6
Bradley Airport near Hartford is a place I know well. A frequent traveler, I have my routine. First stop after going through security is always a small futuristic-looking glass cylinder where for two bucks you can place your eyeglasses inside for a power wash. With satisfyingly clean glasses, my typical pattern is to then proceed to the newsstand to stock up on trashy magazines. After, if time allows, I stop at Lavazza for a mediocre cappuccino to drink at the gate. I find the familiar routine comforting when I travel. It cuts through the usual disorientation I tend to feel when leaving home.
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. Michael stayed close to me as we passed a wall of projected images—part of an interactive ad campaign for Travelers insurance—depicting a series of red umbrellas made of roses that broke apart into hundreds of petals as each person passed by. People of every shape and size disrupted the umbrellas, causing the petals to scatter in different ways. Children were especially taken with the images. They stopped, jumped up and down, windmilled their arms. Tohu va’vohu. The Hebrew words—from the second sentence of Genesis—arose in me the way the Hebrew language tended to: like bits of sediment shaken loose from some subterranean place. Tohu va’vohu meant chaos. The world upside down. No—the world before it was the world. My body felt strange and weightless. Was I even here? Maybe I didn’t exist. My whole life had been a dream I dreamt up. As we passed the red umbrellas, I looked to be sure that my shape registered.
We reached the gate forty-five minutes before boarding. Michael had his computer open on his lap and was typing search terms into Google, looking up fertility clinics in Philadelphia that had existed in the early 1960s. His background as a journalist made this kind of research second nature to him. It took only a few minutes to zero in on the place it had to be.
“The Farris Institute for Parenthood,” he said. “On the campus of Penn.”
Institute, my mother had said. Not clinic. Not hospital.
A few swift keystrokes and we were reading up on Dr. Edmond Farris, a trailblazer—world famous, my mother had said—in the field of infertility and artificial insemination. Another detail my mother had mentioned that night came back to me. The famous doctor had pioneered a method to pinpoint when a woman was ovulating. I’d call your father…and he would race.
All around us, the airport hummed with travelers going places. Flights were departing for Atlanta, Detroit, Miami, Chicago. A tired-looking flight attendant walked past, dragging her small bag behind her. The sun had just begun to rise, glowing orange over the tarmac. The words blurred together: sterility, infertility, insemination. And then another couple of words connected with the Farris Institute for Parenthood: sperm donor. The term seemed to be sharper than all the rest. Sperm donor. I looked up from Michael’s screen and all I saw were men: young men, old men, very old men. Men holding babies. Fat men wearing baseball caps. Men in tank tops and track pants. Men in button-downs and cardigans. If my father wasn’t my father, who was my father? If my father wasn’t my father, who was I?
That February night nearly thirty years ago, after dropping my mother off at her apartment, I went home and called Susie.
“Did you know anything about Dad and Irene having fertility problems?”
“That sounds familiar. I was a teenager, but I knew something was up.”
I told Susie what my mother had said. Philadelphia, the institute, the famous doctor, the slow sperm, the urgency, her biological clock tick-tick-ticking, our father’s mad dash from New York so they could make a baby.
Susie paused. “And she told you it was definitely Dad’s sperm that was used?”
My hand tightened around the phone. My stomach clenched as it often did around my half sister.
“Of course it was Dad’s sperm!”
“You might want to look into it,” she said. “They used to mix sperm in those days.”
Mix sperm. Once you hear a phrase like that you never forget it. Two words that crash against each other, like a nonsensical Mad Libs fill-in-the-blank. Susie said it the way she said most things—in a practiced, seemingly casual way. But beneath it was a current of something alive. She was telling me that I should look into the possibility that we were not sisters. That our father was hers—not mine. My psychoanalyst half sister was expressing a very deep and perhaps not wholly conscious wish: she would have preferred that I had not been born.
I remember my own anger and bitter humor. Analyze that, I said to friends. But I did bring it up to my mother the next time we were together. Here is where my memory becomes hazy. We might have been walking the streets of the Upper West Side. She walked a lot in those days to strengthen her legs.
“Mom, I heard something—going back to what you told me about what happened in Philadelphia—”
My mother was unreadable to me, not only in that moment but in every moment. She never let her true self be seen. Her dark eyes often quivered disconcertingly, and when she smiled it was a careful smile—as if smiling was something she practiced in private.
“I heard that sometimes they would mix the sperm…?”
I may not remember whether we were on Broadway or West End or Riverside Drive, but I am clear on one thing: there was no ripple, no tensing, no quick blink. Not a glimmer of surprise or distress crossed my mother’s face. She exhibited no confusion at the bizarre phrase.
“Do you think,” she responded, “that your father would ever have agreed to that? It would have meant he wouldn’t have known if his child was Jewish.”
My father’s life had been shaped by the rules of observant Judaism. He was a black-and-white thinker. Good, bad, right, wrong. He was also a person who was clearheaded and interested in the truth. 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?”