Inheritance

by Dani Shapiro

  “Let’s take a look at the family tree associated with this Thomas Bethany,” she began, clicking on a link we hadn’t been aware of.

  “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “Got it. Here she is. Bethany Thomas.”

  “I knew it!” Michael seemed almost happy.

  I typed “Bethany Thomas” into Facebook. There were five or six people with the same name.

  “Wait, hold on. Now I’ve just gone on her family tree,” Jennifer went on. “Her maiden name is Hort.”

  I searched for Bethany Hort Thomas on Facebook. Sure enough, there she was. The air was charged with a strange, dangerous momentum, as if I was nearing the top of a roller coaster. Our educated guesses had propelled the ride up—but we had no idea what would happen once we hurtled into the wild speed just on the other side of the crest.

  I clicked on a blurry image of a middle-aged woman in a striped sweater. I saw instantly that we had no shared friends, had liked none of the same pages. I would never have stumbled across her. I scanned posts and photographs from a life very different from my own, scrolling down her page with a merciless intensity, like a stalker trailing a stranger down a busy street. Little kids in a bouncy house. A bunch of people cheering at a football game. Cute kitten photos. She seemed to live in Ohio. What was I looking for? Some way of identifying my first cousin A.T. I was crystal clear when it came to one piece of logic. Later, when I obsessively tell the details of this day dozens upon dozens of times—the nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story—people will look at me blankly when I get to this part. I’ll have to break down this simple line of reasoning, one every family knows and takes for granted. If it was true, if A.T. was indeed my first cousin, then an uncle of his—either his father’s brother or his mother’s brother—would be my biological father.

  * * *

  —

  “Here we go. Her husband’s name is Adam Thomas.”

  Jennifer was moving even faster than we were. Adam Thomas. A.T.—Michael had been right. I kept scrolling down, my thumb against the keypad, scanning, scanning like a gambler at a slot machine until I arrived at a photograph of a man in his late fifties. Receding hairline. Round face. Glasses. Big smile. With my husband Adam Thomas at our daughter Kaycee’s wedding.

  “Does he look like Dani?” I heard Jennifer’s voice from a great distance. “I don’t think he looks like Dani.”

  From that moment forward I would have a uniquely intimate relationship with this journalist with whom I had never before spoken a word. The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events. The man who sat next to me on my flight home when my parents were in their car accident; the doctor who diagnosed our baby boy with a rare and frightening disease. I, too, have been that person in the lives of friends and strangers. And now @CleverTitleTK, the sister of a friend, would forever be part of our trio of detectives as we zeroed in on the seemingly impossible.

  I had already moved on, frantically searching for Adam Thomas online, looking for information about his parents. It was a common name. So far I was coming up empty. If we found nothing, it proved nothing. But what if we found something? Someone? Ancestry.com—with its army of geneticists—put it at 98 percent that this Adam Thomas was my first cousin. How many uncles did he have? How could I find out? I felt no connection to this round-faced, smiling man. But he had the potential to be an arrow, pulled back tightly in its bow, aimed straight and true. Of course, none of this was a thought. I had no thoughts. I was all keen instinct. We never know who we will be in the burning building, the earthquake. We never know until we are faced with our own stripped-down, elemental selves. I wanted to flee. I wanted to stay. I wanted to rescue myself and the whole of my history.

  “His mother died in 2010,” said Jennifer Mendelsohn. She had searched for him along with his Ohio town and his wife’s name. “Here’s her obituary.”

  “Here we go,” Michael said. He looked over at me from his seat at the desk, perhaps ten feet away. We somehow knew before we knew. My husband has always been a remarkably comforting presence for me. Whenever the world has seemed to shudder and tilt off its axis, Michael has made me feel safe. I have felt that, together, we can get through anything. But what was unfolding now was mine alone.

  Jennifer began to read aloud. “Eloise Walden Thomas passed into eternal life…born in Cleveland, Ohio…a stay-at-home mother…her church was at the center of her life…surviving her are five children, twenty grandchildren, a sister, two brothers…”

  Two brothers. Surviving brothers. The brothers of the mother of my first cousin.

  “One of her brothers is a doctor who lives in Portland, Oregon,” Jennifer continued. “His name is Benjamin Walden.”

  At the word—doctor—Michael and I gave each other a quick, startled glance. It was almost too easy. All we had been going on were a couple of key words. Hardly anything, really. Our hunch about a medical student. A mysterious first cousin with the initials A.T. And now this. An uncle of that first cousin. Who was a doctor. Who was alive.

  Michael came over to the bed and sat next to me. It had been thirty-six hours since we had sat side by side on the chaise in my office—since I had discovered that my father hadn’t been my father. Dr. Benjamin Walden. I entered his name, my fingers cold and shaking. Benjamin Walden. Ben Walden. Dr. Ben Walden. There was no part of me that believed this was happening, even as it unfolded with a sense of inevitability so profound that I will later come to think of it as a kind of fate.

  On the page for a medical website: Dr. Ben Walden is a thoracic surgeon who retired from active practice in 2003. He is a well-respected speaker on the subject of medical ethics. He is a graduate of the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania.

  14

  In the months to come—indeed, I suspect, for the rest of my life—I will hear stories. Friends will send me links to news items. Experts will share their experience. I’ll be told of people who have searched for their sperm donors—their biological fathers—all their lives. When these searches have been unsuccessful, some have had their anonymous donors’ identification numbers tattooed on their bodies, a way of marking themselves with their only clue. I’ve seen photos of arms, ankles, shoulders inked with stark series of numbers. And with each story of a dead end, a locked door, I am stunned anew. A favorite poem, “Otherwise” by Jane Kenyon, begins like this: “I got out of bed / on two strong legs. / It might have been / otherwise. I ate / cereal, sweet / milk, ripe, flawless / peach. It might / have been otherwise.” The poet goes on to regard ways in which the bounty of her daily life contained within it the shadow of a darker possibility.

  My daughter was conceived in Philadelphia, my mother had said that long-ago evening. Not a pretty story. When pressed, the word institute. Her language was precise. The thing she never planned to say—that slipped out on the second anniversary of my father’s death, and only because I introduced her to my friend from Philadelphia—was an enormous piece of luck. What if that friend had been from Detroit? What if I hadn’t brought my mother to the graduate student reading that night? A seam ripped open in my mother that night that allowed me access to a vital clue, though I didn’t know it at the time. A moment, a split second—and then it closed up again. If she hadn’t said those exact words—but if everything else had remained the same—when I got the results from Ancestry nearly thirty years later, I would have discovered that my father wasn’t my biological father but known nothing more. I would have come to the conclusion that my mother must have had an affair. I would have supplied yet another false narrative to the story of my life.

  What if Adam Thomas hadn’t shown up on my Ancestry page? What then? All would have been yawning, cavernous emptiness. Devoid of possibility. Like the baby bird that fell from its nest, I might have wandered through the world never knowi
ng where I came from. I would have been left with a hole inside me in the shape of a father or, rather, two fathers. The father who raised me, who died too young, too sad, too lost, and the anonymous man I came from but would never be able to identify. Instead of a false narrative, there would be an infinity of narratives.

  * * *

  —

  Michael kicked off his sneakers and sat in bed next to me. My laptop was balanced between us as we waited for a YouTube ad to finish. Dr. Benjamin Walden. Five syllables—seven if you included the prefix. A nice mellifluous name. He had a website. It took three clicks to get there. It was a simple site, a repository of blog posts and essays he had written about medical ethics, along with links to a couple of videos. The screen went black, and then his name in white sans serif type appeared. Dr. Ben Walden speaking at Reed College, Portland, Oregon.

  An old man with white hair and blue eyes was standing at a lectern.

  “My god,” I whispered.

  Time slowed to a near standstill. I couldn’t compute what I was seeing. Or rather, who I was seeing. The man was wearing khakis, a blue button-down shirt, and a fleece vest. He had a pale complexion, but his cheeks were pink, his color high. My exact coloring. Somewhere, in the background, the comments I had fielded just about every day for fifty-four years: You sure you’re Jewish? There’s no way you’re Jewish. Did your mother have an affair with the Swedish milkman? I saw my jaw, my nose, my forehead and eyes. I heard something familiar in the timbre of his voice. It wasn’t merely a resemblance. It was a quality. The way he held himself. His pattern of speech. He was recommending a book to the audience, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. He referenced an article in The Onion. I had the bizarre thought that he had good literary taste. I ran my hands down the length of my legs. Who was I? What was I? I felt as if I might disintegrate right there in that hotel room floating high above the city. This wasn’t what I wanted to see. But now that I had seen it, I would never be able to un-see it.

  Dr. Ben Walden. His name continued to appear beneath the lectern. The glint of eyeglasses. A wedding ring. Michael raised the volume. The man’s voice moved through me and around me like something invisible, stitched into the air. In just a moment I’ll open it up to questions—

  “Jesus,” Michael was saying. “Jesus Christ.”

  Now, Ben Walden was gesticulating. He held both his hands in front of him as if bracketing the air in parentheses—a gesture that I suddenly recognized as my own. I knew in a place beyond thought that I was seeing the truth—the answer to the unanswerable questions I had been exploring all my life. The audience in Portland was now raising their hands. He called on someone in the back row, then nodded, smiling slightly as he listened.

  “Do you see that?” I asked Michael. “The way he’s—”

  “He even runs a Q and A like you,” Michael said.

  * * *

  —

  The following summer there will be a total eclipse of the sun, and Michael, Jacob, and I will take turns looking at it through NASA-approved glasses. But I will not trust the NASA-approved glasses. I will still look at the eclipse for only a fraction of a second at a time. This is the way I watched the YouTube video on that June morning. A glimpse, then away. Another glimpse. As if the old man in the blue button-down shirt and Patagonia vest—who he was and what that meant—might blind me forever.

  15

  I slipped out of bed and walked barefoot into the bathroom. My mind and body seemed to be disconnected. My body wasn’t the body I had believed it to be for fifty-four years. My face wasn’t my face. That’s what it felt like. If my body wasn’t my body and my face wasn’t my face, who was I? In several weeks, once I’m back east, I’ll meet my best friend from college for dinner, and when I walk into her apartment, I’ll realize I’m afraid that her feelings for me will have somehow changed, that I am now unknowable to her. I’ll stand in her living room, tears streaming down my face, and ask: “Do you still see me as the same person?” And she will look at me, bemused, compassionate. “You are the same person,” she’ll say.

  But on that morning in Japantown, I encountered my own face in the mirror and understood for the first time that the information reflected back at me had always told a different story than the one I had believed—no, more than believed: known. I didn’t feel like the same person. The white-haired, blue-eyed doctor from Portland was now staring back at me. He had always been staring back at me. And it wasn’t only a physical thing, certain common features. Watching him on YouTube, I felt with my entire being something I could barely understand. Come from him.

  I wrapped myself in a robe and sat at the small desk where Michael had made the discovery about Bethany and Adam Thomas less than an hour earlier. I closed the tab for the YouTube video and opened my email:

  To: Dr. Benjamin Walden

  From: Dani Shapiro

  Subject: Important Letter

  It had been easy—just as everything else had been insanely easy—to find his contact information. He had a blog. He was out there in the world, a well-respected physician, a public speaker. He was a man who would probably have no reason to think his in-box would contain any huge surprises. How old was too old for a surprise? He was seventy-eight.

  Dear Dr. Walden,

  I’m writing to you about something that may come as a shock. My name is Dani Shapiro and I am a fifty-four-year-old novelist, memoirist, wife, and mother of a seventeen-year-old son. I live in Litchfield County, Connecticut. I recently took a DNA test as nothing more than a lark. I have always believed my parents to be my biological parents. But now I have reason to believe that you may be my biological father. I won’t write more unless (a) this makes sense to you, and (b) you’re willing to communicate with me about it. I so hope you’re willing.

  I’m going to send you a link to my website so you can see something of who I am: www.danishapiro.com.

  Thank you.

  Dani

  Michael was in the shower. I waited—my finger hovering for a moment before I hit send. Before she got off the phone, Jennifer Mendelsohn had asked me what I was going to do, now that I had zeroed in on my biological father. She urged me to be methodical, to do research. Apparently there was a right way and a wrong way to go about this. There were, she told me, templates. But I wasn’t feeling careful or methodical; in fact, quite the opposite. I was feeling wild and reckless. I needed not to sit back and cogitate but to take any and every kind of action. As long as I was in motion—my fingers against the keyboard, the pen across the page, dressing for the day, swiping lipstick across my now unfamiliar lips, strapping on my sandals—I was able to hold on to the belief that I was propelling myself forward, rather than falling backward into the abyss.

  16

  An early memory: it’s a Saturday afternoon in the late 1960s and my parents are sitting with friends in our New Jersey backyard. The flagstone patio is in dappled shade. A forsythia hedge spills over the next-door neighbor’s fence. The adults sip iced tea from green plastic cups and relax on the kinds of lounge chairs that leave marks on your thighs when you stand. Maybe there’s a bird feeder. I know this much: it’s Shabbos, which means no cigarettes for my father, no radio for my mother. Lunch is served cold, as it always is after my dad returns from temple. The friends are named Kushner. Many years later, their son will be arrested and imprisoned in a tawdry case involving hookers and embezzlement. Their grandson will marry Ivanka Trump. But on this day, the Kushners are just nice older people, quite a bit older than my parents. I’m young—five or six—and when I come outside to say hello to the grown-ups, Mrs. Kushner pulls me to her side. She’s a stout woman with a teased hairdo and a thick accent. I’ve heard whispers that she and her family dug a tunnel out of the Jewish ghetto in their Polish town during the war, enabling hundreds to escape. Mrs. Kushner runs her hand through my hair, which is white-blond, the same color as my eyebrows. She looks at me
hard. What does she see? I am pale, blue-eyed, delicate. I have a heart-shaped face. She’s still gripping me when she says: We could have used you in the ghetto, little blondie. You could have gotten us bread from the Nazis.

  Fifty-two percent of Eastern European Ashkenazi descent. And the rest: French, Irish, English, German. A schism, a fault line, a split. Just about half of me could have, in fact, gotten bread from the Nazis. I was an Orthodox Jewish girl who had the siddur memorized, who belted out the Birkat Hamazon with my father after every Shabbos meal. I spoke flawless Hebrew—a language that now, when I hear it, has the quality of a half-remembered dream. But I didn’t look the part—not just a little bit but to such a degree that it became a defining aspect of my identity.

  I have very few childhood memories—really hardly any at all—but I have always remembered the backyard, the dappled shade, the green cups, and the lounge chairs that particular Shabbos afternoon. My father, still in his suit pants, tie removed, his shirtsleeves rolled up. An embroidered red velvet yarmulke covering his head. My mother is hazier—my mother is always hazier—but she certainly witnessed the moment with Mrs. Kushner as she sat at the table laden with sliced brisket and cold poached asparagus.

  What was Mrs. Kushner really saying to me? What had she been thinking? I was being told: You’re one of us. And I was also being told: You’re not one of us. Which was it? And why has this memory stayed with me all my life? I’ve told the story of Mrs. Kushner before. I’ve written about it in essays and other memoirs. I thought the story’s significance was the strangeness, the trauma of being told as a child that, had I been alive during the war, I could have saved people—and my guilt that I wasn’t able to. But now I know that it was the kernel of truth embedded in that memory that kept it intact for me. Mrs. Kushner meant no harm as she gripped my arm and assessed me. She spoke without thinking and as she did, said what everyone thought when they looked at me. It was the first time I recall—though far from the last—that I was told I wasn’t who I believed myself to be.