She required that it be an adoption. A formal, agency-routed, paperwork adoption of two unrelated children, with a story attached — a birth mother who abandoned them and never looked back.
Perry’s name is not on our original birth certificates. Wanda made that a condition too.
So the man who was our father spent seven years sitting in the front row at school plays as our adoptive dad, clapping louder than anyone in the building, because that was the arrangement under which he was permitted to be in the same house as his own sons.
Ruth said he agreed to it in about four days. She said he was weak and that she loved him and that both of those are true.
And then she said, “There’s a letter.”
PART 4 — PERRY’S LETTER
Perry wrote it in 2002, about nine months before he died, and Ruth thinks he had some sense of his heart by then because he had been to the doctor twice that spring and never told anybody what was said.
He gave it to his mother-in-law, sealed, with an instruction on the front in his handwriting: For Ellis and Fletcher. On their eighteenth birthday.
He gave it to Ruth and not to Wanda, which tells you he knew exactly what his wife was.
On our eighteenth birthday, Ruth asked Wanda about it. She has never pretended otherwise; she says she should have simply handed it over, and she asked permission instead, which is the whole story of that woman’s life.
Wanda said no.
She said if that letter went to us she would take her mother out of the will, stop the Sunday visits, and make sure Ruth did not see us again — and Ruth, who was seventy-one and widowed and whose entire remaining family was in that one house, believed her.
So she kept it.
For thirteen more years it sat in a shoebox in a closet in Cordwell, and she took it out about twice a year and looked at the front of it and put it back.
She gave it to us at that kitchen table on the Sunday morning.
I am not going to reproduce it. It is four pages and it belongs to my brother and me and it is the only thing either of us has that is ours from him.
I will say three things about it.
He says he is our father, in the first paragraph, plainly, without building up to it.
He apologizes for the arrangement and does not excuse it. There is a line about how he took the deal because he could not imagine not seeing us grow up and how he has come to understand that he chose being present over being honest and that we would probably have preferred honest.
And there is one line about Nesta. He writes her full name and where she was from and that she was twenty-two and that she was not the person we had been told about, and that if we ever wanted to find her, we should, and that we should not do it angry.
My adoptive mother spent twenty-eight years telling my brother and me how grateful we should be that she took us in. On her sixtieth birthday I let myself into her house with flowers — and heard her laughing in the kitchen about how we had believed every word she ever told us.
