"I didn't know," he said, "until you told me about the green Philco. I wondered. In your kitchen, when you said your name, I wondered, because you said it the way people say a name they've chosen, a little bit like a question. But there are a lot of Harpers in the world. It was only when you said Hertel Avenue, and the green radio, and eight years old—" He shook his head. "I should have told you then. I'm a coward. I've always been better at talking into a microphone than to a face."
"I didn't hear it," she said. Her voice came out cracked and small. "That Christmas Eve. We were at my aunt Zosia's on Fillmore for Wigilia, the whole family, and we didn't get home until after two, and my father carried me in asleep. I never heard it. I didn't even remember I wrote it. I don't—" She stopped. Then, slowly, like something coming up through deep water: "I took a stamp. Out of my father's desk. A four-cent stamp, with Lincoln on it. I remember I was scared he'd find out. I put it in the mailbox on the corner of Hertel and Parkside on my way to school, and I had to stand on the fire hydrant to reach the slot."
"You put the stamp on upside down," Lucian said. He picked up the envelope and showed her. And there it was: the brown four-cent Lincoln, sideways and upside down in the corner, and her own name in pencil above the return address, AGNIESZKA MAZUR, the S backward.
She laughed, wetly, and then she couldn't stop crying, and he reached across the space between the chair and the desk and took her hand in his long cold trembling one and held it, and neither of them said anything for a while. In the back room Roman slept on, wrapped in his Star Wars comforter, his mouth open. On the radio a car clicked, and clicked again, and then there was only static, soft as snow.
"Tell me about her," Harper said finally. "Cecilia."
So he told her.
He told her that Cecilia Harper had been the daughter of the keeper of the South Buffalo breakwater light, a quiet, enormous Scotsman named Angus Harper who had kept that lamp burning for thirty-one years until the government automated it in 1935 and sent him home with a pension and a brass plaque. That Cecilia had grown up in the keeper's quarters with the lake on all sides of her, and that her father's one rule, the thing he said every night of her childhood at supper, was that a lamp in the window was a promise to somebody you couldn't see. That Lucian himself had been born in 1904 in Tonawanda, the son of a lock tender on the Erie Canal, and had gone onto the lake boats at seventeen as a deckhand, and worked his way up to wheelsman, and spent twenty years of nights steering ore boats from Duluth to Buffalo with nothing but the compass and the dark, and that on those nights the only voices that ever came to him were the ones on the ship's radio, faint and broken, from shore. That he had come off the boats in 1945, after four years of the war on the lakes hauling ore for the steel mills, and talked himself into a job reading the farm prices on WNIA, and met Cecilia when he called the long-distance operator to place a call to his mother in Tonawanda, and she had said, on the line, in a voice he said was like a cup of tea, "Sir, you have a lovely voice, you ought to be on the radio," and he had said, "Madam, I am on the radio," and she had laughed so hard she disconnected him.
"I called back," he said. "Eleven times. She disconnected me nine of them."
He told her that in 1957, when the station needed something to put on between eleven and two in the morning that wouldn't cost anything, he'd gone to the manager with the idea of reading messages to the boats, because he had been on the boats and he knew what it was to be out there. And the manager, a man named Rosen who smoked cigars down to his fingers, had said, Fine, fine, but you can't go on the air at midnight as Lucian Zeller, it sounds like a man who sells sauerkraut, nobody wants to fall asleep to sauerkraut. And that night at their kitchen table on Tonawanda Street, Cecilia had said, Use my name. Use my father's name. Harper. He kept a light on for the boats for thirty-one years. You can keep one on for nine.
"She was exactly right," he said. "Nine years. Almost to the month."
In 1966 the station had been sold to a group from Rochester, and they had wanted rock and roll and car dealers, and they had given him two weeks and a ham. He'd been sixty-two. He had worked after that as a night auditor at the Statler Hilton downtown, adding up the day's receipts in a little office behind the front desk, until they retired him, and then nothing much. They had lived on his Social Security and Cecilia's pension from the telephone company in the downstairs flat on Tonawanda Street for more than thirty years, and they had never had children, though they had wanted them, and in 1979 she had died in her sleep, in the spring, and he had taken her ashes in a coffee can, because she'd told him to and because she said it was what her father would have done, down to the foot of Ferry Street where the river runs fast, and let them go in the current toward the lake.