They are also, of course, details about a person who chose to keep a secret from her grandson for the entirety of his childhood and young adulthood. That choice is worth sitting with. She had, at various points over more than three decades, opportunities to say something. As Jack grew older, as the age gap between him and June became easier to observe, as Jack left home and built a life and eventually became famous — at any of those points, the conversation could have happened. It did not.
Why it did not is not accessible through the historical record. Secondary accounts suggest that the original decision — made in the circumstances of 1936 or 1937, under the pressures of that specific community and that specific moment — simply continued forward without ever being formally revisited. The secret did not need active maintenance after the first few years, because the family had absorbed it so completely. Jack did not know there was anything to ask about. Ethel May did not think there was anything that needed saying.
There is a version of this story in which Ethel May’s silence looks like a sustained act of selfishness — a grandmother who claimed a mother’s role and protected that claim by refusing to reveal the truth. There is another version in which it looks like a sustained act of protection — a woman who believed, or perhaps had convinced herself, that the arrangement was serving everyone well enough that disturbing it would only cause pain.
Neither of those versions is fully supported by what we know, because what we know about Ethel May’s inner life is essentially nothing. We have the external facts: she raised him, she ran the household, she maintained the fiction, she died in 1970 without telling him. What she thought about any of it is not in any record available to the public.