7
Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be? Philosophers, who love nothing more than to argue with one another, do seem to agree that a continued, uninterrupted sense of self, “the indivisible thing which I call myself,” is necessarily implied in a consciousness of our own identity. “The identity of a person is a perfect identity: wherever it is real it admits of no degrees; and it is impossible that a person should be in part the same, and in part different; because a person…is not divisible into parts.” This, from early nineteenth-century philosopher Thomas Reid.
It might have happened that I discovered the truth of my paternity at a moment when I would be staying—as I often do—at home. I might have sat silent for days on end, in my leather chair in my library, surrounded by the thousands of books that make up at least a portion of my consciousness, books that have taught me how to think, how to live. I might have taken my dogs for long, slow walks. I might have treated myself like a postoperative patient, a person who has been carved up and stitched together. With our son on the other side of the country in a summer film program, the house would have been quiet. In late June, the peonies planted along the back of our house had begun to bloom.
Instead, we boarded a flight to Minneapolis. You can’t get from Hartford to San Francisco directly, at least not on Delta, which is where we have our miles. And so I settled into seat 12A, by the window. I pulled my magazines out of my bag and stuffed them into the seat pocket in front of me. A Bachelorette was in the midst of a breakup. A Kardashian was in trouble. I leaned my head against Michael’s shoulder. I didn’t know how to be, what to do next. I saw my dad’s face—not as it was when he was at his happiest but as it appeared in the days after my parents’ accident: gray, his eyes vacant, mouth slack. It seemed the essence of him, the spirit of him, was already gone. He died of his injuries shortly after. And then another image: I’m a young woman meeting my father for lunch on Wall Street. The trading floor doors swing open and out he comes: beaming, alive. He wears a tan jacket, the uniform of all the traders; his head is round and bald. The glasses he always wore are nearly rimless, just a glint of gold at the temples. He smiles the hard-earned smile of a wounded man who lives for pockets of joy and is still able to feel them. He is at his most vital in two places: here, where he works, and in synagogue, where he prays. He wraps me in a bear hug as the crowd mills around us.
I squeezed my eyes shut against hot tears. This felt like a second death. I was losing him all over again. I had become divisible. In part the same. In part different. A fundamental law of identity—my very sense of self—broken open.
Something that never occurred to me as I flew across the country, though it would have been reasonable to contemplate: that my mother might have had an affair. But I just didn’t go there—I didn’t need to. Pieces to an enormous puzzle, the puzzle of my life, in fact, began to click into place with such speed and efficiency that it seemed no other explanation was possible.
The flight attendants made their way down the aisle with the beverage cart. They offered pretzels, granola bars, salted peanuts. The two prior times in my life I had experienced shock and terror—my parents’ accident and Jacob’s illness—it seemed an impossible affront that people were going about their daily business and that in fact no one’s life had changed but mine and those of people I loved. Here I was again. Except a parent’s death, shivering over a child—these were common experiences. You could say my father died or my baby’s sick to just about anybody, and they would respond with compassion and understanding. But how about: I just found out that my dad wasn’t my biological father and that apparently I come from an anonymous sperm donor. I glanced over at Michael’s open computer screen. He booted up Gogo Wi-Fi as soon as we reached ten thousand feet and was on my Ancestry.com page, staring at the small blue human-shaped icon, identified only by the initials A.T. My first cousin. A male. Blue for boys.
What next? I couldn’t imagine what might come next. I am a spinner of narratives, a teller of tales. I have spent my life attempting to make meaning out of random events, to shape stories out of an accretion of senseless, chaotic detail. As a writer and a teacher of writing, this is what I do. What if, I might begin to suggest to a student. How about…? But I had been dealing within the confines of a known world. I am not a fantasist. I have never been drawn to mysteries of the whodunit variety, or to sci-fi. Magic realism interests me, but there are limits to my suspension of disbelief. What never fail to draw me in, however, are secrets. Secrets within families. Secrets we keep out of shame, or self-protectiveness, or denial. Secrets and their corrosive power. Secrets we keep from one another in the name of love.
Out my window, the sky was a vivid blue, streaked with clouds. Below, the fields of Wisconsin appeared in orderly rectangles—the opposite of tohu va’vohu. Evidence of coherence.
“What do you think the profile of a sperm donor would have been, in the early 1960s?” I asked Michael.
“In Philadelphia,” he said, eyes still trained on his computer screen, the blue icon.
“On the campus of Penn.”
What was I asking? Even as I posed the question, the words sounded absurd. The sheer vastness of possibility—any man of a certain age could be my biological father—slammed into a lifetime of singularity and conviction. I wasn’t my father’s daughter. The thought knifed through me, sharper each time I touched it.
“Doctors often donated sperm,” Michael said. “And medical students.”
Was my biological father a medical student? It was nothing more than a working theory, but one that felt right to both of us. What did right even mean? How and where did this shared idea come from? I had never paid any attention to the history of reproductive medicine or artificial insemination. Hell, I hadn’t even watched Masters of Sex, though I’d heard it was pretty good. If I didn’t come from my father, who did I come from?
“A medical student,” I said aloud.
Michael nodded.
“Yeah. A med student at the University of Pennsylvania.”