Inheritance Read online

  These ancestors are the foundation upon which I have built my life. I have dreamt of them, wrestled with them, longed for them. I have tried to understand them. In my writing, they have been my territory—my obsession, you might even say. They are the tangled roots—thick, rich, and dark—that bind me to the turning earth. During younger years when I was lost—particularly after my dad’s death—I used them as my inner compass. I would ask what to do, which way to turn. I would listen intently, and hear them answer. I don’t mean this metaphysically—not exactly. I’m not sure what I believe about where we go when we die, but I can say with certainty that I’ve felt the presence of this long-gone crowd whenever I’ve sought them. My dad, in particular, would come to me in an electric tingle running the length of my body. I was convinced that my father was able to reach me through time and space because of the thousands of people who connected us.

  L’dor vador. These Hebrew words, one of most fundamental tenets of Judaism, translate into from generation to generation. I am the tenth and youngest grandchild of Joseph Shapiro, self-made industrialist, philanthropist, a leader of modern Orthodoxy: chairman of the presidium of the Mesifta Tifereth Jerusalem, treasurer of Torah Umesorah, vice president of the Lubavitcher Yeshiva, member of the national board of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. I am the tenth and youngest grandchild of Beatrice Shapiro, his beautiful, gracious wife, who was admired and emulated by religious women of her generation the world over. I am the daughter of their oldest son, Paul. Everything I am, everything I know to be true, begins with these facts.

  * * *

  —

  I woke up one morning and life was as I had always known it to be. There were certain things I thought I could count on. I looked at my hand, for example, and I knew it was my hand. My foot was my foot. My face, my face. My history, my history. After all, it’s impossible to know the future, but we can be reasonably sure about the past. By the time I went to bed that night, my entire history—the life I had lived—had crumbled beneath me, like the buried ruins of an ancient forgotten city.

  A Zen meditation made popular by the twentieth-century Indian sage Ramana Maharshi goes like this: the student begins by asking and answering the question Who am I?

  I am a woman. I am a mother. I am a wife. I am a writer. I am a daughter. I am a granddaughter. I am a niece. I am a cousin. I am, I am, I am.

  The idea is that eventually, the sense of I am will dissolve. Once we’re past all our many labels and notions of what makes us who we think we are, we will discover that there is no I—no us. This will lead us to a greater understanding of the true nature of impermanence. The exercise is meant to go on long past the most obvious pillars of our identity, the ones beyond question—until we run out of all the ways we think of ourselves. But what does it mean when the I am breaks down at the very beginning of the list?

  4

  There are many varieties of shock. This is something you don’t know until you’ve experienced a few of them. I’ve been on the other end of a phone call hearing the news that my parents were in a car crash and both might not live. I’ve sat in a doctor’s office being told that my baby boy had a rare and often fatal disease. I have felt the slam, the blade, the breathless falling—a physical sense of being shoved backward into an abyss. But this was something altogether different. An air of unreality settled like a cloak around me. I was stupid, disbelieving. The air became thick sludge. Nothing computed.

  “Maybe they got it wrong.”

  Michael just looked at me.

  “Switched vials? Mislabeled the results?”

  It was the thinnest of threads, but it was all I had. Human error. It seemed possible, in that moment, that all of this would turn out to be a big mistake, something that would become a crazy story I’d tell someday, after I’d recovered from this needless distress.

  “Let me see if I can get someone on the phone,” Michael said.

  He paused in the door to my office.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” My voice was reedy, stretched taut.

  Alone in my office, I went back to ordinary things with a vengeance. I unplugged my phone charger from the wall and wrapped the wires neatly around it. I packed up my travel-size toiletries and checked them off the list. I looked up the San Francisco weather and folded an extra sweater into my bag.

  Estimated number of generations to MRCA = 4.5

  Susie and I were four and a half generations away from a most recent common ancestor. At first this didn’t seem like a lot of generations, but within a single ethnic group like Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, by four and a half generations, just about everyone has an ancestor in common. Close relatives—parents, uncles, aunts, first, second, even third and fourth cousins—are pinpointed by DNA testing sites with a degree of precision. If two people share a father, the results would be resoundingly clear.

  Susie and I were not related.

  Somewhere within me, in a place as dangerous and electric as a live wire, I knew what this meant, if it was true. If it was true being something that I would repeat to myself again and again. If it was true being something that I might always cling to, in a disbelieving, childlike way, part of the thick sludge.

  If it was true that Susie and I were not half sisters, my father was not my father.

  That he was Susie’s father was without question. She looked like him. She had his eyes, and the shape of his face. She even sounded a bit like him, her cadences those of a born-and-bred, yeshiva-educated New Yorker. I, on the other hand, looked nothing like my father or like anyone in his family. I was pale-skinned, very blond, blue-eyed. All my life, I’d fielded and deflected comments about not looking Jewish, but I had no reason to question my biological connection to my dad. He was my dad. But now—in a minefield of doubt—there was no doubt in my mind about Susie’s paternity. Only about mine.

  * * *

  —

  The more chaotic my thoughts became, the more precise my actions, as if carefully folded T-shirts and jeans might fix everything. I could hear Michael’s voice downstairs. Had he gotten someone on the phone at this hour? Where was Ancestry.com even located? I imagined a massive warehouse full of thousands of plastic vials.

  I was trying to think it all through, but with a mind blunted as if by a sledgehammer blow. Vladimir Nabokov, in Speak, Memory, ponders the question of how to examine a deluded mind when one’s only resource is a deluded mind. I picked my way through the little I knew. First of all, that business about being 52 percent Eastern European Ashkenazi in the DNA analysis. That was ridiculous. Of course I was entirely Jewish—my parents were both Jewish. I had been raised Orthodox. I mean, I was very Jewish. I spoke fluent Hebrew until I was in high school. I had always countered the litany of questions about my ethnicity with a recital of my impeccable family history. That plastic vial must have been accidentally switched with that of some half-Jewish person, who was at this very moment confused about her own DNA.

  My results had also listed a first cousin who was unfamiliar to me. There he was, a blue icon like one that might be found on the door to a men’s room, identified only by his initials. This—Michael will later tell me—set off loud, clanging warning bells for him.

  But not for me. Obviously I knew all my first cousins. This only reinforced my certainty that there must be some mistake. I ran through the facts of my own identity again and again as if memorizing a poem, or factors of an equation.

  * * *

  —

  By the time Michael came back upstairs, it was nearly midnight. We were leaving for the airport in four hours. I was freezing. He wrapped his arms around me, but not before I saw the look on his face. I registered that I had never seen him look at me that way before. Not when my mother died. Not when our boy was sick. I would describe it as something bordering on pity. It wasn’t so much my future that was being irrevocably altered by th
is discovery—it was my past. Michael had already known this, of course, well before he looked up the toll-free number on Ancestry’s website. He had known when he first saw the surprising breakdown of my ethnicity. When a cousin who was a stranger had appeared along with my results like an emissary from some foreign world.

  “It’s not a mistake,” he said softly.

  In the ensuing weeks, every person I tell about this night will say a version of the same thing: Must be a mix-up. It can’t be true. They will say it protectively. Indignantly. They will say it out of kindness. And they will be wrong. Millions of people have had their DNA tested by Ancestry.com, and no such mistake has ever been made.

  5

  In the immediate aftermath of my discovery, there was one incident—one story—that crystallized in my mind. It was 1988. I was twenty-five years old, and my father had been dead exactly two years. My mother had been badly injured in the car accident that killed my father, and I had spent the previous two years taking care of her. At the same time, I was in graduate school at Sarah Lawrence and I was writing my first novel as if my life depended on it—which, in a way, it did. Writing was my way of trying to give shape to my sorrow. I was alternately numb and filled with searing pain. These seemed my only two states of being. I cut off all my hair, broke up with my boyfriend, quit smoking, quit drinking. All my free time was devoted to reading the poems of Adrienne Rich. I wondered if maybe I was a lesbian. I was a stranger to myself, adrift in the world.

  I didn’t want my mother to spend the second anniversary of my dad’s death alone. I invited her to come with me to school, where some of the graduate students were giving readings. I picked her up at her apartment on West End Avenue and we drove the half hour north together. I didn’t have much to say to my mother. I never really had. Our life as mother and daughter had been fraught and contentious, devoid of the easy love I felt for my father. As a child, I’d had the fantasy—a form of hope, now a staggering irony—that she wasn’t actually my mother. The silence between us was less companionable than tense and awkward. But we had entered strange new territory since the accident. She had recovered from her injuries far beyond her doctor’s expectations. Still, she was frail and walked with a cane. Her face had been smashed to bits, but now it was reassembled, her nose slightly askew, one eye a different shape from the other. As she often reminded me, I was all she had.

  Before the reading, the students and faculty gathered for a reception in the living room of the house on campus where each of us would soon read from our manuscripts. It was at this reception that I introduced my mother to one of my classmates named Rachel.

  “Rachel, where are you from?” my mother asked.

  “Philadelphia,” Rachel replied.

  “Oh, my daughter was conceived in Philadelphia.”

  Smooth, without missing a beat.

  In twenty-five years, I had never heard this. I pictured a hotel, a romantic weekend getaway. But my mother had already moved on to extol the virtues of the City of Brotherly Love.

  “What do you mean, I was conceived in Philadelphia?” I asked.

  “Oh, you don’t want to know,” my mother replied. “It’s not a pretty story.”

  * * *

  —

  That night—after the earnest readings, the Styrofoam cups of herbal tea, paper plates piled with cookies—I drove my mother down the Saw Mill River Parkway in the winter darkness. Two years earlier, with my mother in critical condition in a New Jersey hospital, I had buried my father in the Shapiro family plot in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. It had been my first funeral. My father’s sister, brother, all my cousins, even Susie seemed to know exactly what to do. The stark service was conducted entirely in Hebrew. One of my cousins, a rabbi, led the service. The rituals of mourning were foreign to me—though I had been raised Orthodox, there were striations of Orthodoxy—and at my own father’s funeral I felt like an interloper, out of place amidst my family. Here’s where you walk, one of my cousins guided me. Here’s a shovel, another one said. Now it’s time to wash your hands.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Mom, you can’t just say something like that about my conception. You need to tell me what you meant.”

  Both our eyes were trained straight ahead. The car a confessional, a vault.

  “There was a doctor—an institute—in Philadelphia,” my mother said. “Your father and I were having trouble conceiving.”

  She stopped there. We were twenty minutes from her apartment.

  “He had slow sperm,” she added. And then, after another beat: “I’d had several miscarriages. And I was in my late thirties by then.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I would go to Philadelphia—this was a world-famous institute—and they would monitor exactly where I was in my cycle. Then, when it was time, I’d call your father on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and he would race down so we could do the procedure.”

  “What procedure?”

  “Artificial insemination.”

  If I hadn’t been driving, I would have closed my eyes. You want the story of your conception to be at the very least corporeal. A man and a woman, limbs entwined. Sperm swimming to egg. Not the sterile clinic I suddenly envisioned, a test tube, a medical version of a turkey baster. Not my father alone in a room with pornography and a Dixie cup.

  “I told you,” my mother said. “Not a pretty story.”

  What sharpened my senses that night to such a degree that I would be able to retrieve the conversation in its entirety, thirty years later? At the time, I found the whole thing odd, slightly discomfiting, but of little consequence. Really, what difference did it make how I had been conceived? I was here. Who cared how my father’s sperm got to my mother’s egg?

  Now the details are so clear to me, as if contained in a time capsule: the Hudson River in the darkness; the lights strung across the George Washington Bridge; the even timbre of my mother’s voice; the high plane of her cheekbone. Her long-fingered hands clasped in her lap. Institute. World-famous. Philadelphia.

  6

  Bradley Airport near Hartford is a place I know well. A frequent traveler, I have my routine. First stop after going through security is always a small futuristic-looking glass cylinder where for two bucks you can place your eyeglasses inside for a power wash. With satisfyingly clean glasses, my typical pattern is to then proceed to the newsstand to stock up on trashy magazines. After, if time allows, I stop at Lavazza for a mediocre cappuccino to drink at the gate. I find the familiar routine comforting when I travel. It cuts through the usual disorientation I tend to feel when leaving home.

  But my standard travel anxieties, which had not been insignificant, were, I now realized, nothing compared to this. I walked unsteadily through the wide halls of the airport like a convalescent. Michael stayed close to me as we passed a wall of projected images—part of an interactive ad campaign for Travelers insurance—depicting a series of red umbrellas made of roses that broke apart into hundreds of petals as each person passed by. People of every shape and size disrupted the umbrellas, causing the petals to scatter in different ways. Children were especially taken with the images. They stopped, jumped up and down, windmilled their arms. Tohu va’vohu. The Hebrew words—from the second sentence of Genesis—arose in me the way the Hebrew language tended to: like bits of sediment shaken loose from some subterranean place. Tohu va’vohu meant chaos. The world upside down. No—the world before it was the world. My body felt strange and weightless. Was I even here? Maybe I didn’t exist. My whole life had been a dream I dreamt up. As we passed the red umbrellas, I looked to be sure that my shape registered.

  We reached the gate forty-five minutes before boarding. Michael had his computer open on his lap and was typing search terms into Google, looking up fertility clinics in Philadelphia that had existed in the early 1960s. His background as a journalist
made this kind of research second nature to him. It took only a few minutes to zero in on the place it had to be.

  “The Farris Institute for Parenthood,” he said. “On the campus of Penn.”

  Institute, my mother had said. Not clinic. Not hospital.

  A few swift keystrokes and we were reading up on Dr. Edmond Farris, a trailblazer—world famous, my mother had said—in the field of infertility and artificial insemination. Another detail my mother had mentioned that night came back to me. The famous doctor had pioneered a method to pinpoint when a woman was ovulating. I’d call your father…and he would race.

  All around us, the airport hummed with travelers going places. Flights were departing for Atlanta, Detroit, Miami, Chicago. A tired-looking flight attendant walked past, dragging her small bag behind her. The sun had just begun to rise, glowing orange over the tarmac. The words blurred together: sterility, infertility, insemination. And then another couple of words connected with the Farris Institute for Parenthood: sperm donor. The term seemed to be sharper than all the rest. Sperm donor. I looked up from Michael’s screen and all I saw were men: young men, old men, very old men. Men holding babies. Fat men wearing baseball caps. Men in tank tops and track pants. Men in button-downs and cardigans. If my father wasn’t my father, who was my father? If my father wasn’t my father, who was I?

  * * *

  —

  That February night nearly thirty years ago, after dropping my mother off at her apartment, I went home and called Susie.

  “Did you know anything about Dad and Irene having fertility problems?”

  “That sounds familiar. I was a teenager, but I knew something was up.”