I set it down slow because the compartment held a cloth bundle tied with faded blue ribbon, and I did not want a single finger of mine to touch it before the owners did. It smelled of cedar and old paper, nothing worse. A man gets careful when he sees something wrapped by a loving hand. I climbed down my stepladder, wiped my palms on my jeans, and called out to the kitchen. “Dana, Phil, I think you two need to be standing here for this.” The Hartleys had paid 212 thousand dollars for that tired house on Cutler Street, and I figured they had a right to everything inside it.
Phil lifted the bundle down with both hands. Inside the cloth lay a pair of silver candlesticks, tarnished almost black, each one about ten inches tall. Under them sat a flat tin box, and in the tin were a man pocket watch, a handful of black and white photographs, and one letter in an envelope with foreign stamps. The writing on the front was not English. Dana held it up to the window light and said slowly, “This looks Polish. Wait, there is a name. Halina Wozniak, and an address in Chicago.”
The photographs showed two children on the steps of a stone house, a boy of about ten and a girl of about six, squinting into the sun. On the back, in pencil, someone had written Tomasz and Halina, 1938. Under the photo of the girl was a second line, newer ink, that Dana read aloud. “Never stop looking.” None of us spoke for a while. A transom is just a little glass pane. I had no idea one could hold a whole life.
Silver candlesticks and an unmailed letter hidden above a Weston door lead to a lost sister family in Chicago and a Christmas reunion.
The first thing I did was nothing, and that is the honest answer. I did not pry, I did not pocket a thing, and I did not let Phil put the watch in his pocket either, though he only meant to look at the back. We photographed everything where it lay, set it all on a clean sheet on the dining table, and agreed that these things belonged to somebody who was still out there. Dana searched the county records that evening. The house had been built in 1951 by a Tomasz Wozniak, a mason who came to Weston from Poland after the war.
By morning she had found a short notice from 1996 saying Tomasz had passed his house to a church charity and moved to a small apartment near the lake, where he lived another nine years. No children were listed. But a church secretary named Mrs. Delgado remembered him fondly. She said he spoke about a little sister he lost in the confusion of the war, and he wrote to a Chicago address every Christmas for fifty years without an answer. Dana had tears in her eyes when she hung up. Phil said, “So he did not stop looking.”
The letter in the tin was dated December 1952, never mailed. We asked a Polish teacher at the high school, Mr. Kaminski, to read it. He translated carefully, one sentence at a time. Tomasz wrote that he had built a house with his own hands, with a window for the sun and a hidden place for the candlesticks of their mother, the only thing he carried out of the village. He wrote, “When you find me, Halina, the candles will be waiting. I hid them so nobody could take them again.” I had to look out the window for a minute after that.
One more thing mattered to me. Valuables do not belong to the first person who lifts them off a shelf, even in a house that person owns. So Phil called a lawyer in town, Marguerite Lund, and she wrote up a plain inventory that all of us signed. The watch went to a jeweler who said it was a good Swiss movement from around 1930, worth maybe 900 dollars, and he cleaned it for nothing once he heard why. Everything else went into a locked cabinet at the Weston library, where Mrs. Delgado kept the key. It was slow and a little dull, which is how doing right by somebody usually goes.
It took Dana nine days and eleven phone calls. Halina Wozniak had married and become Halina Moreau, and she had passed away in Chicago in 2011. But her granddaughter, a nurse named Josie Moreau, picked up the call from Weston. Josie said her grandmother always lit one candle on Christmas Eve for a brother she believed had been lost. She drove up that weekend with her father and her teenage son, and she stood at the dining table with her hand over her mouth.
We held a small supper in the Hartley house on a Saturday in December. Dana polished the candlesticks until they shone like new coins, and Josie set them on the table and lit them. Her father, a gray haired man named Stan, carried the old watch in his palm and said it still ticked once he wound it. The two families sat down together at a table made from a door sized slab of oak. Phil asked me to say a few words, and I was not ready, but I said that a house keeps what is worth keeping.
The Hartleys left the little transom window in place after all. I rebuilt it myself with new glass and put a thin brass plate on the sill that reads, Tomasz Wozniak built this house for the family he was still hoping to find. Josie and her son come every Christmas Eve now. I am invited too, and I would not miss it. Dana still sends me a card every December with a photo of the two candles burning. Some jobs you do for the paycheck. Others you do because a mason left a light on for seventy years, and you happened to be the one tall enough to see it.
