Swimming Across the Hudson

by Joshua Henkin

  But I kept all these questions to myself, kept everything to myself, as had become my habit. Perhaps I should have known then what I know now—that secrecy leads to trouble. I’d been so honest as a boy that one time, when the city bus I was on broke down, I walked the remaining mile and a half to school because the small print on the back of my bus pass said that I was allowed to use it only once going to school and once coming home. It amuses me what a stickler I was for the letter of the law, how unwilling I was to lie or cheat under any circumstances.

  Did that boy understand something I’ve forgotten as an adult? The rabbis teach us that one sin begets another. Draw a fence around the Torah, they say, for if you even come close to disobeying the word of God, the next step is surely to disobey Him. As a boy I’d been honest to a fault. If I’d remained as scrupulous as an adult, I might have stayed out of trouble.

  PART III

  Back in San Francisco, I considered telling Jenny about Jonathan’s papers. It seemed unfair, though, to burden her with my dilemma when she was as distracted as she was. She was spending more time with Tara, making sure to get home earlier from work. Every night, before Tara went to bed, they spent forty-five minutes talking about their day. They’d made it a nightly ritual.

  Tara was less sullen than she’d been when she came home from camp, and certainly less so than in New York. She would sit with me in the evening while I read in my bedroom.

  “You’re losing your hair,” she said one night.

  “I guess I am.”

  “Mine’s growing back.” She tugged on a clump of it, as if she were offering to give me some.

  “Are you going to grow it long?”

  “Maybe.”

  I turned to the photograph on the nightstand, of her and Jenny taken the day she was born. “I can see you in that picture,” I told her. “You’re older and prettier, but you look the same.”

  She didn’t answer, but started reading. I’d lent her my copy of A Tale of Two Cities.

  After a while I looked over at her. “‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ That’s one of the most famous opening lines in the English language. Dickens wrote serially. Can you imagine what it’s like having to live with your mistakes all the way through a book?”

  Tara smiled politely, the way you smile at someone who doesn’t know when to stop talking. “I’m going to bed,” she told me, and kissed me on the forehead.

  At school, I saw my students from the previous year. They’d grown over the summer. A couple of the boys sported mustaches. Several students shook my hand and patted me on the back. Some of the girls kissed me, as though we were old friends.

  When school let out for the day, I played pick-up basketball with some of the boys. I was still stronger and quicker than most of them, but when I got the ball they called me Old Man Suskind and said I’d grown up before the jump shot was invented.

  For the first week of school I stuck to my routine—teaching, playing basketball, going home to Jenny and Tara. I tried to forget about Jonathan’s birth papers but wasn’t able to.

  I went over to his house one evening in September, having decided to give him the information. Sandy was out, and we made dinner together.

  “Cheers,” Jonathan said, raising his wineglass in a toast. We were on his deck, overlooking Nineteenth Street. I reached into my pants pocket and gave him the envelope. I was smiling—out of nervousness more than anything else.

  “What is this?”

  “Just open it.”

  The papers fell onto his lap. The birth certificate lay on top; the adoption records were folded beneath. “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s a birth certificate,” I said. “Your birth certificate.”

  “What?”

  “Look at it.”

  He read the name aloud, like someone pulling a piece of paper from a hat and calling out the name of a stranger. “Michael Ivan Harris.”

  “Look at the birthday.”

  “December 21, 1964. Oh, God.” He was reading but he wasn’t, skimming the details, knowing everything at once.

  He stood up. I did too. He put his plate on the table. I put mine there as well. I wasn’t sure what was about to happen. For all I knew, he was going to hit me. We were reflections of each other, like mimes, standing a few feet apart.

  He took a step toward me. I stood still. I saw a bus go by below him. He took another step toward me. He raised his arms. Then he thrust them around me and we were in a hug. His breath came out in tiny shudders. His collarbone was firm against mine. His nose was pressed to my ear. His arms were draped heavily over me.

  The hug surprised me—the strength, the duration. His left kneecap was pressed against my right. I smelled soap and after-shave on his neck.

  When he stepped back, I saw tears in his eyes. His face looked misshapen.

  “I’m sorry, Jon.”

  “Where did you find this?”

  “In storage. In New York.”

  “Do Mom and Dad know?”

  I shook my head.

  “Can we keep it a secret?”

  I nodded.

  He went in and came back with the ice cream I’d brought, which we ate with huge spoons directly from the containers.

  “Let’s not talk about this,” he said. “I want to pretend it didn’t happen.”

  We watched Monday Night Football in the bedroom. Jonathan seemed eager to reflect on our childhood, as if to remind himself that it had taken place.

  We had the picture on without the volume. The players moved silently across the screen and piled on top of one another.

  “Remember Howard Cosell?” he asked. “Monday Night Football and the big boxing matches?” He imitated Cosell’s voice. “The thrilla in Manilla.”

  I smiled. “Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali.”

  “Ben, did you ever think we’d be where we are now?”

  “In San Francisco?”

  “You know. Doing what we’re doing?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I knew nothing about San Francisco,” he said. “I used to call it ‘Frisco.’ Can you believe it?” He started to sing. “ ‘California, here I come . . .’ ”

  I thought of us in seventh grade, standing together on the stage of the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom, singing songs from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the alumni dinner. We used to wait six hours between eating milk and meat so that the food wouldn’t mix in our stomachs. We checked the ingredients on everything we ate. We teamed up to win the National Blessings Bee.

  I wanted to tell him that I loved him, that I’d loved him for as long as I could remember. I was a child again. My parents were saying, “Give Jonathan a kiss, tell your brother you love him.” I could feel my lips brush against his nose. When had I stopped telling him I loved him? One day had passed, and then the next, and soon it had been years and it was something we didn’t do, something it seemed we couldn’t do, as if the words themselves refused to be formed, part of an archaic language.

  “Tell me,” he said, “why do you want me to meet my birth mother? It’s almost as if you’re egging me on.”

  “I’m not egging you on. They’re your birth papers. It wouldn’t have been fair to keep them from you.”

  “But why are you invested in my doing something? Tell me the real reason. Don’t tell me that it’s good for me.”

  He wouldn’t have wanted to hear the real reason. My meeting Susan had everything to do with him. Long before she’d come into my life, I’d imagined us finding our roots together. It all came back to him: the fact that this was what we’d shared—being adopted, above everything else—the fact that even now, at thirty-one, I hadn’t accepted that we’d grown apart. Despite the evidence—perhaps because of it—I’d refused to change. I didn’t dare tell him that I hoped to meet his birth mother too, that I wanted more than anything to know where he was from.

  “Do you remember when I came out to you?” he asked. “I was terrified. There were times
before that when I wanted to tell you, but I just couldn’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make it hard for you.”

  “It was even worse with Mom and Dad. I’d told you already, and there was no turning back. Sandy was pressuring me to do it. He said that if I didn’t come out to Mom and Dad I wasn’t serious about him.”

  Jonathan held his hands out in front of him, the fingers curled up toward the palms. In high school we’d believed that boys looked at their nails by curling their fingers, while girls held their hands out, palms down. That was how you knew that someone was gay, if he looked at his nails the way a girl did. But even then I’d suspected it was a myth. My brother looks at his nails the way I do.

  “I like who I am,” Jonathan said. “I don’t have to explain myself to anyone.”

  “I like who you are too.”

  “I can’t meet my birth mother, because if I do I’ll have to come out to her. I don’t want to go through that with a second family.”

  “I understand.”

  “I was confused a lot when I was a kid. Overall, though, I have good memories of childhood. A lot of that is thanks to you. But my life didn’t stop at seventeen.”

  “I know.” I didn’t think I was telling him that it did, though I understood why he thought I was.

  “The present is crazy enough,” he said, “without having to worry about the past. I’m around death all the time. In this neighborhood. At the office—”

  “I know. I’ve always admired the work you do. I haven’t known how to tell you that without sounding corny or patronizing.”

  He got up and walked around the bedroom. Then he sat back down. “I remember our time together as kids. I think about you more than you realize.” He spoke with a calmness unfamiliar to me. There was an intimacy between us I didn’t remember since childhood. I wanted more than anything to reach out and touch him, but I was paralyzed, afraid.

  “But then I’m thrown back to the present,” he said. “Maybe it’s survivors’ guilt. Everyone around you is dying, and you wonder why you’ve been spared.”

  “What survivors’ guilt?”

  “That I’m HIV-negative. That Sandy is too.”

  My body deflated, as if I’d been holding my breath for eleven years, ever since the night he’d come out to me. I stumbled as I stood up. I threw my arms around him. “You’re not going to die.”

  “Not anytime soon.”

  “I’ve been afraid about this since college.”

  “You shouldn’t have been. You know me. I’ve always been cautious.”

  “You weren’t afraid?”

  “Not for ages.”

  I realized what he was telling me. He hadn’t just been tested—he’d known for a while.

  “When did you find out?”

  “I can’t even remember. 1987? 1988? After Sandy and I got back together.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I’d been afraid for no reason. Why, I asked him, hadn’t he told me, when he’d known how worried I’d been? Didn’t he remember that brunch at college when I’d tried to talk to him about AIDS? Did he realize how worried our parents had been—our mother, who left a condom on his nightstand, who, I told him now, had written me at Yale asking me to talk to him about this?

  Jonathan looked guarded again, defensive. “It’s my private life,” he said. “It was up to me whether to tell people.”

  “But we’re your family. Who do you think would have taken care of you if you’d gotten sick?”

  “Sandy.”

  “And if Sandy had gotten sick? When you had that fever last month, I thought you were dying.”

  “Dying? I had the flu.”

  “I thought it was the beginning of something worse.”

  He laughed. “Whenever a gay man gets sick, everyone’s imagination takes over. Gay people get colds too, you know.”

  “Sometimes they get something much worse than that.”

  “Well, I’m fine. I’m as healthy as you are. In any case, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you. Sandy and I have had good luck. If we were a few years older—sexually active before people figured out what was going on—there’s a good chance we’d both be dead. Or if we hadn’t met each other and settled down, we might have ended up sleeping with a lot more men, and who knows what would have happened? People think AIDS is about promiscuity, but it’s just as much about luck. There are guys out there who’ve had unprotected sex hundreds of times with HIV-positive men and have stayed negative. And there are guys who’ve made just one mistake, and boom, that’s it. Life’s unfair. I truly believe that. That’s why I don’t understand your return to God—even if it’s not a real return. And that’s why I’m not interested in meeting my birth mother. I don’t care how things might have been. Already, without meeting her, I can think of so many ways things might have been, it’s enough to make a person dizzy. So what I’m saying is, That’s that. Case closed. All right?”

  “All right,” I said, believing it was.

  I telephoned my mother at work the next morning to tell her what I’d found out. I was still relieved, still angry.

  She was quiet on the other end. Then she started to cry. “God, Ben, I’ve been so scared.”

  “Me too.”

  “I started to say something to him many times, but I could never do it.” She took a quick breath. “What about Sandy?”

  “He’s negative too.”

  “Thank God.”

  Then she asked me when Jonathan had found out.

  “Last month.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth.

  “Have you told Dad?”

  “You tell him.” I couldn’t imagine talking about this with him, talking with him about anything that had to do with sex.

  My mother repeated an ancient Greek saying that my father had once told us: In times of peace sons bury their parents, but in times of war parents bury their sons. “I’ve thought a lot about that,” she said. “I’ve told myself that all over the world parents bury their kids. As if that would have made it any easier if something had happened to Jonathan.”

  It was almost eight o’clock. I would be late for work. I told my mother I had to go.

  “Talk to me a minute longer,” she said. “I need to hear your voice.”

  Because of vacation and members’ kids going back to school, my adoptees’ support group had been on hiatus. But in October, we started to meet again. I told everyone that I’d found Jonathan’s papers, and this divided the group into two camps. Most members argued that Jonathan was entitled not to meet his birth mother. But a few people said he was denying his true self and it was my job to enlighten him.

  “We should never support ignorance.” This was Phillip, a man about my age, who had met his birth mother when he was twenty, his birth father when he was twenty-five. “In any case, it’s not just a question of what’s best for your brother, but of what’s best for you. It’s a question of what’s best for all of us.”

  “For all of us?” I said.

  “What your brother does has ramifications.” Phillip saw our support group as part of a movement. The greater the number of adoptees who found their birth parents, the more attention adoption would receive and the easier it would be to get birth records opened. In the process, society would be sensitized to the needs of adoptees and to the fact that there were many different kinds of families. We were like any other movement, he told the group. In a way we resembled the gay rights movement. He even used the word “closeted” to refer to Jonathan and suggested that he needed to be outed.

  “My brother isn’t closeted,” I said. “He’s never denied that he’s adopted.”

  “He may not deny it in the narrow sense, but he denies it more fundamentally.”

  Phillip appealed to my vanity, telling me that I had done the noble thing while Jonathan had taken the easy way out. And when I told the group that I was interested in meeting Jonathan’s birth mother, I found an ally in Phillip.

  “Y
ou can search for her yourself,” he said.

  “Me?”

  “Why not? If you think you should know, and I can see a good argument for that—he’s your brother, after all—then you should do it.”

  I kept thinking about this the next few weeks. Why shouldn’t I search for her? Jonathan didn’t have to find out. God knew he wasn’t hesitant to keep secrets from me. We were both adults. We’d each do as we wanted.

  I had off from school on election day, and I took Susan with me when I went to vote.

  “Are you registered in San Francisco?” I asked. If she was, I thought, it would be a clear sign that she was staying indefinitely.

  “No.”

  “Did you vote absentee?”

  “I should have. My husband has been giving me a hard time about it.”

  So she was still in touch with him.

  At her apartment, she made me lunch.

  “I found Jonathan’s birth records,” I said. I considered telling her I might search for his birth mother, but she would have been offended. I hadn’t even searched for her.

  “Where did you find them?”

  “In New York.” I had an image of myself sitting in front of the storage closet, discovering that Jonathan had been called Michael. I asked Susan if she’d given me another name. It had never occurred to me before.

  “Your name was Christopher.”

  I let the word slide across my lips. “Christopher.” A Christian name.

  “But I didn’t call you anything for the first couple of weeks because I didn’t want to get too attached to you.”

  “And after that?”

  “It seemed silly. I was attached to you already and you were still there. I hadn’t found the right parents for you.”

  I hadn’t realized that she’d considered other couples. I’d simply imagined an adoption line with my parents at the front of it.

  “Then I met your parents, and I liked them. They were responsible and financially secure. They seemed concerned about me.”

  “You met them?” They’d made my birth mother out to be almost mythic, a mere metaphor for my dark past. I’d practically come to believe that I’d grown on a tree and that my parents had plucked me from it.