CHAPTER 12

A FATHER, FOR BETTER OR WORSE

I was waiting for Tom to call me back so I could tell him about his father, Jeremy Sampson. I felt grim. Tom had begun his search expecting to find a Nobel dad, a genius, maybe even Jonas Salk. Instead, he was getting Jeremy—an obscure doctor whose notable accomplishment in life was leaving a wake of ex-wives and forgotten children. There’s nothing worse than a wish unfulfilled, except a wish fulfilled.

So I wanted to try to make it gentle for Tom. When he returned my message, I told him the big news. I said that Samantha and I had found his father, his name was Jeremy Sampson, and he was a doctor in Florida. I didn’t mention all Jeremy’s kids, his erratic past, his made-up IQ, or his exaggerated accomplishments. Tom, who was never speechless, was speechless. After a little bit, he managed to mutter, “Wow, great” and “Thank you” and “I can’t believe this.” I told him to expect a call from Jeremy the next day. Before I hung up, I suggested, very shyly, that perhaps Jeremy wasn’t exactly the ideal father and that perhaps Tom shouldn’t expect Jeremy to surpass all his hopes and dreams. Tom was too shell-shocked from the headline—Dad Is Found—to listen to my caution. I hoped for the best.

Tom felt more excited than he had for years, but he warned himself to calm down. He knew he was an easy mark. He was too ready to believe the best in others, and he had been burned repeatedly because of it. Only when he had met Lana, who was full of Slavic pessimism, had he realized that he lacked common sense and critical judgment. Now he was aware of his naiveté, and he tried to order himself to be careful and not to hope for too much. But he couldn’t help it. His parents’ divorce had just been finalized. Maybe discovering Jeremy now was more than a coincidence. Just as he was losing his old father, here came a new one to take his place. Perhaps Jeremy would be the dad his dad had never been.

Back in Florida, Jeremy was happy enough to learn about Tom—another notch in his Darwinian bedpost—but was genuinely thrilled to hear that Tom had a son of his own. “I am amazingly happy elated shocked and surprised that I am a grandfather!” he told me. I gave Tom’s phone number to Jeremy and told him when he should call.

The day arrived. Tom took off from work. He spent the afternoon pacing around the house, playing video games, and staring at the phone. Sometimes it rang, but it was always a friend or someone calling for his mom. At 8:30 P.M., it rang again, and Tom knew this was the call. That’s my dad calling. My dad, he thought. He answered it on the first ring.

“Hello, this is Jeremy. I’m calling for Tom.”

Tom had rehearsed this moment over and over for the past two years. In the conversation he had imagined, he would be angry. The rage would spill out of him. He would confront Donor Coral, grill him on why he had thought it was okay to jack off and leave.

But instead his mind went empty. All he could think to say was “Hello.” And then “So you’re my dad.”

Jeremy said, “Yes.”

The conversation scraped along with chitchat. Jeremy tried hard. He asked for Tom’s address. He asked about Darian. He asked about the weather in Kansas City. For Tom, it all felt out of body: I am talking to my dad, and I have nothing to say. Tom thought Jeremy sounded old. Still, Jeremy’s curiosity comforted Tom, because he had feared that Jeremy would be chilly and distant. Jeremy called Tom “Tom.” But Tom didn’t know what to call Jeremy. He still couldn’t decide. Finally, after a few minutes, Tom tried saying “Jeremy.” It felt okay. Secretly, just a little bit, Tom still thought of him as “my dad.” Tom invited Jeremy to visit him in Kansas City, and Jeremy reciprocated by inviting Tom to visit him in Florida.

The conversation flagged after ten minutes. Jeremy’s eight-year-old daughter, Stacy, pestered her dad to hand her the phone. She didn’t know who Tom was, but they talked for a little bit about nothing. Then, at Tom’s end, Darian hit his head on the floor and started screaming. Tom had to comfort him, so he said good-bye to Jeremy and that was that.

I called Tom the next day to find out how the conversation had gone. He told me, “It was great,” and said he was really happy. Then he confessed how stilted the conversation had been. He said he already feared Jeremy was going to disappoint him, that they were not going to have a real relationship.

A few days later, Tom got a call from Jeremy’s sister. She said she wanted to welcome Tom to the family. She filled Tom in on the Sampsons’ history. She told him he might be a great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Ben Franklin. He might also be a descendant of Nathaniel Hawthorne and of one of the Salem witches. The sister also boasted about how brilliant Jeremy was. She insisted he was a genius, though Tom was dubious. Jeremy had sounded too much like a regular guy on the phone. Then she delivered a warning. She told Tom about Jeremy’s many, many children and his spotty treatment of them. Tom was stunned by the news but he was determined not to judge Jeremy till he knew him better.

During the next couple of months, Tom and Jeremy squeezed in only two short phone conversations, both abbreviated when Darian started to cry. Both calls frustrated Tom. He and Jeremy weren’t getting closer. Tom yearned for a visit. He wanted to show off Lana and Darian to his donor dad. It soon became clear that Jeremy wasn’t coming to Kansas City, so Tom arranged a visit to Florida. Tom, Lana, Darian, and I would fly to Miami in early September and stay with Jeremy for a couple of days. We would also meet Jeremy’s latest female companion—possibly a wife, he called her indeterminately his “old lady”—and their two daughters.

Tom, Darian, Lana, and I rendezvoused at the Miami airport at midnight on a Friday. It was Darian’s first plane ride and Tom’s first trip to the East Coast. As they waited outside the terminal for me to pick them up, Tom and Lana stuck out in the colorful Miami crowd. They were wearing their regular uniform: black Insane Clown Posse T-shirts with glaring satanic clowns on the front. Darian was in his baby seat, cheerier and more active than when I had seen him six months earlier. He had a shock of blond hair and a permanent wide-mouthed grin, like a happy hippo.

Tom’s voice was softer and mumblier than usual. He sounded nervous. “I have that night-before-Christmas feeling,” he said as we drove to the motel. “I’m scared and happy and excited.”

Tom was worried about juggling his two dads. He feared he was trading Alvin, a dad who was imperfect but familiar, for the unknown Jeremy. “I told my dad—my first dad—I was coming out here. My dad really wasn’t too happy about it. He didn’t say much. But he told me he didn’t want me to go.”

At the motel, Tom told me he was frightened that what was inside Jeremy—the compulsion that had made him sire X children and not take care of them—was also inside him. “The dad who raised me was not a good dad. I was really hoping Jeremy would be a good dad. I am already scared I am going to be a bad dad to Darian.”

Alvin had taught Tom nothing about being a good father. If Jeremy was also a bad father, that meant that Tom’s genes were stacked against him, too. So nurture and nature were conspiring against him, directing him toward paternal incompetence, indifference. I tried to reassure Tom that his two dads didn’t matter. He was already proving himself a good dad, I said. After all, I pointed out, at the very moment he was expressing this fear, Tom was hunched over a motel bed, dabbing the spit-up off Darian’s yellow onesie. His family would be fine, I told him, if Tom trusted himself and not his DNA.

Discovering you are a genius sperm bank kid can muddle you in all sorts of ways, but the worst may be in causing you to suddenly believe in genes. Before Tom discovered he was a Nobel sperm bank baby, he had never thought about whether his DNA had made him the way he was. There had been no reason to. But once he learned that he had a special genetic heritage, he applied genetic thinking to his whole life. If he did something well or badly, he would credit it to the genes. When he thought about his future, he tried to read his DNA like a palmist reads hands: What does the double helix say I should do? And now that he had found Jeremy and learned his dubious history, Tom was letting the genetic perspective rule him again. He was discounting the evidence of his very own life—the fact that he was working his eighteen-year-old butt off to raise, nurture, and financially support his baby son—because his genes seemed to contradict it.

Tom was doubting more than just his parenting skills. He seemed uncertain about everything, as I saw the next morning, when I invited him and Lana to accompany me while I visited a friend who worked at a Miami radio station. Tom was mesmerized by the station’s engineering booth. He left the studio talking a mile a minute about how he should be an audio engineer. A few minutes later, when we stopped at Subway for breakfast, he reconsidered. He said he didn’t know where he could get trained.

This segued into a tentative, hesitating monologue about his career plans. “For the past four months I’ve been racking my brains about what I want to do. Sometimes I think I want to be a lawyer or a veterinarian. Or maybe I want to be a doctor, but maybe I can’t. I don’t know. Sometimes I think I want to write novels, but that is really hard to get into. Or I could just stay at my mom’s company, I guess.” I asked what he really loved to do. “I really like to play video games—that’s what I really love. But there are no jobs, except being a game tester, and that’s even harder than getting a job writing novels.”

After breakfast, we started driving out toward the distant suburb where Jeremy lived. It was a clear day but viciously hot. Tom called Jeremy from the road to let him know we were on the way. When he hung up, Tom was back in good spirits. “Jeremy kept asking me about Darian, checking to make sure we have the AC on in the car. He also wanted to know if we are all going to stay with him—he says we’ll have to squeeze, but that it will be fine. It’s weird, I haven’t even met him, but it seems like he really cares about us. Whereas my dad who I have known for eighteen years doesn’t care about anyone.”

Then, out of the blue, Tom announced that he and Lana were married. They had sneaked off to a justice of the peace two weeks before. There had been no witnesses and no party. They had told no one before they went and no one after. Tom’s mom had figured it out a few days later, when she had noticed the marriage license poking out of the diaper bag. She was pleased, because she had feared that Lana could kidnap Darian back to Russia if they weren’t married. Mary had been trying all kinds of different arguments on Tom to get him to tie the knot. The one that had worked was money: Tom’s car insurance would drop by $115 a month if he got married. That’s why they had done it, Tom said. (“Yes, not for love,” Lana injected dryly.) Tom did not say why they had married so suddenly, right before this trip, but he didn’t have to. Tom was eager to present Lana to Jeremy as his bride. Tom mentioned that he and Lana had even considered flying to Miami a few days early and getting married with Jeremy there.

As we drove, Tom sank into a Jeremy-focused reverie, his mood shifting in almost every sentence. “I have a feeling I may end up without a good relationship with either Jeremy or my own dad. It won’t be a real father-son relationship with Jeremy, that’s what I am worried about. I can talk to my mom about anything. She knows how my life is going, and I know how her life is going. She tells me that she loves me, and she tells me that she cares. That’s the kind of relationship I would want with my dad—with Jeremy, I mean. But that’s not what he signed up for, is it? My dad was supposed to do that. But he didn’t. But maybe Jeremy can end up being a caring father, or at least another friend. It doesn’t sound like he is with his own kids, but who knows?”

We reached Jeremy’s suburb after forty-five minutes. It was one of those vaguely familiar places whose name conjures alarming images from the back end of the national newscast—where periodically there is an especially senseless and spectacular murder. It was a sprawling, indefinite suburb. One strip of malls melded into the next. The town itself seemed to consist of fast-food outlets, motels, and a decent university. We followed Jeremy’s directions to a quiet street of grim little ranch houses. We parked in front of the grimmest and littlest of all. That was Jeremy’s. It was white, now smudged to gray. A chain-link fence surrounded the yard. A ruined car lay in the driveway. We got out of the car. It was at least ninety-five degrees, and the asphalt shimmered. It occured to me that this was not a place Jonas Salk would ever have lived. Jonas Salk would have been afraid to even drive through here.

Jeremy had warned me to knock on the left-hand door of the house and to be on guard for the pit bull that his neighbors kept in the right-hand side of the house. We walked up the driveway in silence. We could hear the pit bull barking insanely inside the house. Tom held Darian so that he was shielding him from the house: if the dog raced out, it would have to go through Tom to get to the baby. The house was a wreck. Windows were boarded up with plywood; gutters drooped; siding was dangling off. I saw no left-hand door. Tom knocked hesitantly on the one door we did see, which was scraped and scarred. The dog’s barking became more crazed. After fifteen seconds, there was the sound of dead bolts turning and chains being lifted, and the door opened on the scariest person I had ever seen. He was a white guy, maybe thirty years old. He was shirtless and heavily muscled. His head was shaved, and his mouth was open in a half smile, half grimace. This revealed that his top teeth were gold—all of them. Tattoos stretched across his chest and abdomen, covered his arms, shoulders, and neck. I know nothing about prison, but they looked like prison tats.

“Excuse me,” Tom said. “We’re looking for Jeremy?”

The guy stared blankly at us. “Jeremy?” he said. Even that one word was hard to understand, thanks to his impenetrable drawl and gold teeth. Three other guys, also all shirtless, muscled, tattooed, and frightening as hell, emerged from the gloom behind him and glared at us. Their eyes were freaky: they were amped up on something—crystal meth was my guess, given our location and their paranoia. The dog, if this was possible, was now barking even louder. It felt like a nightmare, Deliverance meets Cujo. The four of them looked us up and down. Tom and I had exactly the same thought: they were drug dealers, and they were trying to decide if we were cops. Thank God Tom was holding Darian, I thought. No cop carries a baby on the job.

Tom again asked for Jeremy. Finally one of them said, “Jeremy. You mean Jeremy Sampson?” Tom nodded, looking relieved. The guys relaxed a little, too. “He’s around the other side of the house.” The house looked too small to have an “other” side, but indeed it did. When we walked around to the left-hand side, past a broken umbrella and various crippled toys, we saw there was indeed a side entrance.

Tom knocked on the side door. It opened, and Jeremy stepped out to greet us. He said, “You must be Tom.” Jeremy reached out, and the father and son embraced awkwardly, all shoulders and arms. So this was what happened when father and son met: nothing much.

Jeremy was in his late forties, but he looked fifteen years younger. He was wearing dress pants, dress shoes, and a garish blue Hawaiian shirt, untucked and open almost to the navel. Tom and Lana had the same first impression: he was a dead ringer for the “hero” in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one of Tom’s favorite video games. (The aim of Vice City was to do anything to anyone for the hell of it—kill strippers, run over old ladies with your car, whatever got you off. Tom tried to block this image from of his mind: it was too alarming, maybe because it was too apt. What had Jeremy done with his life, if not whatever the hell he wanted?)

When I saw Jeremy, I finally understood why he had persuaded so many women to have his children. He had a shambling, raffish Dennis Quaid thing going. His hair was thick and dark, lustrous with some kind of product; he was always running his fingers through it, calling attention to its beauty. He had boyish, laughing features. His eyes were particularly striking: they were slit-narrow, but deep blue and twinkly.

Jeremy hugged Lana after he released Tom. Then he wiggled his fingers in front of Darian, who was delighted. He shook my hand and thanked me for coming. His voice was muddy like Tom’s, but it also had an almost foreign lilt to it. He ended most sentences with a singsong “you know?” It made him sound a bit like a Mexican gangster.

He ushered us into the house and said, “Please, make yourself at home.”

I didn’t see how this was possible. For starters, the house was a sweatbox: it was ninety-five degrees outside and at least ten degrees hotter inside. There was no air-conditioning. A ceiling fan wheezed slowly, stirring the air hardly at all. We entered into what seemed at first glance to be a living room but was actually a bedroom, living room, dining room, and study all rolled into one. It took a while to figure this out, because the room was so gloomy: all the bulbs in all the lights were out, save a single, naked sixty-watt bulb on the ceiling fan. A blue carpet covered the floor. The shag was matted and covered with crumbs. Crushed Pokémon boxes, crumpled family photographs, dirty clothes, old copies of National Geographic, and books about American Indians littered the room. Crayon was scrawled on the walls. A boom box in the corner blasted Cambodian pop music.

Jeremy gestured for all of us to sit down. Lana perched precariously on a canvas director’s chair that was missing an arm. I took a wobbly wood chair. Tom sat down gingerly on the trundle bed, which was covered in stained Star Wars sheets. Lana and Tom looked stunned. Lana was confused: she had always thought that doctors were rich. Tom was thinking, This is my supersperm donor dad? I live ten times better than this. I wondered how Jeremy expected us to spend the night here. The apartment already slept Jeremy, his old lady, and their two girls. Where would we fit?

As soon as we all sat, Jeremy popped out of his chair and stepped into the kitchen: “Would you like some melon?” he asked.

All of us nodded yes, for lack of anything else to say. Jeremy cut slices off an extremely ripe cantaloupe and handed them around. He wolfed his down, spilling juice all over the carpet. I watched as a cockroach strolled brazenly over to the juice spot. Jeremy tossed the rind on the dresser and forgot about it. Tom was sitting dumbstruck, Darian in one hand, melon dripping down the other. He was thinking, This is not real. This is the like the dream I have where I win the lottery and they hand me a tangerine. First there were the drug dealers, now there is the melon, and it’s ninety-five degrees, and I am here, and this is my dad.

Jeremy stood up again and reached for the baby. “Do you want to give Darian a cold bath?” Lana smiled and said, “No, thank you.” Jeremy asked again, “Don’t you think Darian should have a bath?” Again Lana said no. He asked again. Then again a few minutes later. Darian was squirming and fretful; Tom and Lana looked around dubiously for a place to put him down. Jeremy noticed and said, “I don’t think he should crawl around here because of the cockroach problem, you know?”

We tried to settle in. Jeremy and Tom checked each other out surreptitiously. They shared a powerful brow, a big chin, and thick hair but little else. Even up close, Jeremy revealed surprisingly little of his age—some gray hairs, a chin that was beginning to wattle. His boyishness was astonishing. Tom was an eighteen-year-old with the air of a forty-eight-year-old. Jeremy was a forty-eight-year-old with the air of an eighteen-year-old. After so many wives and children, Jeremy ought to have looked dragged down by his troubles, but he didn’t. He was careless, in both senses of that word. He was careless in that he didn’t pay attention to the consequences of what he did—hence children and melon rinds strewn hither and yon—and he was careless in that he did not seem troubled by life’s burdens. They didn’t touch him. They were someone else’s problem. He didn’t seem malevolent, only puerile.

Carelessness made Jeremy a surprisingly gracious host. I would have thought he would be embarrassed by his house or weirded out by meeting an unknown son. But he seemed unperturbed. He joked, he punned, he flitted his attention from Darian to Tom to Lana to me. Tom and Lana seemed too overwhelmed to speak more than monosyllables. So Jeremy carried on a cheery, funny patter. Jeremy said a few words to Lana in Russian, then laughed about how he had once lived in Moscow for a few months and learned only how to curse. He was studying Japanese now, he said, and showed us his language tapes. He offered to buy Tom Russian tapes so he could eavesdrop on Lana’s parents. He questioned Tom about what his mom was like. He said he was part Cherokee. He talked about the weather. Whenever there was a silence, he filled it, giggling his “you know?” at the end of every sentence. He was a natural-born seducer, and he was seducing us.

Jeremy delighted in Darian, and vice versa. He dandled Darian on his lap. He thrust stuffed animals into his face. He fanned him with a National Geographic. He handed Darian one of his books with an Indian chief on the cover. Darian grabbed the book and tried to eat it. “You wouldn’t be so happy if he tried to scalp you, Darian! But you like to read. That’s a good sign. Will you go to college one day, Darian? What do you want to do with your life, Darian?”

At the next conversational pause, Jeremy announced to Lana and Tom, “If you want to get married, I’ll pay. We’ll go down to the courthouse right now.”

Tom broke into a big grin, his first relaxed moment of the visit. At last he had something to say. “We are married. We got married a few weeks ago.” Jeremy grabbed Tom’s hand with a huge pumping shake of congratulation. Jeremy offered to help Lana get her green card. He said he had a lawyer friend, they could fill out the paperwork that afternoon.

The silence descended once more. Jeremy asked again, “Do you want a cold bath, Darian?” Lana again said no, but this time Jeremy raced over to the bathroom and returned with a cold towel that he wiped all over Darian’s face. The baby cried at the intrusion. “He’s a crybaby,” said Tom.

“Well,” countered Jeremy, “he’s just very expressive.”

“I can’t wait for him to talk,” said Tom.

“That’s the way parents are,” Jeremy answered. “When the kids are young, they want them to walk and talk. Then, when they get older. It’s ‘Sit down and shaddup!’ ” He delivered the punch line as if he were performing in a nightclub.

Occasionally suspicion crept into Jeremy’s conversation. He admired Darian’s cuteness, then muttered, “The cuter they are, the more likely someone is to want to steal them.” There was also an undertone of sleaziness. He advised Tom not to have two girlfriends at the same time, peculiar counsel to someone who was (a) your new son and (b) just married: “You get confused and call one of them the wrong name, and they both kick you out.” He sounded as if he were speaking from experience.

After half an hour in the hot house, we were all sweating through our clothes, except Jeremy, who still looked crisp. Tom, Lana, and I were dreading the prospect of spending the rest of the day there. We had to escape. I suggested we get some lunch.

Over Cuban fast food and in the air-conditioning, everyone relaxed. Tom asked Jeremy if he had ever expected to meet his sperm bank kids. In a loud voice, Jeremy started to answer, “I never knew there were any sperm bank kids.” Midway through the sentence, he remembered he was in a public place, looked around campily, and dropped his voice to a whisper. Tom and Lana laughed. Jeremy buzzed Tom with questions, sometimes interrupting answers to make a joke or do an impersonation. What’s your favorite video game, Tom? Why do you like it? Do you play chess? Checkers? What’s your favorite drink? Jack and Coke? Really? What happened when you found out you were a Nobel sperm bank kid? Did you ever break any bones? Which ones?

Tom enjoyed the attention, but I was uncomfortable. Jeremy seemed superficial. Not fake, exactly, but theatrical. He listened to Tom’s answers, only enough to ask the next question. He didn’t seem to care what Tom was saying. It felt like a show of affection for Tom’s benefit. But if it was, so what? Was faked affection worse than none?

Jeremy picked up Darian and stared at his chunky cheeks. “Look, he’s Marlon Brando!” Tom loosened up, too. He called Jeremy “Grandpa.” Jeremy smiled at this in a peevish way. Jeremy scooped up Darian and paraded him around the restaurant. The cashiers cooed over the baby, as Jeremy beamed. Tom whispered to me, “It’s what I was hoping for. It’s good. I feel comfortable.”

It was obvious that Jeremy was no genius. But it was also obvious how he had persuaded Julianna McKillop and Robert Graham that he deserved to be a donor to the Repository: he had a gift for making people feel at ease, and he had a quick tongue. He could charm the pants off anyone (and often had). Twenty years ago, when he was a medical student with a pretty wife, before his life got so messy, he must have shone with all the promise in the world.

I announced that I was staying in a hotel and offered to get a room for Tom and Lana, too. Jeremy looked relieved. We found a Marriott with a pool. As we checked in, Jeremy pulled out his wallet and tried to hand me a hundred-dollar bill to cover Tom and Lana’s room. I refused it, so he thrust it at Tom. “C’mon, Tom. You had to pay for the airline ticket, right? David won’t take it, so I have to give it to someone, you know.” Tom reluctantly accepted the C-note. As he took it, Jeremy said softly to him, “Remember this when I am old and broke and retired.” In case Tom hadn’t heard, Jeremy immediately said it again, as a question: “You’ll remember this when I am old and broke and retired, right?” Later, when he knew Tom was watching, Jeremy picked up Darian and said, “At least you’ll take care of me when I’m old, right, Darian?” It didn’t sound as if he was joking. Tom was embarrassed. There was something sad about a man with so many children hoping a $100 gift would persuade his sperm bank son to cover his nursing home bills.

At 4 P.M. we had to pick up Jeremy’s two kids—or rather, the only two of Jeremy’s many kids who lived with him. I drove Jeremy to the babysitter’s. He thanked me for suggesting the hotel room. “You don’t want to sleep on that floor, not with our cockroach problem.” I asked him about the scary guys next door. They were his landlords, he said. “The guys, they don’t really seem to do anything.” He said this in a way that made it clear that they did something but he was afraid to say what. In front of Tom, Jeremy hadn’t wanted to talk about why he was living in such squalor, but he opened up a little bit when we were alone. His job paid okay, he said, but he was a civil servant, not a rich doctor in private practice. He had to give half his modest income in child support—half was the maximum allowed by law—for his various kids. “Yeah, it’s not really the best living situation, you know. I don’t have much left over after all the child support. That’s what you get for having X kids, I guess.” But he didn’t sound too regretful when he said this—that carelessness again.

Jeremy’s two girls were playing in the yard when we arrived. Mimi was nine; Stacy was eight. They were beautiful and brown-skinned—their mom was Haitian—with their dad’s thick hair and bright eyes. They were darlings: Stacy was powerfully built and full of energy. Her older sister was lither and a little calmer. They bounced all over the car, played with Jeremy’s hair, teased each other and their dad.

When we arrived back at the hotel, the girls were excited to meet Tom, Lana, and Darian but more excited to swim in the pool. They had only the fuzziest idea of who Tom was and why he was there. At first they thought Tom was their uncle. Jeremy finally managed to explain that Tom was their brother, which did not surprise them; they had so many brothers already.

We spread out around the small hotel pool. Lana lounged in a beach chair with Darian. The girls took a shine to Tom, though I suspected they would take a shine to anyone who paid attention to them. Tom loves kids, and he found it easier to talk to them than to Jeremy. He raced them across the pool and played Marco Polo. Jeremy joined them for a game of keep-away. When everyone was exhausted, we sat around the table and Tom gave the girls arithmetic problems while they played peekaboo with Darian. “Can the baby stay with us?” Stacy asked. Everyone was laughing and goofing. It was early evening by now; the sky was pink and hazy and soft. The vicious heat had dissipated into an easy warmth. Tom was calmer than I had ever seen him.

Jeremy, wearing a straw hat and an unbuttoned white cotton shirt, bounced Darian on his knee and gazed at his kids—Tom and the girls—with a bemused smile.

Tom said he was interested in being a writer, too. He asked Jeremy about the book he had written. Jeremy looked embarrassed. “It was self-published,” he said. “It was about a dream I had.” He didn’t elaborate. Then he said, “I was thinking of being a writer, but it’s really hard to get published, really hard to break in. So I gave up on that.” I asked him about his current job. He said he liked it because it was easy working for the state: “When I graduated medical school, I worked for a private practice, and I was going to set up my own practice. But I looked into it, and it was just so complicated. You had to handle billing and a secretary, and you had to find patients and advertise. It just seemed like it was going to be too much.”

He knew my magazine Slate was owned by Microsoft, and he wondered if I had any Microsoft stock options. “I don’t own any stocks,” Jeremy said. “I think I could be a really good investor, but I don’t know enough to do it right. What I have always planned to do is make a practice portfolio and then try it for a while and see how I do, and then when I learned how to do it right, I would invest real money. But I haven’t done that yet.” My God, I thought, he sounded exactly like Tom did in the morning, when he was considering and rejecting possible careers. Was this Jeremy’s genetic gift to Tom—this indecisiveness, this giving-up-before-you-startness?

It was time for dinner. We couldn’t all fit into my rental car. Tom volunteered to ride with Jeremy. (Jeremy’s car looked like his house: trash festooned the floor, books about American Indians were piled on the seats.) We stopped to collect Jeremy’s purse-lipped old lady (though wouldn’t you be purse-lipped if you lived as she had to?).

We ate at a small Thai restaurant. Tom and Jeremy were next to each other, and I sat across from them. Their gestures were eerily similar. Each leaned slightly back in his chair, right elbow on the table, left hand crossed and resting in the right elbow’s crook. When they talked, they tilted their heads a few degrees to the right.

“Are you happy?” Tom asked his dad.

“Yeah, I guess. I am too busy not to be happy,” Jeremy answered. Then he turned the question back at Tom. “You look happy, Tom. You have a beautiful kid, a good job, a pretty wife. You should be happy!”

Tom smiled. Jeremy described a few of his other kids, particularly a son who had gotten straight As and gone to math camp.

“I did real bad in high school,” said Tom. “All Bs. I didn’t study. I was really lazy.”

“You sound like me,” said Jeremy.

“I really don’t know how to work hard yet. I thought I would learn how to work hard in college, but I haven’t really,” said Tom.

“Well, there are worse things than being lazy,” Jeremy said.

Jeremy suggested we get doughnuts for dessert, so we convoyed to a nearby Krispy Kreme. Tom and the girls were mesmerized by the doughnut machine and hyper at the prospect of eating all that sugar. Tom was in an expansive, generous, gleeful mood. He insisted on buying everyone doughnuts, dozens of them, all kinds of them, far more than we could eat in days. We crammed into a couple of small tables, cutely pressed up against one another. Tom fed doughnuts to the girls. Jeremy nibbled slowly on a small glazed; the girls leapt up and down in a sugar mania.

Jeremy suddenly asked me, “Where would you want to live if you had a hundred million dollars?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe Los Angeles in winter, Vermont in summer, New York City the rest of the year.”

“I would live in the Queen Charlotte Islands, way up off the coast of Canada. There’s hardly anyone there, just some Indians.”

“Why are you so interested in Indians?” I asked.

“I think it’s the yearning for a simpler life.” He looked at the girls and at Tom. “But that will never happen.”

We returned to the hotel. Jeremy and his family said good night and left us. Tom changed Darian into his pajamas and reviewed the day—the drug dealers, the melon, the heat, the filth, the pool, the doughnuts. Mostly, Tom said, he was really happy: he felt pretty comfortable with Jeremy. He was glad that Jeremy was curious about him. He didn’t care that his genius sperm bank father wasn’t Jonas Salk.

Still, something was eating at Tom: Why had Jeremy fathered so many kids, and why had he left them?

“I can see why he got so many girls to go to bed with him. He has all this charisma. But I was trying to figure out the kids, and it just hurts my head. He really looks like he loves Mimi and Stacy. If he felt that way about the others, I don’t know how he ever left them. Is it that he just has bad taste in women? I can’t believe that. I can’t believe he has X kids and married that many times. The type of person who would do that, it just doesn’t seem like him.”

“People make mistakes,” Lana offered.

“Yeah, but not X times,” Tom cracked.

“Or maybe he just has bad common sense, like you,” Lana said.

“Yeah, maybe. It’s kind of scary that I am like him, because he has done so much stuff I don’t want to do—the kids, the marriages.”

Jeremy and his daughters returned to the hotel in the morning. We spent a few more hours poolside. Jeremy was wearing his battered straw hat, a white linen shirt, and a towel wrapped around his waist like a skirt. He looked like a contented old hippie. Jeremy and Stacy chicken-fought in the pool with Tom and Mimi. The girls pushed Darian around in his stroller when he fussed. “You are wonderful aunts,” Tom called to them. When Tom tried to feed Darian a bottle, Stacy grabbed it from Tom and rebuked him: “Don’t play with my baby.” Jeremy danced around the edge of the pool with Darian. He stopped for a moment and asked, “How many kids do you want, Tom?”

“Two of them is all I want,” said Tom, “and we’re going to wait five years for the next one.”

“Two or three, that’s a good number,” said Jeremy. “More than that, and the possibility of fighting increases exponentially. There are too many different combinations.”

“Jeremy, can you write down a list of all my brothers and sisters and their ages for me?” Tom asked.

“Yeah, I can do that. I used to have a list like that around. But they keep on coming out of the woodwork. There are more every day. You and Alton and—”

I asked Jeremy the question Tom had asked me the night before: Why had he had so many kids? If he could live his life over, would he have them again? He thought for a moment, then answered, “I don’t know. Stacy and Mimi are number X minus 2 and X minus 1. So imagine, if I had stopped earlier, then I would never have had them.”

But what about all those other kids, all the ones you don’t see and don’t take care of? What about them? That’s what I wanted to ask, but I didn’t.

Jeremy proposed we drive to South Beach. It was a beautiful day, Tom and Lana had never seen the ocean, and that way Jeremy could drop us off at the Miami airport late that night. Jeremy and Tom drove together. On the way down, with me out of earshot, Jeremy congratulated Tom on finding a foreign wife. Foreign girls, he said, let you get away with a lot more. You can mess around with other women and then explain to your wife that cheating is the American way. He told Tom that he even had a built-in excuse if he got caught. “You can tell Lana, ‘Oh, it’s normal for me to want two girls. I was raised by my mom and my sister, so I need to have two women in my life.’ ” Tom was revolted. He had been married for two weeks, and his dad was offering him tips on how to cheat. Tom changed the subject.

Tom and Lana were agog at South Beach—models in bikinis, fortune-tellers, stores selling water pipes and incense, outdoor bars, street musicians. Jeremy found a shady spot on the sand, beneath a lifeguard shack. We laid out towels and settled in for the afternoon. It was mellow and sweet and happy. Stacy fed Darian a bottle. Mimi braided Lana’s hair. Jeremy changed Darian’s diaper. Jeremy and Tom waded in the surf together. Jeremy came back first. We were alone. I asked him what he thought of meeting his Repository son.

“It’s going better than I expected. He’s quite a bit like me. He’s kind of an intellectual, likes college, likes learning. He looks like me. We have the same way of talking, sort of. He is easy to talk to, not too quiet, not too talkative. I hope we will see each other again. I don’t see why not. Maybe I’ll move to the Midwest.”

Jeremy asked whether, if they made a movie from my book, he could sell his movie rights and get some cash. I told him I doubted that anyone would make a movie, so he shouldn’t count on anything. “Yeah, it needs conflict,” he said, then added jokingly, “Where’s the conflict? I guess I could kidnap Darian for two weeks or something and ask for a million-dollar ransom.”

The kids returned, and we ran races around the lifeguard shack. Tom refereed wrestling matches between his two “sisters”—as he was now calling Mimi and Stacy. He buried them in the sand, then dug them up. He grabbed them by the wrists and spun them around like helicopter blades. Jeremy suggested we go visit another one of his children, who lived not far away. Tom nixed the idea: this was family enough for him today. Jeremy marched around with Darian, singing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

It was dinnertime, and we had to start heading toward the airport. Tom stopped at a gift shop to buy presents for all of us: candles for Stacy and Mimi, a Rastafarian hat for me, and—because he had seen how much Jeremy liked Indians—a picture of a tribal chief in a feathered headdress for Jeremy. We found a pizza parlor. Darian sat on Jeremy’s lap and banged the table. “He’s a drummer, I knew it!” Jeremy exclaimed. Jeremy showed off the baby to the cooks and other diners. He was calling himself “Grandpa” without any hesitation.

Jeremy and the girls drove with us to the airport and decided to wait until we boarded our flights. On the shuttle from the rental car lot, Tom whispered to me, “I am really, really, really happy.” He and Lana held hands and nuzzled. Tom and Jeremy made plans for Jeremy and the girls to come visit Kansas City soon, probably before Thanksgiving. We sat in a circle on the floor of the airport terminal and played cards. Tom called his mom. They talked for a few minutes. Then Tom handed the phone to Jeremy. The first thing Jeremy said was, “Hi, this is Tom’s dad.” Then he added, “Thanks for letting Tom come out to see us.” Jeremy listened a little and gave the phone back. Tom then passed the phone off to Stacy, who said a few words. (Later, Mary recounted her end of the conversation. She was annoyed: Mary had told Tom, “Here, talk to your sister,” and passed her phone to Jessica. Tom had heard “sister,” and given his phone to Stacy. Mary said, “Jessica was so hurt when I gave the phone to her and it turned out that he had done that, since Jessica is his sister, not the strangers he is so quick to refer to as ‘sisters.’ ”)

My flight left first, so I hugged everyone good-bye. As I waited in the security line, I gazed back at them. They were playing cards. What were they, I thought, if not a family, even an all-American family? There was Tom, who was too adult for his eighteen years; Tom’s childlike father, Jeremy, the careless “genius” sperm donor; Tom’s immigrant wife, Lana; Tom’s half sisters Stacy and Mimi, merrily oblivious to the paternal abandonment that might await them; and, asleep in his car seat, Tom’s own son, Darian, the heir to Nobel sperm bank genes, which is to say, the heir to God knows what.