The mason, a quiet man named Dennis Fiore, took out the bricks one by one and laid them in a neat stack on a bedsheet. Dust filled the living room, and my daughter Annie held a scarf over her face. Behind the wall was a black hole, and the chimney sweep, Walt Kosko, leaned in with a long hook and a lantern. He worked the metal box off its little shelf and carried it out like a sleeping baby. We set it on the dining table. It was a plain gray tin, the size of a bread box, wrapped in yellowed plastic and tied with a shoelace. My hands shook so badly that Annie had to cut the knot.
Inside, on a folded wool scarf, stood two silver candlesticks, slim and tarnished, each one about ten inches tall. Beside them lay a bundle of letters tied with blue ribbon, and a worn little prayer book with writing in a language I could not read. I knew the candlesticks at once. the mother of Ron, Elzbieta, kept them on her windowsill in the old apartment on Quincy Avenue. She lit them every Christmas Eve and would not let anyone touch them. After she passed in 1983, Ron said they had been sold. I now understood he had lied, and two years later, I understood why he had sealed up the hearth.
A single page lay on top of the letters, in the English of Ron, spelled carefully. “Peg, I could not tell you because I had failed. My mother came to America in 1949 from a village near Krakow with only these candlesticks and the prayer book. Her little sister Halina had been taken to another town, and they lost each other in the war. The mother of Ron searched all her life. On her last night she made me promise to find Halina. I wrote to every office there was. Nothing. I was ashamed. I bricked the box in because I could not light a candle for my mother without feeling that shame.”
A widow opens a bricked up chimney and finds a family treasure that leads her to a long lost relative across the ocean.
There was more. “The week after she passed, three houses on our street were broken into. I was afraid someone would take the last of her, so I hid them inside the chimney and told you the flue was bad. I meant to take them out when I found Halina. Then the years went by and the lie grew too big to take back. Peg, forgive me. Your husband was a stubborn man who loved a promise more than his own peace. If the box finds the light someday, please finish what I could not. The letters are from Halina, 1952. The address is on the back.”
I looked at Annie, and she looked at me, and we did not need to speak. Under the ribbon, the letters were written in Polish on thin blue paper, six of them, postmarked Gdansk. The newest said, in the translation Annie found online, “Dear Elzbieta, I am alive, I am married, I have a little girl named Marta. Please write.” Those letters had come to the mother of Ron in 1952, and she had never been able to answer, because the return address was smeared by water. The family had been searching for each other for seventy years, and the answer had been standing in our living room wall.
Annie and I sat up until two in the morning with a laptop and a pot of tea. We found a volunteer group in Gdansk that helps families trace lost relatives. We sent photographs of the letters, the candlesticks, and the old address. Then we waited. For eleven days, I could not eat. I polished the candlesticks with a soft cloth and a little baking soda, and under the tarnish they shone like new coins. Annie said, “Mom, Dad would be pacing the floor.” I said, “Your father would have been wearing out the carpet.” We laughed so hard that the cat ran out of the room.
On the twelfth day, an email arrived from a woman named Marta Wisniewska, seventy one years old, in Gdansk. She wrote in careful English that her mother had been Halina, who had passed in 2009. All her life her mother lit two candles every Christmas Eve for a sister in America. Marta had the candlesticks of her mother too, a matching pair she had kept on a shelf, and she did not know why the old woman guarded them. She asked if she could see ours by video. My hand froze on the mouse. Annie squeezed my shoulder and said, “Press the button, Mom.”
When the face of Marta came on the screen, she had the nose of Ron and the jaw of Elzbieta. She held up her candlesticks and I held up mine, and we both gasped at once. They were exact twins, made as a pair of pairs, two for each sister. We sat there crying and laughing in two languages, with Annie translating through the tears. Marta said her mother always told her that someday a package would arrive from Pennsylvania. She said she had stopped believing at about the same time Ron stopped looking. Neither of them knew they were separated by a few hundred bricks and one small lie.
Annie had the mason rebuild the fireplace properly, and the sweep declared the flue perfect, as he had said all along. On Christmas Eve, the whole family gathered in the living room, forty three years after the last stocking hung there. Marta joined us on a laptop screen set on the mantel. We lit all four candles, two in Scranton and two in Gdansk, and the flames burned as one. Annie hung the stockings on real brass hooks. Her son, who is nine, asked why this fireplace suddenly worked, and I said, “Because your grandfather finally kept his promise, with a little help.”
In April, Marta flew to Pennsylvania with her granddaughter. I met them at the airport holding the candlesticks wrapped in the old wool scarf. Marta kissed my cheeks three times, and we stood in the terminal, two old women and two little silver lights that had finally found each other. Ron never got to see it. But as we drove up the hill toward Green Ridge, I looked at the sky and said out loud, “You old fool, you did not fail. You just needed forty two years and a bricklayer.” I swear the sun came out right on cue.