The Genius Factory (7 page)

The first Repository parent I actually met was “Lorraine O’Brien.” A couple weeks after my first article, I traveled to see her. I had found Lorraine, rather than her finding me. I had seen her name in an old newspaper article about the Repository. Lorraine was taken aback that I had located her—the newspaper reporter had been supposed to keep Lorraine anonymous, and Lorraine had never seen the finished article with her real name in it—but she agreed to see me anyway.

Lorraine was a neurologist, and I dropped by her exceptionally busy practice one afternoon in February. Lorraine was a brunette in her early forties. She was funny, fast-talking, conservative, beautiful, and ruthless. She was full of advice, most of it smart, all of it absolutely certain. Lorraine said she had three kids, a ten-year-old boy and six-year-old twins, one boy and one girl. The Nobel sperm bank’s “Donor Fuchsia” had been the father of all of them.

Many of the moms I was hearing from were doctors, nurses, or psychologists. As I talked to Lorraine, I understood why this was so. Lorraine said that she saw the miserable consequences of poor health every day at work. So when she went shopping for sperm banks in 1990, she wanted to ensure her donor was a Grade A specimen. The Repository told her far more about its donors’ health and accomplishments than any other bank would. The Repository let her interview its manager and peruse the catalog. Eventually, she concluded it was the only bank rigorous enough to father her children.

But health wasn’t the only reason Lorraine had chosen the Nobel sperm bank. She was also an unabashed elitist. “When you are growing fruits and vegetables, you don’t pick the bad ones and try to grow them. You pick the best. Same with kids.”

She went to the Repository because she wanted superkids, and as far as she was concerned, she got them. The very first thing she told me about her kids was “They’re wonderful children. They are like royal children.” She thrust pictures of them at me. Other parents, she declared, loved her children. Friends volunteered to babysit them: “Do you know what kind of kids you have to have for people to
volunteer
to babysit them?”

Then she announced, “I’m a great mother,” as if daring me to contradict her. Her ex-husband was no father at all to the children, she said. “I am the exclusive provider of food, money, shelter, emotional support. . . . They do not have a bond with him.” She more than compensated for him, she said, by being such a relentless parent. “When my kids were babies, some other moms and I—all of us obsessive-compulsive women—formed a group called ‘better baby salon’ to raise morally intelligent children. . . . I read everything about raising children, good and bad, because you have to take care of that yourself.”

Her kids had become paragons of achievement. Here are some of my notes from the conversation: “99th percentile . . . best school in the county . . . student of the month . . . little angel . . . their Valentines were the best in the class . . . her coach said he had never seen a faster runner . . . unbelievable . . . never had in my entire teaching career a child who is as emotionally balanced as this child . . . enrichment classes.”

The Nobel sperm bank was intended as a scientific experiment to prove how nature trumped nurture. But Lorraine was evidence why the bank could never show that. Her kids might outperform regular kids, but that proved nothing about heredity versus environment. Graham’s customers had not been randomly plucked off the streets of San Diego. They had
chosen
the Nobel sperm bank, and they were the kind of parents you would expect to pick a Nobel sperm bank. Lorraine had gone there because she cared passionately that her kids be standouts. Even if Lorraine had gone to Tony’s Discount Sperm Warehouse, her children would have been achievers: she wouldn’t have let them be any other way.

I don’t mean this negatively; hyperinvolved parents are often the best kind. I hope I can do as much for my kids’ lives as Lorraine did for hers. But I didn’t want to mistake her children’s accomplishments for genius. I am skeptical of the high-achieving child, perhaps because I was once one myself. I tested outrageously well. I aced my SATs at age eleven. My teachers were always predicting a glorious career in mathematics, medicine, or philosophy. But what looked like genius was simply good parenting. I was a pliant, reasonably intelligent, eager-to-please child with bright, attentive parents. Of course I did well in school. By the time I hit college, when I met the real geniuses, the people with incomprehensibly dazzling minds, I recognized I wasn’t one of them or anything like them. So I knew just how little being a ten-year-old prodigy meant—and how cautious I should be about ascribing any child’s accomplishments to the Repository’s superior sperm.

As Lorraine boasted about her kids, she also kept insisting that they were “normal”—or, as she put it, “NORMAL!” They were “
not
nerds,” she said emphatically. Lorraine’s insistence on normality at first befuddled me. But eventually I traced it to the deeply democratic habits of Americans, so deep they still register in a woman as elitist as Lorraine. Graham’s notion of breeding only for intelligence disturbed even her. If all men are created equal, then manufacturing an extraordinary child seems almost anti-American. America admires its Thomas Edisons and Bill Gateses when they grow up, but Gates-like kids are ridiculed. The
genius
child is considered a nerd or a freak. Instead, we cherish all-arounders. There’s no glory in being a math prodigy, but a math prodigy who can play basketball, that’s cool. That was why Lorraine kept battering me with that word “normal” and why Graham’s Nobel effort had been quixotic: he was trying to sell a product—pure intelligence—that most Americans didn’t really want. Even Lorraine, a mother of immeasurable ambition, didn’t want me to perceive her children as too intelligent. It was when I talked to Lorraine that I started to understand why Graham had to recruit non-Nobelists like Edward Burnham as donors: parents really
didn’t
value the Nobel brain above all else.

For a while, Lorraine and I avoided talking about one obvious subject: Donor Fuchsia. I sensed some anxiety in her about him, some tension in her otherwise assured manner. Gradually, she told me little bits about him. He was not a Nobelist, but he was an Olympic gold medalist. He had also written a book. (That was why she had chosen him, because he was well rounded, “not weird or nerdy.”) Finally, forty-five minutes into our conversation, she blurted out, “I have seen pictures of him.”

Then she said, “Dora Vaux [the Repository’s manager in the early 1990s] told me his real name.”

I stuttered that revealing his name to a mother was surely against the rules. Lorraine, who would probably break the law of gravity if it displeased her, agreed but said that was irrelevant because she had really wanted to know it.

Then Lorraine told me his name and how he had won his gold medal. I felt guilty even
hearing
the name: Lorraine shouldn’t have possessed this secret, and neither should I. I steered the conversation back to her kids, but a few minutes later, she mentioned Donor Fuchsia again. “I have a
huge
file on him, you know. I have not used it for anything in particular. I am just curious about what he is doing now.”

A few minutes later, she said, “Supposedly, the guy is just my age. Dora told me that his girlfriend got really sick, with leukemia, and he stuck by her. And he helped Dora move. She says he is the most incredible person.

“And he’s
not
married. He never got married.”

Again, a little later, “I thought about calling him, but I don’t know what his feelings about this are. I thought we might meet serendipitously and fall madly in love, and he would become the father of his own children. That would be a movie and a half!”

Then, as she was saying good-bye, “I thought he and I might meet someday. Wouldn’t that be a story and a half?”

When I heard this, I thought I finally understood why Lorraine had agreed to talk to me: she hoped I would find Fuchsia for her. I doubted that this was a conscious plan, but it explained why she kept telling me more than she should have about him. And it explained why she had kept hinting about them meeting. She realized that she couldn’t track him down herself. It would be too awkward. But it wouldn’t be awkward for me. I had the reporter’s excuse for calling him. If he didn’t want to talk to me, no one’s feelings would be hurt, no one’s ego bruised.

So when I got back to Washington, I set to work locating Fuchsia. It’s harder than you might think to find an Olympic gold medalist, but eventually I turned up a cell phone number. I called him. I told him I had heard he had been a donor to the Nobel sperm bank. I reassured him that I wouldn’t reveal his name. (I did
not
tell him “A woman who has three of your children knows your identity. She might like to meet you and fall in love and have you become a real father to your children. And wouldn’t that be a story and a half?”)

He listened quietly. He didn’t deny that he was Fuchsia, but he asked to continue the conversation by e-mail. I sent him an e-mail, and he replied the next day that after serious consideration he had decided not to talk to me, or to “participate in [my] endeavor.”

At the time, I didn’t tell Lorraine about his refusal to talk. What would it have done except spoil her dream? When I saw her again two years later, I did tell her. But she had a new boyfriend then and seemed unbothered that Fuchsia didn’t want to meet his children or her.

The failure with Fuchsia marked the beginning of my new and entirely unexpected career: sperm private investigator. My encounter with Lorraine made me realize that the real reason she and other mothers would talk to me was
not
to validate Robert Graham’s eugenic sperm bank or even to brag about their children. Rather, they wanted my help. There was an emotional void in their lives. They dreamed of finding donors and half siblings for their kids. Until I came along, they’d had nowhere to look. The bank was closed; there were no public records. Thanks to my project, I was learning the identities of donors, children, and parents, information that was supposed to stay private forever. They realized before I did that I might be able to introduce people who hadn’t been connected except when sperm met egg five or ten or twenty years ago.

When I had started trolling for the kids, mothers, and donors, I had assumed the traditional, self-serving role of the journalist: I was going to use
them
to tell the real history of the Nobel sperm bank. But instead, I discovered that my sources wanted to use
me.
They had reversed me. They put me to work for them. Mothers asked me to hunt for their donors. Kids asked me to hunt for their fathers and half siblings. Donors asked me to hunt for their kids. It wasn’t journalism anymore. I became—through unique access to information, through moral obligation, and through my own curiosity—the Semen Detective.

CHAPTER 4

DONOR CORAL

I
returned from my California visit with Lorraine to find a cryptic message on my voice mail. It was a boy with a slow, gravelly voice. He said he needed to talk to me, but he didn’t leave a number. He didn’t leave a name, either—or rather he left two names, first “John,” then “Tom.” They both sounded fake. Then I saw this in my e-mail inbox:

I dont want my real name revealed through this just call me Goldie its a nickname i have kept for a while among friends. about one week ago my mother informed me that my half-sister and i were both one of the 230 who were born through artificial insemination and the Repository for Germinal Choice. I am searching for the papers that we have showing the “color” of the donor, when i find them i will email you again, until that time the only information that i have about my father is that he was one of the few nobel prize winners who gave sperm, if you could give me a list of possible nobel prize winners who could have been the ones who donated, i would be much appreciative. Then when i find the papers i will tell you the color of my sister and my fathers and you can do whatever you do with them. Thank you for all your assistance as i know you will help in any way possible.

—Goldie

The e-mail fascinated me. “Goldie” was the first Repository kid who had reached me on his (or her?) own. Some of the Repository moms had let me e-mail with their children, but those exchanges had been dreary. The kids had been all preteens: they’d had nothing to say, and their moms had clearly been lurking, making sure they didn’t write anything interesting. But Goldie was a kid who sounded like a kid, all bad grammar and enthusiasm.

I figured “Goldie” and “Tom” and “John” were all the same person. The voice mail and the e-mail shared a scattered, frantic eagerness. I e-mailed a reply to Goldie with lots of questions: Are you a boy or a girl? How old are you? Where do you live? Are you the kid who left me a voice mail? Because he had asked for the names of Nobelists, I sent him a Web page that listed laureates, but I also warned him about what Edward Burnham had told me, that Graham had stopped recruiting Nobelists very early. I added, gently, that perhaps he should lower his hopes, because as far as I could tell, there had not been any Nobel Prize donors after the initial batch of three. I asked Goldie if we could talk on the phone.

He quickly e-mailed a reply. He said that, yes, he had left the cryptic voice mail, and his real name was Tom Legare. He said he lived in a suburb of Kansas City. He had just learned that he was a child of the Nobel sperm bank, and he had come across my articles in a Web search. He said he suspected that Jonas Salk could be his dad. Salk wasn’t a Nobelist, Tom realized, but he had seen Salk’s name on the Repository stationery in his mom’s files.

He gave his phone number. I called it and asked for his mom, Mary. I wanted her permission before I spoke to Tom, who was still a minor. Mary said she wouldn’t normally talk about the Repository with a stranger, but she figured that it would be worth telling the story if I could help Tom find his dad. I prodded her with questions. I asked if she had wanted a superkid. I wondered how Graham’s exotic sperm had made its way to an obscure midwestern suburb. Mary wasn’t like the other Repository moms I had talked to. She didn’t live in some swank Los Angeles home; she had spent her entire life in suburban Missouri. She wasn’t a doctor or nurse or psychologist. She had started in the working class, and, only now, thanks to decades of hard work, had she clawed her family into the middle class.

Mary was in her early forties. She said she had gotten a bad start. She had married at nineteen. Her husband, Alvin, was a Vietnam vet whose work history had been spotty. Finally, he had found work that suited him, in sales. But he was on the road, away from the family for weeks at a time. But Mary was a striver. She’d begun as a secretary at the local insurance company. The company had paid for her associate’s degree, then a bachelor’s in computer science. She’d inched her way up the career ladder. Now she did tech support for the firm and taught computer classes part-time at the local community college. She owned a nice house. She was doing well.

Mary had stumbled onto the Repository, she said. After seven years of marriage, she couldn’t get pregnant. Alvin told her he had been kicked in the testicles in Vietnam—maybe that was the problem. It was 1984: there was no way to fix him, certainly no way they could afford. His doctor suggested the Repository. Mary had never heard of it, but she immediately decided a Nobel sperm bank was a tremendous idea. She was a self-improver: What bigger kick up the ladder could there be for her kids than exchanging her husband’s mediocre genes for a Nobel Prize winner’s? She was pretty sure the bank had told her that her donor was a Nobel laureate, but even if he wasn’t a Nobelist, he was surely better than Alvin. The $500 deposit for the liquid-nitrogen tank had been a ton of money for her back then, but she hadn’t hesitated. She’d conceived Tom almost immediately and given birth to him in 1985. When she’d returned for a second child a couple years later, the bank had run out of sperm from Tom’s donor, so Mary had chosen a different donor, and that had produced her daughter, Jessica. Mary told me she had raised the kids by herself. She and Alvin hadn’t divorced, but his chief contribution to parenting was to watch TV with the kids once in a while. She was a bullying mother, she proclaimed cheerfully. Jessica had been enrolled in dance classes as soon as she could walk. She nagged Tom and Jessica because they were not as driven as she was. If Tom brought home a C, God forbid, she wondered why it wasn’t a B. If it became a B, she hectored, why not an A?

As they grew up, Mary had guarded their secret as if it were a treasure. She loved romance novels. She had even written one when Tom was little and still dreamed of finding a publisher for it. From romances, perhaps, she had learned the value of a secret revealed at just the right time.
Wait—that handsome roughneck with a heart of gold who saved that little girl from drowning in quicksand, that’s really multimillionaire businessman Lance Stone?!?
She had waited patiently to spring the news on her kids: You’re not who you think you are! You are a
Nobel Baby
! She planned to strike a well-timed blow that would change their lives forever.

The moment had just come for Tom, she said, because he had been taunting her with talk of pro wrestling school. It was time Tom knew he was not doomed to become a wastrel. He needed to understand that his genes said—perhaps even
dictated—
that he could become great.

Mary gave me permission to talk to Tom, so I called him the next night. For a while I just listened to him riff about his life. I had to strain to hear at first—his voice was so mumbly—but I soon realized he was funny and self-mocking. I especially liked how easily he rose to indignation at his mom and dad (antiparental indignation being the existential state of the fifteen-year-old boy).
Wrestling school,
he sneered in his mom’s direction, that was a joke. Didn’t she realize he was planning to go to college
and
wrestling school at the same time? Didn’t she realize that what he really cared about was rap, not wrestling? He said he had a band called Infernal. He wrote all the lyrics. He also kept saying “ICP” this and “ICP” that, and I had no idea what he was talking about until I remembered—some neurons firing in the deep reptilian corner of my brain that still read
Rolling Stone—
that there was a band called Insane Clown Posse—a hard-core white rap group. Its music is a dog whistle tuned to the testosterone-addled frequency of the overdramatic teenage white boy. Tom just loved Insane Clown Posse. Tom also said he played a ton of video games, particularly first-person shooters like Halo. He said he was a Wiccan.

Tom told me he had gotten into trouble at school because he had written a song about suicide. The song was antisuicide—a friend of his had been suicidal and the song had been a wake-up call—but someone had narced him to the principal because Tom’s lyrics mentioned Columbine. The principal had called the cops. The cops had wanted to know if Tom was planning to shoot up the school. They’d said they were going to arrest him, but instead they’d just sent a file on him to state police headquarters and given him a warning. Now some of the teachers were looking at him funny and had said he better not try anything in class, and it was all because some idiot couldn’t understand that these were just song lyrics and that the lyrics said the opposite of what the principal thought they did.

Grudgingly, Tom talked about classes. He said he managed a 3.6 GPA but didn’t try. He was a sophomore, but he was already taking courses at the community college. By the time he graduated high school, he would be most of the way to a junior college degree.

Finally I asked him about the sperm bank. He had known about it for a couple weeks by then, and he was still perplexed, toggling between amazement and annoyance. He kept saying, “It’s so science fiction”—which was praise coming from Tom. But in the next breath he might denounce it as a “Nazi” project because, as he had learned, all the donors had been white and lesbians hadn’t been allowed to apply.

Tom told me how delighted he was to be free of his dad, Alvin—“not the most attractive character,” he said dryly—but he still didn’t know what to think of his new, nameless, long-gone biological dad.

Mostly he raged at his mom. He hated that she had kept the secret so long. He hated that she had misinformed him that his donor was definitely a Nobelist. He hated that she couldn’t find any of her Repository records. He hated it even more that when Tom himself had managed to find the records, she couldn’t remember which guy was his dad.

Tom said he felt like he was worse off than he was before he knew the truth. “At first when she said it was a Nobel Prize winner, I figured there weren’t that many, and I would be able to find him. But if it’s not a Nobel Prize winner, if it could be
anyone,
then I will never find him. And so now I have no father. My father—my mom’s husband—isn’t my father. My
real
father—the donor—isn’t my father because all he did was donate sperm, which is not enough to make him a father. So nobody is my father.”

As we ended the phone call, I promised Tom I would do what I could to help but that I wouldn’t be able to discover anything without the donor’s color ID. I had realized by then that the color code was the key to matching kids with donors. Tom and Mary put their heads together again and re-examined the donor catalog. Looking a second time, Mary suddenly remembered: maybe it had been Donor Green. He was a “Professor of a hard science at a major university and already one of the most eminent men in his field.” His IQ had been measured over 200 as a child. He had “extraordinary powers of concentration,” “seldom loses his temper,” and “enjoys playing with children, folk dancing, and linguistics.” Mary suspected that Jessica’s donor had been Turquoise (“a top science professor at a major university, head of a large research lab . . . a professional musician”). She and Tom asked me how they could confirm her suspicions.

I suggested that Mary contact Marta Graham, Robert Graham’s widow, who might have kept the records when the bank closed in 1999. Perhaps Marta could confirm which donor Mary had used. I found a phone number for Marta Graham, and Mary called her. Mary explained that she believed that telling her son something about his donor might inspire him to do better in school. But Marta Graham said she couldn’t help, because she didn’t have the records. Mary eventually located the person who did have the records, a San Diego woman named Hazel. Mary wrote Hazel a letter asking for the donor code names. Finally, in summer 2001, six months after Tom and I first talked, Hazel mailed an answer. Mary had misremembered. Jessica’s donor hadn’t been Turquoise; it had been Fuchsia, the Olympic gold medalist, who was also the father of Lorraine’s three kids. Jessica didn’t know the secret yet, so Mary just filed Fuchsia’s code name away.

The second surprise from Hazel: Tom’s father was not Donor Green. It was Donor Coral. Mary and Tom were thrilled to have the name, or at least the code name. According to their catalog, Coral was a gem: “A professional man of very high standing in his science, has had a book published.” His IQ had been tested at 160 at age nine. His hobbies were “writing, family, reading, chess and piano proficiently.” He was described as good-looking, happy, easygoing, extroverted, and wonderful with kids. His health was superb. He excelled at all sports. He came from a large family of “high achievers.” And he was young, born in the 1950s. That birthday ruled out the elderly Jonas Salk, but Tom didn’t care. Coral sounded perfect—even better than Salk.

Now that he had learned something about his “real dad” (as Tom was now calling Coral), Tom told his dad, Alvin, that he knew the secret. He wanted to see how Alvin responded. But the conversation was an anticlimax. His dad responded with his usual sullen indifference. They didn’t talk about it again.

Giddy on Coral, Tom also broke his promise and revealed the secret to his sister. Jessica was less shaken than Tom had been to discover she was a genius sperm bank product. She was also less surprised. She was generally hard to faze. Her relationship with Alvin had soured, too, so she was glad to know he wasn’t a blood relative. But she didn’t feel the same compulsion as Tom to search for her donor dad. She was only a little curious about Donor Fuchsia. She wondered how old he was and what sport he played, but that was it. The void didn’t bug her. Mostly she was happy because learning the secret brought her close to Tom again. Oddly, discovering that they were
less
related by blood—they shared only one parent, not two—made them feel more like brother and sister. They’d barely talked in years, but suddenly they were friends again.

Tom called me with the Coral news. He told me his image of what Coral might be like: “I think he’s a writer. He probably lives in California. He is probably married and has kids of his own.”

He asked me to help him keep looking for Coral. “I just want to see what he looks like, to find out what he did with his life, and maybe to talk to him, just once. I don’t know whether I want to tell him, ‘How dare you! How could you have done that?’ or tell him, ‘Good job, thanks.’ I won’t know till I see him.”