Chapter 2/Episode 2: The Picture Lands on the Table

Her Mother Has To See The Photograph Sooner Or Later

The polkas were playing again in her mother’s kitchen, the same station, the same Sunday-afternoon program on a Tuesday morning, the way her mother kept the world to a small known shape. Rose was at the sink with her back to the door, washing a cup she had already washed.

“Mom.”

“I said I didn’t want it in this house.”

“I know.” Lila stayed in the doorway. She held the folder loose against her side, the way you hold a thing you do not want to make important by clutching it. “I came to tell you what Babcia told me yesterday. That’s all. I’m not putting anything down on your table. You don’t have to look.”

Her mother did not turn around.

“His name was Mikołaj,” Lila said quietly to her mother’s back. “He was born in a refugee camp in Bavaria in November of ‘forty-seven. The camp was called Wildflecken. She was there from when she was fifteen. She came over with him on a soldier ship in November of ‘forty-eight. She held him on the boat. He died here, in this town, three days before Christmas of ‘forty-eight.” She paused. “I taped it, Mom. She wanted me to tape it. I have it in her own voice.”

Rose set the cup down. Her shoulders were rigid under the cardigan. The polkas wheezed on, somebody’s accordion bright and far away, and her mother stood at the sink and did not turn around for a long moment, and when she did her face was a closed thing.

“And so I have a brother I never had,” Rose said. “Is that what we’re saying.”

“You had a brother. Yes.”

“Sit down.” Her mother dried her hands. “I’m going to put coffee on, because that’s what people do, and then I want you to play me what you have, and I want you to put that picture on the table, and I’ll look at it, and I’ll listen to her voice, and then I would like a few minutes by myself. Can we do this that way.”

“Yes, Mom.”

It was the closest her mother had come to asking, in any conversation Lila could remember, for anything at all. Rose moved around her kitchen with the cardigan still on and her hair still set from yesterday, and the coffee dripped, and Lila put the photograph face up on the table beside her grandmother’s looped pencil slip, and her mother set down two cups and sat across from her and let herself look.

Rose looked at the photograph a long time.

She did not say what Lila had been waiting to hear her say, which was some version of how impossible it was. The protest had gone out of her, between the kitchen door and the coffee. What came up in her face, slow and confused and resisting itself, was an expression Lila had never seen on her mother. It was the expression of a woman doing arithmetic she did not want the answer to. The young proud girl against the wall. The shape of the bundle in her arms. The look on the girl’s face.

“Oh, Mama,” Rose said softly. To the photograph. Not to Lila.

Lila let it sit. Then she pressed play on the recorder, low, and her grandmother’s voice came up between them in the warm kitchen. Wildflecken. Bavaria. In November of nineteen forty-seven. So he was almost one year old when we sailed. His father did not come on the ship with us.

The recorder ran. The polkas in the next room ran under it. Rose listened the way a person listens to a doctor saying the word they came to hear, with the chin lifted and the hands folded and the eyes far away. When Stefania’s voice said, There was a woman. There was a man. The man, I loved him before he died, Rose closed her eyes and did not open them again until the tape went on to small talk and Lila clicked it off.

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“For what.” Her mother opened her eyes. They were dry. Her mouth was small.

“For bringing it to you this way. For all of it.”

Rose was quiet a moment. Then she said, in a voice that was neither the door-closing voice nor the brittle controlling voice but just her mother, tired, sitting in her own kitchen at sixty-eight with the world rearranged underneath her, “Don’t be sorry, Lila. You did what I would not do. Don’t be sorry for that.”

It was, Lila thought afterward, the closest her mother had ever come to giving her anything.

Rose looked at the photograph one more time. Her finger went out and touched, very gently, the edge of it where the wrapped bundle was, and then drew back. “There’s a man’s name on your notebook. I saw it when you came in.”

“She said it once, after the fog came in. Tadeusz. I don’t know who he is, Mom. I don’t think Babcia means for me to know yet.”

“Tadeusz.” Her mother said it the way you say a foreign word you have heard once, getting the shape of it. “I have never in my life heard that name in this family.” She looked up. “What are you going to do now.”

Lila had not realized, until her mother asked the question, that she had already decided.

“I’m going to St. Hedwig’s,” she said. “The parish archive. If Babcia came in ‘forty-eight, the parish sponsored her. There will be a sponsorship file. There will be records of who she was when she arrived. There will be papers somewhere that match up with what she’s telling me.”

“Father Karol won’t say no to you. He likes a project.” Her mother’s mouth twitched in something that almost wanted to be a smile. “He won’t know what he has.”

“I know.”

Rose looked at her across the table. The dish of butterscotch candies on the counter, the polkas going, the photograph on the cloth. Two women in a small clean kitchen in a Pennsylvania cement town, with the photograph between them, deciding without saying it that they were going to do this together now and were going to do it however it could be done.

“I’ll come with you tomorrow,” Rose said. “To the parish.”

It was not what Lila had been bracing for, and her mother saw it land, and looked away.

“I am going to be there when whatever is in those records comes out,” Rose said quietly. “If my mother had a baby before me, Lila, I should be there when the file says so. I owe him that much. I owe her that much. And I owe you that much, considering what I said in this kitchen yesterday.”

Lila reached across the table and took her mother’s hand and held it. Rose held back. The polkas played. The coffee got cold. The photograph lay between them like a small fierce country only the two of them now had passports to.