CHAPTER 7

A FAMILY OF BASTARDS

After Samantha Grant told me she had found Dr. Jeremy Taft, the Miami plastic surgeon she was sure was Donor Coral, I avoided Tom for a few months. Not calling Tom removed any temptation I might have to spill the secret to him. I also wanted to give him time to get to know his half brother Alton, Samantha’s son.

A few nights before Christmas 2002—eighteen months after we first talked—Tom phoned me at home. After a couple of pleasantries, he dropped the bomb: “I’m gonna be a father—a boy, a son. On January 31, that’s when he’s due. We’re going to call him Darian Jacob Legare.”

I was so addled that the only thing I could think to say was “January 31, that’s my birthday, too.” I did some quick math in my head and figured out that Tom was all of seventeen years old. The last time we had spoken, he had seemed barely old enough to think about girls, much less get them pregnant. I recovered enough to congratulate him and ask who the mother was. (I hadn’t yet seen the e-mails he had sent to Alton mentioning a girlfriend.)

“Her name’s Lana. She’s Russian. And I forgot to say, we’re getting married. I met her a year ago—she was in my class at school. I’m in love. I really am. No one believes me, but I actually proposed to her before I knew about the baby. I proposed on our six-month anniversary, and a few days later she found out she was pregnant.”

I asked, doubtfully, how they were going to support themselves. Tom said he had a plan, sort of. He had graduated from high school a year early, and he was already more than halfway to his associate’s degree. Lana would stay home with the baby for a while, and then she’d get certified as a massage therapist. Oh, and since she and her parents were illegal immigrants, Tom would figure out how to get her a green card once they got married. As for his own career, he was working at his mom’s company. The job wasn’t great—he was a file clerk—but they liked him and gave him full benefits. The company also paid for his classes, which he took nights at the local community college. He and Lana didn’t have their own place, so they would split time between her parents’ house and his mom’s. By the time Tom finished explaining all this, he sounded exhausted—and overwhelmed.

The conversation was depressing me. Building a life out of string, chewing gum, and paper clips was hard enough for anyone, but when you were seventeen and engaged to a pregnant illegal immigrant . . .

Tom kept talking. He said he had called because he had a question for me, something he and his mom had been wondering about. “Am I going to be the first kid from the sperm bank with my own child? Is this the first grandchild from the Nobel bank?” There were only a couple dozen Repository kids older than Tom, and I hadn’t heard about any who were married or parents. I told him that I didn’t know for sure but that I would be shocked if he wasn’t the first parent. “All right!” he exclaimed. “I set the record!”

Tom and I had known each other for a year and a half, but never met, so Tom invited me to visit him in Kansas City after Darian’s birth. Tom was excited about my visit. Being a Nobel sperm baby was what made him special. Until I had come along with my odd questions, no one had ever taken an extraordinary interest in him; he had been a regular kid from a regular dysfunctional family living in a regular suburb of a regular city. He had never done anything remarkable—never broken a school record or won a state prize. For the first time, he was at the center of something that the outside world cared about. He was flattered that I would travel all the way from Washington just to meet him. I also sensed that Tom wanted to see me because he was feeling daunted by impending fatherhood. He didn’t know a lot of fathers—his friends were all seventeen, after all. I had talked to him a little about what it was like to be a dad. I didn’t think Tom desired my advice, exactly, but maybe he welcomed the idea of some father-bonding with me.

I flew out to Kansas City on a Friday morning in March, a couple months after Darian’s birth. The day was raw and gray. I drove through endless suburbs. The Legares lived in practically the last subdivision outside the city; just beyond their development stretched fields, all the way to Saint Louis, perhaps. Their house had beige siding and green shutters. It looked friendly. There were cute little statues of squirrels on the lawn.

It was midafternoon by the time I finally rang the doorbell. A middle-aged woman answered the door and introduced herself as Mary, Tom’s mother. Tom was still at work, she said. She added that her husband, Alvin—the way she said “husband” made it clear that the word had only a technical meaning for her—was on the road, as usual. Mary introduced me to Tom’s fiancée, Lana, who greeted me halfheartedly. She was sprawled on the living room couch watching a monstrous TV. Lana was small and pale, with a pretty Slavic face and owlish glasses. She was wearing black nail polish and a creepy black Insane Clown Posse T-shirt. Every few minutes she would check on baby Darian, who was dozing serenely in a swing next to her. He was blond, square-headed, and cute.

There was very little furniture in the house, no family pictures, no sense that it belonged to anyone. I was surprised, because Mary had seemed so familial. As soon as she hung up my coat, Mary gestured to the empty spaces and said that it was not her house, it was a temporary rental. Her house, which was a few blocks away, had burned down the month before, she said. They had lost almost everything, including a dog and two cats. That was why they had so few things.

Mary and I sat down in the kitchen to talk before Tom got home. She was short, red-haired, pretty, and plump—though down forty-six pounds on the Atkins diet, thank you very much. Her eyes were bright and blue; she was cheerful; and she was argumentative. Mary worked her tech support job from home, which allowed her to keep an eye on the comings and goings of Tom, Lana, and her daughter, Jessica. Mary said she liked having Tom and his friends around, eating her food and commandeering her TV. Being here meant that they were not out doing much worse. Just as she was telling me this, a friend of Tom’s wandered into the house, helped himself to soda from the fridge, and flopped down on the couch next to Lana. He introduced himself as one of Tom’s bandmates. He said he “kind of” lived there, or at least crashed on the floor a lot.

Mary and I were just out of Lana’s earshot. Mary told me how worried she was about Tom and Lana. “I want them to get married now, as soon as possible,” Mary said. “Lana could take the baby right back to Russia, and there is nothing we could do about it, unless they’re married.” Mary’s suspicions ran deep: she said she had made Tom get a DNA test when Darian was born, just to make sure that Darian was his. He was. (Mary’s DNA-test demand had been a bitter pill for Tom, he later told me. He was searching for his own father. Yet at the same time his mom was trying to get him to lose his own son.)

Mary had to field a call from work, so she pulled Jessica out of her bedroom and told her to talk to me. Jessica, who was fourteen, seemed as though she’d rather do anything else, but slouchily obliged. She barely resembled her mother or the pictures I had seen of Tom. She was very thin. Her face couldn’t decide whether it was going to be beautiful or belligerent. Right then, it was both. She had deep-blue cat eyes, wide cheeks, and an expression that was all at once scornful, cynical, sullen, and smart. Jessica was the biological daughter of Donor Fuchsia, the Olympic gold medalist, which she had learned when Tom spilled the secret to her.

To make conversation, I asked her about the pentagram pendant hanging from the black choker around her neck. “I’m a Wiccan. We believe in hurting none.” She had a languid, worldly wise voice. She showed me the book she’d been reading when Mary had interrupted her, Witch Child. I asked her about school. High school ruled over middle school, she said. She was a freshman, she loved it, her grades were dropping from As to Bs and Cs, and she didn’t care.

Mary, who was now eavesdropping, dropped a manila folder on the table. Inside were letters from the Repository and a copy of the donor catalog. The pages were lightly browned at the edges.

“During the fire, I was going to go back in to get jewelry and valuables,” Mary said. “I asked Jessica what she wanted, and she told me, ‘I want you to get my dad’s folder.’ So I went and got it. It still smells like smoke.” I sniffed it: it did smell singey. “It is very interesting that she wanted that. She was afraid that she would lose what little she did know about the donor.”

Jessica leafed through the folder.

“That is the only thing that I have connecting me to my real dad,” Jessica said. “That was the first thing that popped into my head. Even if it is a little thing, a piece of paper. I don’t want to lose it.”

Jessica kept talking about Donor Fuchsia and the sperm bank. Discovering her Nobel sperm origins, she said, had made her more tolerant, more decent. “I used to be much more of a bitch. Finding out made me look outside my box and realize there is a whole world out there. I have a dad out there, a real dad among those millions and millions of people. It made me stop judging and made me realize different kinds of people are normal. I am giving people a chance that I wasn’t giving them. I realized my brother is not a long-haired freak.” Before she had known the secret, she said, she and Tom had never talked. Now they were tight. She listened to his music, even dated one of his friends.

But unlike her brother, whose obsession was pulsatingly obvious, Jessica seemed blasé about her sperm origins. “I did have a lot of curiosity about the donor when I first found out. I wondered if I would ever get to meet him. But I don’t need that to know who I am. Now it doesn’t really matter to me.”

I told her that I was acquainted with some of her half siblings—other kids born from Donor Fuchsia. Did she want to e-mail or meet them? She shrugged. She didn’t care.

When I had talked to Mary about her daughter in earlier phone conversations, she had seemed to blame Jessica’s falling grades, sudden lack of interest in ballet, and stoner friends on her new uncertainty about her identity. Learning about Fuchsia, Mary suggested, had rattled Jessica. Talking to Jessica, I wasn’t sure about that. Maybe she wasn’t slacking because she was confused about Donor Fuchsia. Maybe she was slacking because she was a teenage girl, and that is a teenage girl’s job.

Tom arrived home from work at 5 P.M. My first impression was that Jessica had been right: he was a long-haired freak. He had a broad face, tending to plumpness. He had blue eyes beneath a deep brow, a wide, strong chin with a great cleft struck out of it. Blond stubble traced his jaw. He was tall, with broad shoulders, but he was carrying an extra twenty-five pounds in the belly. But his hair! It was dirty blond, straight, and thick. When he shook it out of its workday ponytail, it fell in a cascade halfway down his back. It was amazing hair, a lifetime of hair. Tom looked like a Goth—I don’t mean a Goth kid, I mean an actual Goth. He would not have looked out of place wearing a leather jerkin and swinging a mace. (This is intended as a high compliment to Tom, an avid fantasy gamer.)

As soon as he greeted me, Tom rushed into his bedroom, stripped off his button-down work shirt, and slipped into a T-shirt for one of his favorite bands, Twiztid. The T-shirt said “Freek Show” and had a picture of some nutcase in white pancake makeup. Three quarters of Tom’s wardrobe, I would discover, consisted of black T-shirts for Twiztid or Insane Clown Posse, all of them with pictures of nutcases in white pancake makeup.

Tom was accompanied by a bunch of friends. I couldn’t really tell how many; sometimes there seemed to be three, sometimes four, sometimes six. Most of them were wearing band T-shirts and black trench coats. They all had long hair, and they all seemed to be named Mike or Matt (except the girl). They looked very Columbine, but in a sweet way. They were soft-spoken, polite, and good-natured—nerdy, not scary. Tom explained that his house had become a kind of clubhouse for his posse because he had the best video game setup, because his mom didn’t mind having everyone around, and because he and Lana had to be home with the baby anyway. So every Friday night, and lots of other nights, a dozen of his friends came over and spent the night gaming and otherwise fooling around.

Mary shooed the Trench Coat Mafia out of the kitchen so we could talk. They headed to the basement and stayed up till 5 A.M. playing video games and three-dimensional chess, eating Twix bars, and—when more girls arrived—exchanging back rubs.

Tom, Mary, and I remained upstairs in the kitchen. Tom grabbed a full two-liter bottle of Sam’s Cola from the fridge and started chugging straight from the bottle. By night’s end, he had finished that whole bottle and a second one—filling him with enough sugar and caffeine to wake a dead man. In Tom’s food pyramid, Sam’s Cola ranked as the most important of the three basic food groups. Candy and Burger King were the other two.

Tom was glad to see me. Beneath an ominous appearance and mumbling voice, he possessed a profound sweetness and eagerness to please. Words tumbled out of him as he caught me up on his life. He was proud of Darian, proud of Lana, proud of his job, proud of his college classes—which he was managing to ace despite work and baby. He was thrilled to be engaged to Lana. He delightedly waved his hand in front of me to show off the promise ring Lana gave him and asked Lana to come over to show me hers. Tom’s showing off was endearing, not cocky. He was doing the right things, even though they were hard, and he wanted to share that with me.

After a little bit, Tom badgered me to come downstairs so he could show off his video game setup. “Did you see the basement?” he asked me. “It’s like we robbed an electronics store!” He led me down into the expansive playroom, where the Trench Coat Mafia was silently arrayed around one of the three computers, murdering aliens (or maybe one another) on Halo. “We have everything,” Tom bragged. He pulled out his Sony PlayStation 2, an old Atari, an Xbox, a Sega Genesis, various Nintendo systems, and several game consoles I had never even heard of. Tom said he was even building an “arcade game emulation”: he was going to mount a computer like a 1980s video arcade terminal and use it to play cool old-school games such as Space Invaders and Centipede. “I’m lucky I have Lana and Darian because otherwise I would spend all my paycheck on games,” he said, not kidding at all. The basement also had a pool table, an air hockey table, and an army of Dungeons and Dragons metal figurines. He bumped one of his friends off Halo so that I could try it; much mirth ensued at my ineptitude. Tom and his friends traded insults in some weird gamer dialect. Someone said, “I put it on mimic, dude.” Everyone laughed.

I asked Tom about his band, Infernal. He said that Infernal was dead but he had a new band, Durga. He was writing all the lyrics. Durga sounded like ICP and Twiztid, he said. A friend with a small studio had invited Durga to record a CD and was going to release it. Tom offered to play a track for me. He booted up another computer—the one he recorded on at home—and opened the Durga folder. He considered playing “I Wanna Fuck You” or “Ghost Cat” but clicked on “Shut My Eyes.” Behind a thumping bass line, I heard Tom’s voice:

No weapon is mightier than the pen.

The whole world goes dead when I shut my eyes.

It sounded awful to me—a horrible combination of screaming and droning. But I could hear my own adolescence in it. If I were seventeen again, I would probably like it a lot. It was relentless, loud, and passionate—a close cousin to the barbarous testosterone-laden crap that I listened to at Tom’s age.

Upstairs, Darian had awakened. As soon as we heard him, Tom headed back up to the living room. Tom hoisted him out of his baby swing and carried him over to me, displaying him like a trophy. Tom beamed at Lana, the boy, and me. “The first grandchild from the Repository!” he announced. Darian whimpered. “I think he needs a bottle,” Tom said. He trotted to the fridge, poured some sterilized water, measured out the formula, shook the bottle up, and started feeding it to his son. It was a sweet and incongruous moment—a seventeen-year-old boy in a sociopathic T-shirt who would rather be playing Halo with the Columbine Crew, patiently feeding and burping his son.

“I don’t really feel like a dad a lot of the time. It’s like I am babysitting. I am not responsible enough yet,” Tom said. “I get yelled at for playing too many video games, for not waking up to feed him. He comes first now. That’s really new to me.”

Lana smiled and interrupted Tom. “You’re a very good dad. You have a hard time waking up to take care of him, but you are a very good dad.”

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?