Free The Genius Factory by David Plotz Page B

in school. By the time I hit college, when I met the real geniuses, the people with incomprehensibly dazzling minds, I recognized I wasn’t one of them or anything like them. So I knew just how little being a ten-year-old prodigy meant—and how cautious I should be about ascribing any child’s accomplishments to the Repository’s superior sperm.
    As Lorraine boasted about her kids, she also kept insisting that they were “normal”—or, as she put it, “NORMAL!” They were “
not
nerds,” she said emphatically. Lorraine’s insistence on normality at first befuddled me. But eventually I traced it to the deeply democratic habits of Americans, so deep they still register in a woman as elitist as Lorraine. Graham’s notion of breeding only for intelligence disturbed even her. If all men are created equal, then manufacturing an extraordinary child seems almost anti-American. America admires its Thomas Edisons and Bill Gateses when they grow up, but Gates-like kids are ridiculed. The
genius
child is considered a nerd or a freak. Instead, we cherish all-arounders. There’s no glory in being a math prodigy, but a math prodigy who can play basketball, that’s cool. That was why Lorraine kept battering me with that word “normal” and why Graham’s Nobel effort had been quixotic: he was trying to sell a product—pure intelligence—that most Americans didn’t really want. Even Lorraine, a mother of immeasurable ambition, didn’t want me to perceive her children as too intelligent. It was when I talked to Lorraine that I started to understand why Graham had to recruit non-Nobelists like Edward Burnham as donors: parents really
didn’t
value the Nobel brain above all else.
    For a while, Lorraine and I avoided talking about one obvious subject: Donor Fuchsia. I sensed some anxiety in her about him, some tension in her otherwise assured manner. Gradually, she told me little bits about him. He was not a Nobelist, but he was an Olympic gold medalist. He had also written a book. (That was why she had chosen him, because he was well rounded, “not weird or nerdy.”) Finally, forty-five minutes into our conversation, she blurted out, “I have seen pictures of him.”
    Then she said, “Dora Vaux [the Repository’s manager in the early 1990s] told me his real name.”
    I stuttered that revealing his name to a mother was surely against the rules. Lorraine, who would probably break the law of gravity if it displeased her, agreed but said that was irrelevant because she had really wanted to know it.
    Then Lorraine told me his name and how he had won his gold medal. I felt guilty even
hearing
the name: Lorraine shouldn’t have possessed this secret, and neither should I. I steered the conversation back to her kids, but a few minutes later, she mentioned Donor Fuchsia again. “I have a
huge
file on him, you know. I have not used it for anything in particular. I am just curious about what he is doing now.”
    A few minutes later, she said, “Supposedly, the guy is just my age. Dora told me that his girlfriend got really sick, with leukemia, and he stuck by her. And he helped Dora move. She says he is the most incredible person.
    “And he’s
not
married. He never got married.”
    Again, a little later, “I thought about calling him, but I don’t know what his feelings about this are. I thought we might meet serendipitously and fall madly in love, and he would become the father of his own children. That would be a movie and a half!”
    Then, as she was saying good-bye, “I thought he and I might meet someday. Wouldn’t that be a story and a half?”
    When I heard this, I thought I finally understood why Lorraine had agreed to talk to me: she hoped I would find Fuchsia for her. I doubted that this was a conscious plan, but it explained why she kept telling me more than she should have about him. And it explained why she had kept hinting about them meeting. She realized that she couldn’t track him down herself. It would