Swimming Across the Hudson

by Joshua Henkin

  “It’s a language of great literature,” my father said. He and my mother spoke French to each other when they wanted to tell secrets. Jonathan and I listened carefully, hoping that if we concentrated we’d start to understand.

  But most of the time we pretended not to care.

  “I hate French,” Jonathan said.

  I, though, wasn’t sure I did. Our parents had met in France. The way I thought of it, if it weren’t for France everything would have been different. Jonathan and I wouldn’t have been born.

  “Of course we would have,” Jonathan said. “We just would have been adopted by someone else.”

  “Like who?”

  “Rich people. They can never give birth.”

  The only French person I liked was Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, whom I’d learned about in science class. Lamarck believed that acquired traits were passed on from one generation to the next. I planned to acquire my father’s traits and pass them on to my son.

  I sat at my father’s desk, wearing his glasses, studying the books before me. I examined him at dinner, trying to make the faces he made. When dinner was over, I stood in front of the mirror and stared at myself. My plan was working.

  “I’m starting to look like Dad,” I told Jonathan.

  “No you’re not.”

  “I’ve taught myself Yiddish,” I lied. “I know everything about political science.”

  I used to worry about my parents’ fifteen-year age difference, thinking that was the problem: my father had been too old to have children, so my parents had to adopt.

  “Mom and Dad never had sex,” Jonathan said.

  “Yes they did.” I was nine. I understood these things.

  “Have you ever seen them?”

  I hadn’t, I admitted. I’d never even seen them naked.

  We’d learned in school about declining sperm counts, all those cells like worms our teacher chalked across the board. But once, in the supermarket checkout line, I read about a ninety-five-year-old who had fathered sextuplets and whose wife was pregnant again.

  “A ninety-five-year-old can’t father sextuplets,” my mother said. “You’re lucky at ninety-five to even be alive.”

  “It happened,” I said.

  “Then we’d have heard about it. It would have been in The New York Times.”

  “It happened in Brazil.”

  At night I lay in bed and worried about my father. I was sure he was the reason my mother couldn’t give birth. I told her what I thought.

  “He wasn’t the reason.”

  “Then who was?”

  “No one. Sometimes things happen for no reason at all.”

  But nothing just happened. Maybe my father had done something wrong. What if I couldn’t have children?

  It was possible my wife hadn’t been born yet. If I was fifteen years older, she wasn’t even a cell under a microscope.

  “My wife doesn’t exist,” I told my father.

  “There’s no way of knowing that,” he said.

  He taught Jonathan and me that every person has a bashert, his missing half, the person God chooses for him to marry. In class we learned about atoms and subatoms. Our science teacher liked to explode things; she stood before us in a long white coat. Her face was white too, covered with chalk dust. She drew atoms on the blackboard, huge ovals like flying saucers, particles colliding in the electron field.

  That was how I saw the world, millions of people circling one another. It was coincidence whom you met and whom you didn’t. I thought about what my father had said, how we each had a bashert, how God had His plan.

  I didn’t yet like girls, didn’t want to have a girlfriend, but still I wondered about my bashert. At dinner my father would quiz us on geography. He’d ask us the capitals of all fifty states. He’d have us locate Timbuktu on an unmarked map. On the wall above my desk hung a huge map of China. What would I do if my bashert lived in China? I saw my bashert and me without a word in common, forced to wed by God’s command.

  “It’s not a command,” my mother said.

  “Then what is it?”

  “Think of it as a prediction. God is simply placing a bet.”

  Still, I believed I had a bashert. Every morning, I said a prayer that she be someone I loved, someone I could spend a life with. I was compassionate, my mother said. I gave money to the beggars on Broadway. There was a boy in my class who had cerebral palsy; during recess, I pushed him in his wheelchair while my friends played dodgeball in the gym.

  I was doing a mitzvah, my father said. God would reward me in the world to come.

  But I was concerned about this world. Rabbi Appelfeld had told us that God tests people with inner strength. I hoped I didn’t have inner strength. I imagined myself with a wife like that boy, someone to wheel about and feel sorry for.

  Jonathan and I said we’d travel the world, but mostly we wanted to be like our father, who’d traveled the world in uniform, fighting the Germans in World War II. He was a professor of political science; he never went to work without a jacket and a tie. But years before, he’d been someone else. He’d spent a thousand nights inside army barracks. He went for weeks with little food or sleep, keeping himself sane by reciting poetry. He helped the other soldiers compose letters to their girlfriends, mud-stained declarations of love and honor, carefully honed sentences in fountain pen. He was a poet himself, his army mates thought.

  Unarmed, he’d come upon a battalion of Germans. His German was rusty, but he managed to communicate, getting the Germans to lay down their weapons.

  “How did you do that?” I asked him once.

  “Persuasion,” he said. “It was 1944, and the war was almost over. It was clear we were going to win. I told the Germans the Senegalese were coming. The Senegalese were rumored not to take prisoners.”

  “Were the Senegalese coming?”

  “It was possible. I wasn’t sure.”

  I liked hearing him tell stories about the war, liked holding the objects he’d captured. He had a pair of German field binoculars so powerful that when we used them at Shea Stadium we could see the color of the batters’ eyes. He had a gray wool blanket with German writing across it. Sometimes at night, lying beneath that blanket, I tried to picture him when he was young.

  Was this why I feared I would die, knowing my father could have been killed in World War II and everything that followed would have been different?

  Was it simply that I was adopted?

  I imagined that my birth mother had died. I persuaded Jonathan that his birth mother had died too. “They died in childbirth,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Telepathy. I have ESP.”

  In school we’d learned about our foremother Rachel, who for years had been unable to bear a child and who was buried by the roadside on the way to Bethlehem after giving birth to Benjamin. “Benjamin killed Rachel,” I said.

  “No he didn’t.”

  “We killed our birth mothers too.”

  I thought about this on Yom Kippur, the year I was ten, crying out to God and hoping not to die. In synagogue we read a list of ways to die—plague, famine, pestilence, fire—deaths too awful even to think about. A family down the block from us had been killed in a fire, so every week that year when the sabbath was over I held the havdala candle lit beneath the smoke alarm to make sure the battery was still working.

  “You’re being silly,” my mother said.

  “I’m protecting the family.” I stood on a stool, holding the candle high above me, and when the alarm began to blare, I told Jonathan that we were safe for another week, that God would protect us until the next sabbath.

  “God doesn’t protect us,” my mother said. “The smoke alarm does.”

  “You don’t know anything,” I told her.

  I kept my door open when I went to sleep at night, hoping to hear the smoke alarm. I’d be like my father in World War II, guarding the battalion from death and Hitler, reciting poetry.

  “I hate poetry
,” Jonathan said after school one day.

  “Poetry kept Dad sane during the war.”

  “So what?”

  “So it’s important.” I thought about this when I went to bed that night. Lying beneath the blanket my father had captured, I couldn’t fall asleep. I didn’t want to fight in a war; I lacked my father’s courage.

  “I don’t want to die,” I told Jonathan the next day. “I don’t want to get flown back in a body bag.”

  “They’ve got nuclear weapons now. If you die in a war, you’ll get blown to pieces. There won’t be a body to fly back.”

  I imagined my parents during World War II. What was my mother thinking while my father was in combat? How could she have known the danger he faced, this girl who wasn’t yet a teenager, who lay in bed at night listening to the radio for news from the battlefront, who saved her allowance to buy provisions for the soldiers? Maybe those provisions reached my father. I saw him crouched in his foxhole, eating a can of beans my mother had sent him, grateful for her kindness.

  For a while I thought he’d been injured in the war—and that was why my parents couldn’t have children.

  “Maybe Dad got his balls blown off,” I told Jonathan.

  “He didn’t get his balls blown off.”

  “Maybe he has some kind of disease.” I read about diseases I’d never heard of, and convinced myself I had them. “I have Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

  “No you don’t,” Jonathan said. “Only Lou Gehrig had that disease. That’s why they named it after him.”

  “Lots of people have Lou Gehrig’s disease. Thousands of people in the United States.”

  People with Lou Gehrig’s disease had trouble swallowing, so in fifth grade I started eating my food without chewing it, in the hope that with practice I could improve my swallowing.

  “You’re a healthy boy,” my mother said. “People with Lou Gehrig’s disease are much older than you.”

  I didn’t believe her. I read about rare neurological conditions, about bacteria-carrying insects, and viruses that existed only in the jungle. And I continued to eat without chewing.

  “You’ll choke,” Jonathan said. “That’s what you’ll die of—asphyxiation.”

  He wasn’t worried about disease, but he was happy to pretend he wasn’t well, if only so we could be a team.

  “I have whooping cough,” I said. I stood before my mother and whooped as I coughed.

  “I have the mumps,” said Jonathan.

  We knew about the mumps from The Columbia Medical Encyclopedia. People who had the mumps sometimes lost their hearing, so Jonathan pretended he was deaf. “I have to go to special mumps school,” he said.

  “I have cervical cancer,” I said. Then I felt bad, because my grandmother had died of cervical cancer; now she was in heaven, looking down at us.

  “Only girls get cervical cancer,” Jonathan said.

  For months after that he pretended I was a girl. “You have breast cancer,” he said.

  “No I don’t.”

  “You need to go to a gynecologist.”

  Mostly we pretended we were sick so my parents would let us stay home from school. They rarely believed us, though. As a boy, my father had once had a subnormal fever; he placed the thermometer on top of the radiator so that it would look as though his temperature had risen and he could go to school. Colds went away, he reminded us. Mind over matter.

  In Riverside Park he played baseball with us, and explained the physics of a swing and how a pitcher could achieve maximum velocity.

  “Step into the ball,” he said. “Think about physics.”

  But I wasn’t interested in physics. I was interested in playing for the New York Mets. In the park, as the sun began to set and the pigeons fluttered above us while my father hit us grounders, I could smell beer and peanuts. I pretended I was Tommie Agee and my father, in left field, was Cleon Jones. My mother waved to us from the balcony of our apartment. She looked like a fan in the bleachers. I pictured the whole neighborhood out on the balconies, everyone’s mother rooting me on.

  Over dinner, sweaty and spent, my father taught us how to chant from the Torah. That was our deal. He played baseball with us, and in return we agreed to learn the notes. My father’s brother Marvin, who lived in Chicago, was the best Torah chanter my father had ever heard. He was the champion Torah chanter of the Windy City.

  “There are no champion Torah chanters,” Jonathan said.

  “He’s my champion,” said my father.

  We had potential, he said. We had good voices and good minds; with a little practice we’d chant as well as Uncle Marvin.

  “Who cares?” said Jonathan.

  “I do,” I said. Now I felt bad, because Jonathan and I were supposed to be in this together. But I did care. I wanted to be like Tommie Agee. I’d be the first Jewish center fielder the Mets had ever had, the only player who could chant from the Torah. I’d be older but the same, gazing up at the planes as they dipped toward La Guardia, and at the stands where my parents would be cheering.

  I thought of my father growing up on the Lower East Side, where he’d played stickball on the streets. His family had come from White Russia, eleven consecutive generations of Eastern European rabbis. As a child, he’d walked from kosher butcher to kosher butcher along Essex Street, past shops that sold mezuzahs and tefillin. At home he spoke Yiddish, on the streets English. On Passover, he said, you couldn’t find bread—not a crumb in any store. He had a fantasy in which the president of the United States was Jewish and all the hot dogs at Yankee Stadium were strictly kosher.

  This was my fantasy: I’d be the starting center fielder on the New York Mets, and at the peak of my career I’d boycott Shea Stadium. I’d boycott every stadium in major-league baseball until they all sold kosher hot dogs.

  Then I thought of Roberto Clemente, who had died in a plane crash on a charity mission. What was the point of keeping kosher if God could let that happen? Was this the moment that I started to doubt God?

  In ninth grade, Jonathan and I discovered girls. We each had a girlfriend, and sometimes the four of us went bowling together or stopped at Carvel to eat ice cream and play pinball, breaking up into teams.

  “We could play couple against couple,” Jonathan said.

  “Or brothers against nonbrothers,” I suggested.

  Sometimes after school I went to the movies with my girlfriend. As the images flashed across the screen I dropped Raisinets into her open mouth and let her lick my fingers. I took her to The Deer Hunter, and when the scary scenes came on I rested my hand against her thigh until, gently but firmly, she removed it.

  One time Jonathan met me when the movie was over. He had spent the afternoon at his girlfriend’s apartment listening to Bruce Springsteen. Jonathan liked the line from “Born to Run”—“Strap your hands across my engines”—but he and his girlfriend had to leave the door open whenever they were in her bedroom alone.

  “Can you believe it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Springsteen never had rules like that.”

  We knew the words to all of Springsteen’s songs. We cut out articles about him. He was from New Jersey, where everyone had sex. We couldn’t imagine he had any rules at all, or that he even had parents.

  For months and months we listened to him. We played his music until the vinyl got scratched and his voice grew even raspier than it actually was. We sat in the living room listening to him, staring across the Hudson at New Jersey.

  “We’ll swim there,” I said.

  Jonathan agreed.

  We pressed our noses against the window. Our breath came back to us, frosty against the glass, in the puckered-up shape of our mouths. Across the river were refineries. Behind them, we imagined, New Jersey girls were waiting, saving themselves for the two of us.

  At work, things were changing. There, especially, I found myself thinking about Susan. I’d lecture about family life in colonial America, and I’d think, I too have a family. I saw myself in
everyone and everyone in me.

  I began to feel great tenderness for children. Not only adopted ones, but children of all kinds. I smiled at children on the streets, expecting them to see me as a kindred soul, a male Mary Poppins. When I overheard them arguing with their parents, I instinctively assumed they were right. Adults were impatient, I thought. I failed to recognize that I was an adult and often impatient with Tara.

  I sentimentalized my students and exaggerated my importance in their lives. Sixteen and seventeen years old, juniors in high school, they seemed fragile to me, as if they were toddlers and I was their parent, when in fact they were on the cusp of adulthood, many of them sexually active, the girls full-figured, the boys starting to sprout mustaches, several of them as tall as I was and able to compete with me on the basketball court.

  At the same time, I was having a crisis of confidence. What good, I wondered, was American history? Even if it did some good, how much would my students remember in a year? Would they even remember me? I knew that feeling of running into an ex-student and watching him or her grope for my name. I’d forgotten many of my own teachers.

  I was cramming my students with facts. But I wasn’t sure any longer what purpose these facts served. I knew a lot of facts myself. Evenings, I played along with Jeopardy! and got most of the answers right, but this didn’t do me any good. I wasn’t any less confused than before. I read a novel a week; I actually kept a list of the books I’d read. But even if I lived to be eighty-five, I would read fewer than three thousand more books. That wasn’t much when you considered what was out there. What would I have to show for myself?

  I wanted to make a difference in my students’ lives. I can hear myself saying this, almost coaching myself—“Ben, you need to make a difference in their lives”—a notion so self-serious it makes me cringe, but I felt it quite strongly. In my mind, my status had been raised: history teacher, guru, personal savior. Years from now, my students would come back and tell me I’d changed their lives. But how? By teaching them about the Monroe Doctrine?

  So I tried to turn my classes into something new. In one section of American history, I strayed from the syllabus and became confessional with the students. I stopped class early one afternoon and told them that history needed to be grounded in the present, that we’d been treating old laws simply as old laws and that these laws were embedded in a context.