Chapter 27 #2
The visitor wore a gray suit, a white shirt with silver-and-onyx cuff links, and a striped tie.
A pair of reading glasses was balanced low on his narrow nose.
He had a deep tan and white hair. His smile seemed warm and genuine.
I liked his smile. His eyes were the gray of brushed steel, and his stare was sharp as he peered at me over the half lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles.
I did not like his eyes. Franklin said the visitor was Mr. Morgan Waterford.
With the stately grace of a gentleman, Mr. Waterford rose to his feet, nodded in a sort of half bow, offered me his hand, and said that it was a pleasure to meet me. Stay alert.
He turned out to be a founding partner in a law firm that had grown until it now employed one hundred and ten attorneys, a number in which he seemed to take pride.
I had read Mr. Dickens’s Bleak House, so I had mixed feelings about lawyers.
Those steel-gray eyes were ice-cold now and colder every time he focused on me.
Although his smile had seemed warm, he had no further use for it as he picked up an attaché case that stood on the floor and put it on his lap.
“In spite of considerable effort,” Mr. Morgan Waterford said, “I must tell you that we have not yet been able to locate your birth certificate. We have not developed any credible information on the identity of your father, although we suspect that he might have been the founder and first owner of the Museum of the Strange, which we understand, in carnival parlance, is commonly called a ‘ten-in-one.’ That person seems to have gone by five different names during the first two years of the enterprise before then selling it to Captain Forest Farnam, and not one of those five individuals has a true history. In other words, they are five false identities. In each case, there was a wife, each with a unique name. As none of those five women has a true history either, we assume they were the same person living under false identities. The possibility exists that this woman might have been your mother, but we have no evidence of that. We do not know who she is or where she is—or if she’s even alive.
Finally, Captain Forest Farnam. He earned the rank of captain as an engineer in the US Army.
In 1905, he left the Army in order to work for the noted engineer John F.
Stevens on the construction of the Panama Canal.
He died there of malaria in 1906. No doubt about that.
His name began to appear once again in various public records beginning in 1909.
We have been unable to discover who your Captain Farnam might have been before he stepped into a dead man’s shoes.
I regret to say, young lady, in regard to the investigative aspect of our assignment, we’ve served you and your guardians less well than we had hoped. ”
“No, sir,” I said. “You’ve told me more about Captain than I ever learned during all the years I was under his thumb.”
This was followed by more lawyer talk about the laws governing adoption, which were less complicated in those days.
I had spent the past three months learning the ways of the family, having adventures with the Clyde Tombaugh Club, and worrying about somehow being made to return to Captain and the Museum of the Strange.
As I listened to Mr. Waterford, I began to realize that during that time, Franklin and Loretta, through their attorneys and otherwise, had used their contacts and influence successfully.
The point of this meeting was not to prepare me for bad news, but to educate me so that when I signed the papers swearing I understood what the Fairchilds were offering me and what I was accepting, I would be as informed as the law required.
Because I was not an infant, I legally had choices to make as to my future.
And because I was not a fool, I made the right choice, accepting the incredible gift that this family had given me.
When Mr. Waterford produced from his attaché the sheaf of adoption papers, I signed them with alacrity even though my trembling hand twice dropped the pen.
Included in the adoption was a name change, and not just from Farnam to Fairchild.
As long ago as the few days that we had spent at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I had expressed the desire to shed both names Captain had conferred on me so that I would not think of him every time someone addressed me.
Having given this considerable thought, my guardians arrived at a name that was enough like Alida for me to adjust to it, but which possessed a different meaning and inspired a different nickname. Adiel, pronounced add-e-l.
“Adiel,” said Loretta. “It might lead some to call you Addie, but it seems to us that’s more pleasant than being called Alley.”
“You’re free to pick another name if ‘Adiel’ doesn’t resonate with you,” said Franklin.
“It resonates,” I assured them. “It sounds just swell. It sounds like who I always should have been.”
I didn’t ask how they arrived at it or why it appealed to them, because at that moment all I cared about was signing those papers before the moment popped like a bubble and I discovered that I’d been dreaming.
Although I had been surprised that the adoption was to be finalized, everyone else at the Bram had known and kept the secret.
In celebration, Chef Lattuada had prepared a special meal.
Although the food was fit for royalty, the best thing was that everyone, not just the family, sat together at the extended table.
Harmony, Anna May, Lynette, the Symingtons, Mr. Reinhardt, and Luigi stayed late, quite late—thirteen for dinner.
The number presented no risk of bad luck because we counted Rafael as number fourteen.
There was much laughter, and I discovered that even some laughter could make me cry.
I had destroyed the reputation that had been my armor.
I was no longer the toughest, most hard-boiled freak of all freaks.
The best thing about the event wasn’t, as I had first thought, that everyone at the Bram sat down to a celebratory dinner with me. The best thing was that they wanted to.