PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2013 Carolyn Abraham
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2013 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Abraham, Carolyn
The juggler’s children: a journey into family, legend and the genes that bind us / Carolyn Abraham.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37215-4
1. Abraham, Carolyn—Family. 2. Abraham family. 3. Genetic genealogy.
4. Genes—Popular works. 5. Genetic disorders—Popular works. I. Title.
QH447.A26 2013 929′.20971 C2009-906626-2
Cover design by Jennifer Lum
Cover images: Comstock / Getty images; © Karinabak | Dreamstime.com;
© Ekychan | Dreamstime.com; © Luceluceluce | Dreamstime.com
Maps: Paul Dotey
Interior images: All photos are property of the author.
v3.1
For Jade and for Jackson,
my x and y, my moon and sun
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Maps
Crooks Family Tree
Abraham Family Tree
Prologue
1 “What are you?”
2 Night of the Swab
3 Black Arts and Red Herrings
4 A Molecule of Memory
5 Tricks of John Chinese
6 Return of the Chota Sahib
7 Into the Mist
8 HIC SUNT DRACONES
9 Genghis Crooks, or Who’s Your Daddy?
10 The Trouble with Being Earnest
11 Caught In the Web
12 Men About Town
13 An Island Place
14 Sticks and Stones
15 Bones of Contention
16 Shadow Family
17 A Tale of Two Chromosomes
Acknowledgements
Source Notes
About the Author
“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton,
you may as well make it dance.”
George Bernard Shaw, Immaturity
CROOKS FAMILY TREE
ABRAHAM FAMILY TREE
PROLOGUE
There is a picture of my daughter taken about forty-eight hours after she was born. She’s propped up against pillows in our hospital room, pinched and scrawny, as newborns can be when they come early. Her eyes are half open, taking in the outlines of her new world, oblivious to the questions she pushed to the forefront of my mind in those first days of her life.
On her head is something that looks like a bonnet. It’s white, shaped like a dome, and even has an elastic strap that stretches under her chin. If you look closely you can see it’s not a bonnet, but a mask, a regulation issue N-95, touted to keep out 95 percent of airborne particles—dust, pollution, viruses. In the spring of 2003 masks were as common as streetcars in our city. The hospital provided them to keep people from catching or spreading infection to others. But aside from a few doctors with masks of their own, and nurses in biohazard suits, there were no others. My husband and I never put the mask over her face while we were in that room.
Ten years later, if I try to pinpoint when the desire to know became the determination to find out, or why my daughter would know about DNA before she knew how to read, or how I became preoccupied with collecting it, from both the living and the dead, I keep returning to that picture. The birth of any child pushes the past into the present. It just so happened that Jade was born into a time and place where the clocks seemed to have stopped. An unexpected gift of time had come with her arrival—six long days we spent under quarantine when the city had gone half-mad with fear and confusion.
A strange pneumonia had broken out that winter, a new viral disease called severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Worldwide it infected more than eight thousand people and killed more than nine hundred. Forty-four died in Toronto. As a science reporter, I was writing about it for the Globe and Mail, and there was a lot to write. Ten thousand people were confined to their homes. Schools were closed. Conventions were cancelled. People stopped riding the subway and shaking hands, even in church.
For three months I chased the story, until the hot afternoon of June 5, when I became part of it. Eight months pregnant, I was at a meeting in a downtown coffee shop when my nose started to bleed heavily. I hailed a cab to the hospital, where nurses hooked up a fetal monitor, took a blood pressure reading and told me to call my husband.
“My pressure is through the roof,” I told Stephen. “They’re going to induce. Can you stop at the house and pack an overnight case?”
He arrived with a hockey bag stuffed full of nearly everything we’d bought or been given for our unborn child: washcloths, rattles, baby-safe detergent, a snowsuit sized for a three-year-old. It was just as well; we had to stay much longer than we expected.
A medical student working on the maternity ward developed the symptoms of SARS the day I was admitted. Anyone who had had contact with him was placed under strict ten-day quarantine. Women about to deliver would have to do so in a skeleton-staffed ward closed off from the rest of the world. That included me.
By nightfall of the following day, as the induction drugs took effect, I paced out my labour in a long, eerie corridor, quiet and dark except for the red glow of the exit signs. When the time came, Stephen had to run around the ward just to find a nurse.
Our daughter arrived before dawn, healthy and screaming, and just like that, the rapid pulse of our lives slowed. Alone in a double room with nowhere to go and no one to see, we snatched sleep at odd hours, fired N-95s across the room like slingshots, and took photos—lots of photos.
She was the first baby in our family in more than a dozen years. Since no one could visit, everyone called. They asked the questions people do when a new life appears: What does she look like? Who does she look like?
She might have been fair and blue-eyed, like Stephen’s side, with hair of gold or red, or darker, like me. On my side the possibilities were wide and endless: a complexion of white or deep brown or anything in between. Her hair could have been smooth as black silk or coiled into springs too tight for a comb. She might have been a living testament to the ancestors whose stories had captivated me since I was a child, stories that inspired her name. We called her Jade, after China’s imperial gem, beautiful and strong as an axe-head.
I wished my mum’s mother had lived to see her. I used to tell my grandmother about my work, the stories I was writing, the trips I took. She would lean in and whisper, “But what about babies, my girl? When are you going to have babies?” Oh, eventually, I’d say and shrug. But there was always another story and new jobs and newspapers, and then one July morning in 1999 my mother called to tell me my grandmother had died.
I saw her before her body was taken away. Nana Gladys was still in her bed, the silver hair she curled meticulously lying in strings on her pillow, her mouth turned down in a grimace that reminded me of the expression she’d wear if we were late picking her up.
My mother asked me to give her eulogy. Two days later I made my way through the crowd
ed funeral home with a pen and notepad, expecting to fill it with memories and anecdotes. I had a hard time filling more than a page. No one seemed to be sure where Gladys Crooks had grown up or gone to school, or where her family was from—not my uncles or my mother or me, for that matter. But everyone spoke earnestly about her devotion to the Catholic Church, how often she said the rosary and how, even in hard times, she dressed her seven children smartly in homemade clothes and whisked them to Mass every Sunday. All of this was true. Even at the end my grandmother kept an illuminated statue of the Virgin Mary on her nightstand to guide her in spiritual matters, and on night trips to the bathroom. She was a practical woman, my Nana.
Gladys Crooks had been a seventeen-year-old bride in India, and a young widow too. She’d made a life on three continents and travelled the world, riding alone on its trains and buses and rickshaws, her money stashed away in secret pockets she sewed into her petticoats. But death had shrunk her to a cliché: devoted wife and mother. Maybe grief blocks recollections. Maybe memories are trumped by the hope that emphasizing piety will pave the way to heaven. Either way, she was the last of a generation in my family, and when she died, I felt a window to the past had closed for good.
Then came Jade. Six pounds of new life that made me see the past through a different lens. We spent long stretches of time just gazing at her, stoned on the wonder of her sudden existence. Holed up with us in that abandoned ward for a week, she lay in her Plexiglas bassinette like a prized specimen, and we studied her. She had Stephen’s deep dimple on her chin, his long limbs and mouth, my colour and fingers, my grandmother’s expressions, and, on her lower back, the faint blue patch of a Mongolian birthmark. What I saw in my daughter, in that quarantined room, was the past and the future all at once.
The past is never lost, not completely; we carry it with us, in us, and we look for it in our parents and in our children, to give us our bearings and ground us in the continuity of life. And the past accommodates. It shows off in dazzling, unpredictable ways—a familiar gait, a gesture, the timbre of a voice, a blot of colour along the tailbone. The body has a long memory indeed. Written in the quirky tongue of DNA and wound into the nucleus of nearly every human cell are biological mementos of the family who came before us. And science is finding ways to dig them out, rummaging through our DNA as if it were a trunk in the attic.
Advances in genetics had consumed my professional life before SARS came to town. Scientists were homing in on evermore genes linked to diseases, personality traits and behaviours. I wrote about the discoveries and the sticky questions they were dropping into humanity’s lap. But I had never been tempted to know what secrets my own DNA harboured until it became possible to use genetic testing to learn about ancestry.
It was the prospect of solving the mysteries surrounding two of my great-grandfathers that lured me most. One was a sea captain and the other a circus juggler. Both were nomadic types who turned up in India in the nineteenth century, and neither man stuck around long enough to dispel or confirm the legends that grew up around him. One died young and the other disappeared, but their genetic legacies remain. Was it really possible, in this shiny new millennium, that the genes they had passed down through the generations could somehow reveal the secrets they took to their graves? Why—when questions of our heritage and identity had been with me for so long; when my daughter might grow up with the same questions; when my parents, with everything they know and all the secrets hiding in their living cells, could vanish in a breath—would I wait to find out?
In the months that followed Jade’s birth, after SARS finally disappeared from the headlines, I decided to begin. I pictured myself armed with swabbing sticks, tracking distant relatives around the globe and asking them for their DNA. Hello, I’m Dudley and Thelma’s daughter from Toronto. May I have a bit of your spit? I imagined the cool blade of science cutting to the truth of us, after more than a century of speculation, denial and myth. I didn’t expect that my quest would push me to the moral brink, make me wonder about the existence of ghosts and the propriety of grave-robbing. I didn’t foresee that unearthing the roots of my family could bury the story of someone else’s. But a genetic journey has a way of bending the road in ways you might never imagine.
1
“WHAT ARE YOU?”
Every family has its myths and legends. Families can be as twisted as the genetic strands that bind them, old as time, born of chance and random couplings. From the linen petals of a matrimonial bed to the vinyl ardour of back seats, carpet burns, hayrides, gin-fuelled fumblings—blessed are the fornicators! All families owe them a debt, one way or another. The Mormons believe that by knowing your family history you can get all your ancestors into heaven. My own family has always been very clear about heaven; ancestry has been the murky subject, as it must be for many families. The Mormon family-search website receives more than ten million visits a day. On the Internet, genealogy ranks as one of the most popular subjects after pornography, which seems logical, since all that sex does lead to families. I didn’t know much about sex when I first wondered about our own origins. My parents used to tell us they were counting money when they disappeared into the bedroom on Saturday mornings, and my siblings and I grew up thinking we were very rich.
I started asking questions about our heritage in the late seventies, after people started asking them of me. We had recently moved from the Toronto area to the small southern Ontario town of St. Catharines. Each time we moved, one of my siblings had stayed behind. When we left England for Canada three years before, it was Conrad, the eldest of us four. My mother was emptying his pockets for the laundry when she found a note from his girlfriend announcing that my brother was about to have a family of his own. Con returned to London and got married. When we left Toronto, my brother Kevin stayed to become a chartered accountant. So it was just my sister, Christine, and me who arrived in the Garden City with my parents. She was almost fifteen and I had just turned seven.
They call St. Catharines the Garden City because the soil is so rich that everything grows like a weed, fruit in particular: strawberries, grapes, cherries, Red Haven peaches the size of softballs. Half the trees in our yard bore fruit, and Mason jars boiled on the stove all summer. But the real money in town had more to do with industry than agriculture. There was the General Motors plant, where boys straight out of high school could make twenty bucks an hour on the assembly line. There were jobs with the shipyards and the historic Welland Canal, which ran along the east side of our neighbourhood. It was built in 1829 to give ships a safe detour around Niagara Falls. It also gave the teenagers who parked on its banks a place to make out. Watching the submarine races, they called it.
Other than the high school boys, nothing moves quickly on the canal, least of all the freighters, which could be two football fields long and ten storeys high at the bridge. They cast a long shadow over us. From the neighbour’s backyard we could count the rivets on the huge steel plates of their hulls, and the drain holes, which looked like they cried tears of rust. A long time ago my father had been a marine engineer on oil tankers like these, in the British Merchant Navy. He never said if those ships reminded him of that life. Only years later did I learn that the drone of their engines kept him up nights, suspending him in the half-sleep of expectation as he waited to be summoned to his watch in the engine room. My father rarely spoke of the past then, even when it sailed by his own front door.
We lived in a tidy subdivision that must have sprung up in the Space Age of the sixties. There was a Star Circle and Venus and Saturn courts, and in our roundabout of mostly German families, we were the aliens at 43 Neptune Drive. Before we moved in, the Pontellos had been the most exotic clan. There were loads of kids my age and we hung out during the summers, riding our bikes or playing basketball in the driveways. Sometimes we’d pretend to be detectives investigating versions of crimes we’d seen on Charlie’s Angels. All the girls wanted to play the blonde and bodacious Farrah Fawcett character, and when arguments b
roke out over whose turn it was or whether my dark looks should exclude me from eligibility, an interrogation usually followed.
“So where you from, anyway?” one of the kids would ask.
“Mississauga,” I’d say.
“No, really, where are you from?”
“Well, I was born in England—”
“No, I mean, like, what are you?”
It’s true that kids can be mean, but my friends weren’t. Most of them were just curious about a brown girl with a Jewish last name who went to the Catholic school. I was curious too. I wanted to say Italian, like the Pontellos. I wanted freckles and hair that swung like Dorothy Hamill’s. But more than that I wanted an answer.
“Just tell them you’re English,” Mum would say. “You were born in England.”
“But I don’t look English.…”
“Tell them you’re Eurasian,” my father would offer.
“Where’s Eurasia?”
Those conversations always left me with the uncomfortable feeling that we had something to hide. My parents never said simply, “We’re this” or “We’re that.” They said, “Tell them this …” But “tell them” sounded like they were suggesting an excuse to offer a teacher for not doing your homework—Tell her you lost it … Tell her your dog ate it.… Tell her you’re English.…
Of course, I knew India had something to do with us, or we with it. My parents were born there. Their parents were born there. My father, my brothers, and I sported year-round tans. We called okra “ladyfingers” and eggplants “brinjals,” and my mother cooked a mean curry. When I was four, my parents took my sister and me on a world tour that stopped in Mumbai. It was still called Bombay then and I had strange kid memories of the place we visited: women on their haunches plucking chickens, a lizard creeping up the wall, red dirt, hole-in-the-floor toilets that seemed designed to make me pee on my feet. My parents also paid close attention if anything related to India appeared on television. When Michael Caine walked up the red carpet on Oscar night with his gorgeous Indian wife, Shakira, my father would whistle with patriotic pride—“Indian women are real beauties,” he liked to say. But if I asked, the answer was no, we weren’t Indian, really. We were English, sort of, and Portuguese, probably a little Irish and Scottish, a bit Dutch, and maybe Russian. Luckily, no one mentioned China or Jamaica at the time. What I already knew was enough to inspire panic attacks at grade school on Heritage Day.
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