At the Gathering of the 848 Children of Francis Trembly in the Conference Hall of the Downtown Marriott in Reno, Nevada, in the Autumn of 2018

“IMG 5105” by Eric Creech

Here, all of us, because in 1977 a young entrepreneur, then embarking on his second business venture (selling mail-order brain-teaser booklets to the elderly), and having made his first million off a chain of pop-up cookie stands dispersed throughout the greater San Francisco area—young men and women, mostly college-age, wearing yellow paper caps and toting propane-fueled portable ovens around the city, grunting as they unloaded them from the pick-up truck that he himself drove around—here, all of us, because that young entrepreneur lost a drunk bet to a friend, i.e., could he hit a seagull with a rock (see chapter eight, “Of Course I Can Hit That Seagull with this Rock,” from his memoir, Oh, Me) forcing him, as the bet dictated, to donate a serving of his reproductive fluid to an S.F. Fertility Center. This experience, though anticipated with more than a little embarrassment, he found, in practice, to be highly enjoyable, even titillating—“people needed me,” he later wrote, “a middle-aged woman in a white nurse’s uniform wearing thin latex gloves, who provided me with ‘reading material’ and a little, clear, plastic tube with a white screw-on cap; a young male secretary with a binder full of men’s names, stamp-sized photographs, demographic information, and health records; other women, unknown to me, desperate for children, waiting in the waiting room, wanting something small and sweet and soft and warm and partially myself—they needed me, were desirous that I do what I was doing, which was never something anyone had ever wanted me to do, or even something anyone had ever known I was doing when I was doing it because you don’t say to your girlfriend or flatmate or mom or dad, ‘I’m just going to pop up to my room for a moment and…’” So he made a habit of it. Traveling for work, he stopped at every sperm bank and fertility clinic he passed, looking them up in phone books or at city halls and visitor centers, driving around in the brown 1972 Ford Ranchero he’d inherited from his deceased step-father who’d been a chicken farmer in rural Montana and who’d once lost an entire industrial-sized coop’s chicken population to frost when a heater broke at midnight in February and who he and his mother had found wandering, dazed, in the gray ice-flecked air of early morning, breath steaming across the eight dead ice-stiffened fowl he was carrying, their blue bodies stacked, ice-adhered, a sort of sculpture, jagged beaks blue-misted. He moved with dead eyes along a dirt track: this man who said that to care for another life, any other life, was a terrible thing. “You can never really look at it,” his step-father said, blowing his coffee-scented steam breath into little Francis’ pink, scarf-swaddled face, “not the thing itself, not what you are caring for—the child, the animal, whatever—that’s not what I mean. I mean the act of caring for it, the activity you are engaged in, that activity that would be an object for you if you could look at it, really take it in, but which you can’t look at because you can’t bring yourself to, it is too hot and bright—the center of your life.”

Here, all of us, because twelve months ago we all individually opened letters detailing an all-expenses-paid trip to this very spot, this desert city, this Marriott conference hall with its one thousand high-end folding chairs with padded seats, with circular tables, with a small black platform set up with a lectern and a microphone, with faded rococo designs shimmying up the wallpaper (“faded gold is beige,” one of us noted)—that letter, an invitation in blue ink, on cardstock, the words hemmed in by a border of black flowers: “your biological father invites you…”

Here, all of us, watching Francis hack while giggling at a joke he himself wrote, reading it off a page of black-lined notebook paper, the paper creased where once folded to be placed in a suit pocket, now unfolded, our Francis. “I know it sounds silly,” he continues, “but I became worried, obsessively worried, considering the number of you out there, having been surprised by the sheer number—I mean, think of all the women who must’ve… well, I digress. And those are your mothers after all. But I got worried that two of you might meet up and… and not know. You know? Very funny in the abstract but if it were to really happen I don’t think we’d be laughing. So now you can all see one another. We can all know who’s off limits. And of course,” he says, “besides that, I wanted to get you all together and treat you, give you a good time, just once, like a father should. I don’t really expect any of you to think of me as your father, of course, except in the strictest, most technical sense of the word. I’m your father like a screwdriver is still a screwdriver even if you never use it.” He laughs again.

At table twelve, their seats scooted close, Elizabeth “Liza” Fontenot (the Baton Rouge Fertility Clinic, Baton Rouge LA, 1992; a picture of Madonna in a swimsuit—each of us corresponding, as we must, to a health center and an object of titillation: the place of climax and whatever brought him to climax, usually an image cut from a magazine or provided by the center itself) leans over to Ryan Dombal (Mass General Fertility Center, Boston MA, 1993; a nameless blond woman, nude, on her back, licking a purple popsicle) and whispers, “Did you hear?” and Ryan whispers back, “No, what?” Liza pushes the grilled, lightly salted vegetables to the far side of her plate, as though the broccoli, carrot, and zucchini might listen in.

“He’s been tracking us, some of us, for years!”

“No!” says Ryan, leaning closer.

“Private investigators,” Liza tells him, her breath bubbling warmly between them, her proximity telling him the pattern of soft wrinkles on her lipsticked lips. He met her twelve hours earlier at an airport Starbucks, Liza the one to approach him, coming up to the four-person table he’d commandeered and asking if he wouldn’t mind her joining him, saying, “I think we were on the same flight from Atlanta,” which saved him the trouble of saying it first, of owning up the fact that he’d seen her and not stared—he certainly hadn’t stared, he reminds himself now, sitting with her at table twelve, his skirt steak untouched because he knew he couldn’t eat it gracefully in front of her—he hadn’t stared, just noticed, he’d been noticing her on the plane, and feared, when she approached him in the airport, that she was about to say, “You were staring at me,” and he would have had to correct her.

This private investigator business: Ryan is only learning what many already know, what most will know when we gather, later tonight, in room 415. He is the 321st to learn this. He leans closer to Liza, observation revealing a small freckle cupped by the inner upper socket of her, his half-sister’s, left eye, just below the brow.

He says, “Really?”

“Yes,” Liza tells him, sharing what Ellen Parsons (Magnolia Sperm Bank, Newark, NJ, 1974; polaroid of Francis’s then-girlfriend, topless, kneeling on a bed, wearing parachute pants, her hands clasped and resting on the back of her head, elbows out), now sitting over at table three, had told her, Liza, as the two women waited together for the bathroom in the hallway just outside the conference hall, in a small line that formed because someone had locked the men’s room door probably because it was out of order and the women’s room was the default bathroom for everybody and it was only a one-room bathroom anyway with just a toilet and a sink “so why specify gender” someone wondered. Ellen took that opportunity, whispering, to tell Liza what she had already told so many of us and what Liza now tells Ryan. “Ellen,” she begins, “is Francis’ third child… ” Yes, and the second-richest after Philip Randall (Hudson Valley Fertility, Tarrytown NY, 1981; two naked white women, ruddy with spray-tan, kissing on a boat) who was adopted by a former GE CEO, making Ellen the richest self-made offspring, being the owner of a small chain of nail salons, although she takes issue with the word “small” whenever it’s used in reference to her business, “as though eleven locations in the greater tristate area were ‘small,’ as though a woman becoming a prominent figure in business anywhere in the world were ever ‘small.’ As though all the bureaucratic hoops I had to jump through, never mind navigating ownership of a lucrative business in an area where the mob operates, were ‘small.’”

“It was last October,” Ellen had told Liza, waiting in the bathroom line, “a man dressed like a UPS delivery guy—the brown shorts, the short sleeve shirt with the collar, the little golden shield—came to the door with a big box. I hadn’t ordered anything. I told him, ‘I haven’t ordered anything.’ He says: ‘Your name is on it.’ I look. My name is on it. I bring the box inside and what do I find? It’s this gorgeous mantlepiece clock, golden hands, an ivory face, individually carved black numbers, all set into this walnut wood that is… it smells like an air freshener, this clock. It comes with a letter: From an old friend. No return address. I have had eight friends ever. I call them. I never lose touch with anybody. If I know you I know you, present tense at all times. No one sent me a clock. I’ve dealt with the mob. I’ve been bugged. I once found a microphone hidden behind the right fang of a terra-cotta flowerpot shaped like a yawning cat. I put the package tracking number on the box into the UPS website. Nothing. It’s all a sham. I go outside. I go down the street. There he is, the UPS guy, in his phony van. I pull open the door and show him my gun. I’ve got a gun. I know how to use it. I tell him that he may have packages but I’m packing. I tell him he blew his cover, should’ve made me sign for the package. I tell him to tell me who he works for. He tells me: ‘It’s your Dad. He wants to get to know you.’ ‘I don’t have a father,’ I say. ‘You must,’ he says. ‘I mean, there you are.’” So Ellen Parsons learned that her father, our father, had been hunting down each and every one of his biological children.

Ellen had contacted Liam Jones (Bangor Fertility, Bangor, MA; a picture of a burly man holding a woman in the air, the woman facing him, her legs over his shoulders) who she’d met at a support group for men and women who’d grown up “without a second parent,” (that language: the gender-inclusive re-brand for what had previously been a support community “for fatherless children”—though it turns out that the “second parent” is usually the Dad, who is awol [or dead or incarcerated]) and which Ellen began attending after the disintegration of her second marriage, after her husband called her “a brutal tyrant” for her treatment of their then thirteen-year-old son, a boy who, speaking privately with the judge delivering the verdict on their custody battle, showed a marked preference for his father, a father who, yes, had done most of the housework and made the meals and drove the boy to and from soccer practice but who’d been living in a fucking fairytale as far as Ellen was concerned—a fourteen-year fairytale in which he hadn’t had to earn a penny, hadn’t once had to think about making ends meet. Ellen had protected him from that side of life. And yet, when that man walked out of her life, she was the one who fell apart. She’d felt like she’d felt as a child again, living with just her mother, a woman fighting to make time for both career and daughter. She’d longed for the father she’d never had. She tried to comfort herself. Told herself that of course, of fucking course, she, Ellen, had turned out like this. She was who she was, being who she’d been, raised as she’d been raised. The support group was the answer—the first step in a long process of self-examination. And, there, she met Liam, whose story was oh-so-similar to hers: a stressed mother, a father who’d first been infertile and then at large, and another father who was not a father but a glass tube, curved at the bottom, with a plastic cap, white cloudy viscous reproductive fluid slopping inside, and the two of them, Liam and Ellen, discovered, wonder of wonders, that their mothers had shared a sperm donor, making them siblings. They’d fallen into each other’s arms and wept, clutching each other and shaking with emotion. 

In the heat of the moment, standing on the sidewalk a block down from her house, still holding her gun, the fallacious UPS driver having given her his business card (Mark Priest, Private Investigator), Ellen phoned Liam. She told him everything. Shocked, he revealed that he, too, had recently received a present from “an old friend,” also a clock, but hadn’t thought twice. He’d been quite popular in high school and college and really anywhere he’d ever gone. He had many “old friends,” faces lost to memory. He’d taken the gift in stride, never suspecting. 

Liam worked in market research for a company producing home and bath products ranging from laundry detergent to ceramic soap dishes. Utilizing his expertise, he tracked down a number of fertility clinic record-books. He interviewed nurses and secretaries. Francis Trembly was something of a legend in that community, he discovered, having “planted his seed” in sample tubes far and wide. Responsible, some estimated, for roughly one thousand, three hundred children. So Ellen and Liam began reaching out to us, contacting us, assembling us, one by one, forming us like the first industrious cells of a fetus. (Our consciousness is their work, their outsized contribution to the “us” that is the us of all of us sitting together in the glow of the many cheaply-made glass chandeliers hanging from the conference room’s ceiling). They told us about “us”—as many of us as they could—before Francis’ invites arrived in our mailboxes. They told us that we were big, bigger than we could’ve imagined: a body spread out across forty-five states and three countries. And they told us about Francis, that he was interested in us, that we should be wary of him—his spying ways, his insidious presence.

Ryan produces a series of small noises, indicative of shock and active listening, as Liza speaks. Oh and gosh and really and wow and mhmm and no! and goodness! He imagines a world in which someone suddenly stands up, one of his many half-siblings, maybe Clark Feinbaum (The Rosewood IVF Clinic, Minneapolis MN, 1996; Picasso’s female nude, her blocky body imagined soft, his hands gripping her weird pillowy midriff) because he’s a radio broadcaster, or Madeline Connor (Fourth Ward Fertility, Atlanta GA, 1990; the texture of an autumn leaf, orange-red, picked up off the sidewalk, its veins and midrib, its dissolving edges) an Instagram influencer, either of them would be appropriate, suitable to announce, as he’s imagining them announcing, in a voice tight with shock, that the rest of the civilized world has been totally and utterly obliterated, preserving just this sole block of downtown Reno, like a scrap of unburnt fabric blown free from a conflagration, announcing that we, the occupants of this conference hall, “us,” are all that is left, that we strangers, we siblings, will have to repopulate the globe—though obviously this last bit would go unsaid, an implication floating alongside the gnarled designs on the ceiling. He imagines this while watching Liza’s lips work, her mouth forming soft words.

Ryan thinks: What is it to share a father? Look at a picture of a single sperm and a single egg. The sperm is so small, so dwarfed by the other. Consider sharing a mother, to have literally grown inside the same person, to have emerged from them. There’s something concrete about that. But a father? An absent father, even? Didn’t Strindberg—Ryan took a class on the progenitors of modern theatre as an undergraduate—didn’t Strindberg write a play about fathers? Wasn’t it called The Father? A play about how no father can ever be truly certain that his children are his own? (At least, prior to DNA testing). And isn’t fatherhood a fluid status? Aren’t we always talking about children who don’t have fathers? Aren’t kids always seeking out father figures in films? Found fathers? What is a father? thinks Ryan, looking across the room at Francis, sitting at table five, visible only as a puff of translucent white hair above the heads of so many of his own children. Totally insubstantial. A sort of sentient nothing. What is interesting to Ryan are his siblings. Is “us.” And that is what we are interested in too.

“And it was during that search,” says Liza, “that search for their siblings, for us, wanting to warn us about Francis, that they, Ellen and Liam, found out about the married couple.”

“Yeah?” says Ryan. And then, understanding, “Oh my god.”

The married couple. Two half-siblings who met and fell in love and had three children together. When she discovered them, at first, Ellen didn’t want to believe it. Shouldn’t they know? Hadn’t they talked about where they’d come from and, realizing that they were both the result of IVF, checked to ensure that they did not share a sperm donor? But no, they had not. She came from Arizona. He from North Dakota. It is understood that the male enjoyed a close connection with his mother’s husband, the man who’d raised him—who’d been, despite his infertility, and for all intents and purposes, “his father.” There is some speculation, among our ranks, that he was simply never told, was raised believing that this man was his father in every sense of the word. Ellen and Liam argued at length over what to do. At first, Ellen believed that they should tell them. “They have to know the truth,” she said. Liam argued otherwise. “The damage has already been done,” he said. “What are we going to tell them? That their lives are perverse? That their children are abominations? They can’t know. They mustn’t know.” They took it upon themselves to protect the innocence of that family. They were doing something noble, something beautiful for those siblings they’d never met. We applaud their actions.

Then the invitations came.

Ellen heard about the gathering, this gathering, from Mark Priest, the private investigator who she was now paying to act as a sort of double agent, to tell her everything Francis told him about the search for his children. Francis had asked him to confirm as many of their addresses as he could, Mark said. He was sending out invitations. He was bringing all of his children together. Ellen’s first thought was: the married couple. She drove to their house: twenty-six hours, across seven states. She camped out in their town for two weeks, staying at a Holiday Inn, eating the continental breakfast, managing her salons by cell-phone. Their mail arrived in the early afternoon, and every day, after it was delivered, she rifled through their mailbox—the mailbox that their children had painted bright yellow, with the family name in crooked blue letters, with a little painted green snake, only the width of a paint-brush, which wound around the box until it reached the red flag and its head was at the bottom of the flag and its mouth was open and the flag was its tongue. The couple both worked and the children were in school and the only fear was that the invitation would be delivered on a Saturday. But it wasn’t. It was a Tuesday. She found two invitations. (Oddly, it seems Francis never took note of the same address being on two of the mailings—there are simply so many of us).

Ellen, at the mailbox, was about to take both. She took just one—the one with the man’s name. She left the one for the woman.

She is not entirely a force for good, our Ellen. You don’t manage a highly successful chain of nail-salons in a mob-controlled area if there isn’t a streak of chaos running through your character, if you aren’t piloted by something other than the simple pleasures. In truth, Ellen feels an ownership of us every bit as vital as the ownership felt by Francis, our Father. Ellen: our sister, somehow our matriarch. She took just one of the invitations and let the other lie, the one to the woman, and drove back to her hotel and swam laps around the pool.

“She’s here,” whispers Liza, shifting closer once more. For Ryan, she is too close to look at without looking too interested. He stares at the dangling hem of the table-cloth. Liza’s jaw and bottom lip loom in his periphery. Her words are sticky in his ear. “They’re both here, in fact. The husband isn’t in this room though: he’s out on the town. He thinks he wasn’t invited. The kids are staying with their grandparents. She’s at table fourteen,” whispers Liza, “at the far side of it. Facing in our direction.” His eyes flick up. “Don’t stare.” Ryan’s eyes latch for an instant on the woman’s face: a flash of blond hair, thick lips, glasses with caterpillar pattern rims.

She will invite a few of us to her room after the dinner—just the people at her table—to meet her husband and have a few drinks. But many more will show up. Many many more. A party to which Francis will not be invited, about which he will never even know. We will pack ourselves in to see them, to watch them—his arm around her waist, the quick peck she places on his cheek—in room 415. (Our cover almost blown when Lyle Cormorant [Smoky Mountains Fertility, Asheville NC, 1988; a little vial of hot sauce that he slicked across his tongue before reaching down between his legs] screams, suddenly, “I can’t do this anymore,” and runs out and the couple, siblings, husband and wife, will say, “What’s that about?” and, trying to laugh it off, Ellen will say, “Oh you know, he’s that brother”). And Ryan and Liza will be there. And so many others. To see them. Those two. Lucky enough to find one another. Doomed to find one another. They are not part of “us.” They never could be.

(And there are a few other siblings who are not a part of “us”—we, who if we cannot find it in our hearts to love Francis, at least want to meet him, to meet one another. Like Randy Balfouer [Orange State Fertility, Winter Park FL, 1983; his girlfriend, pictured in his imagination, but only after he blew up a number of balloons which he secreted inside his pockets to get himself lightheaded] a recluse who makes his money coding security software for phone applications and believed Francis’s letter to be part of a scam; Whitney Hall [Eisenhower Center for Maternity and Women’s Health, Kansas City KA, 1979; eyes closed, just the sensation, thinking, god, we forget how good it feels to just do it, to not let anything get in the way of how good it feels] who rejects the idea of meeting anyone just for the sake of meeting them; Jane Clements [Wayne County Fertility, Detroit MI, 1990; a picture of a naked man and woman curled into one another, making a sort of ball of exposed flesh, cut from an arts magazine] who hates Francis, yes, hates him, not for being absent or even for being rich and never trying to make her life any easier—which some of us do hold against him—but because he called her mother two months after she was born, calling her as she shucked corn in the kitchen to ask her why she’d chosen him, what it was about his profile that had stood out to her. Jane’s mother was the only woman he did this to. It precipitated a horrible moment, a traumatic instant. Michigan law says that sperm donors can request partial custody of their child, can claim the child before a certain amount of time has passed, and, for Jane’s mother, that amount of time hadn’t passed. In the moment after Francis told her mother who he was, before he asked his question, her mother felt a fear like nothing she’d ever felt before. He was coming for her child, she thought. She gripped the corn so tight crushed kernels oozed between her fingers. She needed to place a hand over her heart and breathe deeply. Jane, who has never known Francis, hates him for this, this moment which her mother told her about, which her mother described—the fear, the corn, the hand on her chest, how her body started shaking—Jane cannot forgive him for this, will have nothing to do with him, will even deny herself “us,” which is overdoing it, we think, which is taking it a bit too far, but is the essence of loyalty, is how family should be).

About the Author

Aidan O'Brien's stories have appeared in AGNI, The Greensboro Review, Pigeon Pages, Cagibi, Eclectica, Barren Magazine, Failbetter, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College and earned his bachelor's at Sarah Lawrence, where he received the creative writing department's Jane Cooper Scholarship. He lives in Ann Arbor, MI with his family.

About the artist

Eric Creech lives in Kentucky with his wife and daughter. He has published a short nonfiction piece with The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and has photography in an upcoming issue of Constellation: A Journal of Poetry and Fiction.