Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are (7 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Wright

Tags: #Family & Relationships, #Siblings, #Science, #Life Sciences, #Genetics & Genomics, #test

BOOK: Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are
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3
The Secret Study
In 1961, Claire Kellman and her husband, Richard, made an application to Louise Wise Services in Manhattan to adopt a child. They were turned down. The Kellmans were émigrés of modest means who had fled Europe during the Nazi era and settled in New York. Only two years before, they had adopted a little girl from the same agency. The officials told the Kellmans that they would have to wait until the daughter was at least three before they could receive another baby. "That was in July," Kellman recalls. "Then in October, on Yom Kippur, we got a letter that they had a baby for us. They called us right away for a meeting. It happened so fast my head was spinning. Two months later we took David home." The Kellmans were told that David was already involved in an intensive child-development study, and although continuing in the program was not made a condition of the adoption, it was repeatedly stressed that the officials wanted the study to continue. The Kellmans agreed. Getting a baby was an uncertain business, as they already knew, and Jewish babies were especially scarce. "We were dealing with Louise Wise Services, which was like dealing with God," Mrs. Kellman
 
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says. "You knelt down and kissed their feet and said, 'Thank you for this baby.'"
Nearly every month for twelve years the Kellmans went into the city to visit the Child Development Center on West 57th Street, in the offices of the Jewish and Catholic Board of Family Services. Dr. Peter Neubauer was director of the center. David took intelligence tests and batteries of ability inventories. Every step of his development was observed and recorded. The moment that he first rode a bicycle was captured on film, as were many other hours of him playing with toys and talking to psychologists. The Kellmans were also interviewed, as was David's older sister.
David was smallhe weighed less than four pounds at birthand the Kellmans worried that he might be retarded because he was born prematurely. He turned out to be a bright and playful child, as many psychologists, pediatricians, social workers, and testers could attest. "David began talking very early," Mrs. Kellman says, "and I remember him waking up and saying 'I have a brother.' We would all talk about his 'imaginary brother.' We laughed it off."
Nineteen years after David's birth a peculiar coincidence occurred in upstate New York that would turn his life upside down. Robert Shafran, a dark-eyed young man with a square jaw and a riotous mane of curly black hair, enrolled in Sullivan County Community College, planning to study hotel and restaurant management. Soon after Shafran arrived, people he didn't know began saying hello to him and calling him Eddie. "When I told them I wasn't Eddie, somebody who knew Eddie quite well, who knew that he was adopted, asked me when my birthday was and whether or not I'd been adopted," Shafran later recalled. "And when I told him, he told me that he thought perhaps I had a twin brother." Robert
 
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Shafran and Eddie Galland met that very night. They couldn't believe how much they had in common: for instance, they were both wrestlers and they had the same favorite maneuvers, the same record, the same fastest pin. They had watched the same movies and could mimic the same lines. "It was just wild, surreal," says Shafran. "The next thing we knew we were on the front page of every newspaper in the country."
IDENTICAL TWINS UNITED AFTER MORE THAN 19 YEARS
read the headlines on 18 September 1980. The reunited twins story is a venerable chestnut in journalism, one of those rare and quirky good-news items that is guaranteed to gain international exposure, along with stories of pets that have tramped across the country to find their masters. Perhaps what is so compelling about the story of reunited twins is the implicit suggestion that it could happen to anyone; babies actually do get lost or separated, and however rare such an event may be, when a person finds his twin it feeds the common fantasy that any one of us might have a clone, a doppelgänger; someone who is not only a human mirror but also an ideal companion; someone who understands me perfectly, almost perfectly, because he is me, almost me. It is not just the sense of identity that excites us but the difference; the fantasy of an identical twin is a projection of ourselves living another life, finding other opportunities, choosing other careers, sleeping with other spouses. An identical twin could experience the world and come back to report about choices we might have made.
But there is a darker and more threatening side to the story, and this may be the real secret of its grip on our imagination. We think we know who we are. We build up internal barriers to the world, and the barriers are our identity. We struggle through experience to build
 
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our character. Our task is to make ourselves unique by understanding who we are and what we like and don't like and what we're willing to stand for. We become the people we choose to be; this is the premise of free will. Suppose, then, we meet an Other who is in every outward respect ourself. It is one thing to imagine an Other who has lived a life, been marked by it, and become uniquely different from us. But if through some whimsical accident of fate we arrive at the same place, if we discover that we are fundamentally alike despite our various experiences, isn't there a sense of loss? A loss not only of identity but of purpose? We wonder not only who we are but
why
we are who we are.
One can imagine, then, the feelings that ran through David Kellman's mind when a friend at Queens College handed him the newspaper that day, and in the photograph that accompanied the story were two young men who looked exactly like him. David Kellman was the third piece of a puzzle that had been separated nearly two decades before. That night all three were on the phone with each other, comparing lives, asking each other questions about school and food and sports and women. "It's all the same! It's all the same!" Eddie kept crying.
When the three of them finally got together, they quickly learned that they had something else in common. Each had been adopted from Louise Wise Services. When they were young each of them used to go to the Child Development Center to be studied. Each had a sister who was two years older and who had also been adopted from the same agency. The architecture of the study began to make itself apparent as they talked. They had each been placed in Jewish homes, but of widely differing social classes. Robert Shafran's family lived in affluent Scarsdale; his father was a doctor and
 
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his mother was a lawyer. Eddie Galland's family lived in a middle-class suburb in New Hyde Park, Long Island; his father had a master's degree in industrial arts and taught shop in a local high school. David Kellman's parents were high-school graduates who lived in a blue-collar neighborhood in Queens. As they talked, they wondered why they had been separated.
"I've thought about it for quite some time," says Shafran, who is now studying law in New York. (At one time the brothers operated a restaurant in the SoHo district called Triplets, which is now run by David Kellman alone.) "I'm sure it all started with some distinguished psychiatrist and a roomful of people, and the brilliant idea arises of a new way of studying nature versus nurture. 'Okay, we'll separate these kids and watch them grow.' This is nightmarish, Nazi shit."
Dr. Neubauer did not personally counsel the adoption agency to separate twins and tripletsthat decision, he says, was made by Viola W. Bernard, the agency's chief psychiatric consultantbut at the time he was in favor of the idea. He also points out that twins were treated no differently from ordinary siblings. "When a girl would have a child and it would be given up for adoption and then she would go away and have another child, it never occurred to anyone to place them together because they may be siblings. So the advice was given to Dr. Bernard to separate them. She acted on the information available at the timethat twinship was a burden."
Dr. Bernard, now quite elderly and nearly blind, is a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the Columbia University Medical School. "We were of the opinion that the placement of twins who were identical in separate homes had advantages for the children." she says. "They would be able to develop more of their own identity
 
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rather than a shared one. The inevitable rivalries are more intensive for these kids. I thought that if we had infants who were identical twins who could be placed separately, that it was also an opportunity to make a research contribution." She acknowledged that there is a "mystique" about twins, but she thought it would be destructive to let the adoptive families or, later on, the twins themselves know the truth about their twinship. "In those days we were playing God, but we had to do the best we could."
Bernard says she counseled the birth mother about the liabilities of placing twins together, but if the mother rejected her advice the twins were not separated. After the twins were born, they were placed in a foster home to await placement. Twins quickly develop a powerful attachment to each other, an effect that is called the "twinning reaction." Once the twins had begun reacting to each other, says Bernard, they were not to be separated because that would have been too traumatic.
According to Bernard, there were four sets of identical twins plus the triplets included in Neubauer's studya total of eleven individualsplus "three or four other pairs" who were separated but for various reasons not included. One early pair was used as a prototype to establish the research procedures that were used for the final study.
This study was done in the days before DNA testing could definitively establish whether twins were identical or not. Bernard recalls taking a paper bag of placentas to Columbia University so that geneticists could establish zygosity. This was characteristic of the extreme care that Neubauer and his team took from the very beginning with this rare population. Their study was unique because they were able to study the sequence of development as it occurred. "It was a very intensive study, not
 
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only from the observation of the twins, but naturally, the different environments, the total assessment of the child's development, and the parental influences,'' Neubauer says. "We were surprised to see how extraordinary the concordance is among twins." The difference in intelligence, for instance, was "minimal, almost negligible." There was never a phobia that one of the identical twins or triplets developed that was not shared by their genetic partners. The only differences the Neubauer team observed were in the march of development; one twin might lag behind the other, but would eventually catch up. In other respects, "their nature is as close as possible to identity, in different environments." Given that Neubauer has never published the study even though it ended more than a decade ago, it is impossible to assess the data of what may have been the most ideal twin study ever done, however cruel and ill-advised it may seem to the subjects, some of whom may still not know that they have a twin in the world.
"It was pointed out that these twins might meet each other in later life," says Bernard. "Our position was that if it did happen, then I would talk to them. And if one twin found out, then we felt obligated to tell the other." In fact, at least one set of twins Bernard knows about did discover each other. For the others, she's left an explanatory note in their files at the agency, should they ever ask.
After the triplets' reunion, Mrs. Kellman sought out a psychologist she remembered from the study. She asked the woman why she had let the boys grow up unaware of each others' existence. How could she personally have gone from the Shafran house to the Galland house to the Kellmans', sometimes on the same day, carrying such a secret inside her? "As a scientist," the psychologist replied, "how could I resist?"
 
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4
The Minnesota Experience
In 1979 Professor Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. was sitting in his office at the University of Minnesota, where B. F. Skinner did his landmark work on behaviorism, when one of his graduate students came in with a copy of the
Minneapolis Tribune
. "Did you see this fascinating story about these twins who were reared apart? You really ought to study these. You know, you talk about separated twins in your course." Bouchard began to read:
LIMA, Ohio. James Springer, brought up believing that his identical twin had died at birth, says meeting his brother face-to-face was "the greatest thing that ever happened to me."
Born in August 1939 in Piqua, Ohio, the brothers were adopted by different families when they were only weeks old. They say they don't know what has happened to their biological parents nor why they were put up for adoption.
Originally, both sets of adoptive parentsJess and Lucille Lewis and Ernest and Sarah Springerhad been told the other twin had died at birth. But Mrs. Lewis learned the truth by accident when she returned to probate court to complete adoption procedures.

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