Why Tom left Merope /Draco and Harry

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 147008

Carol, wondering what would have happened if Tom Sr. had sought out
>   > his newborn son and raised him as a wealthy Muggle rather than 
>   letting
>   > him grow up unacknowledged in an orphanage
> 
Jen D:
>   You touched on something either I don't understand, forgot or
never connected. Did Tom Sr. even know about his child? I can't
imagine a rich man of that time allowing a child to exist with his
name (plenty of rich men fathered children anonymously, no doubt)
without acknowledging said child. I will go back and read but I can't
remember this point coming up.
> 
>   Andie:
<snip>
>   Quick question - Did Tom know that Merope was pregnant before he
left her? 
>   Did Merope tell him?
<snip quotes> 
>   We don't know if Merope ever told Riddle that she was pregnant. 
LV could have killed his father & grandparents  without them knowing
that he had ever been born.

Carol responds:
I may be skating on thin ice here, but I doubt very much that Merope
would have told Tom Sr. about the love potion without also telling him
about their child, hoping that the pregnancy would keep them together,
begging the man she so desperately loved not to desert their unborn
baby even if he deserted her. (Unless she was even more mentally
deficient than she seems, she would surely have waited until she was
visibly pregnant to tell him, hoping that common decency would bind
him to his child.) 

Also, she gave the baby his father's name, evidently telling the
people at the orphanage that he was named after his father and
grandfather. Otherwise, how could Diary!Tom have known this fact, and
how could he have found his father to murder him? Quite possibly, the
authorities looked for Tom Sr., too, when the baby was born. After
all, it would be better in most people's minds for a baby to be
brought up by relatives, especially rich ones, than placed in an
orphanage. And knowing that his father had a chance to raise him but
refused it would certainly explain the intensity of Tom Jr.'s hatred,
not only of his father but of Muggles in general.

Diary!Tom says in CoS that his father was "a foul, common Muggle who
abandoned me even before I was born, just because he found out his
wife was a witch" (Am. ed. 314). It's possible, of course, that Tom is
wrong (for example, he apparently doesn't know about the love potion
or how pathetically ugly and ignorant his mother was), but I don't
think that JKR would use him as the explicator of the backstory here
(as she so often uses Dumbledore) unless what he was saying was
essentially true.

I also think, given TR/Voldemort's tendency to explain his motives to
Harry and the Death Eaters in both CoS and GoF, that he would quite
likely have first petrified his father and grandparents (Petrificus
Totalus), forcing them to hear who he was and what he intended to do
to them, then Crucio'd them, and finally murdered them one by one,
unfreezing them just long enough to allow them to assume that
terrified expression as he hit them with the AKs. (If, as I speculated
in one of my long-lost posts, the poisoned memory in the cave potion
is that of Tom Sr. being Crucio'd and begging his son not to torture
or kill his parents, Tom Sr. knew that he had "done wrong," that it
was indeed his fault that his son had not been acknowledged and raised
by his family.)

Carol, happy to see her sign-offs receivng responses even when the
posts themselves don't