Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

But he was an honest man. Could an honest man keep the truth of his daughter’s origins from her? “So you’re telling me that my father would have proceeded with total acceptance?” “What I’m telling you,” Lookstein said, “is that he would have felt he had done a huge mitzvah.”

It was comforting to be in the presence of someone who had known him. There were so few people left.

“We thought your father was a hero,” he said.

Ben Walden was not the deepest part of the story for me. He was not the end of the mystery but rather, the beginning.

I rewrote my own history repeatedly until the contents of my mind resembled a chalkboard, words not entirely erased, all smudged a cloudy white.

in an attempt to understand the culture that my parents inhabited. In 1961, Edward Albee’s eviscerating play about a childless couple, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was about to open on Broadway.

A Newsweek survey revealed that zero percent of Americans considered no children the ideal family size.

Anonymity protects the donor from having to confront the inconvenient truth that a child might be born from his or her own body. It protects parents who do not wish for an “outside” party to intrude on their family, and who quite often choose not to tell their children.

I had never before been in the role of being someone’s worst nightmare, but I was pretty sure this was the case now.

Back in San Francisco, I had told Michael that if I had confirmation that Ben was my biological father, along with important medical history, I would be okay. It was more than most people got.

What more did I want? After all, I had been given the very information I thought would make me whole. Above all, I wanted to eradicate this terrible shame, this sense of being defective, alien, other, as if perhaps I never should have existed at all. It was why, I now realized, I had included my website in my original email to Ben. It wasn’t only so that he could see that my motives weren’t mercenary. See? I wanted to say. I’m a real person—with a full, rich life, and a family of my own. I wasn’t just the product of some random morning in Philadelphia—possibly one among many such mornings—during which he masturbated into a cup, tucked his shirt back into his pants, pocketed a few dollars, and returned to anatomy class.

And what I wished for now—though I knew expressing it might topple our entire parsed, careful dialogue—was to meet him. To be in the presence, just once, of this man I came from. Be careful, Wendy Kramer had cautioned. He’s a doctor. He’s used to being in control. Keep your foot in the door. Let him call the shots.

I had raised him without secrets—perhaps to a fault.

Family dinner had been a cornerstone of our lives since Jacob was in his high chair. So much of my way of doing things had been a reaction to the choices my parents had made. I had always known that I had formed myself in opposition to my mother.

I had felt, on that day nearly five years earlier, a sense of completion. My boy, enfolded in his grandfather’s prayer shawl. A modern, eclectic service that I had worked hard to design, which reflected our family and also honored my dad and his legacy. Though my Orthodox relatives would not attend Jacob’s bar mitzvah, I felt I had their blessing. I stood next to Jacob in front of our gathered family and friends and spoke of how proud his grandfather would have been of him. L’dor vador.

As I held Jacob close, I kept reminding myself that everything I had built—my family, my personhood—was unaltered.

My father was an abstraction, an ancestor to him—nothing more. All those stories, the tallis, the sepia photographs scattered around our house of the little boy in the bowler hat—those were important to me.

He must feel it is his fault. Slow sperm. So unlucky. Divorced. Widowed. Now this. He has told no one. He bears the journey toward making a family alone.

His sperm has to be fresh; time is of the essence. If his sperm is indeed to be mixed with my father’s—whether my father is aware of it or not—the two men might even pass each other in the halls of the Farris Institute.

Dr. Edmond Farris knew the score. But did he explain it clearly to my mother and father?

Until I was in my mid-thirties—I met Michael at thirty-four, and Jacob was born days after I turned thirty-seven—my inner world was defined and shaped by longing. This longing was vast, wide, and I was not able to put words to it. All I knew was what I felt, which was a constant, interior ache that propelled me. At times, I felt like a sleepwalker in my own life, moving to a strange choreography whose steps I knew by heart. I have now read interview after interview with donor-conceived people—particularly those whose origins were not disclosed to them—who describe this longing. This sense of being trapped on the other side of an invisible wall: separate, alone, cut off, and—worst of all—not knowing why.

As I lurked and watched, I was like an anthropologist studying a foreign culture. Another form of life was going on behind the closed doors of these homes—a

I did everything I could to flee my parents. It pains me to write these words. They were all I knew of the world. And yet, I walked that poor dog up and down those unfortunately named suburban streets in search of a family who would open their door and take me in.

Later, the garage door would open, my father returning from his job in the city. That was the sound I waited for—the electronic rumble of my father returning, then the brief bear hug that seemed to contain within it his warm and beautiful heart. I was afraid of my mother and wanted very little to do with her.

I was a girl in search of a father—not because I didn’t love my father but because my love couldn’t save him. That younger man on the train to Philadelphia had become a middle-aged man crushed by an accumulation of secrets, losses, and the unsaid. My father was already gone.

In the years after my father’s death, Shirley and I had grown increasingly connected. We spoke by phone often, and many times she had told me that she’d promised my father she’d look out for me. Though Shirley was my father’s younger sister, she had always been his protector, and he had turned to her in times of emotional peril. It was she he had called when he learned that his young fiancée was terminally ill. It was she to whom he had confessed, in later years, his unhappiness in his marriage to my mother. During the time that my father and mother struggled to have a baby, he might have unburdened himself to Shirley.

I was back to the same lurching, destabilizing fear that came over me each time I was about to speak with anyone

who might, in an instant, illuminate the extent of my parents’ ac...

Which story would ease your heart? Lookstein had asked me. The true one, I had answered. But at any moment, the truth could flatten me.

In holding with psychological theories of the time, men were usually told to forget that the procedure had ever happened if they used a donor. Could my father—could any father—have forgotten that the procedure had ever happened?

I was the lone pale, blond child in the sea of dark-haired, dark-eyed grandchildren and great-grandchildren—my otherness and difference glaringly evident. Yet I had never had any doubt that I was part of the chain that reached back and back through the generations, unbroken. As I stood in my cousin Joanne’s sitting room, now knowing better, it felt as if the links of that chain were in pieces on the floor all around me.

Here it is: “There’s a place I travel when I want to roam, and nobody knows it but me. / The roads don’t go there and the signs stay home, and nobody knows it but me. / It’s far, far away and way, way afar. It’s over the moon and the sea / and wherever you’re going that’s wherever you are. / And nobody knows it but me.

Height of their ascendancy. Who spoke in such a manner? And yet, coming from my aunt, it didn’t sound odd but rather, like a humble statement of fact. It was no wonder I had mythologized my grandparents all my life. They were the stuff of myth.

For the first time in my life, I understood the expression blow by blow.

“Do you need me to slow down?” I asked a couple of times. “Is there anything you don’t understand so far?” I asked this not because I thought she had the slightest cognitive decline. She had one of the sharpest minds of anyone I knew. But she was ninety-three. When she was born, automobiles were relatively new. Televisions did not exist. She was already the mother of four when Watson and Crick discovered the chemical structure of DNA. Another elderly person to whom I had recounted the story had asked: So you’re saying you’re part your father and part someone else?

If my father had kept a secret, he’d kept it from his sister as well.

Not a blink. Not a sound. I feared it was as if I had said to her: You’re not mine. I’m not yours. We don’t belong to each other. It felt violent. The world around us fell away. She leaned slightly forward, reached out, and grabbed my hand.

“I’m not giving you up,” she said.

I brought up the question of halachah, and she treated it as if it were completely beside the point, in the same way Rabbi Lookstein had.

When you’re offered an easy moral out and you don’t take it, that’s malchus.” Meaning kingly.

But when I brought up the possibility that my mother had deceived my father—that he never knew—Shirley didn’t go there with me. She preferred the version of the story that I found most painful: that my father knew all along.

“You’re not an accident of history, Dani,” Shirley said. Her eyes were brimming. “Not as far as I’m concerned and not as far as the world is concerned. This isn’t about the cold scientific facts. I have to tell you—in every way, and I’m not saying it to make you feel good, and I’m taking a chance saying it because you’ll think I’m making it up—but between you and Paul there was paternity, ownership, kinship.”

It was the purest manifestation of love I had ever experienced.

You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.”

Finding all this out is a door to discovering what a father really is. It isn’t closure—you may not get to have that—but it’s an opening to a whole new vista.”

“You have to judge things by the result,”

“Sweetheart, this opens up a world of inclusiveness—and in the end, you have to include yourself. You aren’t bleeding color. You’re holding the light ones and the dark ones. They’re all yours. Ultimately, in all of this, Dani—the postscript is that it’s really called love.”

Donating sperm was not the same as, say, donating a kidney.

Each day I entered my office in a state of even deeper dread. The pile of paper grew, as my ability to tackle it diminished.

They were as foreign from my ancestors in the shtetl as could be. And yet they were—in the strict definition of the word—my ancestors. Who were these people? What did this family have to do with me? Once again I became that child standing outside the warmly lit houses of my neighbors, alone in the fading dusk, longing to be invited inside.