Ellen Miller’s “Like Being Killed”
I remember her hands: fingers red, raw, bleeding through layers of skin, all the way from her nails to below her knuckles. A curtain of black hair covered most of her face as she tilted her head forward and lifted her fingers to her mouth. Chewing, biting, quietly gnawing. This was something far beyond a nervous habit. From the moment I saw those hands I wanted to encase them in white cotton so that they—so that she—could heal. I wanted to believe that healing was possible.
Those hands and the woman attached to them followed me around for years. From a table in the dingy basement of a YMCA on the Upper West Side, where she was a student in the first writing class I ever taught, to my apartment where those hands rested on the piano bench where she always sat during private workshops, to yet another workshop table high above University Place in the graduate writing program at NYU. If we see people in impressionistic bits and pieces—eyes, lips, the small of a back—those hands have come to represent everything I ever knew or felt about Ellen Miller. They were elegant, artistic, with long tapered fingers and delicate wrists. They spoke of promise, beauty, potential, self-destruction, agony, despair, decay.
Later, in Like Being Killed, the novel Ellen was working on during all of the years I knew her, her narrator Ilyana Meyerovich had this to say: “I folded my fingers into fists to hide them. From the age of six, I’d had a habit of tearing skin off my fingers. I didn’t bite my nails. Nails lacked pain receptors. Using my teeth or my fingernails from the opposite hand, I’d shred skin off my fingers until they bled. Then I’d wash my hands with hot, stinging, soapy water. I’d pour alcohol on the open cuts, which made the cuts heal faster. Then, to complete the ritual, I’d rub my mother’s moisturizing hand cream which contained searing menthol, into the cuts I’d made.”
I run the risk of offending many of my former students by what I am about to write here: Ellen Miller was probably the most talented writer I have ever worked with. She just was. There are writers who are great storytellers, writers who have lyric gifts, writers who are smart as hell; writers who are fearless, and writers who are wise. But Ellen had a blazing gift, combining a poet’s ear for language with an encyclopedaic mind, insatiable curiosity and a complete and utter lack of fear. Her work was a high-wire act. Watching her teeter was its own kind of thrll.
Consider this passage, in which Ilyana—heroin addict grand-daughter of a Lower East Side bagel baking dynasty—wanders that neighborhood ostensibly in search of bagels: “It was dark. Shops with signs in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish…closed for the night…The paint on the blue-and-white sign for Zelig Guttman’s Paper and Twine—which boasted, “Formerly Isadore Birnbaum’s”—was fading and chipping and flaking…. Birnbaum’s old sign was enduring, holding up, piercing through Guttman’s as if the present was more ephermeral than the past, as if attempts to paint synthetically over the past fade faster than the past fades organically. Almost pentimento, a word suggesting big mistakes, derived from the Italian for repentance, from the Latin poena, for penalty. Poena had been reconstituted, just as Birnbaum’s old sign had integrated itself into the bastardized, vulgarized sign for Guttman’s. Pentimento, via poena, was related early on to penance, to pentinence, to punish, to penal, and in later associations, to pain, and to the infinitive, to pine: to suffer intense yearning, or, in archaic use, to waste away with grief or mourning. I wanted to leave this place, but I was afraid that if I left, I’d lose the chance of ever wanting to stay.”
This (and trust me when I say I am quoting only a very small piece of it) from a walk to buy bagels. The whole novel is full of such passages. References from Aeschylus to Nietzsche, definitions of obscure phobias (catagelophobia: the fear of ridicule, real or imagined), the archaic German adjective for homelessness (obdachlos), scattered like treasures on a treasure hunt through a stark and moving narrative of a friendship between two women.
Ellen got a book deal for Like Being Killed while still a graduate student at NYU. In my class, envy entered the room. It swooshed in and took a seat at the table. Word spread that the advance had been high—very high. The contract wasn’t for one book, but two. She had hit the jackpot—or so people thought. She was well-liked, oh sure, everyone liked her, but in the hothouse environment of an MFA Program, she had somehow broken away from the pack, leaving everyone else behind. If you sat quietly and listened, the sound you would have heard was that of gnashing teeth. This was quiet, literary despair. I had weeping students in my office every single afternoon, envious of the young woman with the bleeding fingers and a voice that had a built-in quaver when she spoke.
Fast-forward past the petty jealousies and literary back-biting that now seems like an eighth-note pause in a piece of music. The novel was published to the sound of…not very much. Some reviews were glowing, but there weren’t many of them. The talent was evident but…unharnessed. Undisciplined. The Times didn’t like it. Like Being Killed moved from the front tables of bookstores to the purgatory of the shelves where one or two copies could be found for a while, spine out. Finally it disappeared altogether—as did its author. Everyone moved on. Several of the students in that NYU class kept at it, and eventually published acclaimed novels and story collections of their own. Quite a while later, I asked a mutual friend what had ever happened to Ellen’s second novel. She had never written it. Her publisher asked for her to return the advance. She went from being a broke East Village writer to an overnight sensation and back to being an even-broker East Village writer, all in the span of five years.
Last winter, I received an email from someone whose name I didn’t recognize. The subject line read: ELLEN MILLER: URGENT. As soon as I saw it, I knew that Ellen was dead. It had been years since I’d seen her. She’d fallen out of touch with most of her old friends and colleagues. At forty, she had collapsed in a bodega in the same East Village neighborhood where she had spent most her life. Her heart—that enormous heart of hers—had simply given out.
In the first chapter of Like Being Killed, Ilyana and her drug addict friends are sitting around a kitchen table getting high, and discussing how each of them is eventually going to die. “I already know how I’m going to die,’” Ilyana says… “I’m just going to…disappear. I’ll dissipate. I’ll evaporate, in increments, molecule by molecule, until I’m not there.’ Deadness had discrete gradations and was easy to calibrate…everything I did on any given day would desiccate, scatter, like soft cigarette ash, by the end of that day, leaving nothing behind. Fugere sine vestigio. The Latin struck me as funny. The phrases—to flee or disappear without leaving behind a footprint or trace—was impregnanted by its own opposite. Fugere sine vestigio was its own footprint, a trace of a dead language, pervading the present. ‘There’s this vanishing point,’ I said, ‘and I can’t see anything ahead of it.’”
Ellen Miller left a footprint. Just as Isadore Birnbaum’s old sign made itself seen—a pentimento revealing itself, asserting its own relevance—Like Being Killed stands as a testament to a singular young woman’s talent, which burned too fast, too blindingly bright.
Frame by Frame
Growing up, Dani Shapiro always felt caught in her mother’s viewfinder-until she found the strength to break free.
When I was six months old, my mother brought me from our suburban New Jersey home to a television studio in Manhattan. I was placed in a high chair, and an actress playing my mother spooned baby food into my mouth. My mother watched nervously from the wings, where two backup babies were waiting in case I spat out the food-but I didn’t. I gurgled and smiled and ate the strained peaches. I was a natural, apparently. When it was over, I had become the Beech-Nut baby. (Here is a video of me in a Beech-Nut orange juice ad.)
The week the commercial was due to air, my grandfather-my father’s father-died suddenly in his home on Central Park West. The following day, at his funeral, my grandmother suffered a massive stroke. As the shocked, grieving family gathered in my grandmother’s room at Beth Israel hospital, my mother arranged for a television to be wheeled to the foot of her bed. The scene, as I imagine it, is in black-and-white: My parents and aunts and uncles, all younger than I am now, turn to watch the last few minutes of the evening news with Walter Cronkite. Then, right on schedule, Cronkite signs off, and I appear. My round baby head fills the screen.
That’s Dani! my mother says loudly into my grandmother’s ear. Look, Mom, there on TV-that’s your granddaughter!
A welcome diversion, no doubt. A small moment of cheer in a grim situation. A baby on television-a widow, hovering near death. My unshaven uncles, my hollow-eyed aunts, my father-the oldest son-pacing the room, wild with grief. And then there is my mother: tall and lovely, her dark hair impeccably coiffed. Almond-shaped eyes, her generous mouth outlined and blotted a deep, dark red. Look, there she is-there’s Dani! She wants everyone to see: the doctors, nurses, orderlies. I am her crowning achievement, her late-in-life only child. This is the first of many times that she will ascribe to me magical powers: Someday she will tell me, in all seriousness, that the glimpse of me on television may have helped to save my grandmother’s life.
The camera formed a bridge between my mother and me. It was a rickety bridge, and crossing it was often fraught with danger, but it was also our deepest, most intoxicating connection. Never did my mother love me more than when she was looking at an image of me. And never did I more powerfully feel her love. As a grown woman, sometimes I would call my mother to tell her about somewhere I had just been. An elegant party, perhaps. How did you look? my mother would ask eagerly. What did you wear? Were there pictures?
My mother didn’t think much of child actors or their stage mothers. She had been an advertising executive before she married my father, and she often told the story of a child who had stamped her foot during an audition and shouted, “Mommy, there’s a spot on my Mary Jane!” As with many of my mother’s stories, it was hard to know what she actually felt. Her words-without exception-seemed rehearsed. She was profoundly composed: The precise way she crossed her legs, or raised an eyebrow, or tilted her head was done with a great deal of awareness. She must have told me the Mary Jane story a dozen times, and yet I was never quite sure what to make of it. She seemed to be implying that she would never let her daughter become a child actor.
How, then, to explain that a few years after the Beech-Nut commercial, I became the symbol for another iconic American brand when I was chosen to be the Kodak Christmas poster child? Just as with the Beech-Nut commercial, my mother acted a bit puzzled, as if she hadn’t been the one carting me around to auditions. She preferred to make it seem as if the advertising world had been banging on our door and it would have been rude and withholding not to answer.
The Kodak billboard stretched across the width of Grand Central station, huge and illuminated, high above the heads of rush-hour commuters: me, age three-no longer a generic baby who might be replaced by another baby. Now I was fully recognizable. I was blonde, blue-eyed, quizzical; an all-American symbol of Yuletide cheer. We were observant Jews, so religious that my father’s colleagues on the New York Stock Exchange had nicknamed him Rabbi. My mother often trotted out the story of the Kodak poster in a way that made me feel oddly ashamed. And there was Dani, wishing the entire world a Merry Christmas!
Reality invariably disappointed my mother. From the time that I was a little girl, I sensed the divide between how she imagined a future occasion-whether an afternoon in the park, an evening at the opera, a dinner party, a walk around the block-and how that occasion turned out. She had a tableau in her mind, a series of images, and anything that deviated from those images was a blot on her good time. But the camera-the camera could capture a moment: evidence that life was really as she fantasized it to be. See? We were happy. We were beautiful and special. We loved each other without fail.
I have a memory of my mother descending the stairs of our home, gliding as regally as a queen, holding her head high. She is dressed to go out for the evening. She is impossibly elegant, a New Jersey housewife who belongs on Fifth Avenue and never lets us forget it. (She could have married the French businessman who ran Chanel, she told me more than once.) On this night she is wearing Bonnie Cashin-a classic American designer who suits my mother’s dark, rangy style. A cloud of Norell perfume drifts around her-I can smell it still. She is on her way to the theater, but before she goes, she finds her camera and hands it to the baby-sitter. “Take our picture,” she commands. She stands next to me, a thin, graceful arm draped across my small shoulders. She smiles a careful, picture-perfect smile. Not too wide, just enough teeth showing. I am in pajamas-fresh-scrubbed, sweet-breathed, ready for bed. I am her pretty girl, her one-and-only. I also produce a camera-ready smile. How I look is desperately important to my mother, and I don’t want to disappoint her.
Over the years of my childhood, my mother’s dreams shifted and changed-perhaps self-protectively. Her vision of herself as a career girl-about-town, a cross between Marlo Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore, quickly receded behind the privet hedges of suburbia. She joined committees, did volunteer work. But always she held herself apart. She saw herself as smarter, better educated, more sophisticated than our neighbors. In truth, she may have been all these things. But she had contempt for the other women, and it showed.
She had writerly aspirations and drove into the city regularly to take fiction workshops and television-script-writing courses. She wrote a series of spec scripts for Hawaii Five-O and The Partridge Family-the sound of the keys of her Smith-Corona typewriter pounding well into the night. She sent these scripts by registered mail to Hollywood and waited for replies that never came-not even rejection slips. She didn’t let her disappointment show. Instead, she turned her attention to writing a children’s book, which she titled Yes, Mary Ann, the World Is Round. She hired the famous children’s photographer who had done the Kodak poster to shoot the illustrations, and cast me-age five-as the angelic Mary Ann. The book was never published. The photographs remain. I am in a pale-yellow flannel nightgown, sitting up in bed, playing with dolls. I am lying flat on my back, doing my best imitation of sleep.
Eventually, the sound of the typewriter keys stopped. My mother moved on to other ventures-each more unrealistic than the last. And always, I wound up in front of a camera, posing as everything I was not: a rah-rah cheerleader, a well- adjusted, popular girl. I am standing in our driveway, an awkward adolescent, modeling a necklace from my mother’s latest line of tennis jewelry. A gold ball the size of a gumdrop hangs around my neck. In the center of the ball is a small sapphire in the shape of an eye. keep your eye on the ball is the motto. Next, I am in profile, shot from the back, a small terry-cloth towel embroidered with no sweat, baby! wrapped around my neck. My mother stages an elaborate fashion show in our backyard. Dozens of neighborhood ladies sit on folding chairs in the hot summer sun and politely clap as I parade around the pool, showing off my mother’s latest T-shirt line. I sense that they are all weary of her-and perhaps me, by proxy.
I was embarrassed by my mother’s quixotic dreams, even as I hoped they would somehow come true. I was all knotted up in her aspirations-her vision of us as a mother-daughter winning team-and when her businesses failed, one after another, I felt as if I had failed as well.
The message was this: If reality disappointed my mother, and photographs pleased her, then I needed to make myself as two-dimensional, flat, and picture perfect as I could. Don’t frown, darling. Your face might freeze that way. When I went off to college, I might have finally been able to cast off this way of being like a second skin. I might have become a serious student, found a passion, and stuck with it. Instead, I sought the comfort of what I already knew-and what I had been told I was good at. I started auditioning for television commercials during my freshman year.
Auditions led to advertising work-York Peppermint Patties, Coca-Cola, Scrabble-which led to my dropping out of school. I didn’t have any great desire to be an actress, and in fact had no talent beyond a certain photogenic quality-but I didn’t know what else to do. I was so accustomed to my mother’s idea of me as a glamorous girl, lit up by flashbulbs, it had become the only way I could imagine my future.
A photograph remains of that time. It’s large, poster-size, and it now hangs on a long wall in my house along with other family photos: my husband’s extended family gathered around his grandparents. Distant relatives of mine in their Lithuanian village, with their long beards and peasant garb. And then there is me: I am in my early 20s. It’s the eighties, and it shows. My hair is big, my earrings are enormous, white dangling stars, and I am gazing over my shoulder at the camera. I keep that photograph around because I’m fascinated and disturbed by the blankness in my own eyes. My husband calls it my Star 80 photo. Who is she, that scary, pretty, empty girl?
Another photo of me, a Polaroid, was taken a few months later. This one I keep in a box in my closet. I am leaning over my mother, who is in a hospital bed. Her face is black-and-blue, very thin. Her legs are in casts from her ankles to her thighs, dangling from traction pulleys. I’m trying to smile for the camera, as is my mother-but there is nothing happy about this picture. I’ve been crying; this much is clear from my swollen eyes. My father has recently been killed in the same car accident that broke 80 of my mother’s bones. My mother and I are surrounded by what remains of our family-uncles, aunts, a cousin-as we conduct a makeshift Passover seder at her bedside. This is perhaps the first picture of me and my mother that is not an attempt to be anything other than exactly what it is: horrible and painful and unavoidably real.
It is a strange and uncomfortable fact that my parents’ accident turned me into a writer. It was as if there had always existed a parallel track-an alternate universe in which I hadn’t been the Beech-Nut baby or the Kodak Christmas poster child or my mother’s muse. Begin again, they say in meditation class, the idea being that in each moment we are given an opportunity to start over. Begin again. I turned my gaze inward as if my life depended on it-which, in fact, it did. I spent the next several years caring for my mother as she recovered. I finished college and then went to graduate school, where I wrote my first novel-in which a car accident on a snowy highway figured prominently.
I would have given anything for the publication of my first book to have made my mother proud, but my writing life caused her a great deal of pain. It wasn’t what she had wanted for me. It was what she had wanted for herself. You be the pretty one, she used to tell me, referring to my romantic choices-her wisdom in this regard being that I should always choose men less attractive than myself. You be the pretty one, as if pretty were my only ticket.
My writing flew in the face of pretty; I wanted to examine the difficult, the secret, the unsaid with all the energy of someone who had avoided such matters her whole life. Paradoxically, as I did so, I began to feel lighter, easier in my own skin. It turned out that my natural habitat was a solitary one-that I was most content spending my days alone in a room, exploring ideas in my head. The man I fell in love with and married was as compelled by a quiet, internal life as I was.
The further I distanced myself from my mother’s ideas about me, the more frightened and angry she became. She lashed out at me at every opportunity. She didn’t like my hair, my furniture, my friends, my outfits. She was threatened by the bond I had with my husband. She couldn’t decide whether to brag about my career or demean it, and did each whenever it suited her. (She once called the 92nd Street Y to suggest that she was particularly qualified to spearhead a lecture series on mothers and daughters in literature.) Finally-before my husband and I decided to leave New York City for the countryside, another decision she deplored-I persuaded her to see a therapist with me. She lasted six sessions-unable to bear the scrutiny of a neutral witness. Irene, he said. Irene, you aren’t seeing Dani. During what turned out to be our final session, she arrived with a large manila envelope tucked beneath her arm. I later found out that the envelope contained another kind of photograph entirely: X-rays of her lungs, which showed evidence of metastatic lung cancer.
My mother spent her last days in her bedroom, surrounded by pictures of the two of us: a professionally done photograph of herself as a young mother, head tilted back just so, glossy hair swinging as she held me-an infant-high up in the air; another baby picture of me from the Beech-Nut era. There were photographs of the two of us in coordinated outfits, smiling our careful, camera-ready smiles. And one more-a portrait of me taken for a book by the photographer Jill Krementz. In it, I am smiling widely, grinning really-a genuinely delighted, unself-conscious, ear-to-ear grin.
As I sat with my mother, who drifted in and out of consciousness, her meticulous sense of her own physical presence gone forever, my gaze kept returning to the photographs hanging on her wall. These lovely images-these were her memories, now receding to nothing more than flickers behind her closed eyes. When I had given my mother the Krementz portrait, years earlier, she had cocked her head and let out a small uncomfortable laugh. She’d stared at it for a long moment, as if looking at a stranger. I’ve never seen this expression on your face, she said.
As I held my mother’s hand, I wanted to tell her that I was happy in that picture. I had forgotten all about the camera, and I was free. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry she had never seen me that way.
There is No Me Without You
Dani Shapiro spared no effort or expense in her quest to find the perfect egg donor – one with her intellect, her looks, even her feelings. But then they met, and she realized that even the finest reproductions still aren’t the real thing.
The palm-filled lobby of Shutters on the Beach, an upscale hotel perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, is a good spot for a blind date. With overstuffed chairs and sofas grouped around low coffee tables, and fireplaces blazing in the middle of a hot California afternoon, Shutters is a place where you can sit and talk, and no one will notice you or care. I’ve chosen a table near some drinking Europeans, with a clear view across the lobby to the front doors. I’m early, anxious. A Fred Segal shopping bag containing a gaily wrapped gift is at my feet. Only a few people in the world know I’m here. It feels as if I’m waiting to do something illicit-something involving sex or drugs. Which, in a way, I suppose I am.
A tall blond in a white pantsuit walks in, preceded by two chihuahuas straining on their leashes. Not her. A trio of young women in jeans and tailored jackets-Hollywood development girl types-scan the room for a table. Not her, not her, not her.
Finally — at exactly three-thirty, our appointed time — a slight woman in jeans, a pink T-shirt, and a blazer walks into the lobby. I recognize her instantly. She’s looking for me, too, though I have the advantage. She hasn’t seen my photograph. She has no idea what I look like, though she’d be correct in assuming that I am probably similar to her in build and coloring – an older version.
She notices me, and I give her a small half-wave. She approaches my table with what appears to be confidence, but who knows? I have a lot of information about her: where she goes to school (UCLA Law), her age when she lost her virginity (15), the causes of her grandparents’ deaths (lung cancer, heart disease). But now I’m suddenly aware that she is a perfect stranger.
“Carly?” I shake her hand, noticing everything. The size of her palm, the length of her fingers, the strength of her grip. “Dani?” she responds.
I’d wondered whether to give her my real name. We’re on a first name-only basis to begin with, but still my name is unusual. As a writer, I’m easily identifiable-traceable, if someone is so inclined.
She settles into a chair, orders a Diet Coke, then looks at me. I’m the one who asked for this meeting. I have a list of questions, scribbled on one of the back pages of my Filofax: How do you and your sisters get along? Who in your family do you most remind yourself of? Would you describe your parents as happy people? I’ve written them down because I’m afraid that I’ll forget to ask something important, something I’ll want to know down the line.
“So how did it go yesterday? Are you okay?”
She gives a little shrug. Her eyes are very blue, much bigger than in the photos. Beneath her left eye, a small muscle twitches. I wonder if she has a thyroid condition. Do they test for that?
“It was fine,” she says. “No big deal, really.”
The day before, a catheter was guided by ultrasound through Carly’s cervix, and eggs, 16 of them, were extracted from her follicles, made artificially mature by fertility hormones. These eggs were meant for me–I had purchased them. She was going to be the genetic mother of my child.
I was 43 when I reached the painful but inescapable conclusion that I wasn’t going to be able to give birth to another child. My husband and I had a six-year-old son and had been trying for several years to add to our family, despite the fact that I’d had a terrifying emergency cesarean the first time around and several doctors had urged us to use a surrogate rather than risk my health or a future baby’s. By the time we agreed to try IVF, the likelihood of success (referred to in the fertility world as the “take home baby rate”) for a woman my age using her own eggs was less than 5 percent.
We’re not going to do anything crazy, my husband and I kept reminding each other. We’re not desperate, we already have a wonderful kid. We thought about people we knew who had spent tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in an unsuccessful quest for a child. We knew couples whose marriages had been wrecked by the physical, emotional, and financial strain of multiple IVF cycles. But each insemination, each near-miss made us feel as if there was an empty chair at our table. We had considered adoption, but ultimately our desire for our son to have a biological connection to his sibling was simply too great. And so, we tentatively began to explore egg donation and surrogacy.
In recent years, gestational surrogacy with an egg donor–in which an egg is taken from a donor, fertilized, then implanted as an embryo in the uterus of another woman, who serves as the surrogate for the woman who can’t conceive–has virtually replaced traditional surrogacy, in which the surrogate uses her own eggs and is simply artificially inseminated. The beginnings of this shift can be dated to 1986, when a New Jersey couple, William and Elizabeth Stern, paid Mary Beth Whitehead $10,000 (plus $5,000 in expenses) to bear a child for them. Whitehead had a change of heart after giving birth to Baby M, and though the court eventually awarded custody to the Sterns, it decreed that a relationship with Whitehead was “in the best interests of the child,” and she was granted visitation rights. Splitting up the reproductive work–such that one woman contributes the egg, another the womb–is the best way to avoid this nightmare.
I did my best to tamp down feelings of queasiness at the mad science of it all. I kept reminding myself to keep my eyes on the prize. The prize! Our family would end up with a baby. I was giddy, euphoric at what I saw, at the time, as the removal of all impediment and doubt. Youthful eggs. An experienced, faultless womb. My own exhaustion, and a gnawing sense of being defective–to blame–made me relieved to take myself out of the equation.
Finding a surrogate had been fairly straightforward. Type surrogacy into Google and you immediately get a long list of agencies. My husband and I, both journalists who reach for the Internet at the slightest provocation, quickly learned that we needed an agency in a state with liberal laws about the subject. California is known for its tendency to uphold surrogacy contracts. Through a Los Angeles agency, Growing Generations, we were matched with Sandra, a third-time surrogate who’d given birth for two gay male couples and wanted a straight couple this time. She was the mother of two young children herself–a homemaker who lived in Fresno. She loved being pregnant and was clearly very good at it. I trusted her to do her job.
Smooth sailing, or so I thought. All it would take was , money and commitment. My mother had recently died and left me an inheritance, and what better way to spend it than to create a new life? After the baby was born, we could forget all about the strange circumstances of the conception and gestation. I pictured myself rocking a baby in the same chair in which I’d nursed my son, Jacob. I pictured him holding his new baby sister or brother in his arms. These images kept me marching.
Sitting across the table from Carly, I examined her carefully, though, I hoped, surreptitiously. I wondered if our meeting was as weird for her as it was for me. At the very moment we sipped our drinks, Carly’s eggs were in a petri dish being fertilized by my husband’s sperm. I felt jealous, as if she were the other woman in our marriage. Michael’s genetic material–his DNA–was cheating on me with the DNA of this blond, blue-eyed UCLA Law student. I imagined his millions of sperm swimming, tails wagging madly, toward her lovely, ripe eggs.
It had taken us months to choose Carly. We sat for hours each night, Michael and I, my laptop glowing in the darkness, scrolling though hundreds of postage-stamp-size photographs of prospective donors, like reading the profiles on a dating website. We were looking for something, though we couldn’t have articulated what it was, to capture us. One face, one bio that clearly shouted, That’s the one! Essentially, we hoped to fall in love.
Carly’s eggs were in a petri dish being fertilized by my husband’s sperm. I felt jealous, as if she were the other woman.
I’d point to a particular young woman, attracted by her prettiness, a high SAT score, or more often than not, just a feeling. And Michael would shake his head no. The reasons ranged from her nose is too big to she’s six feet tall to she just doesn’t look smart. I’d point to another one, and then another. I was looking to stay, however remotely, in the land of natural selection. Would this donor be someone Michael ever would have asked out on a date? How about a one-night stand? In other words, would there ever have been any way whatsoever that Michael’s sperm might have met her egg in a place other than a petri dish? We were so freaked out to be playing God that we wanted to feel, nonsensical as it may sound, that it would have been possible for this baby to have been created in the old fashioned way.
Sometimes it seemed important that the donor be Jewish. I come from an observant background myself. But I am blond and blue-eyed, with unusually–I’ve been told countless times—non-Jewish features. I had always been amused at the comments (“So, did your mother have an affair with the Swedish milkman?”), but now I was up against it, examining the specialized lists of Jewish donors, considering one dark-haired, dark-eyed girl after another. Which was more important to me? A Jewish egg? Or the chance for a baby who looked something like me and my little blond, blue-eyed son? (Though according to some Orthodox rabbis who debate such things, “she who gives birth” is considered the mother by Jewish law–which would make our baby, born of our Latina surrogate in Fresno, a non-Jew.)
Searching for the mother of my future child brought me face-to-face with my values, yet those values were in constant, roiling flux. Certain traits would rise to the top, then others. I became aware that I never would have chosen myself as a donor. My family history (depression, anxiety, drug addiction, heart disease, cancer… need I go on?) would have completely ruled me out. So what was I trying to accomplish here? Did I want to improve upon myself, or match myself? The one constant, and the one indisputably hereditary trait, was intelligence. But how could that be measured? Some agencies listed SAT and ACT scores, even the results of IQ tests. But what did it mean? A young woman might be “book smart,” a good test taker, but a thick, literal thinker. How would Michael and I–two neurotic writers, two misfits who live largely in our imaginations– know what to do with a nice, uncomplicated baby?
I found a donor I loved. She looked nothing like me, but I didn’t care. She had gone to Bard College and lived in Berkeley. She was adorable, with a mass of curls and freckles. She happened to be Jewish. She wrote long, thoughtful answers to the questions on the profile. She was an excellent writer. She had never donated before. I called her agency to inquire about her–my heart set–and was told that she had changed her mind about donating. She was worried about the long-term repercussions, psychologically and physically. And I could hardly blame her. I had chosen her precisely because she reminded me of myself: ruminative, always thinking five steps ahead, or 50.
I found another donor–going completely in another direction. A blond, blue-eyed triathlete and former model from the Egg Donor Program, an operation run by a marriage and family therapist and former Ford model, Shelley Smith. On a visit to Los Angeles, Michael and I met Smith in her office on Colfax Avenue, a suite decorated in an angel theme. Smith refers to her donors as “angels,” and her website describes each young woman in terms that evoke Playboy’s Playmate of the Month, like “perky, affectionate, with a megawatt smile.” We gave Smith a deposit and were days away from beginning a cycle, but I became terrified of the triathlete. Her smile was the same in every photo. She was unknowable to me, and I thought her child would be also.
Going back to the drawing board, I found myself discounting donors for embarrassingly elitist reasons. One was in beauty school; another listed her hobby as scrapbooking, her favorite author as Danielle Steel. Rationally, of course, I knew that these interests weren’t necessarily signs of dullness, but still I pictured my baby being born with a copy of Season of Passion clutched in her fist.
A woman looking for an egg donor yearns for someone who reminds her of herself, only younger, and the industry has learned that she’s willing to pay pretty much anything for that perceived similarity. Perusing websites, my husband and I noticed three factors that dramatically increased a donor’s proposed fee: an Ivy League pedigree, physical beauty, and proven donor success. As for the rare donor who possessed the trifecta, the sky, it seemed, was the limit. A lovely, dark-haired, Harvard-educated Vanderbilt Medical School student was listed as price upon request, like a couture dress. Ditto for a Natalie Portman look-alike Stanford student whose photo showed her playing the violin. One donor in particular comes to mind: a Harvard educated, half-Singaporean, half-Dutch, previously successful donor who wrote– in what amounts to a mission statement — that her desire to donate stemmed from “a Darwinian perspective on life,” her manifest destiny to spread her genetic material far and wide. Her asking price: $50,000.
I found the disparity between the going rate for donor eggs and for a surrogate disturbing. Though $35,000, our surrogate’s fee, seemed small recompense to take on all the physical wear and tear and risk of bearing a child, the greater value was in the genetics. Meanwhile, the amount of money we were laying out was starting to make me nervous–there were so many people suddenly on the payroll. We didn’t have endless stores of cash to spend but were treated by every professional we encountered as if we did. Team Baby! To navigate this baffiing universe of the most assisted of all assisted reproduction, a burgeoning new industry exists to help IPs (industry lingo for intended parents): psychologists, attorneys, insurance brokers, financial managers, egg donor and surrogate agencies, and reproductive endocrinologists.
It is in the interest of all parties to normalize the brave new world of assisted reproduction–a world, it must be said, that is many things, but normal is not one of them–as quickly and seamlesslyas possible. Just as my prospective donor found that the more she thought about donating, the harder it was for her to commit to it, so it is true with IPs. The best–or perhaps the only–way to go through the process is to keep blinders on and run maniacally toward the finish line. Stop, and you may stop forever.
Social worker Patricia Mendell, one of a handful of mental health professionals who specialize in infertility, was the first person in the industry to whom I spoke when Michael and I decided to go forward. I hoped to learn about the psychological pitfalls of the process, for Michael, myself, and for our future child, and, in fact, Mendell was knowledgeable and helpful about such matters. But before I knew what was happening, she also became my de facto egg broker.
A phone call from her to Darlene Pinkerton at A Perfect Match or to Marna Gatlin at Exceptional Donors meant that we might be able to snag a donor who wasn’t yet posted on the Internet, someone special–like a particularly fine wine not displayed on the list of a four-star restaurant. Getting an inside track was important because the best donors, meaning the beautiful Ivy League-educated ones, usually have long waiting lists before their photos even appear online. Those Dartmouth darlings and Princeton lovelies are only posted as bait for clueless IPs.
At Mendell’s suggestion, I started trying to charm the heads of several donor agencies. I sent letters, .along with photos of Michael, Jacob, and me smiling against the backdrop of our classic colonial on top of a hill. See? We were educated and good-looking ourselves. We were in the media, and I shamelessly used this as currency, aware that the agencies like bragging about their fancy clients, despite not being able to use their names. I even sent copies of my latest novel. Anything to let them know that we were serious and special. I had the distinct feeling of being a supplicant, grateful to the agencies and their donors for considering us.
I spoke to Mendell several times a week; she told me she’d called the heads of all the agencies and explained the kind of donor we were looking for. Since I wasn’t sure myself, I asked her to elaborate: a donor of depth, she said. I wondered if depth was hereditary.
She also let us know that she could screen prospective donors for us over the phone, catch red flags that novices like us might miss. I was disconcerted about Mendell’s expanding role. Was she my broker? An (unpaid) agent for the agencies? Wasn’t this unfair to infertile couples who didn’t have the resources or social cachet to have an insider working the phones for them? But I wasn’t about to rein her in. She was like a powerful literary agent, or a coach to help my kid get into the best private school. Mendell and I never once discussed her fee. Like every infertility professional we encountered, she seemed to assume that both our resources and our desire were endless. I remember being afraid before I opened Mendell’s first bill, as I was each time I received an e-mail from the financial department of Growing Generations. It felt as if we were hemorrhaging cash, without a baby in sight.
My universe got very small during the time I was trying to choose a donor. I typically share the details of my life with friends-but as I careened through the process, there were few people outside the industry who knew what we were up to. I didn’t know how to talk about it. I also found myself feeling increasingly old and vulnerable as I tried to replace myself with a bright, young thing. Whether they’re trained to communicate this way or not, the employees of Growing Generations, the donor agencies, and the reproductive endocrinologist’s office all seemed to speak slowly, carefully, as if talking someone off a cliff.
Carly was presented to us by Growing Generations as one of those “special” donors who hadn’t yet been put online; once that happened, we were told, a “feeding frenzy” would ensue. We were given a day to make a decision; I quickly found myself saying yes. She seemed–and this was now at the top of my list of what mattered–normal. She was smart, as indicated by her high SAT and LSAT scores. Her younger sister, also a donor, was equally academically gifted. She was cute and petite, about my height and weight. What more did I want, really? Depth? Humor? Jewishness? Neurosis? What I wanted was myself. Not because I was any great shakes, but because I was all I had. I wanted myself to be the mother of my second child, but that was too much to ask for.
Within a few days of choosing Carly, the bulletin board above my desk was taken up with charts as the countdown to her ovulation cycle got underway; I received phone calls from the clinic, letting me know that Carly had gotten her period and was soon to begin ovulation stimulation injections. A stranger across the country, and I knew when she was menstruating. We made plans to spend a week in L.A.–long enough for Carly’s eggs to be retrieved and fertilized with Michael’s sperm, and then a three-day wait to see whether any of the embryos were in good enough shape to be transferred into our surrogate, who was also getting hormone shots to prepare her uterus.
Carly and I had been together in the bar at Shutters on the Beach for about a half hour when I saw her checking her watch. “I don’t want to keep you,” I said. “Is there anything about me that you want to know?” I was worried that she might someday wonder about her genetic child, being raised far, far away from her. How could she possibly know how she would feel as a grown woman, possibly with children of her own? She thought for a moment.
“No,” she said. “Nothing I can think of”
I reached under my chair for the Fred Segal shopping bag. Inside was a box filled with bath salts, body cream, scrubs, and lotions. Was that too intimate a gift? I had been stumped, walking around the department store earlier that day. What do you buy your egg donor? Jewelry? A scarf?
“This is for you.” I handed her the box.
“Oh, you didn’t need to do that,” she said. Oh yes I did, I thought but didn’t say. In fact, it had been suggested to me by Growing Generations that I bring Carly a gift. She looked at the box for a moment. “Do you want me to open it now?” she asked. Her question made me flinch. The nature of our relationship was brought into its sharpest possible relief: It was transactional. And the transaction between us was coming to an end.
“No, that’s all right,” I said. Carly shook my hand goodbye and walked back through the lobby of the hotel–back into her life as a young, single law student.
Twelve hours later, at four o’clock in the morning, Michael and I picked up our surrogate at her hotel off Sunset Strip. In the dark, we drove through Beverly Hills to the Pacific Fertility Center, where our reproductive endocrinologist, Vicken Sahakian, MD, was meeting us. (He was flying to a conference later in the morning, hence the crack-of-dawn appointment.) We sat, Michael, Sandra, and I, in a brightly lit waiting room. The tables were covered with parenting magazines, alongside which were thick, loose-leaf binders bulging with mostly handwritten letters of thanks to Dr. Sahakian, accompanied by photographs of babies, frequently twins. Sahakian, personable, handsome, emerged from the elevator a few minutes after we arrived. He waved to us, then disappeared into his office, presumably to check the results of the fertilization. After what seemed a long time, he emerged. His expression was grim.
“These embryos are not good,” he said.
I looked at Michael. His face sagged.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“This is a poor donor,” Sahakian said. “The eggs were poor quality.” He was certain, he said, that Carly would be dropped from the program.
I had the sudden thought that I wanted my Fred Segal shopping bag back.”What do we do now?” Michael asked.
“We transfer as many as we can,” Sahakian said.There seemed to be no question as to whether we should move foward. “I think we’ll put four in.”
By in, he meant into Sandra’s womb. “Poor embryos” transferred into a stranger’s uterus. Embryos that were half my beloved husband’s. I felt nauseated as I accompanied Sahakian into the room where Sandra was lying, her lower body covered by a white sheet, her feet in stirrups. All I wanted to do was shout, “No!” But I couldn’t say a thing. I kept remembering Carly’s cool grip, the way she couldn’t think of any questions to ask me. I was acutely aware that I was watching something happen that I could never take back. I watched on a monitor as the microscopic embryos slid, one after the other, into Sandra’s uterus.
We drove her back to her hotel, and I helped her get ready for the 24 hours of bed rest. I presented her with a gift of creams and lotions, as well as every magazine I could find. I settled her into the king-size bed in her purple satin pajamas and left the TV remote in her hand.
“Well, you never know,” she said cheerfully as I prepared to leave. She was a kind, decent woman, trying to make me feel better.
Ten days later, back in New York, I found myself at the Museum of Modern Art. I knew my cell phone was going to ring, and I was as terrified as I have ever been. I wanted to be alone among people, in a place of beauty and history, a place that would somehow ground me as I received the news–whatever the news might be. I wandered through the cavernous second floor, trying to gather strength from the CyTwombly paintings depicting the four seasons. I was looking out at the sculpture garden when my phone rang.
“Dani? This is Christine from Dr. Sahakian’s office,” a voice said.
“Hi,” I responded, girding myself.
“I’m really sorry,” Christine said. “Sandra’s pregnancy test came back negative.”
I stared at the Rodin in the garden.
“Dani?” Christine asked. ”Are you okay?”
I couldn’t speak.
“I already called Sandra,” Christine said. “Please call us if there’s anything we can do.”
My mind had been racing so hard that, for a moment, I didn’t realize it had stopped. The constant, sick whirl I’d been carrying with me flew swiftly away. As my breath slowed, I tried to figure out what was going on. After all the trips, the money, the middle-of-the-night run through L.A., what I felt, finally, was relief. I’d been desperate, I realized, for the answer I’d just received. Desperate for the embryos to disintegrate into nothing.
I think I knew it was over then. I didn’t want any more phone calls from agencies telling me about fabulous new donors who hadn’t yet been posted. I didn’t want my weekly “check-in” calls from the Growing Generations psychologist, who had met me once, for five minutes.
I was pretty sure I wanted out, but I continued to explore donor websites, just to be sure. I found another donor I liked. She was a book editor (a book editor!) who on her agency video was articulate, thoughtful, funny. One other couple was waiting for her, but we could be second in line.
Since she was a first-time donor, she was flown to New York by the couple, who were having her medically and psychologically screened (the latter by Mendell); they were obviously going to great expense to have her checked out.
After Mendell interviewed the woman, I called to ask her how it had gone. This was a donor I thought I could go one more round with–she felt familiar. “I told her she shouldn’t be a donor,” Mendell said. “This couple is really pissed at me, but I had no choice.”
What did she mean? What had happened? ”
She had too many questions,” Mendell said. “She kept wondering about the future. About how she’d feel if she ever met the child–or if she didn’t. If she had kids of her own, or if she didn’t. She couldn’t get comfortable with the whole thing.”
On the other end of the phone, I was nodding. That’s my girl, I thought. She couldn’t go through with it either. Just like me.
The Secret Wife
In 1953, nine years before I was born, my father fell in love with a young woman named Dorothy Gribetz. She was a beautiful Orthodox Jewish girl who was, at twenty-seven, startlingly old to still be single in the moneyed religious urban world of my father and his family. My father was fresh out of a miserable marriage, stinging from a custody battle for his six-year-old daughter, Susie.
He married Dorothy in the living room of her parents’ modest Brooklyn apartment on April 11, 1954. She wore ivory satin, and carried a bouquet of pale flowers streaming with ribbons. Her enormous blue-green eyes were hidden beneath her veil and a tiara rested on her dark, wavy hair. My father was handsome in a morning coat and silk ascot. His best friend and best man, Danny Schacter, stood behind him. The rabbi placed a glass wrapped in a cloth napkin on the floor, and my father raised his foot to perform the ritual that ends every Jewish wedding. He stamped hard and smashed the glass. The guests shouted “Mazel tov!” and applauded as he and Dorothy kissed.
My father was beginning his marriage with a secret that only a few people shared. At the end of the evening, after the dancing, cigars, and toasts-when he and Dorothy ran laughing out of the building and into the brand-new Oldsmobile coupe her father had given them as a wedding gift-Dorothy was bundled up in her sealskin coat and jaunty hat. A bit of black netting drifted over her pretty eyes. She looked the way any bride might, embarking on a life filled with plans and expectations.
Dorothy was my father’s second wife. My mother was his third. I was seventeen before I ever knew Dorothy had existed. My half sister, Susie, let it slip one day. “Once, when Dad, Dorothy, and I were upstate,” she began, and I interrupted her: “Who’s Dorothy?” The few details I learned that day of this marriage of my father’s, a marriage so painful he never spoke of it, were all I knew for a long time. But, still, it made deep, emotional sense to me. My father had been missing for most of my childhood. He had retreated behind a wall of pills and prayer. Occasionally, playing ball with him in the back yard on a beautiful summer morning, I would catch a glimpse of the young man he must once have been – a deep belly laugh, a crushing hug, a sudden sparkle in his eyes – and I would want to reach out and hold onto him and to make things better for him, without ever knowing what had gone wrong.
In a photograph snapped seconds before I was married last year, I am standing next to my husband-to-be under a canopy draped with my late father’s ivory-and-white-striped tallis. In front of us, the rabbi recites a blessing. My heart is racing. I know this isn’t a case of premarital jitters. I have no second thoughts, no doubts about the man I’m about to marry. Before we leave for Paris, I call my doctor and ask for a prescription for tranquilizers. I have never taken pills before. Pills make me think of my father. He was addicted to Valium, Percodan, and Empirin for most of his life. I have a childhood memory of him sitting at the kitchen table in front of a lazy Susan filled with prescription bottles, checking his pulse, two fingers pressed against the side of his neck, his face contorted with fear. I spend my honeymoon certain that I’m about to die. I feel this not in an abstract, intellectual way but in my bones. And I take the first tranquilizer of my life in order to get on the plane home.
I have been married three times – once at nineteen, then at twenty-eight, and now, for the third time, at thirty-five. My first husband was a shop owner, a boyish free spirit. He took off on buying trips for months at a time. I was a teen-ager, unprepared for marriage or solitude. I threw dinner parties, cooked the one dish I knew, and pretended to be a grownup. Less than a year after the wedding, I left. I don’t think either of us was surprised, but I was a divorcee at twenty, and ashamed of it. My second husband was an investment banker. He was exactly the man I’d been brought up to marry: Jewish, stable, financially secure, with a life planned down to the last millisecond. I felt numb. I was giving up at the age of twenty-eight. The marriages had just this in common: they marked the only times in my life when I have been governed by severe, crippling anxiety.
As soon as I met Michael, I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life with him. The insanity of those earlier alliances became even starker when for the first time I realized what love actually felt like. Yet the panic persisted. Why did I equate being a wife with being destroyed?
My father’s first wedding, to Susie’s mother, had been a gala, candlelit affair in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, marking the union of two powerful Orthodox clans. Elaine Brody was from a textile and real-estate dynasty whose properties included the Essex House and the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Her great-grandfather had been the chief Orthodox rabbi of New York. My father never even proposed to Elaine; his parents proposed to hers. After the wedding, he began to work at his father’s silk mill, in Blackstone, Virginia, and would travel there for two weeks of each month. My grandfather was a self-made millionaire, and my father was firmly under his control. He didn’t even receive a salary. Whatever he needed in the way of money he had to petition for. When Susie was a toddler, my father and Elaine moved into an apartment on Park Avenue. But Elaine never accepted the role of traditional Jewish wife. She had been a serious pianist before getting married and wanted to continue to perform and even, perhaps, to pursue a doctorate. Nine years into their marriage, my father returned home from a trip to Blackstone to find the apartment empty. His wife and child were gone. The furniture was gone. Only his clothes remained, folded neatly on the top shelves of the closets. Divorce was unheard of in their circle, a rarefied community of Eastern European Jews who had brought their Old World values with them to America. Everyone pitied my father, but also backed away from him. What had he done to deserve such bad luck? Everyone knew something about it: Elaine had always been too ambitious for her own good, people gossiped over ice-cream sodas at Schrafft’s or lunches at the Tip Toe Inn, on Broadway and Eighty-seventh. She had left my father without even a bed to sleep in. And then there was talk that she had been having an affair with Susie’s pediatrician.
My father first met Dorothy Gribetz at the Brunswick Hotel, in Lakewood, New Jersey. Since his separation, he had been trying to meet eligible Orthodox women, going to Kosher resorts like Grossinger’s or the Concord, in the Catskills, or the Brunswick, where Dorothy was staying with her parents. She was devout, educated (with a degree from Cornell and a master’s from Columbia), and warm. She was kind to Susie. Orthodox Jews in the nineteen-fifties weren’t as strictly observant as they’ve since become, and my father and Dorothy had a courtship typical of its time. She saved the orchids he sent her each week and pinned them to her bedroom wall. On their Saturday-night dates, after Shabbos, they’d stop into a cocktail lounge for Cuba libres. They’d go ballroom dancing at the Plaza or the Pierre. For a nice kosher dinner they’d go to Lou G. Siegel’s, on Thirty-eighth Street. My father presented Dorothy with an emerald-cut diamond engagement ring–and this time he proposed himself.
The summer before she met my father, Dorothy had a cough she couldn’t shake. Her doctor told her it was whooping cough, and he hospitalized her briefly. While Dorothy was having tea at the Waldorf-Astoria, the winter before her wedding, my father’s younger sister, Shirley, noticed her carefully examining her cup before taking a sip. Dorothy explained that she had caught a virus in Nantucket the summer before, and she believed it was from drinking tea out of a cracked cup. My father’s family became concerned. Dorothy would grow suddenly pale, and unnaturally dark circles would appear under her eyes. On the advice of his parents, my father called Dorothy’s internist. The doctor assured him that Dorothy was fine.
But a distant cousin of my father’s who was an intern at the same hospital had interpreted Dorothy’s pattern of symptoms, and he didn’t think she was fine. He stole a peek at her medical records, and saw page after page of scrawled blood-test results: she had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, at the time a uniformly fatal illness. Once diagnosed, most patients could be expected to live about a year. Not knowing what to do with this information, the cousin called my father’s best friend, Danny, and told him what he had learned. Danny was married to the daughter of the renowned rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein, and he immediately went to his father-in-law for advice. The rabbi was emphatic: Danny had to tell my father what he knew.
The wedding was two weeks away. That night, Danny went to see my father, who was camping out in his parents’ study, a black-and-gold book-lined room twenty-seven floors above Central Park West. Oil portraits of the Shapiro ancestors – men with white double beards and black skullcaps — hung on the walls. There he broke the news to him. Dorothy was dying. She didn’t know. Only the doctors and her father knew the truth, and a decision had been made to protect her. Danny advised him not to marry Dorothy, for the sake of his future–his reputation was already tarnished as a divorced Orthodox man in 1954–and for the sake of his six-year-old daughter, who had already lost enough.
The morning after Danny’s visit, my father took a Checker cab to Brooklyn to see Dorothy’s father. Louis Gribetz was a short, wiry man, a respected attorney who had written a book about Mayor Jimmy Walker and made an unsuccessful run for City Council. He had studied for the rabbinate. He would have known the Talmud generally prohibits telling a terminally ill patient the truth about her condition. Dorothy was the oldest of his three children. Eleven years earlier, the youngest, a son named Stanley, had died at the age of seven, of rheumatic fever. Louis, in his living room high above Grand Army Plaza that night, explained to my father that he hadn’t told him because he wanted his daughter to know happiness in the last months of her life.
My father postponed his wedding to Dorothy for ten days. He had a boil on his stomach, and he checked into Beth Israel Hospital on Friday morning to have it removed, and to buy some time. He didn’t get in touch with Dorothy to let her know, and once it was sundown on Friday, the Sabbath, he wouldn’t be able to call her until at least sundown on Saturday. In the meantime, his sister Shirley made arrangements to come down on the overnight train from Boston. My father was determined that his parents shouldn’t be told about Dorothy’s illness. He had been under his father’s thumb his whole life. This time, he was going to make his own decision. But he needed advice. The next day, through a series of favors and connections, Shirley reached and made an appointment to see the Grand Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson. In 1954, decades before he was thought of as the Messiah by many in the Lubavitcher community, Rabbi Schneerson was already a mythic figure. While my family were considered Orthodox by most standards, Hasidim would have considered them assimilated. The Shapiros and their crowd kept their religious practices private. They didn’t wear yarmulkes on the street; they ate dairy or fish in regular, non-kosher restaurants; men and women danced together cheek-to-cheek. Shirley and my father knew that their parents had met Schneerson and respected him, but in turning to him they were moving outside their social circle.
Shirley is now seventy-four, and the grandmother of twenty. Her oldest son is an Orthodox rabbi, and most of her male grandchildren wear payess and dark clothes. I haven’t visited her often. By the time I was born, my father had moved–or perhaps was pushed–away from the Orthodox fold as Shirley and her family became even more deeply involved in it. My father had been divorced, then widowed, and had then married a woman–my mother–who wasn’t religious. With each move he drifted further away from the Manhattan shuls of his youth and the community that went along with them. “That day, I took a taxi to Crown Heights,” Shirley told me. “I was wearing my suit from Saks, but I was worried that I didn’t look religious enough to meet the Rebbe. So I had the taxi stop at a store on Delancey, and I ran inside and bought a tichel, a black rag. I took off my fancy hat and tied the tichel under my chin. When I got to 770 Eastern Parkway, I was shown straight into the Rebbe’s study. He was such a handsome man, with clear, clear eyes and a snap-brim fedora. His desk was absolutely clean. He sat quietly while I told him the whole story. And when I finished he was quiet for a few minutes. And then he said, ‘Tell your brother to postpone and postpone.’ ”
When Shirley got back to Beth Israel, prepared to convey the Rabbi’s advice to my father, there was Dorothy, sitting on my father’s bed, holding his hand, looking incandescent in a coral colored dress that set off her dark hair, and a black velvet hat. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes shone. “Shirl, can you imagine? I was trying on my wedding veil when I heard Paul was in the hospital!” My father was ashen, propped up in bed, still weak from his surgery. His head was bowed, and he was stroking the inside of Dorothy’s wrist, tracing the map of pale-blue veins. Later, when Dorothy left, Shirley told my father about Schneerson’s advice. “I can’t do that to Dorothy,” he said.
After the wedding, Dorothy said she wanted to start a family as soon as she felt better, but late that summer she was hospitalized. She had a lymph node removed from under her arm, and she was treated with mustard gas. When she came home, she had weakened considerably. She was no longer able to get up in the morning on Shabbos to set the table, so she did it with Susie’s help the night before. She never complained, but my father told Susie to be especially gentle with Dorothy. She wasn’t feeling well. Just before the High Holidays, my father and Dorothy moved into an apartment at 50 Plaza Street, on the same floor as Dorothy’s parents. It was an apartment big enough for a family, and it had views of Grand Army Plaza and the Brooklyn Museum. For Dorothy, it was an exciting new beginning. She began to furnish the apartment lovingly, ordering curtains, sofas, rolls of wall-to wall carpeting. But, for my father, being near Dorothy’s parents probably meant that he’d have more help with Dorothy when the time came.
On Rosh Hashanah morning, Dorothy and her sister, Grace, were dressing for shul in their old girlhood bedroom. Dorothy was wearing an ivory silk blouse with silk-covered buttons. Suddenly she sat down on the bed, her face white, the black circles appearing. “I’m too sick to go to shul,” she whispered. Then she unbuttoned her blouse with shaking fingers. “Grace, will you wear this to shul for me? That way, at least a part of me will be there.” As Grace was putting on Dorothy’s blouse, Susie came bouncing into the room in a new dress, excited about going to temple, wanting to see what was taking so long. “Susie, I can’t go to shul,” Dorothy told her. “But will you say a prayer for me?” “You can’t say a prayer for another person,” Susie replied. “You have to pray for yourself.”
In October, on Sukkoth, the holiday that celebrates the autumn harvest, Dorothy was in bed reading a magazine when she began to have trouble breathing. My father sent Susie outside to roller-skate. He called an ambulance, and Dorothv was taken into Manhattan, to Memorial Hospital. My grandfather came up from Virginia when he heard the news. He stood in the doorway of the waiting room and looked at Shirley through his pince-nez. He was an imposing man, portly and bald, and most people’s first reaction to him was fear. “What’s wrong with Dorothy?” he asked. Shirley looked up at him, shaking her head slightly. The word “cancer” was never uttered. “She’s very, very sick, Dad.” My father led my grandfather into Dorothy’s room. She was propped up in bcd, and there were tubes and wires everywhere. Finally, she looked every bit as sick as she was. She was drawn and terribly thin, and her eyes were sunken. “I wanted to say this in front of you, Dad,” she said to my grandfather. “I wanted to thank Paul for giving me the happiest six months of my life.”
Afterward, when it was all over, my father returned to the apartment, stepped over the still rolled-up carpeting Dorothy had ordered only weeks before, and headed down the long corridor into their bedroom. There on the bed was the magazine she had been reading just before she was taken to the hospital. It was open to an article about Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“After the ambulance came and took Dorothy away, I didn’t see Dad for two weeks,” Susie says, as we sit in her East Village apartment. “He called me every night, and every night I’d ask him where he was. And he’d say, ‘Where do you think I am?’ And I’d say, ‘The hospital.’ And then I’d ask how Dorothy was, and he’d tell me she was resting. “He picked me up on a Wednesday night after those two weeks had gone by. He looked like hell, and he was quieter than usual. We were in a taxi going through Central Park on our way to Grammy and Grampy’s when I asked him how Dorothy was. And he told me that Dorothy had died. She had died a week before. They had the funeral, buried her, sat shivah-all without telling me.”
My parents kept secrets. Dorothy was only one of them. My mother’s first marriage, an aunt’s nervous breakdown, an uncle’s attempted suicide–all were kept secret. On the surface, everything seemed perfect, but why was my father so unhappy all the time? Why did my mother seem so constantly on edge? Some of the friction between my parents had to do with my father’s strict religious beliefs. My mother was funloving and glamorous, the head of her own small advertising agency when she met my father. She had no idea that becoming Orthodox meant more than keeping a kosher home and going to shul on holidays. Orthodoxy was its own universe-a universe as suspicious of her as she was of it. As the years went by, we rarely saw my father’s family, and when we did they seemed foreign to me, with their yarmulkes and thick glasses. They were pale and wan with something called “yeshiva pallor.” On our way home from visiting, my mother would make fun of them, and my father would become even quieter than usual.
I grew up in a house full of fear. We were protected by three different kinds of alarm systems: pads on the floors under the rugs, a motion detector, and panic buttons that could be pressed in an emergency. I wasn’t allowed to run barefoot on the lawn; I was slathered with sun lotion year-round; if a bee buzzed near me, my mother would swoop down and rush me into the house. I never had chicken pox, measles, or mumps-any of the childhood diseases. I wasn’t around children enough to have them. But the real dangers were inside our house. What I remember is the silence. Most of the time it was as quiet as a wax museum, and my parents spoke to each other, at least in front of me, with brittle politeness. And then every once in a while there would be the booming sound of my father’s voice, or the loud slam of the back door as my mother went outside to sit on the cold aluminum of the milk can and smoke a cigarette. These fights didn’t seem to have beginnings or ends. But I knew my parents would never divorce. I couldn’t have articulated it back then, but my parents seemed to be holding their fragile world together with some sort of tacit agreement that their histories and secrets–the whole of their past lives–could be kept from each other, and from me. Once I knew about Dorothy, from time to time I would ask my mother about her. “They tricked your father into marrying her,” she’d say. “It was a terrible thing they did.” For my mother, it was as if my father’s second wife had barely existed. But Dorothy was very real for my father. The one time I asked him about her, I glimpsed pain in his eyes so intense I never asked again.
Grace Gribetz Glasser, Dorothy’s younger sister, wasn’t easy for me to track down. She’s married to I. Leo Glasser, the federal judge who presided over the John Gotti trial, and they lead a quiet, private life in a prosperous, protected section of Rockaway Park, facing the ocean. But when I visited her, almost a year into my new marriage, she seemed entirely unfazed that her late sister’s husband’s daughter would have come looking for her. “Hello, dear,” she said, as if she had been expecting me. I recognized her face from wedding photos, a wide-eyed young woman holding her sister’s bouquet. She is now sixty-nine, with silver hair. “You look like your father,” she said, ushering me in. It was a few days before Purim. Between us, on her kitchen table, was a shoebox full of photographs of Dorothy. Grace was twenty-five when Dorothy died. She has four children and nine grandchildren. Her oldest daughter is named Dorothy. Together we shuffled through the photographs. Dorothy on a picnic blanket with one boyfriend, on the beach with another. Dorothy and my father at their wedding. Grace handed me a photo of my father in a navy-blue suit, white shirt, and silver tie, his hands resting on the back of a chair as he turns to the camera, laughing. I had never seen this expression of pure, unadulterated joy on my father’s face. “I used to meet your father for lunch every once in a while,” Grace said. “I remember he called me when you were getting married. When was that?” I knew she was referring to my first marriage–the only one for which my father was alive. “He was worried,” she continued. “He wasn’t happy about it at all.” I wondered if my mother knew that my father stayed in touch with Dorothy’s sister. I doubt it.
Now I followed her down a hall and into her bedroom. The life she has: the children, the grandchildren, the hamantaschen in the oven–that was the life my father was supposed to have had with Dorothy. Dorothy and my father would have lived in Brooklyn, or on Central Park West, or on the beach at Rockaway Park. They would have been active in their local synagogue, had a bunch of children, and lived an observant life. Grace opened a walk-in closet, and I heard the scrape and rattle of hangers. She emerged from’the closet carrying a blouse. It was once ivory silk, with ivory silk-covered buttons. Now it was yellow and stained, and much too big for her small frame. “I’ve worn it to shul every Rosh Hashanah for forty-four years,” she said. Her voice was sweet and sorrowful. “It’s so stained now I can’t even take off my jacket. “I wish my sister were here to meet you,” she said. “But, if she were here, you wouldn’t be.”
After Dorothy died, my father looked for a new apartment. There was a building going up on East Ninth Street near Broadway, and he went with his sister to see it. They were sitting in the rental office when an impeccably dressed dark-haired woman in her early thirties walked in the door. Shirley noticed that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and nudged my father. A few months later, after my father had moved into that building, he saw the dark-haired woman on the street. It was Shabbos, and she was carrying a hammer, modern girl that she was, on her way home to install bookcases. Obviously, she wasn’t observant–a hammer? on Shabbos?–but he was pretty sure she was Jewish. They stopped and chatted, and he caught her first name, Irene. He knew she lived on the block, and the next day he spent his morning poring through the Manhattan phone book looking for Irenes on East Ninth Street. During my parents’ courtship, my father continued to spend weekends at Grossinger’s and the Concord, in search of an Orthodox woman. It was unheard of to marry outside Orthodoxy–it was almost like marrying out of the faith. But on September 4, 1957, he and Irene were married, at Young Israel on Sixteenth Street. A photograph of my parents at their wedding hangs over the desk where I write. They are walking up the aisle, and my mother is smiling triumphantly. My father’s hand is balled into a fist. Within a year, he had injured his back and became addicted to painkillers and tranquillizers. For all the years of my childhood, my father walked gingerly, as if constantly aware that collapse was possible, and as the tension in our home grew he became quieter and quieter. Sometimes I would try to catch his eye, to wink at him, to let him know I understood. But I didn’t understand. And he continued sliding away.
The Six Poisons
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