The older woman at the door of the little yellow house in Dubuque looked at me for a long moment, and then she stepped back and held the screen door wide. I am Harriet Voss, seventy years old, and I had driven forty minutes with the return address from the letters of my husband written on a sticky note, my hands cold on the wheel. “You found where he kept them,” she had said, on the step. “He always said you would.” I walked into her front room, with the smell of coffee cake and furniture polish, and sat on the edge of her flowered sofa.
Her name was Loretta Pike, eighty six years old, small and straight backed, with white hair pinned up in a twist and the same gray eyes as my husband Gerald. I saw it the moment she sat down in the chair across from me. She folded her hands in her lap, in the exact way he folded his, and the room swam. “Mrs. Voss,” she said, “you need to know the first thing before the rest. I am not his sweetheart. I am not anyone he betrayed you with. I am his mother.”
I sat with my mouth open. Gerald had been told his whole life that his mother passed when he was born, in 1953, and he had grown up in the home of his aunt in Cedar Rapids. At thirty one, a county clerk had slid a sealed envelope across a desk with an address, and he had driven to Dubuque, and stood on this very porch. She had opened the door and recognized him at once. She had been seventeen, she told me, and she had been sent away by her father, and told never to speak of it.
A folder labeled for taxes opened after his passing gave one widow the afternoon to bring his mother home to the family in Dubuque.
I gave my terms in the front room, with my coat still on and my hands on my knees. “Mrs. Pike, I would like to read every one of the letters, if you will let me. All forty one years of them. I would like to hear how my husband sounded when he was happy and when he was afraid. And I would like to ask you to come to my house this Sunday and have dinner with my daughter and her children, who do not know you exist. I think he was waiting for me to ask. I am sorry that I took so long.”
Loretta reached for a handkerchief and laughed through her tears. “Gerald never meant to hide anything from you,” she said. “He told me he was afraid that if he said it aloud, it would turn into something that could be taken away again. The folder on the computer was his idea of a joke. He said there was no place safer than a boring name. Every year on my birthday he wrote me a page, and every year I wrote back.” She paused. “He asked me never to make you pretend. He said you were the best thing in his life.”
A car door slammed outside, and heavy footsteps hurried up the porch. A stocky man in a windbreaker pushed through the screen door without knocking. He was Dennis Pike, the son of Loretta by her later marriage, sixty one years old, who had long suspected his mother of hiding money. He had heard from a nosy neighbor that a stranger had come. He saw the cardboard box on the coffee table, which held the printed letters, and snatched it into his arms, certain that it must hold bank papers. He bolted for the door. He nearly ran through the neighbor, Mr. Halloran, a retired highway patrolman of eighty who had been sitting on the porch glider all afternoon watching the street, and who now stood up slowly and spread his arms across the doorway. “Dennis,” he said mildly, “I would not.” The box tipped. Letters slid across the porch boards, hundreds of folded pages in a gray, neat hand. Dennis stood amid them with his mouth open, looking down at the handwriting of his own mother, on page after page that began with the words, “My dear son.”
Dennis sank down onto the porch step and read one of the pages in his hands, and then another. He had not known. His mother had kept a first son a secret for sixty years. The three of us gathered the letters from the boards, one at a time, and stacked them back in the box. He apologized to me three times, and to his mother, and then he said, in a rough voice, “So I have a brother.” Loretta took his hand. “You had one,” she said. “Now you have his family.”
The money consequences were small, which surprised everyone. There had been no secret fortune, only a small house and a modest savings, and Loretta wanted none of the money of Gerald. The estate of my husband came to one million, three hundred thousand dollars, and I put a share in trust for Loretta, over her objections, for her own comfort. Dennis and I became friends. We agreed that the letters should be bound into two books, one for his family and one for mine, and we paid a printer in Dubuque to do the work.
In the name of Gerald, who passed in the winter, I started the Gerald Voss Fund. It pays for records searches, DNA tests and reunion travel for adopted people and the mothers who lost them, in Dubuque, Jackson and Clayton counties. In the first year we completed forty three searches and arranged thirty one reunions. One was a retired machinist from Maquoketa who met his mother at a diner when he was sixty four. She brought a photograph of him as a baby, and he brought a thermos of her favorite coffee.
On Sunday afternoons now, Loretta sits at the head of my dining table in Dubuque, in a lavender cardigan, with my daughter on one side and Dennis on the other, and the great grandchildren climbing over her chair. She reads aloud from the books of letters, a page at a time, in a voice a little unsteady. Last week she read the page from 1989, in which Gerald described his first day as a grandfather. She stopped, took off her glasses, and said, “He always said you would find me. He did not say how kind you would be.”
