Pater Familias | Chapter 8

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Speaker 17 There's this thing I have not been able to figure out when it comes to the man who for 40 years I thought was my biological father, who I've now started calling my original biological father, Warren.

Speaker 20 Did he know he wasn't my biological father?

Speaker 21 On one hand, it seems like he did.

Speaker 22 It would check out given how he stayed out of my life for so long.

Speaker 24 But on the other hand, when I had moments of my life, periods in my life, when I did have a relationship with him, He would tell me he loved me.

Speaker 30 He would peel off a few 20s from a wad of cash that he used to carry around and hand some to me after we went to dinner.

Speaker 31 During college, he flew me out to California to reconnect with his side of the family.

Speaker 28 Once, when we were on good terms, he said he was upset by the fact that I avoided calling him by name.

Speaker 24 He said I didn't have to call him dad.

Speaker 30 I had long ago reassigned that moniker to my adopted dad, Richard.

Speaker 22 But he said he wanted me to call him something.

Speaker 38 Even just Warren.

Speaker 37 Something.

Speaker 22 But I wanted to know what exactly Warren knew.

Speaker 25 And I thought about it this way. If Dr.

Speaker 35 DeBrovner had clearly stated in that office in 1977 that my mom was going to get pregnant from a sperm donor, a man other than Warren, Then Warren would have remembered.

Speaker 24 He would have known he was never really my biological father.

Speaker 41 And he would have had plenty of chances to bring it up to me through the years because he was often mad at me.

Speaker 35 He was mad at my mom, really, and he took it out on me.

Speaker 21 His anger was part of what our very last conversation 13 years ago was about after I called him to tell him he was going to be a grandfather, before he hung up on me and said he didn't care, and no one in the family liked me.

Speaker 21 If he'd known he wasn't my biological father, that's a moment when I figure he could have mentioned it.

Speaker 40 But I still remembered his number by heart, and I decided I had to call him to tell him that I was making this podcast.

Speaker 39 And to tell him the big news.

Speaker 44 Congratulations.

Speaker 15 You're not my father.

Speaker 17 If you didn't know already.

Speaker 24 Just like when I first contacted Warren when I was 16, I could not reach him directly.

Speaker 22 So just like when I was 16, I called his brother, who I hadn't spoken to in years.

Speaker 22 And just like back then, his brother would not give me his correct phone number.

Speaker 39 Instead, Warren called me back.

Speaker 25 His voice was haunting, angry.

Speaker 54 We spoke twice over two days and had two terrible conversations.

Speaker 35 Mostly he yelled at me about things he said my mom and Richard had done to him.

Speaker 50 He denied owing my mom tens of thousands of dollars from back in the day from money he had taken from their joint account and not paid in child support.

Speaker 47 And then, when it came to the news about a sperm donor, he acknowledged fertility problems but said he believed that his sperm was being quote supplemented by donor sperm.

Speaker 12 In other words, he heard the thing that a lot of husbands heard during donor inseminations in the 70s:

Speaker 43 another guy's sperm is gonna help your sperm.

Speaker 24 Warren said, I don't know how the formula worked.

Speaker 34 This was significant to me.

Speaker 24 He seemed as misled as my mom had been, and he used this word supplemented, which confirmed what I suspected all along.

Speaker 39 Warren's sperm, which would have been tested to indicate it didn't work very well, was mixed with sperm that did work.

Speaker 25 That turns out came from an underemployed 41-year-old Irish actor living in a walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village, Manhattan.

Speaker 51 That practice of deceiving couples into believing they were having their own children, I just became convinced that this is how I came to exist.

Speaker 24 This is an answer I'd been trying to figure out as best as I possibly could for almost six years.

Speaker 28 But I didn't feel satisfied just yet.

Speaker 29 I didn't have that sense of closure

Speaker 53 because I still hadn't solved all of the mysteries.

Speaker 31 From Waveland and Rococo Punch, this is Inconceivable Truth.

Speaker 37 I'm Matt Katz.

Speaker 64 Episode 8, Patter Familius.

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Speaker 16 I did not have a positive reaction to talking to Warren again.

Speaker 63 I felt in my body numb, and I had hazy flashbacks to other aggressive conversations with him that ended in hang-ups going back so many years.

Speaker 24 Back to when I was just a kid and couldn't understand why he acted that way.

Speaker 24 So after my phone call with Warren, I just sat down on the couch in my living room.

Speaker 70 The warnings of my barber Daryl echoed in my head. Why did I have to unearth things that were better left unknown?

Speaker 24 Why am I awakening ghosts?

Speaker 24 I sat there miserable, and my daughter Sadie, who's 12, gave me a hug.

Speaker 28 She asked if I was sick.

Speaker 30 I said I just talked to Warren and that I was just sad.

Speaker 36 It's all right, Daddy, she said.

Speaker 47 You have a dad who loves you right there in Manhattan.

Speaker 70 She was talking about Richard, the dad who adopted me.

Speaker 30 Sadie knows what she's talking about.

Speaker 33 Richard's unwavering support for this project, this unusual project centered on his only son finding his father, is a perfect encapsulation of how much he doesn't care about 23andMe or Ancestry.com or DNA tests.

Speaker 27 He just cares about me.

Speaker 38 One of the things that I used to do with him growing up, the thing where it'd usually just be me and him, was go to synagogue on Saturday mornings, two or three hours ending with a shot of wine for him and a shot of grape juice for me and a long walk home.

Speaker 30 And always at the synagogue, there'd be an older woman who'd walk up to us, point at our faces, and turn to me and say, You look so much like your dad.

Speaker 25 Of course, we weren't related by blood.

Speaker 35 In reality, we don't even look alike.

Speaker 24 But we would just kind of smile and glance at each other, and my dad would say, yep, good Shabbos.

Speaker 28 Nature, nurture, who knows?

Speaker 30 My new half-sisters tell me about epigenetics, the scientific concept centered on how nurture shapes nature.

Speaker 28 Maybe how you grow up, how you eat, experiences you have can cause changes that affect how your genes work in your body and mind.

Speaker 30 What I have learned for sure is that the emotional connection between fathers of any kind and their children, or the void of such a connection, can be life-forming.

Speaker 16 When I was at their apartment a few months ago, my dad Richard was looking at old pictures of his grandfather.

Speaker 75 This is

Speaker 75 Grandpa Zuckerman.

Speaker 34 Grandpa Zuckerman was smiling in these photos, which is not the kind of thing you usually see in black and white family portraits from back when.

Speaker 60 The man died 70 years ago, and that death had a huge effect on Richard, even though he never actually understood a word his grandpa said.

Speaker 75 But I understand his eyes because when he looked at me, it was total love.

Speaker 75 It was total love of a grandchild. He was wonderful.
And the one language he never learned was English.

Speaker 77 But you felt close to him, nonetheless.

Speaker 75 Ah, I loved him. And then he died a year before my bar mitzvah.

Speaker 75 And I resented that

Speaker 75 and

Speaker 75 everyone was crying and I was not crying.

Speaker 75 And I think that's why I say so much that I love everybody.

Speaker 75 Because for a long time when I was growing up, I said, everybody loves and I don't.

Speaker 75 And I think it all was because Grandpa died before my bom mitzvah and how dare he leave me before I was bar mitzvah as a man.

Speaker 73 You resented that he had.

Speaker 75 I think I resented that he died and probably felt guilty as hell about it because I loved the man.

Speaker 75 But whatever it was,

Speaker 75 it was a very, very significant

Speaker 75 feeling.

Speaker 75 Maybe it was my beginning to really have feelings that were feminine.

Speaker 75 Because you grow up, you got to be a tough kid. I was never a tough kid.
But here,

Speaker 75 how do you love?

Speaker 75 I think I figured it out.

Speaker 79 I think so too.

Speaker 23 A few weeks ago, my mom sent me a video of my dad tickling my son Ruben.

Speaker 9 There's a tickle coming.

Speaker 30 When I was in seventh grade, Richard rushed home from work to take me to the doctor because contrary to the school nurse's prognosis that I had just eaten too much Halloween candy, Richard had a hunch something worse was going on.

Speaker 30 He got me to the hospital in time for them to take out my appendix.

Speaker 30 When I was living in my first apartment, Richard rushed over after my car was stolen to bring me the title so I could report it stolen to the cops.

Speaker 25 But when he got to my neighborhood, he was circling around looking for a parking spot and he found my car turned out it wasn't stolen at all idiotically i just forgot where i had parked the night before

Speaker 21 richard wasn't mad that he drove all this way for nothing opposite he was thrilled to have helped

Speaker 70 i feel like i learned how to be a

Speaker 33 you know, a good husband and father from you, how to be friendly and open to the world.

Speaker 51 And that I like learned by

Speaker 39 being in your

Speaker 33 home for the first 14, 15 of the 18 years of my life.

Speaker 75 That is

Speaker 75 one of the best compliments or

Speaker 75 things that can make me proud that I've ever heard.

Speaker 30 The death of Richard's grandfather had a lasting impact on him.

Speaker 35 And my mom felt lost too.

Speaker 18 The loss of her father.

Speaker 38 It affects her even now.

Speaker 7 I don't remember my father at all, which is very, very sad.

Speaker 7 My earliest memory is when I was six years old, still in a crib, which is very unusual, but we had a small apartment.

Speaker 65 And

Speaker 7 I knew something was wrong because I could hear some noise. And

Speaker 7 I think this is my memory, but memory does play tricks on you, that I believe I was kind of shaking the bars of the crib and saying,

Speaker 7 what's going on? Whatever a six-year-old would say. And because I found out that my dad had passed away.
He had a heart attack.

Speaker 7 He was in the hospital. They rushed him to the hospital, but my mother was also in the hospital, supposedly, I think, about to give birth.

Speaker 65 And

Speaker 7 that was a horrible, horrible time. And unfortunately, my mother didn't really say much more than that.

Speaker 69 She didn't share anything.

Speaker 65 She had a miscarriage at the same hospital

Speaker 65 at the same time.

Speaker 82 Same time. Yep.

Speaker 50 As your dad died.

Speaker 65 Yes, yes.

Speaker 65 And

Speaker 7 of course, now I wish I could ask and talk to her more and find out a little bit more.

Speaker 43 Did you ever ask her about him later?

Speaker 7 I asked about him.

Speaker 7 She would say your father

Speaker 7 would love that or something, but she didn't, just said that he was a kind,

Speaker 7 affectionate,

Speaker 7 easy-going person. That's all she really told me, you know, hard worker.

Speaker 7 And that's all she told me.

Speaker 7 She didn't remarry because

Speaker 7 she was worried that no man would be a good father, good enough for me.

Speaker 7 And so she sacrificed, in my eyes, she sacrificed her whole life for me.

Speaker 7 And my father's side of the family

Speaker 7 did not come around to really support her.

Speaker 81 So

Speaker 30 you were essentially abandoned by your father's family, particularly the...

Speaker 70 male members of the family.

Speaker 7 I don't know if abandoned? Well, well I guess I never thought of it because that seems like a very strong word but yeah we were not included so you're right yeah

Speaker 7 I think deep down that's why family is so important to me today I miss the fact that we don't have family around now as you well know and I

Speaker 7 on some level missed it my whole life

Speaker 7 yeah that's why I always say that I hope your your children will remember us

Speaker 7 if that they will remember that we took them to wherever, or that we, or that I baked with Sadie, or I.

Speaker 7 I hope so.

Speaker 24 She doesn't have to hope.

Speaker 30 My kids will have stories to tell about their grandparents.

Speaker 28 They've seen their grandmother, 5'Nothing, retire from teaching in New York City public schools to live a rich life of theater and travels and friends and civic activism.

Speaker 46 She survived breast cancer and still walks two and a half miles through the city every day.

Speaker 20 She's been an example for them, a real-life example, not a sketch sussed out from census records and library archives.

Speaker 16 They'll have stories to tell about trips to museums and games of Scrabble and tons of books and, yes, baking with Sadie.

Speaker 85 And six eggs and then pick up button and then mix it and then stir it all together.

Speaker 30 She's doing what she did for me as a mom.

Speaker 59 Creating memories.

Speaker 85 And then take the spoon and put it into my grandma's hand. And then what I do

Speaker 85 and I put it in the oven.

Speaker 49 My mom though does not have stories to tell about her own father, does not have memories, and it's nagged at her forever.

Speaker 24 She didn't want me to be robbed of that also.

Speaker 20 So after she married and divorced, she would not do the same thing my grandmother did.

Speaker 28 She decided to find her child a father.

Speaker 7 I think

Speaker 7 I felt more confident that

Speaker 7 it would be good for me to find somebody for you. I mean, for me too, but also for you.

Speaker 61 Because you knew what it was like not to have.

Speaker 43 Exactly. That's a good point.

Speaker 49 So you appreciate the

Speaker 49 question.

Speaker 86 So do you understand, like then, my quest to understand

Speaker 1 what his father was?

Speaker 69 Yeah, no, I understand.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 39 I do.

Speaker 38 A few weeks after this chat is when I finally confirmed that Vincent McNally was my biological father.

Speaker 35 I call my mom to tell her the news.

Speaker 80 Wow.

Speaker 57 So, yeah,

Speaker 54 the doctor

Speaker 54 was at least less than truthful about where he was getting the sperm from.

Speaker 3 Right. So therefore,

Speaker 73 it stands to reason that he was less than truthful about whatever he told you he was doing

Speaker 87 in 1977 when he inseminated you.

Speaker 80 Yeah,

Speaker 88 definitely.

Speaker 88 Wow. Can't believe he found out all this.

Speaker 89 Wow.

Speaker 80 Oh my God.

Speaker 75 How do you feel?

Speaker 7 I feel a little justified that I wasn't completely a jerk.

Speaker 88 And I feel betrayed by him, by Dubrovna.

Speaker 88 I feel betrayed.

Speaker 89 He betrayed me twice, 45 years ago and six months ago.

Speaker 24 Six months earlier, my mom had decided she wanted to meet Dr.

Speaker 18 Dubrovna in person.

Speaker 23 I gave her his number.

Speaker 55 He lives across the street from my parents, by sheer coincidence, and they set up a time to meet on a bench between their apartment buildings.

Speaker 78 He gave her a hug when he saw her.

Speaker 31 She gave him home-baked mandelbread, delicious traditional Jewish cookies, and thanked him for giving her her son.

Speaker 47 Dr.

Speaker 54 Dubrovner told her that she shouldn't worry about me not being Jewish because in the Jewish tradition, the religion is passed down via the mother.

Speaker 24 And he repeated the claim that he got his donors from other doctors and medical students.

Speaker 52 But But he indicated that the sperm could have been mixed, which is why my mom would have thought Warren was the father.

Speaker 88 Made me feel that I was

Speaker 88 not remembering and that I was,

Speaker 72 I guess, ignorant.

Speaker 88 In those days, whatever a doctor told you, you accepted.

Speaker 22 When you saw him, he told you

Speaker 30 in no uncertain terms that it was a medical student or a resident.

Speaker 89 Yeah, yes.

Speaker 88 And that he worked hard to find somebody who resembled Lauren.

Speaker 80 Yeah.

Speaker 88 But he obviously didn't.

Speaker 88 Thanks for sharing this confusing tree.

Speaker 88 I'm delighted for you, and I

Speaker 88 really feel angry at betrayed and angry at Dubrovna.

Speaker 70 It was my time to meet Dr.

Speaker 57 Debrovna on that park bench.

Speaker 56 I hadn't spoken to him since I'd learned who my sperm donor really was.

Speaker 48 and I wanted to confront him about that, but with some reluctance because without the methods he employed, whatever they were, I wouldn't exist.

Speaker 46 So I'm conflicted about the whole thing.

Speaker 40 I still think his overall aims were just, even good.

Speaker 41 It's a pleasure to meet you, sir. You too.
How are you?

Speaker 26 Thank you so much for doing this.

Speaker 61 Dr.

Speaker 24 Dubrovner is now in his late 80s.

Speaker 22 He acknowledged that he is experiencing a degree of dementia.

Speaker 30 He remembered certain parts of his medical work with precision, but his recounting of other details was inconsistent.

Speaker 22 The first piece I wanted to clear up with him was mixing, this method of mixing donor semen and husband semen.

Speaker 82 We did that fairly early on, actually.

Speaker 84 Psychologically, obviously, it was such that the couple would really never know whether it was the husband, it was only one sperm that did the fertilization, whether it was the husband's sperm or the donor's sperm.

Speaker 84 It wasn't going to really be medically effective, but psychologically it was. But on the other hand, the more you delude it.

Speaker 44 He said he didn't remember if he was still mixing in 1977 when I was conceived.

Speaker 16 But he acknowledged that mixing did create confusion.

Speaker 16 An element of doubt.

Speaker 26 In all due respect, it sounds deceptive. It sounds like deceit was sort of built in the process.

Speaker 84 Well, call it deceit or psychological, well, one way or the other.

Speaker 75 The only people who feel better about it are the couple themselves.

Speaker 84 So they're only, are they fooling themselves?

Speaker 1 Well, perhaps they are.

Speaker 78 Memory is a whole other thing.

Speaker 30 And we, you know, that's where my gut goes, is that there was some

Speaker 86 there was some element of doubt discussed in your office in 77, and that became

Speaker 16 fact at some point in my mom's mind.

Speaker 84 You can see what you want to believe, perhaps. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 84 That's interesting, yes. Yeah.

Speaker 37 And again, I mean, I'm happy to be

Speaker 25 alive and around and having two kids of my own.

Speaker 86 So, I mean, I don't have the

Speaker 49 I don't have like harsh feelings toward you but I it does

Speaker 26 I feel like my mother at the time wasn't given the full correct 100% information.

Speaker 86 I feel like she was a little bit tricked and that is something that she's now trying to like reconcile in her brain.

Speaker 84 It's interesting as I say because

Speaker 84 the longer that the practice went on,

Speaker 84 the more likely it is that the couples who are having donor insemination would be counseled by my infertility counselor.

Speaker 84 And she would be doing a lot of the talk, spending much more time with them perhaps than I would be.

Speaker 24 My mother doesn't remember there being an infertility counselor who explained that they were mixing some bad sperm with some stranger's sperm in order to get her pregnant.

Speaker 16 And it's unclear if the counselor was even working there yet when my mom was getting treatment.

Speaker 30 The counselor wouldn't talk to us for this podcast.

Speaker 84 We've sometimes split the specimen among two couples. In other words, if we have

Speaker 43 a need for a blonde-haired, blue-eyed donor, okay,

Speaker 84 and I match that donor to two different couples, let's say,

Speaker 84 and they both came out that their ovulation was at the same time,

Speaker 84 I might have to take that semen specimen and use half the semen specimen to inseminate one to the other.

Speaker 16 It's funny you mention mention that.

Speaker 26 Myself and two of my siblings were born within three weeks of each other.

Speaker 73 So, is it possible we all came from the same sample?

Speaker 1 Three of them?

Speaker 77 Three of us, we were born, we're all within three weeks of each other.

Speaker 86 It's pretty amazing.

Speaker 84 I could use two, I would never, I can't imagine using three. That would be making the chances of it working too small, I think, at that particular point.

Speaker 30 So, that's a question I still couldn't answer.

Speaker 34 Why were we so close in age?

Speaker 20 Another question. Did Dr.

Speaker 16 Dubrovner really know all the donors personally?

Speaker 84 Any donors that we use, we personally knew, both as far as we worked with them medically, so we realized they were smart.

Speaker 84 We worked with them to know that they had the kind of personality traits that we would like to see in my child, perhaps.

Speaker 21 But then he said he didn't know Vincent McNally, my sperm donor.

Speaker 44 He certainly didn't work with Vincent medically since Vincent was an actor, not a doctor.

Speaker 76 Any idea how that might have happened?

Speaker 86 How an actor who was not in medical school would have come to

Speaker 86 donate sperm in 77?

Speaker 84 In 77.

Speaker 84 Well, again, I cannot tell you because I have no situation where I would have used a non-medical person as a fresh donor in semination.

Speaker 40 But what about Michael, the donor I interviewed who was a graduate student studying psychology, not in medical school?

Speaker 24 Or Lauren, who found out that her donor wasn't a doctor and was black.

Speaker 18 For years, her identity was hidden from her, complicating her ability to grapple with the racism that she experienced during her childhood.

Speaker 62 She found out that her

Speaker 36 father was not Jewish.

Speaker 54 In fact, he was black.

Speaker 73 So that's caused a good deal.

Speaker 46 He was black, yeah.

Speaker 84 And the couple were white?

Speaker 63 The couple were white Jews, and the donor was black, and he was not a medical student or not a doctor.

Speaker 84 I don't know what happened with them with that situation.

Speaker 47 And I recounted how I spoke to a woman whose father was dating Dr.

Speaker 16 Debravner's receptionist in the early 80s and somehow ended up making a donation.

Speaker 36 But he did remember your name because he dated and later married your receptionist.

Speaker 73 And that's how he must have found out about this.

Speaker 26 Does that sound plausible? Like, were there, I'm just trying to figure out if there might have been other means in which you were sourcing the semen.

Speaker 40 Dr.

Speaker 30 Dubrovner indicated that any use of men beyond medical students and residents might have had something to do with a place called Repro Lab, which still exists, just four doors down from his old office.

Speaker 55 He co-founded this facility to do treatments on infertile husband's sperm to isolate the semen for insemination.

Speaker 28 But it was also a place that stored donor sperm.

Speaker 18 It's a cryobank, a sperm bank.

Speaker 47 Dr.

Speaker 31 Dubrovner said it's possible if he didn't have access to fresh semen from a donor that met the patient's needs, he may have suggested they go to ReproLab to get semen.

Speaker 84 My patient at that particular point would have been sent to ReproLab, told to find themselves a donor, come back with the semen, and I'll do the insemination. I still did the insemination.

Speaker 26 I mean, there seems to be at least a small pattern of inconsistency here, that it was not

Speaker 81 just people that you knew who were residents or medical students, and that there was some other means of donating sperm from people whom you didn't know and didn't necessarily match

Speaker 49 the parents or the husbands?

Speaker 39 I

Speaker 84 don't think so.

Speaker 56 He did entertain one theory I came up with.

Speaker 30 I know that in the 70s, doctors had trouble finding sperm donors, and clearly, at some point, the pool of potential donors widened beyond doctors.

Speaker 49 And then I realized Dr.

Speaker 34 Dubrovner's wife was in the same profession as Vincent.

Speaker 40 She was a soap opera star for decades on As the World Turns.

Speaker 34 Turns out, Vincent performed alongside an actor whose wife was in As the World Turns.

Speaker 55 Maybe Vincent met Dr.

Speaker 30 Dubrovner at some actor's holiday party and found out about donating that way.

Speaker 90 You're at the bar drinking a scotch and you tell this guy, I don't drink.

Speaker 39 Okay.

Speaker 53 Diet Coke with me.

Speaker 90 Maybe he asked you what you do for a living and he was fascinated by it and he needed some extra money.

Speaker 53 That's a possibility.

Speaker 53 We all create narratives about complicated life experiences.

Speaker 16 This whole podcast is about working out a narrative and doing some investigation into my own life.

Speaker 34 In the same way, it seems to me that Dr.

Speaker 36 DeBrovener also has a narrative he's created about his life's work.

Speaker 28 He's telling his own version of his own story that intersects and sometimes contradicts mine.

Speaker 84 I had some doubts about

Speaker 84 why

Speaker 84 are people so concerned about their identity being associated with the sperm necessarily.

Speaker 84 So much of their identity is what their

Speaker 84 husband father gave them and taught them over the 20 years between the time that they were born and the time they left for college or whatever it may be.

Speaker 84 So much of our identity is our experience and not necessarily our gene in that situation. Now, granted,

Speaker 84 some of our identity may be the gene that we inherited that gave us

Speaker 84 a bad disease or something of that sort. But how much of it really is me depends on the

Speaker 84 sperm, I don't know. Is there really such a thing as a a Jewish sperm? I don't know that either.

Speaker 39 Right.

Speaker 57 Right.

Speaker 70 Or an Irish sperm, in my case.

Speaker 84 Or an Irish sperm.

Speaker 71 Yeah.

Speaker 24 Jewish sperm, Irish sperm.

Speaker 55 We're putting disparate terms together like this because there really isn't a language to this experience for being one ethnic and religious and cultural identity and then getting a new identity.

Speaker 30 For me, the most meaningful part of being Jewish is the connection it has given me to other generations.

Speaker 16 It makes me feel connected to history.

Speaker 32 That's why I did something that even my wife, who is Jewish, thought was a little weird.

Speaker 30 When my son Ruben was eight days old, we invited dozens of people into our house for his bris, the Jewish circumcision.

Speaker 46 It's the same circumcision newborn boys get in the hospital, but we did it in front of loved ones and had a little ceremony along with it, with Hebrew prayers, the traditional way.

Speaker 36 We also served lunch.

Speaker 57 The bris happened two years before I took a DNA test.

Speaker 15 I wanted Ruben to have a bris because I knew my fathers, both my biological father and my adopted father, had a bris and their fathers did too.

Speaker 37 Everyone up the paternal line going back centuries and maybe millennia did.

Speaker 24 Ruben's bris, his welcome to the world in front of our friends and family and everyone we loved, connected both of us to our past, to the ancestors who helped us come to exist.

Speaker 17 Of course, now we know no one up our biological paternal line had a bris.

Speaker 28 They were instead at a Catholic church, getting baptized.

Speaker 47 And yet, that bris that we had for Reuben, when I think back on it, it's no less meaningful regardless of what I know now.

Speaker 22 I remember this one moment when Richard and my father-in-law David passed Reuben between them before the circumcision.

Speaker 34 Reuben was lying on a cushion, wearing a little yarmulke with his Hebrew name on it.

Speaker 18 And I remember Sadie and her buddy from preschool then put a baby doll on a cushion and pretended to conduct their own breasts.

Speaker 60 I'm grateful to have customs, stories, to center moments in time.

Speaker 73 Biology be damned

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Speaker 9 Tis the season of gifting and holes to deck.

Speaker 3 And the Who's and Who Newville were in love with new tech.

Speaker 4 Where can we find Sonos and Samsung and Nintendo?

Speaker 6 They shouted.

Speaker 66 Would they find it in one place?

Speaker 10 This they questioned and doubted.

Speaker 8 When suddenly a who yelled, Walmart's the place to start.

Speaker 68 And these who added headphones, TVs, and games to their carts.

Speaker 43 With Walmart, their shopping was done in a flurry.

Speaker 6 They cried out, who knew?

Speaker 66 and ordered their gifts in a a hurry.

Speaker 6 Shop the latest tech gifts in the Walmart app.

Speaker 91 Sorry, you're first. Okay, oh, I was first.
Okay, great.

Speaker 92 I'm interviewing Shirley Goldman in her apartment in Littleneck, New York.

Speaker 79 I personally think she has had a very interesting life.

Speaker 39 Okay.

Speaker 42 Where were you born?

Speaker 16 The other day I was digging in my basement looking for journals from when I was a kid and I came across this paper I wrote when I was in maybe sixth grade.

Speaker 35 It's an interview between my grandmother, my mom's mom, and me.

Speaker 24 I have no memory of it, so playing the part of my grandmother is my sixth grader, Sadie Katz, an aspiring actress herself, maybe some Vincent in her.

Speaker 24 Sadie was named for my grandmother Shirley, the part she's about to play.

Speaker 83 I was born in Manhattan.

Speaker 24 Pause for a moment.

Speaker 92 You're doing a...

Speaker 93 I'm doing a New York accent.

Speaker 42 Doing a New York accent.

Speaker 77 Okay, got it. Yeah.

Speaker 77 Okay.

Speaker 79 Do you have any siblings?

Speaker 93 I had two brothers and four four sisters.

Speaker 27 My twins. In her interview with 12-year-old me, my grandmother told a story I feel I was meant to hear now.

Speaker 83 Both my parents were born in Poland.

Speaker 5 They met and were married there in

Speaker 83 1900.

Speaker 69 Wow, that's old.

Speaker 11 My dad is really old.

Speaker 83 He's born in the 1900s, too.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 91 This is the interesting part.

Speaker 73 Why did they leave Poland?

Speaker 93 At that time, the Jewish people were persecuted by the Polish people because of the religion.

Speaker 50 My grandmother then explains that her family was protected by their Catholic neighbors who lent them crosses and other Catholic items so they could hide their Jewishness and protect their children.

Speaker 93 Also, many Jewish people were forced to live in a ghetto.

Speaker 33 So they would borrow those things from the Catholic neighbors.

Speaker 1 So when they were the Catholic neighbors not anti-Semitic, right?

Speaker 39 They were not.

Speaker 39 They helped them.

Speaker 92 Yeah.

Speaker 50 Not only

Speaker 39 were

Speaker 77 our Jewish relatives saved by Catholics, but we have Catholics on this other new side of our family.

Speaker 23 Just as I lost this Jewish connection to the past and gained a Catholic connection, I find out that the two identities were already intertwined.

Speaker 18 I am connected to ancestors everywhere, and sometimes it feels like they've been there with me, helping me get to the bottom of this story.

Speaker 55 Toward the end of this whole thing, I keep seeing connections, meaning, everywhere.

Speaker 22 Maybe the time I've spent with my energy healer sister Tara has influenced me here, but over the five plus years of my search, what strikes me most is the weird coincidences that have occurred.

Speaker 51 Tara told me the right word might be synchronicities that seem too perfect to not be something more.

Speaker 16 I'm not normally one to talk like this, but I can't help but find patterns, resonances, connections that are coloring my worldview now.

Speaker 24 Two years ago when I visited Ireland with my family, we went to the home of one of my Irish great-great-grandfathers.

Speaker 51 At the end of his life, this great-great-grandfather lived with one of his 10 children.

Speaker 16 Of all the homes in that valley, theirs was the home that we went to.

Speaker 55 There were little kids in that house, his grandchildren.

Speaker 58 One of them, who ended up emigrating to America, was Maggie, my grandmother, Vincent's mom.

Speaker 41 Of all the ancestors in our family tree, of all the possibilities, we had somehow visited my grandmother's childhood home before I knew she was my grandmother.

Speaker 25 And then there were the places, certain places that kept popping up while I looked for my father, like there was some eerie geographic pole.

Speaker 34 The doctor who presided over my conception lived, it turned out, in the same apartment complex as my parents.

Speaker 47 Across the street, a library where we ultimately found a huge trove of archives on Vincent McNally's acting career.

Speaker 32 My mom, the doctor, and Vincent, the three people all involved in making me...

Speaker 30 Their stories converged off the same subway stop.

Speaker 32 Vincent had once lived in a building that I had hung out in in New York, and he had lived in a town in California while my sister Tara was living in the same town.

Speaker 16 My mom once said that I learned how to read an analog clock because I'd be staring at it waiting for my original birth father Warren to pick me up, even when he didn't come on time or didn't show up at all.

Speaker 22 But over the past five years, after decades of the clock tick, tick, ticking as I waited to meet my father, I've become aware of something else.

Speaker 22 A new sense that time has unfolded at the right pace.

Speaker 34 I discovered things as I was supposed to.

Speaker 22 It helped me to digest it all.

Speaker 56 For instance, for one week, I got to experience Vincent as alive.

Speaker 24 After I learned he was my sperm donor, I didn't find out right away he was dead.

Speaker 45 And weirdly, that afforded me a chance to think of him as alive and living in California.

Speaker 24 I was excited and amused by the idea of the four of us siblings maybe one day getting a chance to knock on his door. Then I stumbled on his death record that I probably should have found earlier.

Speaker 44 It's strange that I hadn't.

Speaker 15 But I'm glad I hadn't.

Speaker 23 I'm glad I had that time, time, just a little, with Vincent alive before I read that he'd been dead for four years.

Speaker 47 In the final shows he did in his theatrical career before donating sperm, my biological father Vincent played A Father Estranged from His Children.

Speaker 63 It was frankly pretty freaky to find out that the opening musical number of one of his final shows was called I've Got Myself a Daddy.

Speaker 76 That, I've decided, is a meaningful coincidence.

Speaker 74 And he spoke publicly about wanting to have kids, but apparently never did the traditional way.

Speaker 55 The fact that I was even able to know that, to find that out, seems really significant to me and makes me think he might be okay with what I'm doing here.

Speaker 89 I'm telling you, he'd be tickled pink.

Speaker 89 He's watching you right now and he's saying, boy, am I important.

Speaker 89 He would have loved loved it, and he would have loved what you have done to find him.

Speaker 44 Meet Gloria, who dated Vincent in the 1960s.

Speaker 89 He was very adventurous. I mean, he was free.
He was a free soul. He loved to laugh.

Speaker 89 His personality was larger than life. You know, it's like you picture an actor on a stage.

Speaker 89 And that was how he was off stage.

Speaker 89 He was larger than life.

Speaker 30 I found found Gloria a few nights ago as I was wrapping up the last episode of this show.

Speaker 94 I did one last newspaper archive search for Vincent McNally and came across a picture I hadn't seen before.

Speaker 30 It was a photo from the San Francisco Examiner in January 1965 of a young, glamorous couple.

Speaker 22 The caption reported that Vincent and Gloria were attending the first night of a new show at the Koran Theater in the Mission District.

Speaker 78 Gloria had her hair up, beautiful smile right into the camera.

Speaker 30 Vincent wore a white shirt, dark coat, and a tie as skinny as a pencil.

Speaker 24 Vincent would have been 28. His face looked like mine.

Speaker 16 Exactly like mine.

Speaker 78 I found Gloria easily through Google and Facebook.

Speaker 16 This was as close as I could get to meeting the man himself.

Speaker 33 I can't imagine what a surprise, to say the least, it must have been to get my message.

Speaker 89 Oh,

Speaker 89 absolutely. Absolutely.

Speaker 89 But the biggest surprise was how much you look like him.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 19 I mean, my friends and my wife have seen the same thing when I've shown them that picture.

Speaker 78 Was there something that particularly stood out to you?

Speaker 89 It was just

Speaker 89 the shape of your face and I would say your mouth.

Speaker 89 It was like a softened vince

Speaker 89 you want a little bit of history about my time with vince yes please are you ready i'm ready let's see we're talking about the early 60s and it was a very special time in san francisco everybody was a flower child and love was all around i mean it really changed the way society thought about free love and marriage and not marriage and having kids out of what, you know, stuff like that.

Speaker 89 And so that's the atmosphere in which I met him.

Speaker 30 This was around the time that he was performing in a traveling children's production of Pussin' Boots.

Speaker 30 On the day I connected with Gloria, we got a trove of documents, including audio, from Vincent's performance.

Speaker 39 He played King Claude.

Speaker 51 It was the first time I had heard his voice, even though it was clearly adapted to the role he was playing. Angelique!

Speaker 96 Angelique! Yes, Father, I'm right here.

Speaker 96 Now.

Speaker 96 Is that better? Oh, yes, yes, much better. Thank you.
What a naughty child to play such tricks on your poor old father. Well, I'm sorry, Father.

Speaker 30 Gloria said that Vincent performed with his best friend and roommate Ken.

Speaker 30 They lived across the hall from Gloria in the same apartment complex in Sausalito on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

Speaker 89 Ken and Vince acted in the Shakespearean plays. He was a wonderful actor.
He was, he was.

Speaker 89 He was a very broad actor, but he was a wonderful actor. He loved being an actor.
I mean, that was his life. That's who he was.

Speaker 89 And

Speaker 89 dating Vince was like a very informal thing.

Speaker 80 You know.

Speaker 26 What does that mean?

Speaker 89 You know, he wasn't the type to say, you know, let's go to a movie tonight or let's go out to dinner or let's, you know, we were just sort of there. But that was very 60.

Speaker 89 Right.

Speaker 61 Right.

Speaker 89 He made me feel very special.

Speaker 89 And I hope I made him feel very special.

Speaker 89 We were a good couple. I was interested in his acting career.
You know, I encouraged it.

Speaker 89 And

Speaker 89 during that time, too,

Speaker 89 I actually got pregnant with his child.

Speaker 89 But I had an abortion. Wow.
The reason I am so pro-abortion is because it was a nightmare. I had to go to Tijuana.

Speaker 49 This was before Roe v. Wade.

Speaker 89 And the whole experience was absolutely awful.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm so sorry.

Speaker 89 And he came with me. We flew down just for the day, but neither of us wanted to have a child at that point.

Speaker 89 Went to the doctor's office and the doctor's office put us in a car blindfolded

Speaker 89 and drove us around for a half an hour. We could have been going around the block for a half an hour.
I wouldn't have known.

Speaker 89 And then stopped at a clinic.

Speaker 89 And

Speaker 89 I had my abortion. I won't go into the details.
It was just horrible.

Speaker 89 When it was over, Vince and I flew back to San Francisco.

Speaker 89 And as we were walking in the door of where I lived,

Speaker 89 he said,

Speaker 89 I can't take all this emotion.

Speaker 89 It's too much for me.

Speaker 89 And

Speaker 89 I thought he'd broken up with me. Wow.

Speaker 89 That's kind of a big thing, isn't it?

Speaker 50 Yeah.

Speaker 39 Yeah.

Speaker 89 Yeah.

Speaker 89 He couldn't be, he couldn't have anyone emotionally dependent on him.

Speaker 89 Wow.

Speaker 89 You know, I didn't see him for a while after that, but I remember one thing that's always stuck in my mind. We were listening to Barbara Streisand's People That Need People.

Speaker 89 It was a song that she sang, People That Need People Are the Luckiest People in the World.

Speaker 89 And he said,

Speaker 89 people that need people are the most unlucky people in the world. Wow.
And that gives you a real good clue as to his personality at that time.

Speaker 89 And when he said that, I remember feeling sad for him, but

Speaker 89 you know, it was what it was. But it's funny how something sticks in your mind from 60 years ago.

Speaker 23 Gloria says both she and Vincent wanted to move to London.

Speaker 34 He had his heart set on attending a prestigious drama school there, so they moved together.

Speaker 56 But Gloria told me Vincent got rejected from the school, and it was a bad blow.

Speaker 89 I mean, this is something he really, really wanted so badly,

Speaker 89 and it was probably devastating to him. He couldn't handle it.
He just, he could not.

Speaker 89 I mean, this is is something he'd been wanting for so long.

Speaker 39 Yeah.

Speaker 89 And he never entertained the thought that he wouldn't get in. And when he didn't, he just had to leave.

Speaker 33 Vincent went back to the U.S.

Speaker 16 to New York City.

Speaker 23 Gloria stayed in London.

Speaker 89 Now, I must tell you, I did love him.

Speaker 89 And when I met him, he was representative of that world.

Speaker 89 The non-attachment to anything, the laissez-faire attitude.

Speaker 89 Yeah.

Speaker 89 So I was intrigued by him, but I knew it was time to say goodbye when he left London.

Speaker 77 And he must have been in love with you too.

Speaker 80 Yeah.

Speaker 89 I believe he was.

Speaker 30 It was another several years before they saw each other again, one last time.

Speaker 89 So I thought, gee, be fun to look him up and see how he's doing. So we met.

Speaker 89 It was at that time that he told me that he was donating sperm.

Speaker 65 Yeah.

Speaker 89 But you know, actors had a way of finding ways to make money.

Speaker 39 Ah, right. Right.

Speaker 89 You know, I think they had a sixth sense about finding just

Speaker 89 to make money that wasn't, you know, full-time jobs.

Speaker 89 I'm now 80 years old old and it was a long time ago.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 89 it was for me a very, very special time.

Speaker 89 And it's funny because later,

Speaker 89 after I came back and we kind of reconnected a little bit, then he said we should have a baby because then your parents would accept us. And I said,

Speaker 89 that ship has sailed.

Speaker 60 In a final echo from the past, Gloria is Jewish and a journalist and writer like me.

Speaker 33 She wrote a globally syndicated newspaper column on fashion and beauty for 25 years.

Speaker 89 I think he once made the comment that Jews and Irish get along really well.

Speaker 3 Oh my God.

Speaker 19 It's so interesting that you remember that he told you he donated sperm.

Speaker 77 It must have been, I mean, it stuck with you.

Speaker 89 You know, he never held back. He was always very open.

Speaker 89 Yeah. So that he told me he was donating sperm didn't in any way surprise me.

Speaker 89 I thought to myself, what an interesting

Speaker 89 television series that would be.

Speaker 12 Well, here we are.

Speaker 3 I wrote a treatment.

Speaker 95 You did.

Speaker 89 I wrote a treatment and I never did anything with it.

Speaker 27 But you wrote this like shortly after your last time seeing him, yeah?

Speaker 87 Yes. Incredible.

Speaker 89 Yes, because I had to make sense of it somehow.

Speaker 89 Yeah.

Speaker 39 Yeah, well,

Speaker 82 the story continues.

Speaker 89 Yes, the story continues.

Speaker 55 In her treatment or pitch for that fictionalized TV show, a character named Vincent tracks down a daughter created decades earlier through his sperm donation.

Speaker 47 Vincent slowly forms a relationship with his child, and in the final scene, he buys balloons in a park and passes them to her.

Speaker 24 His daughter then literally and metaphorically lets the balloons go, and they float upward over the Manhattan skyline as Vincent and his daughter smile at each other.

Speaker 17 You've remembered a lot from a long time ago.

Speaker 3 This is

Speaker 39 really,

Speaker 1 first of all, I'm impressed by your ability to recall and I just appreciate you sharing all this.

Speaker 89 Well, you know, as we get older, sometimes the past is easier to recall.

Speaker 57 I mean, I'm just kind of thrilled to talk to somebody who knew him so well, even though it was so long ago.

Speaker 89 It has so warmed my heart to talk to you. Because when you love someone, you love them forever.

Speaker 89 Even after we broke up,

Speaker 89 my love for him never stopped. I've never, ever stopped loving anyone that I've loved.
And you're an extension of him.

Speaker 3 Wow. How about that?

Speaker 89 You are part of him.

Speaker 69 I am.

Speaker 90 The four of us are

Speaker 86 some sort of extension of him.

Speaker 89 This wonderful laugh that he had.

Speaker 89 Whether he was laughing at something somebody said that was funny or he said something that was funny.

Speaker 89 you know he had this way of walking can we just sort of throw his feet out in front of him

Speaker 89 i'm walking around my office now trying to

Speaker 3 that's

Speaker 3 that's

Speaker 1 so amazing yeah

Speaker 89 yeah

Speaker 89 I'm hearing him right now as I'm sitting here

Speaker 89 and he's saying hi

Speaker 16 Inconceivable Truth is a production of Waveland and Rococo Punch.

Speaker 52 I'm writer and host, Matt Katz.

Speaker 40 The story editor is Erica Lance, mixing by James Trout.

Speaker 94 Emily Foreman is our producer.

Speaker 48 Natalie White is our intern.

Speaker 31 Thank you to Gloria Linterman's Vincent's Flame from 60 years ago for sharing her memories, her TV treatment, and for sending along the adorable children's book that she wrote, Sam, Cat Without a Tell.

Speaker 22 My kids loved it.

Speaker 34 Special thanks to attorney Bianca Grimshaw of Roomtone and to DNA sleuth Christina Bryan who helped unlock this case.

Speaker 49 I will appreciate her help forever.

Speaker 22 She told me at the start of this that if I'm not able to meet my father, finding new sibling relationships will help to fill that void.

Speaker 30 She was so right.

Speaker 22 Out of everything that's happened during this experience, finding my three new siblings has been the best part by far.

Speaker 22 I also now have a new niece and my first nephew, and I've had the joy of watching them play with my kids.

Speaker 24 And one last word to my original and forever family.

Speaker 22 My mom lovingly and bravely supported this excavation of our lives.

Speaker 47 And you've heard all about how great my dad Richard is, of course, but not enough about his daughters from his first marriage, Sally and Sarah, my stepsisters turned adopted sisters.

Speaker 60 As I've learned more and more about my paternity, I've talked to Sarah, who gets us better than almost anyone.

Speaker 31 From when we were kids, Sarah helped me learn with love and grace how to create new kinds of family relationships.

Speaker 40 It turned out to be the training I needed.

Speaker 63 The beating inner heart of my family is my wife, Deborah, who has enthusiastically and often hilariously rode shotgun for the entirety of of this experience?

Speaker 59 Thanks for reminding me to laugh through it all.

Speaker 49 And Ruben and Sadie, you're the stars of my life and this show.

Speaker 54 Thank you for letting me put your cute little voices on the air.

Speaker 16 Our executive producers are Jason Hoke at Waveland and John Parati and Jessica Alpert at Rococo Punch.

Speaker 23 For photos and more details on the series, follow at Waveland Media on Instagram, X, or Facebook. And you can reach out via email at podcasts at waveland.media.

Speaker 73 That's Waveland, W-A-V-L-A-N-D.

Speaker 30 If you like the series, please leave us a review.

Speaker 34 And as always, don't forget to tell a friend or relative.

Speaker 61 I'm Matt Katz.

Speaker 54 Thanks for listening.

Speaker 93 It would be weird if you weren't actually my dad.

Speaker 44 Can you imagine finding that out 30 years from now?

Speaker 26 No, it's not gonna happen.

Speaker 81 I'm your father.

Speaker 72 I promise. Okay.

Speaker 16 I love being your dad.

Speaker 33 It's my favorite thing ever.

Speaker 58 I like you being my dad.

Speaker 44 Thanks, buddy.

Speaker 92 I appreciate it. We have so much more time to be father and son together.

Speaker 42 I'm trying to appreciate every moment.

Speaker 92 I love you.

Speaker 94 Go brush your teeth, go to bed. Right.

Speaker 5 There are millions of podcasts out there, and you've chosen this one. Whether you're a regular or just here on a whim, it's what you have chosen to listen to.

Speaker 5 With Yoto, your kids can have the same choice. Yoto is a screen-free, ad-free audio player.
With hundreds of Yoto cards, there are stories, music, and podcasts like this one, but for kids.

Speaker 5 Just slot a card into the player and let the adventure begin. Check out YotoPlay.com.

Speaker 9 Tis the season of gifting and holes to deck.

Speaker 3 And the Who's in Houdoonville were in love with new tech.

Speaker 2 Where can we find Sonos and Samsung and Nintendo?

Speaker 6 They shouted.

Speaker 66 Would they find it in one place?

Speaker 10 This they questioned and doubted.

Speaker 67 When suddenly a who yelled, Walmart's the place to start.

Speaker 68 And Diet Who added headphones, TVs, and games to their carts.

Speaker 43 With Walmart, their shopping was done in a flurry.

Speaker 6 They cried out, who knew?

Speaker 66 and ordered their gifts in a hurry.

Speaker 2 Shop the latest tech gifts in the Walmart app.