Inheritance

by Dani Shapiro

  I told Susie what my mother had said. Philadelphia, the institute, the famous doctor, the slow sperm, the urgency, her biological clock tick-tick-ticking, our father’s mad dash from New York so they could make a baby.

  Susie paused. “And she told you it was definitely Dad’s sperm that was used?”

  My hand tightened around the phone. My stomach clenched as it often did around my half sister.

  “Of course it was Dad’s sperm!”

  “You might want to look into it,” she said. “They used to mix sperm in those days.”

  Mix sperm. Once you hear a phrase like that you never forget it. Two words that crash against each other, like a nonsensical Mad Libs fill-in-the-blank. Susie said it the way she said most things—in a practiced, seemingly casual way. But beneath it was a current of something alive. She was telling me that I should look into the possibility that we were not sisters. That our father was hers—not mine. My psychoanalyst half sister was expressing a very deep and perhaps not wholly conscious wish: she would have preferred that I had not been born.

  I remember my own anger and bitter humor. Analyze that, I said to friends. But I did bring it up to my mother the next time we were together. Here is where my memory becomes hazy. We might have been walking the streets of the Upper West Side. She walked a lot in those days to strengthen her legs.

  “Mom, I heard something—going back to what you told me about what happened in Philadelphia—”

  My mother was unreadable to me, not only in that moment but in every moment. She never let her true self be seen. Her dark eyes often quivered disconcertingly, and when she smiled it was a careful smile—as if smiling was something she practiced in private.

  “I heard that sometimes they would mix the sperm…?”

  I may not remember whether we were on Broadway or West End or Riverside Drive, but I am clear on one thing: there was no ripple, no tensing, no quick blink. Not a glimmer of surprise or distress crossed my mother’s face. She exhibited no confusion at the bizarre phrase.

  “Do you think,” she responded, “that your father would ever have agreed to that? It would have meant he wouldn’t have known if his child was Jewish.”

  My father’s life had been shaped by the rules of observant Judaism. He was a black-and-white thinker. Good, bad, right, wrong. He was also a person who was clearheaded and interested in the truth. Mixing his sperm with those of any stranger would have been unthinkable. But a non-Jewish stranger would have been impossible—I was sure of that. His religion was the deepest and most abiding part of his identity—and Judaism wasn’t only a religion, it was an ethnicity. His child would have been other. Set apart from the very lineage he came from.

  “You knew your father,” my mother went on. In my memory, she is looking directly at me. “Can you imagine such a thing?”

  7

  Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be? Philosophers, who love nothing more than to argue with one another, do seem to agree that a continued, uninterrupted sense of self, “the indivisible thing which I call myself,” is necessarily implied in a consciousness of our own identity. “The identity of a person is a perfect identity: wherever it is real it admits of no degrees; and it is impossible that a person should be in part the same, and in part different; because a person…is not divisible into parts.” This, from early nineteenth-century philosopher Thomas Reid.

  It might have happened that I discovered the truth of my paternity at a moment when I would be staying—as I often do—at home. I might have sat silent for days on end, in my leather chair in my library, surrounded by the thousands of books that make up at least a portion of my consciousness, books that have taught me how to think, how to live. I might have taken my dogs for long, slow walks. I might have treated myself like a postoperative patient, a person who has been carved up and stitched together. With our son on the other side of the country in a summer film program, the house would have been quiet. In late June, the peonies planted along the back of our house had begun to bloom.

  Instead, we boarded a flight to Minneapolis. You can’t get from Hartford to San Francisco directly, at least not on Delta, which is where we have our miles. And so I settled into seat 12A, by the window. I pulled my magazines out of my bag and stuffed them into the seat pocket in front of me. A Bachelorette was in the midst of a breakup. A Kardashian was in trouble. I leaned my head against Michael’s shoulder. I didn’t know how to be, what to do next. I saw my dad’s face—not as it was when he was at his happiest but as it appeared in the days after my parents’ accident: gray, his eyes vacant, mouth slack. It seemed the essence of him, the spirit of him, was already gone. He died of his injuries shortly after. And then another image: I’m a young woman meeting my father for lunch on Wall Street. The trading floor doors swing open and out he comes: beaming, alive. He wears a tan jacket, the uniform of all the traders; his head is round and bald. The glasses he always wore are nearly rimless, just a glint of gold at the temples. He smiles the hard-earned smile of a wounded man who lives for pockets of joy and is still able to feel them. He is at his most vital in two places: here, where he works, and in synagogue, where he prays. He wraps me in a bear hug as the crowd mills around us.

  I squeezed my eyes shut against hot tears. This felt like a second death. I was losing him all over again. I had become divisible. In part the same. In part different. A fundamental law of identity—my very sense of self—broken open.

  Something that never occurred to me as I flew across the country, though it would have been reasonable to contemplate: that my mother might have had an affair. But I just didn’t go there—I didn’t need to. Pieces to an enormous puzzle, the puzzle of my life, in fact, began to click into place with such speed and efficiency that it seemed no other explanation was possible.

  * * *

  —

  The flight attendants made their way down the aisle with the beverage cart. They offered pretzels, granola bars, salted peanuts. The two prior times in my life I had experienced shock and terror—my parents’ accident and Jacob’s illness—it seemed an impossible affront that people were going about their daily business and that in fact no one’s life had changed but mine and those of people I loved. Here I was again. Except a parent’s death, shivering over a child—these were common experiences. You could say my father died or my baby’s sick to just about anybody, and they would respond with compassion and understanding. But how about: I just found out that my dad wasn’t my biological father and that apparently I come from an anonymous sperm donor. I glanced over at Michael’s open computer screen. He booted up Gogo Wi-Fi as soon as we reached ten thousand feet and was on my Ancestry.com page, staring at the small blue human-shaped icon, identified only by the initials A.T. My first cousin. A male. Blue for boys.

  What next? I couldn’t imagine what might come next. I am a spinner of narratives, a teller of tales. I have spent my life attempting to make meaning out of random events, to shape stories out of an accretion of senseless, chaotic detail. As a writer and a teacher of writing, this is what I do. What if, I might begin to suggest to a student. How about…? But I had been dealing within the confines of a known world. I am not a fantasist. I have never been drawn to mysteries of the whodunit variety, or to sci-fi. Magic realism interests me, but there are limits to my suspension of disbelief. What never fail to draw me in, however, are secrets. Secrets within families. Secrets we keep out of shame, or self-protectiveness, or denial. Secrets and their corrosive power. Secrets we keep from one another in the name of love.

  * * *

  —

  Out my window, the sky was a vivid blue, streaked with clouds. Below, the fields of
Wisconsin appeared in orderly rectangles—the opposite of tohu va’vohu. Evidence of coherence.

  “What do you think the profile of a sperm donor would have been, in the early 1960s?” I asked Michael.

  “In Philadelphia,” he said, eyes still trained on his computer screen, the blue icon.

  “On the campus of Penn.”

  What was I asking? Even as I posed the question, the words sounded absurd. The sheer vastness of possibility—any man of a certain age could be my biological father—slammed into a lifetime of singularity and conviction. I wasn’t my father’s daughter. The thought knifed through me, sharper each time I touched it.

  “Doctors often donated sperm,” Michael said. “And medical students.”

  Was my biological father a medical student? It was nothing more than a working theory, but one that felt right to both of us. What did right even mean? How and where did this shared idea come from? I had never paid any attention to the history of reproductive medicine or artificial insemination. Hell, I hadn’t even watched Masters of Sex, though I’d heard it was pretty good. If I didn’t come from my father, who did I come from?

  “A medical student,” I said aloud.

  Michael nodded.

  “Yeah. A med student at the University of Pennsylvania.”

  8

  The father I knew had always been sad. He wasn’t so much a depressive by nature as he was a kindhearted, cheerful person who had been beaten down by life. He had married young—a marriage arranged between two prominent Orthodox families—and that relationship quickly turned unhappy. When Susie was six years old, his first wife left while he was away on a business trip. The story I’ve been told is that he came home to their empty apartment to find nothing but his clothes hanging in the closet. Divorce was virtually unheard of in the tight-knit community that made up my father’s world in the early 1950s. Devastated, he fought for the closest thing to shared custody that existed in those days: he had Susie every Wednesday night and on alternate weekends. A short while into his life as a single father, he fell in love with a young woman named Dorothy. Dorothy was twenty-six when they met—an alluring, incandescent creature with bright eyes and an easy smile, and in the few photographs I’ve seen of the two of them together, my father’s face is soft, unguarded, and full of joy.

  They set a wedding date and began to dream of their shared future. But my father had unknowingly become a player in a tragedy. Dorothy had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma—a death sentence back then—and her family had kept her condition secret from her. My father discovered the truth a few days before their wedding and, against rabbinic advice, telling no one except his best friend and his sister, moved forward with the plan to marry. Dorothy was—many of those who knew them together have told me—the love of his life. She died six months later.

  I didn’t know about Dorothy when I was growing up. I didn’t know to what to attribute my father’s unhappiness. Evenings, he slumped in his easy chair watching television. He became sedentary and fat—one of many sources of conflict between my parents—and his belly strained over the top of his trousers. When I was thirteen, his chronic back pain became so extreme that he underwent spinal fusion surgery. He never fully recovered, and he numbed himself with painkillers and sedatives for the rest of his life.

  It wasn’t until I was a grown woman, a writer—when I had reached the age my father had been when he had been divorced, then widowed—that I became obsessed with knowing more of what had happened. I was convinced that the loss of Dorothy must be the primary locus of my father’s pain. And so I wrote an article for The New Yorker and painstakingly assembled the crushing details of the brief life he and Dorothy had shared. It felt to me, in the months it took to write that piece, that I was gluing my father back together. This is what I did, what I had always done from the time I first put pen to paper. Tikkun olam. I was trying to repair my broken father. To make him whole.

  Perhaps—it occurs to me as I write these words—I am attempting to reassemble my father once more.

  * * *

  —

  My father met my mother in the aftermath of Dorothy’s death. He had moved into an apartment on East Ninth Street in New York City, and my mother lived on the same block. She was vivacious, intrepid, an advertising executive recently divorced herself. The first time they encountered each other—on Shabbos—she was carrying a hammer and on her way to install bookcases in her own new apartment. He should have known, my mother would later say. She wasn’t from his world. She was Jewish, but not religious. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been building bookcases on Shabbos. But after months of dating, dazzled by my father and his exceptional family, she agreed to become Orthodox when they married, and to raise their children in an observant home. My father must have been certain that my mother was his last, best chance.

  It took my parents five years to have a child. Five years punctuated by miscarriages, and trip after trip to Philadelphia. Five years in which my mother was approaching forty. In the years my parents were trying and failing to have a baby, my father’s younger brother and his wife had four children. His younger sister already had four children. One of the most important mitzvahs according to Jewish law: pru u’rvu. Be fruitful and multiply.

  I thought I understood my father’s sorrow. I had written deeply on the subject, not only in The New Yorker but also in several of my books. Finally I came to accept that I had learned all I could learn. That he had been unhappy was without question. But at least I had been able to build a monument to him, a stack of stories, essays, memoirs, novels that I wrote in his honor—my own, secular form of kaddish. I knew all about his tyrannical, exacting father; his capricious first wife; the loss of his great love; the bitterness of his marriage to my mother.

  But there had been something more—something I could never quite fathom. An invisible live wire stretched between my parents and me. Touch it, and we all might go up in smoke. I knew this, too, though I couldn’t have articulated it. I had turned away from fiction, toward memoir, as if a trail of words might lead me there. All the while, I wondered: Why did it matter so much? After all, my parents were long dead. I had survived them. I had built a life. I had a family of my own. Whatever their secrets, they were now buried, lost to history. My latest book was the first of my memoirs that had nothing to do with my parents.

  It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life—even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine—and still not know the truth of oneself. In the end, it wasn’t words but numbers I stared at disbelievingly on a computer screen that smashed down the door and flooded every corner, every crevasse, with a blinding light: Comparing Kit M440247 and A765211.

  * * *

  —

  All my life I had known there was a secret.

  What I hadn’t known: the secret was me.

  Part Two

  9

  A classic children’s book I used to read Jacob when he was small is titled Are You My Mother? In it, a baby bird goes off in search of his mother after he falls from his nest. Since he doesn’t know what his mother looks like, his mother could be anyone or anything. “Are you my mother?” he asks a kitten, a hen, a dog, a cow. “Are you my mother?” he asks a plane, a steam shovel. The reader roots for the baby bird, of course, as he perches on the nose of a bored dog. “Are you my mother?” But beneath the most obvious reasons we hope for the baby bird to find his mother is an even more profound one. Unless he finds his mother, he will not know who or what he is.

  We had a two-hour layover in Minneapolis—another airport I know well. I left Michael to his breakfast and found a quiet spot at a gate across from the restaurant. I had scribbled down a very brief list of everyone I could think of—friends of my parents, elderly relatives, anyone at all who might still be alive, and could possibly know something, anything, about what happened in a fertility clinic in Philadel
phia fifty-four years earlier. There were so few people left. My dad’s ninety-three-year-old sister, Shirley, was one, but I couldn’t possibly call her. If my father wasn’t my father, then she wasn’t my aunt. The thought made me tremble, and I lowered myself into a plastic chair bolted to the floor. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins floated away from me like dozens of life rafts. There was only one person I could think of to call: my mother’s best friend, who, if still living, would now be in her early nineties. My mother had had very few close friends. Her friendships tended to end in hurt feelings and recriminations. Yet Charlotte, whom she had known since they were college sorority sisters, had remained. I remembered her as kind, sensible, loyal—a temperament that nicely offset my mother’s penchant for drama.

  I tried to steady myself before dialing Charlotte. I hated the phone in the best of circumstances, preferring email: an introverted writer’s refuge. Would Charlotte tell me that everyone had always known I wasn’t my father’s child? I hadn’t known the truth of my own being, and that was nearly unendurable—but if I discovered that my identity was an open secret, withheld only from me, how would I survive it? As the phone rang, my heart raced. Maybe she was dead. Maybe she was senile. Maybe she would confirm my worst fears. In which case I would be left with the terrible awareness that my two dead parents had hidden my very identity from me. I heard my mother’s voice: You knew your father. Can you imagine such a thing?

  My last conversation with Charlotte had been fifteen years earlier, when my mother was on her deathbed. Now, after a few stilted pleasantries—she was alive and lucid—I began to stutter out the reason for my call. This was the first but far from the last time I would have to tell the story to an old person, a very old person, knowing that it might be painful and challenging. How old was too old for a surprise? How old was too old to blow up the past, rather than keep it intact?