by Dani Shapiro
Once, in my twenties, I actually kept a log of how many times I heard that I didn’t look Jewish in a single day. Shapiro your married name? I’ve never seen a Jewish girl who looks like you. At times, it troubled and angered me. What did it mean, to not “look” Jewish? Certainly there were plenty of blond, blue-eyed Jews. The comments struck me as veiled anti-Semitism when they came from non-Jews, and self-hating when spoken by Jews. What was most uncomfortable—but also a potent and shameful source of secret pride—was that I understood that it was often meant as a compliment. I was pretty in a way that couldn’t possibly be Jewish. Pretty in a 48 percent French, Irish, English, German way, as it turns out.
This is what Jewish looks like, I would think, a kind of internal fuck you. I led with being Jewish wherever I went in the world. It was like a parlor trick, something guaranteed to produce interest, even amazement. You, Jewish? No way. And I would respond by dutifully reciting my family’s yichis, a Yiddish word that translates to wellborn. I would reel off my credentials: went to a yeshiva. Raised Orthodox. Yep, kosher. Two sinks, two dishwashers, the whole deal.
17
And something I didn’t remember, not until I was reminded of it eight months after that morning in Japantown. I had traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend a large annual writers’ conference where I ran into an old friend whom I hadn’t seen since we were in our twenties. As we stood in the cavernous, crowded exhibition hall, we caught up about kids, husbands, books, teaching. It never occurred to me to share my recent discovery with her. It wasn’t the time or place, and besides, we hardly even knew each other anymore. Just before I was about to move on to the next booth, she referred back to the long-ago summer when we first met as young writers with fellowships to Bread Loaf, a conference in Middlebury, Vermont.
“When I think of you, I think of one particular night,” she said. “A bunch of us were sitting around a picnic table after dinner—the fellows and the faculty—do you remember?”
She paused and looked at me searchingly. The faculty at Bread Loaf was made up of literary giants. A few of the fellows had since gone on to become giants themselves. Had something happened that night?
“Mark Strand stared at you across the table and said, You aren’t Jewish. He declared it. Like it was a fact. In front of everybody. He wouldn’t let it go. He just kept staring. You aren’t Jewish. There’s no possibility you’re Jewish.”
My old friend’s words sank in, and the noise of the D.C. conference hall receded around me as if someone had just hit the mute button. The familiar refrain now meant something altogether different, and no part of me could shrug it off.
“There was such an edge to it,” she went on. “He was a poet, a man who knew precisely the value and import of language. He was totally aware of the impact of his words. It was like he was stripping you of who you were. He just kept repeating it over and over again. He got angrier and angrier, as if he thought you were lying.”
If pressed, I wouldn’t have been able to place myself at that picnic table. Whatever had happened that night was buried beneath layers of cotton wool. Nor would I have been able to say for certain that I had ever met Mark Strand. I could picture his craggy, handsome face. He looked a bit like Clint Eastwood. He was a romantic figure, Poet Laureate of the United States, a hero of mine. Just recently I had come across a photograph on Instagram of Strand’s grave in upstate New York. His tombstone, polished but left rough on top, was stark against the snow. MARK STRAND, POET. 1934–2014. He died at eighty. Across the bottom of the tombstone, a line from a poem of his own: WHEREVER I AM, I AM WHAT IS MISSING.
“I’ve never forgotten that moment,” my friend said. “You were so poised in your response to him. You didn’t give away what you must have been feeling. I wondered what that poise was costing you.”
“I don’t recall any of this,” I said softly.
Little blondie.
* * *
—
As it turned out, Mark Strand knew something about me that I didn’t know. He set his gaze on me as if applying a contour map. It wasn’t just my blond hair and blue eyes. No—this had to do with angles, bone structure, skin tone—this was data that didn’t add up. My dismissal of that clearly offended him. Here was a highly perceptive person—a poet I admired to such a degree that I later used a line from a poem of his as an epigraph to one of my novels—demanding that I take a good hard look at myself.
How was it that I had never suspected? Not even after my mother had let slip the method of my conception? I was in my early thirties that summer at Bread Loaf. It had been only a half dozen years since Susie had told me about the practice of mixing sperm. It seems a sliver of doubt would have wedged itself within me. But there was no doubt. No suspicion. I staunchly ignored the evidence. Instead, I sat, glib and certain under the starry Vermont sky, incurious about why this kept happening, why Mark Strand felt moved to speak with such conviction.
Story of my life was what I usually said with a shrug and a sigh. A phrase that seemed to cost me nothing. Story of my life.
18
I had a full day ahead of me in San Francisco. I suppose I could have canceled my long-scheduled lunch and our evening plans, but what was I going to do instead? Climb back into bed? If I stayed in the hotel room, I knew what would happen. I would check my email every five minutes, hoping to receive a reply from Benjamin Walden. I would probably do that anyway, but at least I’d be on the move. Who knew how long it would take him to write back—that is, if he was ever going to write back? Maybe he was out of the country. Or had fallen ill. Or maybe we were wrong, completely wrong about him, about everything. Was it possible? I kept asking Michael whether there was still some chance that all this was a crazy hallucination, a bunch of coincidences arranged so that they only appeared to be facts.
But this was shock talking. This is what shock does. The trapped, frozen mind looks to rearrange the data. In a recursive loop, I kept drifting back to the beginning: the Ancestry.com results, Philadelphia, A.T., Bethany Thomas, University of Pennsylvania, medical student, Ben Walden. I pored over the long-ago conversation with my mother, mining it for further clues. I could hardly bear to think of my father. To think of my father would bring him close to me, and then he’d be able to see what was going on. This is how my thinking went. I didn’t want to break my dead father’s heart.
Michael and I wandered through the sprawling structure called the Japan Center next to our hotel. Even in midmorning, the place was filled with tourists. Japanese families snapped photos beneath the five-story concrete Peace Pagoda. We walked the length of the indoor mall, past Japanese, Chinese, Korean restaurants, boutiques. A hair salon, a bakery. In a paper goods store, I combed the aisles, looking for the perfect notebook. Writers tend to be fetishistic about our materials, and I am no exception. Spiral-bound, perfect-bound, lined, unlined, pocket-size—as if the notebook itself might make a difference. Instead, I ended up buying the packages of index cards, understanding something I couldn’t have articulated: my life was now in fragments I would need to shuffle and reshuffle in any attempt to make sense of it.
* * *
—
My lunch date was with a friend whom I hadn’t seen since she’d moved to the West Coast a couple of years earlier. We were meeting at a vegan restaurant in the Mission. When I had made plans with her, weeks ago, I thought we’d cover the usual subjects: work, family, politics, gossip. Now, the conversation was probably going to go a little differently. How could I talk about what was happening to me? How could I not?
In the back of a taxi on my way to the Mission, I checked my phone. I had five new emails, and as I scrolled through them I felt a disconcerting emptiness. It had been two hours since I’d sent the note to Benjamin Walden. He lived in Portland. We were in the same time zone. Wouldn’t he have checked his email by now? I was insanely, unreasonably impatient. Refresh, refresh.
I i
magined a home in the Pacific Northwest—just a short flight from where I now stood on the corner of Valencia and Mission. I pictured the old man with white hair and blue eyes wearing khakis and a fleece. Perhaps at that very moment, he was pulling a chair up to his desk, which was covered with papers and medical journals. By his side, a steaming earthenware mug of tea. There would be a picture window behind the desk that overlooked a backyard shaded by aspen and poplar trees. As a novelist, the characters I create are as real to me as the people in my everyday life. But this was no character. The noise in my head was so loud I wondered if it might travel all the way from San Francisco to Portland. Maybe just then Benjamin Walden was powering on his desktop computer and opening his email, scanning past fund-raising requests from the Democrats (it seemed all but certain that he was a Democrat), notices from his golf club (he looked like a golfer), and stopping at an email with the subject line Important Letter.
* * *
—
The restaurant my friend had chosen for our lunch was called Gracias Madre. The irony of the name didn’t strike me, and it isn’t until a year later when I try to piece together the events of that day that I look back in my calendar and can’t help but laugh. Gracias Madre. As I floated, dizzy and spectral as a junkie, down Mission on my way to the restaurant, it wasn’t my mother who was on my mind—and certainly I wasn’t in the mood to thank her. I had decided, if anything that day can be called a decision, that my parents had been completely in the dark about the circumstances of my conception. It had been an accident. A mistake. Or maybe a betrayal of them by someone at the institute. My parents had spent their lives not knowing, same as me. No other explanation was bearable.
19
A cool façade got me through the day. The inner avalanche was somehow not apparent on the outside—this had always been the case with me. I held myself together even as I worried that I might pass out. I told my friend the story over lunch at Gracias Madre, aware that I was recounting it, not feeling it. I heard the words coming out of my mouth, I registered her kind, stricken face across the table, but part of me had levitated and was now hovering, as if the story weren’t my own.
This hovering continued that evening in San Francisco. Dinner had been planned months in advance with a couple we adored. The evening, as we had envisioned it, would be boozy, fun, a celebration of friendship. As Michael and I walked from our hotel to their Pacific Heights town house, I continued to fidget with my phone. The whole day had gone by without word from Benjamin Walden. Maybe he wouldn’t write me back. But if he didn’t write me back, wasn’t that a certain kind of proof? Dear Ms. Shapiro, I’m sorry but you’re mistaken. Dear Ms. Shapiro, I was never a sperm donor. Dear Ms. Shapiro, You’re out of your fucking mind.
What I remember: a marvelous, fairy-tale house, the front parlor where we gathered for drinks before heading out to a bistro a few blocks away. A vodka martini with two olives in a long-stemmed glass. I had texted earlier that day to let them know that I had, as I put it, seismic news. It seemed an appropriate choice of words. It was San Francisco, after all. Good seismic or bad seismic? the wife had written back. Just seismic. They looked at us expectantly. What was the news? Michael and I found ourselves tag-teaming the story as if we were actors in a play—a darkly comedic play—tripping over one another, mining the story, beat by dramatic beat. The vodka was having the desired effect. I was becoming numb, but also voluble. It was a good story. A great story. I had pretty much lost sight of the fact that it was my story. We had them laughing. We had them on the edges of their seats. We spent most of the evening talking about it, over steak frites and good French wine.
The next day I received a text: Any word from the good doctor? The wife’s tone was breezy and dismissive, unlike her. She was usually highly sensitive, tuned in. I had begun to despair about ever hearing from Benjamin Walden. I had double- and triple-checked his email address to be sure I had gotten it right. Of course, this was absurd. What was I thinking? That Benjamin Walden would leap to respond to what must have been a bombshell? But as I careened through the hours, I had no patience, no capacity to be measured. The good doctor was my biological father. Meanwhile, the texts continued. Keep us posted with updates! I was hurt by her tone. How could she not understand that this wasn’t a soap opera, this was my life? But later, much later, I came to understand that I had presented it as entertainment. So had Michael. It was a default and a defense; if we were able to shape it into a story, perhaps it would hurt less.
That night, a second night we had planned—a dinner party in the fairy-tale house—I went in resolved that I wasn’t going to say a word. I wasn’t going to hijack their evening. It wasn’t their fault that my life had blown up. It was a table of extraordinary raconteurs, and for whole minutes at a time, I was able to forget that the ground beneath me had cracked wide open. I ate the seafood paella, drank more than my share of wine. I laughed, told other, easier stories, clinked glasses. I met Michael’s eyes across the table. I’ve got you, those eyes said.
It continued to seem oddly possible to go on living my life as if nothing had happened. Nothing had, in fact, happened. It had been uncovered, but it wasn’t new. It had always been the case. My father had never been my father. A doctor from Portland had always been my father. I was not who I thought I had been. But I was who I had always been.
The next morning, when I awoke, I could wait no longer. Certainly, I should have given it more than two days. The templates Jennifer Mendelsohn had spoken of would have me waiting weeks, months, possibly forever. Eventually, I’ll read sample letters online—generally meant for parents of donor-conceived children who wish to contact their anonymous sperm donors—that contain phrases like priceless gift and unbelievably lucky and grateful. Experts counsel patience. If you receive no response at all you must respect the donor’s wish for privacy. When breaking the barrier of silence with your child’s donor, be sincere and stay hopeful.
To: Dr. Benjamin Walden
From: Dani Shapiro
Subject: Regarding my letter
Dear Dr. Walden,
I realize my letter must have been shocking to you and respect that you may need to process this information before deciding how to respond. I’d be grateful, though, just to know that you received it. I’m reeling from this myself. It has turned the entire narrative of my life upside down. Of course, if you haven’t received it, I’ll resend.
Thanks. I hope to hear from you.
Dani
20
To: Dani Shapiro
From: Dr. Benjamin Walden
Subject: re: Regarding my letter
Dear Ms. Shapiro,
I apologize for the delay answering. We were out of town plus it’s taking some time to process the information you sent. I have shared this with my wife and we are thinking this over. We now reside in a retirement community and are enjoying our children and grandchildren. If you wish to send more information, we’ll be glad to review it.
Best regards,
Ben Walden
As a girl, I wasn’t allowed to study Talmud, the ancient collection of texts in which rabbis and scholars explored and dissected the meaning of every word in the Old Testament. The word itself, talmud, means to learn. As the boys read the Talmud, we girls studied the less-interesting Dinim, which were the laws themselves. Still, I credit my yeshiva education with a love I’ve always had for parsing language. I read Ben Walden’s email aloud to Michael as we packed up our hotel room in Japantown. It arrived two hours after I had sent the inappropriately prodding, non-template follow-up. I felt a powerful and immediate sense of vindication. I had so little to go on—nothing but instincts—and my instincts thus far hadn’t led me astray. The good doctor had responded to my simple, human plea.
I noticed that he used the word plus, rather than and. I didn’t know what it signified, except that it was an interesting linguistic choice. Shared
this with my wife. Thinking this over. It could mean only one thing: he had indeed been a sperm donor. The math added up for him. Seventy-eight minus fifty-four equals twenty-four. Minus nine months equals twenty-three. The age he would have been as a young medical student at Penn. I purposely hadn’t included details—Farris Institute, University of Pennsylvania—in my initial letter to him. I had asked him if it made sense, and this was his response. Yes. Yes it made sense.
We now reside in a retirement community and are enjoying our children and grandchildren. I interpreted this as a request, even though he had asked me for nothing. Don’t disrupt our lives was the subtext pulsing just beneath those words. Don’t hurt us. How old was too old for a surprise? And then finally, that they—Ben Walden and his wife—would gladly review any further information I sent. The pronoun, throughout: we.
I had included a link to my website in that first letter. This, too, I did for a reason. I may have been in a feral state when I composed it—an animal bent on survival—but within that state I had a survivor’s clarity. I wanted him to see that this woman claiming to be his biological child was not crazy. She wasn’t after his money. Her public persona, at least, was one of a relatively sane and successful person. She had written quite a few books. She had taught at an Ivy League university. She seemed like someone he might even be proud to have fathered.
