“…he has the check,” Frank finished, and his hand shook as he held out that crumpled feed store receipt in the porch light, with a Milwaukee telephone number written across the back in blue ballpoint. I did not wait until morning. I sat in Frank truck, with the rain drumming on the roof, and dialed the number with a thumb that would not hold still. It rang four times. A man answered, in a deep, careful, kindly voice, like an old radio announcer. “This is Michael,” he said. “I have been waiting a long time for you to call, Glenn.”
We talked until two in the morning. He was seventy, a retired band director from Wauwatosa, a widower with three grown daughters. He told me he had been born with a hole in his heart, and that a surgeon named Dr. Walter Kessler had operated on him at St. Joseph Hospital when he was three weeks old. That same surgeon and his wife, who could not have children of their own, had raised him. He said he had always known he was adopted. He had not known, until a cousin sent him a box of papers last year, that he had a twin brother, or where to look.
Frank and I drove down together the next afternoon in my Buick, not speaking much. The house in Wauwatosa was a white colonial with a porch swing, and on the porch stood a tall old man in a gray cardigan, bald, with a hearing aid and my own father long upper lip. When I stepped out of the car he put his hand on his chest. I put my hand on mine. We stood across forty feet of lawn, looking at each other, two old men with the same nose, until Frank said quietly behind me, “Go on, Glenn.”
A crossed out name in a family Bible, a cancelled check from 1956, and an old man on a porch in Wauwatosa.
Michael had spread the papers on his dining room table, with a pot of coffee and a plate of kolaczki his late wife had taught him to bake. The check lay in the middle, yellow and soft at the folds. It was made out to Stanley Ostrowski, for twenty five hundred dollars, signed Walter Kessler, M.D. In the memo line, in the surgeon neat hand, were the words: For the boy hospital care and board. “My adoptive father kept it,” Michael said, “because he wanted me to know the whole truth one day. Your father was not paid for me, Glenn. He was paid for the bill.”
He explained it slowly. In 1956 the surgery cost nearly three thousand dollars, and the Ostrowskis had a mortgage, a failing herd and a new baby at home. Dad had driven Michael to Milwaukee in the truck with everything he owned, two hundred dollars in a coffee can. The operation saved the baby life, but it would take months of care, and Dad could not stay, because the cows had to be milked. Dr. Kessler offered to cover every cost if he and his wife could keep the boy through his recovery. Dad signed, with a shaking hand, and drove home alone.
“It was supposed to be six months,” Michael said. “Then he would come and take me home. But when your father came back to Milwaukee that winter, he stood in a hospital hallway and watched me playing on the floor with Mrs. Kessler, and I was laughing. I was strong. I was happy. I have thought about it all my life. I believe he decided he would rather lose me than take me from a house where I was loved. And I believe it broke him.” I looked across at Frank. His whole face was wet.
Michael opened a shoebox. Inside were forty one birthday cards, mailed from Pulaski, Wisconsin, with no return address, one for every June 2nd from 1957 until 1997. Each had a twenty dollar bill folded inside. Each was signed, in tight Polish cursive, with a single letter: S. “I never knew who S was,” Michael said, “until your brother called me. Turn it over.” On the back of the first card, in pencil, so faint I had to tilt it to the lamp, were two words in my father hand. Forgive me.
I read the cards for an hour, one after another, while Frank sat with his head in his hands. In 1969: I saw your name in the Milwaukee paper. You play the trumpet. In 1974: They say you are a teacher now. In 1988: I hope she is kind to you. Dad had followed his lost son for forty years from a distance, through newspapers at the Pulaski library, and had never said a word to anyone. I understood at last the silence at our dinner table, the hard hands, the way he stood at the barn door every June 2nd, looking south.
In June, on our birthday, the three of us stood in the Pulaski cemetery beside our parents stone. Michael had brought a single pale blue hydrangea. For a long time he said nothing. Then, in his radio voice, he said, “Thank you for keeping me alive, Dad.” I think it was the only way any of us knew how to say what we felt. Frank put his hand on one of our shoulders. I put my hand on the other. A red tailed hawk wheeled over the green field, calling once, and then it was quiet.
At home in Green Bay, I opened the old family Bible one more time and turned to the back page. I could not erase the neat line through my brother name. But beneath it, in my own handwriting, in ink, I wrote the word: Found. Then I drew a small bracket joining the two entries, Glenn and Michael, June 2, 1956, together at last. Now every Friday Michael drives up from Wauwatosa, and Frank brings the pierogi, and the three of us sit at my kitchen table, three old men arguing about the Packers, as if we had never been apart.