by Dani Shapiro
Ben Walden looked at his own simple typo and saw a Freudian slip, potential meaning. He didn’t have second thoughts but second thoughts about us—he and I. Thoughtus. I had noticed the typo, too, of course, and had smiled at it. It had the kind of psychological nuance I tend to enjoy. The feeling I would have again and again, of recognizing myself in Ben, was one I could become aware of only as I realized I had never experienced it before.
I had not seen myself in my father. Nor had I seen myself reflected back in my mother, no matter that she had given birth to me. Nor had I felt a kinship with Susie, as much as I tried. A friend who had once met Susie later told me she had always known we couldn’t possibly be related. It wasn’t only a physical thing. It was a disjunction of the spirit. We didn’t fit. We didn’t—any of us—belong together.
As the weeks ticked closer toward my meeting with Ben, I wondered if he, too, felt this strange sense of familiarity. How much of my work had he read? My books and essays would have given him a smattering of insights and clues. But I had a powerful instinct about him—the kind that doesn’t come from study. His gentleness, his manner, his way of being, signaled something deeper.
I tried to read as much as I could about what it must have been like to have been him—a medical student, a sperm donor—in the early 1960s. I wanted to put myself in his place. He had walked through the doors of that institute in Philadelphia with its cages of albino rats. He had been there. Quite often, by his own admission. I couldn’t see talking with him about it—and yet I couldn’t see not talking with him about it. I found images of the nine-story Art Deco building on the corner of South Thirty-sixth Street, central to Penn’s campus, which now houses the women’s clothing store Loft. The Farris Institute had been on the sixth floor. I thought of my parents, side by side in the elevator, riding up. And of Ben Walden, stepping into the same elevator, moments later.
The research continued to be bizarre and almost unbearable. I discovered an obituary of Edmond Farris that made no sense—he had died suddenly, of a heart attack, several months before I was conceived. If Farris was dead, then who was running his institute? A man I met on Wendy Kramer’s Donor Sibling Registry told me that Augusta Farris—not a doctor, not a scientist, in fact a cookbook illustrator—had put on a white lab coat and continued her husband’s work after his unexpected death. Did I owe my existence to Augusta Farris? This new information left me reeling. What potent combination of lawlessness, secrecy, desire, shame, greed, and confusion had led to my conception? Would Ben Walden have known anything about the inner workings of Farris, or had he simply slipped through the back door, performed his services, then headed blithely back to Chemistry Lab?
A hardcover book arrived in the mail during that mystifying month of Elul—one I had ordered from a used-book store online months earlier. It was titled simply Artificial Insemination. Its spine cracked when I opened it, emitting the musty scent of old, abandoned paper. The book was nearly as old as I was. Its author, Dr. Wilfred Finegold, had been the head of the Department of Sterility at Planned Parenthood in Pittsburgh. Leafing through chapters like “Artificial Insemination and Animal Husbandry” and “Anticipated Legal Problems,” I turned to one called “The Couple—The Donor.” Finegold offered a list of standards all vigilant sterologists—and presumably a widowed cookbook illustrator in a white lab coat—should follow in order to select donors who would produce the highest-quality semen for their patients:
The donor must remain an unknown.
The donor should be in fine health mentally and physically.
The donor should be of fine physical stock.
The donor should be of high fertility.
The donor should be of excellent character.
The donor must be cooperative.
The donor’s characteristics must match those of the patient’s husband.
The donors should be men of science or medicine.
Multiple donors should be utilized if possible.
The chapter concludes: “It isn’t absurd to presume that a child of artificial insemination has an advantage eugenically, mentally and physically. The donors chosen are devoid of hereditary taints; they have the mental capacity to advance to upper classes in schools of medicine; they are physically able to procreate and they are even free of such irritating conditions as hay fever or allergy.”
39
My shoulder had begun to ache over the summer, and by early autumn I could hardly move it. It became impossible to reach for a dish on a high shelf, or even strap on my seat belt. If the body can be seen as a metaphor, then it seemed I was shouldering something, carrying a giant boulder on my back all through the night in my sleep, then awakening to a half-frozen self. Nothing helped. Not physical therapy, not yoga, not even a cortisone shot.
Days before lunch with Ben, I got the name of an acupuncturist in the Berkshires, an hour’s drive from my house. I hoped that he might help release me from whatever had me in its grip. Driving was good. Driving was a moving meditation for me, as I sped along winding country roads trying not to think—reasoning got me nowhere. I had reread some of my early books in recent weeks and was taken aback, again and again, at the choices I’d made, the language I’d used—particularly in my fiction—that pointed to some sort of consciousness lurking just beyond my ability to perceive it. The truth had been inside me all along.
In my first, highly autobiographical novel, the narrator is aware that she is out of place in her father’s Orthodox Jewish family and longs to be a part of them. But she is haunted by the fact that no one ever recognizes her as part of the family by her face. In a much later novel, a secret wears away at a family until it is very nearly destroyed; parents with the best of intentions make selfish decisions affecting the fate of their child. What had I known without knowing? My unconscious mind had shaped stories out of its own rough landscape. I had scrambled from one rocky path to the next. I had spent all my life writing my way through darkness like a miner in a cave until I spit into a plastic vial and the lights blinked on.
After the acupuncturist took a long history—and I haltingly answered the question of whether my father was living or dead—he asked me to lie faceup on a narrow table. He placed needles along the tops of my shoulders, the insides of my wrists, my calves, ankles, and at the center of my sternum. He covered me lightly with a blanket and started to leave me alone in the small room, but before he did, he stopped.
“Do you know the three great spiritual questions?” he asked.
My eyes were closed, stinging from my disclosure, as they often did.
“Who am I?” I whispered and paused. I couldn’t remember the other two.
We were silent for a long moment. Outside his office, on the main street of Stockbridge, I could hear the whoosh of a passing car, the chirp of a lone bird.
Finally, he continued. “Why am I here?”
Tears ran down my temples and into my hair.
He paused before offering me the last question.
“And how shall I live?”
* * *
—
I lay on that table for what seemed like hours. Hanging on the wall next to me were several Eastern medicine diagrams of the human body. They looked like intricate topographical maps, with well over three hundred individual points lining the main meridians. Lungs, large intestine, stomach, spleen. Heart, small intestine, bladder, kidneys. Pericardium, gallbladder, liver. Fine lines and arrows dipped and swirled in elaborate patterns and channels that I found at once disconcerting and comforting. How had I lived my life without being able to answer that first and most fundamental of all questions: Who am I? Without an answer, how could I possibly have fully moved on to the others? Why am I here? Augusta Farris in her white lab coat, my parents in all their shame and desire, Ben Walden and his assurances of anonymity. Shirley’s words floated back
to me: not an accident of history. This was the challenge that had been set down at my feet. How shall I live?
40
The streets of Teaneck, New Jersey, were nearly deserted on Erev Yom Kippur. We had arrived early and circled the block a couple of times to get our bearings. In the emptiness and quiet—not typical of an ordinary weekday—I could sense the town’s anticipation of the holiest day in the Jewish year. We passed a large synagogue, one of several. By this evening it would be crowded with congregants, and the sound of the shofar would pierce the air. A suburb of New York City, Teaneck has long been known for its tight-knit Jewish population. My father’s younger brother raised his family in this town, and I counted at least two cousins among its many rabbis. This only added to the surreal nature of the moment. Of all the possible destinations, this place to which I felt an uneasy connection had turned out to be the best meeting spot for lunch with Ben and Pilar.
Michael and I parked just outside Amarone, an Italian restaurant I had chosen. I know the area somewhat. In fact, I knew the area not at all and had relied on the recommendations of local friends, one of whom had even scouted a couple of places and sent me photographs. Much of my anxiety had been poured into making a restaurant choice. It needed to be quiet but not too quiet. Not empty at the lunch hour, or too busy—I didn’t want us to feel rushed. Oh, and not too expensive, but nice enough to be relaxing. I then called the restaurant and asked for a corner table—my friend had specified which one—and explained that it was a special occasion. No, not a birthday or an anniversary, nothing like that. Just important.
I was in a state of high alert. Even after all the careful planning, it seemed crazy and impossible, as if I had been swept into someone’s novel—someone’s melodramatic novel—and I was playing a character rather than living my life. And then there were the practical concerns: Was I going to risk alienating him by asking questions about what he remembered from that time? Were we going to keep it at polite chitchat? How much would we share with each other? And what about his wife? I wondered what it could possibly be like—married for fifty years, retired, with three grown children—to discover that your husband had another child. From what I could gather about Pilar from bits and pieces available online, she seemed to have lived a traditional life for a woman of her generation. She was a doctor’s wife. An avid golfer. She and Ben were dedicated congregants of a local church. My news must have rocked their world—and yet they had come around to deciding to have this meeting. Second thoughtus.
“We should go in,” Michael said.
We still had half an hour. Maybe they had arrived early as well. What if they were already inside? I wanted to stay suspended in this moment of before. I didn’t have the muscles for this. How could I be emotionally or psychologically equipped to meet the biological father I hadn’t ever known existed? It was as if I had just strapped on my ice skates and was expected to perform a triple axel.
“I’m not ready.”
We sat in the car watching the entrance of Amarone. The restaurant’s maroon canopy hung over a small patio dotted with tables. It was still quite warm, unseasonably so. I had worn a favorite sweater over a silk camisole and corduroy jeans for my meeting with my biological father. Father, Michael had said that morning as he was getting dressed. We’ve been married twenty years, and I’m about to meet your father.
I had considered wearing something of my dad’s to keep him close to me. But I didn’t want him at the table with Ben. I didn’t want him hovering there, stricken, sorrowful. It felt like a betrayal of one father, that I was meeting my other father. And if my dad had known—had always loved me, as I knew he did, in full recognition that I wasn’t his biological child—then that, too, would make this day fraught beyond measure. If he had chosen to keep such a massive secret, how could it feel to have that secret revealed now, when it was too late to discuss or make amends? I once heard a psychic say that the dead are able to observe the living with compassion but not emotion. In that case, the entire restaurant would be filled with my long-lost relatives: mother, father, aunts, uncles, floating, invisible, impassively witnessing the meeting about to take place.
I watched the sidewalk and front door of Amarone.
“Let’s go in,” Michael said again.
“I can’t.” I felt pinned to the spot. “How do I greet him? Do I hug him? Shake his hand?”
“You’ll know.”
“And who should pick up the check?”
“We’ll pick up the check.”
“You don’t think that will insult him?”
“Honey, you’re going to have to let this play out.”
Just then—seeing before I fully registered what I was seeing—I caught a glimpse of an older couple slowly walking up the sidewalk in the near distance. The man was tall, white-haired, wearing a blue button-down shirt and khakis. He held the bent elbow of a petite, elegant woman. It was Ben.
“Get out of the car,” Michael said.
“I can’t. Let’s wait.”
“Get out of the car,” he repeated. “Now.” He said it lovingly but firmly, not taking no for an answer, as if teaching a child to swim or ride a bike. This was my moment to flail or to fall on my own. I opened the car door. I saw them seeing me. There was no going back.
The four of us moved toward one another. It was probably no more than half a dozen steps. What now? There seemed to be nothing to do but acknowledge the strangeness, to live inside the world of it.
“Ben,” I said. “Hello.”
It was bewildering to look at him—to see my features reflected back at me. All those staring contests I’d held with myself as a child were about this, I now understood. I had been searching and searching for the truth in the mirror, trying to make sense of my own face. Here it was, finally, irrefutably, in the form of the old man standing before me.
I stuck out my hand. “I’m Dani.”
His eyes crinkled as he smiled. Both of us were flushed bright pink. Michael and Pilar were now both standing slightly apart from us. A passerby might take us for a family.
Ben took an awkward half step toward me. His voice was like a fragment from a remembered dream. His first words:
“Would it be all right to give you a hug?”
41
We were seated, as I had requested, at a secluded corner table. Checked tablecloth, leather menus, Italian bread, a small pitcher of olive oil. Our water glasses filled and filled again. We didn’t touch our menus for at least the first hour. Beneath the table, I couldn’t stop shaking. I had no appetite. I directed most of my conversation to Pilar, but my ears were trained on Ben’s conversation with Michael. They were talking of simple things, ordinary things. Both men had been in the Peace Corps. They had done some research on each other—they knew they had that in common. Ben and Pilar had read three of my books and were in the middle of a book Michael had written about foreign aid. We had all boned up, as if for an important exam. But there was something I had promised myself I would say, and I said it as soon as I had an opening to cut through the polite chitchat.
“I want to thank you,” I addressed Ben. “You didn’t have to do this. When I first wrote you, you could have ignored it.”
His cheeks became even redder.
“He deleted it from his mailbox the second he read it,” Pilar said. She had a lilting voice and retained her Brazilian accent. “Like a hot potato!”
Those interminable, surreal days in San Francisco. Checking my email, obsessively checking. Envisioning the doctor in Portland opening my letter. He had deleted it. He had hoped it would just go away.
“Then you wrote me again,” Ben said. “And I fished it out of my trash.”
“I was shocked!” Pilar’s voice rose. It will be months before I know what she really said to Ben: How could you have been so stupid?
“It just never occurred to me that I might have biological
children out there,” he said. “I donated for a short while. I honestly never thought about it after I finished medical school.”
Michael and I exchanged a quick glance. It seemed purposeful, Ben’s phrase. He was letting us know that he hadn’t been prolific. That I was not in a situation—like some I had read about—where I might have hundreds of half siblings. Which of course was the very scenario about which he and Pilar must have been most terrified.
In time, I will question how it could be possible that Ben—a man of medicine, who specialized in medical ethics—had never considered that he might have biological children. I will think of the three of them—my mother, my father, Ben Walden—all burying the consequences of their actions so deep that it seemed there weren’t any consequences at all. But not on this day. On this day my entire being was trying to absorb as much as possible. Who knew if we would ever be together again?
As we finally ordered lunch—Caprese salad, grilled chicken—we went over the whole story detail by detail. The way Michael zeroed in on the Farris Institute. Our hunch about the donor being a medical student at Penn. The appearance of Adam Thomas on my Ancestry page. The ease with which we found him—Ben’s nephew, my first cousin—on Facebook. Ben’s sister’s obituary. In the absence of A.T. we would not have been gathered at that table. The elderly doctor from Portland and I would have remained oblivious and anonymous to one another. I would have discovered that I wasn’t my dad’s biological daughter but known nothing more. I might have spent the rest of my life looking into the faces of certain men, wondering how I came to be.