The watch had been repaired by a man in San Antonio, Heidi explained, a quiet little watchmaker named Mr. Lindgren, who ran a shop behind a florist on Broadway. She had taken it in the week before because she could not stand the thought of the watch of her father lying dead in a drawer. He had opened the case back with a tool the size of a pin. And inside, pressed flat against the brass like a pressed flower, was a folded piece of onion skin paper no bigger than a postage stamp.
I took it from her with fingers that did not feel like mine. The paper had gone the color of weak tea. The writing on it was the German of Klaus, tiny and careful, the handwriting he used for the inside of watches. I read the first line, and the organ loft seemed to tilt. Meine liebste Frau. My dearest wife. Heidi sat on the bench with her hands knotted in her lap. “Mama,” she said, “I could not read the rest. I thought you should.”
I will not copy all of it here, because some things belong to the person they were written for. But I will tell you what it said. Klaus had been apprenticed as a boy to a watchmaker in Engelhartszell named Anselm Brandl, a gentle old bachelor who had no children. The watch was his gift on the day Klaus finished his training. Anselm was the older brother of my mother. He had written to her for years, and she had never answered, because she was ashamed of having left.
Anselm was dying in 1962, and he had one wish. He wanted his only family, a niece in Texas he had never met, to have what he left behind. He sent Klaus to find her. Klaus came to America with a suitcase and an address that turned out to be the church on Seguin Avenue where I played. He walked in on a Sunday morning, heard the organ, and sat down in the back pew. He wrote that he had come for the estate. He wrote that he stayed for the music.
A man can begin a journey for the wrong reason and finish it for the only reason that ever mattered.
He had meant to tell me within a month. Then a month became a year, and the year became a wedding, and the wedding became a house and a child. He knew the longer he waited, the harder it would be to say. How do you tell a woman you walked into her church for a house in Austria? He filed the claim quietly in 1963, to keep the property from reverting to the state, and every year after, he paid a lawyer in Linz a small fee to keep it open. He did it out of love and guilt, and he never found the courage to stop.
The last line of the note was the one that undid me. He wrote that the estate was a small thing, a stone house, a patch of vines, and some savings. But he had spent his whole life afraid I would think our marriage was a pretense, and it never was, not for a single day. He said that if I ever found this, I should go and see the house, and play the organ in the church where my mother had been baptized. He said that part, at least, he had been right about.
Heidi was crying openly by then. She laid her head on my shoulder, and I put my arm around her, and for a while we did not speak. The late sun came through the window of the loft and made the dust shine. I thought about the man I had been married to for forty seven years. Forty seven years of morning coffee, and watch repair, and Saturday football. I tried to be angry. I held on to the idea of it as long as I could. But all I could feel was the small, warm weight of a secret that had carried us both.
We flew to Austria in October, Heidi and I, and a lawyer from Linz met us at the airport with a bouquet of yellow roses. The house sat above the Danube on a stone terrace, two stories, white walls, green shutters, with a grapevine that had gone wild across the whole front. Someone had been paying a neighbor to keep it up all those years. The kitchen smelled of apples. On the mantel stood a photograph of a stern bald man with kind eyes. He looked exactly like my mother.
On Sunday we walked to the church in the village. The old priest remembered the family of my mother and had a baptism record to show me. He asked if I would like to play, and I said yes before I could think. The organ was small and a little out of tune and smelled of beeswax. I played the first hymn that came into my head, one my mother used to hum when she thought nobody was listening. Heidi sat in the front pew with her hand over her mouth. When I finished, nobody in the church moved.
Jason called from Texas that same week. Heidi put him on speaker, and I heard him stumble through an apology. He said he had been a fool at the birthday dinner, that he had been under pressure at work, and that he was ashamed of the joke. I let him finish. Then I told him a neighbor had pressed a few bottles of wine from my own vines, that it was very good, and that I would be sending him a case, so that he would never again have to wonder how a woman forgets what she is worth.
I did not sell the house. I am seventy years old, and I spend April through October there now, playing for the village on Sundays, drinking coffee on the terrace, and teaching four children their scales on a piano that belongs to the church. Heidi visits every summer. The watch hangs on a nail in the kitchen, wound each morning by whoever is up first. It keeps perfect time. When it ticks, I do not hear a secret. I hear a man, still trying to say it.
