Inheritance

by Dani Shapiro

  But there was a second area in which Farris had broken new ground, according to Hayflick—who clearly hadn’t liked him and was loath to credit him with any discovery. Farris was among the first, if not the first, in the field of reproductive medicine to consider the male as the possible reason for a couple’s infertility.

  “Sexism was profound,” Hayflick said, “and it was always assumed that it was the wife, not the husband, who was responsible for the infertility problem. But Farris looked at sperm specimens for low motility and poor morphology.”

  My parents. My mother, pushing forty. Trying, month after month, year after year, desperate to have a baby. When had her miscarriages occurred? Before—or during—their excursions to Philadelphia? And why had she miscarried, over and over again? The culture dictated that the problem lay with her. Plus, my father already had a child. So when they chose the Farris Institute for Parenthood, it would have likely been because of Farris’s innovation. Perhaps my mother’s Park Avenue obstetrician to the stars pressed a phone number into her palm. Go see this doctor. I’ve heard he gets good results. My mother’s urine, injected into the ovaries of albino, virgin rats.

  But at some point, perhaps even at their very first appointment, Farris would have evaluated my father’s sperm as a matter of course. He had been writing academic papers about male infertility that had been infuriating the medical establishment since the 1940s. He would have looked through his microscope at a slide and determined just how unlikely it would be for this couple to have their own child.

  An older mother. A subfertile father. A couple who could not fathom their future without a baby—without their baby. A scientist with sharp elbows and a Napoleon complex. An era in which doctors played God. In which religious leaders of every faith decreed donor insemination an abomination. In which—in legal terms—it was often considered adultery, and the child a bastard.

  What course was invisibly charted for my parents after they crossed the threshold of that institute in Philadelphia? Did my father race in vain—believing he was doing everything possible to have his own child? I imagine him now as he leaves his job and takes the subway to Penn Station. He settles himself on the train to Philly and cracks open The Wall Street Journal, but he is distracted. His mind drifts to my mother, his bewildering, despairing wife. He must feel it is his fault. Slow sperm. So unlucky. Divorced. Widowed. Now this. He has told no one. He bears the journey toward making a family alone.

  In a small room next to a laboratory where white rats are locked in their cages, my mother waits. She is capable of being very still, my mother, like a statue, with her hands clasped, her legs crossed, a small smile in place. She’s going to have a baby, goddamnit. And—this much is certain—at some point a fair-haired, blue-eyed medical student is also present. Pains are taken to be sure that Ben Walden and my mother never cross paths, though he is probably no more than fifty feet away, in another room discreetly outfitted with old issues of Playboy. His sperm has to be fresh; time is of the essence. If his sperm is indeed to be mixed with my father’s—whether my father is aware of it or not—the two men might even pass each other in the halls of the Farris Institute.

  Dr. Edmond Farris knew the score. But did he explain it clearly to my mother and father? Did he tell them that their chances of having their own baby were next to nil? That there was good news—a ready solution—one that might be difficult to contemplate but would greatly increase their chances for success? The more I continued to learn, the less I trusted any story.

  * * *

  —

  When I was growing up in suburban New Jersey, in a neighborhood of pretty homes built on well-tended, one-acre lots, two cars in the driveway, and families of three, four, even five kids, it was notable that I was an only child. Especially because my parents were older—I now wonder what people thought of the white-blond, pale girl who lived in the red-brick house on the corner. When people commented on the size of our family—which, amazingly, they did—my mother had a ready response. I can hear her voice as if she’s here in the room as I write these words. She would turn her beautiful, darting eyes on me, and I would feel pride. I may only have one, but I hit the jackpot, she would say. As if it were a lottery. She had won me. I was her prize.

  29

  Until I was in my mid-thirties—I met Michael at thirty-four, and Jacob was born days after I turned thirty-seven—my inner world was defined and shaped by longing. This longing was vast, wide, and I was not able to put words to it. All I knew was what I felt, which was a constant, interior ache that propelled me. At times, I felt like a sleepwalker in my own life, moving to a strange choreography whose steps I knew by heart. I have now read interview after interview with donor-conceived people—particularly those whose origins were not disclosed to them—who describe this longing. This sense of being trapped on the other side of an invisible wall: separate, alone, cut off, and—worst of all—not knowing why.

  During my childhood, this ache took on two forms: first, I snooped. Whenever my parents were out of the house, as my bored babysitter watched television or talked on the phone with her boyfriend, I would stealthily climb the stairs to my parents’ bedroom and open their drawers and closets. Many children are curious about their parents’ private lives, but my ritual bordered on obsession. I ran my fingertips over my mother’s chiffon scarves folded delicately in tissue. Her scent—rather, a mélange of scents—wafted up from inside each drawer: gardenia, jasmine, orchid, sandalwood, oakmoss, vetiver. Beneath her bathroom sink, she stored dozens of unopened boxes of L’Air du Temps and Calèche, as if she was afraid of ever running out. Her jewelry drawer was locked, but I had located the key and explored her necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and pins whenever I could, as if clues to who my mother really was might be found amid the gems.

  My parents slept, according to Orthodox tradition, in single beds that were pushed together and attached to one headboard but made separately, each with its own set of sheets and blankets. The religious reason for this had to do with the belief that a woman is unclean during her menstrual cycle and the couple shouldn’t touch at all during this time. I would sit on the sea of my parents’ two beds and look around their room. The heavy silk curtains, their bedside tables with their twin clocks, the needlepoint pillows with their tiny stitches, all seemed to hold some sort of elusive truth. Then, if I still had time, I would walk into each of their offices and rifle through the papers covering their desks, careful to leave no trace. It wasn’t anything specific I was after. It was just a sense that something was out of reach—and if I could only find it, this terrible feeling of longing would go away. I’d have my answer to a question I couldn’t even formulate.

  My second response to the constant ache was to look for a new family. I didn’t realize that this was what I was doing, of course. We had a small dog, a poodle, and I walked that dog around our neighborhood every chance I got. I took the same route each afternoon, and longer walks on weekends. The neighborhood streets were named after English locales: Exeter Way, Surrey Court, Westminster Avenue. But it was the identity of each family in each home that consumed me. The Quentzels had four kids, the youngest of whom was my age. The dad was a dentist. The Markowitzes also were a family of six. The dad was a builder, and the mom was young—the mothers were all a lot younger than mine, I came to realize. The Wilfs, Pantirers, and Kushners were among the community of Holocaust survivors. The Topilows had three mostly grown children. The dad was an ophthalmologist. The boys were already in college. Lawns were littered with swings, jungle gyms, plastic recliners. Sprinklers sprayed gentle arcs back and forth. I knew the neighbors’ cars and made a study of the patterns of their comings and goings. Once school let out each day, it seemed like the moms and kids gathered at home. The dads pulled into the driveways at dusk. As I lurked and watched, I was like an anthropologist studying a foreign culture. Another form of life was going on behind the closed doors of these homes—a different, eas
ier, more comfortable life than what was happening in mine.

  As a grown woman, a mother myself, I received a phone call one day from our across-the-street neighbor from long ago. She felt compelled to share a memory about my childhood. I took notes as I listened: Alarm went off. Babysitter in the basement, didn’t hear. You came running across the street. Scared, alone. As she recounted the story, I remembered the loud clanging, my confusion, and running in my nightgown across the lawn to their house. I recalled the grass beneath my bare feet, the strangeness of being outside all by myself in my nightclothes. The entirety of my childhood formed around the memory, and I felt a sudden cavernous emptiness. The next day I stopped your mother to tell her what had happened. She was always leaving. Going to the city. Parade of babysitters. I told her you had been frightened. She needed to be home more. Or at least hire someone more caring. She screamed at me, furious. How dare I tell her how to raise her child?

  I did everything I could to flee my parents. It pains me to write these words. They were all I knew of the world. And yet, I walked that poor dog up and down those unfortunately named suburban streets in search of a family who would open their door and take me in. I now wonder what those people thought; whether they were curious about why I was always circling their block, pausing by their front walks—why I always seemed to be hanging around. Once invited in, I ate cookies at their kitchen tables, watched television in their dens, drank soda on their porches, quietly desperate to belong to what seemed a warm, enchanted circle.

  Eventually, the sky would begin to darken and it would be time for me to go home. I’d let myself in through the back door and make my way upstairs to my room. There was no one to ask me why I had been gone so long, or where I had been. The antiseptic silence was suffocating in contrast to the messy, noisy world outside. By the time night fell, either my mother would have returned from whatever she did during the day or a babysitter would make me dinner to my mother’s specifications.

  Later, the garage door would open, my father returning from his job in the city. That was the sound I waited for—the electronic rumble of my father returning, then the brief bear hug that seemed to contain within it his warm and beautiful heart. I was afraid of my mother and wanted very little to do with her. She was not the locus of my longing. It wasn’t another mother I was after when I went from house to house like a stray kitten. It wasn’t siblings, either. I was a girl in search of a father—not because I didn’t love my father but because my love couldn’t save him. That younger man on the train to Philadelphia had become a middle-aged man crushed by an accumulation of secrets, losses, and the unsaid. My father was already gone.

  30

  Before summer came to an end, I forced myself to fly to Chicago to see my father’s sister, Shirley. It was not a trip I wanted to make. In all the exploration I’d done thus far—my conversation with my mother’s best friend, Charlotte; my visit to Rabbi Lookstein—nothing had terrified me as much as coming face-to-face with my beloved aunt. At first, I thought I’d never tell her—that at the age of ninety-three, this was something she didn’t need to know. But Michael had pushed me. Shirley might know something, he’d said. And he had a point. She and my father had been very close. If he had confided in anyone—that is, if he’d had anything to confide—it might have been her.

  I was alone in the backseat of a town car on the outskirts of Chicago, searching for signs of Jewish life. It felt like we had been driving for hours, though it had been no more than forty minutes. Strip malls gave way to the flat grid of a suburban neighborhood. The driver turned on Golda Meir Boulevard. I spied a kosher butcher, a yeshiva, a lone Hasid in a long black coat and black hat walking down a side street lined with ranch houses and split-levels. When Jacob and I had visited the year before, we had arrived in the dark. Through the tinted window I saw a woman wearing a wig, holding the hand of a small boy with payes. I knew that Shirley’s house must be close. As I neared her home, I fought an overpowering urge to ask my driver to turn around and head back to the airport.

  In the years after my father’s death, Shirley and I had grown increasingly connected. We spoke by phone often, and many times she had told me that she’d promised my father she’d look out for me. Though Shirley was my father’s younger sister, she had always been his protector, and he had turned to her in times of emotional peril. It was she he had called when he learned that his young fiancée was terminally ill. It was she to whom he had confessed, in later years, his unhappiness in his marriage to my mother. During the time that my father and mother struggled to have a baby, he might have unburdened himself to Shirley.

  I was back to the same lurching, destabilizing fear that came over me each time I was about to speak with anyone who might, in an instant, illuminate the extent of my parents’ actions and awareness. Just as when I’d spoken with Charlotte, and Rabbi Lookstein, the possibility existed that I would discover with absolute certainty that my parents had colluded to keep my identity a secret from me. Wendy Kramer had summarily dismissed my belief that my parents hadn’t known. Or, at the very least, that my mother hadn’t known. Which story would ease your heart? Lookstein had asked me. The true one, I had answered. But at any moment, the truth could flatten me.

  On the flight to Chicago, I went over some correspondence I’d had with the author of a dissertation on the history of fertility. As for records, most clinics purposefully destroyed them, she wrote. I stared at the word destroyed, willing the letters to rearrange themselves. I still held out the hope that a dusty file cabinet in the basement archives of Penn, or in the attic of one of Edmond Farris’s three children, would contain notes, signatures, evidence. In holding with psychological theories of the time, men were usually told to forget that the procedure had ever happened if they used a donor. Could my father—could any father—have forgotten that the procedure had ever happened?

  * * *

  —

  My car pulled away and I walked up the front steps to my cousin Joanne’s home, where Shirley now lived. Another car would pick me up in four hours. Four hours, in which I would tell my aunt—who had once described herself to me as a weaver’s daughter—that she and I were not threads in the same tapestry; that we were not related by blood; that her much-adored older brother was not my father.

  Joanne opened the door and ushered me inside warmly. I was still holding a Starbucks cup from the airport. Was Starbucks kosher enough? I wasn’t sure.

  “Is this okay?” I gestured to the cup.

  If it wasn’t, she didn’t embarrass me.

  “Of course. Mom’s been expecting you.”

  Joanne led me into a sitting room. There, in the corner, was a framed photograph of Joseph Soloveitchik, the same rabbi whose portrait graced Lookstein’s office at Ramaz. A desk was surrounded by bookcases filled with leather-bound Hebrew volumes. On several long polished tables—just as had been the case in Shirley’s home near Boston and in my grandmother’s apartment in New York City—there were literally hundreds of family photographs. Perhaps as the eldest daughter, Joanne had inherited them. Being a part of this vast array had always comforted me, even as it had confused me. I was the lone pale, blond child in the sea of dark-haired, dark-eyed grandchildren and great-grandchildren—my otherness and difference glaringly evident. Yet I had never had any doubt that I was part of the chain that reached back and back through the generations, unbroken. As I stood in my cousin Joanne’s sitting room, now knowing better, it felt as if the links of that chain were in pieces on the floor all around me.

  Shirley emerged from her living quarters behind the sitting room, and we held each other close. She wore a dark skirt and a gray silk blouse, her silver hair pulled back into a low bun. She was unadorned. No makeup. No necklace, no earrings. Her plain gold wedding ring the only decoration on her elegant, supple hands. A Juilliard-trained pianist, she had still been able to sit at the keyboard and play Brahms ballades well into her eighties.r />
  She had become smaller with each passing year. As I hugged her, the top of her head rested beneath my chin.

  “Come into my room, sweetheart, before we sit down. There’s something I want to show you.”

  I followed Shirley into her bedroom. She had managed to distill the contents of her seven-bedroom home near Boston into a simple, almost monastic space that still contained the essence of her life. Black-and-white portraits of her four children were arranged on a wall opposite her small, well-made bed. A photograph of her late husband, my uncle Moe, was crowded onto a bookshelf along with those of her two brothers, my dad and Uncle Harvey. All of them, gone. She was the last of her generation. A pair of ancient baby shoes sat atop a pile of Shakespeare plays. All of my books—five novels, three memoirs—were nestled among volumes of Judaica. My heart quickened as I had the devastating thought: Would she keep my books on her bookshelf, once she knew the truth? Would it matter to her—would she somehow blame me for not being her brother’s daughter?

  A laminated newspaper clipping from an advice column, old and yellowed, hung on the wall near the bedroom door. It seemed so out-of-place amid the religious artifacts in Shirley’s room, in a place of prominence where she would see it each day as she left her living quarters.

  Q: You mentioned the poem James Garner recites in the Chevy Tahoe ad. Is it by e. e. cummings?—Fred Good, Mount Dora, Fla.

  A: “Nobody Knows It but Me” is by ad copywriter Patrick O’Leary. Many readers asked for the text. Here it is: “There’s a place I travel when I want to roam, and nobody knows it but me. / The roads don’t go there and the signs stay home, and nobody knows it but me. / It’s far, far away and way, way afar. It’s over the moon and the sea / and wherever you’re going that’s wherever you are. / And nobody knows it but me.