One and the Same

by Abigail Pogrebin

  Does he feel like he lost his brother?

  Mark shakes his head. “I feel there are things about Clair that are gone. Some things I’m glad are gone: some of the anger and the tendencies to be aggressive—those qualities that I saw in Alex that I feared a little bit or didn’t like. I see those are gone and I don’t miss them at all. And the qualities that I always enjoyed about Alex, I still see in Clair today. … It’s amazing just to see how far she has come.”

  And he’d still say she’s his identical twin, though they’re not a match anymore?

  “Of course,” Mark replies.

  I wonder, chiefly because they share the same DNA blueprint, whether Mark has had similar urges to have a different body.

  “I’m happy with my penis,” he replies. “But I wouldn’t say the whole of me is male. I agree with Clair that there are aspects of me that are female.”

  “You have worried about people wondering if you’re trans,” Clair reminds him, meaning transsexual.

  “Now people think Clair’s voice is too low”—Mark smiles—”but for years, my voice has been too high. People have inbred in them that ‘this is what a man sounds like; this is what a woman sounds like.’”

  Though Clair made perhaps the most dramatic symbolic separation of any twin I’ve met or known, I find it remarkable the extent to which her breaking away has brought them closer than ever. “If a week goes by, I totally need to see him,” Clair says. “I think I’ll always have that feeling of wanting to connect with someone I’ve loved for my entire life.” Though they spent years apart during and after boarding school, they now choose to live in the same city, talk daily, and honor a weekly date every Friday. Mark’s longtime boyfriend, David, is understanding that Mark’s twin takes precedence.

  “There’s just a huge responsibility I feel to be there for her,” Mark admits. “It can take me away from my own life.”

  Clair’s decision to “transition” from male to female has been the dominant event of their lives for a while now—because it was such a radical, public metamorphosis; because their mother was embarrassed and vehemently resistant for so long; because it required drastic, expensive medical procedures; and because they chose to put their story on film.

  “There will be times Mark feels more caught up in my own experience,” Clair says almost apologetically. “The worst part of being a twin is feeling responsible for the other person’s situation, and feeling like you have some control over it. When you don’t have control, it can feel like heartache. I really don’t want to see him in pain or for him to see me in pain.”

  Mark seems to want to make clear that he doesn’t resent for a moment being his twin’s chief supporter, and, in some sense, her supporting player. “She’s still the wisest, strongest person I’ve ever met,” he tells me. “I feel honored to be part of her life.”

  ROBIN: I have really felt like what’s interesting to me about your doing this book project is I feel like there’s a huge amount we take for granted. It’s almost an ignorance of what really is there between us. It’s this major, defining thing that I haven’t really paid attention to, given credence to, as a shaping element. That’s true for every permutation of it. There’s a sense with which I carry you with me all the time. I think back to those childhood days as halcyon days. I kind of preferred a blissful ignorance. All the stuff now that weighs on me is more of a burden. I kind of liked the uncritical time, when it was all just great. But I realize that that’s why it’s maybe rearing its head now. I’m sure there are things that the research would turn up about twins’ attachment that would tell me something about myself, that has to do with not appreciating what the space would be without you. The degree to which I can go forth in the world because of you, all of that. It hasn’t been a point of inquiry for me.

  ABIGAIL: But when you think about how your life would be different if I were gone?

  ROBIN: It would be broken.

  • •

  8 AND THEN THERE WAS ONE

  So when I looked into a mirror, even the small things that made my face my own made my face into his, and if I waited long enough he would begin to speak to me. He would tell me about heaven, about all sorts of little details. … He said he was watching me all the time. … And always the last thing he said to me was, “When are you going to come and be with me again?”

  —Chris Adrian, “Stab,” A Better Angel: Stories

  “A twin doesn’t know what alone means until you lose your twin.”

  Gregory Hoffman is a broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced Long Island native, dressed in a U.S. Open windbreaker when we meet over a burger, medium rare, in a pub-like restaurant called Churchill’s in Rockville Centre. He lost his identical twin, Stephen, in the Twin Towers on 9/11, when they were both thirty-six years old.

  There is no way to overstate the emotional wreckage; Gregory was undone by it. “Those times I’ve thought about killing myself, I’d say, What would Stephen want me to do now? When I asked myself that question, the right answer was always, Stay alive. Sometimes I have to divorce myself from the pain I’m in, and put myself in a position of being able to ask that question. That’s been helpful through this.”

  He still hasn’t gotten “through” it, and he seems to bristle at the idea that he’s supposed to. “I hate the words move on,” Hoffman says briskly. “You move forward. There’s no moving on.”

  Stephen Hoffman, three minutes Gregory’s junior and a bond broker at Cantor Fitzgerald, was—even according to his twin—the more gregarious of the two, which is hard to imagine, because Gregory’s personality is outsized: energetic, high-volume, and bursting with twinship. More than any one thing he says about it, what comes through is rapture at their alliance—an unbreachable, almost hallowed union.

  “One day you talk to somebody,” Gregory says, “and the next day, they’re just gone. I remember the first night I went home by myself and I was hyperventilating. I was looking at pictures; they weren’t enough. I had to watch Stephen talk; I had to see him move. I started watching football tapes from when we were coaching together. I needed to see him alive. I had never had such a strong urge, like I couldn’t breathe. I was going through major twin withdrawal.”

  Gregory remembers the sickening escalation of that awful Tuesday morning. “I’m looking at the North Tower on television and I’m counting down from the top of the building, trying to see his floor. And I say to myself, If that plane flew into their floor, they’re all dead. People were calling in: ‘Have you heard from Stephen?’ I was initially calm. I said, ‘Stephen was in the Towers in ‘93 and he got out; he’s going to get out again.’ But I remember looking at the screen and saying, ‘How the hell are they going to put out that damn fire?’ So I’m calling him on the phone, and suddenly he picks up. And I say, ‘Steve! It’s Greg!’ To hear his voice …”

  Greg looks so relieved for a split second that I actually have the fleeting hope maybe the story can turn out differently. “I’m sure it was so reassuring to hear my voice, too,” he continues. “He says, ‘Greg, I’m okay,’ and the next thing you know it’s 9:02, and the second plane smashes in. I’m watching CNBC on my computer screen at work, and it was just disbelief. I hear Stephen say, ‘Oh my God. Look at that.’ He was talking to somebody, and then the cell phones went dead.”

  The night before 9/11, Greg left Stephen a phone message, suggesting they go surfing at dawn near their homes on Long Island; they often started the workday that way. “If we had gone surfing, he wouldn’t have been at his desk at eight o’clock,” Greg says. “How often I’ve said to myself, If I’d only have made him go surfing.”

  Hoffman seems eager to recount this nightmare to a fellow twin. (He has signed all his e-mails to me “In twinship.”) “I have trouble explaining this to people,” he says. “I tell them, ‘Remember when the North Tower was burnt out like a shell but still standing; to me, that’s what a twinless twin is.’ You’re still there, but you’re not. And you never will be. There’s not a day or a m
oment that goes by that I don’t think about him. But he’s alive in my conversations, like this one. If you want someone to truly be dead, stop talking about him. If you ask me why it’s so great to tell you all this, it’s because it keeps him alive. I could talk about Stephen all night.”

  He takes a bite of his burger.

  “You know how twinship is such a tactile thing,” he continues. “You reach out and touch your sister. Imagine suddenly you don’t have that anymore. I have two beautiful daughters, a beautiful wife, ten other brothers and sisters, my mom and dad, great friends, but I still felt like I was in an enormous, inescapable black hole. I remember Saint Patrick’s Day, 2003, I was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge; I stopped and I looked out over the edge and I said to myself, Three steps and my pain is gone. That’s how bad it got sometimes. You just wanted the pain to stop.” He calls to mind this description in Diane Setterfield’s novel The Thirteenth Tale: “The separation of twins is no ordinary separation. Imagine surviving an earthquake. When you come to, you find the world unrecognizable. The horizon is in a different place. The sun has changed color. Nothing remains of the terrain you know. As for you, you are alive. But it’s not the same as living. It’s no wonder the survivors of such disasters so often wish they had perished with the others.”

  Gregory’s wife, Aileen, a social worker, is a petite, attractive woman dressed in a blazer and slacks when I meet her separately in my apartment. “He really spiraled down,” she says in a calming voice that suits her profession. “It has changed him profoundly. There are some days that I feel like we’re starting all over again. I’m grateful I have Gregory alive. But it comes with a huge change.”

  Aileen decided to track down other twin survivors of 9/11 so that Gregory could connect with people going through the same unique torment. She found seventeen twins at first, but when the New York Times ran an article about her search, other twins came forward. “I ultimately found forty-five twins,” Aileen recalls. “We had two social events when we brought all the twinless twins—I hate that phrase—together. It was very moving.”

  She and Greg also attended an annual gathering of twin survivors, organized by a group called Twinless Twins, which has ten chapters in the United States and four in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. “Twins spend four days telling each other sad stories about how they lost their twins,” Aileen explains. “In some ways, it really saved Greg.” In July 2008, some eighty people attended the Twinless Twins gathering in Toronto, according to the National Post. One twin explained why the loss is acute, whenever it happens: “You meet your twin before you meet your mother.” Another twin, Davona Patterson, forty-four, who lost her twin to cancer, told the paper, “It’s not an occasional breakdown, it’s an everyday breakdown. There’s only one of me now.”

  Gregory tells me that Aileen could fathom his bottomless anguish, but it was more complicated dealing with Stephen’s wife. “Gabrielle and I had The Fight—about which is more important, a spouse or a twin,” Greg says soberly. “And I said, ‘Gabrielle, don’t ask me to answer that question. Because you’re not going to like the answer.’ She was going through her shit and I was going through mine, but I wasn’t going to minimize my twinship. I told her, ‘Stephen and I were together since we were conceived.’ I wasn’t going to stand there and say I loved him more, but one thing I did say was, ‘You can go find another husband; I can’t go find another twin.’ She stormed out, yelled at me. It was hurtful to her. And I’ve never brought it up again.”

  Aileen, who remains extremely close to her sister-in-law (they have daughters fourteen months apart), saw the friction building between Greg and Gabrielle. “People were trying to measure who had more grief,” Aileen says. “I think when you’re in pain, especially in a tragedy like this, you want to stand on the rooftops and say, ‘I’m in so much pain.’ And if you have a way to measure it, to say that one is more than the other, you try.”

  Aileen describes the Hoffman twins’ friendship as “magnificent.” She met them her first day at Buffalo State College (she was a freshman; they were seniors) and remembers being dazzled. “They were electric.” She smiles. “Literally the friendliest guys you’ve ever met in your life.” Both loud, both economics majors, both Republicans, both working at the student union flipping eggs, they talked very fast, and were the hub of the social scene. “Everybody knew Gregory and Stephen,” she says decisively. “The two most popular guys on campus.”

  Even on her wedding day, Aileen says, Greg and Steve were still riffing on their twinship. “Gregory wore a button that said ‘I’m the groom’ ”—Aileen laughs—“and Stephen wore one that said ‘I’m the best man.’ And people still got them mixed up. When the wedding was all said and done and we went back to my house, Greg and Stephen were saying good-bye to each other outside; they were hugging, and they kept touching each other. It was as if they were saying good-bye to that chapter of their life.”

  Gregory admits he is still grappling with how to be an uncle to his twin’s daughter, Madeline, eleven, when we meet, without appearing to insinuate himself as a replacement father. “When Madeline hugs me, I don’t mind if she pretends it’s her dad she’s hugging. Because I know how much I look like him. I remember right after he died, she said, ‘Uncle Greg, can I call you “Daddy” now?’ What an emotional bomb that was. I said, ‘Madeline, your dad is your dad. Not that I mind being called that, but it’s not fair to him. I’m never going to replace your dad.’ That’s what I said to her when she was six years old.”

  It’s clearly a sensitive subject—that he doesn’t see Madeline more often; he’s not sure how much Gabrielle wants him around, and he admits he doesn’t always know how to be with his niece. “I feel terrible about that,” he says. “I ask myself, Would Steve be happy with the time I’m spending with Mad? No, he wouldn’t be. But he probably understands.”

  I ask if Gregory has ever wished he could trade places with his brother.

  “The answer is, I wouldn’t want Stephen to go through this kind of pain. He had a horrible death—I can’t imagine what a horrible two hours he had, but then it was over and he was at peace. For me, it’s five years and counting, and I wouldn’t wish this on him. It’s the one downside of being a twin: if you’re the one who survives losing the other one. It’s knowing what you had and knowing you’ll never, ever, ever have anything quite like it again.”

  I tell him that I doubt Robin and I think about the fact that one of us could be gone at any moment. “You shouldn’t,” Gregory insists. “But recognize what you have. Stephen and I always understood how great we had it. My sense from you is that you and Robin don’t take each other for granted. That’s not going to change the fact, Abby, that one day it’s going to happen to one of you. And you know what? It sucks.”

  Hoffman gave me not only a glimpse of destabilizing sorrow but also what felt like an urgent message: Live consciously. Know that you can’t fathom what you would be—or would no longer be—alone.

  I’ve never thought of myself as being held together by Robin but neither have I considered whether I’d fall apart or be diminished without her. Hoffman’s description that “you’re still there, but you’re not” tells me that I might ultimately be not just one without Robin, but less than one. He suggested she’s more integral to my daily strength and character than I realize. Who am I without my twin? Do any of us twins discover that without being forced to?

  Nancy Segal’s studies on twin bereavement found not only that identical twins have higher initial “grief intensity ratings” than fraternal twins but that the grief ratings for twins are equal to those for bereaved spouses. My guess is that most twins would expect those results.

  In his book Wish I Could Be There, Allen Shawn talks about his lost twin, Mary, and maintains that the age-old maxim “We are born alone and we die alone” is inadequate in his case: “For twins, this statement needs to be amended. We are born with company, but we die alone.”

  Former Baywatch actress Alex
andra Paul said five words in the middle of our interview that make her weep abruptly: “If something happened to her …” She couldn’t continue for a moment. And then she echoed Gregory Hoffman exactly: “It would be worse than if my husband died. You can fall in love again, but you can never get another twin.”

  Liza and Jamie Persky, near forty when I interviewed them at a Manhattan café, admitted that they constantly think the worst when they can’t reach each other. “If either one of us is not where we say we’re going to be, we think we’re dead,” Liza stated.

  “We think we’re dead all the time,” Jamie affirmed. “And people will hear about it. Like I’ll get home and there will be like eighteen phone messages: ‘Your sister thinks you’re dead.’”

  Liza: “I panic.”

  Jamie: “We also have a code—”

  Liza: “We made a code thirty years ago that if anything was ever wrong with one of us, like if you have a gunman holding a gun to your head and you can’t let on, you’ll pick up the phone, and the code is—”

  In unison: “How’s Dale?”

  Jamie: “That was our Irish setter when we were like nine.”

  Liza: “We know if you ever hear that, then you’re really in trouble.”

  The world of twin loss—and it feels like a whole universe once you enter it—extends powerfully to parents who have lost a twin. One pioneering organization, CLIMB—the Center for Loss in Multiple Birth—was started in Alaska in 1986 by Jean Kollantai, who lost one of her fraternal-twin sons just days before his birth; his brother emerged healthy.

  I meet Kollantai, forty-seven, at the Ghent International Twins Conference. She’s dressed in a patterned blue skirt and black sandals, and we sit in a grassy courtyard with our egg-salad sandwiches on our laps. “My introduction to parenthood,” she says in a gentle voice, “was literally holding these two full-term babies, where one was alive and one was dead.”