by Dani Shapiro
Pilar was telling me about her golf game, their lives in a retirement community near Portland, and stories of their three children, but I continued to have one ear tuned in to Ben and Michael’s conversation. I heard Ben ask if Michael had seen a photo of his daughter, Emily. I could feel Ben’s gaze upon me—his astonishment at the resemblance. Every cell in my body was on high alert. I had questions for him I felt I couldn’t ask. I didn’t dare upset the delicate balance. We were four people who genuinely liked one another. We had entire conversations in which the reason for being together seemed to be momentarily forgotten—that is, except by me.
I kept looking over at Ben and then away. Father. He didn’t feel like my father. He hadn’t raised me. We’d met hours earlier. So who was he to me—and I to him? Biological. Social. Later, it will occur to me that Ben Walden felt, to me, like my native country. I had never lived in this country. I had never spoken its language or become steeped in its customs. I had no passport or record of citizenship. Still, I had been shaped by my country of origin all my life, suffused with an inchoate longing to know my own land.
* * *
—
The sunlight that had streamed through the restaurant’s windows had now vanished. Four and a half hours had passed in a moment. The other diners had long since vacated their tables. The waitstaff was setting up the restaurant for dinner all around us. Dusk would soon fall—my relatives would be preparing for yontef. Pilar asked to see a photo of Jacob, and I scrolled through albums on my phone for the one I had planned to show them, if asked. It had been taken over the summer; Jacob’s hair was bleached by the sun and he was tanned from months outside, shooting films and playing tennis. He looked like a golden boy. He looked quite a bit like Ben. Pilar inhaled sharply when she saw him. So handsome. Then she passed my phone to Ben.
At some point Ben seemed to have made a decision to trust me—to put aside his concerns about privacy, or my being a writer, or worries about possible other offspring. Perhaps this had happened before we even met. The week prior, on Rosh Hashanah, he had sent me a note wishing us L’shana tova tikateivu. May you be inscribed in the Book of Life for a good year. He must have looked it up. He was reaching out a hand, respecting our differences while understanding the enormity of our bond.
After he studied the photo of Jacob for a good long minute, Ben picked up his own phone and handed it to me. It was open to a folder of photographs. He cleared his throat.
“I put these together, thinking I might show them to you,” he said. “Ancestors. Family.”
A man and woman stood on the porch of a farmhouse. She wore a flowered dress. He was in shirtsleeves. I once again had the sensation of not being able to compute what I was looking at.
“My parents,” said Ben. “At home in Ohio.”
Grandparents. Not the imposing bald man with the yarmulke and pince-nez. Not the regal woman in the gilded frame, hair pulled tightly back, a brooch at her throat. Those were the grandparents of my psyche but not of my being. I was descended from this couple. I searched their faces as if I might find something familiar there.
“And the next one is my grandfather,” Ben said. “He was a lawyer in Cleveland.” A photograph of a mustached man, self-conscious and unsmiling in the manner of the day. “And his father, my great-grandfather.” A sepia portrait from the mid-nineteenth century. “Our family landed on Nantucket in the 1600s.”
In neighborhoods all around us, families would have completed the yontef meal before the customary fast and have started the walk to shul, leaving yahrzeit candles to burn on kitchen counters. Remembering their dead.
Just outside this Italian restaurant, I could picture men in their tallises, women with their heads covered, small boys wearing small yarmulkes, girls in dresses holding their fathers’ hands—parading down the streets as I once did. In synagogues, Torahs rested in their arks, dressed in embroidered velvet and gleaming silver. When three stars appeared in the darkening sky, arks would be opened and all would rise. The Kol Nidre service would commence in all its plaintive beauty.
Landed on Nantucket in the 1600s. It made no sense, and all kinds of sense. But before I had even a moment to digest it, Michael’s phone began vibrating on the table. As he picked it up, I saw that it was Jacob. He knew we had been meeting with Ben and Pilar, and surely figured lunch must be over.
I panicked.
“Go take it outside,” I urged Michael. I didn’t want Ben to feel pressed or railroaded.
The sense of the fragility of our bond returned full force. As Michael began to rise, Ben stopped him.
“It’s okay,” he said gently. “It’s fine.”
Michael handed me the phone. Our boy’s face filled the screen.
“We’re still with Ben and Pilar, honey,” I said. “Do you want to say hello?”
I turned the phone’s screen to Ben. He took it from me and looked at his grandson.
“Hi, Jacob—how’re you doing? It’s very nice to meet you.”
“I’m good! It’s great to meet you too!”
In the architecture of extraordinary moments that had begun the previous June—so many instances that were singular, inexplicable, beautiful, and deeply mysterious—watching a seventy-eight-year-old man meet his seventeen-year-old grandson on FaceTime felt sacred. Something loose within me settled. If nothing else happened—if we never saw one another again—Jacob and his grandfather had acknowledged each other, as if to simply say: there you are.
None of us wanted to part. After we made our way out of the restaurant and onto the street, we walked Ben and Pilar to their car, which was parked across from the synagogue around the corner.
“You know, Emily is interested in knowing you,” Pilar said.
“I’m interested in knowing her as well,” I answered.
“You should write to her,” Pilar said.
“I didn’t know if it was okay.”
I thought of Emily’s smoke signal to me via Twitter. I see you. And mine back to her. I see you, too. What would it mean to get to know my half sister?
“I’m sure I’m going to hear from her tonight, asking how our lunch went,” Pilar said with a twinkle in her eye. “What do you think I should tell her?”
“Tell her it couldn’t have gone better.”
In our remaining moments I let Ben and Pilar know that I would be in Portland during my book tour the following spring. This seemed to be a relief to all of us—the idea that we’d be able to get together again.
“We’ll come to your reading!” Ben said.
And then we hugged goodbye—each one of us hugged the others—and this time there was no awkwardness. Only a sense of having been visited by some kind of grace.
* * *
—
When Michael and I arrived back home later that evening, I looked through my cupboards for my usual stock of yarhzeit candles, but it turned out we had none. I would light no candles in memory of my complicated, beloved, dead parents on the night that I met Ben Walden. Instead, I tried to hold all of them in my overflowing heart.
Later a rabbi will remind me that the Hebrew word for father, abba, is composed of the first two letters in the alphabet: aleph, bet. He will ask me if I can accept the two tributaries—these two fathers I come from. I will learn to accept the two tributaries, in time. Their convergence is the story of my life. But on that night, I sat alone on the chaise in my office, the same chaise where less than four months earlier I had discovered the truth of my paternity, and I wrote Ben a note of thanks. I signed this one With love.
Part Four
42
I would have thought, in the aftermath of my lunch with Ben, that I would have felt somehow better. Relieved, perhaps. Consoled by the loveliness of the encounter. After all, it was just about the best possible outcome, for a donor-conceived person. I found myself describing it as miraculous—which
I believed it was—but it was not only miraculous.
I was in a deeper despair that surprised me. Sensitive to bright light, startled by the most harmless noise—a clanging pipe, a slammed door would make me jump—I continued to spend most days in my house, burrowing into the history of donor insemination, reading academic papers quoting ethicists and philosophers on the rights of donor-conceived children, and further books on halachah, as if I might find a single key that would unlock a door leading to everything I still didn’t know.
Sometimes, late at night, exhausted, emotionally spent, I would end up on websites displaying catalogs of sperm donors. I scrolled through page after page. These men used handles like Le Artist, 100 Watt Smile, McDonor, Coach of the Year, and Mission Accomplished. While on these websites, I would feel faintly uncomfortable, voyeuristic, as if I had gone to a place where I didn’t belong.
If asked, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate what I was looking for, why I was perusing catalogs of sperm donors. The biblical story of Joseph and his brothers came flooding back to me, along with a passage from Thomas Mann’s novel of the same name.
His desire to set a new beginning to the chain of events to which he belonged encountered the same difficulty that it always does: the fact that everybody has a father, that nothing comes first and of itself, its own cause, but that everybody is begotten and points backwards, deeper down into the depths of beginnings, the bottoms and abysses of the well of the past.
We came from different worlds, Ben and I, and we had lived different lives—unshared lives—but everyone has a father, and he was mine. He begat me—to use the ancient language—and therefore a connection existed between us so powerful it felt impossible to grasp. As I scanned the biographical information of these men, I wondered if they understood—really understood—what they were doing. I clicked on some of their profiles: all were described as handsome, and bearing similarity to celebrities ranging from Kurt Cobain to Cary Grant. And many were listed as anonymous. Anonymous, anonymous, anonymous. They were not willing to be contacted when the child turned eighteen. They wished to donate, and be done with it. Could a man donate sperm, check the “anonymous” box, and—emotionally speaking—be done with it? Or, as Ben had done many decades earlier, perhaps such thing could be compartmentalized.
* * *
—
Well over a decade earlier, Michael and I had tried to expand our own family. We hadn’t wanted Jacob to be an only child. But his illness as a baby had consumed us for some years, and we had waited until we were certain he was going to be okay. By then, I was in my forties. Months of “trying” led to relatively low-tech intrauterine inseminations. Michael experienced his own version of a cubicle with its assortment of porn. I had one miscarriage, then a second one—this time at the end of my first trimester. We gripped hands in my obstetrician’s office as we were told that the heartbeat was faint, then—a week later—gone. I clutched my belly and wept as the possibility that we could have a second baby of our own dwindled to nothing. Jacob was, by this point, six years old. The age difference between him and a possible sibling was growing wider with each passing month.
Nights, Michael and I sat side by side on the sofa in our library, leafing through photos and brief biographies of young women—egg donors—in an attempt to replace, or even improve upon my aging, faulty biology. We looked at Jewish donors, athletic donors, Ivy-educated donors, former model donors. We pored over handwriting, dismissing certain young women for ridiculous reasons: one dotted her i’s with hearts. Another had gone to an evangelical university. What did that have to do with their genes? Our obsession and confusion grew in equal measures. Without knowing it or sensing it, we slipped into the gray, murky world that my parents had once lived in; an atmosphere in which we felt shame, failure, pain, and were offered a sliver of hope. Even at the time, I thought of us as putting blinders on, eyes on the prize. I knew that if we stopped to ponder all of the possible implications of our actions, we would grind to a halt.
We did know one thing for sure, so obvious to us that we barely had need to discuss it. This baby—if there were to be a baby—would always know her origin. It would be woven into her earliest life like a bright thread, with no fanfare. We knew plenty of parents of donor-conceived kids who had beautiful families. Some had told their children, and others hadn’t. I felt uncomfortable around the kids who weren’t aware of their true identities. How was it possible that I knew something so fundamental about them that they didn’t know themselves? How could the parents believe this was for the best? I couldn’t imagine—so I told myself—going through life carrying such a secret.
But of course I had been just like those kids, and my parents like their parents. The problem, it now seemed to me, was anonymity—the promise of it, the desire for it. The hidden disaster was secrecy, the pretense and magical thinking, the certainty that no one ever needed to know. It wasn’t that my parents had sought to conceive a baby in this manner—unorthodox and lawless as it once was—but that they had banished the truth even from themselves, thereby obscuring it from me. I’d begun to understand how it might have happened, still, their choices had formed my inner world as a place of cracks and fissures, lacunae of a lost child who intuited her own otherness and blamed herself for it. I understood that otherness now. I had just had lunch with it.
Secrecy and anonymity had been the prevailing wisdom fifty, sixty years ago. But now? As I opened website after website, I wondered how many children were still being born into a lie. Donors continued to stay in the shadows—or at least many of them planned to. Of course, in today’s world the very idea that anonymity could be guaranteed was ludicrous, but there it was, again and again. I recalled Alan DeCherney’s rueful words. Now there are no more secrets.
* * *
—
I decided to pay a visit to the California Cryobank, America’s largest sperm bank. I wanted to witness the contemporary landscape of assisted reproduction, not as the frightened, clueless consumer I had been years earlier but as a person who possessed the long-secret information about her own origins.
On a classic Los Angeles late afternoon, the sky cloudless, palm trees rustling in the slightest breeze, I craned my neck skyward, staring at a six-thousand-gallon stainless-steel silo towering over a two-story building in a residential neighborhood. It was filled with vials of sperm frozen in liquid nitrogen, surrounded by barbed wire and a sophisticated alarm system. It felt as if I were staring at the future—as if encased in that silo were the eventual populations of several small countries.
Beside me was the California Cryobank’s founder, Cappy Rothman, a spry eighty-year-old urologist known as the God of Sperm. Rothman had slicked-back, long white hair and piercing blue eyes. He had come on the reproductive medicine scene well after the time of my conception, so he wouldn’t be likely to have information or background for me. His interest wasn’t in the history I was working so hard to understand, but in the future. I was curious about the future too—struck hard by the many stories I’d read and heard from men and women who felt exiled from their own identities, set apart by a lack of information.
“How many souls—potential souls—do you have here?” I asked as I tried to take in a campus that looked like a small, well-protected nuclear arsenal. I used the term soul purposefully. I wanted to sort out whether Rothman thought of the lives that would be potentiated by these vials of sperm—or whether his interest stopped at the point of purchase. In the Cryobank’s catalog, I had noticed that childhood photos could be purchased à la carte, along with a three-generation history, a recording of the donor speaking about his areas of interest, even examples of poetry, songs, essays, and drawings. Parents—and perhaps children—would be able to listen to the sound of a donor’s voice, or read a handwritten sonnet. I wondered whether such biographical bits and pieces would ever be enough.
Rothman paused, as if he had never considered the q
uestion. There were hundreds of cylinders, and each—as I saw when we entered the interior and Rothman pried a few open for me—contained thousands upon thousands of tiny vials of sperm, bobbing in the vapor.
“Millions, I guess,” he said. “Millions of souls.”
It was a far cry from the small, secretive world my parents had encountered in Philadelphia in 1961. The technology to freeze sperm did not yet exist. Of course they’d had no catalog. No websites advertising dreams and possibilities, or examples of their potential donor’s dream lunch date, as if this were a Proust Questionnaire. Did my parents sit in Edmond Farris’s office, debating the merits of certain men? I truly didn’t think so. The decorous, polite euphemisms of the day would have sufficed. Would an attempt have been made to match my dad’s coloring? Would they have paid attention to blood type? Unlike many prospective parents of today—us included—my parents would not have wished for the curriculum vitae of their donor. They would have wanted to block him out, to explode him into bits and particles that left only a microscopic trace. Leave it to us, my parents may have been told. That is, if they were clearly told anything at all.
In Rothman’s second-floor office, we sat surrounded by replicas of famous paintings. Van Gogh’s The Starry Night was hung next to one of his self-portraits, all made up of swirls of swimming sperm. Later, Rothman will send me sperm bank swag: a ballpoint pen displaying a tiny floating plastic embryo; a T-shirt printed with a version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream with a sperm who looked a bit like Casper the Friendly Ghost. It was difficult to tell whether his campy self-presentation was a kind of performance art, or his holy grail—or perhaps a bit of both. He had fashioned himself as a creator of life. The more life, the better.