Inheritance

by Dani Shapiro

  “Emily just followed you on Twitter,” he said.

  He showed me her name atop a list of my newest followers.

  Emily Walden. There she was. I felt a strange and instant comfort. She did know about me. She did. And she was reaching out.

  The three of us piled into our packed-to-the-gills car and began the long drive to Provincetown. I kept my phone in my lap, refreshing Twitter again and again to see if perhaps Emily Walden had thought better of it and unfollowed me. But there she continued to be. My thumb hovered over her avatar, a Bitmoji of a dark-haired, apple-cheeked woman.

  It took two days for me to follow her back. I was afraid of seeming too jumpy, too eager—though of course I was both. Finally, early one morning, as I sat in the sun-drenched kitchen of our cottage at the arts center, I touched follow on my phone’s screen. I saw it—a vision—two half sisters who had never known of one another’s existence, sending the most modern version of a smoke signal, each from her own coast.

  I see you.

  I see you, too.

  35

  Later, I will become a student of trauma. I will read deeply on the subject as a way of understanding the two opposite poles of my own history: the trauma my parents must have experienced in order to have made a decision so painful that it was buried at the moment it was made, and the trauma of my discovery of that decision more than half a century later.

  Anything was capable of setting it off. A guest at a party in my home admired the sepia photograph of the small boy in his bowler hat. Who’s that? The answer I had always given was no longer true. Or a doctor’s appointment at which I was asked to update my medical history. How could I explain that my father was no longer deceased? While having my vision checked, I let my longtime ophthalmologist know that I am genetically predisposed to a rare eye condition. Nothing to worry about, Ben had said. It would be reasonable to be followed.

  It is the nature of trauma that, when left untreated, it deepens over time. I had experienced trauma over the years and had developed ways of dealing with it. I meditated each morning. I had a decades-long yoga practice. I had suffered other traumas—my parents’ car accident, Jacob’s childhood illness—and had come out the other side, eventually. What I didn’t understand was that as terrible as these were, they were singular incidents. The car crash. The diagnosis. In the aftermath, what was left to be dealt with was the grief, the anxiety. But this—the discovery that I wasn’t who I had believed myself to be all my life, that my parents had on some level, no matter how subtle, made the choice to keep the truth of my identity from me—this was no singular incident. It wasn’t something outside myself, to be held to the light and examined, and finally understood. It was inseparable from myself. It was myself.

  The boa constrictor had begun to metabolize the elephant. I began to visualize my parents’ choices on a continuum, like weights on a scale. On one end, there was absolute lack of knowledge. But my desperate parents, struggling to have a child, had gone to a lawless institute near the campus of Penn to see a mad scientist known specifically for donor insemination. Increasingly, absolute lack of knowledge had begun to seem like my own self-protective fantasy.

  Everyone seemed to be telling me that my parents had possessed some level of knowledge. Wendy Kramer, Leonard Hayflick, Alan DeCherney, Rabbi Lookstein, Aunt Shirley—all of them had gently or not so gently let me know that there was agency. My parents had made a decision. And no matter how difficult or painful, I had to open the door to the likelihood that they had some awareness. The weights inched further over to conscious knowledge with each passing week.

  Their trauma became mine—had always been mine. It was my inheritance, my lot. My parents’ tortured pact of secrecy was as much a part of me as the genes that had been passed down by my mother and Ben Walden. It was another facet of the whole picture. It felt as if I had only ever been able to see in two dimensions, and now I had been handed a pair of 3-D glasses. The clarity was both liberating and devastating. I listened over and over again to the interview with the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk which I had noted on that early index card: “The nature of trauma,” van der Kolk had said, “is that you have no recollection of it as a story. The nature of traumatic experience is that the brain doesn’t allow a story to be created.”

  I grew up to become a storyteller. I moved from fiction to memoir, writing one, two, three, four—now five—memoirs. I captured my life, and the life of my family, between the pages of book after book and thought: There, that’s it. Now I understand. I dug until my shovel hit rock. Sometimes people suggested that I must have an amazing memory—that surely I must recall so many scenes, moments, sensory details from my early years. But the truth is that I have a terrible memory. I struggled to access any of my childhood or even my teenage years. I had no recollection of it as a story. And so I followed my own line of words to see where it would lead me. I understood that there were layers, striations of consciousness, inaccessible through analysis or intellect. Only in a state of half dreaming could I begin—and then only barely—to touch the truth.

  I am the black box, discovered years—many years—after the crash. The pilots, the crew, the passengers have long been committed to the sea. Nothing is left of them. Fathoms deep, I have spent my life transmitting the faintest signal. Over here! Over here! I have settled upon the ocean floor. I am also the diver who has discovered the black box. What’s this? I had been looking for it all my life without knowing it existed. Now I hold it in my hands. It may or may not contain clues. It is a witness to a history it recorded but did not see. What went on in that plane? Why did it fall from the sky?

  36

  Our week in Provincetown, usually a fun time for my family, was instead a struggle. Each morning I met with my class around a workshop table in a high-ceilinged studio to discuss their stories. The subject matter—as is often the case in a creative nonfiction class—was thorny and painful: addiction, suicide, grief, estrangement, abuse. The difficult passages of people’s lives and the desire to wrest meaning from those passages never fail to move me. As a teacher, I am accustomed to being able to hold my students’ stories with both rigor and care. I am usually able to leave myself and my own troubles behind when I teach. But during this particular week I felt unsteady.

  In a journal I had kept in my early twenties, I berated myself, just a short while after my father had died, for still being in the thick of grief. As a grown woman, stumbling across that journal entry, I wanted to reach back and let that young, lost girl know it was okay. I wanted to tell her that grief—particularly the phenomenon known as complicated grief—runs its own course in its own time. But it was hard for me to allow myself that same compassion now. I tried to tuck my sorrow away each day as I taught, went to the beach, biked around town, ate lobster rolls on Commercial Street with Michael and Jacob—but when I awoke each morning it was to the wallop of shock and the remembering all over again as if for the first time.

  All the while, as I began to reassemble and re-understand the childhood I could hardly remember, Ben Walden was never far from my mind. Friends kept sending me articles about donor-conceived people discovering half siblings or searching for biological fathers. I wondered if Ben was also reading and thinking about any of this—or whether he had moved on. Was he at all tortured by the idea that he had a biological child—or likely multiple biological children—wandering the earth? That his actions had living consequences? I also wondered if his daughter knew that he had written me a letter severing our communication. Would Emily have told him that she followed me on Twitter? Was the Walden family sitting around the dinner table discussing the matter of me?

  Finally, sunburned, sticky, tired, our skin salty, sand covering the floor of our car, we began our trek home. I closed my eyes as Michael navigated vacation traffic; I was exhausted from my week of making room for other people’s stories when I hardly had the space for my own. In the years we’d bee
n coming to Provincetown, we’d established a routine to break up the long, monotonous ride. We stopped at a roadside tourist attraction, Arnold’s Lobster & Clam Bar, and gorged on towering trays of fried clams and onion rings, washed down with cold soda.

  This annual trip spelled end-of-summer for our family. Jacob would be getting ready to start his junior year of high school. Michael and I, too, were in back-to-school mode—I was busy with plans for my upcoming book, and Michael was in the throes of putting together a new film. We had plenty going on—but no matter what was happening in our daily lives, my mind continued to leap back to only one story, and it seemed like it would be that way forever.

  We had stopped for gas somewhere along the Mid-Cape Highway when I dug into my purse for my phone and saw, amid announcements of sales and political entreaties, Ben Walden’s name. His subject line read: Second thoughts.

  I said nothing. Jacob was in the backseat, listening to music on his headphones. Michael was inside the rest stop. I spent a long moment looking at the subject of the email before I opened it. Second thoughts.

  Dear Dani,

  My wife, Pilar, and I will be flying to Newark on Monday October 10 and will be in Paramus for a few days in order to be with an ill friend. We’ll then be driving to Philadelphia for a class reunion and to visit my sister there.

  I have been having second thoughts about meeting with you. It may well be the right thing for both of us to bring more of a sense of reality to our human connection. I know your schedule is busy, but would it be possible to meet with us for lunch somewhere within a twenty-minute drive from Paramus? Either Tuesday the eleventh or Wednesday the twelfth would work. Or, if you happen to be in the Philadelphia area, we could work something out later in the week.

  I apologize for wavering on the idea of meeting. I hope that you are still interested and that the timing works. Your husband, of course, is more than welcome to join us.

  Best regards,

  Ben

  37

  From the time I was a child, I thought of the month of September also as the month of Elul, the last month of the Jewish calendar, leading to the High Holy Days. Elul is meant to be a period of reckoning with oneself in preparation for Rosh Hashanah, when God opens the Book of Life and judges each one of us. How have we sinned? How might we repent? Following Elul are the Days of Awe, the ten-day stretch between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a period of intense transformation fraught with meaning and dread. On Erev Yom Kippur, God gathers the great court to determine our fate, and on Yom Kippur, the Book of Life is sealed for the coming year. In synagogue, we list our sins, pounding our chests above our hearts: For the sin we have committed before You by false denial and lying. For the sin we have committed before You by a confused heart.

  Some of my clearest memories of my father are of praying with him. As a young girl, I was allowed to sit next to him in shul, and I could feel the way his body relaxed when he davened, the way his voice became stronger and fuller within the plaintive melodies of the Hebrew liturgy. The synagogue was his home. When he shook his tallis from its velvet pouch and wrapped it around his shoulders, he became larger, almost mystical. Here in shul, prayer was our secret language, our way of connecting. We had the choreography down. We knew just what to do. Here we stand. Here we sit. Here we sway. Here we close our siddurs. Here we sing Ein Keloheinu. Here we kiss each other’s cheeks and say: Good Shabbos. What thoughts ran through my father’s mind as he listed those sins, his little girl beside him? Was he confused? Did he feel he had lied?

  It was a solemn undertaking, this business of reckoning. The Sunday before Rosh Hashanah, my father would make the trip from our home in New Jersey to the cemetery in Brooklyn where his father and grandparents were buried. He never asked my mother or me to accompany him on this journey. I can see him now: he parks his car near the small utility building just inside the gates, then walks along the narrow paths of the vast graveyard, thousands upon thousands of headstones etched in Hebrew spread out in every direction until he arrives at the Shapiro family plot. In the distance, the rumble of an elevated train and the white noise of traffic on the Belt Parkway. A wild dog barks. He unlatches the heavy chain that cordons the family plot off from the path. Perhaps he sits on a bench for a few moments and thinks of his father. He recites the Mourner’s Kaddish at the foot of his father’s grave. Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba. He pokes around the roots and pebbles, the fallen leaves, until he finds just the right handful of stones. He places one atop each of his ancestors’ graves, a custom that symbolizes permanence. Does my father foresee his own early death—only a decade away? He can’t envision the future: his daughter making her way alone down the cemetery’s narrow paths, year after year, reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish for him, warming a stone in her hands.

  * * *

  —

  The dates Ben proposed in early October most likely fell within Elul. Before I had a chance to even glance at my calendar, Michael had finished gassing up the car and climbed back into the driver’s seat. I wordlessly handed him my phone. Ben Walden. The feeling—the predominant one—was of being flooded with relief. See? I wasn’t wrong about him. A hard knot inside me unraveled. I had the strangest sense that I knew him, though I had never spent a moment in his presence; his last letter to me had seemed harsh, perhaps influenced by others, and didn’t feel expressive of his true self. But how could I possibly know anything about Ben Walden’s true self? Did the genetic code that linked us allow me to recognize him? Was there a gene for depth of thought? For kindness? It may well be the right thing for both of us. Not just for me. For him as well. Sense of reality to our human connection. In the weeks of silence between us, I had become real to him. Apologize for wavering. Hope that you are still interested.

  “I told you something would happen,” Michael said. He reached over and squeezed my hand.

  “Yeah, but this.” I stared at the screen. Lunch. New Jersey. October. I studied Ben’s email as if it were a cryptogram. I noticed that he misspelled the word thoughts in the subject line: Second thoughtus.

  As Michael pulled back onto the highway, I opened the calendar on my phone and looked up the two dates Ben had proposed. They didn’t fall over Elul. They fell on Erev Yom Kippur and Yom Kippur—the holiest days of the year.

  Dear Ben,

  I would be happy to meet you and Pilar on Tuesday, October 11, near Paramus. I’m glad you reconsidered. My husband, Michael, will join us, too. If you’d like, I can find a quiet restaurant within twenty minutes of Paramus—I know the area somewhat.

  Thanks for getting back in touch. I look forward to meeting you.

  My best,

  Dani

  I had become a master of restraint and understatement. Our lunch was six weeks away. I wrote the date—lunch with Ben—in my calendar. It gave me a jolt each time I noticed it, a stark, otherwise blank page amid all the others: Brattleboro Festival, reading at Southampton College, haircut, teaching at Kripalu, dinner with the Campbells, Jacob PSATs. Lunch with Ben.

  The six weeks leading up to our meeting were all preamble. I could think of little else. Each time I wrote Ben, I read Michael the email before I sent it. What if he got cold feet again? What if he changed his mind? What if he became ill? Our delicate back-and-forth continued, though the tone of his emails was markedly warmer. Something had fallen away from him—a tremulous, suspicious sense of me as other. He easily shared personal details: he wasn’t really familiar with New Jersey, though he had worked in Trenton the summer before medical school. He preferred Italian food to Greek. He was feeling very well, thank you, other than the usual aches and pains of aging. He sent me his mobile number in case we needed to text each other on the day. And then he wrote two brief lines that for the first time made me weep. Strange how I misspelled thoughts as “thoughtus.” Perhaps it was an appropriate slip.

  38

  What do w
e inherit, and how, and why? The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens—that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube—formed me? I did not come from the line of small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands. The imprint of pogroms, of the difficulties and sorrows of immigrant life was not mine—at least not in a physical sense. But I had carried these things a long way in my heart. I was of that dusty and doomed Polish village—and I was not. What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood? I was made of three people: my mother, my father, Ben Walden. Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life.

  To contend with these invisible floating worlds, I had created a narrative edifice, I now understood. Story after story kept me from ever inching too close to the truth. People had told me every single day of my life that I didn’t look like I belonged in my family—nor did I feel I belonged in my family—yet I didn’t stop to consider what this might mean. I couldn’t afford to. Not even after I learned the method of my conception at the age of twenty-five. Not even after Susie told me I ought to look into it.

  The clues screamed in neon. But I could not see them. After all, plenty of people feel or look “other” than their parents or siblings. Biology doesn’t promise similarity. Traits skip generations. Characteristics emerge, seemingly out of nowhere. Our parents seem alien to us. My mother, certainly, had always seemed alien to me, biology be damned. And so I built my narrative edifice, brick by brick: my mother was a pathological narcissist who had a borderline personality disorder; my father was depressed, shattered by marital misfortune; I was an Orthodox Jewish girl who looked like she could have gotten bread from the Nazis; I was the hard-won only child of my older parents. My sense of otherness derived from these—and only these—facts.