The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  As Darian finished the bottle, a guy and a girl emerged from the basement and ducked into Tom’s bedroom. Tom quickly excused himself, walked over to the bedroom, and beckoned them to come out. A little shamefaced, the couple returned to the basement. Tom came back, annoyed and amused. Whenever those two were left alone, Tom explained, they sneaked off to have sex. They shouldn’t be doing it, he said, and they definitely shouldn’t be doing it in his room without his permission.

  I suddenly realized how condescending I had been toward Tom. I had been smugly thinking of him as the long-haired oddball who had knocked up his illegal immigrant girlfriend, who was scraping along with a dead-end job and only the vaguest idea of a future.

  I was all wrong. Tom had grown up in a dreary suburb where kids dreamed small. Tom was the only one of his friends who held a real job (almost the only one who held any job). He was taking a full load of classes; his friends barely managed one. He was the guy who was writing the songs and cutting an album; it might never sell more than seventy copies, but he was doing it. He had gotten Lana pregnant, but he was doing right by her. He was marrying her, raising their son, getting her a green card, supporting her through school. Yes, he lived in his mom’s house. Yes, he wanted to goof around and play Halo all the time. He was still a teenage boy, after all. But he was seventeen going on forty-three. He wasn’t a genius. He knew that. But he was capable, and that counted for a lot more in his life. He was keeping it together when no one else was bothering to.

  The family piled into my rental car for a ride to a nearby restaurant. I asked Tom how he and Alton were getting along, what it was like to have a brother. Tom slumped in the front seat. He said they had stopped e-mailing a while ago. They had had “trouble relating,” and Samantha had suggested to Mary that the brothers take a breather, give Alton a little more time to grow up.

  “His mom said I was a bit too ‘mature’ for Alton. I had told him I was in group therapy and why I was in it, and I think she didn’t like that. She said maybe we should get back in touch in a year.” Tom paused for a second, rankled by the “mature” line. “However much Alton is maturing, I am having to mature a lot more.” He nodded toward Lana and Darian. Tom tried to play it cool about the breakup with Alton, but he couldn’t hide his disappointment. Again and again during my visit, he would return to Alton and Samantha’s rejection. Tom was baffled by their brush-off. His brother had been yanked away, and no one would tell him why.

  To change the subject, I asked Tom about why he had chosen “Darian” as the pseudonym for his son. Tom adored fantasy novels, and I knew that his son’s real name had come from one of his favorite fantasy novels. The pseudonym had, too, Tom said. Darian was the hero of a book called Owlflight. “It’s about a boy who loses his parents and then finds himself, finds love, and ultimately finds them again in the end.” Tom’s symbolism was not lost on me. He had found love in the form of Lana; now he needed to find the lost parent, the vanished Donor Coral.

  Tom started talking about “him.” He didn’t have to say who that was. “It is just not fair. I don’t even know his name, and I don’t think I will ever know it. For Darian, I wish I could find out who his grandpa is. And for me, I really want to know. I want to know who he is and what he did. And I would like to meet him, even just once.”

  Tom asked me if I knew where the Repository’s records were stored. I said that I wasn’t sure but that Hazel in San Diego might have them. Tom thought about this for a moment, then said, “I’m thinking of going out to California and getting a job with whoever has the records—not tell them who I am—and then sneaking a look at my file.” I started to laugh at this but realized Tom was serious.

  I had done enough reading about children of donor insemination to know that Tom was unusual. Most “DI” kids his age aren’t interested in their donor fathers. According to psychologists I have talked to, DI kids tend to be most curious about their donor fathers just before adolescence. That’s when kids start to construct their own identities, when they are still attached to their parents but breaking away. It’s at that age when kids fantasize that their parents are pirates or princes, so it’s understandable that a lost dad would fascinate them. But once adolescence hits, the interest usually wanes; they form friendships that matter more than family, fall in love, make their own way in the world. Only much later, when they are married and having their own children, do they wonder again about their genetic origins and lost dads. Tom was in the heart of adolescence, yet he was fascinated with his donor father. I told him how exceptional that was, that he was acting more like a thirty-two-year-old than a seventeen-year-old.

  Tom puzzled over it, then said, “But it makes sense for me, because I was becoming a dad myself. I guess that’s why I have been thinking about him so much.”

  He continued, “When we found out Lana was pregnant, we signed up for this welfare program to pay for pregnancy and birth. They sent someone over to the house to tell us about pregnancy. The person usually gave Lana some homework. And one time she gave Lana a family tree to fill out. Lana was supposed to fill it out for her side of the family, and I was supposed to fill it out for my side. But it was pretty awful when I sat down to do it. My mom does not know who her real dad is. My dad—that is, her husband Alvin, not my donor dad—doesn’t know who his dad is. And then my dad is not even my dad, and I don’t know who my dad is. Basically, we are a family of bastards.”

  “So what did you write down on the family tree?” I asked.

  “I just put question marks. It was depressing.”

  The man Tom had considered his father for seventeen years was no longer really his father. The man who was Tom’s biological father was missing. The boy who had briefly been Tom’s brother was no longer talking to him. Tom’s life was full of absence.

  Tom blamed the emptiness on his mother, mostly. Her mistakes had left his life in such a mess. Physically, Tom and Mary were not much alike, but their emotional temperature was similar. Mary was abrupt and Tom was naive, but they had the same spirit of openness. They told each other the truth, or a lot more of it than mother and son usually did. Lana’s arrival had divided them a little—Tom was torn between his two women. And Tom was growing up. Their relationship was the heart of the family, and it was fraying. His search for his donor father had placed new strains on it.

  Tom’s anger at Mary poured out at dinner. Tom started by razzing her for having chosen the Repository. He said she hadn’t considered how going to a genius sperm bank would mess up the family.

  “Because I went there, I think you have advantages that other people don’t have,” Mary countered. She turned to me and made her case: “What I did gave them a better chance in life. I know things were always easy for my kids, maybe because they had better genes. I did not have problems that other parents did. Yes, I did focus on their grades. I had a fit when Jessica had a D, and I think I should have. Not enough parents do.”

  Tom responded. “The bank was selfish for you and the donor. The donor said, ‘I am better than the average person, so I should be in this sperm bank.’ In theory, it looked like a good idea, but when you get down to it, it is a Nazi idea.”

  Mary got more defensive. “Don’t you think that girls always seek certain qualities in men? What is the difference if you do it with a donor or a boyfriend?”

  “You never got to know the donor,” said Tom. “You were presented with a sheet of paper. You could only make the choices they gave you to make.”

  Mary answered, “You don’t understand. I got married at nineteen. I was married for six years and kept trying to have a baby and I couldn’t. You don’t know what that is like.” Mary looked pointedly at Darian and Lana, then went on, “I still think the Repository was good, and I don’t like it when you suggest I did something wrong.”

  “I don’t think you did something wrong. I think you made the best of a bad situation. But think about what it’s like for me. I can’t know who my dad is,” said Tom.

  Tom started
to complain about Alvin, his dad, her husband. “I remember that he would call us ‘your kids.’ He used to tell you, ‘Clean up after your kids.’ ”

  I asked Jessica if Alvin was now aware that she knew the truth about him. Jessica smirked. “I think Mom just told my dad by accident.” Mary looked pained. Mary said that when she had spoken to Alvin on the phone the day before, she had mentioned that I was coming to talk to Jessica and Tom. “He said, ‘Oh, Jessica knows now, too?’ Then he was really quiet.”

  None of the Legares had much sympathy for Alvin—they knew him too well, I guess. Still, I couldn’t imagine how humiliating this must have been for him. Maybe he had been an indifferent father to Jessica, but at least he had been her father. Now she knew he wasn’t even that.

  Mary took this opening to mention that she was planning to serve divorce papers on Alvin when he returned home from his current road trip. Tom had been expecting a divorce for a long time. Now that it had arrived, it was bittersweet. He was glad for his mom, who was certainly going to be happier. But he felt a little sad for himself, too. He had lost his dad once when he had learned about the Repository; now he was losing him again to divorce.

  After Mary mentioned the divorce, I told the Legares about one of the odd things I had noticed in my reporting on the genius sperm bank: in most of the two dozen families I had dealt with, the father was notably absent from family life. I knew I had a skewed sample: divorced mothers tended to contact me because they were more open about their secret—not needing to protect the father anymore—and because they were seeking new relatives for their kids. I had heard from only a couple of intact families with attentive dads. While good studies on DI families don’t seem to exist (at least I have not found them), anecdotes about them suggest that there is frequently a gap between fathers and their putative children. “Social fathers”—the industry term for the nonbiological dads—have it tough, I told the Legares. They are drained by having to pretend that children are theirs when they aren’t; it takes a good actor and an extraordinary man to overlook the fact that his wife has picked another man to father his child. It’s no wonder that the paternal bond can be hard to maintain. When a couple adopts a child, both parents share a genetic distance from the kid. But in DI families, the relationships tend to be asymmetric: the genetically connected mothers are close to their kids, the unconnected fathers are distant. I suspected that the Nobel sperm bank had exaggerated this asymmetry, since donors had been chosen because mothers thought they were better than their husbands—Nobelists, Olympians, men at the top of their field, men with no health blemishes, with good looks, with high IQs. Of course sterile, disappointed husbands would have a hard time competing with all that.

  Robert Graham had miscalculated human nature. He had assumed that sterile husbands would be eager to have their wives impregnated with great sperm donors, that they would think more about their children than their own egos. But they weren’t all eager, of course. How could they have been eager? Some were angry at themselves (for their infertility), their wives (for seeking a genius sperm donor), and their kids (for being not quite their kids). Graham had limited his genius sperm to married couples in the belief that such families would be stronger, because the husbands would be so supportive. In fact, Graham’s brilliant sperm may have had the opposite effect; I told the Legares about a mom I knew who said the Repository had broken up her marriage. Her husband had felt as though he couldn’t compete with the donor and had walked out.

  When I finished, Mary responded that the sperm bank hadn’t shattered her marriage. It had been doomed anyway. But Tom said he thought the rest of my description of strained families applied to them. He and Jessica were very alienated from their dad, and maybe that was the sperm bank’s fault. Tom angrily challenged his mom: “Why didn’t you stop to think about the gap we would have with Dad?”

  “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 “rwhite6@aol.com.” 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.