44

As I continued to correspond with both Ben and Emily, I tried to loosen my own reins on the very notion of certainty. It was no longer a desirable state, especially since I had spent my whole life being so certain and so wrong. Instead, I tried to ride each new wave like a surfer: fluid, balanced, focused, come what may. Over the holidays, I made batches of Christmas cookies. Why Christmas cookies? It was very nearly a joke, but it was also a kind of permission. Merry Christmas, David Ingber had said. I liked Christmas cookies. Why couldn’t I bake them? I sprinkled gingerbread men and wreaths with red and green, allowed them to harden, and placed them in a jar on our kitchen counter. We lit Hanukkah candles each night, and Jacob and I chanted the brachot. Genetically speaking I was half Ashkenazi Jewish, half Anglo-Saxon Presbyterian. My ancestors, scattered far and wide. There could be confusion in that—or liberation. The choice was mine.

I had been reading up on the rare hereditary eye disease Ben had told me about—the one medical condition he felt it was important for me to know. When I paid a visit to the ophthalmologist, indeed a test revealed that I exhibited early signs of the disease. It was a condition that might affect me in later years, causing light to become diffuse, occluding my night vision. The worst-case scenario would be a corneal transplant, way down the road. I learned that the recessive form is present prenatally, and certainly by the time of birth. I was not my father’s child. The eyes through which I saw the world from the moment they opened were eyes that I inherited from Ben Walden.

To: Dani Shapiro

From: Ben Walden

Subject: Thanks

Hi Dani,

Thanks so much for the poem by W.S. Merwin. I’ll plan to put it on my blog. It poignantly touches on the gift of aging and remembering. The other day I was visiting two residents in a nursing home and talked to a frail fellow who had recently fallen out of bed. By taking time, sitting and listening, he told me about his days as a trombone player with all the big name bands. It was fun to see him light up as the memories poured forth.

Pilar sends her warm regards to you, Michael and Jacob.

Love, Ben

This is what we had begun to do, Ben and I. We exchanged quotes. When I came across something I thought he might like, I made a mental note to pass it along to him. An essay on an Australian website about faith; a reference to Walt Whitman’s “Hospital Visits” on Brain Pickings; a haunting poem forwarded to me by a friend. I wrote him about a favorite novel, Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, and he wrote back that it was one of his favorites as well, so much so that he had recently read it for a second time. Was it a coincidence that we both loved the Stegner? Our literary sensibilities were remarkably similar. This overlap in our consciousnesses felt like a comfort and a loss, all at once. Michael described what we were doing as a grown-up version of exchanging mixtapes. A way of a biological father and daughter who had never known each other saying: this is who I am. Thoughtus.

At the same time as Ben and I deepened our connection—the meadows surrounding my house blanketed in a hard layer of snow, the lakes frozen, dotted with the dark shapes of ice fishermen—my dad began to reappear. He emerged in my internal world as if he had been patiently waiting for me to be ready for him. At times, I would look up from a book I was reading and see him sitting there in his favorite cabled vest, a yarmulke covering his head.

In Hebrew the word for soul is neshama. It is variously translated as wind, or breath. Try to capture it and it disappears. I was once again able to feel my father’s presence, those unmistakable chills running the length of my body. He seemed intent on letting me know that he was there. He looked at me with the distant benevolence of the ghost he was. He gave a single, slow nod, as if to acknowledge his sorrow that he wasn’t able to come back to help me—that I had to navigate this hazardous terrain alone.

I dug up some notes I had taken years earlier, during a phone session with a medium. I had never quite believed in mediums or psychics, nor did I remember any urgency at the time about contacting the dead. My literary agent had urged me to make the appointment, and I tended to do whatever she suggested. Now, I scanned the torn-out notebook pages as if they were a relic from another era. The medium and I had spoken of my parents, but this all fell into the category of before. Before I knew the truth—about them, about me. I almost just shoved the notes back into the file cabinet, but then I got to the part about my father. He apologizes for not speaking the truth in your childhood. A lot left unsaid. He says someday you will understand why he needed to walk this path alone.

The words hadn’t resonated with me back then. I had been skeptical of the whole enterprise. But now they stood out. Certainly there had been a lot left unsaid. The truth hadn’t been spoken. He had been solitary and had set himself apart. And now my father’s apology—there in my own handwriting, as dictated by the medium—assumed an entirely new potential meaning. He was trying to tell me something. It was almost as if he knew what was in store for me.

I watched a documentary by a Canadian filmmaker named Barry Stevens, who learned as a young man that he had been donor-conceived and began searching for his biological father in midlife. Stevens interspersed research into his paternity with film footage from his childhood in which he and his parents—his mother and his social father, as it turned out—were on vacation in California. The footage shows a man trailing several feet behind his family as they walk outside a winery. His head is slightly bowed, his hands clasped behind his back. He appears nearly servile, as if he feels undeserving to be walking alongside them. It made me think of my father and his own diminishment. My mother’s disgust, her patronizing tone when she spoke with him or about him, her pure and unmistakable contempt. This, too, I always had believed I understood—and found narratives, reasons to support my understanding—but now my father’s retreat from the world seems to be, at least in part, the price he paid for becoming my father.

I spent my entire adult life trying to make him proud. Not a day had passed since his death during which I didn’t think of him, or silently confer with him. My initial piercing sorrow at our lack of biological connection had begun to fade, as had the double sorrow as I came to believe he’d carried the truth in his heart. Through the medium, he’d apologized to me for leaving so much unsaid. But how could he have said it? How, when the complex web of doctors and specialists insisted that silence was best for the entire family? I heard Shirley’s voice once again: Knowing what you know, you’re more of a daughter to Paul than you can possibly imagine. I may have been cut from the same cloth as Ben Walden, but I was and forever would be Paul Shapiro’s daughter. Haskel Lookstein’s voice joined Shirley’s in my head: Kol hakavod to your father. All the honor. If not for him, I would never have been born. I was connected to him on the level of neshama, which had nothing to do with biology, and everything to do with love.