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 “
[email protected].” 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).
