EA: I had no problem. Look, remember. I didn’t belong with those people that adopted me. They had nothing to do with me. I had nothing to do with them. We were together through contract.
JFB: The thing I can’t get my mind around is their son was—Edward Albee. How could they not have been grateful?
EA: That wasn’t the one they bought. They bought something they could turn into what they could tolerate. And ended up with me instead.
JFB: Well, who did they want?
EA: They wanted somebody who probably would be a businessman, certainly would carry on the family and all that—family name—and give them grandchildren and things like that. The entire family was sterile. The mother of the sister, my father’s sister, couldn’t have any kids, nor could he. I don’t really know who was lacking there. Both of them perhaps. I don’t know. But I know that the grandfather, old EF, he wanted a grandson. That’s why I turned up.
JFB: Your biological parents were Louise Harvey and an unnamed man. Who do you imagine they might have been?
EA: I don’t know. That’s the only thing that bothered me about being adopted in the days when you couldn’t find out that sort of thing. I would like to know where I got my odd mind from.
JFB: Do you think that your odd mind came from them or do you think that you invented it yourself?
EA: Well, it must have come in part, probably more from him than from her. Maybe not.
JFB: Because oddness of mind is a thing that fathers give us?
EA: No, I just think maybe because I was a guy that I turned out to be so unlike other guys. Must be in my father’s personality. But then again I was surrounded by men who were more passive and women who were more—
JFB: Characters.
EA: Yeah, characters. And aggressive. When I was told that I was adopted my feeling was relief. I’m not these people. I don’t owe these people anything. I never felt like I belonged there.
JFB: But it’s funny, Edward. I was not adopted. I was the son of a Main Line banker and his very sweet wife and yet, I didn’t think I was related to them either. I often fantasized who were my real parents. That I must have been adopted somehow.
EA: Maybe the basic difference is, there are some of us who want to find out—create ourselves—and others who wish to be whatever they want us to be.
JFB: And we created ourselves. I guess that’s the thing about wondering about your biological father. If it turned out, somehow, that he was actually George M. Cohan—
EA: Then he’d have a lot to apologize for.
JFB: Who would he have been? Have you imagined, given that you are known for invention—?
EA: I just think he would have been interesting. It ties into my great love for that line from “Knoxville” from James Agee’s book. “Finally I am put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those that receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh will not, not now, not ever, but will not ever tell me who I am.”
[There is an unexpected pause here as both Edward’s eyes and JFB’s mist up.]
JFB: I think there is—well. [Clears throat]
EA: There is no one to tell you who you are except yourself.
JFB: Knowing who your parents are doesn’t necessarily provide the answer, Edward.
EA: No. No. Because a lot of people have to abandon all the things that they’re supposed to be and their entire upbringing if that’s not who they are.
JFB: There was a moment when you said, “All right. I’m leaving.” And you packed a bag and you left.
EA: It was a wonderful feeling of liberation that I could get on with the business of being who I was. I knew what I was giving up. I wasn’t crazy. I knew I was giving up wealth and comfort and all of that stuff, but I’d gotten my education. I’d gotten what I needed. Enough to spend the next ten years undoing a lot of stuff and finding out totally who I needed to be.
JFB: Did you ever know what your parents’ reaction to your work was? The Albees?
EA: The father, no. I never found out anything about his reaction to anything. I know that the mother would refer to me as “my son, the playwright.”
But I don’t think she was ever sympathetic to the work. No, it was not the kind of theater that she thought one should be seeing. Theater is not to make you happy, but escape. No engagement. All escape.
JFB: What was her idea of a great night on the town?
EA: Oh, a wonderful musical.
JFB: George M. Cohan. [Laughs]
EA: Are you completely satisfied with where you are and who you are?
JFB: What? Am I satisfied? You mean completely?
EA: Mm.
JFB: On a good day.
EA: And the bad days?
JFB: The bad days I guess I feel lingering guilt at having made the lives of the people that I love more complicated.
EA: If life is not complex what’s the point of living it?
JFB: You were blessed with a long relationship with Jonathan Thomas. What would have happened if you had adopted children?
EA: Never occurred to us.
JFB: Never on the radar?
EA: Never for a second.
JFB: Because?
EA: I thought that I was having kids by writing plays.
JFB: Humor me. If you’d had a child, who would he have been? Or she?
EA: I would have forced them to be as individual as I could possibly have forced them to be.
JFB: How would you have done that?
EA: I’m pretty good at seeing and hearing bullshit. I think I would have been saying, “Come off it. Come off it.”
JFB: What would his or her name have been?
EA: I have no idea.
JFB: I know you have no idea. Would it have been Edward Jr.?
EA: I think I would have rather had a son than a daughter.
JFB: Why?
EA: ’Cause I’m gay. I relate much more to guys.
JFB: Other than teaching him not to tolerate bullshit—which, by the way, that was my goal, too, and it’s actually a bigger job than it sounds—what else would you have liked to have taught your son?
EA: That when you get to the end of it you should be okay with the fact that you dealt pretty honorably with yourself and other people and didn’t compromise too much.
JFB: Is it fair to say that in your plays, couples are frequently dissatisfied with the state of their marriages?
EA: They both change or one of them changes and the other doesn’t.
JFB: Don’t start with me.
EA: Every relationship has its duration.
JFB: A thing I took from Thurber is that it just seems as if every form of love, heterosexual love anyway, seems at some point to lead to bedlam.
EA: Well, gay relationships rarely go on for a long time untroubled, too, you know.
JFB: I was thinking about your play The Goat, which is a play that I saw in the heart of my own transition. [It’s a play about a man who sacrifices his marriage because he falls head over heels in love with a goat named Sylvia.] When I left the theater, I think you’ll be pleased to know, I left the theater that night and I went back to my hotel and I wept—
EA: Good for you.
JFB: No, good for you. I took it very personally.
EA: You wept for me?
JFB: No, I wept for me. I’m not worried about you, Edward.
EA: [Chuckles]
JFB: No, I thought, Oh my God, that’s me. That I’m someone whose passion is so unseemly that I’m just bringing chaos wherever I go. Although in a way, I guess our story ended differently in that it was as if Deedie in the end said to me, “Okay, we’ll make room for the goat.”
EA: Don’t you have to be ruthless if you’re going to become who you need to be? Don’t you have to be ruthless?
JFB: Yeah, I think so. I think so. Although I think for me to become who I needed to be also required taking as much of my former self with me as possible.
EA: No, you
have to be ruthless in response to other people’s reaction.
JFB: I guess. Although maybe I’m less ruthless than you are.
EA: Let me get you some green tea.
JFB: Okay. Shall I follow you in?
[We walk through the loft, past its paintings and primitive sculptures, into the kitchen, where Edward starts looking through the cupboards.]
EA: Do I have any green tea? Here’s some green tea. Do you like green tea?
JFB: Yes, please.
[There is a long interval as the water boils and we speak of Easter Island, which we visited within weeks of each other in 2005, and which made a lasting impression on us both. We talk about going back there together for Edward’s eighty-fifth birthday in 2013.]
EA: Do you take anything in your tea?
JFB: No, I think I’ll take it just like this. What are you looking for?
EA: I was looking for my sugar substitute. The Equal.
JFB: Edward, you have no equal.
EA: Yes, I do.
JFB: Oh, that’s nice of you to say.
EA: A little bit.
[We walk back into the loft and sit back down on the couch together.]
EA: How does your older boy handle the problem of you with friends?
JFB: Oddly there has never been a problem with me.
EA: Interesting.
JFB: I say, “Well, how can that be?” He says, “Our generation doesn’t worry about the things that your generation worried about. Plus, we don’t sit around talking about our parents.”
I think that to some degree they are protected by my being so public and by being a visible voice in the country for people like me, like us. Sometimes what kids can taunt each other with is secrets. “Oh, did you know that Zach’s father is now a girl?” What can people say, except “Yeah, everybody knows that.”
[A rushing sound comes from outside.]
EA: Is that rain?
JFB: That is rain. It’s quite a rain.
EA: Oh my goodness. I didn’t know whether the air-conditioning had suddenly come on. It’s rain. Good.
JFB: Edward, I met you two months before my father died in 1986. Much later, I learned that you and he were born about two months apart in 1928. While you didn’t have any children with Jonathan or anybody else that I know of, you do have children, in the way that students do become the sons and daughters of their teachers. And one of those students, of course, was me. So the good news is, you do have a son. The bad news is that she’s a woman. [Laughter]
EA: Oh, I don’t know. Not too many guys can claim that.
JFB: So what is the difference between motherhood and fatherhood?
EA: It’s two things, of course. What the kids have been instructed to expect. What they understand a mother to be and a father to be. But it’s also how really differently you feel having been a male parent and now being a female parent. So much of it has to do with what we are instructed and how we’re instructed to behave as certain things.
JFB: There was a time when I thought, I am not only the luckiest but, like Tiresias, the wisest, because I’ve lived as a man and I’ve lived as a woman. Now, though, sometimes I think my experience as a man was not like that of any of the men that I know and my experience as a woman is not like that of many other women that I know.
[We drink our tea, and Edward looks at his collection of paintings and sculpture.]
JFB: Is there a painting here that makes you think about parents and children?
EA: About parents and children. No. [Laughter]
JFB: What about the Chagall?
EA: Well. That’s his sister, yeah. But I don’t think in those terms.
You’re making me think about things that I haven’t thought about from your point of view. Do you know one thing I’ve never thought? What it would be like to be straight. I’ve never thought about that. I was so accepting of being gay. It was my first awareness of who I was; I never even thought about it.
[We listen to the rain for a while. Edward speaks about a play he has recently abandoned.]
JFB: What’s the play?
EA: It was called “Laying an Egg.” It’s about a forty-seven-year-old woman who’s been trying to get pregnant for a very, very long time and keeps having miscarriages and her brother’s wife keeps dropping kids every three weeks and everyone thinks she’s too old to have a kid now. It’d be very dangerous for her and the kid will be damaged and all the rest of it.
So, she finds a Bulgarian doctor who’s giving her all sorts of interesting medicines and she gets pregnant. The way the play was going, at a certain point in the pregnancy they could no longer find the fetus because it was encased in something very much like an egg.
JFB: Hm. And at the end of act 1—
EA: Well, that was the end of act 2.
Do you and your wife still live together?
JFB: Do we—? We do.
EA: Who are you to her? Are you still her husband?
JFB: I am her wife.
EA: She made the transfer?
JFB: Yeah. Sometimes I’m her spouse or partner. Less frequently I’m her wife, but I’m never her husband.
EA: Hm. What does that indicate? A loss there of some sort?
JFB: Well, she has lost a husband, but she’s got me.
EA: Yeah.
[A pause]
JFB: Oh look. The rain has stopped.
EA: Yes, that was huge. Huge and brief. But fun.
BARBARA SPIEGEL
© Barbara Spiegel
I was concerned about her future. If she was going to be a dwarf, then there was no problem. Whereas now she was going to be different than us. I know how society can be.
Barbara Spiegel is the director for District 1 of the Little People of America, which encompasses all of New England. I went to visit her at her home in South Portland, Maine, on a beautiful day in September. She is the mother of three children, Alexandra, Irina, and Talia. I knocked on her door and she answered—a four-foot-two-inch-tall woman in a tiedyed T-shirt. As we spoke, thirteen-month-old Talia (like all of Barbara’s children, an achondroplastic dwarf) crawled around merrily on the floor.
JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN: Wow. What a beautiful home. Although I guess I thought your furniture was going to be—
BARBARA SPIEGEL: Little?
JFB: Smaller.
BS: I changed my furniture because I knew you were coming. [Laughs] Actually it’s kind of funny. I’ve moved nineteen times in my life. So the concept is just crazy. I’m going to customize everything in my house? Seriously? I mean, kids ask me the same question. “Is your house little?” And I’m like, “No. Because then, it’s like I’ve gotta find another dwarf family to buy it.”
JFB: So help me understand the dilemma that mothers and fathers with achondroplasia face in terms of deciding to form a family. Dwarves have to spin a kind of genetic roulette wheel when you have a child with someone else who shares the condition. Right?
BS: Right. Goodness, my husband and I both have achondroplasia, so we stand a 50 percent chance of passing it off to our child. We have a twenty-five percent chance of the child being average size, which is all fine and dandy. But then we also have a twenty-five percent chance of the child being double dominant, inheriting the achondroplastic gene, the FGFR3 gene, from both parents. And that’s fatal.
JFB: So it’s [a] fifty percent chance that your child will be born like you. A twenty-five percent chance that the child will be of average size. And a twenty-five percent chance that the child will be stillborn.
Those are kind of frightening odds. How do little people deal with it?
BS: Well, it’s even more complicated than that. Because if you’re giving birth, the chances are pretty good it’s going to be a C-section. Our pelvis can’t do that.
JFB: Wow.
BS: Well, in a way it’s awesome. Because you don’t have to do labor.
I told my doctor, “I’ll let you know when I’m done,” and he said, “You should carry till thirty-nine wee
ks,” and I was like, “I’m telling you now, I will not. Just my luck, I’d go that long and the thing would be poppin’ out.”
JFB: But when you first conceive a child, there’s no way of knowing if it’s going to be like you, or if it’s going to be—what do I say?
BS: We say “average-sized person.”
JFB: An average-sized person, or if it’s going to be stillborn.
BS: They told us our middle child, Alexandra, was going to be average-size at first. There was a mix-up at the lab.
JFB: Were you feeling disappointed? Or relieved? Or what?
BS: I was concerned about her future. If she was going to be a dwarf, then there was no problem. Whereas now she was going to be different than us.
I know how society can be.
I was also concerned for my own physical capabilities. As a baby, she’s going to be all long and lanky. How was I going to manage that?
Then, a week later, I get a phone call from the doctor’s office, “Your daughter is not average size. She’s going to have achondroplasia,” and I said, “I’m—I’m sorry, what?” They mixed up our genetic stuff with somebody else’s and I guess when the diagnosis came back for this average-size couple they probably did the, you know, “What the hell?”
At that point, my husband and I decided we were going to take it to another testing facility, because I didn’t want them calling me, in another week, and going, “Oh, you know what, that baby that you’ve named in your belly now? It’s double dominant,” because when you have that double-dominant gene and you know ahead of time, there are choices that can be made.
JFB: The double dominant means the child will be stillborn.
BS: Yeah. And so some people would choose not to carry that out.
JFB: Is that a common choice with people with achondroplasia?
Stuck in the Middle with You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders Page 13