The Lost Letter

by Jillian Cantor

  “No.” She reached for my shoulders and pulled me back toward her so I wouldn’t get out of the bed. “Don’t go.” She kissed me again. She pulled herself on top of me, and our bodies moved in a way that had become so familiar, so easy. We were one person, together. Even our breathing seemed in harmony, our chests rising up and down and up and down, as one.

  Afterwards, she laid her head against my chest, her ear against my heart. “If we get separated,” she said quietly into the darkness, “I’ll meet you in America. You’ll go without me . . .” Her voice trailed off. She was half asleep. She didn’t even know what she was saying.

  “We’re not going to get separated.” Secretly I planned to take both her letter and my own to the post tomorrow morning, before she had a chance to. I couldn’t risk her walking to town alone, no matter what she or Josef said.

  “Promise me,” she said.

  “I promise.” I stroked her hair absently between my fingers, and I drifted off to sleep.

  When I awoke the next morning, she was already gone.

  Los Angeles, 1989

  SHE TOOK THE LETTERS,” my father says, turning to look out the window. I’m still trying to absorb his story, put together what he told me, along with what I already know from Miriam and Gram. “They were both gone. I found one in the snow, at the edge of the woods. I don’t think she made it to town before the Germans got her.” He lets out a strangled cry, like he’s reliving it all again, right in this moment.

  “Oh, Dad.” I put my hand on his shoulder, but he doesn’t react, just stares out the window as if he can still see Elena, somewhere, just beyond the hills where I often think he can see my mother.

  I try to make sense of everything he just told me. My father, my dad. Fifty years ago he engraved stamps for Austria, for the Nazis, and for the resistance. I always knew his first language was German, though I never heard him speak a word of it, ever. He loved telling me about history, the world’s past, but he never talked about his own past, before he came to the United States. I’d always thought it was because he was so young when he came over, just a boy—that was the word he always used himself—that he couldn’t remember another life in Europe the way Gram could. But maybe his silence was a choice. I was a different person then, he said. I always knew he’d converted to Judaism when he’d married my mom and that he was so steeped in religion, my mom used to tease he was more of a Jew than she was. But now knowing all this . . . this man he used to be, this woman he once loved, it almost all makes sense.

  I look at him again. His face is contorted, and he has tears in his eyes. He reaches his hand up and puts it against the glass of the window. “I never saw her again,” he’s saying, not necessarily to me. “Never again,” he repeats.

  “But you came to America to meet her here, just like she asked?” He’s still staring out the window, but I keep talking, more to myself than to him, trying to piece it all together. “You came to find Frederick Faber, but he was already dead. And then you met Gram and Grandpa Gid. And Mom.” Benjamin was right. None of this was a coincidence. I wonder if my mother knew any or all of this. Maybe she did. But Gram doesn’t. So maybe my mother never knew either.

  And this letter that Benjamin and I have been clinging to these past few weeks, it was never sent. “You wrote a letter to Elena after she disappeared that morning, but then you never sent it? You kept it all these years. You collected all those stamps . . .” I suddenly understand it; I understand him. All the trips to thrift stores, yard sales, sifting through other people’s trash, holding on to all those stamps. His collection. Not just paper and ink. The stamps were a connection to the past, his past, to this person he once was, this woman he once loved.

  “I loved her,” my father says. He turns and puts his hand on my cheek. “But I love you, too. I don’t want you to go, Rissa. I don’t want you to leave me, too.”

  “I won’t,” I say. And I sit with my father for a long time and look out his window with him. I sit with him until Sally interrupts, tells my father it’s time for lunch. “Turkey sandwiches, Ted, your favorite,” she says, smiling too wide.

  “You’ll tell her I’m here,” he says to me as he listens to Sally, stands to go to lunch. I’m not sure who he thinks I am now, where he thinks we are, and who he’s really asking after. “If you see her, you’ll tell her where to find me.”

  “I will,” I promise. But it feels just like the promises I always make to him when I leave here, when I promise to find his airline tickets, to look for his departure date, his checkout time from this hotel. It’s an empty promise.

  I head straight to Benjamin’s office after I leave the Willows. In the story my father just told me, Kristoff is a different man. Not just my father with a changed name, but a stranger, a person I never knew. I keep reminding myself that it was him, that he lived through all of that. It’s a wonder that he survived, that he got out of Austria, made it here. That I’m sitting here. The thought gives me chills, though it’s hot inside the car.

  I park haphazardly, taking up two different spots, and I run from my car through the parking lot, opening the front door of Benjamin’s office hard enough that the bell hits the glass and makes a loud clanging sound.

  “Katie?” Benjamin stands up; he’s surprised to see me, and he smiles.

  “I found Kristoff,” I say. I’m out of breath. And Benjamin walks around to the front of his desk, takes some papers off a chair for me to sit on.

  “Our Kristoff?” he asks as I sit.

  “My Kristoff.” Benjamin’s face falls; he thinks I’m trying to exclude him. “No, no, I didn’t mean it like that,” I say. “My Kristoff because Kristoff is my father.”

  “Your father is Ted,” Benjamin says, in that logical way he has of seeing everything.

  “And Frederick was Charlie when he came here, remember?”

  Benjamin frowns; he’s still not sure, and I might almost doubt the truth of it, too, except my father’s words were so real, so vivid, when he told me this morning. I tell Benjamin how his details overlapped with Miriam’s and Gram’s and Dr. Grimes’s assumptions about the stamp. And how now it all makes sense to me: my father’s lifelong obsession with stamps. Looking for them. Collecting them. Preserving them. Loving them. And I tell Benjamin about his paintings at the Willows, the edelweiss in the woman’s hair, the same flower that was on our stamp. I’ve taken one with me, courtesy of Sally on the way out, and I show it to Benjamin, who examines it closely, then hands it back to me.

  “He was a stamp engraver in Austria during the war.” Benjamin’s voice is filled with awe. He sits on the front edge of his desk and leans in toward me. He’s close enough that our legs almost touch. “Your dad?”

  “My dad,” I repeat, and I tell Benjamin the rest of the story my father told me, about forging papers, about how the edelweiss was proof of unusual daring, proof that he loved Elena, about how they forged their own papers to become the characters Elena loved from Little Women, and how he never saw Elena again after that morning when she went to mail the last letters.

  “Wow,” Benjamin says, and then he’s quiet for a few minutes, speechless. “What do you think happened to the other letters?” he asks, when he recovers. “The ones that Josef and Schwann were supposed to mail? Do you think they actually sent them, that they got those people their papers even after Elena was taken?”

  “I don’t know.” It seems so small in the face of the whole rest of Europe, Austria, all the Jews who died in the camps. My father and Elena and Josef and Schwann—does it really matter whether they saved ten people or fifteen or twenty? Yes, for some reason it feels like it does. The tiny town of Grotsburg where everything was eradicated by the Nazis, everything burned, is no longer just a missing dot on a modern map, but people who are connected to me, my family, my own history.

  “I guess Elena was probably taken to Mauthausen herself and joined her mother. Or she was killed
that day,” Benjamin says. “Either way, she probably didn’t make it through the war.”

  I ache for her, this woman I never met or knew, this woman my father loved when he was a different person. This woman who saved her own sister and her father and strangers, but did not save herself when she had the chance. My father said she forged his papers, she made him promise to leave, even without her. I’m pretty sure she saved him, too. “I promised my dad,” I say, my voice breaking. “That if I found her, I’d tell her where to find him.” I’m trying really hard not to cry, but I can’t stop thinking about my dad as Kristoff, this other man, all the danger he and Elena faced, all the life he’s lived since then and all the life that was stolen from her so many years ago. And I can’t help myself. The tears well up.

  Benjamin leans in closer and puts his hand on my shoulder. His face is close enough that I can see his eyes are blue-gray in this weird fluorescent office light.

  “He really loved her,” I say. “And she was taken from him.”

  His expression turns a little in understanding. And then he jumps off the desk and before either one of us can hesitate, separate, he pulls me up from the chair, wraps me in a hug. His arms are stronger than I would’ve expected, and he smells like Irish Spring and some sort of aftershave that reminds me of the beach, the cold salty sea spray in Coronado.

  We hold on to each other for a few minutes, and I don’t ever want to move, but the bell clangs over the door, and Benjamin lets go first.

  I turn around, and a young blonde-haired woman stands in the doorway, looking a little confused. “I had an appointment.” She glances at her watch, as if to double-check the time. “But if I’m interrupting, I can . . .”

  Benjamin looks over me at her. “Miss Kemp?” She nods. “I’ll be right with you.” He looks back to me, puts his hands in his pockets, and shrugs. This stamp has consumed us for weeks. But he has other clients, ones who might actually make him some money.

  “I should go,” I say, but I don’t for a minute. Because it feels like I should say something else, something more. Our work here is done pops into my head. But that sounds so stupid. I want to tell him I’ll call him later or make plans to meet tomorrow for breakfast, but what reason does he have to spend time with me now? I found Kristoff, the answer to his question about the unusual stamp. We have nothing to talk about, no reason to meet up anytime soon. So I turn to walk out.

  “Katie,” he calls after me as I walk past Miss Kemp. I turn back to look at him. His hair is messy, unruly, and his glasses are a little crooked. Maybe I bumped them when we hugged? He notices, and pushes them back up his nose. “Take care,” he finally says.

  “Yeah,” I echo back. “You too.”

  I don’t get a Christmas tree this year, for the first time since I started dating Daniel. Instead I go up to the attic and dig out the old menorah I’d taken from my father’s house along with his stamp collection when I’d first moved him into the Willows.

  Hanukkah begins just before Christmas, on the 22nd, and for the first time in years I find myself in my old neighborhood, at my old temple. They always have a menorah lighting, crafts and dreidel games for kids. I haven’t been since my parents and I came when I was a kid, but this year I go alone, if only just to feel connected to the girl I once was and the place that I came from. I want to feel a part of something bigger and more important than me. This is my holiday. My father’s and Gram’s holiday. And Elena’s and the Fabers’ once, too.

  On Christmas morning I give Benjamin a call. But he doesn’t answer his phone, and I guess he got out of the office, maybe even out of the country. I leave him a message telling him I just wanted to see how he was doing, how he was holding up over the holidays. And then I drive down to Coronado, and spend an entire glorious week by the ocean with Gram.

  When I get home, there are no messages on my machine. But I find the rest of my father’s stamp collection piled up on my porch with a note:

  Thought you’d want this back. I looked through it all. Nothing else Faber/Austrian or of any significant value.—Benjamin Grossman

  His note is so formal, all business. He’s done with my father’s stamps. And with me. Whatever we shared, briefly, is over.

  Los Angeles, 1990

  I ALWAYS LIKE NEW BEGINNINGS, fresh starts. It’s a new year, a new decade. After I get back from Coronado in January I know it’s time to find a new job. But first I find a realtor and put my house on the market. I don’t want to live with so many old memories. I want to start over.

  Then I call Jason and tell him everything I learned about the stamp and about my father. “Wow.” He whistles on the other end of the line. “I knew there was a story there.”

  “Yeah,” I say, biting at my thumbnail. I want Jason to offer me a job, offer to pay me to write this story. When he doesn’t immediately, I come out and ask: “So are you hiring me to write this or not?”

  “On one condition,” he says. “I want to know what the letter says.”

  “The letter?” It takes me a second to realize what he’s asking, because for a while now I’ve been fixated only on the stamp.

  “The letter your father wrote Elena. We would print the text of it, with the article.” His voice rises with excitement.

  “I can’t open the letter,” I say. “It’s not addressed to me.”

  Jason laughs a little. He thinks I’m kidding. But I’m not.

  “No, really. It’s not mine to open.”

  “But you said yourself, Elena is almost certainly dead,” he says.

  “Still . . . I don’t feel right opening it. My father wrote her a love letter. We can’t just print that in Voice magazine for the whole world to see. It was meant to be private.”

  “But your story isn’t complete without knowing more about Kristoff and Elena’s love affair,” Jason points out. “Your story doesn’t really have an ending yet. You don’t even know what happened to Elena.”

  “You’re right,” I tell Jason. But I realize I’m not going to work for him. That’s not really what this was about this whole time.

  I’m going to hang on to this letter as a piece of my father, his past, his history. And I’m going to keep trying to figure out what happened to Elena, but not for Jason, not for Voice magazine. For my father, for myself.

  In February I finally get a new job working for Gladys Weinstein, a hippie-ish woman who’s about the age my mother would be, had she lived. She runs a small start-up magazine, Jewish LA, and she hires me to write the content. I reacquaint myself with the Los Angeles that I knew as a kid, and the Jewish pieces of life I’d all but left behind. I buy Shabbat candles, and sometimes I light them on Fridays, if I’m home and the mood strikes me. Mostly it does, these days. My father told me how he really first became a Jew the night he thought he’d lost Elena forever, how she’d caught him whispering the prayer wrong. There were so many Fridays Elena wasn’t able to light the candles out of fear, and I can light them whenever I please. I feel I owe it to her, to my father, somehow, not to forget all this.

  In the spring I sell my house to a young, newly married couple, who are still annoyingly bright-eyed about marriage and love and possibility, and I find a one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica, where I’m close enough to walk to the Willows. It suits me better anyway.

  I adopt a terrier from the pound, and I often walk her on the beach. I walk her over to the Willows a few times, and we sit out in the garden atrium with my dad. He enjoys the dog, even if every time he sees Lucky he believes he’s meeting her again for the first time.

  In April, I drive down to Gram’s for Passover, and we have a Seder, the two of us and some of her friends from her bridge club. They all talk about setting me up with their grandsons, and I murmur polite excuses as to why I can’t. I’m not ready, I say.

  “What about that sweet Benjamin Grossman?” Gram whispers to me conspiratorially, across the table. She
tells her friends how he drove down here with me once, and how she thought he was cute.

  “I haven’t even talked to him in months,” I say, but what I don’t say is all the times I’ve thought about him, wondering what he was up to, what he was doing, if he was awake in the middle of the night when I was. “And Benjamin was only interested in the stamp,” I add. “Nothing else.”

  “If you say so,” Gram says.

  June brings with it the hottest day ever recorded in LA, and when the city tops out at 112, I’m grateful to be closer to the water in my new apartment. It has a balcony and even today, there’s a slight breeze coming off the Pacific Ocean. My proximity to the water feels like a new gift.

  Gladys calls me in the morning and tells me not to come into work. Our small office isn’t air-conditioned, and luckily, my apartment is. I offer her respite here, but she says she’s heading to the mall, where she can stay cool and shop. I tell her I’ll work at home, but she just laughs and says, “Oh, Katie, take the day off. No work required when it feels like Hell outside.”

  Lucky and I spend the day watching soap operas on the couch, and I’m surprised when around dinnertime I hear a knock at the door. No one is crazy enough to be out soliciting today, but the person knocks again and I get off the couch and glance through the peephole. Benjamin stands on the other side, looking sweaty and disheveled, his curly hair a mess, his glasses a little steamed up from the heat. And everything we shared together, those foggy days in Wales, all comes surging back to me.

  “You moved,” he says, without even a hello first when I open the door. And I remember that he’s so direct, always to the point. It makes me smile to see him here, exactly the same. “I had trouble finding you.” He peers past me, into my apartment, which is a mess, laundry piled on one end of the couch, library books piled on the floor. Dirty dishes in the sink, if he can see that far. “Smaller than your old place,” he says.