A letter on plain typewriter-paper, carbon copy retained in the bottom of the green ledger of the Halpern cabinet, dated 17 June 1962. Written by Saul A. Halpern at his desk in the Carroll Street apartment to a Mr. Theodoros Karras-Halloran of Florence (the addressee being Halpern's second-cousin-by-marriage, the grandson of the Athenian antiquary Theodoros Karras who had been instrumental in the Barlin matter of 1879). The carbon is dim but legible. The top copy was posted by registered post on the 18th; the letter is preserved in the addressee's papers at Florence and was returned to the Halpern family in 1971 by the addressee's widow.
1418 Carroll Street, Brooklyn, New York 11213, the 17th of June, 1962.
My dear Theodoros,
I am writing this in the form of the letter we agreed in 1937 we would one day write, when the time came to write it. The time has not come yet; I am writing it because I am sixty-eight years old this winter, and because Miriam has been pressing me to think about the cabinet, and because I would rather we have it on paper between us than continue to have it in the silence we have shared for twenty-five years.
The object is in the cabinet. It has been in the cabinet, in Brooklyn, since I brought it from Florence on the Conte di Savoia in November 1936. You will remember the crossing; you came to the docks at Genova to see Miriam and me off. The object was, on that crossing, in the lining of my overcoat, and I have not told even Miriam that. I do not think it is necessary to tell her now.
The Athens publication of August 1937 was, as you and your father agreed at the time, a necessary fiction. I have, in the intervening twenty-five years, come to feel the word fiction more strongly than the word necessary, and I am writing this morning to tell you so. Your father commissioned the copy in Florence in the spring of 1937 from the silversmith Vannucci — whose workshop you know — and your father delivered the copy to the Museum in Athens through the offices of Mr. Stavridis, who entered it into the accession-book under "anonymous donation" by an arrangement we have not since had to revisit. The copy is, by Vannucci's hand, an excellent copy; the weight is wrong by three-tenths of a gram, and your father did not know, and Vannucci would not have said, and the Museum did not weigh. The Bulletin's plate XIV-3 photographed Vannucci's work, not your grandfather's.
What I am writing this letter to say is that I do not intend to address the necessary fiction in my own lifetime, and I am asking you not to either. Our daughters do not need our matter on their shoulders. If our daughters' children should, in their generation, come into the cabinet and find the ledger and the clipping I have kept together and choose to read them as I have written them, they will be free to decide what to do with what they read; and I will trust them with it, and I will not write to them across forty years from the dead and tell them what I think they should do. I have, in candour, no idea what I think they should do.
I ask only this. If a young person of the family — a niece, a granddaughter, a great-niece, a stranger's hand by some kinship I cannot imagine from the present chair — should one day write to you, or arrive at your door, with a small velvet box in their hand and a question on their face: hear them. Tell them what you and I and your father did. Tell them why we did it. Do not protect them from the part of the answer that hurts.
I have not been wholly easy with the cabinet, Theodoros, in twenty-five years. I would like to think a young person of the family might be more easy with it than I have been; or, if not easy, then at least certain. Certainty is what your grandfather lacked when he made the exchange at the Strand in 1879, and what your father lacked when he commissioned Vannucci in 1937, and what I have lacked when I have closed the cabinet door at the end of each Saturday's reckoning of its contents.
The cabinet is on the second shelf from the top of the steel cabinet behind my workbench. The ledger is on the bottom shelf. The Bulletin clipping is folded into the ledger at the page for the object. If you visit this country, you will see the arrangement.
Give my love to Sofia and to the boys.
Your cousin and your friend, Saul
P.S. The colombina, in case I have not been clear, is the original. The Athens piece is the copy. The original has been the original since the year I am told it was the year of grace 1204; we have, between us, the modest function of making sure it is not the copy that travels into a museum's hands in our lifetime. I think, on reflection, that our great-grandchildren may regard this function differently from how we have regarded it. They will, in any case, regard it. — S.