by Dani Shapiro
As Shirley rummaged through her desk drawers, I examined this unlikely bit of ad copy. Later, I would think about what the poem meant to Shirley. It was something apart and aside from her daily prayers. Something that was hers and hers alone, that seemed to go to the core of her spiritual life.
“I had it right here,” she said, closing one drawer and opening another. “An envelope.”
It occurred to me that maybe she was nervous. After all, I had called a few weeks earlier to say I had something important to discuss with her, and asked if I could pay a visit. She might have wondered why I was making the sudden day trip to Chicago. Or she might have suspected the reason. Either way, she would have been apprehensive.
“I wanted to give you—”
“Don’t worry, Shirl.”
“—wait, here it is.”
I opened a small plain envelope and pulled out three photographs. One was of Jacob and me, taken on the beach in Cape Cod when he was a toddler. In the golden light and salty air, we look as alike as we ever will, our hair wild and wavy, eyes the same blue as the sea. I had sent it to Shirley years ago. Why was she returning it to me? I had the awful feeling that perhaps she really did know, and she was returning my own son to me, disclaiming him as part of the family. I shoved the thought away as hard as I could. And, not for the first time, I wished I had taken Michael up on his offer to accompany me on this trip.
The second two photographs were of my grandparents.
“I wanted you to have these of Grammy and Grandpa,” Shirley said. “They were at the height of their ascendancy.”
Height of their ascendancy. Who spoke in such a manner? And yet, coming from my aunt, it didn’t sound odd but rather, like a humble statement of fact. It was no wonder I had mythologized my grandparents all my life. They were the stuff of myth.
Shirley and I settled on the sofa in the sitting room.
“I wonder if you know why I’m here,” I began.
She shook her head no.
“I have a story to tell you, and I’m afraid you’re going to find it painful,” I continued.
Shirley was so small, her back erect as she readied herself to hear whatever it was I had come to say. Joanne must have gone out. The house was dead quiet—so quiet I heard a clock somewhere, ticking, ticking. Was there any part of her that had always wondered if this day of reckoning would come?
I began at the beginning. I told her I’d had my DNA tested. I looked for a flicker of awareness, a sense that she knew where this was going. I saw none. For the first time in my life, I understood the expression blow by blow. At the mention of an unfamiliar first cousin, a ripple crossed her forehead but nothing more. I began to explain about calling Susie and asking for her DNA sample.
“Do you need me to slow down?” I asked a couple of times. “Is there anything you don’t understand so far?”
I asked this not because I thought she had the slightest cognitive decline. She had one of the sharpest minds of anyone I knew. But she was ninety-three. When she was born, automobiles were relatively new. Televisions did not exist. She was already the mother of four when Watson and Crick discovered the chemical structure of DNA. Another elderly person to whom I had recounted the story had asked: So you’re saying you’re part your father and part someone else?
Shirley grew ever more still as I spoke. She reminded me of a tiny animal in the forest: big eyes, big ears, quivering with attention. I told her that the comparison of DNA samples revealed that Susie and I were not related by blood. We were not half sisters.
She didn’t move.
And then: “Shirl, did you know that my parents had a hard time conceiving me?”
“No, I didn’t,” she responded.
There it was—my answer. She hadn’t known. If my father had kept a secret, he’d kept it from his sister as well. I went on to tell her about Philadelphia, the institute, my father’s mad dashes from New York. As I spoke, a transcendent calm came over me. Some part of me broke off from the rest and marveled at this calm.
“So you’re saying—”
“Dad isn’t my biological father,” I said. Five words. Five words and a lifetime. Her eyes were locked onto mine. I was afraid she was going to stop breathing. Not a blink. Not a sound. I feared it was as if I had said to her: You’re not mine. I’m not yours. We don’t belong to each other. It felt violent. The world around us fell away.
She leaned slightly forward, reached out, and grabbed my hand.
“I’m not giving you up,” she said.
The thin shell holding me together cracked, and suddenly I was weeping with my whole body.
“And you’d better not be giving me up,” she said.
Every syllable, deliberate.
“I’m not giving you up, Shirl,” I sobbed. “I was so afraid that—”
“I have fewer years ahead of me than behind me,” she said. “And you are my brother’s daughter.”
* * *
—
As the hours blurred together—coffee, bagels, lox, tea—Shirley entered with me into the thicket of what might have happened. I brought up the question of halachah, and she treated it as if it were completely beside the point, in the same way Rabbi Lookstein had. The two most religious people I’d consulted seemed willing to throw out the rulebook in this matter. She listened carefully as I shared Lookstein’s opinion with her.
“It would have been within your father’s character,” she said slowly. “Very much in Paul’s genre.”
I repeated what Lookstein said about my dad and the choices he made back in 1953, when his young fiancée was dying. Your father was a hero.
“I think there was great nobility in what Paul did at that time,” Shirley said. “The Lubavitcher Rebbe offered him a very easy moral out—to keep postponing the wedding until Dorothy died. When you’re offered an easy moral out and you don’t take it, that’s malchus.”
Meaning kingly.
Grammy and Grandpa at the height of their ascendancy.
Great nobility.
My eyes had not stopped stinging with tears.
“Shirl, are you surprised that my father never said anything to you about their struggle with infertility?”
“Not at all,” she said. “He would have felt private about it. That’s something that would have been in the deepest interior of their marriage. He would have been protective of your mother.”
A lifelong animosity had existed between Shirley and my mother. Shirley had described their relationship to me rather gently as being “on different wavelengths, as if there was electric circuitry buzzing in the wires between us.” I recall hearing my mother’s raised voice, the slamming down of a phone. But when I brought up the possibility that my mother had deceived my father—that he never knew—Shirley didn’t go there with me. She preferred the version of the story that I found most painful: that my father knew all along.
“You’re not an accident of history, Dani,” Shirley said. Her eyes were brimming. “Not as far as I’m concerned and not as far as the world is concerned. This isn’t about the cold scientific facts. I have to tell you—in every way, and I’m not saying it to make you feel good, and I’m taking a chance saying it because you’ll think I’m making it up—but between you and Paul there was paternity, ownership, kinship.”
She trained her whole ninety-three-year-old self, every cell in her being, in the direction of consoling me. Every bit of energy. It was the purest manifestation of love I had ever experienced.
“Knowing what you know, you’re more of a daughter to Paul than you can possibly imagine. You take something that isn’t your own and you breathe life into it. You create it—and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.”
Her hand rested on top of mine.
“It’s rare that you get an opportunit
y in life to stand outside yourself. It’s as if Hakadosh baruch hu is saying, Child, come sit next to me and now, look. Finding all this out is a door to discovering what a father really is. It isn’t closure—you may not get to have that—but it’s an opening to a whole new vista.”
For the first time since that evening in June when I’d stared uncomprehendingly into my computer screen, I felt a sense of peace. At least for the moment, the constant ache was gone.
“You have to judge things by the result,” Shirley continued. “And the result in which you can exult is that the very best was combined in you: grace, brains, creativity, beauty. Whatever alien, mechanical, outside element was in the story—it was a story of success. You have such a rich endowment. You have been so recompensed. You carry the heightened sensitivity, to be sure. You carry the pain and you also carry the reward.”
Her voice—hoarse from speaking for hours—was a part of me. Her strong hands, her expressive forehead, her sweet smile—all a part of me, because she had always been a part of me. I had been so afraid that blood would be all that mattered. Oh, how I had underestimated my remarkable aunt. My car was waiting at the curb. She had hardly paused all afternoon. Her eyes had never left mine. Words had coursed through her as if channeled from the very God she believed in. Hakadosh baruch hu. She was telling me that she was still my aunt—that my father was still my father. My whole lost family encircled us as we sat in the fading light of her kitchen in Chicago.
“Sweetheart, this opens up a world of inclusiveness—and in the end, you have to include yourself. You aren’t bleeding color. You’re holding the light ones and the dark ones. They’re all yours. Ultimately, in all of this, Dani—the postscript is that it’s really called love.”
Part Three
31
Shirley had used certain words to describe Ben Walden: alien, mechanical, outside element. Cold scientific facts. But Ben didn’t feel like an outside element to me. Quite the opposite—he was very much an inside element. It wasn’t just a physical resemblance. The man I watched on that YouTube video spoke in a cadence similar to mine, moved his hands in the same way, as if clearing space for his words when making a point. Donating sperm was not the same as, say, donating a kidney. Or a retina. It was the passing along of an essence that was inseparable from personhood itself.
I had told Shirley nothing about discovering Ben. She didn’t need to know that there was a retired doctor who lived in Portland—an actual human being with a face and a name—who was my biological father. Knowing what you know, you’re more of a daughter to Paul than you can possibly imagine. I longed to believe this, even though I couldn’t yet understand it. My father and I had shared a history, a culture, a landscape, a home, a language, an entire world. Our bond was real and unbreakable. But I also now knew, in the starkest terms, what had been missing: mutual recognition. I did not come from him. I had never once looked into his face and seen my own.
Weeks passed as I waited, hoping for a response from Ben, who had asked for time to thoughtfully process my request. With each email exchange, I braced for the possibility that he might stop writing back. He could drop out of sight and there would be absolutely nothing I could do about it. Ben was the only person involved in my conception who was still living. My new reality continued to be ungraspable to me, and I was constantly aware of Ben’s very aliveness—his existence on the other side of the country as he walked through his days, a person in the world.
I latched onto facts. It was a fact that I had been conceived by artificial insemination. It was a fact that my father wasn’t my biological father. It was a fact that Adam Thomas was my first cousin. It was a fact that Ben was Adam Thomas’s uncle. That he had been a young medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, where he had donated sperm. I ran through these facts as I tried to fall asleep each night, as if recounting them might help me make more sense of things. But what I was really doing was unspooling a narrative fifty-four years long, and perhaps meeting Ben would help me to find my footing, and to begin again, at the beginning.
As late summer’s golden light fell across our meadow out back, I allowed myself to get caught up in fantasies of meeting Ben. I pictured a cool, crisp afternoon in Portland—a city that was a blank slate for me. I conjured up a café of Ben’s choosing. Perhaps we would sit outside at a small table. It would be a one-time meeting—so I told myself—and that would be just fine. We would make polite small talk. Or we would speak of delicate matters. Maybe he’d tell me about the Farris Institute. Or maybe we’d stick with safer subjects. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to see myself in a stranger. I wondered if he would, in fact, feel like a stranger. Michael asked me more than once what I hoped I’d get out of meeting Ben. I didn’t know. I just knew that it felt urgent and necessary.
The books and printouts of articles and studies from scholarly journals and doctoral dissertations continued to pile up on my office floor near my desk. They shared the same small space decorated with the portrait of my grandmother, along with an entire crowd of framed family photos atop a standing bookcase. Each day I entered my office in a state of even deeper dread. The pile of paper grew, as my ability to tackle it diminished. I would begin reading an essay on, say, the legal history of donor insemination, and would find myself stricken, slightly ill, confused, enraged. I came across a Time cover story from 1945, “Artificial Bastards?,” in which a judge ultimately ruled that artificial insemination is not adultery, and therefore not grounds for divorce. How had this become my story? Or rather, how had it been my story all along?
When I took a break from reading, I found it easier to search for more information about Ben on the Internet. Haunted by the eerie awareness that I was stalking, I scrolled through his blog on medical ethics, found bits and pieces of news about him and his family. He had been married for fifty years. His wife was a Brazilian nurse whom he’d met in the Peace Corps, just after medical school. I learned more about their three children: a girl and two boys. The girl—my half sister!—was only six years younger than me. I watched YouTube videos of the Walden family at Christmas. A twinkling tree laden with ornaments dominated one corner of a living room. Tartan plaid place mats covered a holiday table. Teenagers ducked away from the camera. Little kids played underfoot. Grandparents sang a shaky duet that may have been a hymn. They were as foreign from my ancestors in the shtetl as could be. And yet they were—in the strict definition of the word—my ancestors. Who were these people? What did this family have to do with me? Once again I became that child standing outside the warmly lit houses of my neighbors, alone in the fading dusk, longing to be invited inside.
Early one Saturday evening, Michael and I were sitting in our library, about to head out to meet friends for dinner, when Ben Walden’s name appeared in my in-box. As had been the case since the first time he wrote to me, the name—a name that would have meant nothing to me less than two months prior—filled me with a potent mixture of dread and excitement. I opened his email and saw that it was longer than the others. My voice shook as I began to read aloud to Michael:
To: Dani Shapiro
From: Benjamin Walden
Re: re: re: re: Important Letter
Dear Dani,
I truly appreciate your emails about respecting my family’s privacy and I certainly take you at your word when you wrote, “…I would never expose you or your family in my work. I may someday write about my experience, but I will never name or identify you or your family. You have my word. That is not the kind of writer or person I am.”
I think I can understand and empathize with your desire to further connect face to face and to have further genetic confirmation of our link. I can only imagine how you feel since I’ve never been there myself. A sense of our genetic link is important to most of us.
When I donated sperm as a twenty-two-year-old medical student, I was promised privacy and anonymity
by the fertility institute so I, along with many medical student friends, became donors for a period of time. The thought of some future contacts from the children conceived by artificial insemination never crossed my mind. So this has been an unusual and surprising situation that I’ve given a lot of thought to.
I’ve looked though your website and read some of your writings. You are a remarkably talented writer and appear fortunate to be having such a successful career and family life. I’m happy for you in that you appear to be on a path to continue that success, which I hope brings you great personal happiness.
Dani, you have been able to see me from videos on my blog and to read my blog posts. These have bits and pieces of the biographical information I’m willing to share. Likewise, I have been able to see videos of you and to read some of your writings, so I feel I have at least some glimpse of your life.
At this point in my life, I don’t have the time, energy, or interest to pursue this further. So, Dani, I don’t intend to have genetic testing done or to have a meeting with you. I’m so sorry that this may sound harsh and uncaring, but I can’t think of a better way to put it. I have reached this decision after discussion with my family and a few others. Please believe me; I empathize with your quest to understand your genetic history. But this is going to be my final communication with you. I wish you nothing but the best as your life moves forward with your family and your writing.
Best regards,
Ben
32
I stared at the last paragraph of Ben’s letter. Final communication. I’m so sorry that this may sound harsh. I closed my laptop and sat there, trembling.
“He can’t just do that,” Michael said.