Because David is mine I try to change him. I come into a room where he is deferentially dematerialized against a wall (his old habit of blending with furniture of any style is still unbroken; indeed, I suspect he deliberately dresses for rooms he knows he will inhabit), and I call in a loud voice, “David, where are you, son?” It embarrasses him to be flushed out this way, but he does not yield: next time it is the same. The boy’s will is like iron.
Margaret is left out of this; she understands that David is not her son. We have been trying to have children together. She wants them badly, but mine is the more urgent need. I must have them! We are neither of us ardent but we have used no devices since David came to live with us. We make love with an extraordinary frequency and there is a sense of emergency about our throes. In a way that I do not understand, I see that if I have a destiny at all it is to be a father. It’s not that I am putting aside for that rainy day when there will be no more Boswells. I am not concerned with perpetuating my name; that kind of immortality has nothing to do with me. But were I a king whose succession depended upon getting sons I could not be more concerned. (I perceive that as I grow older I become more obsessive rather than less. If one day this leads me into a park where I will sit, my fingers inside my corrupt overcoat fondling my erection, waiting for the lunchtime passage of one particular small schoolgirl, that’s just too bad. There are only two kinds of intelligences, the obsessive and the perspectual. All dirty old men come from the former and all happy men from the latter, but I wouldn’t trade places. In this life frustration is the Promethean symbol of effort.) Fatherhood, I think, fatherhood! I lust for sons and daughters, but nothing happens. The more I pump Margaret the less good it seems to do. I asked her if there was something wrong.
“Wrong, what do you mean wrong?”
“In the old days in Italy, did you ever have an abortion?”
She was very angry and for several days wouldn’t allow me in her bed. My God, how those days were torture. I had never felt so strong, my seed so ripe, never experienced greater impatience, the sense of time so uselessly destroyed. I realized that I could not risk offending her that way again and I became conciliatory, fatuous in the pains I took with her. Yet the question, which I had not meant to ask, had implications. I had never really minded Margaret’s promiscuity, nor had I any reason to suspect that after we were married she was unfaithful. Before David came I might have forgiven an infidelity with a wave of the hand, but now I had a horror of raising another man’s son. After I had apologized, I immediately re-risked everything by telling Margaret that if I ever discovered she had gone to bed with another man I would kill them both.
I made her go to a gynecologist. She had all the tests. Her womb was not tipped, her tubes not stopped. She produced eggs like a million hens. “Then why aren’t you pregnant?” I demanded.
She shrugged. “The doctor says I can have children,” she said. “He thinks you ought to be examined.”
“Did you explain that I have already proved myself?”
But of course I went. I made an appointment with a Dr. Green, whom the Doctor’s Exchange listed as a specialist in these things.
“Your wife has been examined, I assume,” the doctor said.
“Yes. She’s all right.” I was looking at the certificate on the wall, from a medical school I had never heard of. Why did it have to be a school I never heard of?
“Yes, the husband’s always the last partner to be examined. That’s masculine vanity for you, isn’t it? And I suppose you thought it out of the question that a strapping fellow like yourself could be the sterile one.”
“That’s what I’m here to find out.”
“Well, let’s go down to it then, shall we? We’re not here for recriminations or to fix blame, but out of scientific interest, am I right? Now I don’t know what I’m going to find in your case, but I don’t want you to worry. If we should discover that you’re infertile there may be some things we can do to build you up. If that fails there’s the possibility of adoption, isn’t there? So don’t look so nervous. As it happens, I handle a lot of adoptions and you don’t even have to wait as you would if you worked through an agency. It’s all legal, brother. I don’t want to hear any uninformed talk about a black market. It’s expensive, I won’t crap you, but how are you going to fix a price on human life, do you see? I mean it ought to be expensive.”
“I’m not interested in adopting children.”
“Now look here, son, I can see what you’re thinking. I’m way ahead of you in that respect. You’re thinking, ‘Why, he’s a quack.’”
“Something like that.”
“Sure you are. Well, it’s not true. I’ll tell you the truth — there’s a lot of prejudice in this business. Very few men are as honest as you evidently are and will even come in for an examination like this. The adoptions? That’s something I do just to keep my experimental work going. Because you see I haven’t put all my cards on the table for you. How’d you get my name?”
“Through the Doctor’s Exchange.”
“That’s what I thought. That’s just what I thought. Well, I’ll take care of you. Nobody could do it better. But do you know what we do here? It’s a fertility clinic. This is a donor station. I’m talking about artificial insemination. I only accept the very highest type of donor: intellectual, slightly left-wing Jewish medical students. How’d you like a son by one of those fellers? A very popular number right now. Well, we get them all. Artists from the Village, writers. All very good-looking as well as smart. It’s the surest way I know of to raise a family. Takes all the risk right out. It’s the genes — the genes are everything. Some of my patients come back two, three, four times. You’d be astonished to learn just how many of Dr. Green’s kids are the leaders of their communities today.”
“Are you a donor?”
“No. Oh God, no. In the early days when it was slow I won’t say I didn’t try to cut expenses by putting something in the bottle now and then, but that’s water under the bridge. Well, images change. Taste changes. This I promise, my young doctors are the highest example of the current image. To get on my list they take vows of celibacy. That keeps the stock up, you see. It’s a kind of quality control.”
“But let’s suppose, for argument’s sake, you don’t like the current image. Well then, pick any type you do like. If you don’t see what you want, just ask for it. If I haven’t got him now I know where I can get him. This I promise — the biggest depth in the City of New York. What do you want? An actor? A politician? I’ve even got scions of famous families who have to be specially solicited. Now for obvious reasons the donors have to remain anonymous, but if you want I could show you my library. It’s a file, you see, with the biography of the donor. What the father did, the mother, personality traits, IQ’s, medical histories — the works. You’d be surprised at the famous men represented in that library. They’re not all active donors now, of course, but when they were young they might have needed a little extra dough. You could get men just like them today. Every type, any type.