I could have told her that I loved her and that I didn’t. Why had she brought me into this world? Why had she left me, and why had she waited? Why, right now, had she finally come back, this woman who was sixteen years older than I was, who sat before me after all her troubles and looked young enough to be my sister?
“Mrs. Green—”
“Please, Ben. Susan.”
“Susan.”
“Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not thinking anything right now.”
“Then tell me the first thing that comes to your mind.”
So I told her that, when we were children, Jonathan would take a picture of me every month. “I used to line up the pictures,” I said. “I was trying to figure out the person I was becoming. I wanted to pinpoint the moment I changed.”
“I like the person you’ve become.”
“But you don’t know me.”
“I want to get to know you.”
I wanted to get to know her also. But what if she tried to take over my life? What would Jenny think—Jenny who had encouraged me to meet her but who hoped that, in doing so, I’d move on? I had no idea how you got to know someone when you were trying so hard to do just that. You could fail from all the effort.
Perhaps I’d grow bored with her. Or maybe she’d grow bored with me. If we’d met under different circumstances, we might not have had anything to talk about. What could be worse than being bored by your own birth mother?
“How did you find me?” I finally asked.
“I tracked you down.”
“Right, but how?”
She cupped her hand in front of her face as though she were about to tell me a secret. But I knew no one in the restaurant besides her.
“I hired a private detective,” she said.
“To follow me?”
“To find out where you were.”
“Susan.” Had someone been following me to and from school? Had this person been peeping through the windows? I was angry with Susan, although at the same time I was touched that she’d tried so hard to find me.
“It was the only way to contact you,” she said. “For a while when you were small I was living in New Jersey, and I used to take the bus across the George Washington Bridge and come down to Riverside Park and watch you. But then I moved to Indiana.”
“You used to watch me?”
“I was always careful. No one knew who I was.”
I used to see strangers in Riverside Park, idle men and women sitting on the benches, feeding bread crumbs to the pigeons. One of those strangers might have been Susan. My parents had warned me not to talk to strangers. I’d heeded their warnings with such diligence and fear that even when I was asked what time it was I looked down at the pavement and kept walking. Children could be kidnapped, just like Patty Hearst. Had Susan thought of kidnapping me? I’d read about birth parents who changed their minds and tried to retrieve their children.
“Is the detective still following me?”
“He found you,” she said. “I don’t need him anymore.” She stared down at her lap. “I’m sorry.”
She sounded sincere. I didn’t know what to do other than to tell her I forgave her.
“A week ago,” I said, “I found out you weren’t Jewish.”
“You thought I was?”
“It’s what my parents told me. I believed it all my life.”
“Your parents don’t approve of me, do they?” She’d left a tiny slice of turkey on her plate, pale and milky as a sliver of moon.
“Why would they disapprove of you? You’re the person who brought me into the world.”
“That’s true.” She seemed happy to hear me say this.
She told me that her ancestors had come from Scotland, and I in turn told her about my Jewish heritage.
“I stopped being religious in college,” I said. “But when I was a kid, I thought I’d be a baseball player in the spring and summer, and a rabbi the rest of the year.”
Then I told her about Jonathan, Jenny, and Tara.
“I know about them,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You already mentioned your brother.”
“And Jenny and Tara?”
She seemed to regret having brought this up.
“Your detective?”
She nodded.
“Susan—”
“I’m sorry. But I would like to meet them.”
I wanted her to meet them too, but I wasn’t pleased that she already knew about them. I considered laying down some ground rules. We’d meet only so often and in certain locations; we’d meet on my terms or we wouldn’t meet at all. But I couldn’t get myself to do this. I kept thinking of myself reversing our roles, treating Susan as if she were my child: This much TV, be home by midnight, don’t dye your hair green, no beer in the house.
“Why did you track me down?” I asked.
“It seemed time. When your child dies, it gets you thinking.”
“I’m sorry.” I’d forgotten that her son had died. I wanted to tell her I’d do all right by her; I’d try not to let her down.
“There are articles about this. When a child dies, the sort of strain it puts on a marriage.”
Was she talking about her own marriage?
“Another reason I’ve flown here is that I make earrings, and some stores in San Francisco want to sell my work.”
“Is something wrong with your marriage?” I asked.
“My husband and I are on a trial separation.” She looked embarrassed. “I’m not good at much, am I?”
“Of course you are.”
“Like what?”
“You just told me about your earrings. You live in Indiana, and stores in San Francisco want to sell your work. You must be good at that.”
“But important things.”
“That’s an important thing.”
“Is your work important to you?”
“Sure it is.” I told her I was a schoolteacher.
She seemed about to say she knew this as well.
“What happened after I was born?” I asked.
“I was sad for a long time. I was in eleventh grade when I got pregnant with you, and when I started to show I dropped out of school. You almost had to then. Times were different.”
“And afterward? Did you go back?”
“I got my GED. I’d always planned to graduate from college, but things didn’t work out that way. I spent a year in junior college and a year in secretarial school. Then I met my husband, and we moved to Indiana for his work. He’s a manager at a bank, and he got me a job there. I’ve been able to save some money.”
She got up, as if she’d seen someone she knew. But then her gaze dropped and she simply stood still. She began to search through her pocketbook. “Ben, I want to have a picture of us.” She removed a Polaroid camera from her pocketbook.
My school was on the other side of town. That was why I’d met Susan on Telegraph Avenue—so I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew. I’m a private person, but it was more than that. It was as if I didn’t want there to be a record; I could pretend that this lunch hadn’t taken place. No one cared about our reunion. Our pictures wouldn’t show up in the National Enquirer. Still, I worried. Meeting my birth mother and not meeting her. This was the story of my life. One foot in and one foot out, never able to commit myself.
But before I had a chance to object, Susan had approached the man at the next table and asked him to take our picture. We stood behind my seat; Susan had her arm around me. Aside from our handshake, this was the first time we’d touched.
“Smile,” the man said. He pressed the shutter button, and the photograph shot out. He pressed the button again.
We watched the photographs develop. Susan handed me one and kept the other. I felt tears in my eyes. Seeing that picture of Susan and me, I was overcome by grief for everything I’d lost, for all that hadn’t happened between us.
I turned away from her and wiped
my face.
When I turned back, she was staring at the photo. “Ben.” Her voice had grown softer. A line of mascara dripped down her cheek. “Do you think we look alike?”
“The two of us? We have the same color hair.” I grabbed a lock of mine as if to demonstrate, as if I were speaking a foreign language. “Other than that, I don’t think we do.” All my life, I’d imagined that I looked like other people, that I had siblings and parents, carbon copies of myself somewhere on this earth, if only I could find them. I simply didn’t think I looked like Susan. I would have told her if I did.
“Well, I think we do. What about genetics? Don’t you ever wonder how much in life is determined?”
“In college I wrote a paper about the paradox of free will.”
“I’m not talking about that. We share the same blood.”
“I know.”
“Half your genes come from me.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank me what?”
“Thank you for giving them to me.”
I wanted more than anything to be patient with her, to treat her without malice or irony. But I wasn’t responding well to her pressure. I wished I lived thousands of years ago, a man in a loincloth roaming the fields who did nothing more complicated than pray for rain.
“They’ve done these studies of identical twins,” she said. “The babies are separated at birth and raised in different homes, but they grow up to be extremely similar. One twin goes to the bathroom and flushes the toilet twice. The other twin lives hundreds of miles away, but when he goes to the bathroom he does the same.”
“So what?”
“Two flushes. Tell me that’s a coincidence.” Her blouse hung open at her neck; freckles dotted her skin, brown and dense. “I gave birth to you. You can’t change that.”
“I’m not trying to.” I didn’t know what she wanted from me. To acknowledge that without her I wouldn’t be alive?
She rested her hands on the table. Her knee brushed against mine. I flinched.
“Will you tell me about my birth father?” I asked.
“He was my high school boyfriend. I haven’t seen him in more than thirty years.”
“What’s his name?”
“What difference does it make?”
We were quiet now. We had run out of things to say. How was that possible? We had whole lives to reconstruct. But an hour had passed, and already I didn’t know what else to talk about.
Susan got up and walked to the register. She stood at the door, a shimmering figure in the early-afternoon light.
When she came back, she was holding a rose. “For you,” she said. She stuck out her hand. The flower’s head was pink and bent; its petals were hunched like someone in prayer.
Hesitantly, I reached out to take it. “Thank you.”
For a moment she stood there gripping the stem, her fingers firmly wrapped around mine. For a moment I let her hold my hand.
We stood outside the restaurant, watching students walk past. We didn’t know what to do. It had been a date. In a way it felt like a one-night stand. Inside, it had been as though no one else were with us; the other patrons had receded. But now, amid the cars and the wave of bookbags, we saw each other in the harsh light. There was a world staring back at us. Perhaps that was why we didn’t make plans to see each other again. Maybe we just panicked.
I reached out to shake Susan’s hand. “It was good to meet you.”
“It was good to meet you too.”
We walked in opposite directions. When I turned around a few seconds later, I wasn’t able to find her.
There were so many questions I’d forgotten to ask her. How much longer would she be here? Was she staying at a hotel, or had she rented an apartment? I hadn’t even gotten her phone number. She’d offered to go out for Ethiopian food the next week, so the odds were good that I’d see her again. But I couldn’t be sure. I wanted to continue a relationship like this, Susan wishing to spend time with me and me resisting, all the while hoping she’d continue to call.
I was exhausted when I got home. “I’m drained,” I told Jenny. “It feels as if I did a thousand push-ups.”
“What was she like?”
“She was a lot of different things.” But I couldn’t come up with even one way to describe her. The whole lunch was a haze; I had no idea who she was.
I showed Jenny the photograph of us.
She gasped.
“What?”
“She looks so young.”
“She’s only sixteen years older than I am. When my mother was her age I was still in high school.”
“She’s pretty,” Jenny said.
“You think so?”
“Very.”
I supposed she was. It hadn’t occurred to me to think of her as pretty or not pretty. She had component parts: green eyes, wide face, dark skin, straight nose; she was this, and I was that. But the whole of her, the full image, escaped me even now as I stared at her photograph.
“Do you think I look like her?”
“Not really,” Jenny said. “You’re pretty too, but you look different.”
I was disappointed to hear Jenny say this. I’d been hoping she’d see something I hadn’t noticed.
“Did you like her?” she asked.
“Mostly it felt like she was real. That’s the hardest thing—giving up your fantasies. I used to think my birth mother was an Arabian princess and a brilliant researcher at the NIH. Not one or the other, but both.”
“Ben—what was she like?”
“She was a little pushy, I guess. But I couldn’t have expected her to be calm.”
I tried to sum up the meal for Jenny, yet everything I said felt inadequate.
“How long will she be here?”
“I don’t know. I was meaning to ask her, but I forgot. I’m starting to think this is just the beginning.”
“Of what?”
“I thought this would be like opening a curtain—I’d see what was behind it, and that would be that. But you open the curtain, and there’s another one behind it. And another and another.”
Jenny said nothing.
“Susan makes earrings,” I said. “That’s part of the reason she’s here. Because of me, of course, but also because some stores in San Francisco want to sell her work.”
“She’s an artist?”
I nodded. “I’m embarrassed to say this, but it made a difference to me. It made her seem more substantial.”
I wrote my parents, wanting to tell them what had happened, as if failing to do so would be a betrayal. I tried to assume a breezy tone—both casual and reassuring.
Dear Mom and Dad,
I had lunch with my birth mother today. We had a nice time. She doesn’t look like me—at least I don’t think so. Do you think I look like you? They say that when you live with someone long enough you begin to resemble them. Some people even start to look like their pets. I’m glad things weren’t reversed—that I wasn’t raised by Susan and meeting you two for the first time. Think of all the catching up we’d have to do.
The weather’s warm here. That’s one of the nice things about California. I’ve almost forgotten what snow looks like. Remember the story you once told me, Mom? How the first time you saw snow you thought it was sugar piled on the cars?
Teaching is going pretty well. My students think I ask them to memorize too much, but Jonathan tells me they’ll be grateful for this someday. Short-term memory goes first, he says, but his patients recall a lot from their childhoods. So I can be confident that, sixty years from now, my students will be able to recite the Gettysburg Address. Remember what we learned in “Ethics of the Fathers,” Dad? How when a child learns, it’s like ink written on new paper, but when an old person learns, it’s like ink written on paper that’s been erased?
Jenny’s doing well. She continues to keep long hours, working hard to defend people in trouble. I think you both would be proud of her. Whoever said that our generation is selfish—that we
have no interest in politics and just sit around watching MTV—hasn’t met Jenny. I hope you’ll get to know her better and recognize what I see in her.
Tara is good too. We get along most of the time, although she thinks I know nothing about fractions.
I love you, Mom and Dad. I hope you’re doing well.
Love,
Ben
I went to Jonathan’s house to tell him I hadn’t been born Jewish. I’d waited long enough. My news would come across as something serious, something I’d contemplated for a while.
But he didn’t seem interested or surprised.
“Did you know?” I asked.
“I suspected it. What were the chances your father’s real name was Abraham?”
“There are lots of Jewish Abrahams.”
“Like who?”
“Abe Beame, for one.” We used to pretend that Abe Beame was my father. Mayor Beame, who’d brought New York City to the brink of bankruptcy. We’d been in sixth grade when that had happened. In the next Democratic primary for mayor, we handed out leaflets for Mario Cuomo before he lost in the run-off to Ed Koch.
“If it’s any consolation,” Jonathan said, “I’ll give you my Jewish birth. It’s more important to you.”
“How do you even know you were born Jewish?”
“Because my birth father’s name is David.”
“Mom and Dad might have made it up.”
“Whatever. Either they did or they didn’t. It doesn’t make a difference to me.”
I didn’t know how he could say that.
I told him I’d met my birth mother that day. I did my best to describe what had happened, but again the words seemed inadequate.
“Tell me something,” he said. “Do you think she had the right to come looking for you?”
The right? What did this have to do with rights? He was adopted too; he should have understood. We weren’t dealing with abstractions. “Of course she did.”
“Our mothers gave us up at birth, Ben. I can’t blame them. I don’t know what the circumstances were. But a person has to live with the consequences of her decision. You can’t go bursting into someone’s life.”
“What about us? If we made the first move and searched for our birth mothers, would we have the right to find them?”
Swimming Across the Hudson Page 6
