The Lost Letter

by Jillian Cantor

  “I know, but that’s not what I mean.”

  “Where’d you take it?” he asks.

  “A stamp dealer. Benjamin Grossman,” I tell him.

  “A Jew at least,” he says, and his voice softens, as if he’s coming around to the idea of getting his collection appraised. It hadn’t occurred to me that Grossman is a Jewish name. The only thing more important than stamps to my father is his Judaism. But to me—as a grown woman who married a non-Jewish man—I’ve left almost all of my religion behind. I’d never tell my father, but one of my favorite times of the year throughout my seven years married to Daniel was decorating our Christmas tree. Maybe because it was such a novelty or maybe because it was something I purely associated with my marriage. The thought of Christmas, practically right around the corner, saddens me now. What reason does an almost-divorced Jewish girl have to get a Christmas tree?

  “You won’t sell anything,” my father says, emphatically, interrupting my thoughts, and I bring my mind back to the stamps.

  “If you don’t want me to, I won’t.” I lean in and put my hand on his. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I didn’t know what else to do with your collection when you told me I could have it. But I can go get it back. And I’ll just . . . keep it.” I wonder what Benjamin Grossman will think of me when I do, or how much I’ll owe him, for simply wasting his time.

  But my father doesn’t respond. He turns back to stare out the window. “The stamps were everything,” he murmurs, and maybe he’s pushing himself to remember the specifics of his collection. Once, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had committed every single stamp in it to memory. But now, who knows what’s still in his mind and what’s lost.

  “I know. Your collection is huge. It filled up my entire car.”

  “But you never understood it, Rissa. Never even wanted to.”

  Rissa. I sigh. In an instant I’ve turned into my mother in his mind. I’ve wasted his few good, lucid moments this morning talking about stamps, and I want to take them back and talk about something real with him instead. To tell him about what happened with me and Daniel, about how I haven’t been able to bring myself to open the envelope with the divorce papers yet. About how a part of me is still hoping Daniel will change his mind, that we could figure out a way back to each other if we really, really tried. About how thinking that makes me feel weak, and I hate that. I want to ask for his advice, the way I always have. “Dad.” I touch his shoulder gently.

  “You never understood it,” he repeats. “You never even wanted to.”

  “Don’t worry, your collection is safe. I’ll go get it back, and I’ll take good care of it. I promise.” I’m echoing the words Benjamin Grossman said to me when I left everything at his office. Though my promise feels empty. I’m not sure what I would do to take good care of it.

  His book falls from his lap to the floor, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He watches the outside world carefully, as if he can envision my mother there, beyond the hills, beyond the Pacific Ocean. I look, too, as if she might really be there, visible, a ghost, until the brightness hurts my eyes and I finally look away.

  I pick his book up off the floor, and it’s filled with stamps, pages and pages of stamps categorized by year, country, engraver. Was all of this committed to his memory once, too? But these days does it appear just as new, as foreign, to him as it does to me?

  I hand him back the book and kiss the top of his head. He turns to me, and something brings him back. I can see it in his eyes. He sees me again. “Kate,” he says, sounding surprised. “You came today.”

  “Yeah.” I put my hand on his arm. “I come every Sunday.” I pause and wait to see whether this information registers, but his stare is blank and I’m not sure. It’s so hard to watch him come and go, when I really need him to be here. “I have to go to work.” I give him a hug. “But I’ll be back soon. Next week, okay?”

  “Kate,” he calls after me as I walk away, and I turn. “My tickets. I can’t seem to find my passport.”

  “I know.” I force myself to smile. “I’m still looking.”

  Every time I leave the Willows I feel like I’m sinking. Like I’ve dived into the cold waters of the Pacific without a wet suit. I am numb, cold. Tired. I really do have to work. I’m supposed to go to a movie premiere, but I still have a little time, so I head home first to collect myself. I don’t live in Fairfax any longer, but near UCLA, in Westwood, where there are still a fair number of synagogues—I just haven’t been in any of them.

  When I get back home, I consider calling Daniel, asking him to assign someone else to the premiere. Sitting in a dark theater and concentrating on a movie, a Chevy Chase National Lampoon movie about Christmas no less, feels nearly impossible after this morning. But these days, I try not to ask Daniel for anything. I’ve tried to avoid him at work, communicating mostly through notes in our inboxes and outboxes on our desks, and I certainly don’t want to call him now and ask for a personal favor.

  I make myself a pot of coffee and try to regain my composure. But then I sit in the kitchen to have a cup at the very same table where Daniel and I ate dinners and breakfasts for so many years. Daniel offered me this house in the divorce settlement as a gesture of kindness. He said he didn’t want to force me to sell so we could split the equity, force me to move out of my home when everything else in my life was in upheaval, too. And so he’d graciously just . . . given it to me. Graciously. That was the word my lawyer had used, anyway. But there are so many memories of us together, everywhere in this house.

  When he had first said the terrible words to me last spring, we were eating dinner at this table. I’d made lasagna and a salad, and I’d taken the day off work. Earlier that morning I’d visited the Willows for the first time and had made the decision to put my father on the waitlist for a room there. In a way, it had felt like a relief. I’d come home and thrown myself into chopping, cooking, baking. I’d also made a cake—chocolate chip with buttercream icing, Daniel’s favorite.

  “But I made dessert,” I said that night, in response to his unexpected announcement that he was done, that he no longer wanted to be married, that he’d be moving out. I’d thought, at first, that he was joking. That I’d offer him the cake and he’d laugh and take the words back.

  “We’re just not working anymore,” Daniel had said, calmly. “This is the first time we’ve had dinner together in months.” Was it? I tried to recall the last dinner we’d shared at this table, and I couldn’t. My father really shouldn’t have been living alone at that point, and I’d been spending all my free time with him.

  There were probably a thousand things I could’ve or should’ve said, starting with the fact that things were going to get better once I moved my father into the Willows. I could’ve gotten angry, yelled at him that taking care of a parent was no reason to leave someone, or that it wasn’t okay for him to just decide all this without even discussing it with me first. Or that no matter how many dinners or nights we’d spent apart I couldn’t imagine my life without him. But I was so shocked by his announcement that instead, I just kept talking about the stupid cake. “Cake,” I’d emphasized. “I made you a cake.” I never baked a cake, unless it was his birthday. The cake was my apology, in a way. I knew we’d grown apart. I’d just believed, right up until that moment, that it would be okay. That we could still fix things, that this was just a rough few months in a marriage that would last forever.

  “Katie,” he said, evenly. “Our marriage is over.”

  And then it hit me: He was giving up on us? I cut him a slice of cake. I shoved the plate toward him, harder than I should’ve, and the cake bounced off the plate. Daniel stared at me, then at the cake, half on the table, as if suddenly he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with it.

  “It’s your favorite cake,” I finally said, and though it’d felt like a gesture of kindness when I was making it, I sounded bitter, angry, when I sa
id this to him.

  Daniel looked down, picked up his fork, and took a bite of the cake.

  After dinner he packed a bag, and left to go sleep at a hotel.

  A few hours later, after I get home from the premiere, I sit in bed, chewing on my pen, trying to find the words for my review. But the page in front of me is totally blank, and my mind is still lost in my morning visit to my father. I have the urge to pick up the phone and call him now, the way I often used to back in college when something occurred to me, late at night, or when I just wanted to talk, hear his voice. After my mother died of cancer my freshman year, I knew he would be awake, no matter how late it was. He was always a night owl; so am I. Daniel left me, I might tell him. I can’t even bring myself to open the divorce papers because I still can’t accept that we’re done. Once, years ago, when Daniel and I were first married, we got into a stupid fight and Daniel left me then, just for the night. I’d called my father in tears, sometime after midnight. And I still remember what he said: Kate, when you really love someone you don’t run. Any goodwill he’d had for Daniel dissipated after that, and I’d felt a little bad that I’d called him at all. But now I’m grateful for the memory of it, his words. That’s probably what he’d say to me, if I did call him tonight. But anyway, I can’t call him. The Willows doesn’t accept phone calls after eight p.m.

  I remember the promise I made to him earlier that I’d get his stamps back, and I decide to call Benjamin Grossman now and leave him a message instead. But after two rings, Benjamin, not his machine, picks up.

  “Oh,” I say. “I didn’t expect you to answer, to be in your office so late on a Sunday night. I figured I’d leave you a message.”

  “Who is this?” he asks.

  “Right, sorry. It’s Katie. Katie Nelson. I brought you my father’s collection last week.” He doesn’t say anything, so I jump in, with the reason I called. “I need to come back and pick his collection up. I changed my mind. I don’t think I want it appraised after all.”

  He’s quiet for another minute, and I have no idea whether he’s surprised or annoyed, or just uncaring and maybe doing something else in the background. I picture him sitting at that messy desk, adjusting the antenna on his TV. “I found something unusual in his collection,” he says.

  “Unusual?”

  “There’s a stamp on a letter,” he says. “A World War Two–era Austrian stamp. And I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

  “It’s valuable?” Every stamp is valuable, my father had said to me this morning. But what if he really did find a gem? My father would be thrilled. I know he would be. Not to mention we could use the money for his care, for the Willows.

  “It’s unusual,” Benjamin counters.

  “But unusual means valuable to a stamp collector, right?”

  “Philatelist,” Benjamin corrects me, the technical word for stamp collector rolling easily off his tongue, though I’ve never really liked that word. It strikes me as oddly sexual, a little embarrassing.

  “But unusual is good, isn’t it?” I ask.

  “Maybe,” Benjamin says. “Can you meet me? I want to show you what I mean. In person.”

  “Now?” I glance at the clock, at my half-drunk glass of wine. It’s almost ten, but I’m wide-awake. I haven’t drunk enough wine yet to begin to feel myself ready to slide into sleep.

  Benjamin exhales on the other end of the line. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m an insomniac. I do my best work at night. Sometimes I forget that other people sleep.”

  “I don’t sleep either,” I admit.

  We’re both quiet for a moment, and then Benjamin says, “I know a diner, Frankie’s, off the 405 just a little south of my office. It’s open twenty-four hours. If you want to meet over there?”

  “I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” I say.

  Austria, 1938

  KRISTOFF OPENED HIS EYES and saw Elena’s round face hovering close above his own. She looked worried, and as he tried to sit up, he felt a sharp aching in his head. He reached up and felt a painful lump on his forehead. “What happened?” he asked.

  “You’re alive.” Elena exhaled and stepped back. She held a thick piece of metal in one hand, a candle in the other, and her hands were shaking.

  Then he remembered the clunk against his skull. “You hit me? Why would you do that?”

  Elena put the metal down and reached out her free hand to help him up. Her hand was tiny in his, cold and soft, and he let her lead him to the corner armchair in the workshop, where Frederick often sat and smoked his pipe, just before lunch.

  Once he was settled in the chair and Elena seemed satisfied that he wasn’t going to die, she put the candle on the worktable and folded her arms in front of her chest. “It’s the middle of the night,” she admonished him. “Why are you sneaking around in my father’s workshop?”

  “Why are you here?” he countered. His head throbbed, and he put his hand to his forehead in an attempt to quell the ache.

  “I live here,” she said, as if that gave her the right. Frederick would most likely be angry to know that either one of them was in his workshop in the middle of the night, much less both of them. “Were you trying to steal from my father? I knew you couldn’t be trusted,” she added. It seemed a strange thing to say, when only hours earlier she’d teased him as they played a board game together, and he’d thought they were finally becoming friends.

  “No,” he protested, and tried to sit up, but Elena had hit him hard, and the workshop spun all around him in dizzying waves. The metal engraving plates, the tools, they all seemed misplaced, upside down. “I don’t want to steal anything,” he said as the world tilted around him. “I just wanted to practice. I . . . I need more practice. With the engraving tools.”

  Elena opened her mouth slightly, and she leaned forward, her shoulders slumping. She kneeled on the floor in front of him and reached up and touched his forehead lightly. Her fingers were cool, her touch gentle against his throbbing head. “I thought you were an intruder. It’s dark. That’s why I hit you.”

  “An honest mistake,” he said, wondering how long it would take for the aching in his head to subside. He might suspect it wasn’t a mistake at all, given Elena’s clear dislike for him, except her face turned in such a way that she genuinely seemed to feel bad. “You still haven’t told me what you’re doing in here,” he said.

  “I’m practicing, too,” she said quietly, her eyes moving to the worktable. Her hair fell across her face, and he couldn’t read her expression. He had the urge to lean down and move her hair behind her shoulders so he could see her eyes, but he didn’t.

  He raised his eyebrows, and felt a new flash of pain across his forehead. “Why?” he asked. “Why would you be practicing?”

  “None of your concern.” She stood and moved toward the door.

  “Elena,” he called after her.

  “It’s late,” she said. “I should get some sleep. We both should.”

  He heard the door click shut behind her, and he sat for a little while longer until the dizziness finally subsided.

  The next morning at the breakfast table, Mrs. Faber noticed Kristoff’s head right away. He’d overslept, and Frederick was already out in his workshop. Kristoff hoped he wouldn’t be angry, but after Elena left and his headache had subsided a bit, he had practiced, and he hoped today the progress would show. That Frederick would be happy with him, in spite of his tardiness.

  “Oh, dear boy,” Mrs. Faber said, handing him a cup of her strong black coffee. “Whatever happened to you?”

  The bump had already turned purple and ugly, and protruded from his forehead, the size of a small apricot. He glanced at Elena, who stared very hard at her toast. “I fell out of bed,” he finally said. “Hit my forehead on the side table.”

  “That looks nasty. Oh, I feel terrible. I’ll have Miriam move that table for you after school tod
ay,” Mrs. Faber said.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I’m just clumsy sometimes. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

  Elena finally looked up at him, and it seemed she couldn’t help herself. She gave him a small, maybe grateful, smile. He shrugged in response, to say, I’ll keep your secret. For now. If he was being honest, he didn’t care so much why she was in Frederick’s workshop in the middle of the night, why she was practicing with his tools. He cared about falling into her good graces. About seeing her smile again. At him.

  “You’re late,” Frederick barked at him as Kristoff walked into the workshop. It looked different in the daylight, all the engraving tools more menacing again.

  “Sorry,” Kristoff apologized, and went straight for the burin. Last night he had gotten it to make a small, straight line, just the exact size that he wanted it to be. Even with his head throbbing. But as he picked it up again, he felt nervous, uncertain.

  “Kristoff,” Frederick said. “I know you came back in to work last night.”

  “You do?” Kristoff touched the swollen lump on his forehead, and he wondered how Frederick knew.

  Frederick held up an engraving plate, and Kristoff saw it bore a strong resemblance to his drawing of the hillside, the one Frederick had told him was not half bad. But he wasn’t nearly skilled enough with the engraving tools yet to do anything like this, in the metal. He was still learning to make simple lines behave the way he wanted underneath the pressure of the burin, never mind trying to replicate an entire drawing. In order to make an engraving plate for a stamp, a drawing had to be engraved on the metal plate, backwards and to scale. Each line and detail of the original drawing had to be replicated with perfection, in reverse order, before the plate could be taken to the printer in Vienna. “I couldn’t . . . I didn’t . . .” But Elena had. She must’ve. Elena had said she was practicing. And, looking at the plate in Frederick’s hands, Kristoff realized that she was actually good. Far better than him, anyway. Why wouldn’t she tell her father that she was interested in engraving, in fact very skilled at it? Sure, engraving wasn’t a trade for a woman, but Frederick seemed the kind of man who wouldn’t pay any attention to what other people would think. So why all the secrecy? But he remembered the smile Elena had shot him at breakfast, and he wasn’t about to give her away now.