His father, Charley’s brother, was “something in the State Department” and did a lot of traveling. When he was twelve, his mother told him they had adopted him, that he wasn’t really their child. “So I am not really Richard Woodgate at all,” he said to her, trying to hold back his tears. “I’m really someone else.” She tried to assure him that he was as much a son to them as any son of their own flesh and blood could be, but from that day on he was always convinced, somewhere in his mind, that this was all a pretense and that he was really someone else. His adoptive parents did not know the names of his natural parents—all the records had been sealed by the adoption agency. It was not until he was twenty-two that he found out, through illegal access to court records, that his birth name was Paul Savage and that he was the illegitimate offspring of teenagers, members of two important Washington law families.
