The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  I lingered by my phone the next day. No call back. The following morning, the phone rang, and I heard the same whispering voice. “I called you the other night. I have a ten-year-old daughter who was born with the help of the Repository.”

  I said hello and asked, “What’s your name?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment, then whispered, “Beth Kent. My daughter is Joy.” I cleared my throat and summoned up a whisper of my own. I never really had to whisper until I started working on this sperm bank story, but there is something about these conversations that makes people talk softly. It’s not the need for secrecy; they would whisper to me when they were alone in their houses. It was more like the hush of the confessional, the sense that these are sacred matters—birth, identity, genius—not to be joked about or even discussed in everyday voices. Even the e-mails from mothers and donors felt like whispers. No exclamation points. No smiley faces.

  I asked Beth why she called. She said she wanted to dispel the notion that the women who went to the genius sperm bank were crazies seeking über-children. She told me she had gone to the Repository not because she wanted a genius baby but because she wanted a healthy one. The Repository was the only bank that would tell her the donor’s health history. She had picked Donor White. Her daughter Joy, she said, was just what she had hoped for, a healthy, sweet, warm little girl. (That’s why Beth asked me to call her daughter “Joy.”) “My daughter is not a little Nazi. She’s just a lovely, happy girl.” She described Joy to me, how she loved horseback riding and Harry Potter. She read me a note from Joy’s teacher: “Wow, it is a pleasure to have her smiling face and interest in the classroom.”

  Even so, Beth was cautious. She was suspicious of reporters. I sensed that she was feeling me out in the conversation, gauging whether I seemed to exploit her. At some point, she must have decided that I passed the test, because she said in a new, confiding tone of voice, “Now I want to tell you a little bit more about what happened to us. Maybe you can help us. I was hoping that you might be able to help me find Donor White. I’m looking for him, and I am pretty sure he is looking for us, too.”

  Oh, boy, here came another secret. I had not been privy to this many secrets since the late-night drunken spill sessions in college, and I was starting to feel funny about it. I don’t think I am a particularly good confidant. I can keep a secret well enough, but I don’t have the instinct for knowing the right thing to say when I’m told it. Still, I was starting to realize that empathetic ability was not so important, at least when it came to the Nobel sperm bank. I was the useful idiot here. Mothers were not confiding in me because they hoped I would go all Oprah on them and counsel them on how to live a better life. They were confiding in me for strictly pragmatic reasons—because I could help. Like a movie detective, I was being told secrets only because I might be able to unravel them.

  Beth unfolded the mystery for me on that first day and over several weeks with phone calls, e-mails, and packages of letters. Eventually, she let me visit her and Joy in their small Pennsylvania town. I liked her a lot, especially once we dispensed with the solemn whispers. She was a nurse, which didn’t surprise me a bit. She was at once brisk and warm. I could imagine her jabbing the needle, and I could imagine her giving the hug afterward.

  Here’s the story she told. In the late 1980s, Beth and her husband were living in San Diego. She was finishing up a stint in the coast guard. He was a fireman, a bit older. He’d had a vasectomy, but Beth was desperate for kids. She was in her early thirties and couldn’t wait any longer. Beth was leery of sperm banks. She had inquired at several banks, but they had been closemouthed about who their donors were. How could Beth know if the guy was really healthy? What if he had a family history of mental illness or cancer or heart disease? She wouldn’t take the risk. But in 1988, she read an article about the Nobel sperm bank. It sounded different. She sent away for an application and a catalog and was pleased to discover that the Repository told her everything she wanted to know about the donors: notably that they had passed blood tests for major illnesses, that their family medical history was clean, and that they had led lives of accomplishment, happiness, and good health. Beth knew nothing about Robert Graham’s eugenic ambitions, and she would not have been interested if she had.

  Beth filled out the Repository application, which she found gratifyingly comprehensive. She liked that she had to give her medical history and that she had to promise not to smoke or drink while pregnant. The bank’s Escondido office wasn’t far from Beth’s home. After mailing back the application, Beth and her husband dropped by to introduce themselves to Dora Vaux, then the Repository’s office manager, recruiter, and fairy godmother. They asked her advice about which donor to choose. Dora studied Beth’s husband for a minute, then declared, “Donor Turquoise or Donor White.” Dora flipped open the catalog to Donor Turquoise #38, who was described as “a top science professor at a major university, head of a large research lab. Has published several college text books.” His IQ was 145. He was of German descent and had blue eyes, fair skin, and thick, wavy brown hair. He was born in the 1940s and was “very outgoing, happy, confident.” His hobbies were “farming, drama, German literature.” He had two “healthy, bright children,” and “all his family are very long-lived.”

  Then she turned to Donor White #6: “Scientist involved in sophisticated research. Many technical publications.” He was of English ancestry, with blue eyes and dark brown hair. He was taller than Turquoise—six feet to Turquoise’s five feet, eight inches—and a decade older. His personality was “very engaging, warm, friendly.” He liked running, gardening, and reading history. His family was long-lived, too. His mother suffered from migraine headaches; he was nearsighted.

  Shopping for a father! That special Turquoise glow or White’s whiter than whites? Crest or Colgate? Beth agonized. Dora asked her what she really wanted. Beth said, “I want to have a happy baby.” Dora told Beth that Donor White was a friend of hers, he lived nearby, and he was a delightful, sweet man. She told Beth that Donor White had already fathered lots of children through the Repository, and they were all happy, happy babies.

  Then Dora dug into her file cabinet and pulled out a copy of an essay, “The First of My 12 Children Will Soon Be Four” by “R. White.” Donor White had written it, Dora said. Beth took it home and read it. Donor White described how he and his wife had been childless through more than twenty-five years of marriage, because of unknown fertility problems. But when he was over fifty, he’d been recruited as a sperm donor at the Repository and had been amazed to discover that he was very fertile. Now a dozen babies had been born from his seed in only three years. Donor White wrote how happy the children made him feel, even though they were unknown and unknowable:

  The indirect success described above is not like having your own children, of course, and I will likely never be able to see any of them in person. . . . Moreover, many of these children will likely never know that their adopted fathers are not their biological fathers. Still, I know these children are out there somewhere, and they are thought about often. I have seen very pleasing photographs of several of them, with their parents’ permission, and have been able to form my own mental images of others while running on the beach in the quietness of the early morning. This is a rather poor substitute for having one’s own children, but it does provide a sense of continuity that was not present before. In my view, a person’s genes really belong to all of those many ancestors from whence they came, and we are only allowed to borrow and make use of them during our lifetimes. I have the satisfaction, then, of having been able, in an anonymous way, to connect the past with the future in a continuous line like a curve on a graph.

  The article touched Beth. She liked Donor White. She ordered several vials of White sperm and scheduled inseminations with her doctor. Month after month passed, and she couldn’t get pregnant. Beth occasionally visited the Repository office to cheer herself up. Dora and Robert Graham had covered the office walls with ph
otographs of the sperm bank’s offspring. These beautiful babies frustrated and enticed her. She ached for a child. Dora hugged her, comforted her, and told her it would all work out.

  Beth was so desperate to conceive that she quit her job for one with better health insurance. After six months of failure, she gave up on regular insemination. She spent almost all her savings on in vitro fertilization, trying to have a test-tube baby with Donor White’s sperm. This was 1989, when IVF success rates were very low and the cost was very high. But the pregnancy took.

  Beth swore she wouldn’t raise a kid in Southern California—too dirty, too dangerous. She and her husband moved back east to Pennsylvania farm country. Beth had grown up in small-town Indiana. She desired the same kind of childhood for her daughter. Joy was born in the summer of 1990, a boisterous, darling little blondie. After all her fertility trials, Beth considered Joy a miracle baby. Her thoughts returned again and again to Donor White. She thought about his article, and about the children of his own he could never have. When Joy was a few months old, Beth wrote him a thank-you note, care of Dora at the Repository, and enclosed a picture of tiny Joy.

  Then, when Joy was almost a year old, Beth had a more radical idea. She was traveling to southern California on family business. She called her old friend Dora at the Repository. Beth offered to leave Joy with Dora at the Repository for a couple of hours, in case Donor White wanted to come by and meet his daughter. Now, at any other sperm bank in the country, the office manager would have declined that offer politely. Allowing anonymous donors to meet their children violates every principle of sperm bank confidentiality. It sabotages the contract among donor, parent, and bank. American sperm banking is premised on the notion that the donor is anonymous and free of all the obligations (and pleasures) of fatherhood. Allowing visits could open bizarre legal trapdoors. What if the mother dropped off the child and never returned, for example? The emotional bonds created by such meetings would be tragically precarious, as fathers bonded with children that could never really be theirs.

  But Dora’s attitude toward rules was erratic. (After all, she had told Lorraine the full name of Donor Fuchsia.) And Dora had a warm heart; Donor White was her friend. He lived around the corner. Besides, no one but Beth and Donor White would ever know the meeting had occurred. So Dora said yes, come on by and I’ll babysit Joy.

  So, on the afternoon of June 2, 1991, Beth dropped Joy off with Dora at the Repository’s small office in Escondido. Beth headed out to a coffee shop, telling Dora she would return in two hours. Dora called Donor White. He and his wife raced over from their house.

  When Beth came back, Joy was clutching a gift from Donor White, a Playskool doll wearing a pink dress. Dora told Beth that Donor White had been ecstatic to meet his daughter. “He told Dora that he would live on that moment for the rest of his life.”

  After they returned home to Pennsylvania, Beth locked the doll away in a keepsake chest. As Joy grew up into a toddler and then a little girl, Beth would occasionally bring out the doll and say, “Someone special gave this to you.”

  Her gratitude to Donor White endured. Beth would mail photos of Joy to the Repository almost every year, always enclosing an extra print and asking that it be sent to Donor White. Then, right before Joy’s fifth birthday in 1995, Beth and her husband received an envelope from the Repository. Inside they found a birthday card for Joy. It was signed “Donor White.” There was nothing else on the card.

  Soon, a three-legged correspondence arose among Beth, Donor White, and the Repository. Beth would send a letter to Donor White, care of the Repository. The new Repository manager, Anita Neff, would cross out all identifying information and forward it to Donor White. He would send a reply to Anita, who would edit it and mail it on to Beth.

  In December 1995, Beth mailed the Repository a Christmas card for Donor White, along with a photo of Joy and Santa Claus. The day after Christmas, Donor White and his wife replied with a long letter. Donor White described some of his favorite ancestors—without naming names, of course. He discussed his fascination with DNA research and his hope that Joy might become a microbiologist, before adding wryly, “We won’t make Joy select a career before she finishes first grade.”

  Donor White wrote that he and his wife hoped they would meet his daughter, even though he knew it was impossible. “In the back of our mind there is the thought that some day, some way, we might get to make a future visit in person. In the meantime, please know you are thought of very often, Joy, and thank you for letting us believe that we really do have a small part in your life.” The letter was signed, “With all our love, Your adoptive grandparents.”

  The next summer, Beth mailed Donor White a large photograph of Joy skiing in a red snowsuit and a videotape of Joy’s ballet recital. Anita Neff rejected the videotape—Joy was too identifiable—but forwarded the skiing picture because Joy’s face was sufficiently blurry. Donor White replied with a letter announcing that he had framed the skiing picture and mounted it in his living room. On Christmas Day, 1996, he composed a poem to Joy inspired by the photo. He called it “A Figure in Red on a Field of White”: “. . . May your path through life be as smooth and happy as on that day, when over the snow you did joyfully glide away. . . .” He sent it to Beth. That was the last she heard from him.

  Three weeks later, Beth received a letter from Anita Neff. The Repository’s board of directors was cutting the correspondence, Anita wrote. “We simply cannot continue to share Joy with the donor. A unanimous decision was made to discontinue any further interaction between donor and offspring as it breaks the rule of confidentiality. While this has been the rule of the Repository all along, we recognize it has been bent for you in the past. . . . However, no further interaction will be allowed.”

  Beth was disappointed. The letter arrived just as her marriage was breaking apart. Her father had died soon before Joy’s birth, and her mother was sick. She and Joy were practically alone in the world. Beth had heard of women who fell in love with their unknown sperm donors, fantasized about them as real husbands and fathers. That wasn’t her. She had no romantic dreams about Donor White. He was married and way too old for her. But she had hoped he would be the steady grandfather that Joy had never had.

  Beth puzzled over how to find Donor White. Dora Vaux, who might have helped her locate him, had moved away. (Dora died before Beth ever thought to look for her.) Beth reviewed what she knew about Donor White: that he was about sixty, that he had lived in California, that he liked to run, that he had a much younger sister and a niece of college age. She surmised, from hints in his letters, that he might work for the Human Genome Project. She wondered if his last name might in fact be White, that it wasn’t merely his donor ID. She starting hunting, slowly, for biologists named White who lived in the West.

  She didn’t get anywhere, and soon, she stopped looking. Life took over. Joy was growing up from a bouncy baby into an enthusiastic girl. She had the energy of eight kids. She played soccer and basketball and rode horses. She took harpsichord lessons. Mostly she danced ballet: Nutcracker season was the highlight of the year. The older Joy grew, the more Beth believed in nature over nurture. Joy was extroverted whereas Beth was quiet; that had to come from Donor White, she thought.

  Beth, now remarried, worked as a nurse but designed her life around Joy’s. She worked only during school hours. In the afternoons, she shuttled Joy from game to practice to rehearsal. Beth was proud of her daughter, but in a measured way. Joy was not an egghead, Beth thought, but she was a bright girl and a good student. She was healthy, athletic, and friendly. Whenever Beth thought about the Repository, which wasn’t a lot, she judged that it had given Joy a small helping hand: Beth had expected her daughter to be sweet and smart and pretty, but Joy was a little sweeter and smarter and prettier than she’d expected.

  Beth knew, rationally, that she was not entitled to meet Donor White. That had never been part of the deal. She had happily signed the Repository’s confidentiality contract. At the
time, she had never anticipated wanting to break it. She had believed her marriage would last, that her husband would be Joy’s father in both name and action. And even if she had wanted to break the contract, she understood its necessity. It would be a mess if donors and kids were always hunting for each other. What if a kid found a donor who didn’t want to be a father? What if a donor found children whose own father objected to the donor meeting them?

  But the makers of the rules had never imagined the possibility of a Donor White, Beth thought. The Repository had violated its own regulations: It had let her correspond with him. It had let him meet Joy. It had encouraged the relationship among father and mother and daughter to blossom. Just because it might be a mess if all donors and children could connect, that didn’t mean it was wrong for one family. Beth knew that Donor White was a good man, that he was no threat to her daughter. In this one case, surely, the system could bend.

  In 1999, two years after she lost contact with Donor White, Beth heard that the Repository had closed. She figured that her last chance to find Donor White had vanished. Beth decided she needed to tell Joy about Donor White. Beth had seen too much loss in the hospitals where she worked, too many people who died young and left things unsaid. She didn’t want to leave anything unsaid to Joy. So one day in 2000, Beth explained it all to Joy in a way that a ten-year-old could understand. She told Joy that her daddy was her daddy, but that she also had a “donor daddy,” a special, very smart man who had helped her get born. Beth read Joy one of Donor White’s letters. She pulled out the Playskool doll again and told Joy where it had really come from. Joy might never meet the donor daddy, Beth said, but she should know that he thought about her every morning when he ran on the beach. Joy wasn’t surprised to learn she had a second father. “She loves her dad, but he is very different from her,” Beth told me. “I think it made sense to her that there could be this other father, too.”