USA - Hoboken, New Jersey - Laurence McLellan stutter-stepped his way down the neighborhood sidewalk, the tidy brick two-stories on either side of the well-maintained avenue that separated them distinguished one from another solely by whether or not they had matching second-floor dormers (every other one did).

He was headed to number 832, and he had walked this route often enough to know that if it were after school it would not be long before the neighborhood's children would begin peeking out from nicely-trimmed evergreen hedges and shared backyards to stare and speculate about the Western-Union man's irregular gait, and about a man of his age not being deployed in the war.

'4-F,' he would sometimes hear from them in hushed undertones, knowing in his heart that such a category, such a distinction, was not right, somehow, to be knowledge meant for children, but the war bled over into everything these days, even, it often seemed, the very air one breathed. This crisp October day, the leaves turned and sporadically falling, seemed better meant for roasted peanuts, backyard bonfires and excuses to sit closer to sweethearts, than for the overseas news he felt certain burned within his official Western-Union leather satchel, destined for number 832.

It had been more than a month since he had had cause to deliver there. The two ladies and the girl. The child with whitest hair, like fragile angel hair's spun glass, plaited tightly and efficiently by the older lady, the great-grandmother, and finished off with a topknot bow easily the size of a cabbage.

Little Zara was certainly sweet, even if her wee size in contrast to the enormous hair ribbon often made it seem as though she would capsize under its weight. Not that at age three going-on-four she kept still long enough for such a tumble to occur.

The grandmother, Mrs. Olive Carter, and the great-grandmother received regular wires from his company. Overseas monies from a son, also last name of Carter. Received them quite regularly until only recently. It had still been summer the last time Laurence had had reason to deliver to 832.

He was always invited into the kitchen by the elder lady, Tamara, whose last name was not Carter, and she always insisted he sit a moment for a drink of something she called compote. It was a heavily sugared concoction, and though out of politeness he swallowed it down with feigned relish, he often found himself leaving their house after the delivery with his mouth more puckered and his throat more parched than when he went in, far from experiencing the refreshment he pretended at.

Having arrived at 832, the Western-Union courier rang the front door buzzer.

"Good day," the elderly Tamara wished him as she answered the door.

"Good day, Madam," he replied, using the only formal address he knew of, something about her always seeming to require and expect it. "I've a cable for Mrs. Olive Carter."

"Won't you come in?" she asked. "My daughter-in-law is not here at the moment, but you know I am always glad to sign for the wire for her."

"No," he gently corrected her, "it is not a wire of money today. It is a cable. From a military address in London."

"A letter?" A small wrinkle showed at her temple. "That is unusual."

McLellan cast his eyes about behind her for Mrs. Olive Carter.

With an unfamiliar-to-him imperiousness, the elderly lady held out her hand, grandly, as if used to being both in charge and obeyed. "I shall hold this for my daughter-in-law, Mr. McLellan. She will not mind my signing for it."

In response he smiled uneasily. It was not something he was technically supposed to do. This cable was meant for Mrs. Olive Carter, at this address. He was not to leave it with whomever he found at home at this address. He was not to go next door and ask the neighbors to do his job for him. No, all of Western-Union and its grand tradition stood behind him, expecting him to properly execute his duty.

Now, had this cable come from the usual address, and come in the form of a wire of money (as they so often did), he would not have given the matter a second thought. Those wires usually bore the names of both women on them. But this cable, he felt nearly certain, contained rather important information meant specifically for Mrs. Olive Carter. Yet here was the great-grandmother, her hand still extended, expectant, majestic, even. "You will...see that she gets it?"

"Mr. McLellan," the imperiousness of her bearing shifted a little, into one of wounded pride, that he might suspect her of doing anything else with the cable other than delivering it.

Quickly he let go of the cable, laying it in her waiting hand. "Say hi to Zara for me, will you? I'll have her a licorice stick next time I'm by."

The elderly lady smiled. "Zara is napping just now," she said, placidly polite now that she had gotten her way. "She will not even know you have been here."

There was a smile of goodbye, but one that did not engage her eyes, making it more of a dismissal, and then the door shut.

He found himself regretfully wondering as the wood of his right leg beat a tattoo on number 832's concrete porch steps down to the sidewalk if he would, in fact, (as with many of his deliveries, with the war dragging on) ever have reason to return here again.

Exiled Princess Tamara Lyubov Sergeiovna Komonoff of Imperial Russia waited a moment as the courier McLellan made his way back down the street. It would not do for him to have a change of heart and return to find that she had opened the cable meant for (addressed to) her daughter-in-law, "Mrs. Olive Carter". Tamara snorted. Hysterical, since there was no 'Mr. Carter' for her to be Mrs. of.

She tore into the paper, her blue-veined hands, and arthritic, but still useful, knuckles careful not to rip the contents.

It was as she had suspected. As she had feared: the announcement of Flight Commander Thomas Carter's disappearance in action. It offered no further information, only assured them they would be notified upon any change of his status.

Alexsei-missing. She took the paper and immediately put it to her breast. Moved to the stove to take down a match and the cast-iron skillet. Things that until some years ago her graceful hands would never have touched, kept in rooms of her palace or country home she would rarely have entered.

She placed the torn Western-Union envelope addressed to "Mrs. Olive Carter" within the well-used skillet and set it afire, in short order turning the paper into unremarkable ash.

She could just imagine the scene, were her daughter-in-law to be in receipt of such news:

"I will tell the child," Olive would say, her brain heaping with practicality, with the constant belief that her son would only grow, as had her husband, to (in her mind) betray and abandon her.

"If you tell that child," Tamara would say, "our life here is over."

"What can you mean?" Olive would ask.

"For 26 years, Olga Lena," it would incense her daughter-in-law for her mother-in-law to use her real, Church-christened name, "no matter what you think, you and I have been family. The only family one another has. For long I have not spoken as I might. I think now I was wrong. Wrong not to speak up when you took this ridiculous new name, when you stripped your son of his as well. Wrong not to speak when my grandson, when our Alexsei, left to fight the Soviet with the Finns."

Tamara, often called merely 'Mara' now, when not called 'Babushka', would deliver such a lecture without the expected Russian accent to her speech. As a princess of Imperial Russia, she had been tutored from a young age in many languages, and primarily spoken French at Court, and in her life, until the Spring of 1917, and their flight from their homeland.

"You," she would tell Olive, "have long believed that I do not like you. That I never have, even from the early days."

"Why would you? I took," (her daughter-in-law would strain to say the once-cherished name), "Igor from you, away from your side."

Tamara would scoff. "In my life, the men I know have longed for two things: women, and war. I did not think I could keep him from you, then, any more than I think we could have kept Alexsei from this war, now. A heart that tends toward passion will find it in the arms of one such vice, if not the other. As women we can only pray that such zealous appetites will not destroy the men we love. The men to whom our hearts belong."

"My son is dead," Olive would say, taking the cable to its, perhaps, logical end.

"Your son is missing. It is not the same thing," and here Tamara would marshal all the authority a woman whose father had carried fourth rank, receiving the personal attention and friendship of two Tsars, might summon, a woman who now settled for being addressed as, 'Ma'am', but who would not forget her Divinely appointed right to be designated, 'your high nobility' when being spoken to. "Olga Elena Petrovna. For years you poisoned your son's heart. It may be only this war will draw the poison from him. He is missing, not lost. Not dead. I will NOT allow you to 'bury' him as you did his father-MY son. Who may yet live. Who is only missing, never lost. And until," Tamara shook with the imagining of her fictional confrontation with Olive, "such a day as Alexsei's body is brought to us, and the child may meet her father in the flesh, you will NOT tell her this news. Or I will take myself, the child, and my money (no, I have not forgotten, as you sometimes seem to have, that it is my international accounts and investments, and MY jewels upon which we live-as you left everything with Igor, hoping he could buy his release), and I will leave you here without word."

Tamara was so overcome by her own eloquence in the invented reality, by her no-holds-barred ultimatum, she found she very much needed to sit. Her hand shook slightly as she pulled out a kitchen chair for herself.

Once seated, with the same hand she again opened today's cable, read the blunt news as it was baldly related within. She took her other hand and pulled a rough, now-brown copy of a handwritten letter from the top of her slip, where she wore it day-in, day-out. It was dated 1939. He had been gone a year, searching for war, for a way to fight a country, a people that no longer wanted him, that had rejected him, exiled him from its lands.

Tamara's mouth moved as she recited from memory what the letter had to say. It had come directly to her, and as such was written in Alexsei's exquisitely-learned Cyrillic script. "Babushka, do not fear to take the child in. She is yours, as she is surely mine, though I did not know it, and if I had would have done right by it. You must love her for me. I do not think I would know how. I will send more, more monies for the care of her, though I do not know what a child might need. If the day comes that you must tell her about me, tell her of ten-year-old Alexsei, who loved to fish, and dreamed of fantastic adventures in his very own hot air balloon. Give her that boy for a father to love. Not Thomas Carter."

It was the last personal letter anyone at number 832 had received. Shortly thereafter they had received notice Thomas Carter had been captured by the Soviet Army and was classified a prisoner of war.

Olive had initially despaired, and then come to hope that with Finland's Winter War ended, once released he would return home. Instead he had re-enlisted, with the British Royal Air Force this time. He would fly planes for them, still at war. And so the regular wires of money resumed, but no personal letters. Never a word, only the monies.

His was a very Russian story, Tamara thought, her own given name a combination of 'bitterness' and 'love', her grandson's life certainly a narrative performed in a minor key, but one better served in a novel by Count Tolstoy, than by one having to live it.

She folded the new cable into the cherished letter, and replaced both into her slip's neckline, satisfied Olive would be none-the-wiser. And she went to wake Zara from her nap, the day, the week, the year set to progress as though the cable, its contents unshared, its envelope destroyed, any confrontation over it entirely imaginary, had not arrived at all.

Missing. Not lost.

...TBC...