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.
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 would 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.
Since he didn’t know what was actually happening to his children, he had to imagine it. Roger removed a little black notebook from one of his manila folders. He leaned over conspiratorially—though we were alone in the room—to show it to me. Each page of the notebook listed a birthday. Often there was a first name written below the date. Every time Dora informed him of a birth, Roger recorded it here. A surprising number of parents mailed baby photos to the Repository as thanks, and Dora sent them on to Roger. He had a dozen of them. Each of them was backed by a sheet of cardboard, sealed in its own protective plastic bag and inserted into the notebook by the corresponding name.
Roger leafed through the black book. He pointed to a boy named Avi Jacob. “He’s probably Jewish,” Roger said, smiling buoyantly at me. “So, David, you are not the only one here who has a Jewish child!”
On the next page were twins, a boy and a girl. Roger had two pictures of them: one at four months, a second at eleven months. Roger noticed what I didn’t, that the boy was smaller than his twin sister in the first picture and bigger in the second. “Look how much he is growing!”
Next came a darling curly-haired boy: “He was just four pounds when he was born. They were worried. But now look at him!”
Then Roger showed me a large, curious picture of a baby boy in a bathtub. The bathtub was at the top of a tower in the middle of a forest. “Dora said his parents worked as fire watchers,” said Roger. What’s his name? I asked. It was not written on the notebook page. Roger shrugged, then grinned. “Dora didn’t tell me. But I even have names for those whose names I don’t know. So I call him ‘Watchtower Boy.’ Or sometimes ‘Boy in Tub.’ ”
Roger closed the book. “Maybe Dora should not have shown me these pictures, but I am glad she did. These children are very pleasing to me,” said Roger. And here, “pleasing” meant something very much more than pleasing.
He handed me several letters. They were thank-you notes sent by “White” mothers that Dora had passed on to him. One read, “Every mother believes hers to be the most special baby ever born, but mine truly is.” Another read, “You have given us the greatest of all gifts, more precious than anything money can buy, and changed the way I feel about human nature. You are an unseen but not unfelt member of my family.”
Roger commented that Joy was not the first of his children whose identity he knew. In the late 1980s, Dora had, as usual, told him the first name of the latest White child. It was an unusual name, “Jeroboam,” let’s say. A couple of years later, Dora mentioned to Roger that the boy was about to have a baby sister, also by Donor White. The next week, Roger happened to see a birth announcement in his local newspaper. The announcement mentioned that the new baby girl had an older brother, Jeroboam. Roger was thrilled. He looked up the family in the phone directory and realized they lived only a mile away. He took to running by their house on his morning jog, especially on Christmas morning and on the kids’ birthdays, which Dora had told him. Sometimes he would see Jeroboam playing in the yard. Once, when Roger jogged by during the boy’s birthday party, Jeroboam shouted to him, “Hello, Man in the Hat.” Roger stopped and said, “Happy Birthday.” Soon after, he made a plan to meet the boy. He ran by the house carrying a beach ball and rang the doorbell. He pretended he had found the ball on the street and wanted “to give it to the little guy who sometimes waved at me when I jogged past.” The mother, suspicious, stayed inside the house. Roger had to shout his story at her through the locked front door. She thanked him and asked him to leave the ball on the porch. Later, he saw Jeroboam playing with the ball. It was ten years since then and he had never spoken to the boy—or his sister—again. He knew that he should not.
As Roger showed me his notebook and told me his stories, I felt heartsick for him. This was what happened when a deliberate man with a pure soul became a sperm donor. He had tracked his children because he felt he must. It was the closest he could come to being the father they deserved. He knew he would never—and could never—interfere in their lives, and that agonized him. The Repository children—at once his and not his—were excruciating for Roger. In October 1991, he wrote an article for San Diego Woman magazine, under the pseudonym R. White. (It was an early draft of the article that Dora had shown Beth when she was shopping for donors.) The magazine article described the sperm bank kids as being a kind of comfort to him, because at least he had the satisfaction of passing on the genes of his ancestors (not his own genes, he was too modest to say that). He also joked about his fertility: “It is really beyond the imagination of a fifty-seven-year-old man, who thought only five years ago that he might be infertile, to realize that he now has enough boys for a baseball team (with one extra to umpire) and enough girls for a basketball team.”
But mostly Roger’s article was elegiac because he knew that he would never see his children. “Fathering children anonymously is somewhat akin to producing paintings that to you are beautiful and priceless, but doing this with the understanding that when they are finished they must be given away and likely never seen again.” This was a haunting image. Whenever someone asks me what it’s like to donate sperm, I quote them that passage. For Roger, every time he learned of another birth, he felt pride and he felt loss: every donation was an act of loving-kindness and of pain.
Roger stopped donating shortly after he wrote the article. He had fathered nearly twenty children. The Repository professed a limit of twenty per donor, but Graham had urged him to continue anyway. Roger thought he shouldn’t. His sense of obligation made him stop.
Becoming a semifather had another effect on Roger, one he hadn’t expected. The children—the children he couldn’t ever know—made him feel he had wasted too much of his life on work. In the mid-1990s, he retired, full of regret for all the hours squandered at the office. Whenever I mentioned to Roger that I was taking a business trip, he rebuked me for spending time away from my wife and kids. As we were chatting in the hotel about something else, he suddenly grabbed my arm: “I was a workaholic. I regret it. I missed time with my family. Don’t ever do that, David.”
All of the nineteen White children occupied Roger’s thoughts, but the one who occupied them most was Joy. Their 1991 meeting—when Beth had dropped baby Joy at the Repository so Roger could see her—had affected him profoundly. As we talked, Roger recalled the visit as if it had been the day before: When Dora had called, he and Rebecca had raced over to the office. Joy, he said, had immediately held out her arms to him, inviting him to pick her up. He had been astounded at how much Joy looked like his sister had when she was an infant. For half an hour, Roger had held little Joy on his lap while Rebecca and Dora snapped Polaroid after Polaroid. Roger had kept these, of course, and he slid them out of a folder and showed them to me: Joy was wearing a light blue romper, with a tiny lace collar. Roger, then in his late fifties, stared at the camera with a stunned expression of wonder, fear, shock, and gratitude. I recognized the expression from family snapshots of me after my daughter’s birth. It was the look of all first-time fathers.
Eventually, Roger said, Joy had squirmed off his lap, scooted over to her stroller, and tried to pull herself into it. She couldn’t manage it on her own, so Roger had lifted her up and placed her in the seat. Joy had been annoyed at the assistance. She had slid herself off the stroller and tried again till she managed to climb in by herself. This also reminded Roger of his beloved sister, who could never tolerate being helped. Roger had turned to Rebecca and said, “We really have ourselves something special here.” After forty minutes, Dora had told Roger they would have to leave. Roger had kissed Joy and said, “I will see you again.” She couldn’t understand him, of course, and he had known it was impossible, that he could never see her again.
Roger’s reaction to the visit showed why sperm banks forbid meetings between donor and child. Roger was supposed to be a detached, anonymous donor, a source of fine DNA and nothing more. But this visit had bonded him to Joy. She was no longer simply “donor offspring.” She was his daughter. When he got home from seeing Joy at the Repository, Roger wrote a letter to her, a letter he could not send, since he did not know her last name or address. In it he told Joy that the visit had been enough to make him feel like a father. He had kept the letter since then, locked away safely at home.
After meeting baby Joy, Roger tried to accept that he would never hear from her again. But a few years later, he started receiving occasional photos of Joy, sent by Beth and passed on by the Repository. When the Repository permitted the correspondence between him and Beth to accelerate in 1995 and 1996, he was ecstatic. He wrote much less than he wanted, for fear the Repository would stop the letters if he was too avid. Roger framed the pictures of Joy that Beth sent. He hung a collage of eight snapshots in his living room and put the photo of Joy skiing—blurry, unrecognizable—above the mantelpiece. He was proudest of a picture of Joy sitting on the lap of a Confederate soldier. Dora had told Beth about Roger’s dream of his Confederate great-grandfather. When Joy was two Beth had taken her to a Civil War reenactment near their town and had a photo taken of Joy with a Confederate soldier. Beth had thought Donor White would appreciate the coincidence. Roger showed me a photocopy of the picture of Joy and the reenactor. The soldier in the picture, he said, looked just like his great-grandfather in the dream.
Donor White was heartbroken when the correspondence with Beth ceased in 1997. He didn’t know why it had ended, because the Repository didn’t send him the explanation that it sent Beth. Then, two years later, he received a letter from the Repository’s medical director, announcing that the sperm bank was closing. Roger feared that once the bank closed, his faint remaining hope of finding Beth and Joy again would vanish. He started improvising. He reexamined the photographs Beth had sent him. Printed on the back of one—and overlooked by the Repository—were the name and address of a Pennsylvania photo studio. Then he studied Beth’s correspondence and noticed that she had used personal stationery for the first letter she had sent, way back in 1991. That stationery was embossed with a lily. It occurred to him that her last name might be “Lily.” He searched for an Elizabeth Lily in every state. He found only one, and she lived in Pennsylvania, near the town where the photo studio was located. He immediately sent a letter to her. It was extremely cryptic. In it, he wrote that a person named Beth had befriended him through a third party and that third party was no longer available to pass on information. If Beth Lily was the Beth who had befriended him, then she could write to him at such and such an e-mail address. He added that he had only the very best intentions toward Beth and that if she was the wrong person, she should please discard this strange letter. He put no return address on it. No one but Beth herself would have had the foggiest idea what he meant.
Roger had guessed wrong, and he heard nothing back from Elizabeth Lily. He resigned himself to the loss and to a life without children. He filled his retirement with studying Civil War history and investigating his family tree. In 1999, he finally told his eighty-nine-year-old mother about his sperm bank kids. She took the news very cheerfully. When she died a few months later, Roger was relieved that he had shared the secret with her.
In early 2001, right at the time I published Beth’s plea for Donor White in Slate, Roger fell seriously ill. I had feared his yearlong silence might have meant he was dead, and, in fact, he almost was. Although he slowly recovered, he wasn’t the same man. The illness had left him with permanent complications. He had shed thirty pounds, wasting down to skin and bones. He couldn’t jog anymore. He wasn’t even seventy yet, but he could barely manage to shop for groceries now. A great specimen of a man, he had become weak, his athletic body slack. If his body was broken, his spirit was worse. “I thought, ‘Life is not worth living. If I die now, that’s fine.’ ” As he slowly recuperated, Roger berated himself for having spent his life in the lab. He belittled his scientific accomplishments; his patents meant nothing next to his nineteen children—the children he would never know.
In June 2002, a friend e-mailed him a Web page with a link to an Internet search engine, Alltheweb.com. Roger was a novice Web surfer. He had never even heard of search engines. He went to Alltheweb, and the first thing he typed in was “genius sperm bank.” The first entries were for my Slate series on the Repository. He scrolled down the page. Halfway down he saw this listing: “A Mother Searches for ‘Donor White.’ ” He was stunned. He e-mailed me that day.
June 16, 2002—four days after Roger wrote to me—was Father’s Day. Roger logged on to AOL. “You’ve got mail.” A message from an unfamiliar address was waiting. He opened it. It was from Beth. It began, “Happy Father’s Day!”