Swimming Across the Hudson

by Joshua Henkin

“I can’t. I’m too afraid.”

  “You can try.”

  I’d always thought of us as related, assumed that whatever I felt he did too. Now I realized this wasn’t so. We looked different from each other, more so than ever. He was taller and ganglier than I was, all elbows and knees. His skin was darker than mine, his eyes lighter. The whiskers were thick on his upper lip and chin, while I could still go a week without shaving. He’d become a leader in the movement to divest from South Africa. Sometimes at night I’d see him camped inside a shanty.

  “They’ll still love you,” I said, staring at the postcard.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “They will. Believe me.”

  Perhaps this had to do with his being adopted. If he’d been born to them, he might have been more confident that they would love him for who he was, that he was their son and they wouldn’t trade him.

  “I wish they could find out by accident,” he said. “Maybe I’ll fly to Europe and write them from there. I need to put an ocean between us.”

  How long, I wondered, had he known he was gay? I wanted to ask him, but I was afraid—afraid he’d say it wasn’t my business, afraid he’d tell me he’d always known and all these years he’d been faking it.

  My mother wrote back before my father did. Jonathan showed me her letter, as if trying to include me in the correspondence.

  Dear Jonathan,

  We love you. That’s most important. We hope you’ll call us when you’re ready. I was surprised by the news, but if this is who you are and you’re sure of it, then I want you to know you have my support and I’ll always stand up for you. You’re our babies—you and Ben both. Nothing will ever change that.

  Love,

  Mom

  My mother grew more adamant as the weeks passed, trying to demonstrate her support for Jonathan. She sent him magazine clippings about gay adult children and their parents; she went to the library and read gay fiction. It seemed to me that she was trying too hard. Sometimes I see this even now, my mother always doing what’s right, as if this were another cause to fight for, pretending she isn’t ambivalent about this—my mother who dreamed Jonathan would get married, who used to talk to us about grandchildren.

  We’re a family of letter-writers, and my mother wrote me too.

  Dear Ben,

  Jonathan told us he’s gay. Dad and I will do our best to be there for him. But we’re worried. We read about AIDS all the time. We’d like to say something to him, but Dad doesn’t know how to, and I’m not sure what to say either. Maybe you can say something to him—if you feel comfortable.

  Love,

  Mom

  I spoke to her a few days later, but I said nothing about her comment on AIDS, and I didn’t mention that I’d already spoken to Jonathan. I refused to talk behind his back. I didn’t want to be their intermediary.

  When my father wrote Jonathan, he was more reticent than my mother. He danced around the subject of my brother’s coming out. He was working on an article about 1950s Soviet culture, and he described the research he was doing and asked Jonathan about his work. He wrote about the social safety net and the mean-spiritedness of the Reagan budget cuts. But he only briefly mentioned Jonathan’s announcement. “You shouldn’t jump to any conclusions,” his letter read. “You’re still young and trying to figure things out. College is an exciting time, but a lot of what you think when you’re in college won’t mean anything twenty years from now.”

  “Dad believes this is just a phase,” Jonathan said.

  “Give him time,” I told him. “He’ll come to terms with it eventually.”

  Every letter my father sent us had the Hebrew date on top and the words “with the help of God,” written in Hebrew, in the upper right-hand corner. Sometimes he declared his love to us in Hebrew. He liked to allude to verses in the Torah, to remind us of everything the three of us shared. But this letter to Jonathan, more than others, was filled with such verses. Perhaps my father was being indirect, reminding Jonathan that the Torah prohibited him from having sex with another man.

  That’s what Jonathan thought. He said my father would use the Torah against him.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Dad’s too uncomfortable to confront you. You know how he hates to talk about sex.”

  “But I’m his son. He cares what I do. And he believes in God. For all I know, he really thinks God gave the Torah to Moses. It’s hard to figure out what Dad believes.”

  “You know what Dad believes.”

  “Not really. His life is the university. That’s who he is. But then he gets up every morning and prays to God.”

  “He loves you,” I said. “That’s what counts.”

  But was I being honest? Was I so concerned about protecting Jonathan that I wasn’t willing to admit that I too was disappointed, that I’d hoped we’d grow up and be larger versions of ourselves, that we’d marry sisters and live across the street from each other, that because we were adopted nothing could separate us?

  When we came home for summer break, my father spoke directly to Jonathan. He didn’t say anything about religion. He just wanted to know who Sandy was.

  “He’s a guy, Dad. What else do you want me to tell you? He’s tall. He grew up in New Mexico.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “In anthropology class. What difference does it make?”

  “I just want to know what he’s like.”

  For this was what my father thought: that Sandy had made Jonathan gay. My father was a decent man, but he convinced himself that, if not for Sandy, Jonathan would have gone out with a nice Jewish girl and settled down and married.

  “What would you have done if you’d gone to Harvard?” my father asked him.

  “The same thing I’m doing right now. I’d be sleeping in a dorm room and going to class. I’d be living my life, only in Cambridge.”

  “You wouldn’t have met Sandy, and everything that followed would have been different.”

  “I’d have met someone else.”

  “She might have been a girl.”

  “There are lots of girls at Yale.”

  At night, the first week we were home, my father sat in the living room, reading books about psychological development and the inner workings of the human brain. He got recommendations from professors in Columbia’s psychology department and brought home library books by genetic determinists and radical behaviorists, and laid them out in two piles as if to weigh them against each other. He’d been first in his class in high school and college and had always believed he could understand the world if only he read enough pages. But he didn’t understand what was happening to Jonathan. This boy who for years had gone with him to synagogue had become someone he didn’t know.

  “Dad,” I said one night, “you should try to get some sleep.” The two of us were alone in the living room.

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  I stared at the books at his feet. He covered them when Jonathan was around, like a teenager hiding pornography. But Jonathan knew what he was reading.

  “You could read something else,” I suggested. “Try a novel, or a book of poetry.”

  “What’s more important than my children?”

  Your children are all right, I wanted to tell him. But I didn’t say anything.

  My mother tried to talk sense to him. She was persuasive and intelligent. She’d gone to Yale Law School for a year, then dropped out to become a union organizer. For seven years she tended to Jonathan and me full-time, then went back to work, as an advocate for the homeless. She lobbied for funding at City Hall and in Albany; she helped people get medical treatment and legal counsel; she worked with soup kitchen administrators; she organized media campaigns for public support. One time she even got my father to agree to let a homeless person spend the night in our living room.

  My father was a formal man. He didn’t think living rooms were meant for sleeping in, whether you were homeless or not. He wore a suit to work every day, and he
refused to eat even an ice cream cone in the street. He reminded Jonathan and me what “Ethics of the Fathers” said: Dogs eat in the street; people don’t. But he agreed to let a homeless man stay in our apartment because he loved my mother. She could get him to do things that no one else could.

  Now she was arguing with him about Jonathan, trying to persuade him to accept who my brother was.

  “I just want him to be happy,” my father said.

  “I do too.” My mother was silent for a moment. “Maybe this will make him happy.”

  “It’s a hard world. He’ll spend his whole life confronting other people’s prejudices.”

  “Let’s not make it any harder.” My mother still had her law casebooks, which she occasionally removed from the closet and quoted from to my father. Sexual orientation, she was telling him, was like race twenty years ago. This was the issue her children would hold her responsible for.

  “It’s different,” my father said.

  “What’s different about it?”

  “It just is.”

  She quoted to him from Plessy v. Ferguson.

  “What’s your point?”

  “This is what people used to think. Decent people, like you and me.”

  “Plessy is about segregation,” he said. “I’m not talking about segregation. I’m talking about our baby. We brought him up as if he were our own.”

  “He is our own.”

  “I know that.”

  Over the years he has accommodated to her point of view. Although he still gets uncomfortable when he sees Jonathan and Sandy touch, he does his best to be respectful.

  But Jonathan remembered that my father thought Sandy had made him gay. He poked fun at my father. “If you hadn’t gone to Yeshiva University, who knows what would have happened? You might have met a nice guy.”

  “Don’t be silly,” my father said. “I’d still have met Mom, because we were meant for each other. God was watching over me.”

  The following Passover, our junior year of college, Jonathan brought Sandy home. Sandy was the first person in his family to attend college; before going to Yale he’d never met a Jew. He had come out while in high school, although no one else in his hometown was openly gay.

  If he’d suffered from culture shock when he first got to Yale, it was no longer apparent. He had friends on campus and in the New Haven gay community. He’d won the freshman composition prize. Like my brother, he was active in the divestment movement. Now, at our seder, he was doing well, sitting between Jonathan and my mother, reading from the Haggadah in transliterated Hebrew and asking my father questions about the text.

  Why, Sandy wanted to know, was enslavement in Egypt the formative Jewish story? What about the Spanish Inquisition or the Holocaust? Weren’t they more tragic and therefore more important? Perhaps Jonathan had coached Sandy. Perhaps Sandy had guessed how to win my father’s heart, by being an interested student.

  “I’ve wondered that myself,” my father said. “Why harp on Egypt so many years later? But it’s less what happened in Egypt than what happened afterward—Mount Sinai and the giving of the Torah. Before the Exodus, the Jews weren’t a people. They were simply the Israelites, the Eevreem. But in the desert they were given the Torah. That’s what transformed them into a nation before God. Egypt was the beginning of this process.”

  Framed photographs of Justices Brandeis and Frankfurter, my father’s heroes when he was young, hung on the dining room walls. Above my mother’s head, facing the Hudson River, were bookshelves built into the wall. I’d once counted the books on them; there were more than five hundred. Who else had books even in the dining room? What could Sandy make of this?

  We had a matzo sandwich with horseradish and haroset, the horseradish to commemorate the pains of slavery. We ate a full meal, and for dessert had kosher-for-Passover seven-layer cake made from potato flour. Finally we ate the afikoman, which we’d hidden at the beginning of the seder.

  “This is the real dessert,” my father said. “It’s better than seven-layer cake.”

  Then we said Grace after Meals. Sandy stayed quiet, with his head bowed. Jonathan and I had stopped being religious our freshman year of college; my parents knew that. But when I came home, I acted as if everything were the same. I went to synagogue with my father; I celebrated the sabbath in my parents’ home. Jonathan didn’t approve of this. You shouldn’t pray, he said, to someone you don’t believe in. Now, though, at the seder, he was singing along. I was singing too, happy to see that we were a family again.

  My mother asked Sandy about his childhood. Had he spent his whole life in New Mexico? Had his parents come to visit him at Yale?

  “They’ve never been east of the Mississippi,” Sandy said. “They’d like to come, but it’s expensive.” Sandy’s father owned a repair shop and didn’t want to leave it unattended. Sandy’s parents had never been on an airplane, and Sandy suspected they were afraid of flying. Here he was, the classic story: the boy who goes to college and leaves everything behind, who can never come home again.

  Jonathan’s and Sandy’s hands touched. What exactly did I feel? Was it mere discomfort? For my parents? For myself? Or was it envy, really, that Sandy had taken my brother away from me? Walking down Riverside Drive when we were small, we used to hold hands. When we were a little older, we lay on the same bed late at night and watched the Knicks on TV, disregarding our parents’ orders to go to sleep. Now we were in college, and we rarely touched.

  When dinner was over, my mother put sheets and towels in the guest bedroom, where Sandy would spend the night. That was the rule—girlfriends, and now boyfriends, stayed in separate bedrooms. My mother pretended this was my father’s policy, but it was really hers also. She had us believe that she was liberated, but she didn’t like to think about her sons having sex.

  Still, she left a condom on Jonathan’s nightstand.

  “Mom,” I said, holding it up. “This is embarrassing.”

  “What is? He needs to protect himself.”

  I thought of saying something about the letter she’d sent me. But what? That it wasn’t her business? That she should leave Jonathan alone about AIDS, when I hadn’t?

  “We all need to protect ourselves,” I said. “They sell condoms in New Haven.” I put the condom back on the nightstand. “Mom, you’re trying too hard.”

  She looked at me fiercely. “I’m being polite.”

  “Jonathan doesn’t want you to be polite. Polite is for strangers. You’re his mother.”

  “They’re not mutually exclusive, Ben.”

  She was right. But I wanted to tell her what I was thinking then, and what I’ve thought many times since. There’s affection and there’s propriety; there are things you do because you love someone and things you do to support a cause. My mother has worked harder to bring justice to the world than most people I know. But for her, Sandy isn’t primarily my brother’s boyfriend; he’s someone whose rights she’d defend with her life. For my mother there’s family and there’s the rest of the world. You love your family; you stand on the picket line for the rest of the world. After all that Jenny and I have been through, my mother sometimes still treats her the way she would a diplomat, with a measure of deference that borders on the remote. My mother won’t admit it, but she wishes we’d remain the boys we were, the babies she adopted more than thirty years ago.

  Still, I thought, the seder had gone well. Everyone had gotten along with Sandy.

  But later that night, after we’d done the dishes, Jonathan overheard my parents talking.

  “Maybe it’s genetic,” my father had said. “Who knows for sure about these things?”

  I realized what Jonathan thought—that my father had been saying that they’d made a mistake, that maybe they shouldn’t have adopted him.

  “Dad didn’t mean it that way,” I said.

  “I’ll always be a stranger to them.”

  “You’re not a stranger to me. I’m adopted too.”

  “What does adop
tion have to do with it?”

  “It’s where we came from. It’s what we share.”

  “I don’t care where I came from. I could have come from the stork, for all the difference it makes.”

  “You don’t mean that. You’re just upset. Remember when we imagined we’d been flown to earth by spaceship? Don’t you ever miss those times?”

  “They were okay,” he said, “but I’ve stopped dwelling on them. I don’t know why you think about them so much.”

  We moved to San Francisco after graduating. I had no plans, so I went to California because Jonathan was going there with Sandy. I’d lived across the hall from him until we left for college, and across a courtyard all four years at Yale. He was the constant in my life, and I in his; I didn’t see why anything should be different.

  Also, I had a vague plan that we’d find our birth mothers. I never told him this. I didn’t fully acknowledge it to myself. But the possibility was always there. We were living in the same city. Eventually we’d go on a search.

  We arrived in San Francisco in September 1986. I held odd jobs for five years. I was a bike messenger, then a short-order cook at a taquería in the Mission district, then a proofreader for Stanford University Press, then a driver for the airport Supershuttle.

  Eventually I got my teaching certificate at San Francisco State University. Since September 1992, I’ve taught American history to high school students in Berkeley at a progressive private school, where the students serve on the disciplinary board and call their teachers by their first names.

  I’d always thought of myself as countercultural (“Countercultural?” Jenny once said. “Give me a break, Ben. Your father’s a professor at Columbia. You grew up in an apartment on Riverside Drive. You went to Yale. You teach kids who will also go to Yale. Who do you think you’re kidding?”), but when I arrived at the school, I realized that representing the counterculture wouldn’t be my role. The principal wore blue jeans, and some of the male teachers had long hair. It was hard to tell who was a teacher and who was a student.

  This made me uncomfortable. I believed in appropriate professional boundaries. I also thought students should learn the fundamentals. As “Ethics of the Fathers” says, five years old for Scripture; ten years old for Mishnah; thirteen for the Commandments; fifteen for the Talmud; eighteen for the marriage canopy. I’ve ignored some of the particulars, but I believe in the principle. A person should learn certain things at certain times.