Ohio, Indiana, Illinois - 1843-1945
I did not know, when I arrived in Alton in 1948, that the record was already here.
I had carried my portion from Prague - the chalice case, Father Novák's journal, the materials he had given me in the sacristy in 1943 - across the ocean and across half a continent, believing that I was bringing the chain to America for the first time. I had read Thomas Bennet's chapter in the record before I left Prague. I knew the American branch existed. I did not know it had come to rest in the same city where I was going, had been there for sixty years before I arrived, had been waiting in a house three streets from the house I rented in September of 1948.
I discovered this in 1952, when a woman named Irene Kowalski came to my door with a box of materials and the name of my predecessor in Prague written on a piece of paper in handwriting I recognized. She had been told to find me when she found me. She had been looking for four years.
The convergence of two branches of the same chain in the same Mississippi river city is not, I have come to believe, a coincidence. The record moves according to patterns I do not fully understand and do not fully need to understand. What I needed to do was receive what Irene brought, incorporate it into the record, and spend the next several years reconstructing the history of the American branch from the materials that were now in my custody.
What follows is that reconstruction. It is more complete than the Silesian chapter and less complete than I would like. The American branch kept records - the Bennet family had a tradition of careful documentation that Thomas had established and his successors maintained - but the documentation becomes thinner as the chain moves west, the way most documentation thins as you move west in the nineteenth century. I have done what I could with what I have.
— T.M., 1961
The Bennet line held the record for fifty-two years after Thomas's death in 1822 - his son Robert, Robert's daughter Eleanor, Eleanor's son William, each keeping what they had been given with the methodical care Thomas had established as the tradition of the custody. They lived in Charles County, Maryland, and then in Baltimore, and then - in William's generation, in the 1850s - in Philadelphia, following the movement of the family's commercial interests northward and eastward as the tobacco economy of the old Catholic Maryland declined.
William Bennet was the last of the direct line. He had no children. He was sixty-three years old in 1874, a bachelor, a lawyer, a Catholic in a Philadelphia that had become increasingly Irish and German in its Catholic composition while he remained the representative of an older Maryland tradition that was quietly disappearing. He understood, with the clarity that comes to careful men in their sixties, that he needed to find the next keeper and that the network he had inherited from his father and grandfather was no longer the right network for the task.
The Irish Catholic community in Philadelphia was large and vital and not, in William's assessment, the right environment for the specific kind of custody the record required. Not because of any deficiency in Irish Catholic faith - which was genuine and often heroic in its own way - but because the Irish Catholic community's relationship with authority and institution was different from what the record needed, shaped by a different history, carrying different wounds.
The German Catholics were different. They had come from a tradition that was more theologically serious, more connected to the pre-Enlightenment intellectual life of Central Europe, more accustomed to the kind of quiet long-term custody that the record required. They had arrived in large numbers after the failed revolutions of 1848, bringing with them a specifically Central European Catholicism that had been formed in the same environment that had produced the chain's European keepers.
William found his way to a German Catholic community in Cincinnati through a Jesuit priest in Philadelphia - the Society had been restored in 1814 and was rebuilding its networks, slowly, across the Atlantic world. The priest gave him a name: Margarethe Huber, widow, of Cincinnati, who had come from Bavaria in 1852 with her husband Franz and who had been, the priest said, keeping certain things for the Church in ways she had not been asked to explain.
William traveled to Cincinnati in the spring of 1874. He was not well - the journey took more out of him than he had expected, and he arrived at the Huber house on a Tuesday afternoon looking, as Margarethe would later write to a correspondent, like a man who had been carrying something heavy for a long time and had decided it was time to set it down.
He had.
Margarethe Huber was sixty-one years old, a small woman with the specific quality of stillness that the record's keepers had in various forms and registers - in Ambrose it was practiced patience, in Margaret it was active listening, in Margarethe it was something more domestic and no less complete. She had raised six children in Cincinnati, had buried her husband Franz in 1868, had maintained the German Catholic community's connections to its Bavarian roots through a correspondence network that was simultaneously social and, in ways she did not fully articulate, something more.
She had been keeping certain materials since 1865, when a Benedictine monk from the Abbey of Saint Meinrad in Indiana had left them with her for safekeeping during a period of what he called uncertainty about the Abbey's stability. The monk had not returned. The Abbey had stabilized and the monk had died, and Margarethe had kept the materials because no one had come to collect them and because they had the quality, she wrote, of things that knew where they needed to be.
She recognized the notation system when William showed her what he carried. She had seen it on the materials from Saint Meinrad, which she had been examining for nine years with the careful attention of a woman who read slowly and retained everything.
William spent three days in Cincinnati. He told her what he knew of the full record - more than Father Talbot had told Thomas Bennet in London in 1791, because eighty years of American custody had added to the chain's understanding of itself, and because the situation was more urgent and the time for gradual disclosure was past. Margarethe listened with the specific quality of her listening and asked three questions, all of which were the right questions, and then said that she would receive what he brought.
She asked what she should do when the time came to pass it on.
William said: find someone from the old country, or close to it. The chain's roots are in Central Europe and the Central European Catholic communities are coming to America in numbers now. Find someone who carries the same formation, the same instinct for custody, the same faith that does not require an audience. You will know them when you find them.
He died in Philadelphia in the autumn of 1874, six months after the Cincinnati visit. He left no will that mentioned the materials because there was nothing to leave - he had already given them away.
Margarethe kept the combined materials - the Bennet line's American accumulation and the Saint Meinrad materials - for nineteen years, until 1893, when she passed them to her youngest son Anton, who was thirty-four and unmarried and had, of all her children, the quality she recognized as the one William had described. Anton kept them in Cincinnati until 1901, when his work took him to East St. Louis, Illinois, across the river from St. Louis proper, in the industrial corridor that was drawing workers from across the Midwest and from Europe in the last years of the nineteenth century.
He moved to Alton in 1903. He was drawn by the river and by the German Catholic community that had established itself in the bluff towns above the Mississippi, the same communities that had built the churches whose limestone still stood along the river road, the same communities that had sent their children to Catholic schools in the town that overlooked the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi.
He lived in Alton for thirty-seven years. He died in 1940, five years before I arrived in America, three years before Father Novák gave me the chalice case in Prague.
He passed the materials to a woman named Irene Kowalski in 1938, two years before he died, because Irene was Polish and Catholic and had the quality he had been looking for since he understood that he needed to find the next keeper. Her family had come from Kraków in 1912. She had the formation William had described to Margarethe - the Central European Catholic instinct for custody, the faith that had been shaped by a history of suppression and survival.
She kept the materials through the war years in a house in Alton, three streets from the house I rented in 1948. She had been told that a man named Teodor Maren was coming, that he would be from Central Europe, that he would know what she had when he saw it.
She came to my door in 1952.
I opened it.
The record had been in Alton for forty-nine years before I arrived. Anton Huber had kept it through the long ordinary years of the early twentieth century in a river city that had no idea what was on his shelf. Irene Kowalski had kept it through the war and its aftermath and the strange American peace that followed, in the same city, waiting for someone she did not know.
I have spent years trying to understand what it means that two branches of the same chain arrived in the same city without having been directed there by anyone who knew both branches existed. Thomas Bennet brought the American branch to Maryland in 1791. I brought my portion from Prague in 1948. The American branch had been moving west for a hundred and fifty years, arriving in Alton in 1903. I arrived in 1948.
I do not have an explanation for this that satisfies the historian in me. I have something else instead - the recognition, which I have come to trust more than explanation, that the record moves according to patterns larger than any single keeper's understanding. What I needed to do was not understand it but receive it, and I received it, and the record is now more complete than either branch had been alone.
Joshua will inherit both. He does not know this yet. He will.
— T.M., 1961