Bob Lisowski set the little mitten on the folding table between the toy trucks and the rolls of wrapping paper. “Mrs. Dombrowski, my father told me everything, and I drove straight here.” He said that on Christmas Eve 1991, his father Al was not due to leave the prison for another month. The judge had made his early release depend on paying eight hundred and fifty dollars to the man whose jaw he broke in that bar fight. His mother had no such money. She had a seven year old and a job at a laundry.
The man in the Santa suit was my Leo. He read the letter of the little boy at the mall that week, and he asked Bobby nothing, only whether he had been good. Then he went home and opened the coffee can where he put the tips that parents pressed on him every December, the money he never once counted. There was eight hundred and fifty dollars in it, almost to the dollar. He turned it into a money order, and on Christmas Eve he drove the bakery truck forty miles to the gate of the prison, in the red suit, beard and all, because he had come straight from the mall.
The warden, a stern man named Hargrove, came out to the gate in the snow. Leo handed him the money order and a note. Bob said his father remembered only the words of the warden. “Mr. Lisowski, somebody paid your debt. Gather your things.” He walked out at dusk, in the cold, past a bakery truck with its engine running, and a man in red who lifted one gloved hand and drove away. Al never learned who it was. For thirty four years he called it a miracle.
Last week, in a hospice bed, Al heard a volunteer mention a retired bakery driver who had played Santa at the Steamtown Mall for thirty two years. He asked a nurse to look into it. She found the obituary of Leo Dombrowski, and the photograph that went with it, and Al knew the face under the beard. That was the day he called his son, and told him to find the family. I could not stop crying. I was married to Leo for forty eight years, and I thought I knew every pocket of that man.
A man who gives away his tips in secret may leave behind only a red suit, a shoe box, and a street full of grown children who never learned his name.
The costume shop lady had brought all forty one letters in a shoe box that Saturday, and Bob read the notes on the back with us, one by one. Some were small. Mitchell boy, new coat. Two sisters, no tree. Betsy, needs eyeglasses, ask the nurse at school. In thirty two years, my husband had quietly answered more than a dozen of those letters with money from his own pocket and the back of a bakery truck. I had always wondered why we never took a vacation.
Kayla sat down on an overturned crate with the baby in her lap. She said it softly. “I told that lady a dead man wore it. I was talking about the best man I ever heard of.” She asked if she could carry the suit home and wash it herself. I said no, it was going to the toy drive. But I told her I would be honored if she and the baby came with me to see who would wear it.
Jason did not say much. He took the letter of Bobby out of his own hand and set it down in front of me, the way he used to hand me a good report card. “Mom, I should have called you back. I should have called you every day.” I said I knew. I said I had kept the porch light on anyway. He put his arms around me in the basement of St. Ann Basilica, and the baby grabbed my collar, and for a minute nobody could talk.
That night Bob asked if I would drive with him to the hospice. I said yes, and Jason came along. In a narrow room, an old man with white stubble lay under a quilt. Bob handed me the mitten, and I put it into the hand of his father. “Al Lisowski,” I said, “I am the wife of Leo.” He looked at me for a long time, and then he said, “Tell him thank you. Tell him I was good, after.” I said I would. I have told him every day since, in the front hall, to the polished boots.
Al died on the twenty first of December, holding a red mitten. Bob called the next morning, and then he asked a question I will not forget. Would I let him put on the suit for the toy drive? He was far too big, we both knew it, and the beard would never sit right on that jaw. I let out the seams myself on the kitchen table. The retired mailman who played Santa that year was glad to hand it over.
On Christmas Eve, two hundred families came through the basement of St. Ann. Bob sat in a folding chair in the red suit with the white beard, and the children climbed up on his knee, one after another. Jason wrapped gifts at one end of the long table. Kayla sat at the other, with the baby in a tiny elf hat. I stood by the door with a stack of tags. I have not been that proud since the day I married.
In January, I started the Leo Fund. We put an old coffee can on the counter at the toy drive, and anyone who wanted could drop in a few dollars for a family with a letter and no one to answer it. The first month it held eleven hundred dollars. The first letter we answered was from a girl in Olyphant who asked Santa for a way to see her mother at the county jail. We found her a ride. Some wishes are small, and cost a gas tank, and mean the world.
