Karen stood at the bottom of the attic ladder with the telephone still in her hand, and her face was the color of paper. I came down the last rungs with the gray cash box under my arm, and she did not look at the box. She looked at me. “Neil,” she said, “a woman called the house yesterday. She said her name was Ruth. She said she was eighty four years old, and that she had not heard from my father in four weeks, and that she was frightened.” I set the box on the hall table, and the sound it made was as loud as a gunshot in that quiet house.
We opened the yellow envelope together at the kitchen table in Erie. The adoption papers were dated 1961, signed in Pittsburgh, and the name of the birth mother was Ruth Dombrowski, nineteen years old at the time, a mill worker daughter who could not keep a baby. Stan, then a young fireman, and his wife had come to the office of the lawyer and taken home a girl of three months. For sixty three years they had never said a word. In the checkbook, the memo line of the last check read, Last payment. Keep your promise, and the promise had a name on it.
Karen read the memo line out loud and then lowered her head onto her arms. When she raised it again, she asked me what I thought the promise was. I said I did not know. But before I could say more, a gray sedan pulled up in front of our house, and a small old woman in a tan raincoat got out of the back seat with the help of a younger man. She looked up at our front window. She was holding a handkerchief to her mouth, and I knew without being told who she was.
A gray cash box found in an attic gave one son in law the afternoon to bring his wife back to her mother in Erie.
I gave my terms at the front door, with my hand on the knob. “Karen, you do not have to open this door if you do not want to. It is your door and your choice, and I will stand beside you whichever way you go. But I will tell you what I think Stan wanted. He wanted you to see her face before either of you ran out of time. He wrote the check four weeks before he passed. He knew. Whatever she did or did not promise him in 1961, it is yours to hear now, from her own mouth.”
Karen opened the door. The old woman stood on our porch, trembling. “I am Ruth,” she said, in a thin Pittsburgh voice. “I promised your father that I would never come looking for you, and I kept it for sixty three years, every day. He paid for my rent and my medicine so I would not be on the street, and he asked for nothing but the promise. But he is gone, and I am very ill, and I could not keep it any more.” She took a small photograph out of her coat. “I only wanted to tell you that I never gave you away because I stopped loving you.”
That was when Ray, the son of the sister of Stan, who had come to help with the house and who had been hovering in the hallway all morning, reached over my shoulder, snatched the cash box from the hall table, and ran out the side door toward his pickup. “Family money,” he shouted. “It belongs to the family.” He made it to the gate. Three retired firemen of Station Five, in their old navy jackets, who had come with a ladder to patch the roof as a favor to Stan, stepped out from behind the pickup and folded their arms, and Ray stopped as if the road had ended.
The box clanged onto the gravel, and the lid sprang open, but nothing fell out. The old firemen simply stood there with their jaws set. One of them, a man named Big Walt, picked up the box with a gentle hand, and put it back in mine. “Stan would have wanted it with Karen,” he said. “He used to talk about her at the station until we were all sick of it.” I looked back at the porch. Karen had taken both hands of the old woman and drawn her inside, and I saw them sit down together on the sofa, side by side, not saying a word.
The money consequences were small and kind. The sixty seven thousand dollars in the cash box was the savings of Stan from thirty two years of overtime shifts, put aside for the day Karen should learn the truth and want to find her mother. It paid for the care of Ruth in a good nursing home in Erie, near our house, for as long as she lived. Ray gave a sheepish apology and a day of work on the roof. The leak in the back bedroom was fixed on Saturday, by the firemen, free.
In the name of Stan, who passed in February, I started the Stanley Wozniak Fund. It pays for searches, travel and counseling to help adopted adults and birth families find each other, in Erie, Crawford and Warren counties. In the first year we arranged thirty one reunions. One was a man of seventy from Corry who learned that his mother was alive in a nursing home thirty miles away. He rode the whole way holding a bouquet of grocery store carnations, and he did not let go of them for an hour.
Ruth lived eleven more months, and Karen sat with her every afternoon. In the last week of her life, the old woman asked to be taken out to the porch in a wheelchair, and Karen wrapped her in a blanket from the cedar chest of Stan. They watched the sun go down over Lake Erie, and the old woman said she could finally rest. Karen said, “Mama,” for the first time, and the word fell quietly between them. I stood in the kitchen window with a dish towel in my hand and let the water run.