Mike put the letter down on my kitchen table and neither of us spoke for a long while. The refrigerator hummed. Out in the street a car door slammed. Finally I asked the only question I could think of. “What was it about your Aunt Teresa?” My son shook his head. He did not know. Walt had a sister, seven years younger than he was, who lived in a care apartment in Warren, and every Christmas he called her and every Christmas the call ended in a long silence. I had never once asked him why. I was seventy three years old, and I was ashamed of how little I had asked.
We drove to Warren on Saturday morning. Teresa Kowalski was seventy seven, tiny and sharp, with white curls and a rosary wound around her wrist. When I laid the Purple Heart in her hands, she held it for a long time without a word. Then she said, “My brother never wanted anyone to see it.” I told her we had found his letter to the Army, and what it said, and I asked her as gently as I could what it was that Eddie Mazur had held over my husband for fifty five years. She looked at the window. “Sit down, Donna,” she said. “I have been waiting a long time to tell this to somebody.”
In the summer of 1967, she told us, she was seventeen and in love with a boy named Johnny Brzezinski who shipped out in June. In August she learned she was expecting. In September came the telegram that Johnny was dead. Her father was a deacon, and a proud man, and she knew what the parish would say. So her brother Walt, then twenty one and home on leave, made a plan. He asked his friend Eddie, who had a car, to drive her to the home for girls run by the Sisters on the east side of Detroit, and to tell no one. Eddie promised. He sat in the car outside for two hours.
A hero who hides his medal in a drawer is not hiding from shame. He is hiding the weight of what he gave away.
The baby was a girl. The sisters took her the day she was born, and Teresa never held her. Then Walt shipped out, and so did Eddie, and the two of them were in the same platoon at Hue. When Eddie was charged in that terrible business in the village, he came to Walt with a hard smile and a simple bargain. Swear that I was with you all night, or I tell your father and the whole parish what your sister did. Walt was twenty two years old. He had just carried six men out of the fire, Eddie among them. He thought about his sister, and he did what he thought a brother had to do.
“He never told me,” Teresa whispered. “Fifty five years, and he never said one word. I would have told him to let them hang the fool.” She laughed, and then she cried, and then she laughed again. “I told our mother in 1979. She cried for a week. Then she made pierogi and never mentioned it again. My brother gave away his whole good name for something nobody even cared about by then.” Mike took her hand. I thought of the man who said flat feet, flat feet, and changed the subject, every time, for forty nine years.
On Monday, we went to see Eddie Mazur. He lived in a small brick house in Hamtramck with an oxygen tank and a photograph of the godson of Mike on the wall. He was seventy nine. When he opened the door and saw the velvet box in my hands, his face collapsed like a house of cards. He sat down on the front step. He did not deny anything. He said he had worn that pin for fifty years because it was the closest he could get to the honor that belonged to the better man, and that every time someone thanked him for his service, he wanted to die.
I did not forgive him on that step. I said, “I am not the one you owe, Eddie.” He nodded, and the next morning he went with Mike to the Veterans Affairs office downtown, and he gave a sworn statement about the village, about the court martial, and about what he had done to Walt. The Army could not try him after so many years, but the record would be corrected, and that was enough for me. He took the pin off his lapel with trembling fingers and placed it in the hands of Mike without a word.
Then my son did something I did not expect. He called a friend at the state adoption registry, and in three weeks he found a woman named Marie Dolan, a school principal in Ann Arbor, who was fifty eight years old and had been looking for her mother for twenty years. The day Marie walked into the apartment in Warren, Teresa stood up from her chair without her walker. They did not say anything. They just held each other in the middle of the carpet, and I stood in the hall with the Purple Heart against my chest and wept like a girl.
In November the Army Board for Correction of Military Records approved the Silver Star that Walt had been recommended for in 1968. The ceremony was held at the parish hall of St. Florian, with folding chairs and a flag and a big sheet cake from the Polish bakery. A colonel read the citation. Two of the six men he had carried out of the fire were still living, and one of them, a frail eighty year old named Frank DeLuca, rolled up to me in a wheelchair and said, “Mrs. Kowalski, your husband carried me on his back for a mile.” Eddie sat in the last row. He stood up when the colonel read the name.
These days both medals sit in a shadow box in my front room, next to the photograph of the two young soldiers, and under it, in the frame, I put the letter that Walt wrote in 1971. Teresa and Marie come to Sunday dinner, and Marie brings her grandchildren, who ask me about the man in the picture. I tell them he was a machinist who loved polka and hated to be thanked. I tell them he had very flat feet. They laugh, and I let them. It is the one thing about him he always told the truth about.