Inheritance

by Dani Shapiro

  I had been reading up on the rare hereditary eye disease Ben had told me about—the one medical condition he felt it was important for me to know. When I paid a visit to the ophthalmologist, indeed a test revealed that I exhibited early signs of the disease. It was a condition that might affect me in later years, causing light to become diffuse, occluding my night vision. The worst-case scenario would be a corneal transplant, way down the road. I learned that the recessive form is present prenatally, and certainly by the time of birth. I was not my father’s child. The eyes through which I saw the world from the moment they opened were eyes that I inherited from Ben Walden.

  To: Dani Shapiro

  From: Ben Walden

  Subject: Thanks

  Hi Dani,

  Thanks so much for the poem by W.S. Merwin. I’ll plan to put it on my blog. It poignantly touches on the gift of aging and remembering. The other day I was visiting two residents in a nursing home and talked to a frail fellow who had recently fallen out of bed. By taking time, sitting and listening, he told me about his days as a trombone player with all the big name bands. It was fun to see him light up as the memories poured forth.

  Pilar sends her warm regards to you, Michael and Jacob.

  Love, Ben

  This is what we had begun to do, Ben and I. We exchanged quotes. When I came across something I thought he might like, I made a mental note to pass it along to him. An essay on an Australian website about faith; a reference to Walt Whitman’s “Hospital Visits” on Brain Pickings; a haunting poem forwarded to me by a friend. I wrote him about a favorite novel, Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, and he wrote back that it was one of his favorites as well, so much so that he had recently read it for a second time. Was it a coincidence that we both loved the Stegner? Our literary sensibilities were remarkably similar. This overlap in our consciousnesses felt like a comfort and a loss, all at once. Michael described what we were doing as a grown-up version of exchanging mixtapes. A way of a biological father and daughter who had never known each other saying: this is who I am. Thoughtus.

  At the same time as Ben and I deepened our connection—the meadows surrounding my house blanketed in a hard layer of snow, the lakes frozen, dotted with the dark shapes of ice fishermen—my dad began to reappear. He emerged in my internal world as if he had been patiently waiting for me to be ready for him. At times, I would look up from a book I was reading and see him sitting there in his favorite cabled vest, a yarmulke covering his head.

  In Hebrew the word for soul is neshama. It is variously translated as wind, or breath. Try to capture it and it disappears. I was once again able to feel my father’s presence, those unmistakable chills running the length of my body. He seemed intent on letting me know that he was there. He looked at me with the distant benevolence of the ghost he was. He gave a single, slow nod, as if to acknowledge his sorrow that he wasn’t able to come back to help me—that I had to navigate this hazardous terrain alone.

  I dug up some notes I had taken years earlier, during a phone session with a medium. I had never quite believed in mediums or psychics, nor did I remember any urgency at the time about contacting the dead. My literary agent had urged me to make the appointment, and I tended to do whatever she suggested. Now, I scanned the torn-out notebook pages as if they were a relic from another era. The medium and I had spoken of my parents, but this all fell into the category of before. Before I knew the truth—about them, about me. I almost just shoved the notes back into the file cabinet, but then I got to the part about my father. He apologizes for not speaking the truth in your childhood. A lot left unsaid. He says someday you will understand why he needed to walk this path alone.

  The words hadn’t resonated with me back then. I had been skeptical of the whole enterprise. But now they stood out. Certainly there had been a lot left unsaid. The truth hadn’t been spoken. He had been solitary and had set himself apart. And now my father’s apology—there in my own handwriting, as dictated by the medium—assumed an entirely new potential meaning. He was trying to tell me something. It was almost as if he knew what was in store for me.

  I watched a documentary by a Canadian filmmaker named Barry Stevens, who learned as a young man that he had been donor-conceived and began searching for his biological father in midlife. Stevens interspersed research into his paternity with film footage from his childhood in which he and his parents—his mother and his social father, as it turned out—were on vacation in California. The footage shows a man trailing several feet behind his family as they walk outside a winery. His head is slightly bowed, his hands clasped behind his back. He appears nearly servile, as if he feels undeserving to be walking alongside them. It made me think of my father and his own diminishment. My mother’s disgust, her patronizing tone when she spoke with him or about him, her pure and unmistakable contempt. This, too, I always had believed I understood—and found narratives, reasons to support my understanding—but now my father’s retreat from the world seems to be, at least in part, the price he paid for becoming my father.

  I spent my entire adult life trying to make him proud. Not a day had passed since his death during which I didn’t think of him, or silently confer with him. My initial piercing sorrow at our lack of biological connection had begun to fade, as had the double sorrow as I came to believe he’d carried the truth in his heart. Through the medium, he’d apologized to me for leaving so much unsaid. But how could he have said it? How, when the complex web of doctors and specialists insisted that silence was best for the entire family? I heard Shirley’s voice once again: Knowing what you know, you’re more of a daughter to Paul than you can possibly imagine. I may have been cut from the same cloth as Ben Walden, but I was and forever would be Paul Shapiro’s daughter. Haskel Lookstein’s voice joined Shirley’s in my head: Kol hakavod to your father. All the honor. If not for him, I would never have been born. I was connected to him on the level of neshama, which had nothing to do with biology, and everything to do with love.

  45

  At a conference in Miami that winter, I attended a talk by Luke Dittrich, a journalist who had written a book about his grandfather, the surgeon famous for performing a lobotomy on a severely epileptic man which had the unintended consequence of complete and irreversible memory loss. The man became known as Patient H. M. and was, for the next sixty years, the most studied patient in the history of neuroscience. Dittrich’s grandfather had been a prolific lobotomist, performing thousands of these psychosurgeries during the 1940s and ’50s, a time during which the procedures were considered the last best resort for certain brain injuries and mental disorders.

  Today, of course, the idea of driving a sharp instrument through the eye with a mallet in order to sever the brain’s prefrontal lobe is barbaric and insane. But at the time, in the United States alone, forty thousand people were lobotomized. The surgeons performing lobotomies believed they were doing good, important, humane work. One of the surgeons who developed the lobotomy even won the Nobel Prize, though recently there has been a movement to rescind the prize, calling the innovation a massive error in judgment.

  I attended Dittrich’s lecture in part because I had long been interested in the history of neuroscience but also because the subtitle of his book—Patient H. M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets—caught my eye. His family’s secrets were very different from my own, but what he and I shared was the long lens through which we were forced to see the context of the times. In the 1940s, lobotomies were normalized. People—patients, their families—were told the procedure would help. They may even have been told it was a treatment. Doctors were not to be argued with—as was true when it came to the very different matter of donor conception in the early 1960s. The eugenic benefits of donor conception were discussed confidently and with no sense of self-consciousness. The children conceived in this manner were considered to have great advantages in life; they were the genetic progeny of men of science, m
en of fine character, men with exemplary family histories. The children would never know the truth of their origins, and the social fathers could comfortably believe whatever they chose.

  But the truth was darker and more complicated than even this. Doctors inseminated patients with their own sperm, or the sperm of whoever happened to be available. There were very few clinics or hospitals that put restrictions on the number of times a man might donate, resulting in scores of half siblings in small geographical areas. I had just heard a story from a writer friend: he had been a sperm donor a couple of decades back, when he was homeless and living out of his car, having been a drug addict and ward of the state. “I made up a whole profile,” he told me. “Harvard-educated, varsity tennis player. I was very popular.”

  “Modern notions of informed consent did not exist,” Dittrich said from the auditorium stage. What did my parents sign? Were records ever kept, or were they immediately destroyed? I had tried to reach Edmond and Augusta Farris’s three children—who were now in their seventies—a number of times, but they hadn’t responded to my entreaties. Their son, also named Edmond, was a singer on Carnival Cruise Lines. I knew he had received my email because he mistakenly forwarded it back to me, with a note to his sister: Sue, what do you think?

  Shame, shame, and more shame, the present overlaid on the past, casting an angry, judgmental pall. It was impossible not to question how anyone had ever thought the practices of the day were sound and safe. I wondered what the Farris offspring now thought about what their parents had done: the two of them practicing medicine without a license in their renegade institute. What did they know? Were they proud? Disturbed? Was it devastating to them that their father had been forgotten? Or perhaps there had been mishaps, mistakes—stories that hadn’t turned out quite as well as mine.

  “I don’t want to be a presentist,” the author was saying. Presentism: the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. It would be easy to fall into such thinking. I had done so from the moment I discovered the truth of my identity. Those early months were taken up first with the disbelief that my parents could have ever knowingly participated in such a deceit, and then later with anger and sorrow that they had made the choices they did—even though those choices resulted in my existence. For a long while I was able to put myself in their shoes only as myself, product of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with all the biological, genetic, historical, and psychological tools available to me.

  But now I was coming to the awareness that my young parents-to-be had none of these tools. They possessed only their own fear, shame, despair, and desire for a child at any cost. They joined hands and went deeper into the wilderness until the only way out was through. There was no going back.

  And then they pretended that it never happened. They never spoke of it again—not to each other, not to family, nor to friends. My mother—now successfully pregnant—went back to her obstetrician in his office lined with celebrity head shots. As I became heavier in her belly, so, too, did her certainty grow that I was my father’s child. How could it be otherwise? My mother had always had a remarkable ability to bend reality to her will. The obstetrician most likely had known nothing—or chose to know nothing—about my parents’ visits to the Farris Institute.

  From the pages of Finegold’s 1964 book Artificial Insemination: In A.I. the child is never told. It was perhaps the most painful reading I had done, its language clinical and self-satisfied. Finegold was thorough, and covered matters such as A.I. and the public, A.I. and religion, A.I. and the law. Throughout, there was a stress on anonymity. The doctor described the way legal questions of paternity might be dispensed with by referring a freshly inseminated woman to an outside obstetrician unaware of the “artificial impregnation.”

  To prevent the courts from establishing that a donor was the father of the child, some gynecologists mix the husband’s semen with that of the donor. Some rely on the strict secrecy involved with A.I. to deter litigation. Many doctors refer their pregnant A.I. patients to an obstetrician who is not aware of the donor insemination. If the obstetrician knows that the husband is not the father of the newborn child, it is dishonest and illegal for him to claim the husband as the father on the birth certificate…A well-known and respected author on infertility insists that the “white lie” is a kindly, humane act. He wrote, “It is a violation like burning fallen leaves in the street so they will not scatter over the neighbor’s lawn. It is the type of offense to which the good accomplished, completely neutralizes the infraction of a law.

  On the day of my birth, my father’s name was entered on my birth certificate. Dearest darling. Now, there would be no question he was my father. It’s been long. It’s been hard. His name was on the ultimate document of identity. A white lie, a kindly, humane act no different from burning fallen leaves in the street.

  46

  A principle often used in theoretical physics is Occam’s razor, attributed to the fourteenth-century logician whose name it bears. The principle holds that “entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” It was later refined by Sir Isaac Newton, who wrote in Principia Mathematica: “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.”

  Michael had raised the principle of Occam’s razor to me early in my struggle to understand what my parents had known. He told me that a popular follow-up statement in the scientific realm is “When you have two competing theories that make the exact same predictions, the simpler one is the better.” I rebelled against the notion at first—reflexively, self-protectively. Nothing about my discovery was simple, and for a long while it felt safer to weave byzantine stories about deception, cover-ups, and intrigue, since these felt closer to the shock of my experience.

  But scientific method eventually became a key component in my arrival at a resting place, a narrative of sorts, distrusting of narratives as I had become, for the likeliest story. The simplest explanation for my parents’ pilgrimage to the Farris Institute was that Edmond Farris was known for his use of sperm donors. Full stop. Treatments, boosts, the thicket of euphemism aside, this was what Farris did. And so wherever on that slide rule of consciousness versus denial that my parents found themselves, there was knowledge. Deep knowledge. Buried knowledge. In the case of my mother, I believe, acute dissociation when it came to the truth of who I was and where I came from.

  As much as the most painful parts of my discovery had to do with my father—giving me insight into his depression, his physical and psychic pain, his decline—my mother was, of course, at the center of it. Though I had spent far more time thinking about what this meant for my dad, my mother had been the engine. She was active. He was melancholy, passive. She was someone who would never have taken no for an answer. His life had been lived as if “no” had been shouted at him since the day he was born. It was my mother who would have done the research and found Edmond Farris, rogue scientist, man with a plan. It was my mother who would have made the appointment. And if there was convincing to do—if the conversation ever became detailed and honest, conscious—it would have been my mother who would have done the convincing.

  But then I was born, and whatever sequelae there might have been to the unorthodox methods surrounding my conception vanished into the ether of magical thinking. If it wasn’t thought, it wasn’t so. If it wasn’t spoken, it hadn’t happened. Except that secrets, particularly the most deeply held ones, have a way of leaching into everything surrounding them. A psychoanalytic phrase—“unthought known”—became my instrument of illumination as I poked and prodded at my history with my parents. The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher Bollas, writes: “There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.”

  * * *

  —

  “I gave you lif
e!” my mother screamed at me whenever she was at her angriest, when I wasn’t complying with her wishes or to her will. “I gave you life!” I had always found it borderline funny, but also disturbing, that my mother felt the need to underscore this bedrock parental fact. On each of my birthdays as an adult, I was meant to call her—it never occurred to me that it was usually the other way around—and thank her for having me. But here were the noxious fumes, leaking from beneath the sealed door where the truth resided.

  She named me Daneile. Not Danielle. Not a plain name like Lisa or Wendy—or, come to think of it, Susie—something simple and easy to pronounce. Not a biblical name like Sarah or Rebecca. Not a family name, of which there had been some perfectly fine ones: Anna, Beatrice. In Moses: A Human Life, the biblical scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg writes that “classically, naming a child is an opportunity for self-reflection.” What had my mother made of this opportunity to name her child who was already being born into such unusual circumstances? She was proud of her originality, her ingenuity in choosing a name for me that had never been chosen before. In recent months I typed my own name into Names.org to see if perhaps there might be a hint as to its origins.