32

I stared at the last paragraph of Ben’s letter. Final communication. I’m so sorry that this may sound harsh. I closed my laptop and sat there, trembling.

“He can’t just do that,” Michael said.

But of course he could. Ben Walden could do whatever he wished, his moral high ground the guarantee of anonymity given by a long-defunct fertility institute and the dead scientist who ran it. Promised privacy. Many medical school friends. Period of time. I didn’t even need to refer to the letter—I had memorized it as I read it.

“He’s scared,” Michael went on. And this did seem possible. The tone of this letter was different from Ben’s communication in the past. The repetition of my name, almost like a plea. Leave me alone. Don’t hurt me. Don’t come after my family. The quoting back to me of my own words about respecting his privacy—as if I might have forgotten them. The strange appeasement of his flattery, as if his praise of me as a writer might serve as some sort of consolation prize. And finally, the slammed door—quickly, almost in haste, as if he’d better act fast before he changed his mind.

I got up and poured myself a glass of wine. I had been drinking more than usual since late June, drinking differently—medicinally—blunting the internal blows. I took a deep breath and surveyed the room around me, trying to remember that I had a life that had been going on long before I knew about Ben Walden—a life in which the man in the yarmulke on the bookshelf was my one and only dad. A life in which the boy at his bar mitzvah was wrapped in the enormous tallis of his grandfather, fastened by his great-grandfather’s filigreed tallis clips. A life of roots and certainty.

At first my fingers itched to respond. I’m disappointed. Or: How dare you? Or: I hope you’ll reconsider. But instead of the wild, reckless abandon that had inspired my first communication with Ben, I now felt a calculating, merciless fury. I placed my laptop on the coffee table on top of a family photo album.

“I’m not writing back to him,” I told Michael.

I wanted Ben’s own words to echo in his ears—and I believed they might, even though I didn’t know him. Even though he was a perfect stranger. He had shown himself to be a reflective person in each of our communications. And yet: The thought of some future contacts from the children conceived by artificial insemination never crossed my mind. In the fifty-plus years since he had been that young medical student, his brief stint as a sperm donor had not haunted him. He hadn’t lain awake a single night wondering about the unknown children he might have fathered. Even when DNA testing became available—and later, when it became inexpensive and simple—the possibility of being sought out had never occurred to him.

But he was someone who spent his life thinking about medical ethics. And ultimately, this was an ethical question if there ever was one. What did I owe him? What did he owe me? Who were we to each other?

Michael and I left home and drove to our friends’ place on a nearby lake. It was too late to cancel, and besides, what else was there to do? I seethed with a sense of futility and powerlessness. What if Ben really was resolved to keep the door between us slammed closed? I was an unpleasant aftereffect of an action so inconsequential to him that it didn’t even bear recalling. A bit of space debris, the flotsam and jetsam resulting from a meaningless, young person’s choice.

“Maybe this is it,” I said to Michael as we drove the winding country roads, the pretty landscape in stark contrast to the darkness inside me. “Maybe there won’t be anything more to learn. Not about my parents. Not about Ben.”

“That’s not what’s going to happen,” Michael responded. “No way.”

“How do you know?”

“Too much has been set in motion. If nothing else—you know there are more half siblings out there.”

Indeed, the likelihood of this was high. Very high. Ben had donated for a period of time. At that very moment there were probably half siblings of mine going about their lives, clueless. People who, like me, might have always been haunted by a feeling of otherness. Of not quite belonging. And the sense that there was something wrong—something secret.

So, there would be more to come. I knew Michael was right, that this wouldn’t be the end of the story, but it didn’t set my mind at ease. My biological father had made it clear that he was done with me. The possibility of half siblings conceived through artificial insemination was bizarre and felt somehow less than human, as if we had been a litter of kittens, each placed with a different owner.

A few days earlier, a high school friend had sent a photo she’d found of me, dancing at a sixteenth birthday party. I took in my pudgy, teenage face, my hair pulled back in a bandanna, my eyes half-closed in a self-conscious attempt to look cool and sexy. I remembered the disorder in my mind, my intense desire to please, my lack of any clear sense of myself. This is true of many teenagers, of course, but my relationship to my own identity was even murkier. That girl did not know who her father was. She was wrapped in a thick cocoon of the deepest sort of misinformation. She, quite literally, did not know where she came from. Would I ever again look at a photograph of myself, or my father, or my mother, without the eerie sense that our lives together had, from the start, been built on a lie? Would I ever look at myself and not see Ben Walden reflected back at me?

Late that night, half-drunk, exhausted, I created a new file on my computer titled “Imaginary Responses.” In the weeks to come, each time I felt compelled to write to Ben, instead I would open the file and draft a note I knew I would never send:

IMAGINARY RESPONSE 1

Ben,

For the rest of my life, when I look in the mirror, I will see your face. As I’m sure you’ve noted, the resemblance is more than striking. It would have been nice to have felt better about the face staring back at me. I wasn’t asking for much, and I gave you every assurance of privacy. I would have happily signed a waiver or a release if that would have made you feel better. For you to be unwilling to grant me these two small favors which would make a real difference in my life moving forward is incomprehensible to me.

IMAGINARY RESPONSE 2

Dear Ben,

In one of my favorite short stories, Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Become Responsibilities,” written on the eve of his 21st birthday, a secondary character addresses the narrator: “You will find that out soon enough, everything you do matters too much.”

I would have thought that as a person whose focus is on medical ethics, you would have considered the ethics of the situation we find ourselves in, and not fallen back on youth, or how so many others were doing it, or a paper you signed at an institute, promising privacy.

This is a moral, ethical, human issue. And though I’m sure you have your reasons and can justify them to yourself, you’re doing something cruel and inhumane, and not taking responsibility for something you in fact did.

IMAGINARY RESPONSE 3

Dear Ben Walden,

I have begun referring to you in my head as Ben Walden. Not Ben. Not “my biological father,” which is a mouthful. I need a way of thinking of you as the man who gave me life but isn’t willing to meet me for a cup of coffee.

I feel it’s important that I clarify one thing. It seems your greatest concern is your privacy. You’ve used that word in every single communication. Donating “for a period of time” is surely what you’re most concerned about. I imagine you’re worried that I’m at the lead of a long parade of offspring who will show up unannounced at your doorstep. Which of course is not my problem. I also imagine that you were worried, had you been willing to meet me, that I might have, say, Oprah jump out of the bushes with a camera crew. I wanted to reassure you that I would never have done such a thing, that my interest was—at its deepest level—in understanding where I come from, so that I might be able to live the rest of my life in peace.