Swimming Across the Hudson

by Joshua Henkin

  “Do you like San Francisco?”

  “Oh. Yes. But I’ve lived here for a while.”

  Susan took another bite. But no sooner had she done that than she put her bagel down again, seeming to want to speak. It was as if she hadn’t yet learned how to coordinate these activities. I pictured her epiglottis, flipping back and forth as she ate and talked, victim of her indecision, trying to keep up with her brain.

  “You’re Ben’s brother.” She appeared simply to be musing, talking to herself as much as to anyone else. Over her shoulder, in a big plastic box attached to the counter, mini-hamantaschen were arranged in piles: prune, apricot, and cherry; they looked like pieces of candy. On the wall opposite the counter were photographs of Noah and of his parents. There were pictures of New Yorkers protesting the Brooklyn Dodgers’ move to L.A. and of David Ben-Gurion talking with Albert Einstein. There were handwritten letters from satisfied customers, including one from somebody who had been born in Eastern Europe and grown up in New York City, and who said Noah’s bagels compared favorably with any other bagels in the world. I imagined a bagel store in Indiana, golden-haired farm kids smiling pleasantly at you as they tossed frozen Lender’s into the microwave.

  “You’re adopted also,” Susan said to Jonathan. This came out like an announcement.

  Jonathan looked amused. “That’s right.”

  This too provoked silence.

  Periodically, Jenny and Jonathan looked at Susan. They were curious about her, glad enough to be here, I could tell—even my brother, who’d pretended that having to come to brunch had been an imposition on him. But they didn’t say anything to Susan. I felt like a talk-show host, with the urge to introduce her to the audience. This is my birth mother, folks—what do you think?

  “I’m sorry,” Susan told them. “The last thing I want is to make everyone uncomfortable.”

  “It’s just an unusual situation,” I said. “I mean, you and me being related, Susan, but not really. And Jonathan and me also being related but not really, but in the opposite way that you and I are. It’s kind of like Jack Sprat.”

  Everyone stared at me perplexedly.

  “You know,” I said. “Jack Sprat and his wife. One of them ate fat and the other ate lean. But together, they ate everything—they covered all the bases.” I stared at my plate with the confusion of someone who had never seen a bagel before. “Then there’s me and Jenny. We’re not even related at all.”

  Now Susan came to my rescue. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” she told the three of them.

  “Like what?” Jonathan asked. Was he pleased to hear this, or did he wish that I hadn’t talked about him with someone he considered a stranger? The fact was, I hadn’t said much about him or Jenny; my conversations with Susan had focused mostly on us. But I had told her that Jonathan was gay. Was that what she was referring to? I hadn’t prepared anyone for what would happen today. I should have done a better job of prompting them.

  Susan spoke to Jonathan. “I’ve actually seen you several times before.”

  “You have?”

  She told him what she’d told me—that she’d grown up in New Jersey, and that when we were children she used to ride across the bridge and watch the two of us play in Riverside Park.

  “You spied on us?” Jonathan glared at me, as if I were implicated in what Susan had done.

  “I wasn’t spying.” Susan seemed to regret having brought this up. “I just wanted to watch Ben play.”

  Susan turned to Jenny. “Ben tells me you’re a public defender. And that you’ve just gotten a rape case.”

  “Mom’s feeling conflicted about rape,” Tara said. She appeared simply to be mouthing the words, amused to hear the phrase—Mom’s feeling conflicted—come out, as if she were mimicking something she’d read.

  “I’m not feeling conflicted about rape,” Jenny said. “When it comes to rape, there’s nothing to feel conflicted about.”

  “She’s feeling conflicted about defending a rapist.”

  “Yes,” Jenny said. “Well. . .”

  Susan listed some things she’d heard about the three of them. She knew that Jonathan was a doctor and that Jenny had gone to U.C. Berkeley and Stanford Law School. She mentioned Tara’s pottery lessons. These were trivial facts, but they made it appear that Susan was showing off. In a way she was. I was beginning to understand that she liked to inform you she knew about you. That had been one of the purposes of her hiring a private detective—to fluster me. Now she was flustering Jonathan and Jenny as well.

  She had another purpose, I suspected. She hoped that by listing all the things she knew, she might get Jenny and Jonathan to reciprocate. She wanted to determine what they knew about her. Was she an important part of my life? Was I talking about her with them? Rattled by her list of facts, Jonathan and Jenny didn’t tell her much. They ate their bagels in relative silence.

  Finally Jenny spoke. “It must have been hard having a baby at sixteen.”

  Susan looked surprised.

  “I had Tara at twenty-one,” Jenny said. “It’s not sixteen, but I was still just a kid.”

  “It was my own fault,” Susan said. “I’m the one who got pregnant.”

  “Maybe so. But I assume someone else was involved. You’re the one who had to live with the consequences.”

  “Except I didn’t. I gave Ben up.” Susan looked sadly at Tara. I guessed she was imagining me at that age, wondering what her life would have been like if she’d kept me.

  “I was five years older than you were,” Jenny said. “That makes all the difference in the world. I had a husband for a while. I was practically done with college.”

  “Still,” Susan said. “Maybe—” But she didn’t finish her thought. She said nothing more, and neither did anyone else. We all sat quietly eating.

  When we got home, I felt disappointed, as if I’d promised a good time and hadn’t delivered, as if everything Susan had said reflected poorly on me.

  “That was your birth mother?” Tara said. “The person you’ve been flipping out over?”

  “I haven’t been flipping out over her.” I folded my arms across my chest.

  “You’ve been turning your life upside down. That’s what Mom says, and I agree.”

  “Didn’t you like Susan?”

  “She was all right. She could have been bigger or smarter or something.”

  I thought of telling Tara that when I’d met Susan I too had been disappointed by how ordinary she’d seemed. But I didn’t see the point of it. “Everyone was tense. You might like her more next time.”

  We were in Tara’s bedroom. The shades were drawn, and the light from the fish tank cast the room in the blue hues of an aquarium. Facedown on Tara’s bed was a copy of Little Women. “I liked that book,” I said, “but I didn’t read it until I was in high school. You’re a lot more advanced than I was. A lot smarter.” She lay down on her bed and started to read. “Tell me something,” I said, “was it wrong of me to ask you to come along today?”

  “It wasn’t wrong . . .”

  “But?”

  “Susan didn’t even talk to me.”

  “We were all nervous. You probably handled it better than we did.”

  “Well, I don’t want to see her again.”

  My father had known for almost a year that he was coming to lecture at U.C. Berkeley. But only in the last month had my mother decided to join him. I suspected this had to do with Susan’s arrival. My mother was looking for an excuse to visit.

  My parents arrived in San Francisco on a Thursday night. Jonathan was on call, so I greeted them alone at the airport.

  “It’s great to be here,” my mother said.

  I smiled at her and took her in my arms, pressing her tightly against me.

  My father stepped forward and kissed me on the cheek. “You look good, Ben.”

  “Thanks, Dad. You do too.”

  He ran his fingers through my hair, then kissed me again, this time on the other cheek—two k
isses, the way the French did.

  My mother wheeled a suitcase across the floor and my father clutched his briefcase. He carried it with him wherever he went. Years before, I’d imagined he purveyed secret information—my father the spy, the carrier of some code, everywhere toting his secrets.

  “Dad and I flew together,” my mother said. They’d flown separately when Jonathan and I were children, so that if one of them was killed in a crash the other could take care of us. For years I’d worried that this would happen; I wasn’t sure which parent I hoped would survive.

  “The whole thing was silly,” my father said now.

  “I was worried about the boys,” said my mother.

  “I was too. But if we really were worried, we should have taken separate taxis and flown together. The cab ride’s the most dangerous part of the trip.”

  “Everything worked out in the end.”

  “That’s true.” I heard contrition in my father’s voice, felt his desire to protect Jonathan and me. We walked quietly through the airport corridors, out to where my car was parked.

  The next day, Jonathan took my father on his patient rounds. I had no classes after lunch, so my mother and I visited Jenny at work.

  Jenny and my mother traded statistics about the death penalty—specifically about how it was racially biased. If the murder victim was white, Jenny said, the suspect was more likely to be sentenced to death. All else being equal, black defendants received the death penalty at higher rates than whites did.

  “I know,” my mother said. “You don’t even have to worry about the Eighth Amendment. It’s a problem already with the Fourteenth Amendment.” Their interaction was so casual a stranger might have thought I was the boyfriend and they were mother and daughter.

  As if further to establish her authority, my mother gave a breakdown of Supreme Court opinions. Only Justices Brennan and Marshall, she said, considered the death penalty a violation of the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, although Justice Blackmun, over time, had come to oppose it on due-process grounds. “But Marshall’s dead, and Brennan and Blackmun are gone from the Court. Which doesn’t leave the country in a very good position.”

  Jenny showed my mother her office, which she shared with another public defender. Next to Jenny’s computer were two photographs, one of Tara and one of me. Political buttons were pinned to the bulletin board. “Impeach Ronald Reagan.” “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t get it.” “Adlai Stevenson in ’52.”

  “I campaigned for Stevenson,” my mother told Jenny.

  “You did?”

  “I used to go door-to-door for him. Maybe it’s because I was just a teenager and you feel things most strongly when you’re young, but to this day I still think he’s the best candidate we ever had. The world would have been a much better place if he’d beaten Eisenhower.”

  Jenny handed my mother the Stevenson button. “You can have it,” she said.

  My mother smiled gratefully, but stuck it back on the bulletin board. “I wouldn’t want to take it from you.” She stared at the tiny picture on the button. “Stevenson had a strange effect on a lot of people. We related to him as much more than a candidate. Ben’s father feels the same way about Dean Acheson. Acheson was the only person he thought was qualified to be president.”

  “But Acheson never ran,” Jenny said.

  “That’s all the more reason Ben’s father liked him. He thinks that wanting to be president automatically disqualifies you. I tend to agree.”

  I stood next to them by Jenny’s desk. Yet I was removed, watching from a distance as they talked to each other.

  Jenny and my mother had gotten along, but later that afternoon, when my father returned to the hotel, I had to ask my parents why they hadn’t invited Jenny to sabbath dinner, which we would have in their suite that evening.

  “If we’d known it was important to you,” my mother said, “we would have. But then we’d have had to invite Tara as well.”

  “So what?”

  “It would have changed the flavor of everything. We’re only here for the weekend. Dad and I thought it would be nice to spend the sabbath just with the family.”

  “But Jenny is family.”

  “No she isn’t,” my father said. “She’s your girlfriend. You’ve had girlfriends before, and you may have others in the future.”

  “I live with Jenny.”

  “I know you do. But that doesn’t mean the two of you are married. You could move to New York. There are lots of single Jewish women there.”

  “I’m not interested in single Jewish women. I’m interested in Jenny. Besides, I live here. This is where my job is.”

  “There are jobs in New York.”

  “There are jobs in Thailand too, but I’m not moving there. Dad, listen to me. I live with Jenny. I wake up with her every morning. I go to sleep with her at night. I help raise her daughter. You may be my family—”

  “We may be?”

  “You are, Dad. Of course.” I resented having to insist on this, resented that my parents were probably thinking about Susan, whom, to my surprise, they hadn’t yet mentioned on this trip. But this didn’t have anything to do with Susan. Whether or not I’d met her, I’d have hoped my parents would invite Jenny to dinner.

  “Besides,” my father said, “Jenny isn’t Jewish. What would she do at a sabbath dinner? She’d be uncomfortable, and so would we.”

  “She wouldn’t be uncomfortable. In fact, we had our own sabbath dinner last month.”

  “You did?” my mother said.

  I might have expected my parents to be pleased—my father especially. But he didn’t express pleasure. He may have taken this as evidence that my relationship with Jenny was more serious than he’d thought.

  “We didn’t invite Sandy either,” he said.

  “Well, you should have,” I said, although I knew that Sandy wouldn’t have come. Not because he’d have objected to coming but because my brother would have wanted it that way. Jonathan compartmentalized. He kept his life with Sandy and his life with my parents as distinct as possible.

  “It’s just sabbath dinner,” my father said. “It’s not a convention. Did you expect us to invite your birth mother as well?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Not everything has to be all-inclusive, Ben.”

  “I know, Dad. It just would have been nice for you guys to invite her.”

  Jonathan came to the hotel and helped us prepare for the sabbath. We set the table in the common area with a tablecloth my father had brought from New York. My mother was out walking in Golden Gate Park.

  “Dad brought everything,” Jonathan said. “He doesn’t think there are stores in San Francisco.”

  “That’s not true,” my father said. He sniffed the roses he’d bought for my mother. I liked thinking of him those sabbaths he was away, calling card in hand in hotel rooms around the world, sending flowers to her.

  He put the challahs on the table and laid out the utensils. Soon my mother returned, hurrying through the suite with her coat trailing behind her. She sliced carrots while my father shaved in the bathroom; he called out instructions about what lights to leave on. Friday afternoons when I was a child, I stood on the toilet seat so I could look him in the eye, and reached out to feel his stubble.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said, standing next to him in the bathroom.

  “Me too.” Outside, the sun was descending; he looked at his watch to see how long until sunset. “Do you remember when you were small, and you thought daylight saving time was just for Jews? You thought non-Jews didn’t move their clocks forward.”

  “I think so,” I answered.

  “It was sweet. It’s something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.”

  I stood beside him while my mother lit the candles. When he finished praying he blessed Jonathan and me. He held his hands above our heads and moved his lips slowly. I could feel his breath as he whispered in our ears.

  At dinner, I
joined him as he sang the sabbath songs. My mother hummed along, while Jonathan stayed quiet. I thought of a time when God watched over me, when he appeared in my dreams with his long gray beard.

  After dinner, I went into the bedroom. I opened the blinds and looked down at the city. The streetlights cast shadows across Golden Gate Park.

  On the nightstand lay my father’s tefillin. He placed them on his head and wrapped them around his arm when he prayed at home every weekday morning. In the tefillin boxes lay the words of God. I’d once wanted nothing more than to reach my bar mitzvah so I could wrap the tefillin around my arm.

  A prayer book was tucked inside the tefillin sack, along with a crocheted yarmulke big enough to stay on my father’s head without the help of a bobby pin. He’d lost most of his hair over the years. I took out the prayer book and began to recite the sabbath evening service.

  A few minutes later, Jonathan walked in. He was on his way to the bathroom.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Praying,” I said.

  “Ben, I don’t get it.”

  “What?”

  He took a step toward me and pointed at the prayer book. “This.”

  “It’s the sabbath, and Mom and Dad are here.” I thought about the Millsteins, my parents’ made-up friends, and how you could be Jewish in name only. What was the point of being that kind of Jew?

  “Ben, you’re thirty years old. You’re too young to be nostalgic.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You’re becoming religious again, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You consult a rabbi. You and Jenny celebrate the sabbath. You’re standing in the dark, praying. Why are you doing all this?”

  “It’s a lot of things. Susan’s coming to town. My finding out I wasn’t born Jewish. Things getting more serious with Jenny. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m growing older. We’re not kids anymore.”

  “I know we’re not. That’s why we stopped being religious. It’s what we did when we were young, because we didn’t know any different. But I look at you now, and I see you reverting.”

  “I’m not reverting, I assure you.”