False Conception Read online

  “Does that make any difference?”

  “Supposedly not. Supposedly the risks to the fetus from using frozen sperm aren’t that much greater than doing it the normal way.”

  “And what about the egg?”

  “Despite the infection, Millicent’s ovaries can produce eggs just fine; it’s just that they don’t have a place to go to get fertilized—no tubes, no uterus. So when they decided they’d try to have a kid, she went to the Coastal Fertility Center and they gave her a drug to make her super-ovulate—make a whole bunch of eggs at one time—then did something called a laparoscopy, which is when they go in with a tiny camera and look around, then suck up the eggs with a vacuum cleaner-type thing. Then the folks at the fertility center put Millicent’s eggs and Stuart’s sperm side by side in a petri dish—in vitro fertilization—and lo and behold they got an embryo. Three of them, to be exact.”

  “Not very romantic,” I said.

  “That’s the nineties for you—the only romance is in Madison County. It’s interesting, by the way, that for couples whose religious convictions prohibit the in vitro process, something called a gamete intrafallopian transfer can happen so fertilization can take place in the fallopian tubes of women even if they’ve had a hysterectomy. Conception occurs inside the biological mother, to track with whatever the Bible has to say on the subject, then the embryo gets transferred to the surrogate for gestation.” Russell looked at me puckishly. “It’s also interesting that this transfer process suggests that some day it may be possible for embryos to be implanted in the abdominal cavities of males.”

  I blinked. “A man could be pregnant?”

  “Conceivably.” He grinned. “No pun intended.”

  I didn’t want to think about it. “An embryo is a what? A fetus?”

  “More like a prefetus; it’s only a fetus when it’s recognizable as human, which is at about the eighth week of gestation. The Colberts’ embryos are at the eight-cell stage of division, frozen at minus 196 degrees Centigrade in liquid nitrogen, ready to be thawed and implanted in the surrogate’s womb the next time she’s scheduled to ovulate.” Russell looked at his watch. “Which is exactly five days from now.”

  I recapitulated. “Five days from now, one of their embryos goes in the surrogate, and from then on she’s pregnant with the Colberts’ kid.”

  “If the implant takes, as they say.”

  “It’s spooky, sort of.”

  He shrugged. “The governor evidently thought so. But it’s a godsend to people like the Colberts.” Russell looked at me quizzically. “You got an objection to any of this, Marsh? In principle, I mean?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t thought about it before today, but I don’t think so.”

  “Good.”

  “How about the surrogate?” I asked. “How does she benefit in all this?”

  “The biggest benefit is that she enables two people who are desperate to have children to realize their dream.”

  “I have a feeling there’s more to it than that.”

  “Plus, she gets paid,” he added crisply. “In this case, the surrogate will benefit to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars.”

  I whistled.

  Russell’s voice lowered to a portentous buzz. “Which brings me to why you’re here.”

  “And why is that?”

  “This woman they’ve come up with—this surrogate. I need you to check her out for me, Marsh. I need you to tell me she’s fit for the job. I need you to tell me she’s not some kind of nut who’s going to do something dreadful, either to the fetus or to my clients. And I need you to do it by Monday.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Is that all?” I grinned. “I was afraid you figured me for a cheap source of day care from someone who isn’t an illegal alien. I come cheap, but not Zoë Baird cheap.”

  Russell was irked at my flippancy, “This is serious, Marsh. If this woman turns out to be a charlatan, she could wreak all sorts of emotional havoc. For the Colberts and for me.”

  “Tell me about her,” I said.

  Although it was almost chilly in his office, Russell began to sweat. “This part is unusual, too,” he murmured.

  “How so?”

  “In the normal situation, the surrogate and the parents start out as strangers. They meet through the auspices of a place like the Center for Surrogate Parenting in Beverly Hills, or the Center for Reproductive Alternatives in Pleasant Hill, and a screening process takes place—both the surrogate and the contracting parents undergo a psychological evaluation and a background check, to make sure no one’s a weirdo. If the initial indications are favorable, the surrogate and the parents meet to see how they get along. If they like each other and want to go ahead with the project, they execute a contract. From then on it’s a collaboration, a joint venture in which all three parties participate together, seeing each other regularly to provide mutual counsel and support until the baby is born and given over to the nurturing mother. Sometimes the venture continues afterward, as well. The surrogate sees the child periodically, keeps tabs on its development, that kind of thing.”

  “But that’s not what’s happening in your case,” I guessed.

  Russell shook his head. “A year or so ago, the Colberts consulted both of the centers I mentioned, but they weren’t happy with the candidates they screened. They’re leery, Marsh—horrible things have happened in these surrogate things, as I mentioned, and the Colberts, especially Mrs. Colbert, want to do all they can to ensure that nothing remotely like that will happen to them.”

  “How are they going about it?”

  Russell hesitated, then fiddled with his tie once again, then looked at me with what appeared to be trepidation. “The main thing they did was dig up a surrogate themselves.”

  I raised a brow. “How?”

  “It’s a woman who used to work as Stuart’s secretary when he started in the clothing business.” Russell paused. “You know the Colbert story, don’t you, Marsh? The stores and all that?”

  “Some of it,” I said.

  What I knew was that if you lived in San Francisco in the middle years of this century, and decided to buy a fashionable frock or a fine suit of clothing, the odds were that you would patronize a local dry goods dynasty. If you were a businessman, the Roos brothers or the Grodins could meet your needs. If you were a stylish matron or a professional woman, the Magnins or the Livingstons would fill the bill. Over the years, these and other mercantile families became rich and powerful and prestigious, and their members contributed mightily to the legend that was the lifeblood of the city.

  But as the years went by, the great retailing families began to subdivide, or feud, or go bankrupt, or all three simultaneously. The younger generation was more fascinated with cash than tradition and, under the pressure of partnership partitions and economic recessions, the dynasties began to crumble and a succession of carpetbaggers moved in to usurp them: Macy’s and Saks from the East; Neiman-Marcus out of Texas; most recently the Nordstrom brothers slipping down from Seattle. It didn’t take long before most of the local dry goods empires vanished, often in the wake of lawsuits and resentments, and oncevibrant buildings stood empty for decades, awaiting a commercial revival.

  But somehow the Colberts held on. The flagship store on Market Street continued to hawk its wares in style and abundance despite the foreign and domestic competition, and a string of Colbert satellite stores sprang up to serve neighborhoods from the Mission to the Marina, keeping both the name and the good will alive. Several years ago, the family patriarch—Rutherford B. Colbert—had come down with some health problems and management had devolved to his kids—Stuart and Cynthia—at least it did so in name. But even though the old man is breathing with the aid of a canister of oxygen somewhere in St. Francis Wood, the word was that he still made the major decisions unilaterally, giving the children no choice but to acquiesce in public and grumble behind closed doors at the extent of the old man’s continued interference in the business.

>   As his health continued to decline, Rutherford’s children wrestled with each other for primacy, providing fodder for the local media and panic among the employees in the stores, who were in fear of a total collapse. Finally, the old man decided to make like Solomon and, in an odd experiment in crosspollination, divided the empire in two: men’s wear went to Cynthia; women’s wear and haute couture to brother Stuart

  Surprisingly, the partition seemed to be working. The business page of the Chronicle declared the Colbert for Men and Colbert for Women chains were thriving, even while the gossip columns painted Stuart as a petty tyrant and Cynthia as a raging harridan. I had no way of separating the truth from its opposite, and since I do most of my shopping by catalog to avoid the fluorescent reality of dressing rooms, I hadn’t paid it much mind. But apparently that was about to change.

  “Stuart and Millicent have known each other since they were kids,” Russell was saying. “Stuart was older, so they didn’t travel in the same crowd, but they were raised in the same block out in St. Francis Wood. After Stuart got married and Millicent went back East to school and then to work in publishing, they lost contact. Just before Stuart’s divorce, they met at the mansion at the Colberts’ Christmas party and started seeing each other socially. Then they fell in love, or whatever it is you fall into at that age—they were married four years ago.”

  “Where does the surrogate come in?”

  “Apparently the woman made such an impression during the years Stuart knew her, they decided to hunt her up and ask her to be their surrogate when the other alternatives were lackluster.”

  “What’s this woman’s name?”

  “Greta. Greta Hammond.”

  “How old?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “How old are the Colberts?”

  “She’s thirty-five; he’s forty.”

  “Is Greta married?”

  “Most surrogates are; she’s not. But she was; she’s been divorced for years.”

  “Kids?”

  “Apparently she has a daughter.”

  “Where?”

  “The daughter? No idea.”

  “Where does Greta live?”

  “Kirkham Street.” He gave me the number.

  “Does she have a job?”

  “She’s some sort of technician at the medical center. Glorified orderly, it sounds like.”

  “Let’s see if I get it,” I said after a moment’s thought. “The Colberts start thinking about this surrogate stuff but they don’t like the women they see at the reproductive centers, so they give Stuart’s old secretary a call out of the blue and ask if she wants to be implanted with an embryo that will grow to be their kid?”

  By the time I was finished, Russell was shaking his head. “No call from the Colberts, Marsh. And no visit—I made the contact myself.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “That’s when you laid the surrogate thing out to her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she was willing to do it?”

  “Not at first.” Russell smiled halfheartedly. “I summoned my legendary powers of persuasion.”

  “It probably helped when she heard it was the Colberts who wanted to hire her.”

  Russell’s eyes focused and his tone grew insistent. “No, Marsh. That’s the thing you have to understand—the Colberts absolutely must remain anonymous in this. Greta Hammond is not to know who the contracting parents are—not now; not ever. I’ll sign the surrogacy contract on the Colberts’ behalf under a power of attorney—their names won’t appear on the documents, not even on the birth certificate.”

  I frowned. “Why all the secrecy?”

  Russell rubbed his brow. “The Colberts have a high regard for Greta, or they wouldn’t have picked her as their surrogate. But they want to make absolutely certain that she can’t contact either them or the child once it’s born. They want no interference from her at any time—no chance that the surrogate will try to void the contract and no chance that she’ll try to make a claim of parental rights in the boy.”

  “Boy?”

  Russell nodded. “This thing has been planned down to the last genetic dot—they know the sex of the child already.”

  “Even though it’s only an embryo? How?”

  “Some sort of sperm sifting procedure—apparently the lab people can isolate the sperm with the Y chromosomes and put only those in the petri dish, so a male offspring is pretty much guaranteed.” Russell’s look was sheepish. “It’s not as sexist as it sounds—if everything works out, the Colberts want to have another one the same way, only next time they’ll make it a girl.”

  “Sounds a lot like animal husbandry. Or maybe 1984.”

  Russell darkened. “Don’t say anything like that to the Colberts, Marsh. Not even as a joke. Besides, 1984 was ten years ago. The next stop is 2001.”

  “I think I sort of hope that science fiction stays fiction,” I said uneasily. “Let’s talk about me for a minute. I latch on to Greta Hammond. Then what?”

  “You check her out, you evaluate her, you establish her bona fides, but by no means do you disclose what you’re doing or who you’re doing it for. What I need you to give me is a rundown on her habits, good and bad. Her friends and associates. Reputation in the neighborhood and at work. Extracurricular activities, including her dealings with men. Anything that might indicate a problem that would make her do something dumb. Which is to say, something harmful to the Colberts or the child.”

  I indicated my understanding of the task.

  “There’s one thing more,” Russell said heavily.

  “What’s that?”

  “The fact that the Colberts are using a surrogate must remain absolutely confidential. From everyone, and particularly from the media and from other members of the Colbert family. I don’t suppose you’ll have reason to be in contact with any of them, but if you do, not one word of this can leak out. The word will get out that Millicent’s expecting a child, but no one will know of the surrogacy situation. Is that clear?”

  He was so intense that it was tempting to toy with him, but I resisted. “Absolutely,” I said.

  Despite my assurance, Russell looked increasingly distressed. “I’ve gone out on a limb letting this thing get so far along without getting some assurances, Marsh. I want to know anything at all that could pop up and bite me. And I need to know it in time to put a stop to it, no matter what it is.”

  “Roger, Russell.”

  “We’re talking kids here, Marsh. Families. Even dynasties, if you will. So don’t fuck it up.”

  “Other people’s lives I can deal with, Russell. It’s only my own that I can’t get a handle on.”

  CHAPTER 3

  By the time I got back to the office, I’d decided the Colbert case had too many roots—too many entanglements with everything from Freud to families to the frontiers of biotechnology—and I was getting strangely nervous. My foreboding was almost as weighty as if I were deciding whether to have a child myself, and that was an issue I’d been warring with for twenty years. If I warred with it much longer, the battle would end by default.

  Part of my problem was the surrogate concept—the more I thought about it, the more complicated it got. Some people saw the idea as sinful, I knew, a blasphemous abandonment of the divine design of propagation. Others saw it in feminist terms, a degradation of the bond between mother and child, a perversion of the concept of womanhood. Others viewed it from socio-economic perspectives, as part and parcel of an age-old pattern of exploitation akin to prostitution—a needful young woman persuaded to sell her body not for sex but for its by-product: impregnated artificially, then forced to endure the discomfort and inelegance of pregnancy and emerge nine months hence with a child much the way farmers emerge in the fall with a crop, the gestation in both cases financed up front by those who would enjoy the lion’s share of the profits. And still others were outraged on moral grounds—womb for hire, baby-maker, child-seller, were
some of the less spiteful terms that groups like the National Coalition Against Surrogacy called women who sought to be surrogates. Cast in such harsh and unforgiving lights, surrogacy was not a pretty picture.

  But seen from the side of the Colberts, the concept looked quite different. Surrogacy was unquestionably a blessing for reproductively impaired or infertile people, a chance at biological parenthood for those blocked from achieving it through usual channels and unwilling to risk the uncertainties of adoption. As for the surrogates themselves, surely many—if not most—of them were motivated not by financial desperation but by the desire to help others achieve what they considered to be the species’ greatest blessing, a blessing they had already enjoyed themselves.

  As with debates over other emotional issues like the death penalty and abortion, people of good will were lined up on both sides—people desperate for a child versus those convinced the process was crass and unscrupulous. Righteousness ran rampant; lawsuits raged over surrogate arrangements gone bad. Did I want to be involved in such a volatile and delicate thing? Not really.

  Maybe I was reluctant because my toughest cases—the toughest on me at least—were the ones involving kids. My most frequent assignment involves a runaway, a young girl who has run off the reservation and whose parents engage me to bring her back. Even when I get the job done, which isn’t always, I seldom feel good about it, because kids usually run off for reasons and often those reasons linger in their absence, or even intensify. Which is why sometimes after I find them, I decide to leave them be.

  Kids are always kids, in my experience, and I imagine it’s true even in the embryonic stage. When their welfare is at issue, it raises the stakes exponentially. So for reasons of inclination and history, my urge was to reject the assignment. But the imploring clutch in Russ Jorgensen’s voice, and the pounding panic that had reddened his face when he voiced his fears of fiasco, made me grope for an enabling rationale.