Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are (9 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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Indicator, and the California Psychological Inventory. When they are finished, they switch places. Monday at eight, the first full day, the twins go to the hospital. Electrodes are attached to their scalps for electrocardiograms; the twins also get a chest X-ray, a hearing test, and endure ninety-nine different physical measurements, including such things as arm size, head length, nose depth, ear shape, the diameter of the eyes. They occupy the rest of the morning by taking tests of mental abilities. After lunch, they have their fingerprints taken and their allergies tested, submit to a complete physical examination, then complete personality assessments until five-thirty. Tuesday, the longest day of the week, begins with a donation of blood before breakfast and again ninety minutes later, in order to measure the rate of insulin production. For the next twenty-four hours the twins wear monitors that record their pulse, blood pressure, and body temperature. They undergo lengthy psychiatric interviews and medical life histories. After dinner, the twins are faced with a sexual history questionnaire that is so intimate that many simply refuse to finish. Wednesday morning is full of visual and dental exams. Thursday, the twins are greeted with more mental abilities tests, voice sampling, psychomotor tasks to measure hand-eye coordination, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Each twin is videotaped lighting a cigarette if he smokes, catching a pair of keys that are tossed to him, drawing pictures of a house and a person, writing a paragraph, and walking across the room and shaking Professor Bouchard's hand; the point is to make a visual record of their physical mannerisms. Friday features information-processing tasks, such as sorting objects into trays, and an interview that explores the major life stresses that each twin has experienced. The afternoon is occupied by a two-hour pulmonary exam and
 
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more tests of mental abilities and personality assessments. Saturday concludes with a final round of mental abilities, information processing, psychomotor tasks, and personality inventories.
One can imagine the state the subjects are in when the week finally ends; it wears the staff out as well. But by two o'clock on Saturday Bouchard's team will know as much about the twins as it is possible to measure after approximately fifty hours of tests. They will know what they eat, the books they have read, their sexual orientation and predilections, the television shows they watch, how much their hands quiver when they hold a stick in a hole, their musical tastes and talents, their phobias, their childhood traumas, their pulse rates at rest and under stress, the diameter of their pupils and how quickly they contract in the light, the amount of decay in their teeth, their hobbies, their values, the way they sit in a chair. Many of the twins return for follow-up studies, as do family members. Because of the Minnesota project, separated twins have become one of the most densely studied populations in the history of psychology.
Many memorable characters have passed through Elliott Hall. Among the early pairs were Daphne Goodship and Barbara Herbert, who, like the Jims, had been adopted separately as infants and lived thirty-nine years apart. Barbara had grown up in a modest home in Hammersmith, in London, as the daughter of a city gardener. Daphne had a middle-class childhood north of London in Luton, where her father was a metallurgist. Barbara had learned that she was a twin when she needed a birth certificate to qualify for her pension fund. There she learned that her birth name was Gerda Barbara Jacobson, but she also noticed that the doctor had jotted down the time of her birth, which in Britain is only used as a way of distinguishing between twins. Barbara finally met her iden-
 
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tical twin at King's Cross Station in London in May 1980. Each appeared wearing a beige dress and a brown velvet jacket. They greeted each other by holding up their identical crooked little fingersa small defect that had kept each of them from ever learning to type or play the piano. They discovered that they are both frugal, like the same books, had been Girl Guides, hated math in school, chose blue as their favorite colorthe sort of incidental things that many people discover they have in commonbut there were other commonalities that were harder to explain. Both had the eccentric habit of pushing up their noses, which they each called "squidging." They liked their coffee black and cold. Both had fallen down the stairs at the age of fifteen and claimed to have weak ankles as a result. At sixteen, each had met at a local dance the man she was going to marry. They each suffered a miscarriage with their first pregnancies, then proceeded to have two boys followed by a girl (although Barbara had two more children after that). Both put on weight easily, although Daphne, the more serious dieter, weighed twenty pounds less than Barbara. And both laughed more than anyone else they knew, which was why Bouchard nicknamed them the Giggle Sisters when they arrived in Minnesota shortly after their first meeting. During the physical examinations, the sisters learned that each had a minor heart murmur and an enlarged thyroid gland. They also had identical brain waves. Although both of the sisters loved to talk, Bouchard was interested in the fact that each fell silent whenever the conversation turned to more provocative subjects, such as politics. In fact, neither had ever voted, except once, when they were both employed as polling clerks. Avoidance of controversy was supposed to be classic learned behavior; was it possible that it had a genetic component as well? And if so, how?
 
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There were two male pairs with gay members. In one, neither member of the pair knew of the other's existence until one of them went into a gay bar in a neighboring town and was mistaken for his brother. They had very similar histories. Both had been hyperactive as children and had learning disabilities; both were highly emotional and subject to depression; and both had been actively gay since the age of thirteen. After their reunion, they actually became lovers.
*
In the second pair one twin was exclusively homosexual and the other considered himself exclusively heterosexual, despite an affair with an older man when he was a teenager. Among the separated twins who came to Minnesota there were also four lesbian twin sets with one member who was gay or bisexual, but in every case the other twin was straight.
Many of the twin pairs had similar fears. A British pair of sisters feared ocean bathing and would get into the water only by backing in slowly. Another pair of sisters arrived in Minneapolis each wearing seven rings on her fingers. One pair reported having had similar nightmares, imagining doorknobs and fishhooks in their mouths and smothering to death. Few twins were such pure specimens as the Jims, whom Bouchard labeled ''the most valuable pair that has ever been studied." Usually the pairs had been separated later in their childhood, or had been reunited years before, or had been raised by other relatives. Oddly enough, the degree of similarity between them did not seem to be positively correlated with their age at separation; those twins, like the Jims, who had been separated early tended to be even more similar than those who had been separated later.
*
Gay twins who have been reared together typically deny any feelings of sexual attraction for each other. This seems to be characteristic of siblings who have been raised together.
 
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Again and again Bouchard and his team would be flabbergasted by the similarities, the unheard-of coincidences, and the counterintuitive findings that their tests would turn up. "We were not ready for what we found," he reported after a year of study. "Worse yet, we do not feel we have adequately captured the phenomenon. Many differences between the twins are variations on a theme more than anything else."
Jack Yufe and Oskar Stöhr were born in Trinidad in 1933 and were split apart a few months later in a bitter divorce, brought on by the father's violent behavior. Jack stayed in Trinidad with their father, a Jewish merchant in Port of Spain. Oskar went to live in the all-female household of their German maternal grandmother, who was Catholic. She was also a devoted Nazi. While Oskar was preparing to become a member of the Hitler Youth, Jack was exploring his Jewish identity. At the age of sixteen, he was sent to Israel to work in a kibbutz. He later served in the Israeli navy. In 1954, he decided to emigrate to the United States, and stopped off in Munich to meet his brother for the first time since their separation twenty-one years before. It was hard for them to communicate, because Oskar spoke only German, whereas polyglot Jack spoke English, Spanish, some Yiddish and Hebrewbut not German. Jack was shocked when the translator advised him not to mention he was Jewish because Oskar's stepfather still didn't know there were Jews in the family. The reunion was chilly and brief. Jack moved to San Diego, where he opened a clothing and appliance store. Oskar stayed in Germany, where he became a factory supervisor. Twenty-five years passed, with little more communication than a Hanukkah card from the Yufes each year and a Christmas card in reply from Oskar's wife. One day in 1980 Jack's wife read about the Jim twins and the
 
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Minnesota studies, and Jack decided that it might be a good idea to meet his twin again, this time on neutral ground. He contacted Bouchard, who eagerly agreed to fly them both to Minneapolis to become the eleventh pair to be studied.
One of the objections to twin studies is that the twins are often reared in similar environments that might account just as well as genes do for the often startling similarities of these Minneapolis encounters. Also, say the critics, twins are prone to mythologize their similarities in a bid for publicity, movie, and book deals, or at the least, a consoling sense of specialness after being partly robbed of their identity. If environment was ever going to assert itself in these studies, Oskar and Jack should have been an ideal pair. The contrasts in their upbringings, their cultures, their family lives, were overwhelming. Moreover, they didn't seem to like each other enough to create the kinds of identity legends that the critics suspected were at the bottom of the separated-twin sagas.
Bouchard was standing with Jack at the Minneapolis airport when Oskar came off the plane. "I remember Jack pulling in his breath because Oskar walked exactly the same way he did," Bouchard recalls. "They have a kind of swagger to their body." Each sported rectangular wirerimmed glasses, a short clipped moustache, and a blue, two-pocket shirt with epaulets. They shook hands but did not embrace. Soon they were sitting in Elliott Hall in separate rooms, answering some 15,000 questions about themselves.
As it turned out, Jack and Oskar had dozens of quirky habits in common, such as storing rubber bands on their wrists, reading magazines from back to front, flushing the toilet before using it, and dipping buttered toast in their coffee. They also shared a taste for spicy foods and sweet liqueurs. They differed in certain obvious respects: Oskar,
 
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for instance, was married, while Jack was divorced, but Jack noticed that Oskar expected his wife to take care of all needs without question, much as Jack himself had done when he was married. Jack regarded himself as a liberal Californian, and he saw his brother as "very traditionalistic, typically German." Oskar was a skier, Jack was a sailor. Oskar was a devoted union man, Jack a self-employed entrepreneur. Of course they had lived profoundly different lives, so that their memories, their experiences, their religious and political orientationsin other words, the interior world, the raw stuff of self-hoodwere unique. Their personality profiles were strikingly similar, however, despite the fact that they had been raised in such opposing cultures. Bouchard observed that their tempos, their temperaments, their characteristic mannerismstheir style of being in the worldwere far more alike than different, similarities that were all the more surprising because Oskar was raised entirely by women and Jack had grown up with his father.
One night in Minneapolis, the two men went to see a hypnotist in a cabaret. As the hypnotist was attempting to put a volunteer into a trance, and was dramatically counting backward, Oskar abruptly sneezedloudly, so that everyone in the club was startled. "He does that all the time," Oskar's wife whispered to Jack, who was astonished. One of his favorite pranks was to step into a crowded elevator and let out a loud fake sneeze just to watch everybody jump.
The team studying these twin pairs was at a loss to explain how these uncanny coincidences might have happened. Was it possible that people could be wired in such a way that they were programmed to marry people named Betty and Linda, or squidge their noses, or sneeze on elevators? Did these events have meaning or were they just random, freak happenstances? Clairvoyance is

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