What do we inherit, and how, and why?
Photo: Courtesy of the Author An early memory: it’s a Saturday afternoon in the late 1960s and my parents are sitting with friends in our New Jersey backyard. The flagstone patio is in dappled shade. A forsythia hedge spills over the next-door neighbor’s fence. The adults sip iced tea from green plastic cups and relax on the kinds of lounge chairs that leave marks on your thighs when you stand. Maybe there’s a bird feeder.
Another memory has more recently crystallized in my mind. It was 1988. I was twenty-five years old, and my father had been dead exactly two years. My mother had been badly injured in the car accident that killed my father, and I had spent the previous two years taking care of her. At the same time, I was in graduate school at Sarah Lawrence and I was writing my first novel as if my life depended on it — which, in a way, it did.
“Mom, you can’t just say something like that about my conception. You need to tell me what you meant.” Both our eyes were trained straight ahead. The car a confessional, a vault. I told Susie what my mother had said. Philadelphia, the institute, the famous doctor, the slow sperm, her biological clock tick-tick-ticking, our father’s mad dash from New York so they could make a baby.My hand tightened around the phone.“You might want to look into it,” she said. “They used to mix sperm in those days.”
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.
She paused and looked at me searchingly. The faculty at Bread Loaf was made up of literary giants. Had something happened that night? The author with her father in Israel. In the winter of 2016, my husband had become curious about his origins. Michael knew far less about the generations preceding him than I did about mine. Do you want to do it too? he might have asked. I’m sending away for a kit. It’s only like a hundred bucks. Though I no longer remember the exact moment, it is in fact the small, the undramatic, the banal — the yeah, sure that could just as easily have been a shrug and a no thanks.
The numbers, symbols, unfamiliar terms on the screen were a language I didn’t understand. It had taken a fraction of a second to upend my life. My mind began to spin with calculations. If Susie was not my half sister — no kind of sister — it could mean only one of two things: either my father was not her father or my father was not my father.
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