Swimming Across the Hudson

by Joshua Henkin

  “You’re part of my family.”

  I didn’t respond.

  I flipped through her Bible as if to glean some lesson from it. I lay down on the sofa and closed my eyes. “I’d like you to tell me some Christmas stories. Not traditional ones—baby in the manger and stuff like that. Just stories about Christmas when you were growing up. Better yet, tell me what Christmas is like with your family.”

  I realized this was a lot to ask. Two Christmases before, Scottie had been alive. The memories must have been painful.

  I no longer remember what she told me that night, because even at the time I was focused more on the sound of her voice than on what she was actually telling me. Hush. Moonlight. Candied ham. Waking up early Christmas morning. The creaking of narrow stairs. I lay on the sofa until three in the morning, listening to her talk.

  It was almost four when I got home. I was feeling conciliatory, less because of anything that had happened at Susan’s than because of fatigue and the passage of time, because of the sense that I’d blown things out of proportion—that Jenny and I would work something out.

  But Jenny was still awake and not feeling conciliatory. “Look at you. I’ve never seen anything more pathetic in my life. Have you been wandering around in the rain, looking for other people who hate Christmas?”

  “No,” I said, “I haven’t.”

  “You’ve been gone for hours. I thought maybe you’d flown off to Israel so you could be with a whole country of people who hate Christmas.”

  “That’s very smart, Jen. As you might recall, Jerusalem’s a holy place for Christians too. And Bethlehem is just a stone’s throw away.”

  “All right. Drop it.”

  “Look, I’m sorry for how I handled this. If I could do it over, I would.”

  I told her that next year we would work out a compromise. We could have the tree in the apartment, only maybe she’d consider keeping it for less time—just the week of Christmas perhaps. I, in turn, would be respectful of her holiday. I’d even try to join in.

  “I don’t know if there will be a next year.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m not sure we’re going to be together.”

  “Because of this?”

  “Because of the bigger problems beneath it.”

  This scared me. We’d always known that things might not work out, but this was the first time she’d said she was thinking of leaving me. Suddenly the tree seemed insignificant. I didn’t want to lose her over something like this. I didn’t want to lose her, period.

  When I got back to work after New Year’s, I found an envelope in my box with handwriting startlingly similar to my brother’s. Inside was a letter.

  Dear Mr. Suskind,

  I received your note last month, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I never expected to hear from you. Yes, I gave birth to you, but if you knew the circumstances, you’d understand why I gave you up—it was the only real option for everyone involved. I thought I found good parents for you. I certainly did my best. I’ve spent many years trying to forget about you, but I haven’t slept much since I got your letter, so maybe you’re right—maybe it’s best for me to know who you are.

  I’m willing to meet you. But only on the condition that you keep this a secret. No one else knows you exist. I eat lunch every weekday between one and two at a restaurant in Chicago named Pauline’s. You can find it in information. There’s no need to write me back. I’m not going anywhere. You can just show up, and I’ll be there.

  Cordially,

  Rebecca Harris

  She hadn’t mentioned Alfred or the fact that my letter had been addressed to them both. She’d left it up to me—I didn’t have to go to Chicago. All I’d done was send her a letter to which I hadn’t expected a response.

  But it wasn’t fair to tease her like that. That was what I told myself—to justify my plans. Also, what if months passed without my showing up? She might write me again to see what had happened. She might look Jonathan up in San Francisco information and call him. I was locked in now. I had to follow through.

  Her letter intrigued me. “. . . if you knew the circumstances, you’d understand why I gave you up.” What circumstances? And why did this have to be a secret? She ate every day at the same restaurant. She sounded like she was in the Mafia.

  I made a plane reservation for two weeks later. I’d fly to Chicago on Sunday and spend the night in a hotel. Monday was Martin Luther King Day, and school would be closed. I’d take Tuesday as a sick day and fly back to California that night.

  I wrote her a short note.

  Dear Mrs. Harris,

  I received your letter, and I’m glad you have agreed to meet me. I expect to come to Chicago soon.

  Best wishes,

  Jonathan Suskind

  I was fidgety and nervous till I left. I spent my evenings pacing around the living room, opening and closing closet doors, flipping through channels on TV.

  “What’s wrong?” Jenny asked.

  “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  The week before I left, I told Jenny I had to fly to Chicago.

  “For what?”

  “A teachers’ meeting.”

  “In Chicago?”

  “It’s a national teachers’ meeting.”

  She wondered why I hadn’t mentioned it before.

  “I didn’t know about it,” I said. “Someone else was supposed to go, but she got sick. They asked me to replace her.”

  “Did you have to say yes?”

  I nodded.

  She looked at me dubiously.

  “Believe me, Jen, I wish I didn’t have to.” My voice sickened me. Yet I carried on.

  On the plane to Chicago, I ate my kosher meal and tried to fall asleep. I was scared by what I was doing, unsure about how I’d gotten from there to here. This was how such decisions were made. Only in retrospect did you realize you’d made them. When we were little, the walk to synagogue was long for Jonathan and me, so my father used to tell us to think of it as a block at a time; no single block was too long or difficult. The same was true here. Piece by piece. Divide and conquer. Until the decision was so fragmented it didn’t feel like one. You met your birth mother. You encouraged your brother to meet his. You found his birth certificate and gave it to him. You considered finding his birth parents. You called an operator and took down an address. You wrote a letter. You got one back. Each of the steps seemed insignificant until they’d been added up and you realized you’d been moving inexorably forward.

  So there I was, still with the chance to turn back, but also with the compulsion to continue. By finding out who Jonathan had been I might learn something about who he was now. And then, maybe, I could put things to rest.

  But I was terrified. What if my plane crashed? The truth would come out—there had been no teachers’ meeting—and Jenny would spend the rest of her life not knowing why I’d gone to Chicago. Had I been having an affair? I’d be dead, of course, unable to worry, but I was alive now, plenty capable of worrying about my dead self and how he would be remembered by the world.

  Mrs. Harris might not believe I was Jonathan. His eyes were lighter than mine, and he had a mole on the side of his neck.

  “What happened to your eyes?” she would ask me.

  “They got darker,” I would say. “A baby’s eyes almost always do.”

  “What happened to your mole?”

  “I had it removed.”

  We’d be sitting at Pauline’s. Everyone who ate there would be sitting alone; it would be a haunt for spies and organized criminals. They would wear sunglasses and smoke cigars; above the bar would be a set of antlers. The windows would be tinted like those of limousines, and the waiters, out of fear and respect, would look down at their polished black shoes when they took your order.

  I arrived at O’Hare, rented a car, and checked into a hotel. I turned on the TV and fell asleep on one bed with my clothes still on and the contents of my bag strewn acro
ss the other bed.

  The next morning I drove into the city. On the radio, the mayor of Chicago was talking about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the work that was still to be done. Teenagers were playing basketball, skidding on the ice as they shot lay-ups.

  I drove out to the suburbs, to Oak Park, past Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace and the Frank Lloyd Wright houses. I circled back to the city and parked near the Art Institute. It had been months since I’d been to a museum, and I had no special interest in this one. I seemed determined to be a tourist, to pretend I was there for reasons other than the real one. I went into the museum, walked around for ten minutes, and left.

  At one o’clock, I stood in front of Pauline’s, checking my reflection in the window. Maybe Mrs. Harris wouldn’t be there; perhaps she didn’t work on Martin Luther King Day.

  Pauline’s wasn’t a haunt for organized criminals. It didn’t have tinted windows, or antlers on the walls. It was so ordinary it might have been part of a chain of luncheonettes—something you saw in the basement of a shopping mall, Indian food next to Chinese next to bagels next to pizza next to frozen yogurt.

  The floors were white tile and the bare walls looked scrubbed. The place smelled antiseptic and was illuminated by parallel sets of long fluorescent light bulbs. The food was served cafeteria style. I couldn’t imagine anyone eating there every day, much less Jonathan’s birth mother—Jonathan, who in college had brewed his own beer, who for his thirtieth birthday had gotten a set of Thai cookbooks and Thai cooking lessons from Sandy.

  The restaurant was long and narrow. It turned at a right angle past the food counter, then at a right angle again. It was like an obstacle course, the chairs and tables arranged indiscriminately.

  I saw myself doing what I’d done years before. “Excuse me,” I’d say, moving from customer to customer, “are you my mother?”

  Although no one in the restaurant looked like Jonathan, there were several women about the right age. I stopped in front of one of them. “Excuse me,” I said, “are you Rebecca Harris?”

  “No,” the woman said, sounding slightly annoyed, as if she were always being mistaken for Rebecca Harris—as if this were an occupational hazard of eating at Pauline’s.

  “I’m Rebecca Harris,” a woman called out. She was at another table, several yards away, and appeared no more surprised than the first woman had been, as though she too were used to having strangers ask whether she was Rebecca Harris. She stared at me without a touch of inquisitiveness—without any emotion, it seemed—like a statue of who she was, a woman in a bad restaurant holding her soup spoon in midair.

  The first thing I thought was, This is a mistake. She looked nothing like Jonathan. I was convinced she was playing a prank on me, retaliating for my deception.

  “Mrs. Harris,” I said, “I’m Jonathan Suskind.” I was astonished by how easily these words came out, by how quickly and unashamedly I took to the role. Rebecca Harris was small, heavyset, and not especially attractive. Her hair was mostly gray and she wore bifocals. She reminded me of a school nurse. Her skin was pale and her eyes were grayish-green. There was something indeterminate about the way she looked, like those 3-D baseball cards I used to find in cereal boxes, with faces that changed when you held them at different angles. She must have been at least sixty years old. No one would have mistaken her for my sister; no one could have thought we were on a date.

  She put down her soup spoon. “Goodness.” A bead of sweat trickled down her forehead. Her hair looked like it had been set with bobby pins.

  I reached out to shake her hand. She squeezed it firmly. I took a step closer to her, as if I really thought she was a nurse and was expecting her to examine me.

  She seemed as surprised by me as I was by her. I worried that I’d betrayed my identity, like someone who’s just come from a conference and forgotten to remove his name tag.

  “Mr. Suskind,” she said.

  “Jonathan.”

  “Jonathan,” she repeated.

  I was excited by the lie I was telling. My identity really was fungible. I could say anything here, and no one would know. Looking at the mirror behind her, I almost expected to see myself transmogrified, actually melting into Jonathan.

  “You said I could come here.” I sounded more defensive than I’d intended to. I pointed to the floor where I was standing, as if she didn’t realize where I was.

  Mrs. Harris stood up, indicated the seat opposite hers, and sat down again. She pushed her tray aside, and picked up a folder that had been lying on the floor and placed it on the table between us. She smiled politely at me the way an interviewer would. Was she going to produce my résumé?

  “Weren’t you expecting me?”

  “Of course I was.” Her voice was even, unmodulated.

  “But not yet?”

  “I expected you to come sometime.” Her face softened briefly. But then it turned tight. She sat up straight, like a mannequin.

  A man walked by, his tray casting diagonal shadows along the table and reflecting in the mirrors. Mrs. Harris rested her hands flat on the table, which was made of the kind of wood usually used for picnic benches. It was distinctly out of place. People had carved figures into the top, and between Mrs. Harris’s hands was a big heart with the words “Diane & Hud” inside it.

  “Well, here I am.” I’d been waiting for this moment, but now that I was here it felt anticlimactic. Maybe it would have been better to have gotten someone else to point Mrs. Harris out to me. I could have examined her from afar and left. I had all these questions to ask her, but it was as if I were standing at the front of a lecture hall and being required to speak in Japanese.

  Mrs. Harris’s hands still rested next to her soup bowl. I didn’t understand how she could seem so calm. I felt offended for Jonathan, and by association for me.

  When Susan had met me, she’d told me to call her by her first name. But Mrs. Harris hadn’t asked me to call her Rebecca. She sat before me, hazy and stout, making me wonder what the years had done to her. I had the inexplicable urge to call her Mom.

  I stood up. I wasn’t hungry, but I couldn’t just sit there doing nothing with my hands. Maybe Mrs. Harris would resume eating if I too had some food before me.

  I came back with a roast beef sandwich and a can of Dr Pepper. “This is a nice place,” I said. On the table next to ours was an abandoned tray that held a plate of congealing meat loaf and a few overcooked pieces of carrot.

  “Where’s my birth father?” I asked. I thought of my own birth father shooting baskets on the courts outside his high school.

  “Mr. Harris?”

  “I wrote both of you.”

  “My husband’s dead.”

  “Oh God. I’m sorry.”

  “It happened a long time ago. The summer of 1974.”

  I was only ten, I thought.

  “It was the day Nixon resigned,” she said. “My husband was just sitting in the living room, and he dropped dead of a heart attack.”

  “I’m really sorry.” The day Nixon resigned, Jonathan and I had watched my parents rejoice. My mother did a jig when she heard the news. Now I wondered what my brother had been thinking. Was it possible that he’d sensed something was wrong?

  “He was forty-one years old,” Mrs. Harris said. “The same thing happened to his brother.”

  “A heart attack?”

  She nodded.

  I worried for Jonathan. Arteriosclerosis. Clogged arteries. High cholesterol. I didn’t know what his cholesterol was. We played basketball together; he was lean and in good shape. But he ate a lot of meat and cheese. I’d brought ice cream to dinner that night. I was helping to kill him.

  Mrs. Harris took out her wallet. “That’s your birth father.” She pointed at a photograph. “Twenty-two years later I still carry him with me.”

  I was so startled I gasped.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The picture looked so much like Jonathan it could have been of him. “He was a very han
dsome man.”

  “Thank you.” Hearing me say this seemed to make her relax. She put her folder back on the floor. I wanted to ask what was inside it. Why she had placed it on the table like something she wanted to refer to?

  “Mrs. Harris,” I said, “will you tell me what happened?” We’d been at Pauline’s for half an hour, and suddenly she was more attractive to me. Her face had opened up. People never look the way they do when you first meet them. No one stays the same.

  “It’s only fair,” she said. “You flew across the country. But you have to promise me something. You can’t track any more of us down.”

  “Any more of you?”

  “Promise me.”

  I had no idea what she meant, but I promised.

  She looked around to make sure no one was listening, then leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I gave birth to you on December 21, 1964.”

  “Right.”

  “But everything happened in secret.”

  “Why?”

  She moved her hand back and forth across the table, like someone dusting crumbs into a pile. I realized how hard this was for her, how she was doing her best not to cry.

  “Your birth father was an engineer,” Mrs. Harris said, “but he got laid off from his job and couldn’t find another one. Times were bad. We had loans to pay and two kids to support. We were in serious trouble.”

  “Two kids?”

  “A boy and a girl.”

  “I had a brother and a sister?”

  “You still do.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Jonathan had two siblings he didn’t know about. In a way I did too. I imagined the four of us living together, renting a house in Chicago. Perhaps Jonathan would feel a kinship with them, something deeper than he and I had.

  “Where are they now?”

  “I can’t tell you that.” Her voice was firm. “They don’t know you exist. No one does.”

  She was six months pregnant, she told me, when her husband lost his job. It was too late to get an abortion. The family was in debt and had to sell the furniture. Collectors were knocking on the front door. Their only choice was to give me up. Her husband was embarrassed that he couldn’t support the family, so he persuaded her to tell people she had miscarried.