30
Before summer came to an end, I forced myself to fly to Chicago to see my father’s sister, Shirley. It was not a trip I wanted to make. In all the exploration I’d done thus far—my conversation with my mother’s best friend, Charlotte; my visit to Rabbi Lookstein—nothing had terrified me as much as coming face-to-face with my beloved aunt. At first, I thought I’d never tell her—that at the age of ninety-three, this was something she didn’t need to know. But Michael had pushed me. Shirley might know something, he’d said. And he had a point. She and my father had been very close. If he had confided in anyone—that is, if he’d had anything to confide—it might have been her.
I was alone in the backseat of a town car on the outskirts of Chicago, searching for signs of Jewish life. It felt like we had been driving for hours, though it had been no more than forty minutes. Strip malls gave way to the flat grid of a suburban neighborhood. The driver turned on Golda Meir Boulevard. I spied a kosher butcher, a yeshiva, a lone Hasid in a long black coat and black hat walking down a side street lined with ranch houses and split-levels. When Jacob and I had visited the year before, we had arrived in the dark. Through the tinted window I saw a woman wearing a wig, holding the hand of a small boy with payes. I knew that Shirley’s house must be close. As I neared her home, I fought an overpowering urge to ask my driver to turn around and head back to the airport.
In the years after my father’s death, Shirley and I had grown increasingly connected. We spoke by phone often, and many times she had told me that she’d promised my father she’d look out for me. Though Shirley was my father’s younger sister, she had always been his protector, and he had turned to her in times of emotional peril. It was she he had called when he learned that his young fiancée was terminally ill. It was she to whom he had confessed, in later years, his unhappiness in his marriage to my mother. During the time that my father and mother struggled to have a baby, he might have unburdened himself to Shirley.
I was back to the same lurching, destabilizing fear that came over me each time I was about to speak with anyone who might, in an instant, illuminate the extent of my parents’ actions and awareness. Just as when I’d spoken with Charlotte, and Rabbi Lookstein, the possibility existed that I would discover with absolute certainty that my parents had colluded to keep my identity a secret from me. Wendy Kramer had summarily dismissed my belief that my parents hadn’t known. Or, at the very least, that my mother hadn’t known. Which story would ease your heart? Lookstein had asked me. The true one, I had answered. But at any moment, the truth could flatten me.
On the flight to Chicago, I went over some correspondence I’d had with the author of a dissertation on the history of fertility. As for records, most clinics purposefully destroyed them, she wrote. I stared at the word destroyed, willing the letters to rearrange themselves. I still held out the hope that a dusty file cabinet in the basement archives of Penn, or in the attic of one of Edmond Farris’s three children, would contain notes, signatures, evidence. In holding with psychological theories of the time, men were usually told to forget that the procedure had ever happened if they used a donor. Could my father—could any father—have forgotten that the procedure had ever happened?
My car pulled away and I walked up the front steps to my cousin Joanne’s home, where Shirley now lived. Another car would pick me up in four hours. Four hours, in which I would tell my aunt—who had once described herself to me as a weaver’s daughter—that she and I were not threads in the same tapestry; that we were not related by blood; that her much-adored older brother was not my father.
Joanne opened the door and ushered me inside warmly. I was still holding a Starbucks cup from the airport. Was Starbucks kosher enough? I wasn’t sure.
“Is this okay?” I gestured to the cup.
If it wasn’t, she didn’t embarrass me.
“Of course. Mom’s been expecting you.”
Joanne led me into a sitting room. There, in the corner, was a framed photograph of Joseph Soloveitchik, the same rabbi whose portrait graced Lookstein’s office at Ramaz. A desk was surrounded by bookcases filled with leather-bound Hebrew volumes. On several long polished tables—just as had been the case in Shirley’s home near Boston and in my grandmother’s apartment in New York City—there were literally hundreds of family photographs. Perhaps as the eldest daughter, Joanne had inherited them. Being a part of this vast array had always comforted me, even as it had confused me. I was the lone pale, blond child in the sea of dark-haired, dark-eyed grandchildren and great-grandchildren—my otherness and difference glaringly evident. Yet I had never had any doubt that I was part of the chain that reached back and back through the generations, unbroken. As I stood in my cousin Joanne’s sitting room, now knowing better, it felt as if the links of that chain were in pieces on the floor all around me.
Shirley emerged from her living quarters behind the sitting room, and we held each other close. She wore a dark skirt and a gray silk blouse, her silver hair pulled back into a low bun. She was unadorned. No makeup. No necklace, no earrings. Her plain gold wedding ring the only decoration on her elegant, supple hands. A Juilliard-trained pianist, she had still been able to sit at the keyboard and play Brahms ballades well into her eighties.
She had become smaller with each passing year. As I hugged her, the top of her head rested beneath my chin.
“Come into my room, sweetheart, before we sit down. There’s something I want to show you.”
I followed Shirley into her bedroom. She had managed to distill the contents of her seven-bedroom home near Boston into a simple, almost monastic space that still contained the essence of her life. Black-and-white portraits of her four children were arranged on a wall opposite her small, well-made bed. A photograph of her late husband, my uncle Moe, was crowded onto a bookshelf along with those of her two brothers, my dad and Uncle Harvey. All of them, gone. She was the last of her generation. A pair of ancient baby shoes sat atop a pile of Shakespeare plays. All of my books—five novels, three memoirs—were nestled among volumes of Judaica. My heart quickened as I had the devastating thought: Would she keep my books on her bookshelf, once she knew the truth? Would it matter to her—would she somehow blame me for not being her brother’s daughter?
A laminated newspaper clipping from an advice column, old and yellowed, hung on the wall near the bedroom door. It seemed so out-of-place amid the religious artifacts in Shirley’s room, in a place of prominence where she would see it each day as she left her living quarters.
Q: You mentioned the poem James Garner recites in the Chevy Tahoe ad. Is it by e. e. cummings?—Fred Good, Mount Dora, Fla.
A: “Nobody Knows It but Me” is by ad copywriter Patrick O’Leary. Many readers asked for the text. Here it is: “There’s a place I travel when I want to roam, and nobody knows it but me. / The roads don’t go there and the signs stay home, and nobody knows it but me. / It’s far, far away and way, way afar. It’s over the moon and the sea / and wherever you’re going that’s wherever you are. / And nobody knows it but me.
As Shirley rummaged through her desk drawers, I examined this unlikely bit of ad copy. Later, I would think about what the poem meant to Shirley. It was something apart and aside from her daily prayers. Something that was hers and hers alone, that seemed to go to the core of her spiritual life.
“I had it right here,” she said, closing one drawer and opening another. “An envelope.”
It occurred to me that maybe she was nervous. After all, I had called a few weeks earlier to say I had something important to discuss with her, and asked if I could pay a visit. She might have wondered why I was making the sudden day trip to Chicago. Or she might have suspected the reason. Either way, she would have been apprehensive.
“I wanted to give you—”
“Don’t worry, Shirl.”
“—wait, here it is.”
I opened a small plain envelope and pulled out three photographs. One was of Jacob and me, taken on the beach in Cape Cod when he was a toddler. In the golden light and salty air, we look as alike as we ever will, our hair wild and wavy, eyes the same blue as the sea. I had sent it to Shirley years ago. Why was she returning it to me? I had the awful feeling that perhaps she really did know, and she was returning my own son to me, disclaiming him as part of the family. I shoved the thought away as hard as I could. And, not for the first time, I wished I had taken Michael up on his offer to accompany me on this trip.
The second two photographs were of my grandparents.
“I wanted you to have these of Grammy and Grandpa,” Shirley said. “They were at the height of their ascendancy.”
Height of their ascendancy. Who spoke in such a manner? And yet, coming from my aunt, it didn’t sound odd but rather, like a humble statement of fact. It was no wonder I had mythologized my grandparents all my life. They were the stuff of myth.
Shirley and I settled on the sofa in the sitting room.
“I wonder if you know why I’m here,” I began.
She shook her head no.
“I have a story to tell you, and I’m afraid you’re going to find it painful,” I continued.
Shirley was so small, her back erect as she readied herself to hear whatever it was I had come to say. Joanne must have gone out. The house was dead quiet—so quiet I heard a clock somewhere, ticking, ticking. Was there any part of her that had always wondered if this day of reckoning would come?
I began at the beginning. I told her I’d had my DNA tested. I looked for a flicker of awareness, a sense that she knew where this was going. I saw none. For the first time in my life, I understood the expression blow by blow. At the mention of an unfamiliar first cousin, a ripple crossed her forehead but nothing more. I began to explain about calling Susie and asking for her DNA sample.
“Do you need me to slow down?” I asked a couple of times. “Is there anything you don’t understand so far?”
I asked this not because I thought she had the slightest cognitive decline. She had one of the sharpest minds of anyone I knew. But she was ninety-three. When she was born, automobiles were relatively new. Televisions did not exist. She was already the mother of four when Watson and Crick discovered the chemical structure of DNA. Another elderly person to whom I had recounted the story had asked: So you’re saying you’re part your father and part someone else?
Shirley grew ever more still as I spoke. She reminded me of a tiny animal in the forest: big eyes, big ears, quivering with attention. I told her that the comparison of DNA samples revealed that Susie and I were not related by blood. We were not half sisters.
She didn’t move.
And then: “Shirl, did you know that my parents had a hard time conceiving me?”
“No, I didn’t,” she responded.
There it was—my answer. She hadn’t known. If my father had kept a secret, he’d kept it from his sister as well. I went on to tell her about Philadelphia, the institute, my father’s mad dashes from New York. As I spoke, a transcendent calm came over me. Some part of me broke off from the rest and marveled at this calm.
“So you’re saying—”
“Dad isn’t my biological father,” I said. Five words. Five words and a lifetime. Her eyes were locked onto mine. I was afraid she was going to stop breathing. Not a blink. Not a sound. I feared it was as if I had said to her: You’re not mine. I’m not yours. We don’t belong to each other. It felt violent. The world around us fell away.
She leaned slightly forward, reached out, and grabbed my hand.
“I’m not giving you up,” she said.
The thin shell holding me together cracked, and suddenly I was weeping with my whole body.
“And you’d better not be giving me up,” she said.
Every syllable, deliberate.
“I’m not giving you up, Shirl,” I sobbed. “I was so afraid that—”
“I have fewer years ahead of me than behind me,” she said. “And you are my brother’s daughter.”
As the hours blurred together—coffee, bagels, lox, tea—Shirley entered with me into the thicket of what might have happened. I brought up the question of halachah, and she treated it as if it were completely beside the point, in the same way Rabbi Lookstein had. The two most religious people I’d consulted seemed willing to throw out the rulebook in this matter. She listened carefully as I shared Lookstein’s opinion with her.
“It would have been within your father’s character,” she said slowly. “Very much in Paul’s genre.”
I repeated what Lookstein said about my dad and the choices he made back in 1953, when his young fiancée was dying. Your father was a hero.
“I think there was great nobility in what Paul did at that time,” Shirley said. “The Lubavitcher Rebbe offered him a very easy moral out—to keep postponing the wedding until Dorothy died. When you’re offered an easy moral out and you don’t take it, that’s malchus.”
Meaning kingly.
Grammy and Grandpa at the height of their ascendancy.
Great nobility.
My eyes had not stopped stinging with tears.
“Shirl, are you surprised that my father never said anything to you about their struggle with infertility?”
“Not at all,” she said. “He would have felt private about it. That’s something that would have been in the deepest interior of their marriage. He would have been protective of your mother.”
A lifelong animosity had existed between Shirley and my mother. Shirley had described their relationship to me rather gently as being “on different wavelengths, as if there was electric circuitry buzzing in the wires between us.” I recall hearing my mother’s raised voice, the slamming down of a phone. But when I brought up the possibility that my mother had deceived my father—that he never knew—Shirley didn’t go there with me. She preferred the version of the story that I found most painful: that my father knew all along.
“You’re not an accident of history, Dani,” Shirley said. Her eyes were brimming. “Not as far as I’m concerned and not as far as the world is concerned. This isn’t about the cold scientific facts. I have to tell you—in every way, and I’m not saying it to make you feel good, and I’m taking a chance saying it because you’ll think I’m making it up—but between you and Paul there was paternity, ownership, kinship.”
She trained her whole ninety-three-year-old self, every cell in her being, in the direction of consoling me. Every bit of energy. It was the purest manifestation of love I had ever experienced.
“Knowing what you know, you’re more of a daughter to Paul than you can possibly imagine. You take something that isn’t your own and you breathe life into it. You create it—and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.”
Her hand rested on top of mine.
“It’s rare that you get an opportunity in life to stand outside yourself. It’s as if Hakadosh baruch hu is saying, Child, come sit next to me and now, look. Finding all this out is a door to discovering what a father really is. It isn’t closure—you may not get to have that—but it’s an opening to a whole new vista.”
For the first time since that evening in June when I’d stared uncomprehendingly into my computer screen, I felt a sense of peace. At least for the moment, the constant ache was gone.
“You have to judge things by the result,” Shirley continued. “And the result in which you can exult is that the very best was combined in you: grace, brains, creativity, beauty. Whatever alien, mechanical, outside element was in the story—it was a story of success. You have such a rich endowment. You have been so recompensed. You carry the heightened sensitivity, to be sure. You carry the pain and you also carry the reward.”
Her voice—hoarse from speaking for hours—was a part of me. Her strong hands, her expressive forehead, her sweet smile—all a part of me, because she had always been a part of me. I had been so afraid that blood would be all that mattered. Oh, how I had underestimated my remarkable aunt. My car was waiting at the curb. She had hardly paused all afternoon. Her eyes had never left mine. Words had coursed through her as if channeled from the very God she believed in. Hakadosh baruch hu. She was telling me that she was still my aunt—that my father was still my father. My whole lost family encircled us as we sat in the fading light of her kitchen in Chicago.
“Sweetheart, this opens up a world of inclusiveness—and in the end, you have to include yourself. You aren’t bleeding color. You’re holding the light ones and the dark ones. They’re all yours. Ultimately, in all of this, Dani—the postscript is that it’s really called love.”