Swimming Across the Hudson

by Joshua Henkin

  Jenny was eloquent in defending her work. And one of the things she had liked about San Francisco was that for years her work hadn’t needed defending. This was a liberal city, the ideal place to be a public defender. Jenny liked to run into her clients on buses and on BART; sometimes she would find them huddled on grates and would offer them a cup of coffee.

  But times had changed. The former police chief was finishing his term as mayor; even in San Francisco people were hunkering down. There was a sense of fatigue and of indifference to the poor. Let the criminals fry, people said. California had a three-strikes law. At dinner parties and parent-teacher conferences, people asked Jenny what she did for a living, and when she told them, they looked rebuking and uncomfortable. People used to ask, “Do you like what you do?” Now they asked, “How can you do that?” A colleague of Jenny’s was being stalked by a client the colleague had successfully defended, and when Jenny told this story to a couple of friends, they had little sympathy for her colleague. You reap what you sow, they said.

  Even my brother gave Jenny a hard time. Jonathan, who at Yale had slept in a shanty, who at fifteen had campaigned for Barry Commoner for president, who once could recite the ratings given to every senator by Americans for Democratic Action: my brother had become law-and-order. Gays had been assaulted in the Castro; neighborhood groups had banded in self-defense.

  “Would you defend absolutely anyone?” Jonathan asked Jenny once. “How about Hitler or Mussolini?”

  “That’s a silly question,” she said. “Everyone uses Hitler as the absurd example.”

  “Would you defend someone who shot your mom?”

  “That’s even sillier.” At law school, Jenny had learned that hard cases make for bad law. The same idea was true here. Some people were harder to defend than others. But it wasn’t for her to decide.

  I tended to agree with her. Although some of her clients were unsavory, I thought she was doing the right thing. Late at night in our bedroom I’d cup my hands over her small breasts, then place my ear to her sternum. “Jen,” I’d say, “I can hear your heart bleeding.”

  She’d poke me gently in the forehead. “Don’t patronize me.”

  “I’m not patronizing you.” She did important work.

  But late that night, when she finally came home, I wasn’t feeling sympathetic toward the man whose case had kept her out late.

  “Where were you?”

  “At work,” she said. “You knew that.”

  “Defending an ax murderer?”

  “Drunk driving. What’s gotten into you?”

  “What’s gotten into me is it’s ten o’clock and you just came home. Tara had a fit because she thinks you’re the only one who can do fractions. And I went to see a social worker because you wanted me to, and you know what we talked about?”

  “You saw a social worker because you wanted to. It was your decision.”

  “Do you know what we talked about?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” I paced around the bedroom in tight circles, then threw myself down on the bed.

  “You’re being a baby,” Jenny said. “Cut it out.”

  I had waited to tell Jonathan about the letter. I didn’t know how he would react. Now I handed it to him and watched him read it.

  “Your birth mother?”

  “So she claims.” Suddenly it occurred to me I was going on her word. It could have been a hoax. She might have been mistaken. I could ask her to provide ID—a lock of my infant hair, a piece of information only she could know. I could require her to take a blood test.

  “I have a feeling you’re going to meet her,” Jonathan said. He looked nervous, and that surprised me. I’d expected him to act indifferent, as he often does about family matters. Maybe the letter had awakened something in him. Maybe he was nervous because, although he wouldn’t admit it, he too wanted to meet his birth mother.

  “Do you want my advice?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t meet her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you have a life to live. You’ve got a girlfriend to love and her daughter to help take care of. You’ve got students to teach.”

  “I’m not quitting my job or leaving Jenny. I’m just agreeing to meet this woman. We’ll probably have coffee. It will be an hour out of my life.”

  “It will be a lot more than that. Trust me. It always is.”

  What did he know? Even if he was right, it was worth it, I told him, for me to find out about my past. It should have been worth it for him to find out about his also.

  “Well, it isn’t,” Jonathan said. “I’m not interested.”

  “We used to talk about our birth mothers all the time. Don’t tell me you weren’t curious.”

  “I was, but I’m not any longer.”

  “You’ll change your mind about this. Believe me.”

  I had no reason to think I was right. No reason other than the conviction itself, the belief that we were embarking on a joint venture.

  I called my parents and told them about the letter. They talked to me through different receivers.

  “Did you know about this?” I asked.

  “That she was going to contact you?” said my mother.

  “Right.”

  “We certainly didn’t,” my father said.

  “What do you remember about her?”

  “Please, Ben,” my mother said, “it happened a long time ago. Does it really make a difference?”

  “Of course it does.”

  “We were honest with you,” my father said. “You always knew you were adopted.”

  “I know that.”

  “Whatever we remember,” my mother said, “isn’t likely to be true any longer.”

  “All right, then. Just tell me if I’ve got the right person. I don’t want to go through with this if it’s a mistake.”

  “Who wrote the letter?” my mother asked.

  “Susan Green.”

  There was silence.

  “Well?”

  “Susan’s the right name,” said my father.

  “But not Green?”

  “Maybe she got married,” he said.

  My parents asked if they could get off the phone. They wanted to call me back a little later, once they’d had a chance to think.

  Only ten minutes passed before the phone rang again. They asked me to come home for the weekend.

  “This is my home,” I said. “I live in San Francisco.”

  “We don’t make very many requests of you,” my father said. “I’d insist if I could.” They needed to tell me something, he said, and it had to be in person.

  My parents were standing at the gate when I got off the plane. They looked awkward—erect and attentive with their hands behind their backs, as if they were posing for a portrait.

  I hugged them separately, then together. “Where’s the cardboard sign?” I asked. Once, years before, they’d stood like chauffeurs at the airport gate, holding a sign with my name scribbled across it.

  “We ran out of cardboard,” my father said. He laughed, and my mother did too. But I could tell they were nervous; they stood uncomfortably before me in the glaring airport light and shifted their weight from one foot to the other.

  During the car ride home, my parents told me several times that they loved me. I felt bad for them, my mother and father with their backs to me, repeating these words like a mantra.

  “I love you too,” I said.

  “Still?” said my mother.

  “Of course, still.” Cars passed in the other direction, headlights flat and illuminated like sets of yellow eyes. The Manhattan skyline shone above the water.

  “Will you call her ‘Mom’?” my mother asked.

  “No,” I said. “You’re my mother.”

  “She gave birth to you.”

  “You brought me up.”

  My mother leaned her head against the window.

  “You can’t change history,” my fa
ther said.

  “I’m not trying to,” I told him.

  We ate dinner by candlelight when we got home, my mother at one end of the table and my father at the other, sitting in an antique chair. He’d bought it at an auction many years before. It was delicate and expensive. When we were small, Jonathan and I hadn’t been allowed to sit on it.

  “I used to sit on that chair,” I told him now.

  “That’s okay.”

  “Jonathan and I both did. We took turns on it while you two weren’t watching.”

  “It was a long time ago,” he said.

  “We didn’t mean any harm by it.”

  “It’s just a chair.” He hit the antique hard across the arm. “Just a bunch of pieces of wood.”

  “I think we made too many rules when you were small,” my mother said. She patted her food with a spoon. “Ben, were you happy when you were young?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you happy now?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “Because we want you to be happy,” my father said. “That’s the only thing we care about.” His arms lay limp along the tablecloth; his hands were rough and hairy. Freshman year of college, I’d told him that I’d stopped being religious—that I didn’t cover my head with a yarmulke and that I ate nonkosher food and that I went to football games on the sabbath. He had said nothing, but he’d looked palsied and liquid-eyed. I realized that he was getting older, that someday he was going to die.

  “I remember when I first held you,” my mother said. “It was the happiest day of my life.”

  “It was my happiest day too,” said my father. When I was little I used to go into his study and watch him work; I liked just to be there while he marked his exams, while he penciled in tentative grades in Hebrew. I sat quietly beside him, and the way I imagined it, we were in something together, the two of us grading his students’ papers. I would read through an exam and judge it by its handwriting, then ask him if I’d given it the proper score.

  My mother rested her hand on my forearm. “Do you think Dad and I did all right by you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Because we did the best we could,” my father said. He looked out the window, and my mother did too.

  “You can meet your birth mother,” my father said.

  “Ben doesn’t need our permission,” said my mother.

  “I know. But I want him to realize that he has it if he wants it.”

  The next day was Friday. I stayed home with my mother and helped her prepare for the sabbath. We roasted chicken breasts and made matzo balls for the soup. I laid the challah and the wine cups on the dining room table. After taking a shower, I put on navy slacks and a white oxford shirt. When my father came home, he smelled of library books and after-shave; he held out flowers for my mother. Standing in the living room next to the avocado plants, I watched my parents kiss.

  After my mother lit the sabbath candles, my father blessed me. He rested his hands on my head and asked God to watch over me. As he did, I kept my eyes closed and my body erect. I tried to picture God, gray-bearded and munificent, protecting me from harm. I held my breath and just listened.

  Later that night we sat in the living room. My father read the TLS and my mother read The New Yorker, and I lay on my back on the old sofa and listened to the sounds of the night. At midnight, the lights went off. The lamps were on timers—it was forbidden to turn them on and off during the sabbath—and we sat in the dark for a long time until my eyes adjusted.

  “This isn’t bad,” my father said. His hand glided above him, taking in the darkness. “The sabbath. All these rules. You can’t tell me it’s a bad thing, Ben, this life.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It’s what you grew up with,” he said.

  “Please,” my mother whispered. “Leave Ben alone.”

  The next day I went to synagogue with my parents. I was called up to say the blessings on the Torah. I followed along as the reader chanted, as his fingers moved above the parchment. I felt the prayer shawl slung loosely over my shoulders, the tzitzis dangling by my waist.

  In the afternoon we walked through Riverside Park, past the monkey bars where children played. “New crop of kids,” my father said. He’d repeated that each spring when I was younger. But it touched me now in a way I hadn’t remembered. I thought of all the rituals that wove through our lives, the shalts and shalt nots and the phrases we repeated, the way we told ourselves that nothing much had changed.

  Above us the oak trees swayed. We passed through triangles of refracted light. “I had a dream the other night,” my mother said, “and the strange thing is, I wasn’t even in it. It felt as if I were watching my own life.”

  “I’ve felt that,” I said.

  “Ben,” she said, “where are you going?”

  “Now? I’m walking with the two of you in Riverside Park.”

  “I mean in general. What path are you taking?”

  “Please, Mom, don’t ask me these questions.”

  “Will you meet your birth mother?” my father asked. The veins in his forehead shone through the skin like tiny blue tracks.

  “Yes,” I told him.

  “We could come along when you meet her,” my mother said.

  “Please, Mom.” I wished she wouldn’t talk this way. I wished this didn’t upset her.

  “We’d be respectful. We’d be there to offer you moral support.”

  The shadows extended before us, blotches of evening on the speckled concrete. In less than an hour it would be dark. My father would recite the havdala service. We’d drink the wine and smell the spices; then a new week would begin. The next day I’d return to San Francisco. Already I could feel my parents’ unhappiness. I worried they thought that I’d never come home again, that things wouldn’t be the same between us.

  “Do you remember when you were a teenager,” my mother asked, “and you wouldn’t let Dad and me hold your hand?”

  I nodded.

  “It was just for a while.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay. That’s how teenagers are.” She looked at me sadly. For an instant I felt something strong between us, something basic and ineffable, almost in the blood.

  “I remember when you were small,” my father said. He stared up at the sky as if he were peering through a telescope, as if my former self were suspended there like a planet. “I’ve never told you this before, but there were times I’d wake up in the middle of the night and I’d go down the hall to check on you boys. I was afraid something had happened to you.”

  “We were afraid a lot,” my mother said.

  “One time,” said my father, “I saw a U-Haul parked outside the building, and for an instant I thought someone had come to take you.” He turned to face me. “You need to know something.” He glanced at my mother, then back at me. “You weren’t born Jewish.” He stood before me, awkward and penitent. He looked as rigid as a marionette.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jewish babies weren’t easy to find,” my mother said.

  “Next to impossible,” said my father.

  “So we converted you,” my mother said.

  My father nodded. “The rabbi dunked you in the mikve. The mohel performed the bris.”

  My mother shuddered. “It’s barbaric.”

  “It’s a commandment,” said my father.

  “You lied to me,” I said.

  “You’re Jewish,” my father said. “That’s what’s most important.”

  “You could have told me.”

  “A Jew is a Jew,” my father said. “A Jew is a Jew is a Jew.”

  I couldn’t fall asleep that night. My parents had lied to me. Now it seemed so obvious I felt foolish for not having realized it before. All my life, I’d thought my birth father’s name was Abraham. That was what my parents had told me. It was how I’d been called to the Torah, Benjamin the son of Abraham. I used to flip through the pages of the Manhat
tan phone book looking for men whose first name was Abraham. I wrote down their addresses and phone numbers, and kept the list in my desk drawer.

  But my birth father’s name wasn’t Abraham. That was how converts were called to the Torah. They were all sons of Abraham. Abraham, our forefather, the founder of Judaism. He’d broken his father’s idols; he was the first Jew.

  Jonathan was called to the Torah as the son of David. But maybe my parents had lied to him as well, only this time they’d constructed a more elaborate story, actually providing a made-up name. If Jonathan found his birth mother, we might learn we were related by blood: two Christian babies abandoned on the subway, as in a headline from the New York Post. Then the story I’d told him about The Guinness Book of World Records wouldn’t have been a lie after all.

  I might have been able to pass for a Jew. I didn’t have a pug nose or ruddy Irish cheeks; my hair had grown a bit darker over the years. But I didn’t look especially Jewish. My features were straight, and my neck was thick, like the necks of the football players I’d known at Yale. After basketball practice in high school, my teammates had joked about how I looked. “Hey, Jesus, pass the soap,” they said. I laughed with them and pretended not to notice. Had I simply not wanted to recognize the truth?

  Halfheartedly I considered searching for my birth mother back then. I asked my parents who she was. They said they’d tell me when I turned eighteen.

  On my eighteenth birthday, my parents threw me a surprise party. They invited my friends from school and summer camp, everyone I knew in a huge bowling alley. Rock music played on the speakers. The drinking age was still eighteen. Standing by the flickering pinball machines, my father bought me a can of Schaefer beer. Schaefer. The beer that sponsored the New York Mets. As I popped open the tab I looked at my father, who was also drinking a Schaefer, my father who didn’t like beer, who never before and never since drank a beer with his son.

  I understood even then what my parents were doing. They were hoping to drown me in the party, to make the day pass without my noticing that I could find out who my birth mother was.

  I said nothing about this. Not that day or the next. As the days passed and then the weeks, I wondered why knowing was important to me. I had parents who loved me. Couldn’t I control my curiosity when I realized how much this upset them?