Norman Hecht as a boy
Norman Hecht as a young man
I have not spoken to my father since the conversation in late 1998 that ended with him saying I could call him anytime—“Call me in the car, my wife’s not usually in the car.”
In the summer of 2005, as an extension of my genealogical adventure, I decide to join the Daughters of the American Revolution. My desire is not political but personal. I want to join the DAR because it is a lineage organization—and among the first things my father told me about myself was that I am eligible. And while I am an unlikely member of such an organization, I want to try it on as a piece of my biological identity—I want to see from the inside the thing that I am not. My friends are upset by the idea; they view the DAR as right wing and racist. In 1939 the DAR refused to allow the black singer Marian Anderson to sing at Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall. (Subsequently Miss Anderson sang at Constitution Hall six times.) I explain to my friends that understanding my background is not just about embracing the parts that feel comfortable, and that, in this case, my interest is in the concept of lineage. I trade e-mails with the president of the Port Tobacco, Maryland, chapter—the hometown chapter of the Slyes of Maryland. She sends me a copy of the worksheet, which asks the applicant to walk back through time and provide the documentation for fourteen generations proving the link to the one deemed “the Patriot.”
I am assured that this documentation can be assembled if I can provide the more current information—namely my father’s birth certificate and my own. A complication—my father’s name is not on my birth certificate. And my father’s birth certificate is available from the District of Columbia Department of Vital Records, but only to next of kin—photo ID required. I explain to the DAR that my birth parents were not married and that I was adopted and I do not have a birth certificate with my father’s name on it, but that my father and I had a DNA test to prove our relationship. The DAR responds that they do not care if my parents were married or not, they will accept the DNA test as sufficient proof. A further complication—I don’t have a copy of the results.
Why didn’t I ask him for a copy of the test in July 1993 when the blood was drawn? I could say I felt shy, but the truth is I felt infantile—thrown back through time. It was all I could do to hold on to any semblance of self. I wanted him to like me, I wanted to know more about who I was, where I had come from. I felt I had to do what I was told. As much as he and I were equal participants in the test, he paid for it, refusing to accept my offer to share the expense. I was intimidated. I didn’t want to cause trouble. I didn’t want to be rejected again.
I imagine asking him and am intimidated even now. Just the idea of it hurts. And I always worry that my call will come too late—he will be dead. And even if he’s not, what will I say—“Hi, I want to join the DAR and I need a copy of your birth certificate and the DNA test?”
I imagine him answering the phone—his voice will tremble and he’ll say, “This is not a good time—can I call you back later?” How will I feel if he doesn’t call back? And what if I do manage to ask for what I want and he stalls, and there is an awkward and heavy silence? Do I continue, “We were equals in submitting to the test and both have the right to the information?” And if he says, “I don’t think so,” I’m not sure where I go. “I’ve never asked you for anything, but now I am asking you for something and I hope you will reconsider.”
I think of calling him—in my imagination, his wife answers the phone, and is not pleased. To her I am illegitimate. Does it mean I don’t exist, that I never existed, that I am something to be forgotten, left behind, basically a big embarrassment?
In my thoughts I can call him; in reality I can’t pick up the phone.
I ask Marc, my lawyer—the same lawyer who called him years ago to tell him Ellen was dead—if he would mind giving him a call. I give Marc the phone number and explain that his wife might answer. We discuss what he is going to say. The call is made.
The wife answers the phone and my father goes into another room to take the call. My father tells my lawyer that he will not provide the test result, that in fact he does not even have the test result—he gave it to his own lawyer for safekeeping. Marc is told that he should not call my father anymore, that any further communication should go through my father’s lawyer. Marc calls my father’s lawyer and the lawyer tells him that, yes, he did have the test result but that he did something with it—can’t remember what, so it’s not to be had. Marc tells him that an affidavit of paternity will do and is told that that’s not possible, that’s not going to happen.
Call me naive—there was part of me that thought when my lawyer called and asked for the test results, the answer would be, Yes, of course, and how is she?
When Marc calls to tell me how it went I’m feeling hopeful, cheered by the swiftness of the response. “I spoke to your father,” he says and I’m pleased, proud in a certain way, and then he says, “And it didn’t go well,” and my spirits sink. “He declined to provide the information and asked that we not contact him directly again.” That’s my father we’re talking about—my father is saying, Please don’t call again. Was it something I said, or just the fact of my existence?
The idea that my father asked me to participate in a DNA test—asked me to prove myself to him—and now won’t share the results is not okay. It is about power and arrogance and the negation of my right to own my identity. I feel a moral obligation—a social and political obligation, an obligation that is larger than me—to try and get a better resolution, a better end.
“What did you expect?” a friend asks.
“More,” I say.
“This is nothing new,” she says. “He’s behaving in character. Look at what he did to your mother. He’s not a good guy.”
“He’s my father.”
“You’re screwed.”
I am waiting for this man to do the right thing. What I want from him is not his money or even his love—at this point, in the absence of his affection, I want a context, a history, a way of understanding how all this came to be. Will I ever have the question answered: Where did my paternal grandparents meet, what was their courtship like, how did it happen that the son of a Jewish butcher married a Southern belle?
And now I also have to defend my dead mother. My friend is right about this. It’s not about me, it’s about him, it’s about the way he behaves, how he values people, how he does only what he wants, what’s good for him. My mother had no life after she gave me up—she never married, never had another family. She had invested in him from a very early age—he used her and then said good-bye. She never recovered.
“Law is not about what is fair, you realize that,” a friend says to me.
I call another friend, who calls Lanny Davis, a well-known Maryland lawyer who acted as special counsel to the White House under Bill Clinton. I remember Davis from when I was growing up and he was an up-and-coming local politico. I instinctively trust him and explain the situation. Lanny offers to make a call for me; he is quite sure that if he explains the situation to my father—and the reason that I am asking for this document—it will be forthcoming.
“There’s no reason to think we’ll have to take this further.” I give him the telephone number and again mention that the wife might answer the phone. He calls me the next afternoon—shocked. My father took his call, seemed to know why he was calling before he even said anything, and flat out refused. Lanny, being careful about his description of the events, told him, “I was approached by your daughter and asked to consider representing her, but having heard the story, it is my hope that this can be resolved without my having to put my lawyer hat on.” Norman refused. “Should I put my lawyer hat on? Should I be speaking with your lawyer?” My father refused to even tell Lanny his lawyer’s name and/or provide the lawyer’s phone number—both of which I already had.
Lanny called my father’s lawyer. The lawyer said, “You don’t have a leg to stand on, there is nothing to go to court about, there is no case, and you cannot have the document.” He said no and no and no. The lawyer was cautiously reminded that if this became a court case it also became a public event. He was unfazed.
“Is there anything else I should know?” Lanny asked me. “Some other reason why he wouldn’t want you to have this?”
“There are only two things I can think of: one is that he is not really my father, but somehow wanted to be, in some strange way; or maybe he’s worried I’ll make a claim on his estate.”
Long ago, when he stopped talking with me, I thought it might be because he was worried that I would sue his estate for a “piece of the pie.” I explain to Lanny I want nothing from his estate and in fact would feel compelled to refuse anything were it to come.
Once again in my head I am writing letters.
Dear Norman,
Are you kidding? You are writing your own history. You are painting a portrait of yourself that is less than flattering—want to reconsider?
I confer with lawyers—everyone is surprised. It shouldn’t be this difficult.
“Is it something about your family and the DAR? Something maybe you don’t know? Something that bubbles beneath?” someone asks.
What bubbles beneath is rage—nuclear-hot rage. And below that, deep grief—profound disappointment that he is not capable of more, cannot rise to the occasion, does not feel compelled to do better.
I go to see the rabbi. I am hoping for some insight, hoping there is learned example, spiritual intervention that will guide my decisions. We talk a lot about what is to be gained and what is to be lost—the actual importance of the piece of paper and the larger picture.
The rabbi suggests I write a letter—a simple note: I am writing to let you know that if I don’t hear from you to the contrary, I am going, from now forward, to act as if and assume that you are my biological father.
The rabbi suggests that I run that past the lawyer. I do and the lawyer points out that it proves nothing, that it simply sets me up to wait—for nothing.
I write more letters in my head:
Dear Dad,
My interest in the DAR is about genealogy and lineage and I cannot let your actions stop me from joining with hundreds of years of my biological decedents.
You long ago promised to take me into your family—and I understand that life and families are complicated things. What I am asking for is not about your immediate family, your sons and daughters who are biologically no more or less related to you than I—what I am asking you for is to provide the link, so that I may make my own connection to my past, allowing me to join my relatives of the last four hundred years. It is the history that interests me, the history of all of the families that I am part of….
Dad—
You fancy yourself a man of belief, of good character; I would think as one grows older one would think about that belief, about what one’s God expects of him, about one’s behavior through the course of his lifetime. I am a person of great optimism and faith and it remains my hope that we can resolve this with some measure of grace.
Pop—
Take responsibility for your actions, be a bigger person, be a man.
Mr.
You are an old man——don’t you want peace, don’t you want people to feel good about you?
Dad—
Fine thing. Isn’t that your expression for events such as these?
The lawyers debate what to do—is there a way to compel him to produce the document? If we were to take him to court, what would we take him to court for—breach of contract? unfair use of the results? He’s had more than 50 percent use of a co-owned result for all these years. If in fact he lied to me, saying, I want you to do this test so I can take you into my family, when he may have wanted the results to explicitly exclude me from his family, from his estate—it’s fraud. Was he acting fraudulently?
“Where was the test done?” one of the lawyers asks me.
“The blood was drawn in Washington, D.C.”
“What was the name of the lab?”
“I don’t remember. I’m not sure it even had a name—it wasn’t so much a lab as an office, a collection site.”
“Maybe you can get the result directly from the lab.”
Once again I am digging. I am looking for blood labs that did DNA blood testing in 1993—before it was all the rage, before everyone and their mother wanted to know who throughout history was their brother. I uncover Orchid Cellmark—the leader in DNA testing—and give them a call.
“This is Jennifer,” the voice of Orchid Cellmark says.
“Hi, I’m trying to locate the results of a DNA blood test I had done in 1993.”
When I say 1993, it’s as though I’m saying 1903—the world we are living in is so brutally advanced and ahistorical.
In a millisecond Jennifer tells me, “Oh, we wouldn’t have that. Anything over five years we don’t keep.”
“What do you do with it?”
“We shred it,” Jennifer says. And I don’t believe her. I’m thinking, Jennifer, you can’t shred it because it doesn’t exist on paper—it lives in a computer. And then images of laptop computers being fed into a giant shredder fill my mind.
“Thanks,” I say, hanging up. I try another lab.
According to Pat at LabCorp of America they too don’t have the results. “We keep our records for seven years.”
“When did you start doing DNA testing?”
“Hold on.”
I’m on hold with tin can music in my ear. I’m on hold for a long time and it occurs to me that she just put me on hold to make me wait and is sitting there on the other end, picking her nose. It occurs to me that she might not come back. “First in its industry to embrace genomic testing,” says the background tape.
“Nineteen eighty-one,” she says, coming back on the line. There is a peculiar coldness, a kind of self-satisfaction to the way these people say, We don’t have that, as though they have no idea what that might mean, they really don’t care, as though they get enormous and perverse pleasure from emptying the electronic trash can on their computer screen. Gone, gone, and gone.
One of the lawyers asks if I have any letters from him. I think somewhere I might have a birthday card. Would there be enough DNA on the envelope to get a result? And anyway, without him already in a database, how would we deny or confirm?
Again the lawyers debate. We talk about the fact that I have not said his name in public, have never printed the information. I am wondering if my father realizes that until now I’ve never told anyone who he is. In fact, the origin of this book, a long piece I wrote for the New Yorker in 2004, reflected my desire to continue to protect him. In that article, I called Norman “Stan” and Ellen “Helene.” I’m wondering if Norman knows that what I wrote for the New Yorker was so convincing that when it was time for the magazine to fact-check the article, they e-mailed me and asked for “Stan’s” phone number. “My father’s name is not really Stan,” I explained. And again they asked for his name and number. I told them that I had never given anyone that information and I would not be able to provide it to them.
Only after the magazine first threatened and then did briefly kill the piece did I question why I was ruining my professional reputation protecting the identity of someone who had never shown any particular concern for me. Still, I didn’t think they needed to bother the man. They insisted. The New Yorker has what they call a double standard for fact checking—if the subject is to be unidentified or masked, not only does the subject have to be rendered unrecognizable to others, but also unrecognizable to himself. My father, simply by knowing that he is my father, had his cover blown.
The way the magazine killed the piece—as if doubting me—practically killed me. For the first time in years, I felt that my right to exist was in question. That there was any doubt to the truth of my story sent me into a spin. It had never been my desire to expose my father—and at the same time I couldn’t help but wonder, why was I being so protective? Finally I gave the New Yorker his phone number. I have no idea what was said between the magazine and my father and his lawyer. I asked to be there, a witness to the conversation, but the fact-checker refused. From what the fact-checker told me, I understood there were thirty-five questions the magazine wanted to ask; they detailed them for my father and his lawyer—and my father and his lawyer declined to answer any of them. The piece was published by the New Yorker in December of 2004.
I confer with my lawyers about the DAR application—it occurs to more than one of them that the lawyer for my adoptive parents might actually have a copy of my original birth certificate, because it was a private adoption and because my mother never signed the papers, and someone had to provide the court with a copy of the original birth certificate.
The lawyer I have to call is the man who called my parents in 1992 to tell them that Ellen had contacted him, the same lawyer who opened the letters from Ellen, who recognized my father’s name and called Ellen to say, if you’re going to give her (me) that information, you’d better tell him.
Dialing the lawyer’s house, I have chest pains. His wife answers—she is tentative when I ask for him. “May I ask who’s calling?”
“A.M. Homes.”
“May I ask, what is it about?”
And I explain, “Mr. Frosh helped my parents finalize my adoption back in 1961. It was a private adoption and I spoke with him several years ago when my birth mother contacted him trying to reach me—and now I have some questions.”
There is a pause. “He’s not entirely well.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say, wondering what that means—again, always the fear that I’ve called too late.
“He’s eighty-seven and some days he knows everything and the next remembers nothing. But I will ask him when it seems like a good moment.”
“Thank you,” I say. “What I’m looking for is the file, a copy of the file.”
“Maybe my son Brian,” she says.
“Yes,” I say, “if he could find it, that would be great. I think he knows about it. When my birth mother called, she actually first called Brian.” (Brian is also a lawyer).
And then she tells me a story of someone, maybe her daughter, maybe a neighbor, having adopted two Romanian children. At this point I’m having what I call situational deafness. I am worrying about the fact that I may not be able to get this information. I’ve half of a mind to say: Do you know where he kept his files? Are they stored somewhere? But instead I say, “Did it work out?” And I think she says yes, and I say something like, “That’s good. Good or bad, up or down, it’s all interesting, isn’t it?”
“Are you having a good life?” she asks, like she wants to know, did it all work out?
“A good life? Yes,” I say, both lying and not. I’m having a great life. “I’m really lucky. I have a great life.” And it is equally true that I am suffering, otherwise I wouldn’t be calling her. “Everything is good,” I tell her.
“That’s good,” she says. “Have a good life.”
I contact the lawyer’s son Brian Frosh, now a Maryland state senator. We exchange e-mails; I tell him about my conversation with his mother and remind him of the call he intercepted from Ellen years ago. I ask Brian if, when he visits his parents’ house, he might check for the file. He is incredibly gracious and understanding. We trade stories of what it is like to have an aging parent, our concerns for our families, for the history that is lost. Brian Frosh makes a special trip to his parents’ house to look for the file—he looks everywhere, but finds nothing.
I am running out of options.
The question of whether or not to sue, to attempt to legally compel my father to produce the DNA document or an affidavit, remains open. Joining the DAR is not essential to my health and well-being, but the idea that my father—or any one person—can decide to exclude someone from her lineage profoundly bothers me. The real question is not about the DAR but about adoptees’ rights to access and join their own heritage—and for that reason I am not entirely willing to drop the subject.
I think of my father asking me to have the DNA test and then later refusing my request for the DNA document, refusing to sign an affidavit, and refusing to acknowledge me. I think of my father and can’t help but think of Ellen—falling for him when she was just a teenager, being his mistress for seven years, and then pregnant with his child. I think of Ellen and I think of how my father behaved—making her promises, stringing her along, and ultimately abandoning her.
Nothing has changed. More than forty years later he is still behaving exactly as he always behaved. He is doing what is good for him, what suits his needs and desires. I see my mother as a teenager in love with an older man, a young woman who had to give up her child, who lived the rest of her life in the shadow of that loss, a woman who never married, who never really recovered—and for her I am angry with him.
This is not just about the DAR—that’s clear. I wish there had been more: a father-daughter relationship, a friendship. I wish I could know more about his family (my family)—where they came from, how they lived their lives, what they valued. I would have liked to know his children, to learn what we have in common, to feel what it means to have a blood knot. And I would have liked to have come out from the shadows, to be seen not as the product of an affair but as a person, an adult—who is no more or less ofthem than they are of one another.
Based on nothing except my own blind faith, I am cautiously optimistic that there will be some natural opening, some give on Norman’s part. I resolve to do nothing for the moment, to watch and wait, to allow myself to catch up to my feelings and to see over time where the story leads me.