to see her once more before he went. There was something on his shelf in the rectory, all those years, that I noticed and never asked about. A small photograph. Black-and-white. A woman in a coat too big for her, holding an infant against a pale wall. I had seen this picture before, Mrs. Lila. I saw it on his bedside shelf for ten years.”

She looked up.

“Today, when I went in to him at four o’clock in the morning, the picture was no longer on the shelf. It was in his hand under the blanket. The hospice nurse said he had asked her to put it there. He had asked for it specifically and asked her to give it to him, and he was holding it when he slept.”

Lila closed her eyes a moment.

“Father,” she said, “call me the minute he is clear. I don’t care what hour.”

“I will.” He stood, and gathered the folder, and stopped at the door. “Mrs. Lila. One more thing. I do not know what your grandmother carries. I do not need to. But the note he wrote in ‘forty-eight, the conscience is at peace, that was a young man giving his future self a kind of promise. So whatever else is in this, whatever else he wants to give her or ask her, you should know that for seventy-eight years he has slept with the picture of an eighteen-year-old refugee girl with a baby against a wall on his shelf, and he has done it without ever once breaking his word about her in any other way. There is more than one kind of love, Mrs. Lila. He loved your grandmother. I am telling you because I do not want you to walk into that room not knowing.”

He left her in the empty front room with the photograph on the box and the last of the November light going out the bare window, and Lila stood up and got her keys.