by Dani Shapiro
“Charl? Did you know that my parents had fertility issues?” I waded in slowly.
“I did. Your mother had quite a few miscarriages.”
“Were you aware that they went to a doctor in Philadelphia?”
“Yes. There were many trips to Philadelphia,” Charlotte responded. “Your mother desperately wanted a child.”
“So you knew that I was conceived by artificial insemination.”
“Yes, dear. I knew that. Yes.”
There was nothing to do but come out and say it.
“Charl, I’ve just found out that my father wasn’t my biological father,” I said.
A second passed, maybe two. I pictured her sitting at the kitchen table in her small New Jersey condo, a mug of coffee by her side. It was still morning, even though Michael and I had already flown halfway across the country. Please, please, please, I found myself praying. But for what? And to whom?
“What are you saying?” Her voice shook. “That’s impossible.”
Impossible. Suddenly I was able to take a deeper breath. She hadn’t known.
“Did my mother ever say anything? Anything at all that might have even hinted at—”
“Your mother would have told me,” Charlotte said. “She told me everything.”
I went on to explain the genetic testing, and the stark fact that I was not related to Susie, along with the mystifying appearance of A.T., a first cousin.
“There must have been a mistake. Maybe they switched the test tubes,” she said.
As unseemly as it felt to be telling this to a nonagenarian, I described what I knew thus far about the practice of mixing sperm. I was now the conveyor of information, rather than the recipient. Each word was an effort. All the while, I kept an eye on Michael, who had gathered his belongings and was making his way over to the gate where I sat—the wrong gate, it turned out, unless we were planning to go to Kansas City.
“Oh, Dani. Well, I’m absolutely sure of one thing,” Charlotte finally said before we got off the phone. “Your father is still your father.”
* * *
—
It had been eleven, maybe twelve hours since Michael sat next to me in my office, a sequence of numbers unlocking the combination to a me I hadn’t known. In those hours I had felt sorrow, despair, alienation, numbness, shock, confusion—mostly confusion. And also something else: I was on the hunt. A fact-finding mission had taken me over, keeping the deeper reservoir of feelings at bay. Your father is still your father. It was a loving thing to say, meant to console, but I didn’t know what it could possibly mean, that my father was still my father. I was at the beginning of a journey, one that I would walk alone, step by treacherous step. It felt like a truism, a cliché, a salve. I loved my father with all my heart and had devoted much of my life to him. But—in purely clinical terms—he wasn’t my father. There was someone out there—some anonymous man, possibly alive, probably dead, maybe a sperm donor who had once been a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania—who technically, biologically, was my father. A point of fact.
Michael and I stepped onto the moving walkway. Still, quiet, pensive, we glided through the airport. People, people everywhere. Fellow travelers. An elderly couple moved in the opposite direction. A white-haired man, mid-eighties, wearing a raincoat. I smiled at him and looked swiftly away. Fifty-four was definitely not too old for a surprise. At fifty-four, with any luck, I had a few decades left to live. Would I ever know about that somebody else? Would I ever again feel that my father was my father? Would it always matter? Lines from a Delmore Schwartz poem come to mind: “What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest day; / Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn.”
10
I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person’s experience is not another’s. If five people in a family were to write the story of that family, we would end up with five very different stories. These are truths of a sort—the truth of adhering to what one remembers. Then there are facts, which are by their nature documentable. The weather on a particular day can be ascertained. As can the date of the explosion. Perhaps there is a photograph of the dress she was wearing. And so forth. But the intentions of your father? The inner life of your mother? At these we can only hazard our best guess.
Students sometimes tell me that they’re waiting for someone to die before they feel they can write their story. They say this sheepishly, guiltily. As if, in some way, they’re wishing for that person to expire, already, so they can get on with the business of writing about them. I try to liberate my students from these tortured thoughts by telling them that they may as well just start now, because it can be more difficult to write about the dead than to write about the living. The dead can’t fight back. The dead have no voice. They can’t say: But that isn’t how it was. You’re getting it wrong. They can’t say: But I loved you so. They can’t say: I had no idea.
And so each day when I sit down to write I am wrestling not only with my dead parents but with a dearth of documentable facts. A friend offers to set me up with a world-famous medium the FBI frequently uses as a resource in solving complex cases. “She’ll be able to tell you what your father knew,” she says. But I can’t call the medium, at least not now—not only because I’m skeptical but because I need to arrive at my own beliefs about myself and my parents and the world we inhabited. I need to understand who I was to them, and who they were to me. In the absence of the empirical, I am left with a feeling central to my childhood: all my life I had the sense that something was amiss. I was different, an outsider. My family didn’t form a coherent whole. My parents and I lived in a breakable world. I had been deeply, mutely certain that there was something very wrong with me, that for all this I was to blame.
Thirty-five thousand feet in the air, between Minneapolis and San Francisco, that mute certainty began to fall away as if I were a molting animal. There had been something amiss. We didn’t add up. And not because I wasn’t my father’s child but because I—and possibly one or both of my parents—had never known.
11
The Uber driver who picked us up at the airport in San Francisco in a hulking black Humvee was a six-foot-tall blonde who looked like she’d just walked off a movie set. This only added to the surreality of the moment. San Francisco—though I’ve passed through on business many times—is not a city I know well. Nor does Michael. Through the tinted windows I caught glimpses of the bay as we hit stop-and-go traffic on the 101. There was construction everywhere I looked, massive cranes dangling high above building sites. We crept along past streets at once familiar and strange, known to me more from literature than from direct experience. Mission, Van Ness, Geary.
I had taken a break from the Internet during the flight from Minneapolis, and now the emails were pouring in, among them a possible jacket design for my new book. It was a beautiful design—very close, in fact, to what ended up as the final cover—a black-and-white photo of Michael and me on our wedding day. But I hated the florid, curlicued type. I noticed that this was possible—my being able to hate the type on a book jacket—something that seemed like a vestige from a previous life.
“It looks like calligraphy on a wedding invitation,” I said to Michael.
Our Uber driver, who had been chatty the whole way into the city, was asking about our trip.
“Business or pleasure?”
“A little of both.”
“Staying in town long?”
“Just a couple of days, and then on to L.A. Our son is in a film program at UCLA for high school students.”
As I would discover
in the coming months, I was capable of functioning as if on one side of a split screen. Our driver overheard our conversation about the jacket and asked to see it. As she drove, I handed her my phone. One eye on the road, she agreed that it looked like a wedding invitation. As we reached our hotel in Japantown, my sense of disorientation only grew. We were speaking of normal things. Where to have dinner? I needed to call my editor to talk through the jacket design. But the thick sludge was everywhere. I now understand it as shock: the sense of my own body as foreign, delicate, fractured, and the world at once hostile and implacable in its anonymity.
Our room was spacious and spare, the late afternoon light filtered through windows covered with shoji screens that, when slid open, revealed the low buildings of Japantown. From that particular vantage point, we could have been in any city—Tel Aviv, Berlin. The pagoda a block away wasn’t visible from our room. Later, the next day, I would walk past the pagoda to a shopping center filled with sushi joints and tea shops, and spend an hour in a stationery store buying index cards. My instinct was to begin to write everything down—every random thought, even just single words—as a record of a time I might not be able to clearly remember. At some point I will wonder what I meant by Huxley’s Island, or “Filius nullius—son of nobody.” Like a drunk in a blackout, I will try to reconstruct what happened and when. From another index card: Bessel van der Kolk: “The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.”
I unpacked our suitcases quickly, efficiently, with the same military precision with which I had packed the night before. I made a dinner reservation at a bistro a short taxi ride away. It was as if well-folded clothing and the prospect of a candlelit dinner could stave off the rumble of a distant avalanche. I couldn’t afford to be quiet or still. I had to keep moving, to outpace whatever might come next.
When I checked my phone, I saw an email from Susie. I had written her at some point over the course of the day. I don’t know how to tell you this but we’re not half sisters. It hadn’t been a hard note to write, and I didn’t think she’d find it a hard note to read. It didn’t disturb me in the least that Susie was not my half sister, nor would it disturb her. This is how we had always referred to one another—half sisters—though I had noticed that in more cohesive families, stepsiblings, half siblings often didn’t differentiate themselves but considered themselves siblings, period. Not Susie and me. That half was always there. And now it wasn’t.
As a girl, I had looked up to Susie. She had written a book—her doctoral dissertation—on schizophrenia, which I didn’t understand but that sounded important. She was smart, and worldly. She lived in the West Village, in NYU housing, which seemed like the epitome of adult life to me, a New Jersey kid with inchoate aspirations. Susie tried to be kind to me—and there were a few years there when I was a teenager and we actually got along. Our shared enemy: my mother. Susie hated my mother, and by the time I was fourteen, fifteen years old, I did too. Susie would use words to describe my mother that both terrified and secretly thrilled me: Narcissistic personality disorder. Borderline.
I put on lipstick. Changed out of my airplane clothes. Spoke with my editor in New York about the type on the book jacket. I was struggling mightily to stay on the safe side of the split screen. Then I opened Susie’s response to my email:
Wow. This must be so difficult for you. Especially since dad and Irene aren’t here to process this with you. Could Irene have been trying to tell you in that crazy moment? Let’s meet up the next time you’re in town or Hamptons.
What it felt like: a sharp, overpowering aloneness. Susie’s casual tone only increased my sense of being adrift in the world. I was my mother’s daughter. Narcissistic personality disorder. Borderline. I had read dozens of books over the years ranging from complex psychoanalytic tomes to straight-up self-help as I tried to navigate the difficulties of being my mother’s daughter. But my single best defense had always been that I was my father’s daughter. I was more my father’s daughter. I had somehow convinced myself that I was only my father’s daughter.
Now—as Michael and I headed to dinner in that vertiginous, magical city, houses and buildings perched in jagged rows on steep inclines—I felt cut loose from everything I had ever understood about myself. The wind kicked up, and my eyes began to tear. How could I survive this new knowledge that I was made up of my mother and a stranger?
12
The following morning, long before I opened my eyes, I heard Michael on the other side of our hotel room, the rapid clicking of laptop keys. Dawn light filtered through the shoji screens, red against my pulsing lids. I ached with grief, but this grief was not the sharp, suffocating grief that accompanies a recent death. It was a field of grief, a sea of it. There were no edges. The night before, a friend had sent me a passage from Moby-Dick, a description of a ship in a gale, a caution against the attempt to sail back to land: “In the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is the ship’s direst jeopardy.” Before I fell asleep I read it again and again, as if trying to interpret a spiritual text. I was in a gale. My mind was wild, grasping, seeking solid ground. But there was no solid ground. I kept my eyes closed, trying to orient myself. You’re in San Francisco. Japantown. Your husband is here. It’s Thursday, June 30. One phrase of Melville’s had remained with me overnight: “the lashed sea’s landlessness.”
The sound of Michael at the keyboard was comforting. I was sure he was chasing down leads. I smelled coffee. Michael had spent many years in Africa, investigating warlords and third world dictators, and had written a book that exposed the underside of foreign aid. Dogged research was second nature to him. The work often began with a hunch—and hunches often led to dead ends. Only sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they led straight to indisputable facts. As long as I could hear the sound of Michael typing, it felt as if something was happening.
“You up?”
“Yeah.”
Slowly I opened my eyes. The room was dim, Michael silhouetted against the shoji screens. A couple of Starbucks paper cups were next to him on a small table. He had gone to sleep obsessed with my mystery first cousin, A.T. Often, on Ancestry.com, family trees and the pages associated with them are administered by a separate person, and in A.T.’s case, there was an actual name attached to his page: Thomas Bethany. Michael had been digging and digging into all sorts of people named Thomas Bethany, the one identifiable link to A.T., and had come up with nothing but dead ends. There were death records for several men named Thomas Bethany; there was a Thomas Bethany who was a middle school soccer star from Rhode Island. Down the road, Michael will tell me that he found a Thomas Bethany who was a huge supporter of presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Michael brought me one of the coffees, and I propped myself up in bed. Bed was where I wanted to stay. Bed would continue to be a place from which I would try to navigate my ship in the gale.
“It’s not Thomas Bethany,” he said. “It’s Bethany Thomas.”
I tried to clear my head. I looked up at Michael. He was wired, hopped up on coffee. I had a feeling he’d been up for hours. Besides, we were still on East Coast time. I grabbed my own laptop from the bedside table and opened it to my page on Ancestry.com. There he was again, whoever he was; the small blue person-shaped icon. He looked so harmless, really, like a cartoon figure.
“Why?”
“A.T.,” Michael said. “T.”
“I don’t get it.”
“People tend to do this—administer these things—for their relatives. T. Like Thomas. Maybe A.T. is the husband, brother, father, whatever, of someone named Bethany Thomas.”
I was having a hard time computing. A.T. B.T.—who were these people to me? They were as abstract and surreal as the fractions and decimals representing genetic code.
“Have you gotten anywhere?”
> “Not yet. But I’m pretty sure I’m right. I think we should get some help with this. What do you think about calling Jennifer Mendelsohn?”
Jennifer Mendelsohn is a journalist based in Baltimore. We hardly knew her. In fact, I don’t think either of us had ever met her. We were friendly with her brother, the writer Daniel Mendelsohn. But hers was one of those warm acquaintanceships born of Twitter. Her handle, @CleverTitleTK, often appeared in my Twitter stream, and we had engaged with each other over the years in a way native to our cultural moment. A decade earlier, such a relationship would have made no sense. A decade hence, Twitter might well be obsolete, replaced by another mode of rapid-fire communication. But in June 2016, it was simple enough for me to direct-message @CleverTitleTK, whose brief Twitter bio read: Old school journo. Genealogy geek.
Michael had known of Jennifer Mendelsohn’s subspecialty in genealogy because when Ancestry.com returned his own altogether unsurprising results, it turned out that the two of them were distantly related. He had shown up on her page as a fourth, maybe fifth cousin. During an email exchange, he learned the depth of her interest and knowledge of these testing sites.
“She might be able to help us—maybe there’s another level of information here I can’t access.”
My phone pinged almost instantly. It was @CleverTitleTK sending her phone number.
13
Indelible: the rumpled white sheets, their texture slightly nubby. The thin blanket pooled around my waist. Michael seated at the desk. Both of our laptops open. The coffee, room temperature at this point. I hadn’t emerged from my cocoon—not to pee, not to brush my teeth. Jennifer Mendelsohn was on speakerphone. We had already walked her through the basics.