Go Ask Your Father: One Man's Obsession with Finding His Origins Through DNA Testing - Couverture rigide

Davis, Lennard J.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0553805517 ISBN 13 : 9780553805512

Editeur : Bantam Dell Pub Group, 2009

A propos du livre

Extrait

Chapter One
A Phone Call and Its Consequences

It was June 2, 1981, and I was in my apartment on Morningside Drive in New York City working on a new book. A professor in the Columbia University Department of English, married, with a one-year-old son, I had a life that seemed pretty steady. At that particular moment, however, I was grieving. My father, Morris Davis, had died a week earlier, just before his eighty-third birthday, after a long, slow decline caused by prostate cancer.

Born in 1949, I was the son of Morris and Eva, and I had grown up in the Bronx with my brother, Gerald. Aside from the fact that my parents were both deaf and we spoke sign language at home, ours was a typical, ordinary family. I felt sure that I understood the basic contours of my life as well as anyone else did.

But this was a difficult time. I was still feeling the strangeness of being an orphan. My mother had died ten years before, having been hit by a truck while crossing the street when I was twenty-two years old. And now my father, too, was dead, a mere two days after slipping into a coma.

The phone rang, taking me away from my work. It was a call from my uncle Abie, my father's younger brother. We began talking about dividing up some of my father's possessions. As we were discussing these details, I remembered that a month or two earlier Abie had taken me aside at my father's hospital bed and said in an unwelcome, confidential tone, "I've got a secret, but I can't say what it is until your father dies."

At the time I had shrugged off Abie's sepulchral whisper in my ear as yet another of the odd and annoying things that had come out of his mouth over the years. Abie was someone my father and mother had held in low esteem. Whenever they talked about him, they presented him as an example of what not to be like: he was always late and always impulsive, and he did things that I was told not to do. These were rather ordinary things that, I learned later in life, many people did—things such as read in bed, read on the toilet, and hang around the house in his pajamas all morning. But there was a particular urgency in the way I was encouraged not to do such things. My father, Morris, was a precise, orderly man of British birth who prided himself on punctuality and control. He was a man who went to sleep when his head hit the pillow, emptied his bowels on schedule and without the aid of printed matter, arrived on time, and got up in the morning dressed for action. Abie was his opposite, his less superego-driven counterpart. In addition, having lost one wife when he was younger and divorced another in later years, Abie had dated a constantly changing stream of women even into his seventies—in sharp contrast to my father's lifelong history of steady and devoted monogamy. In our family, Abie was what one should not be. Not exactly a rebel, but someone without a cause.

Now, as I talked to Abie on the telephone, I suddenly remembered his knowing whisper at my father's deathbed.

"By the way, what was that secret you said you'd tell me after my father died?" I asked.

"Oh, nothing. Forget about it." Abie still had traces of a British accent that my father never had because Morris became deaf before he could speak.

"Come on! You said there was a secret. Since you mentioned it, you really have to tell me."

"No, it's not important."

He demurred; I insisted.

Finally he took a breath and said: "You know, there are ten years between you and your brother, and that was because your parents had trouble having another child. Well, when they finally realized they couldn't, they asked me for help."

I didn't get it. Then he added, "Well, I don't know how to say this, but I am your father."

There was a long pause. The last four words hung in the air like a sword of Damocles. My father's body was barely settled in its grave; my grief was still fresh.

"You . . ." I trailed off.

"It's not what you think."

I had immediately conjured up the distasteful image of my uncle and my mother locked in a forbidden embrace. That thought, given all I knew of my uncle, wasn't impossible, but from what I knew of my mother, it appeared highly unlikely.

"It was . . ." He hesitated for the words. "What do you call it? Artificial insemination."

This story was sounding fishier every minute. Did they even have artificial insemination in January 1949, the month and year I was conceived?

"Your father came to my store on Fourteenth Street, where I was making leather novelties, and he had a jar."

"A jar? What kind of a jar?"

"I don't remember. Just a jar, a tube. He asked me to, you know, put some semen in it. I went to the men's room and did."

I had an even more distasteful image of my uncle masturbating in the smelly bathroom of his grimy workshop.

"Nine months later you were born." Abie said this in his high, nasal, lower-class British accent, which had become somewhat Americanized. It was an unpleasant voice, metallic, whiny, and insinuating. So was that how I was conceived? No candles or flowers, no romance, no glint in the eye—just a quick jerk-off in a rank toilet?

I couldn't say anything. The whole idea seemed so far-fetched and impossible. My parents had repeatedly told me how they "tried" to have me. How long it took. How difficult it was. It always struck me as an embarrassing but also funny tale. How hard could it have been to "try"? Sex is fun and enjoyable, isn't it? Why had they looked so tormented when they told that story? After all, I was born. Here I was. I had always imagined some vast and chronic investment of sexual energy that ultimately produced me. And even though they had told me of the difficulty, the story always had a happy ending, with my triumphant birth and their collective bliss and tears of joy. My brother had always told me how pleased he was, at ten years old, to have a little brother. It was a family romance culminating in happiness and success. Wasn't it?

If Abie's story was true, why had they never spoken or signed a word to me about this strangely dark tale that was now unfolding?

Abie continued in an insinuating tone that was becoming more and more disconcerting to me: "You know, you are very bright. I always followed your achievements. Your father was, you know, intelligent, but he was deaf. How well you did at school, I always knew that was because of me. I was proud of you. When you got into Columbia University, got your Ph.D., I knew that was because I was your father. Now you are a professor at Columbia. I'm proud of that." Was he insulting my father, who had just died? Was Abie crowing over his sexual and intellectual superiority to his deaf brother?

The whole thing seemed so ludicrous and so much like the nineteenth-century novels I wrote about in my work as an English professor that I began to feel like a character in an elaborate plot. There was a scene in a George Eliot novel, Felix Holt, that came instantly to mind. Harold Transome's argument with an older man named Jermyn, who is his enemy, is becoming more physical and violent.

By this time every body's attention had been called to this end of the room, but both Jermyn and Harold were beyond being arrested by any consciousness of spectators.

"Let me go, you scoundrel!" said Harold, fiercely, "or I'll be the death of you."

"Do," said Jermyn, in a grating voice; "I am your father."

In the thrust by which Harold had been made to stagger backward a little, the two men had got very near the long mirror. They were both white; both had anger and hatred in their faces; the hands of both were upraised. As Harold heard the last terrible words he started at the leaping throb that went through him, and in the start turned away from Jermyn. He turned it on the same face in the glass with his own beside it, and saw the hated fatherhood reasserted.

I, like Harold, felt the "leaping throb that went through," but I couldn't respond. Here was the man my parents least respected; the one I had been cautioned from youth not to be like; the one who, practically waltzing on my father's grave, was telling me that of all the people in the world, he was my father.

As if all this was not confusing enough, Abie now tossed a new bombshell. "I wouldn't be too disturbed. Because I may not be your father after all."

"No? Why not?"

"Well, Morris said that when he brought my semen to the office, the doctor mixed my semen with Morris's. So, who knows, you might actually still be Morris's son."

They mixed the semen? This seemed like a preposterous detail. Abie was surely making the whole thing up. He was delusional. This wasn't happening to me.

"But why didn't you tell me this before? Why didn't anyone tell me?"

"Morris made me swear never to say anything about this. I probably shouldn't even be telling you now. But you made me tell you."

"I made you? You told me you had a secret."

"Well, I shouldn't have told you."

This was degenerating into a squabble. I don't recall what I finally said. I just hung up the phone in a state of utter confusion.

I moved from the phone to the dining room table and collapsed into a chair, my head in my hands, sinking down to the table. As my eyes focused on the New York Times in front of me, I saw a headline: "New Use of Blood Test Is Decisive in Paternity Suits." The article talked about DNA paternity tests and how they could tell with 95 percent accuracy who your father really was. The coincidence made the information I had just received seem even more bizarre. Whose movie was I in?

In the days that followed, I had a virtual identity crisis, conjuring up how I would feel about ...

Présentation de l'éditeur

Every family has a secret. But what if that secret makes you question your own place in the family? Mixing equal parts memoir, detective story, and popular-science narrative, this is the emotionally charged account of one man’s quest to find out the truth about his genetic heritage–and confront the agonizing possibility of having to redefine the first fifty years of his life.

Shortly before his father’s death, Lennard Davis received a cryptic call from his uncle Abie, who said he had a secret he wanted to tell him one day. When finally revealed, the secret–that Abie himself was Davis’s father, via donor insemination–seemed too preposterous to be true. Born in 1949, Davis wasn’t even sure that artificial insemination had existed at that time. Moreover, his uncle was mentally unstable, an unreliable witness to the past. Davis tried to erase the whole episode from his mind.

Yet it wouldn’t disappear. As a child, Davis had always felt oddly out of place in his family.  Could Abie’s story explain why? Over time Davis’s doubts grew into an obsession, until finally, some twenty years after Abie’s phone call, he launched an investigation–one that took him to DNA labs and online genealogical research sites, and into intense conversations with family members whose connection to him he had begun to doubt.  

At once an absorbing personal journey and a fascinating intellectual foray into the little-known history of artificial insemination and our millennia-long attempt to understand the mysteries of sexual reproduction, Davis’s quest challenges us to ask who we are beyond a mere collection of genes. And as the possibility of finding the truth comes tantalizingly within reach, with Davis facing the agonizing possibility of having to reenvision his early years and his relationships with those closest to him, his search turns into a moving meditation on the nature of family bonds, as well as a new understanding of the significance of the swarms of chemicals that are the blueprints for our very human selves.  

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Bantam Dell Pub Group
• Date d'édition: 2009
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0553805517
• ISBN 13: 9780553805512
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 227
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible