The Unbroken Horizon | Excerpt Two
In this excerpt from Chapter 35 of The Unbroken Horizon, Sarah discovers a box of her father’s things in the attic that her mother just told her about.
The next morning, I woke up early with a sense of bubbling anticipation. What if I found some of the Dad puzzle pieces that had been missing from my life? I decided to skip my morning meditation, yoga, and run, and tiptoed up the stairs to avoid waking my mother on a Saturday morning.
The attic was big. A few rays of dawn sunlight filtered in through the tiny rooftop window, and along with a weak, naked lightbulb, shed enough light to start exploring. I recognized some furniture from our house in D.C. An old rocking chair that, as I recalled, had been in my mother’s family for generations. A sturdy, antique table that was probably worth some money was gathering cobwebs in the far corner.
I had to rummage around before I saw the boxes huddled in a corner, with “Saul’s things” written on top in my mother’s neat, clinical handwriting. There were a few boxes of differing sizes, but one of them had the sub-label of “articles, research, letters, etc.”
The writing was hard to decipher in this light, so I decided to take the box down to my room, stopping to get a rag to dust off the layer of grime covering it. Settled cross-legged on my area rug, I peeled off the tape that was yellowed with age and barely sticking to the cardboard anymore. It had been twenty-two years, I realized to my astonishment. My mother must have packed his things before we’d left for Paris, right after my father’s death and — not one to dwell on the past, as she said — had probably never opened them again.
I hesitated for a second before opening the box, a ripple of fear laced with hope and longing coursing through my body. Even with those retrieved during my therapy sessions with Patrick, my memories of my father were few and far between. Those that remained were a child’s memories, frozen in time and stale from having been recycled over and over again. I had never known my father as a man, as a person in his own right. In light of my conversation with my mother, I wondered at all the things I didn’t know about him. His interests. His dreams. Who he had been before he became a father. Or a lawyer, for that matter.
Slowly, I reached over to unhook one flap from the other. The cardboard was soft from age and multiple handlings. Reverently, I began unpacking its contents. There were several manila envelopes labeled “college essays,” which I set aside to peruse later.
Then I found them. Several thick folders labeled “anti-lynching bill.” Next to them was a withered shoebox with the label “letters from family et al.” My hand wavered between the folders and the box, wondering whether to start with the academic or the personal. Finally, I landed on the folders.
Fingers shaking as though I’d discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls and they might disintegrate in my hands if I made a wrong move, I took the contents out ever so delicately. A single page fluttered down, detached from all the other stapled or paper-clipped pages. The writing was hard to decipher in this light, so I decided to take the box to my room.
Upon closer scrutiny, the page looked like the xeroxed copy of a list of handwritten names. “Men and women who died at Auschwitz” was faintly legible above the names. One name was underlined: “Isaac Baum, b. March 12 1905 d. Aug 1942.”
I stopped, stunned, scanning my memory for a record of that name. Nausea threatened to overtake me once more. I slowly sipped my green tea until I’d regained my composure and could look at the paper again.
Isaac. Isaac? I hadn’t known many people on my father’s side. He had an older sister he was fairly close to, but I hadn’t seen my aunt since my father’s death. I made a mental note to ask my mother about her. My grandmother had died of cancer when I was five or six. From the little I could recall, she had a thick Polish accent and long, dark hair she pulled back in a bun. Babcia Valda, I called her. I liked her a lot better than Grandma Belle — beneath her strictness was a warm heart, I could tell even at that age. And she made the best apple strudel!
I looked at the date of death. Was Isaac a great uncle? My grandfather? I racked my brain for more information. I knew my father’s father had died when my dad was a baby, back in Poland, I thought I remembered my father saying. What else? From a vague distant part of my brain came the recollection that when his wife and kids fled to the United States at the onset of World War II, he’d had to stay behind.
But nobody had ever mentioned anything about Auschwitz! I turned the page over, and in my father’s handwriting were the words: “Never forget. This is why you do this work.”
Never forget what?? And why was it inserted into his research on the anti-lynching bill? I sighed, noticing that a headache had begun to grip the side of my head with the effort of trying to dredge up fragments of family history from the little I’d ever known in the first place.
Not sure where to go from here, having wrenched every last bit of information I could from my own mind, I opened the various folders, rummaging until I found dad’s article: “The Anti-Lynching Bill: Why it Failed and the Civil Rights Act Succeeded,” by Saul Baum. Seeing his name in print stirred something in my heart, as though a little part of him had been brought back from the dead and was here with me.
