bestowed upon me & swallow it greedily & never look back.
To tell him: Yes, yes, it is possible you are my son, you, Arthur, were named for me, & therefore you are my son, my very admirable son, fully formed, absolutely perfect, my son. My long-lost son. Arthur.
But I couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t have been right to deceive him. It would have haunted me forever & ever. I would have taken it into the afterlife with me. I would not have rested easy in my grave.
I walked into my bedroom & got out Charlene’s letters & leafed through them to find my favorite one of all. It is my one love letter. It was sent in the midst of our courtship. In it she said many things (O I could name them all) but the one that is most important to me now is something she said that I found peculiar then.
She said that in her wildest dreams we would be married & I would be the father of her child. At the time I took it as something hypothetical, but I wonder now if she already knew. If she was pregnant when she wrote to me. If she stopped seeing me because she was pregnant by somebody else. You would make a very good father I am sure, she wrote to me then. You’re smart and you respect people.
We were never intimate. Occasionally we held hands. Occasionally she took my arm. Occasionally. Nothing more. The closest to Charlene I ever felt was the very first time we met outside of school—the one time I helped her with her coat. If I could have helped her with her coat for hours, for the rest of her life, I would have.
I sat on the bed and read her old letter over and over again. & then I read the new one I held in my hands. For one whole day I pondered what to do.
Finally I allowed myself to call Yolanda, though I had promised myself I never would, not until she called me first. It was important & I had no adviser. Fortunately for me she answered.
“Invite him to your dinner party,” she said, after I told her my strange tale.
& I felt somehow that this was a very good idea. & I felt that now Yolanda would come too.
My task then was to write back to the boy.
I am deeply sorry to hear about your mother’s death. I knew her when she was about twenty years old. We had a special sort of friendship, but I regret to tell you that, although you do have a father—everyone does—he is not I. I wish with all of my heart that I could tell you differently. I hope this doesn’t bring you any sort of despair. Fathers aren’t all they are cracked up to be. For example I know who my father is, but I also know he isn’t a very good one, and I probably would have been better off without him. All my life I have heard it said that you can’t choose your family, and all my life I have lamented this fact as true & unfair. But I think it is possible to look at things differently: I believe we can choose to surround ourselves with a circle of people we love and admire & they can become our adopted family. For example I had an adopted sister for many years. Her name was Marty. & I seem to have found a daughter to adopt along the way as well, & her name is Yolanda, & I hope you will meet her someday.
And then I invited him to my dinner party, & told him about all the letters I’d had from his mother over the years, & that maybe I could tell him about his mother when she was young, & I encouraged him to bring whomever he pleased.
I opened my front door & put it in my mailbox and I tipped the happy little red flag up.
At last I walked to the shelf & took his picture off it & studied him closely. I stood there, very still, until my knees hurt. Suddenly I thought I saw in him a certain resemblance to my father, when he was young. Something about his eyes & ears. His stern worried expression. O yes, I thought, he could look like my father.
I imagined, one day, telling the boy the story of our name. My mother used to tell