The Genius Factory (16 page)

“I didn’t think about it because I did not know about it,” Mary answered. “No one knew about that. I thought we were just going to be a family. In the early days, Dad took full credit. He thought you were cute.”

I defended Mary, too. Seventeen years ago, no one was particularly worried that fathers would reject their own nonbiological kids.

Mary spoke more gently to Tom. She said she was sorry Alvin had not turned out to be a particularly attentive dad to him, but that the sperm donor wasn’t necessarily the ideal dad, either. “You are looking for the father you wanted to have but didn’t have.”

Tom nodded and looked resigned. “Yeah, and even if I find Donor Coral he probably wouldn’t be that father.”

“I don’t want you guys feeling you should be ashamed of your origins,” Mary said.

“I am not. I am not,” said Tom. “Look, I am very happy you did what you did. You don’t have to be defensive about it. It’s great that you found a good sperm donor. Honest, I don’t think Dad would have been a good dad anyway, no matter what.”

Mary tried to sum it all up optimistically. “I think you should look on the sperm bank as a positive. You can go through school without studying for tests.” That was our last word on the subject. We retreated to the calmer, duller conversational topics of family life: Darian’s sleeping habits, Tom’s classes, Mary’s job.

But the dinner argument stuck with me. All parents expect too much of their children. The United States is beset by tennis parents, aggro soccer dads, and homeschooling enthusiasts plotting their children’s future one spelling bee at a time. Mary wasn’t that bad. But she certainly did goad her kids to do better, and definitely hoped that knowing about their special origins would inspire them.

But in the case of a sensitive soul like Tom, I wondered if genetic expectation had inspired him or punished him. When your mom tells you you have to do better, you try to do better. But when your mom tells you your genes say you have to do better, it’s different. You lose your free will. In some ways, the only logical response is to rebel and screw up, just to prove that your genes don’t rule you.

Tom was too dutiful a son and too responsible a father to rebel on purpose, but when I left the Legares the next day, I got the sense that he was starting to feel taxed by his genes. He had been given a fantasy of Donor Coral—Dad was brilliant, handsome, healthy, and kind. But the fantasy was also a burden. How could he possibly live up to it? He was expected to find the magical, mysterious Coral-planted genius locked in his DNA and do something extraordinary with it. But he was already raising a son, holding a job, earning a degree, marrying a girl. Wasn’t that enough?

CHAPTER 8

THE SECRET OF DONOR WHITE

A
year passed, and I didn’t hear from Donor White. Lots of people offered to help me find him. Two private detectives volunteered to search. TV producers kept calling: if Beth and Joy appeared on their show, they said, it would definitely smoke out Donor White. I conveyed all the requests to Beth. At low moments she entertained the idea of going on television, but she eventually rejected the idea: finding Donor White would be nice, she said, but not if the price was sacrificing the family’s privacy and Joy’s innocence. A hope was all it had ever been. “If nothing comes of it, I will have lost nothing. I knew it was a long shot.” Both of us gave up on Donor White.

I took a three-month work trip to Japan and forgot about sperm banks. A few days after I returned to America, on June 12, 2002, I logged in to my e-mail and saw a message waiting from “[email protected].” It began like this:

Dear David Plotz,

This is Donor White and, even though some 15 months late, I hope that you will be so kind as to pass on this note and my e-mail address to Beth about whom you wrote in your article regarding the Repository of Germinal Choice (RGC).

The e-mail continued for 2,300 words. “Donor White” described how the Repository had recruited him. He recounted some of his family history. He sheepishly mocked his own Internet incompetence to explain why it had taken him so long to see the article:

I am sorry to be so late in responding, but some allowances should be made for lack of knowledge about the type of Internet search engines that finally led me to your article, considering that I was one of those who went to college in the days when students wore their foot-long slide rules dangling from their belts and tied to one leg like a gun fighter in the Old West. Later, when introduced to computers, I carried a foot-long tray of punched cards into a room about the size of a basketball court, all of which was required to hold a single computer. Those of my generation can never compete in cyberspace with younger people who grew up using modern computers.

The letter finished sweetly:

I cannot imagine that some of the donors contacted have said that they rarely think about their children, because I think of mine very often. Indeed, I expect that they will be included among my last conscious thoughts on this sweet earth.

My thanks and best regards,
Donor White

Donor White sounded like none of the other donors I had talked to. Until Donor White, the donors had split neatly into two categories: the rationalists and the egotists. The rationalists, such as Edward Burnham, were matter-of-fact. They summed up the experience of having donated to a genius sperm bank with a shrug. They weren’t troubled by it, and they weren’t delighted by it. They weren’t really interested in it. They didn’t care about their “children.” For them, donating to Graham was a nearly forgotten favor.

The egotists—such as Michael the Nobelist’s son—were obsessive, creepy, and self-aggrandizing. Donating to the bank had been the greatest moment of their lives—not because they had helped anyone but because they had hoodwinked Mother Nature. They cared about the children the way a miser cares about gold. The purpose of the children was to be counted.

But Donor White was different. In form, he resembled the rationalists. Donor White wrote his letter with the exactitude of a scientist—dates and times recalled precisely, names spelled right, all facts crisp. The prose was formal, even pedantic: “. . . about whom you wrote in your article regarding the Repository of Germinal Choice (RGC).” But the soul of the letter was something else, something new. His language, for example: it was long-winded, but it was courtly. (I immediately suspected that he was from the South.) The letter was also funny and—unique among donor correspondence—modest. The author was obviously a smart man, but he didn’t show off. He referred to himself only in order to deprecate himself. But what struck me most about the e-mail was how romantic it was. Not romantic in the moon-June-for-you-I-swoon sense but romantic in the sense of romantic poetry—filled with a childlike sense of wonderment, possibility, and love.

I was smitten by Donor White. Still, I was on guard for hoaxsters, and on second reading I realized that “Donor White’s” note lacked identifying details. He was specific about his family history, but since I didn’t know his family, he could have been making it all up. And when he described the Repository, he included no fact that he couldn’t have gleaned from reading my articles about it. So I replied to him with a curt e-mail quiz. I demanded information that only Donor White could know: Beth and Joy’s real first names (which he had been told) and minutiae about his ancestors that he’d revealed in his correspondence with Beth seven years before.

Donor White took the quiz in the right spirit—he was a cautious man, too. He aced it. So on June 13, I called Beth and told her that Donor White had found me. She could barely speak. (In our excitement, we started whispering again.) I gave Beth his e-mail address. I mentioned that as far as I could determine, this would be the first time an anonymous sperm donor and his child had ever met.

I felt oddly ambivalent about introducing Donor White to Beth and Joy. My life as the Semen Detective had been straining my conscience. I had decided that as long as I was careful not to identify those who wished to remain invisible, I would be doing no wrong. Failure had presented one kind of dilemma. Donor Fuchsia’s insistence on privacy, for example, meant that the eight kids of his I had found would never know about their father, even though I did. There was also a pair of half siblings who, because one parent asked for privacy, wouldn’t ever meet each other or even know about each other. I hated having to keep these secrets, but I had no choice.

But now that Beth and Donor White were on the cusp of meeting, my conscience was muddier. Success presented a different, more demanding moral challenge. I worked my way through the dilemma. First: Beth and Donor White. Was it okay for them to meet? Beth was a sensible, well-meaning adult. Donor White seemed a sensible, well-meaning adult. What was the harm in letting them talk to each other? None.

Okay, second: Joy and Donor White. Was it okay for them to meet? Joy was only twelve years old. Meeting Donor White might upend her life, yet she wasn’t permitted to stop it from happening. Her mother would decide for her. I rationalized this: Parents always make decisions—even traumatic ones—for their children. That is a parent’s job. I had to trust Beth to do right for Joy, just as I would expect others to trust me to do right for my kids. So that was fine.

Now the third and hardest problem: Joy and her father. Was I doing her father wrong? I had never talked to Joy’s dad—Beth’s ex-husband—and didn’t even know his name. It’s true that Beth, not I, would decide whether Joy got to meet Donor White. But that was a technical distinction. I knew that what I was doing could alter Beth’s ex-husband’s life, perhaps for the worse. I was helping Joy connect with a second father who might compete with him. Was this justified? Perhaps not except in the utilitarian sense: the potential benefit to Beth, Donor White, and Joy outweighed the possible pain it might cause the father.

Donor White and I struck up a lively correspondence, and it was immediately clear that he was just as sweet a man as his initial e-mail suggested. It didn’t make much sense that Donor White and I got along as well as we did. He was a Southerner by birth, a Californian by lifestyle, a scientist by vocation, and a Republican by sensibility. I was none of the above. But Donor White reminded me a bit of my father, and not just because they were both scientists in their sixties. They possessed the same balance of rationality and kindness. Donor White gave any question I asked him two answers, a logical one and a soulful one—sometimes they matched, sometimes they didn’t. Like my father, Donor White could hold in his head the incompatible demands of rationality and irrationality, of facts and love.

Despite our warming friendship, he remained something of a riddle to me. I was sure he was Donor White and that he had contributed sperm to the Nobel bank, but beyond that, I hit a brick wall. He was cagey about his identity. Unlike every other donor I had talked to, he didn’t tell me his real name, where he lived, or what he did for a living (beyond “scientist”). He used an untraceable e-mail address—an e-mail address that had never shown up on the Internet with a name attached to it. He wouldn’t give me his phone number, and he wouldn’t call me, so I never heard his voice. We communicated only by e-mail. He had shared his true identity with Beth, she told me, but he had asked her to keep it from me. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust me, he insisted, he was just worried about any number of circumstances where the pressure on me to surrender his name could be intense. If I didn’t know it, I would have nothing to say.

Eventually, Donor White did feed me a few crumbs of information. He admitted that he lived near San Diego, and he gave his first name—“Roger,” let’s say.

I begged him to let me visit him in San Diego. He reluctantly agreed and laid out his conditions. He would bring some documents to show me but would not carry anything that identified him, not even a driver’s license. He set a meeting place, a San Diego hotel at ten on a Saturday morning. He would be sitting in the lobby carrying a brown satchel. He wanted privacy, so I was to reserve a room where we could talk.

The day came. When I arrived, there was only one person sitting in the lobby, an old man. Roger’s e-mails were so full of youthful enthusiasm that I had forgotten, as we had corresponded, that he was nearing seventy. He had been recruited as a donor after his fiftieth birthday, so he was twenty years older than most of the other Repository donors I’d met. Roger stood to greet me. He was six feet tall, with a pot belly, and he had the presence of an even larger man. That was because his face was so big and so round: a shiny full moon of a face. He was not quite handsome—his features were too fleshy for that—but he looked . . . nice. His cheeks were large and sagging down into jowls. His coloring was rich and red. The “dark brown” hair listed in the donor catalog had turned gray but remained bushy. The anchor of his face was a strong, appealing nose: it almost seemed to be three noses, the bridge and each nostril were so massive. (Seeing this distinctive nose was what made me certain he was Joy’s father: she had that nose, too, in a more delicate, girlish form. The nose knows.) Roger’s eyes were blue and cheery behind a clunky pair of bifocals. He wore high-water pants and a striped shirt that looked as if it should have a pocket protector but didn’t.

Roger welcomed me with a strong handshake, a smile, and a southern gentleman’s grace. He said it was “pleasing” to meet me. “Pleasing” was the linchpin of his vocabulary. The word occurred over and over again in his conversation. When something mattered to him, he said it was “pleasing.” Getting letters from Beth years ago, that had been “pleasing” to him. Seeing pictures of Joy, that was “pleasing.” And the chance to meet Joy, well, that would be “very pleasing.”

When we got up to the hotel room I had booked, Roger unsnapped his briefcase and stacked a sheaf of manila folders on the table. Every folder was labeled, and they were arranged in a precise order. Methodically, he worked his way down the pile. Some contained original documents or private documents that I was allowed to examine in the room but could not take home. Other folders contained only photocopies that were mine to keep. Where the photocopies were blurry or cut off, Roger had neatly printed the missing words. His archive was both idiosyncratic and elaborate: he had brought everything from a copy of Graham’s original 1963 agreement with Hermann Muller to the Christmas cards that the Repository sent donors to the program from Graham’s funeral.

As Roger talked about the documents and the Repository, what struck me most about him was not that he was a precise scientific man, though he clearly was. What struck me was that he was a precise scientific man who had been bonked on the head by a miracle. Roger seemed physically unsettled by the discovery of Joy. One of the first things he said was “I am a technical guy. I believe in
facts.
But so many strange things have been happening to me! Finding Joy again, there is just no scientific basis for that. I have never believed in destiny, but now I think there must be something to it.”

He told me how he had become a donor to the Repository. He began—ever meticulous—at the beginning. He pulled out a photograph of himself as a toddler. He looked as Joy did in her baby photos, but perhaps just in the way all cute little blond kids look alike. Roger had grown up in small-town Alabama in the 1940s and ’50s. His father, Roger said, had been a machinist, and though he had only finished high school, he was a numbers genius. His dad could multiply huge numbers in his head, and keep a running count of the number of letters in Sunday’s church sermon. His dad had died when Roger was a teenager, leaving Roger a kind of surrogate father to his younger sister, herself a math prodigy. Roger was no genius child, but he was dogged. He earned degree after degree in chemistry from state universities. When he graduated, the chemical industry was booming, and he easily found work, first in Texas, then in California.

The clues he dropped in our conversation—Alabama, chemicals—were enough, combined with a few other hints, for me to identify him later using an online database. As he had told me, he was a successful, but not famous, scientist.

Roger worked with the intensity of a poor kid made good. He scarcely had time to date, and he didn’t marry until his thirties, when he met Rebecca, a colleague several years his senior. Roger had always been a family man: he was devoted to his mom and sister, and he wanted to be a father. Rebecca already had a child by a first marriage, so when Roger and Rebecca couldn’t conceive, he assumed that he was sterile. They talked about adoption but never got around to it. He was working too hard.

His professional success seemed satisfaction enough. He earned four patents. Scientific papers and technical reports piled up by the dozen. He leapt from one snazzy company to another. He was always in demand, not because he had the best brain but because he had a pit bull brain. Roger grabbed problems in his teeth, shook them like mad, and wouldn’t let go till he had broken them. He worked twelve-hour days, week after week, year after year. It took a toll on him. But he pretended it didn’t.