Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. —George Orwell, 1984

but I always knew it when I saw it. If I waited long enough, my face would begin to morph. I was eight, ten, thirteen. Cheeks, eyes, chin, and forehead—my features softened and shape-shifted until finally I was able to see another face, a different face, what seemed to me a truer face just beneath my own.

Over the course of a single day and night, the familiar has vanished. Familiar: belonging to a family. On the other side of the thin wall I hear my husband crack open a newspaper. The floor seems to sway. Or perhaps it’s my body trembling. I don’t know what a nervous breakdown would feel like, but I wonder if I’m having one. I trace my fingers across the planes of my cheekbones, down my neck, across my clavicle, as if to be certain I still exist. I’m hit by a wave of dizziness and grip the bathroom counter. In the weeks and months to come, I will become well acquainted with this sensation. It will come over me on street corners and curbs, in airports, train stations. I’ll take it as a sign to slow down. Take a breath. Feel the fact of my own body. You’re still you, I tell myself, again and again and again.

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.

After all, it’s impossible to know the future, but we can be reasonably sure about the past.

There are many varieties of shock. This is something you don’t know until you’ve experienced a few of them.

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.

The more chaotic my thoughts became, the more precise my actions, as if carefully folded T-shirts and jeans might fix everything.

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 ran through the facts of my own identity again and again as if memorizing a poem, or factors of an equation.

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 this 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.

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

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.

Tohu va’vohu meant chaos. The world upside down. No—the world before it was the world.

Mix sperm. Once you hear a phrase like that you never forget it.

Mixing his sperm with those of any stranger would have been unthinkable. But a non-Jewish stranger would have been impossible—I was sure of that. His religion was the deepest and most abiding part of his identity—and Judaism wasn’t only a religion, it was an ethnicity. His child would have been other. Set apart from the very lineage he came from. “You knew your father,” my mother went on. In my memory, she is looking directly at me. “Can you imagine such a thing?”

I squeezed my eyes shut against hot tears. This felt like a second death. I was losing him all over again. I had become divisible. In part the same. In part different.

What next? I couldn’t imagine what might come next. I am a spinner of narratives, a teller of tales. I have spent my life attempting to make meaning out of random events, to shape stories out of an accretion of senseless, chaotic detail.

As a writer and a teacher of writing, this is what I do. What if, I might begin to suggest to a student. How about…? But I had been dealing within the confines of a known world. I am not a fantasist. I have never been drawn to mysteries of the whodunit variety, or to sci-fi. Magic realism interests me, but there are limits to my suspension of disbelief. What never fail to draw me in, however, are secrets. Secrets within families. Secrets we keep out of shame, or self-protectiveness, or denial. Secrets and their corrosive power. Secrets we keep from one another in the name of love.

It felt to me, in the months it took to write that piece, that I was gluing my father back together. This is what I did, what I had always done from the time I first put pen to paper. Tikkun olam. I was trying to repair my broken father. To make him whole.

But at least I had been able to build a monument to him, a stack of stories, essays, memoirs, novels that I wrote in his honor—my own, secular form of kaddish.

But there had been something more—something I could never quite fathom. An invisible live wire stretched between my parents and me. Touch it, and we all might go up in smoke.

My latest book was the first of my memoirs that had nothing to do with my parents.

It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life—even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine—and still not know the truth of oneself. In the end, it wasn’t words but numbers

All my life I had known there was a secret. What I hadn’t known: the secret was me.

There was only one person I could think of to call: my mother’s best friend, who, if still living, would now be in her early nineties. My mother had had very few close friends. Her friendships tended to end in hurt feelings and recriminations. Yet Charlotte, whom she had known since they were college sorority sisters, had remained. I remembered her as kind, sensible, loyal—a temperament that nicely offset my mother’s penchant for drama.

This was the first but far from the last time I would have to tell the story to an old person, a very old person, knowing that it might be painful and challenging. How old was too old for a surprise?

And also something else: I was on the hunt. A fact-finding mission had taken me over, keeping the deeper reservoir of feelings at bay.

Lines from a Delmore Schwartz poem come to mind: “What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The

smallest color of the smallest day; / Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn.”

I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person’s experience is not another’s. If five people in a family were to write the story of that family, we would end up with five very different stories.

These are truths of a

sort—the truth of adhering to what one remembers. Then there are facts, which are by their nature documentable. The weather on a particular day can be ascertained. As can the date of the explosion. Perhaps there is a photograph of the dress she was wearing. And so forth. But the intentions of your fa...

try to liberate my students from these tortured thoughts by telling them that they may as well just start now, because it can be more difficult to write about the dead than to write about the living. The dead can’t fight back.

But I can’t call the medium, at least not now—not only because I’m skeptical but because I need to arrive at my own beliefs about myself and my parents and the world we inhabited.

In the absence of the empirical, I am left with a feeling central to my childhood: all my life I had the sense that something was amiss.

I had been deeply, mutely certain that there was something very wrong with me, that for all this I was to blame. Thirty-five thousand feet in the air, between Minneapolis and San Francisco, that mute certainty began to fall away as if I were a molting animal. There had been something amiss. We didn’t add up. And not because I wasn’t my father’s child but because I—and possibly one or both of my parents—had never known.

I was capable of functioning as if on one side of a split screen.

But the thick sludge was everywhere. I now understand it as shock: the sense of my own body as foreign, delicate, fractured, and the world at once hostile and implacable in its anonymity.

At some point I will wonder what I meant by Huxley’s Island, or “Filius nullius—son of nobody.” Like a drunk in a blackout, I will try to reconstruct what happened and when. From another index card: Bessel van der Kolk: “The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.”

I couldn’t afford to be quiet or still. I had to keep moving, to outpace whatever might come next.

This is how we had always referred to one another—half sisters—though I had noticed that in more cohesive families, stepsiblings, half siblings often didn’t differentiate themselves but considered themselves siblings, period. Not Susie and me. That half was always there. And now it wasn’t.

I was more my father’s daughter. I had somehow convinced myself that I was only my father’s daughter.

How could I survive this new knowledge that I was made up of my mother and a stranger?

I ached with grief, but this grief was not the sharp, suffocating grief that accompanies a recent death. It was a field of grief, a sea of it. There were no edges.

“In the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is the ship’s direst jeopardy.” Before I fell asleep I read it again and again, as if trying to interpret a spiritual text. I was in a gale. My mind was wild, grasping, seeking solid ground. But there was no solid ground.

“the lashed sea’s landlessness.”

The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.

But he had the potential to be an arrow, pulled back tightly in its bow, aimed straight and true. Of course, none of this was a thought. I had no thoughts. I was all keen instinct. We never know who we will be in the burning building, the earthquake. We never know until we are faced with our own stripped-down, elemental selves. I wanted to flee. I wanted to stay. I wanted to rescue myself and the whole of my history.

A favorite poem, “Otherwise” by Jane Kenyon, begins like this: “I got out of bed / on two strong legs. / It might have been / otherwise. I ate / cereal, sweet / milk, ripe, flawless / peach. It might / have been otherwise.” The poet goes on to regard ways in which the bounty of her daily life contained within it the shadow of a darker possibility.