“I don’t believe it.” My mother turned to me. “Did you know about this?”
“No.” I laughed.
“Of course he knew, Mom.” Jonathan walked over and kissed her. He kissed my father too.
We all sat in the living room. “You boys,” said my mother, shaking her head. I thought I could see tears in my parents’ eyes.
Around midnight my father went to bed. My mother removed five sets of towels from the linen closet. She handed a set each to Jenny, me, and Tara and placed the other sets on Jonathan’s bed along with a second pillow.
“You’re letting us sleep together?” Jonathan asked. Sandy had visited the apartment only twice, and both times they’d slept in separate rooms.
“You’re adults,” my mother said, “and if Jenny and Ben are going to sleep together, it’s only fair to be consistent. And Dad’s gone to sleep, so he doesn’t need to know.” She fluffed up the pillows on Jonathan’s bed and patted down the blankets. “Besides, where else am I going to put you guys?”
That night in bed I asked Jenny, “Do you think Jonathan has AIDS?”
“What?” She sat up. “Where did you get that idea?”
“The thought must have occurred to you.”
“I just always assumed—”
“When he got sick a couple of weeks ago—he was really sick, Jen, you should have seen him—I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I didn’t want to say anything to you then. I was too scared.”
“But he’s fine now.”
“He seems fine. But who gets the flu in August?”
“He and Sandy are monogamous, aren’t they?”
“I assume so. But there’s the time they broke up after college, and whoever else they slept with before they started going out.”
“You could ask him if he’s positive. He’s your brother, you know.”
“I can’t. I tried in college, but he wouldn’t talk about it. And what if he’s positive? I’d kill myself.”
“No you wouldn’t.”
She was right. But it was more than just a figure of speech. It wasn’t simply that I couldn’t imagine his dying. I couldn’t fathom living without him. Even now that we were older and much had changed between us, he was the closest approximation to me in the world. We shared something deeper than genes.
“He looks healthy, don’t you think?”
“Magic Johnson looks healthy too,” I said.
The next day, Saturday, my father went to services and my mother slept in, and the rest of us ate breakfast at a diner on Columbus Avenue, where we sat and read the paper. Then Sandy and Jonathan went to the Metropolitan Museum, while Jenny, Tara, and I took the subway down to Greenwich Village. Amy had told Tara about the Village, and Tara had insisted we go there.
“That’s where I’m going to live when I grow up,” Tara said. “When I finally escape California.”
“The East Village or the West Village?” I asked.
“Who cares? The whole thing’s the Village.” She rolled her eyes at me, as if I were the one in New York for the first time and my ignorance of the Village were too embarrassing to countenance.
We had lunch on Bleecker Street, then wandered in and out of boutiques and used-clothing stores. Tara tried on a denim jacket she wanted Jenny to buy for her, but Jenny said it was too expensive.
We were going to take the subway uptown so I could show Jenny and Tara my old high school.
“We’ve spent less than an hour in the Village,” Tara said.
“That’s not true, hon,” said Jenny. “We’ve spent close to three hours here, and there are other things to do in New York.”
“Who wants to see Ben’s high school anyway?”
“I do,” Jenny said.
The school was on the Upper East Side. I hadn’t been back in many years. Although it was Saturday and the doors were locked, I could make out the bank of elevators.
“That was my locker,” I told Jenny. “Number three eighty-four.”
Jenny pressed her nose against the glass.
“I still remember the smell. Sweaty gym clothes and chocolate-covered doughnuts. Jonathan and I stored Entenmann’s in there.”
“Where do the elevators go?” Jenny asked.
“To the classrooms.”
“I can’t believe you went here.”
“Why not?”
“Who takes elevators to class? That’s about as real as going to school in a spaceship.”
“You probably hung out in treehouses after school.”
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
“That’s a lot stranger than taking elevators to class. It sounds like Little House on the Prairie.”
Jenny turned around. “Where’s Tara?”
She was gone.
“Oh my God!” Jenny said.
We were standing between Fifth and Madison avenues. I ran toward Fifth and Jenny ran toward Madison, although it wasn’t clear why either of us was running. We could have passed her in our haste.
I ran back and forth across the street. I must have looked like a madman. Out of breath, I asked several doormen whether they’d seen a girl walk by, or whether they’d noticed anything suspicious. They hadn’t. I stopped a few strangers on the sidewalk, but no one seemed eager to help. I ran back toward Madison Avenue, where Jenny too was stopping strangers. She looked frantic.
I headed uptown while Jenny headed down. I stopped everyone I passed. I thought I spotted Tara’s back inside a bakery, but the girl who turned around was Asian. I flagged down a policeman, but when I told him what had happened, he wasn’t helpful. He assured me that Tara would show up soon.
I ran back to the corner where I’d separated from Jenny. She was standing there unsure of what to do. She had had no luck either.
Then we saw her. She walked out of a grocery store, eating an apple.
“Where the hell were you?” Jenny grabbed Tara by the arm. “You scared the shit out of me.” I wasn’t sure whether she meant to hug her or strangle her. I’d never seen her hit Tara before, but it occurred to me that she might do it right then.
“I was hungry.” Tara spoke as casually as she would have if someone had asked her the time. “I wanted an apple.”
“Give me that.” Jenny grabbed the apple from Tara’s hand, wheeled around, and threw it across Madison Avenue. It bounced against the curb.
“Come on, Jen,” I said. “She’s all right.”
“You be quiet!” She’d thrown the apple so hard it could have hurt someone. It easily could have hit a passing car. Jenny grabbed Tara again by the arm.
“You’re hurting me, Mom. Let go.”
“Tell me what you thought you were doing, Tara. Do you know how scared I was?”
“I just went for a walk.”
“This is New York. It’s a dangerous city.”
Tara gave her an insolent look. “You’ve been watching too much TV.”
“I certainly haven’t. This is life, not TV.”
“If I want to take a walk, I can take a walk. I’m going to live here someday.”
“You may or may not. But right now you’re eleven years old, and you don’t live in New York City. You live in San Francisco with Ben and me.”
“It’s your problem for not noticing that I left.”
“My problem?”
“You should have seen the two of you—standing there staring at a bunch of elevators.”
“That happens to be Ben’s high school.”
“Well, la-dee-da.” Tara began to cry.
“What’s wrong now?” Jenny asked.
“Forget it.”
“Okay. I will.”
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” Tara said. “Everything. You’ve got your rape case and Ben’s got his birth mother, and you’re celebrating the sabbath like you’re a Jew or something, Mom. No one even notices me.”
“That’s not true. Do you have any idea how much we missed you when you were at camp?”
“Well, I’m here now.
Why are we in New York, anyway?”
“You love New York. We just went to Greenwich Village because you wanted to go there.”
“We’re not here for me. We’re here for Ben’s dad. So he’s seventy-five years old. Who cares?”
“I do,” Jenny said. “So does Ben. It wouldn’t be the worst thing if you cared as well. When you get to be seventy-five, you might think it’s a cause for celebrating.”
On the bus ride home all three of us were quiet. Tara looked out the window, ignoring us. I held Jenny’s hand and tried to comfort her.
She spoke to Tara. “I want to explain something to you. I’d have been glad to let you get an apple. But you can’t walk off without telling me. It has nothing to do with how old you are. I wouldn’t walk off without telling you either.”
Tara kept staring out the window.
When we got home, I said nothing to my parents about what had happened. Tara went into the bedroom where she was sleeping. When I closed the door behind us in my room, Jenny started to cry.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I should have been paying better attention.”
“I should have. I’m her mother.” She lay facedown on my bed. “This is crazy, Ben. We shouldn’t have come here.”
“I had to come. It’s my father’s birthday.”
“But I should have stayed home with Tara. She’s starting school next week. Why am I shuttling her across the country?”
“Do you want to go home now?”
“I can’t.”
“I’ll explain it to my parents. They’ll understand.”
“No,” she said. “I’m all right.”
After havdala, my parents took Jenny, Sandy, and Tara to the movies. Jonathan and I stayed at home and prepared a surprise album for my father.
We removed boxes from a storage closet and searched through them. We found a few photos of my father as a child. In one, he stood next to his brother Marvin, both of them holding a huge fish. You might have thought they had gone fishing and were showing off their catch, but they were actually standing on the Lower East Side; you could see the Hebrew lettering on the storefronts. My father looked timid. I couldn’t believe this was the same person who’d brought me up, who walked confidently across the Columbia campus, who genuinely believed that if he didn’t call attention to himself, if he said his prayers, ate well, and rode his stationary bicycle each day before work, he’d be teaching political science when he was a hundred.
Jonathan found my father’s eighth-grade valedictory speech, dated June 14, 1933. He’d spoken about his faith in President Roosevelt and the commitment Jews should have to helping others, as embodied in the Torah and in Roosevelt’s Hundred Days. He used words like “sanguine” and “munificence.” I thought of the vocabulary book I’d given Jonathan and the hours we’d spent quizzing each other, until we knew so many words we simply chanted them. I imagined a competition—Uncle Marvin and my father versus Jonathan and me, all of us in eighth grade, seeing who had the best vocabulary.
“Do you think we used sanguine and munificence when we were in eighth grade?”
“Of course we did,” Jonathan answered. “You got me that vocabulary book two years before. I bet we knew those words when we were eight.”
“You think so?”
“We knew obstreperous when we were ten.”
“Thanks to Dad,” I said. He’d told us to stop being obstreperous. I couldn’t imagine that. Who used words like obstreperous with a ten-year-old?
“It was thanks to our brains,” Jonathan said. “Thanks to our Bill Bradley memories.”
I found a Yankee scorecard from 1928. The Yankees had been playing the Boston Red Sox. Lou Gehrig hit a home run that day. In the boxes of the scorecard were Hebrew letters in my father’s handwriting: aleph for a single, bet for a double—the secret code my father taught us when we watched the Mets at Shea Stadium.
We came across a letter from North Africa dated October 3, 1942. It was a love letter to a Gwen sent by a Theodore. My father must have written it for an army mate one night in the bunkers. I had no idea why the letter hadn’t been sent and what it was doing in our apartment. I found another pile of letters, stashed in an old shoe box, written between my mother and father during their courtship. We started to read them but stopped; we were invading their privacy. I wondered what we’d do when they died, what we’d read and what we wouldn’t, what we’d keep and what we’d throw out.
“Dear Francine,” Jonathan said, holding up a piece of stationery and pretending to read a letter from my father to my mother. “Come see me in Paris. We’ll eat baguettes by the banks of the Seine and sing French nursery songs at the Eiffel Tower.” When we were toddlers, they’d played French nursery songs for us on the stereo. Sur le pont d’Avignon l’on y danse tout en rond. The summer after our freshman year of college, Jonathan and I had traveled to Europe, and made a special trip to Avignon to see the bridge we’d sung about.
I found a picture of my parents dated July 1962. My mother wore a yellow-and-white-striped tank top; my father was shirtless, burly, and dark. I thought of them as they’d once been, looking toward the horizon, the future.
“Do you think Mom’s pregnant?” Jonathan asked. He pointed at the photograph.
“What do you mean?”
“You know. The miscarried baby.”
I’d forgotten about that. I tried to determine whether they seemed lonely, this childless couple staring across the ocean, their faces clear and handsome.
I asked Jonathan where he thought those pictures were that he’d taken of me every month.
“They’re probably in storage. In one of our closets, I’m sure.”
“With our baseball cards.”
“And our Wacky Packages. Remember them?”
I did. I also remembered subscribing to record clubs, receiving all those albums for a dollar, only we kept getting charged for new ones each month. They sent us John Denver and Barry Manilow. For a while we listened to Billy Joel. It wasn’t until Bruce Springsteen, I reminded Jonathan, that our taste got better—Bruce Springsteen, whom our father called Bruce Springstine, some Jewish rock-’n’-roller from New Jersey.
“The things Dad didn’t know,” I said.
“He had no idea who Johnny Carson was.”
“Or Rod Stewart.”
“Or Elvis Presley.”
“He knew Elvis,” I said.
“All right. He knew Elvis.”
Jonathan went to bed. The album was finished, and I was going to return the boxes to the storage closet. But I couldn’t bring myself to put them away. I sat with them for a while longer on the floor.
I ran my hand across some photographs, just to touch them, really. I filed through old grade-school report cards. Ben is becoming more assertive with his peers. He needs to work on his penmanship.
I came across a sealed envelope, which I opened. Inside were several sheets of paper, and on the top page the words State of Illinois. This was a photocopy of a birth certificate, I realized, but it belonged to someone I didn’t know—Michael Ivan Harris. It reminded me of the letter from Theodore to Gwen, all the odd items that were stored in this apartment.
Michael Ivan Harris had been born at Northwestern Memorial Hospital at eight twenty-three in the morning on December 21, 1964. Suddenly I realized what I was holding. Jonathan’s birth certificate! He’d been born in Chicago and had a different name. Everything about him was in my hands: how much he’d weighed and how tall he’d been, and attached to the birth certificate were his adoption papers with the lawyers’ signatures and the signatures of my parents, as well as the signatures of his birth parents, Alfred and Rebecca Harris. They had the same last name, so they must have been married. Harris. Was it a Jewish name? I got paranoid, sure that my parents would be home in a minute. They’d see me sitting with all those boxes and immediately know what I’d found.
Jonathan’s door was s
hut. I could wake him up and tell him. But maybe I should wait until morning, or even until we got back to San Francisco. Who knew how he’d react with the family around?
He could fly to Chicago to meet his birth parents. I’d go with him if he wanted. I’d be there to guide him; I’d been through this already. As the months passed, everything would make sense. It wouldn’t matter that he was gay, because we’d have this in common: meeting our birth mothers the same year.
I took his papers and hid them in my suitcase. The next day I’d make a copy of them. I’d return them to their envelope and place them back in the box. No one would know what I had done.
In the morning, I told everyone I was going to do some errands. I went to a Kinko’s, where I made two sets of copies of Jonathan’s papers. One set I folded and put in my pants pocket, and in case it got lost, I mailed the other set to myself in San Francisco.
On the way back to my parents’ apartment, I imagined what would happen if I got mugged. I’d be left unconscious in the gutter, and the police would empty my pockets. They’d think I was Michael Ivan Harris. Then they’d find my wallet and notify my parents. I’d have a lot of explaining to do.
The next afternoon, at the Labor Day party, I chatted with my parents’ friends and colleagues. My father’s album was sitting in my bedroom, along with the gifts we’d gotten him for his birthday. We would give them to him after the guests had left.
I introduced Jenny to my parents’ friends. She was doing better, but she still seemed tentative. She’d stare over the shoulder of the person she was talking to, looking for Tara.
Jonathan and Sandy were in the living room. I watched my brother from various angles. Did he look different to me? Michael Ivan Harris from Chicago. I had to know why his parents had given him up. I felt offended for him—more offended than I’d felt for myself—at the idea of parents who didn’t want him.
I tried to make sense of him as someone else: a kid named Michael, wandering through the halls of the Chicago Art Institute, eating deep-dish pizza, rooting for the White Sox—or worse, the Cubs—doing all the stereotypical Chicago things I could think of. Where would he be if he hadn’t been adopted? At a Labor Day party in Chicago? Would he be a doctor? Would he be gay? Would he be a Jew?
Swimming Across the Hudson Page 15
