The archbishop did not let go of my arm. In that basement hall, with the coffee urn humming and the television still showing the empty altar, he told me his name had been Tadeusz Kowalski long before it was Archbishop. In the winter of 1958 he was fourteen years old, an altar boy at the Lincoln Village parish, and his mother lay in St. Mary hospital with pneumonia. The doctor would not come to their flat on Lincoln Avenue until somebody paid him eleven dollars. Nobody in that flat had eleven dollars.
“I was a frightened boy,” he said, “and a foolish one. After the Saturday evening Mass I opened the poor box with a butter knife. I took eleven dollars in dimes and quarters. Then I sat down in the last pew and shook so hard my teeth rattled, because I knew exactly what I had done.” He looked at the television, though I do not think he saw it. “A girl of sixteen found me there. She had a bucket, a scrub brush and a red kerchief on her head. She was cleaning candle wax off the floor for the parish. Her name was Halina Nowak.”
“She did not scold me. She sat down beside me and said, Tadek, I counted that box this morning, and the numbers will not match tonight. I started to cry. She said, Then we will make them match.” He pressed his lips together. “She walked to the bakery on Mitchell Street, where she worked weekends, and came back with her whole pay envelope. She put eleven dollars into the box, every crumpled bill and coin of it, and never asked me for a single word of explanation. She told Father Brzezinski the count had been her own mistake, and he believed her, because who would doubt Halina Nowak?”
An old Milwaukee machinist sent downstairs to watch the ordination of his grandson on a basement television learns what his late wife once did for an archbishop, and watches his whole family finally make room for him.
“Then she did the thing I have never forgotten,” the archbishop said. “She took me to the hospital herself, on two buses, in the snow. My mother was too sick to talk. I sat alone in the corridor, and Halina took this very rosary from her coat pocket, amber with the silver Lady, and she folded it into my hands. She said, My grandmother carried it from Krakow, and she said it never sleeps even when we do. I held it all night, bead by bead, until my fingers ached, and a nurse with kind eyes brought me a blanket and a cup of cocoa. By morning the fever had broken. My mother lived thirty more years.”
“I brought it back to her the next Sunday, and she only smiled. She said, Keep praying, Tadek. And if God ever asks you for something, answer him. I did. I went to the seminary because of that night.” He wiped his eyes with the back of a wrinkled hand. “I looked for her afterward, Mr. Wojcik. Lincoln Village merged into another parish, the records were scattered, and a Nowak girl who marries becomes someone else. For sixty five years I have said one prayer at the end of every Mass for Halina. I never knew where to send my thanks. And now I find her husband sitting in a basement, and I am ashamed of this church for putting him there.”
Then he turned to Adam, who had gone completely white. “Father Adam, your grandmother is the reason there is an archbishop in Milwaukee. And this morning, in the sacristy, your rector told me something else. About six years of checks, nine thousand four hundred dollars, from a retired machinist who asked that his name stay quiet.” Adam dropped to his knees beside my folding chair, right there on the basement floor, in his new white vestments. “Dziadzia,” he whispered. “I did not know. I swear before God I did not know.”
The archbishop stood, slowly, with a hand on my shoulder. “Mr. Wojcik, I will not celebrate this day with the man who made it possible sitting beside a coffee urn. Give me your arm.” And so we climbed those stone stairs together, two old men and a cane and a crozier, with Adam carrying my hat. The organ stopped. The whole cathedral turned around. The archbishop walked me down the center aisle to the very first pew, where Melissa sat with her sisters, and he said gently, “Please make room.”
They made room. Nobody said a word. Melissa slid down the pew with her face the color of a boiled beet, and Greg, who had been standing in the back all along, came forward and took the seat on my other side. His hands shook. “Dad,” he said, “I let her. I stood there and looked at my shoes. I have been looking at my shoes for thirty years.” Melissa could barely speak. “Stan, I am so sorry.” I patted her hand. I am eighty four, and I have learned that a person who truly means sorry does not need a speech.
The litany ended, the bells rang, and the rest of the Mass went on with a joy I had not felt in years. Afterward Adam gave his first blessing to me, right there in the front pew, with the archbishop standing beside him and half of Milwaukee wiping their eyes. I took the rosary of my Halina off my wrist and put it into the palms of my grandson. “Your grandmother asked me to give you this when you were ready,” I said. “I think you are.” He closed his fingers around the amber beads, and I swear I heard her laughing somewhere above the organ.
Last Sunday the archbishop came to my bungalow for coffee and kielbasa, and Greg drove him over. Greg drives me to St. Josaphat every week now, and I sit in the front pew, where Halina always wanted to sit, and Melissa saves me a place. Adam says Mass there on the first Sunday of the month. He uses the amber rosary at the altar. Melissa now calls me every Saturday just to ask what I would like for dinner, and I let her. A man can wait a long time for his family to see him, but love, like a good prayer, gets answered in the end.