The Genius Factory (17 page)

In July 1984, two women visited Roger, unannounced, at his laboratory. They told him that their names were Julianna McKillop and Dora Vaux and they worked for the Repository for Germinal Choice. Had he heard of it? He had heard of it. He was dumbfounded. He had enough presence of mind to shut his door and ask his secretary to hold his calls. Roger still didn’t know how they had selected him—he suspected that a former colleague had tipped Graham off to him. Roger was a great candidate for Graham’s post-Nobel bank—a Renaissance scientist. He was plenty smart, but he was also big, friendly, hardworking, and very athletic. Julianna and Dora told him he could do the world a great favor by donating to the bank and preserving his wonderful genes. “I listened, without saying much, mainly because of being virtually speechless,” Roger remembered. “I would never have thought about such a thing in my entire lifetime. Not wishing to be rude, I told them that I would need to think about this myself for some time and then speak to my wife before getting back to them.” He reminded them that he was over fifty and had never fathered a child. They told him not to worry about that yet.

Roger was inclined to reject the invitation, but he was a deliberate, contemplative man. So he turned the idea over in his head for months. Every few weeks, he told me, Julianna would mail him a testimonial from a happy mother or a glossy pamphlet or a videotape of a news program about the Repository. He was not swayed. Graham’s eugenic ambitions did not move Roger; he thought DNA was far too fickle to guarantee the superkids that Graham sought. Roger decided to turn Graham down. He wrote the encounter off, and filed it in his head under “strange experiences.”

Then, for practically the first time in his life, Roger allowed himself to be interrupted—and that’s exactly how he thought of it, as an interruption—by fate. He rarely dreamed, and when he did dream, it was always in black and white. But about six months after Julianna and Dora’s visit, he had a Technicolor dream. In the days before the dream, he had been researching his family history. Roger had long known that his great-grandfather had died in the Civil War, fighting for the Confederacy. He had just discovered that the great-granddad had fathered his only child right before he died in the war.

So this was the dream Roger had:

I was sitting on the edge of an open field with my back against the trunk of a giant oak tree. It was a beautiful day and monarch butterflies were flitting about all around me, when some distance away the outline of a man could be seen coming out of the field toward me. There was a bright light at his back that blinded me until he came close enough to fall within the shade of the tree, at which time I immediately knew who he was before a single word was said. While no photograph of him existed, I knew that this poorly dressed man was my great-grandfather from the Civil War, because he looked exactly like a composite of my father and grandfather.

Without any introduction, he spoke to me as follows: “Most of my friends volunteered at the first opportunity to enter the war. I was newly married and waited until there was danger of being conscripted before joining up. Because of that I had a son . . . which is the only reason that you and all of those known to you having my name ever had a chance at life. You now have that same opportunity.”

The dream changed his mind. He called Julianna back and agreed to take a physical and give a semen sample. To his surprise, his spermatozoa were both numerous and lively. He also passed the Repository’s medical exam. Julianna code-named him Donor White #6 and wrote a catalog entry describing him as “a scientist involved in sophisticated research” with “good features, good presence.”

For Roger, becoming a sperm donor was an act of moral purpose. He had committed to help couples who needed him, and by God he would not disappoint them. Once he determined to do it, he did it with the care that he gave to everything that mattered. He wasn’t paid a penny, but Roger made himself as passionate about donating sperm as he was about running chemical reactions. He learned to process sperm at home, how to preserve it with extender solution, pipette it into tiny vials, top each with a white screw top (hence, Donor White), and freeze them in liquid nitrogen. Every few months, Dora Vaux would leave an empty liquid-nitrogen Dewar flask on his front porch and collect the Dewar he had filled up. It felt productive to Roger, and it felt right.

Roger also insisted that donating sperm had to be an act of love. In the peculiar transaction that is sperm donation, donors and sperm bankers leave a lot unsaid. They don’t talk about the fact that, at its heart, sperm donation is a furtive, in-a-closet-with-a-porno-mag process. It’s lonely, and—trust me, because I have been through it—skanky. It is exactly what it seems to be: jacking off. That’s why sperm banks avoid telling donors exactly what they’re supposed to do. Instead, they couch it in euphemism: “donation,” “collection,” and “processing.”

But Roger rejected the sleaze and the furtiveness. Sperm donation, he determined, “need not be a solitary activity.” Roger had married well: Rebecca tolerated, even encouraged, Roger’s sperm donations. She had friends who had suffered through infertility and thought it was a good deed to assist other couples who longed for babies. She was willing to help. So when Roger and Rebecca made love, he collected the sperm in a special condom and saved it for the bank.

At first, Roger said, he seemed to be shooting blanks. Donor White sperm wasn’t getting anyone pregnant. Finally, in 1986, Dora called him: the first Donor White baby had been born. Soon the White babies were arriving at a rapid clip—one every couple of months. By 1990, he had fathered a dozen kids. By 1991, nineteen of them.

Why did Roger know the number? Because he kept records. He examined data for a living; this was data. Roger opened one of his folders and handed me a handwritten graph. The Y-axis read, “Conceptions for Donor White.” The X-axis had the year. He unfolded another graph, which charted how many babies had been born at the Repository—from all donors—when each manager was in charge. I asked him how he’d collected the numbers. He said that he and Rebecca had struck up a friendship with Dora. When she delivered a tank, she would drop in for tea and spill secrets. Whenever a White baby was born, she told him the birthday and sometimes the first name.

With his typical orderliness, Roger also took the occasion of being a sperm donor to make himself a student of fertility. He read scientific papers about it, and once, when he encountered a curious fact in the literature—that women married to older men have disproportionate numbers of boys—he saw an opportunity to contribute to fertility research. Did the same anomaly exist with donated sperm? Since Repository donors tended to be older than the mothers, you could check if their older sperm also tended to produce boys. He wrote to Graham requesting the bank’s data on sex of offspring. Graham never responded.

But Roger’s fascination was only incidentally scientific. He was enthralled by the numbers because the numbers represented life. Each number was a child
—his
child. The older he got, the more he thought about his distant kids. He did not ask the obvious, vain question about them: Are they like me? (That is what all the other donors asked.) No, he asked the questions a father asks: Are they happy? Are they healthy? What are they going to do with their lives? He thought of all the paternal care and advice they deserved and how he couldn’t provide it. That depressed him. All he could do was think about them.

Since he didn’t know what was actually happening to his children, he had to imagine it. Roger removed a little black notebook from one of his manila folders. He leaned over conspiratorially—though we were alone in the room—to show it to me. Each page of the notebook listed a birthday. Often there was a first name written below the date. Every time Dora informed him of a birth, Roger recorded it here. A surprising number of parents mailed baby photos to the Repository as thanks, and Dora sent them on to Roger. He had a dozen of them. Each of them was backed by a sheet of cardboard, sealed in its own protective plastic bag and inserted into the notebook by the corresponding name.

Roger leafed through the black book. He pointed to a boy named Avi Jacob. “He’s probably Jewish,” Roger said, smiling buoyantly at me. “So, David, you are not the only one here who has a Jewish child!”

On the next page were twins, a boy and a girl. Roger had two pictures of them: one at four months, a second at eleven months. Roger noticed what I didn’t, that the boy was smaller than his twin sister in the first picture and bigger in the second. “Look how much he is growing!”

Next came a darling curly-haired boy: “He was just four pounds when he was born. They were worried. But now look at him!”

Then Roger showed me a large, curious picture of a baby boy in a bathtub. The bathtub was at the top of a tower in the middle of a forest. “Dora said his parents worked as fire watchers,” said Roger. What’s his name? I asked. It was not written on the notebook page. Roger shrugged, then grinned. “Dora didn’t tell me. But I even have names for those whose names I don’t know. So I call him ‘Watchtower Boy.’ Or sometimes ‘Boy in Tub.’ ”

Roger closed the book. “Maybe Dora should not have shown me these pictures, but I am glad she did. These children are very pleasing to me,” said Roger. And here, “pleasing” meant something very much more than pleasing.

He handed me several letters. They were thank-you notes sent by “White” mothers that Dora had passed on to him. One read, “Every mother believes hers to be the most special baby ever born, but mine truly is.” Another read, “You have given us the greatest of all gifts, more precious than anything money can buy, and changed the way I feel about human nature. You are an unseen but not unfelt member of my family.”

Roger commented that Joy was not the first of his children whose identity he knew. In the late 1980s, Dora had, as usual, told him the first name of the latest White child. It was an unusual name, “Jeroboam,” let’s say. A couple of years later, Dora mentioned to Roger that the boy was about to have a baby sister, also by Donor White. The next week, Roger happened to see a birth announcement in his local newspaper. The announcement mentioned that the new baby girl had an older brother, Jeroboam. Roger was thrilled. He looked up the family in the phone directory and realized they lived only a mile away. He took to running by their house on his morning jog, especially on Christmas morning and on the kids’ birthdays, which Dora had told him. Sometimes he would see Jeroboam playing in the yard. Once, when Roger jogged by during the boy’s birthday party, Jeroboam shouted to him, “Hello, Man in the Hat.” Roger stopped and said, “Happy Birthday.” Soon after, he made a plan to meet the boy. He ran by the house carrying a beach ball and rang the doorbell. He pretended he had found the ball on the street and wanted “to give it to the little guy who sometimes waved at me when I jogged past.” The mother, suspicious, stayed inside the house. Roger had to shout his story at her through the locked front door. She thanked him and asked him to leave the ball on the porch. Later, he saw Jeroboam playing with the ball. It was ten years since then and he had never spoken to the boy—or his sister—again. He knew that he should not.

As Roger showed me his notebook and told me his stories, I felt heartsick for him. This was what happened when a deliberate man with a pure soul became a sperm donor. He had tracked his children because he felt he must. It was the closest he could come to being the father they deserved. He knew he would never—and could never—interfere in their lives, and that agonized him. The Repository children—at once his and not his—were excruciating for Roger. In October 1991, he wrote an article for
San Diego Woman
magazine, under the pseudonym R. White. (It was an early draft of the article that Dora had shown Beth when she was shopping for donors.) The magazine article described the sperm bank kids as being a
kind
of comfort to him, because at least he had the satisfaction of passing on the genes of his ancestors (
not
his own genes, he was too modest to say that). He also joked about his fertility: “It is really beyond the imagination of a fifty-seven-year-old man, who thought only five years ago that he might be infertile, to realize that he now has enough boys for a baseball team (with one extra to umpire) and enough girls for a basketball team.”

But mostly Roger’s article was elegiac because he knew that he would never see his children. “Fathering children anonymously is somewhat akin to producing paintings that to you are beautiful and priceless, but doing this with the understanding that when they are finished they must be given away and likely never seen again.” This was a haunting image. Whenever someone asks me what it’s like to donate sperm, I quote them that passage. For Roger, every time he learned of another birth, he felt pride and he felt loss: every donation was an act of loving-kindness and of pain.

Roger stopped donating shortly after he wrote the article. He had fathered nearly twenty children. The Repository professed a limit of twenty per donor, but Graham had urged him to continue anyway. Roger thought he shouldn’t. His sense of obligation made him stop.

Becoming a semifather had another effect on Roger, one he hadn’t expected. The children—the children he couldn’t ever know—made him feel he had wasted too much of his life on work. In the mid-1990s, he retired, full of regret for all the hours squandered at the office. Whenever I mentioned to Roger that I was taking a business trip, he rebuked me for spending time away from my wife and kids. As we were chatting in the hotel about something else, he suddenly grabbed my arm: “I was a workaholic. I regret it. I missed time with my family. Don’t
ever
do that, David.”

All of the nineteen White children occupied Roger’s thoughts, but the one who occupied them most was Joy. Their 1991 meeting—when Beth had dropped baby Joy at the Repository so Roger could see her—had affected him profoundly. As we talked, Roger recalled the visit as if it had been the day before: When Dora had called, he and Rebecca had raced over to the office. Joy, he said, had immediately held out her arms to him, inviting him to pick her up. He had been astounded at how much Joy looked like his sister had when she was an infant. For half an hour, Roger had held little Joy on his lap while Rebecca and Dora snapped Polaroid after Polaroid. Roger had kept these, of course, and he slid them out of a folder and showed them to me: Joy was wearing a light blue romper, with a tiny lace collar. Roger, then in his late fifties, stared at the camera with a stunned expression of wonder, fear, shock, and gratitude. I recognized the expression from family snapshots of me after my daughter’s birth. It was the look of all first-time fathers.