by Dani Shapiro
I dove into the books and printouts of articles from old magazines and scholarly journals that were stacked on my office floor, my bedside table, the kitchen counter—Lethal Secrets, Artificial Insemination, Personhood Revisited—in an attempt to understand the culture that my parents inhabited. In 1961, Edward Albee’s eviscerating play about a childless couple, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was about to open on Broadway. A Newsweek survey revealed that zero percent of Americans considered no children the ideal family size. What state of desperation would my parents have found themselves in? And what actions might have arisen from that desperation? A 2010 paper titled “My Daddy’s Name Is Donor” painted a vivid picture:
Donor conception has always been shrouded in secrecy. Anonymity is the thick cloth that permits no one to look inside. For years, the medical profession has touted anonymity as the answer to the quandaries created by sperm and egg donation. Anonymity protects the donor from having to confront the inconvenient truth that a child might be born from his or her own body. It protects parents who do not wish for an “outside” party to intrude on their family, and who quite often choose not to tell their children. And it certainly facilitates the buying and selling of sperm and eggs as products, no longer identified with one wholly unique human being whose life continues to evolve long after the “donation” is made. As a director of one of the oldest sperm banks in the U.S. said, “[Without anonymity], you’re going to lose the really smart, the really wonderful people who I think are going to question,…‘Do I really want to be in a situation where, down the road, someone may contact me?’ ”
Ben’s communication with me was careful. I had the sense that each email had been combed over by multiple people—his wife, perhaps his children. One of his sons was an attorney. I had never before been in the role of being someone’s worst nightmare, but I was pretty sure this was the case now. Ben was a good man, an ethical man. He could have blown me off. Ghosted me. Thus far he had been responsive, but surely he wasn’t happy about the biological child who had appeared out of nowhere to disrupt his life.
Back in San Francisco, I had told Michael that if I had confirmation that Ben was my biological father, along with important medical history, I would be okay. It was more than most people got. I had seen his face. I had been able to watch him in motion—to see his gestures, his smile. I knew where I came from. It would be enough. So when, early one morning, I opened an email from Ben containing just what I had hoped for—information about a rare hereditary eye condition he had discovered in his early seventies, along with assurances that there had been no cancer, heart disease, or Alzheimer’s in his family—I should have felt relieved.
But there was something else, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Ben had written that he’d decided not to take a DNA test because he didn’t trust the privacy provisions on commercial testing sites. He told me that he had been discussing the whole situation with his wife and children. That his family wished privacy in this matter. Situation. Matter. And again, privacy. The words disturbed me, but beneath the disturbance was something I wasn’t used to feeling. I walked through my days feeling weighed down by a peculiar, polarizing heaviness. I wanted to hide. It was shame, I realized. The Walden family wished privacy in the matter of me.
What more did I want? After all, I had been given the very information I thought would make me whole. Above all, I wanted to eradicate this terrible shame, this sense of being defective, alien, other, as if perhaps I never should have existed at all. It was why, I now realized, I had included my website in my original email to Ben. It wasn’t only so that he could see that my motives weren’t mercenary. See? I wanted to say. I’m a real person—with a full, rich life, and a family of my own. I wasn’t just the product of some random morning in Philadelphia—possibly one among many such mornings—during which he masturbated into a cup, tucked his shirt back into his pants, pocketed a few dollars, and returned to anatomy class.
I understood that he didn’t want to think about something so unseemly. He was a successful, erudite, grandfatherly gentleman. I also realized that he had become a donor under the cloak of secrecy, the thick veil of anonymity that had been pervasive at the time. In 1961 it had been only nine years since Watson and Crick had discovered DNA. The thought of a future in which it would be possible to spit into a plastic vial and discover one’s genetic heritage would have been the stuff of science fiction.
But here I was. An inconvenient truth that had indeed been born from his own body. A consequence of his actions. A wholly unique human being whose life continued to evolve long after his “donation” was made. My very existence was due to the fact that he never dreamt he’d have to deal with such a thing. And what I wished for now—though I knew expressing it might topple our entire parsed, careful dialogue—was to meet him. To be in the presence, just once, of this man I came from. Be careful, Wendy Kramer had cautioned. He’s a doctor. He’s used to being in control. Keep your foot in the door. Let him call the shots.
I waited until midsummer before writing Ben Walden with my request. I told him I’d fly to Portland for a cup of coffee. That I’d do whatever would make him feel most comfortable. I imagined sitting across from him at a café—Portland was a city full of cafés—and looking into his eyes, so like my own. I had watched his YouTube video perhaps a dozen times, each time struck anew by the similarities between us. I wanted nothing from him beyond this. I reassured him that I would continue to be respectful of his privacy. I hoped he would give this one-time meeting serious consideration. It would go a long way toward making the surreal real.
To: Dani Shapiro
From: Dr. Benjamin Walden
Re: re: re: Important Letter
Dear Dani,
Thanks for your very thoughtful note. I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that I have a biological daughter unknown to me for 54 years.
At the moment, my life is very busy and I’m still processing your request. It will take me some time to respond thoughtfully. So I’ll write back in a few weeks to let you know my thinking (as filtered through my family input).
All the best,
Ben
27
It was time to tell Jacob. He had just returned from his summer program and was settling back into life at home. I hadn’t wanted to give him this strange news while he was still in California, in case it would be upsetting to him. But I couldn’t withhold it any longer. I had raised him without secrets—perhaps to a fault. I had grown up in a house where the air crackled with the unsaid. I had always wished for Jacob to feel that, in his home, the air was clear.
As I considered how and when to tell Jacob, I wondered, as I had when we were with him in L.A., whether it would matter. What were genes, after all, to a seventeen-year-old boy? Michael had been focused on the idea that Jacob now had a different grandfather, a living grandfather. But would Jacob feel that Ben Walden was his grandfather? I doubted it.
Jacob had never known my dad—so would this feel like a loss to him? I thought about this as I cooked my son’s favorite dinner—grilled steak, roasted broccoli, spaghetti with butter and grated Parmesan—as if a good meal might help.
Family dinner had been a cornerstone of our lives since Jacob was in his high chair. So much of my way of doing things had been a reaction to the choices my parents had made. I had always known that I had formed myself in opposition to my mother. But I hadn’t realized to what degree I had designed our family life counter to the one I remembered. As a child, I had most often eaten dinner alone. Meals with my parents were always in the dining room. The house of my childhood was formal and cold. The home I had shared with Michael and Jacob for fifteen years was simple and warm. But more than anything, what I aimed for was ease. I wanted to laugh with my son. I wanted him to feel he could be honest with me. And just about nothing made me happier than seeing how close he was with his dad. They had a few pas
sions in common—particularly music, and the Red Sox—and a dialogue that was all theirs.
Michael had a good-size family. His parents were still living and had always been a big part of Jacob’s life. Jacob had uncles, aunts, and an assortment of cousins as well. It had been a source of sadness to me that I hadn’t been able to give him the same. No grandparents, a half aunt who displayed little interest, and cousins who were black-hat Orthodox, with whom he shared nothing at all. I had made sure to encourage a relationship between Jacob and my father’s younger sister, Shirley, who was unusually open-minded, despite her strict religious beliefs. The previous year we had gone to Chicago for a visit. But the threads connecting him to my family were few and fraying.
I thought back to Jacob’s bar mitzvah. I had presented him with a blue velvet pouch containing my father’s enormous, yellowed tallis, the same one I remembered playing with as a child in shul. It had dwarfed him, and my aunt Shirley had sent along a pair of silver, filigreed tallis clips to hold it together on his narrow frame.
Here’s my father’s tallis. You wrap it around yourself like this.
These clips were your great-grandfather’s.
I had felt, on that day nearly five years earlier, a sense of completion. My boy, enfolded in his grandfather’s prayer shawl. A modern, eclectic service that I had worked hard to design, which reflected our family and also honored my dad and his legacy. Though my Orthodox relatives would not attend Jacob’s bar mitzvah, I felt I had their blessing. I stood next to Jacob in front of our gathered family and friends and spoke of how proud his grandfather would have been of him. L’dor vador.
* * *
—
“Honey, there’s something important we need to talk with you about.”
Jacob was suddenly very focused as we sat down to dinner.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I added quickly. “You don’t need to worry.”
As I began to share the story with Jacob, it felt unlike any previous time I had recounted it. It mattered—whether he would be aware of it or not—it mattered to him. I was giving him a missing piece of his own history. Michael was across the table from me, quiet, listening as I went through the details: the DNA test, the strange results, the lack of a biological connection to Susie, the mysterious first cousin. The artificial insemination, the discovery of the young medical student from the University of Pennsylvania. My voice shook. I was trying not to cry. Telling Jacob that my father wasn’t his grandfather felt like I was undoing the work of a lifetime, or perhaps several lifetimes.
Jacob reached over and took my hand once he understood.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
His chair scraped back as he stood and came around the table to hug me—my beautiful boy, who wouldn’t exist if everything hadn’t happened just as it did. The dogs hunted for scraps at our feet. As I held Jacob close, I kept reminding myself that everything I had built—my family, my personhood—was unaltered. My new knowledge changed both everything and nothing. My life was like one of those large and complicated jigsaw puzzles that, once finished, displayed a completely different image on the reverse side: a streetcar in San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge. Van Gogh’s sunflowers, a self-portrait. Same puzzle pieces. Same materials. Same shape. Different picture.
As it slowly sank in, Jacob asked only a few questions—all of them about Ben.
“Is he alive?”
“Yes.”
I hadn’t told Jacob Ben’s name. I didn’t want him going upstairs to his room and heading down the Google rabbit hole. I also wanted to protect my son. I had no idea how Ben was ultimately going to respond to my request for that single cup of coffee.
He gave a nod.
“Are you going to meet him?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to. I hope so.”
“Can I meet him?”
“Let’s see what happens.”
I resisted the ridiculous urge to tell Jacob that his grandfather was still his grandfather. What could that possibly mean to him? My father was an abstraction, an ancestor to him—nothing more. All those stories, the tallis, the sepia photographs scattered around our house of the little boy in the bowler hat—those were important to me. But they held no more of a sense of reality for my son than the fables and fairy tales I’d read to him when he was a child.
Jacob sat back down at the table and began cutting up his steak. I was suddenly hungry myself, relieved that this conversation, which had been looming, was now behind us. I watched as he ate his dinner with the gusto of a teenager and wondered if he would always remember this evening, or if it would eventually fall into the category of weird, but no big deal. He seemed to be lost in thought as he ran a hand through his thick, dark blond hair. I waited to see if there was anything else he wanted to know, or if we were just going to move on to other subjects. The Red Sox had a game that night. He and Michael would probably watch after dinner.
He took a big sip of water, started to say something, then stopped.
“What? You know you can ask me anything.”
His hand raked through his hair again.
“So, just wondering—does this mean maybe I won’t end up bald?”
Michael and I burst out laughing. My father and grandfather had heads like cue balls. I hadn’t known it had even occurred to Jacob that it was hereditary. Ben Walden, on the other hand, did indeed have an excellent head of hair.
“You probably won’t end up bald, honey,” I said, glad that he was able to crack a joke. “I hadn’t considered that particular upside.”
28
That very first night—as Michael sat in our kitchen searching for the words institute and Philadelphia—it had quickly become clear that my parents had had excellent options closer to home. Cornell’s medical school was, at that time, still housed at New York Hospital. The Margaret Sanger Clinic was well known. And just an hour and a half north, in New Haven, Yale School of Medicine’s department of reproductive endocrinology would have been considered the gold standard.
My mother prided herself on always choosing the best of the best—whether in clothing, furniture, art, or jewelry. When she was dying she felt compelled to tell me that the Armani jacket in her closet still had its tags on, and that the double string of pearls were particularly fine—and she had mentioned more than once that her Park Avenue obstetrician’s office was lined with photographs of movie stars, signed with notes of thanks. She enjoyed thinking of herself in the company of Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth. So how had my parents ended up at the Farris Institute for Parenthood? Was there something about Farris that was different from the others? Or perhaps my parents wanted to go farther afield, to avoid any chance of running into someone they knew?
My mother had taken pains to describe Edmond Farris as a world-famous doctor, a pioneer in his field. If this was the case, there was surprisingly little information available about his work. Michael and I had been able to ascertain that he’d begun his career at the Wistar Institute, a scientific research center housed at Penn, and had risen to the position of director. But in the mid-1950s, Farris had been summarily dismissed. It was at that point that a few small newspaper articles about his new institute began to appear. Not the stuff of world fame.
I finally came across a video interview of Leonard Hayflick, an elderly endocrinologist who had worked at Wistar, in which he mentioned Farris. Hayflick was eighty-eight, and I could find no email for him, only a phone number.
He answered the phone with a sharp yes in lieu of a hello.
“Is this Leonard Hayflick?”
“Who wants to know?”
I wasn’t cut out for this kind of reporting. I stuttered out my name and reasons for calling him until he became convinced I wasn’t a telemarketer. Once we were clear on why we were speaking, I asked him if he could give me background on Edmond Farris.
“I knew Farris at Wistar
,” Hayflick told me. “A strange little man. When did you say you were born?”
“Nineteen sixty-two.”
“Impossible,” he said. “His lab at Wistar no longer existed by then. He had been kicked out in the mid-1950s—he was performing artificial inseminations and the Church found out, there was press, the local bishops became involved, pressure built—”
“And then he opened his own institute,” I told him. “The Farris Institute for Parenthood. Where I was conceived.”
Hayflick had never heard of the institute, and he had trouble believing that Farris had continued to operate near the campus of Penn after his dismissal from Wistar. But about this much, I was certain. I was proof of it. I began to think that Hayflick wasn’t going to be of much help to me, beyond a sense that Farris was unpopular, a renegade. Hayflick described him as a Napoleonic type—short but dynamic, with sharp elbows. Someone who had made a lot of enemies.
But then Hayflick began talking about the science—his area of expertise. It seemed that Farris was a pioneer in two divergent ways, both of which would turn out to have been of great importance to my parents. First, he had developed a method by which a woman’s ovulation could be monitored.
“Wistar was world famous for its colony of albino, virgin female rats,” Hayflick said.
Just when I thought the story couldn’t possibly get weirder. For months after this conversation, white rats would populate my dreams.
“While Farris was at Wistar, he benefited from the rat colony at no cost to him. The morning urine specimens of women would be inoculated into the ovaries of the rats—and then, a couple of days later, the animals would be sacrificed so that the ovaries could be examined. If the veins were red and swelling, it would show the hormonal surge of the woman’s ovulation.”