December 25, 2025 • 36 mins
In 1998, long before Dani discovered the truth of her biological paternity, she published a story called “The Secret Wife” about the discovery of her father’s second wife, a secret marriage that had been hidden for decades. Today, she reads and reflects on this story—the uncovering of the silent grief and buried histories that shaped her.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, Family Secrets. Family. The season is not remotely over.
But this week, this Christmas Day, I'm going to do
something a little different, a gift for you, and perhaps
a gift for myself as well. Over six years and
now thirteen seasons of hosting this podcast, I've heard hundreds
of stories of family secrets and the way what we
(00:23):
don't know, what has been hidden from us, acts upon
us none the less. Long before I discovered the secret
that had shaped me, there were other secrets. As a child,
I simply felt them, hungry ghosts in the room. When
I grew up and became a writer, I began to
write about these secrets, digging for them in my fiction
(00:44):
and my nonfiction, trying to get to the essential why
Why had I been born into such a legacy of secrecy.
In nineteen ninety eight, I wrote a personal history piece
for the New Yorker magazine. I was terrified. It was
a huge opportunity for a young writer, but that wasn't
the only reason it scared me. It scared me because
(01:06):
I was going to have to dig without knowing what
I would come up with, how complex and painful I
might find it. I'm going to tell you that story,
which is titled The Secret Wife. I may interrupt myself
as I'm telling it, annotate it in a way, because
when I wrote this story about my father and what
(01:27):
I thought was his most profound secret, of course, I
did not yet know his biggest secret of all, which
is that I was not his biological daughter. So let's
go on this adventure together. Here's The Secret Wife. In
nineteen fifty three, nine years before I was born, my
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father fell in love with a young woman named Darthy Gribbitz.
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
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a custody battle for his six year old daughter, Susy.
He married Darcy in the living room of her parents
modest Brooklyn apartment on April eleventh, nineteen fifty four. She
wore ivory satin and carried a bouquet of pale flowers
streaming with ribbons. Her enormous blue green eyes were hidden
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beneath her veil, and a tiara rested on her dark
wavy hair. My father was handsome in a morning suit
and silk ascot. His best friend and best man, Danny Shackter,
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.
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He stamped hard and smashed the glass. The guests shouted
mazeltov 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
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laughing out of the building and into the brand new
oldmobile coup 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 with plans and expectations. Dorothy was my father's second wife,
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my mother was his third. I was seventeen before I
ever knew Dorothy had existed. My half sister Susy 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
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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
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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 on to
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
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to my husband to be under a canopy draped with
my late father's ivory and white striped talis. In front
of us, a 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
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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, perkidin and emperin
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,
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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,
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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, took off on
buying trips for months at a time. I was a teenager,
unprepared for marriage or solitude. I threw dinner parties, cooked
the one dish I knew, and pretended to be a
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grown up. Less than a year after the wedding I left.
I don't think either of us was surprised, but I
was now 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.
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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
had been governed by severe, quippling anxiety. As soon as
I met Michael, I knew I was going to spend
the rest of my life with him. The insanity of
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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 ball room
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of the Waldorf Astoria, marking the union of two powerful
Orthodox clans. Elaine Brodie 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,
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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 Susy was a toddler. My father
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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 pursue a doctorate.
Nine years into their marriage, my father returned home from
a trip to Blackstone to find the apartment empty. His
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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 knew something
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about it. Elaine had always been too ambitious for her
own good. People gossiped over ice cream sodas at shrafts
or lunches at the Tiptoe Inn on Broadway in eighty
seventh Street. 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 Gribbets at the Brunswick Hotel in Lakewood,
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New Jersey. Since his separation, he'd been trying to meet
eligible Orthodox women, going to Kosher resorts like Grossinger's or
the Concord in the Catskills, or the Brunswick, where Darthy
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
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fifties weren't as strictly observant as they've since become, and
my father and Darthy 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 Shabus, they'd stop into a cocktail lounge for
Cuba libres. They'd go ballroom dancing at the Plaza or
the pier. For a nice kosher dinner, they'd go to
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Lugie Siegal's on thirty eighth Street. My father presented Drothy
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.
(10:11):
While Dorothy was having tea at the water off Astoria
the winter before her wedding, my father's younger sister surely
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
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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 internest. 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
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Dorothy's pattern of symptoms and he didn't think she was fine.
He stole a peek at her medical records and saw
a page after page of scrawled blood test results. She
had hotkins lymphoma at the time, a uniformly fatal illness.
Once diagnosed, most patients could be expected to live about
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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 Lukstein, and he
immediately went to his father in law for advice. The
rabbi was emphatic Danny had to tell my father what
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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 paintings
of the Shapiro ancestors, the men with white double beards
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and black skull caps hung on the walls. Then 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,
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his reputation was already tarnished as a divorced Orthodox Man
in nineteen fifty four, and for the sake of his
six year old, 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 Gribbitts, was a short,
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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 Rabbinet. He would
have known that TAMA generally prohibits telling a terminally ill
patient the truth about her condition. Dorothy was the oldest
his three children. Eleven years earlier, the youngest, a son
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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 Darthy for ten days. He had
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a boil on his stomach, and he checked into Beth
Israel Hospital on Friday morning to have it removed and
to buy time. He didn't get in touch with Drothy
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.
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My father was determined that his parents shouldn't be told
about Darthy's illness. He had been under his father's som
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 labovicher Rebbe Menachim
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Schneerssen in nineteen fifty four, decades before he was thought
of as the Messiah by many of the Labubbisher 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
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practices private. They didn't wear yamakas on the street. They
ate dairy or fish in regular, non Kosher restaurants. Men
and women danced together cheek to cheek. Surely 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
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of twenty I'm actually going to insert there that Shirley
is now one hundred and three and the great grandmother
of countless countless great grandchildren and great great grandchildren. Her
oldest son is an Orthodox rabbi, and most of her
male grandchildren wear paeous and dark clothes. I haven't visited
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her often. By the time I was born, my father
had moved, or perhaps was pushed, away from the Orthodox
fold as Surely and her family became even more deeply
involved in it. My father had been divorced, then widowed,
and then had married a woman my mother who wasn't religious.
With each move he drifted further away from the Manhattan
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shoals of his youth and the community that went along
with them. I'm also going to insert here that after
writing this piece, I became extremely close with my aunt Shirley,
and have remained so ever since. That day, I took
a taxi to Crown Heights. Shirley told me I was
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wearing my suit from Sachs, 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 De Lancey,
and I ran inside and bought a tykel, a black rag.
I took off my fancy hat and tied the tyrol
under my chin. When I got to seven seventy Eastern Parkway,
I was shown straight into the rebby's study. He was
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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 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
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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 charl Can
you imagine I was trying on my wedding veil when
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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
Darthy's wrist, tracing the map of pale blue veins. Later,
when Dorothy left, Shirley told my father about Niersen's advice.
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I can't do that to Darthy, he said. I also
want to add here that surely had the most extraordinary memory,
her memory of what Dorothy was wearing, her memory of
verbatim of what the rebby had said. I never would
have been able to write or publish this piece in
The New Yorker, which is famous for its fact checking process,
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without having had the incredible generosity of my extraordinary aunt,
who for whom it was not easy to tell this story.
It was such a painful story for her than for
everyone who knew my dad. 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
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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 Shabas to set the table,
so she did it with Susie's help the night before.
She never complained, but my father told Susye to be
especially gentle with Dorothy. She wasn't feeling well. Just before
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the high Holidays, my father and Dorothy moved into an
apartment at fifty 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,
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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 Roshachana morning,
Dorothy and her sister Grace were dressing for shul in
their old girlhood bedroom. Dorothy was wearing an ivory silk
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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 shool, she whispered. Then she
unbuttoned her bouse with shaking fingers. Grace, will you wear
this to shool for me? That way, at least part
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of me will be there. As Grace was putting on
Dorothy's blouse, Susy came bouncing into the room in a
new dress, excited about going to temple, wanting to see
what was taking so long. Susy, I can't go to shool,
Dorothy told her, But will you say a prayer for me?
You can't say a prayer for another person, Susy replied,
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you have to pray for yourself. In October, on Sioux Cote,
the holiday that celebrates the autumn harvest, Dorothy was in
bed reading a magazine when she began to have trouble breathing.
My father sent Susy outside to rollerskate. He called an
ambulance and Dorothy was taken into Manhattan to Memorial Hospital.
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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 ponsnez. 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
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was never uttered. She's very, very sick, dad. My father
led me my grandfather into Drothy's room. She was popped
up in bed and there were tubes and wires everywhere. Finally,
she looked every bit as sick as she was. She
was drawn and thin, and her eyes were sunken. I
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wanted to say this in front of you, Dad, she
said to my grandfather, I want to thank Paul for
giving me the happiest six months of my life. Afterwards,
when it was all over, my father returned to the apartment,
stepped over the still rolled up carpeting Dorothy had ordered
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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 Hopkins lymphoma. After
the ambulance came and took Dorothy away, I didn't see
Dad for two weeks, Susy says, as we sit in
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her East village apart. 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 Darthy was, and
he'd tell me she was resting. He picked me up
on a Wednesday night, after those two weeks had gone by.
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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 Darthy was, and he told me that Darthy had died.
She had died a week before. They had the funeral,
buried her sat Shiva, all without telling me. I am
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going to interject here that all these many, many many
years later, Susie and I have virtually no relationship, and
a big part of the reason that we have no
relationship is all a thing history, all of this pain,
all of this unnecessary secrecy, They were very much people
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of their time, and their time was a time in
which you didn't say the word cancer, and you didn't
tell children when someone had died, and the children didn't
come to the funeral and were never able to have
any closure and carry that pain with them throughout their
entire lives. And reading this all these years later, reading
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this out loud for all of you, is a very
emotional experience for me, and a very moving one. My
father was an extraordinary man, extraordinarily brave and kind, and yeah,
I'm just going to keep reading. My parents kept secrets,
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Dorothy was only one of them, to which I really
need to interject here, no shit, sorry. 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
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was my father so unhappy all the time? Why did
my mother seem so constantly on edge? Here I will
also interdict, I didn't have all the information, and all
the information I did have, and everything that I wrote
in this piece was in fact completely true, it just
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wasn't the whole truth. I didn't know all the secrets.
Some of the friction between my parents had to do
with my father's strict religious beliefs. My mother was fun
loving and glamorous, the head of her own small advertising agency.
When she met my father. She had no idea that
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becoming Orthodox meant more than keeping a kosher home and
going to school 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 yamukas and thick glasses. They were pale and wan
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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
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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 sunlation 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 mump, any of the childhood diseases.
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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
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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
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sort of tacit agreement that their histories and secrets, the
whole of their past lives, could be kept from each
other and from me. Again, extraordinary that I understand stood
on some level. This speaks to what listeners of this
podcast know. I talk about a lot in various episodes
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about the unsought known right here buried in my own
words before I ever knew that my dad wasn't my
biological father, that my parents had used a sperm donor,
that they had never spoken a word of their fertility
journey or their use of donor sperm, or the fact
that he wasn't my biological father. Ever again, I'll never know,
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but I believe they never spoke of it to each other,
and I'm certain that they never spoke of it to anyone,
most definitely not to me. So how's that for a
tacit agreement. Once I knew about Drothy, 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. From my mother, it was as
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if my father's second wife had barely existed. But Darthy
was very real for my father. The one time I
asked him about her, I glimpsed pain in his eyes
so intense that I never asked again. Grace Gribbet's Glasser,
Darthy's younger sister, wasn't easy for me to track down.
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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
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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's
now sixty nine with silver hair. You look like your father,
she said, ushering me in. It was a few days
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before pooram. Between us on her kitchen table was a
shoe box full of photographs of Darthy. Grace was twenty
five when Drothy died. She has four children and nine grandchildren.
Her oldest daughter is named Drothy. Together we shuffled through
the photographs. Dorothy on a picnic blanket with one boyfriend,
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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 hand resting on the back of a chair as
he turned to the camera, laughing. I had never seen
this expression of pure, unadulterated joy on my father's face.
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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 one for
which my father was still alive. He was worried, continued,
he wasn't happy about it at all. I wondered if
my mother knew that my father had stayed in touch
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with Drothy's sister. I doubt it. Now I follow her
down a hall and enter her bedroom. The life she has,
the children, the grandchildren, the hamentashen in the oven. That
was the life my father was supposed to have had
with Drothy. Darcy and my father would have lived in Brooklyn,
or on Central Park West, or on the beach at
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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 at hangers. She emerged from the closet
carrying a blouse. It was one's ivory silk with ivory
silk covered buttons. Now it was yellow and stained and
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much too big for her small frame. I've worn it
to shool every Roshashana 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 says. But if
she were here, you wouldn't be Is that ever true?
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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
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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 Shabus 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 Shabus, but he was pretty sure she was Jewish.
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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 pouring through the Manhattan phone
book looking for Irenees on East ninth Street. During my
parents courtship, my father continued to spend weekends at Grossinger's
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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 fourth,
nineteen fifty seven, 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
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are walking up the aisle and my mother is smiling triumphantly.
My father's hand is bawled into a fist. Within a year,
he had entered his back and become addicted to painkillers
and tranquilizers. For all the years of my childhood, my
father walked gingerly, as if constantly aware that collapse was possible,
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and as the tension in our home grew, he became
quieter and quieter. Sometimes I would catch his eye to
wink at him, to let him know I understood, But
I didn't understand, and he continued sliding away. So that
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is the end of the story that I wrote. In
nineteen ninety eight. It was the year twenty sixteen before
I learned what my parents had gone through in those
early years of their marriage, their attempt time and time
again to have a child, to create a family together,
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and ultimately what drew them to the very unusual and
completely secretive decision to use a sperm donor to create
a family, which was something that in the early nineteen sixties.
It happened. It happened plenty, but it was illegal, It
was considered immoral, It was frowned upon and forbidden by
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every religion. I could have been taken away from my
father legally, I would have been considered not his child.
He knew all that, and he loved me with every
cell in his being. I know that, and he was
a wonderful father in so many ways. But he and
my mother harbored this tremendous secret on top of all
(34:45):
of those other secrets. Their reasons for shivering over me
are now reasons that I understand so much better. His depression,
his sorrow, the compounding of all of those secrets in
his life life must really have been too much for
him to bear. And it's one of the great honors
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of my life as an artist, as a writer, as
a podcaster, to be able to tell his story, to
be able to tell my mother's story, to be able
to in a way honor them by sharing what was
really a very very difficult life. When I wrote in
(35:29):
this piece, just reading it to you now aloud, that
I knew they would never divorce. I did know they
would never divorce. I think they couldn't have tolerated divorcing. Also,
if they had divorced, it's possible that my mother could
have taken me away from my father. My father was
never going to leave her. I don't think that she
was ever going to leave him either, And instead, they
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lived with their secrets, and they lived with their pain
until each of them took those secrets to the grave
with them. So here I am family, Secrets. Family. On
this Christmas Day, or wherever this finds you, whatever, you
listen to this. What an extraordinary experience for me to
have just come back revisited this story, this story that
(36:15):
thrumbs beneath all the other stories that I have learned
since and that have liberated me from so much that
I didn't understand
Hi, Family Secrets. Family. The season is not remotely over.
But this week, this Christmas Day, I'm going to do
something a little different, a gift for you, and perhaps
a gift for myself as well. Over six years and
now thirteen seasons of hosting this podcast, I've heard hundreds
of stories of family secrets and the way what we
(00:23):
don't know, what has been hidden from us, acts upon
us none the less. Long before I discovered the secret
that had shaped me, there were other secrets. As a child,
I simply felt them, hungry ghosts in the room. When
I grew up and became a writer, I began to
write about these secrets, digging for them in my fiction
(00:44):
and my nonfiction, trying to get to the essential why
Why had I been born into such a legacy of secrecy.
In nineteen ninety eight, I wrote a personal history piece
for the New Yorker magazine. I was terrified. It was
a huge opportunity for a young writer, but that wasn't
the only reason it scared me. It scared me because
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I was going to have to dig without knowing what
I would come up with, how complex and painful I
might find it. I'm going to tell you that story,
which is titled The Secret Wife. I may interrupt myself
as I'm telling it, annotate it in a way, because
when I wrote this story about my father and what
(01:27):
I thought was his most profound secret, of course, I
did not yet know his biggest secret of all, which
is that I was not his biological daughter. So let's
go on this adventure together. Here's The Secret Wife. In
nineteen fifty three, nine years before I was born, my
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father fell in love with a young woman named Darthy Gribbitz.
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
(02:09):
a custody battle for his six year old daughter, Susy.
He married Darcy in the living room of her parents
modest Brooklyn apartment on April eleventh, nineteen fifty four. She
wore ivory satin and carried a bouquet of pale flowers
streaming with ribbons. Her enormous blue green eyes were hidden
(02:31):
beneath her veil, and a tiara rested on her dark
wavy hair. My father was handsome in a morning suit
and silk ascot. His best friend and best man, Danny Shackter,
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.
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He stamped hard and smashed the glass. The guests shouted
mazeltov 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
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laughing out of the building and into the brand new
oldmobile coup 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 with plans and expectations. Dorothy was my father's second wife,
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my mother was his third. I was seventeen before I
ever knew Dorothy had existed. My half sister Susy 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
(04:01):
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
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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 on to
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
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to my husband to be under a canopy draped with
my late father's ivory and white striped talis. In front
of us, a 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
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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, perkidin and emperin
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,
(05:26):
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,
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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, took off on
buying trips for months at a time. I was a teenager,
unprepared for marriage or solitude. I threw dinner parties, cooked
the one dish I knew, and pretended to be a
(06:10):
grown up. Less than a year after the wedding I left.
I don't think either of us was surprised, but I
was now 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.
(06:33):
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
had been governed by severe, quippling anxiety. As soon as
I met Michael, I knew I was going to spend
the rest of my life with him. The insanity of
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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 ball room
(07:15):
of the Waldorf Astoria, marking the union of two powerful
Orthodox clans. Elaine Brodie 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,
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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 Susy was a toddler. My father
(08:02):
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 pursue a doctorate.
Nine years into their marriage, my father returned home from
a trip to Blackstone to find the apartment empty. His
(08:24):
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 knew something
(08:44):
about it. Elaine had always been too ambitious for her
own good. People gossiped over ice cream sodas at shrafts
or lunches at the Tiptoe Inn on Broadway in eighty
seventh Street. 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 Gribbets at the Brunswick Hotel in Lakewood,
(09:05):
New Jersey. Since his separation, he'd been trying to meet
eligible Orthodox women, going to Kosher resorts like Grossinger's or
the Concord in the Catskills, or the Brunswick, where Darthy
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
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fifties weren't as strictly observant as they've since become, and
my father and Darthy 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 Shabus, they'd stop into a cocktail lounge for
Cuba libres. They'd go ballroom dancing at the Plaza or
the pier. For a nice kosher dinner, they'd go to
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Lugie Siegal's on thirty eighth Street. My father presented Drothy
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.
(10:11):
While Dorothy was having tea at the water off Astoria
the winter before her wedding, my father's younger sister surely
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
(10:34):
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 internest. 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
(10:55):
Dorothy's pattern of symptoms and he didn't think she was fine.
He stole a peek at her medical records and saw
a page after page of scrawled blood test results. She
had hotkins lymphoma at the time, a uniformly fatal illness.
Once diagnosed, most patients could be expected to live about
(11:17):
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 Lukstein, and he
immediately went to his father in law for advice. The
rabbi was emphatic Danny had to tell my father what
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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 paintings
of the Shapiro ancestors, the men with white double beards
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and black skull caps hung on the walls. Then 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,
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his reputation was already tarnished as a divorced Orthodox Man
in nineteen fifty four, and for the sake of his
six year old, 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 Gribbitts, was a short,
(12:42):
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 Rabbinet. He would
have known that TAMA generally prohibits telling a terminally ill
patient the truth about her condition. Dorothy was the oldest
his three children. Eleven years earlier, the youngest, a son
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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 Darthy for ten days. He had
(13:27):
a boil on his stomach, and he checked into Beth
Israel Hospital on Friday morning to have it removed and
to buy time. He didn't get in touch with Drothy
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.
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My father was determined that his parents shouldn't be told
about Darthy's illness. He had been under his father's som
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 labovicher Rebbe Menachim
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Schneerssen in nineteen fifty four, decades before he was thought
of as the Messiah by many of the Labubbisher 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
(14:32):
practices private. They didn't wear yamakas on the street. They
ate dairy or fish in regular, non Kosher restaurants. Men
and women danced together cheek to cheek. Surely 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
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of twenty I'm actually going to insert there that Shirley
is now one hundred and three and the great grandmother
of countless countless great grandchildren and great great grandchildren. Her
oldest son is an Orthodox rabbi, and most of her
male grandchildren wear paeous and dark clothes. I haven't visited
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her often. By the time I was born, my father
had moved, or perhaps was pushed, away from the Orthodox
fold as Surely and her family became even more deeply
involved in it. My father had been divorced, then widowed,
and then had married a woman my mother who wasn't religious.
With each move he drifted further away from the Manhattan
(15:37):
shoals of his youth and the community that went along
with them. I'm also going to insert here that after
writing this piece, I became extremely close with my aunt Shirley,
and have remained so ever since. That day, I took
a taxi to Crown Heights. Shirley told me I was
(15:57):
wearing my suit from Sachs, 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 De Lancey,
and I ran inside and bought a tykel, a black rag.
I took off my fancy hat and tied the tyrol
under my chin. When I got to seven seventy Eastern Parkway,
I was shown straight into the rebby's study. He was
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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 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
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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 charl Can
you imagine I was trying on my wedding veil when
(17:03):
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
Darthy's wrist, tracing the map of pale blue veins. Later,
when Dorothy left, Shirley told my father about Niersen's advice.
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I can't do that to Darthy, he said. I also
want to add here that surely had the most extraordinary memory,
her memory of what Dorothy was wearing, her memory of
verbatim of what the rebby had said. I never would
have been able to write or publish this piece in
The New Yorker, which is famous for its fact checking process,
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without having had the incredible generosity of my extraordinary aunt,
who for whom it was not easy to tell this story.
It was such a painful story for her than for
everyone who knew my dad. 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
(18:11):
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 Shabas to set the table,
so she did it with Susie's help the night before.
She never complained, but my father told Susye to be
especially gentle with Dorothy. She wasn't feeling well. Just before
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the high Holidays, my father and Dorothy moved into an
apartment at fifty 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,
(19:00):
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 Roshachana morning,
Dorothy and her sister Grace were dressing for shul in
their old girlhood bedroom. Dorothy was wearing an ivory silk
(19:20):
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 shool, she whispered. Then she
unbuttoned her bouse with shaking fingers. Grace, will you wear
this to shool for me? That way, at least part
(19:42):
of me will be there. As Grace was putting on
Dorothy's blouse, Susy came bouncing into the room in a
new dress, excited about going to temple, wanting to see
what was taking so long. Susy, I can't go to shool,
Dorothy told her, But will you say a prayer for me?
You can't say a prayer for another person, Susy replied,
(20:03):
you have to pray for yourself. In October, on Sioux Cote,
the holiday that celebrates the autumn harvest, Dorothy was in
bed reading a magazine when she began to have trouble breathing.
My father sent Susy outside to rollerskate. He called an
ambulance and Dorothy was taken into Manhattan to Memorial Hospital.
(20:28):
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 ponsnez. 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
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was never uttered. She's very, very sick, dad. My father
led me my grandfather into Drothy's room. She was popped
up in bed and there were tubes and wires everywhere. Finally,
she looked every bit as sick as she was. She
was drawn and thin, and her eyes were sunken. I
(21:15):
wanted to say this in front of you, Dad, she
said to my grandfather, I want to thank Paul for
giving me the happiest six months of my life. Afterwards,
when it was all over, my father returned to the apartment,
stepped over the still rolled up carpeting Dorothy had ordered
(21:36):
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 Hopkins lymphoma. After
the ambulance came and took Dorothy away, I didn't see
Dad for two weeks, Susy says, as we sit in
(21:59):
her East village apart. 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 Darthy was, and
he'd tell me she was resting. He picked me up
on a Wednesday night, after those two weeks had gone by.
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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 Darthy was, and he told me that Darthy had died.
She had died a week before. They had the funeral,
buried her sat Shiva, all without telling me. I am
(22:44):
going to interject here that all these many, many many
years later, Susie and I have virtually no relationship, and
a big part of the reason that we have no
relationship is all a thing history, all of this pain,
all of this unnecessary secrecy, They were very much people
(23:07):
of their time, and their time was a time in
which you didn't say the word cancer, and you didn't
tell children when someone had died, and the children didn't
come to the funeral and were never able to have
any closure and carry that pain with them throughout their
entire lives. And reading this all these years later, reading
(23:30):
this out loud for all of you, is a very
emotional experience for me, and a very moving one. My
father was an extraordinary man, extraordinarily brave and kind, and yeah,
I'm just going to keep reading. My parents kept secrets,
(23:53):
Dorothy was only one of them, to which I really
need to interject here, no shit, sorry. 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
(24:14):
was my father so unhappy all the time? Why did
my mother seem so constantly on edge? Here I will
also interdict, I didn't have all the information, and all
the information I did have, and everything that I wrote
in this piece was in fact completely true, it just
(24:36):
wasn't the whole truth. I didn't know all the secrets.
Some of the friction between my parents had to do
with my father's strict religious beliefs. My mother was fun
loving and glamorous, the head of her own small advertising agency.
When she met my father. She had no idea that
(24:58):
becoming Orthodox meant more than keeping a kosher home and
going to school 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 yamukas and thick glasses. They were pale and wan
(25:20):
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
(25:41):
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 sunlation 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 mump, any of the childhood diseases.
(26:02):
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
(26:24):
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
(26:46):
sort of tacit agreement that their histories and secrets, the
whole of their past lives, could be kept from each
other and from me. Again, extraordinary that I understand stood
on some level. This speaks to what listeners of this
podcast know. I talk about a lot in various episodes
(27:08):
about the unsought known right here buried in my own
words before I ever knew that my dad wasn't my
biological father, that my parents had used a sperm donor,
that they had never spoken a word of their fertility
journey or their use of donor sperm, or the fact
that he wasn't my biological father. Ever again, I'll never know,
(27:30):
but I believe they never spoke of it to each other,
and I'm certain that they never spoke of it to anyone,
most definitely not to me. So how's that for a
tacit agreement. Once I knew about Drothy, 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. From my mother, it was as
(27:53):
if my father's second wife had barely existed. But Darthy
was very real for my father. The one time I
asked him about her, I glimpsed pain in his eyes
so intense that I never asked again. Grace Gribbet's Glasser,
Darthy's younger sister, wasn't easy for me to track down.
(28:15):
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
(28:37):
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's
now sixty nine with silver hair. You look like your father,
she said, ushering me in. It was a few days
(28:59):
before pooram. Between us on her kitchen table was a
shoe box full of photographs of Darthy. Grace was twenty
five when Drothy died. She has four children and nine grandchildren.
Her oldest daughter is named Drothy. Together we shuffled through
the photographs. Dorothy on a picnic blanket with one boyfriend,
(29:21):
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 hand resting on the back of a chair as
he turned to the camera, laughing. I had never seen
this expression of pure, unadulterated joy on my father's face.
(29:45):
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 one for
which my father was still alive. He was worried, continued,
he wasn't happy about it at all. I wondered if
my mother knew that my father had stayed in touch
(30:06):
with Drothy's sister. I doubt it. Now I follow her
down a hall and enter her bedroom. The life she has,
the children, the grandchildren, the hamentashen in the oven. That
was the life my father was supposed to have had
with Drothy. Darcy and my father would have lived in Brooklyn,
or on Central Park West, or on the beach at
(30:27):
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 at hangers. She emerged from the closet
carrying a blouse. It was one's ivory silk with ivory
silk covered buttons. Now it was yellow and stained and
(30:51):
much too big for her small frame. I've worn it
to shool every Roshashana 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 says. But if
she were here, you wouldn't be Is that ever true?
(31:17):
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
(31:37):
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 Shabus 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 Shabus, but he was pretty sure she was Jewish.
(31:59):
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 pouring through the Manhattan phone
book looking for Irenees on East ninth Street. During my
parents courtship, my father continued to spend weekends at Grossinger's
(32:20):
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 fourth,
nineteen fifty seven, 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
(32:44):
are walking up the aisle and my mother is smiling triumphantly.
My father's hand is bawled into a fist. Within a year,
he had entered his back and become addicted to painkillers
and tranquilizers. For all the years of my childhood, my
father walked gingerly, as if constantly aware that collapse was possible,
(33:06):
and as the tension in our home grew, he became
quieter and quieter. Sometimes I would catch his eye to
wink at him, to let him know I understood, But
I didn't understand, and he continued sliding away. So that
(33:32):
is the end of the story that I wrote. In
nineteen ninety eight. It was the year twenty sixteen before
I learned what my parents had gone through in those
early years of their marriage, their attempt time and time
again to have a child, to create a family together,
(33:56):
and ultimately what drew them to the very unusual and
completely secretive decision to use a sperm donor to create
a family, which was something that in the early nineteen sixties.
It happened. It happened plenty, but it was illegal, It
was considered immoral, It was frowned upon and forbidden by
(34:19):
every religion. I could have been taken away from my
father legally, I would have been considered not his child.
He knew all that, and he loved me with every
cell in his being. I know that, and he was
a wonderful father in so many ways. But he and
my mother harbored this tremendous secret on top of all
(34:45):
of those other secrets. Their reasons for shivering over me
are now reasons that I understand so much better. His depression,
his sorrow, the compounding of all of those secrets in
his life life must really have been too much for
him to bear. And it's one of the great honors
(35:07):
of my life as an artist, as a writer, as
a podcaster, to be able to tell his story, to
be able to tell my mother's story, to be able
to in a way honor them by sharing what was
really a very very difficult life. When I wrote in
(35:29):
this piece, just reading it to you now aloud, that
I knew they would never divorce. I did know they
would never divorce. I think they couldn't have tolerated divorcing. Also,
if they had divorced, it's possible that my mother could
have taken me away from my father. My father was
never going to leave her. I don't think that she
was ever going to leave him either, And instead, they
(35:52):
lived with their secrets, and they lived with their pain
until each of them took those secrets to the grave
with them. So here I am family, Secrets. Family. On
this Christmas Day, or wherever this finds you, whatever, you
listen to this. What an extraordinary experience for me to
have just come back revisited this story, this story that
(36:15):
thrumbs beneath all the other stories that I have learned
since and that have liberated me from so much that
I didn't understand
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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