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.