by David Plotz
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.
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 w
ould 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.