The man in the gray suit stood with both hands on my counter, and the bell over the door of the shop was still quivering from the way they had come in. His name, he told me, was Gerald Strand, the son of Harold. His eyes were pale and watchful and full of a fear that I recognized. It was the fear of a man holding something heavy that he has been told to carry, and has never once seen. “Mr. Feldstein,” he said, “my father said your father was arrested that night. My father said the two of them were taken in together.”
I told him he was mistaken. I told him my father, Isaac, had been at home with my mother on the night of December third, 1962, as he had been every night of his life. Gerald Strand shook his head slowly. “My father had a document,” he said. “A sworn statement, signed by a police sergeant. It says Isaac Feldstein was brought in at two in the morning and released at six, and that a check for four thousand dollars was written to him by my father the same week.” He wet his lips. “Mr. Feldstein, I think that is how your father bought this shop.”
I did not speak. I looked around at the walls I had known my whole life. The glass cases my father built. The oak bench where he taught me to hold a loupe. The brass sign in the window, which he had hung in the spring of 1964, a year after Sam went to prison, on a street where no one in his family had ever owned anything. I had always thought of it as the proudest thing he had done. I stood very still, with the tweezers in my hand, and I understood that it was also the price of his brother.
A watchmaker who always opens the back will in time discover the hidden works of his own family.
“Four thousand dollars,” I said. It came out hoarse. “Why would my father take it?” Gerald Strand did not answer at once. He took a folded handkerchief from his pocket and held it. “I think because my father told him that if he did not take it, they would charge him too. He was a young man with a wife and a baby. I think he was frightened. I think he did what he thought a person had to do.” He looked down. “And I think he lived with it the rest of his life, Mr. Feldstein, the way my father did.”
I closed the shop early that afternoon and drove to the Jewish cemetery on Chicago Street, and stood in front of the two stones in the Feldstein row. My father, Isaac. My uncle Samuel. I had stood there a hundred times. I put my hand on the cold granite of Sam and I said, aloud, in the empty cemetery, “I know.” A crow called from a bare tree. And I thought of that quiet, gray man in the back room, mending watches with his sad careful hands, who had never once said a word against his brother.
That night I took the confession out of my safe and read it again by lamplight. I, Harold Strand, confess that on the night of December third, 1962, I set the fire at the Lakeview Tannery. I knew the night watchman was inside. The tannery was losing money and I needed the insurance. I let another man go to prison for it. In the morning I paid his brother to stay quiet. I have had no peace since. In the margin, in a different ink, was a line added later: Sam Feldstein was innocent. I have always known.
I called the Wisconsin Innocence Project in the morning. A lawyer named Rebecca Alt answered, a brisk young woman with a warm voice, and listened to me for twenty minutes without interrupting. When I finished, she said, “Mr. Feldstein, bring it in tonight. Do not let it out of your sight.” I drove to Madison with the watch on the passenger seat, the way you would transport a sleeping child. In a small office on State Street, I laid the yellow paper on her desk, and she put on white gloves and bent over it with a magnifying glass.
The case moved with astonishing speed, because Harold Strand had signed a statement that could be authenticated by the ink, the paper, and the handwriting, and because Gerald Strand, to my great surprise, decided to testify. He came to the courthouse in the same gray suit and said in a low steady voice that his father had set the fire for money and had let an innocent man take the blame. The judge of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court vacated the conviction of Samuel Feldstein in February, fifty three years after the trial and thirty six years after his death.
There was a small ceremony in the courtroom. About forty people came, a handful of cousins and old neighbors, some in their eighties, who remembered Sam. The daughter of Joseph Kowalski, the night watchman, now seventy one, came to the front and shook my hand. She said, “My father died in that fire. And a man went to prison who had nothing to do with it. I am so sorry for your family.” I held her hand in both of mine. I said, “We are both sorry for the same man.” She nodded, and we stood there without speaking.
The four thousand dollars I have repaid in the only way I know how. Every year on the third of December, the shop on North Oakland Avenue stays closed, and I repair watches for free for anyone who comes in with a story. Old ones. Broken ones. Heirlooms with a stuck crown. I put a small brass plaque in the window, beside the sign of my father, and it reads in three lines: SAMUEL FELDSTEIN. INNOCENT. OPEN BY HIS GRACE. And when the bell rings, I look up from my bench and say, “Come in. I will fix it. And I will always open the back.”
