Swimming Across the Hudson Read online

  So I made my students memorize names and dates. I had them recite passages from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address. I made them learn the names of all the presidents, vice-presidents, and secretaries of state.

  My students, understandably, thought I was uptight.

  “We love you, Ben,” one of them said, “but you’re a rigid guy in a suit.”

  “I don’t wear a suit,” I said. “I don’t even own one.” I took foolish pride in that.

  “Are you married?” a student asked.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” asked another.

  “This is American history,” I said. “This is not the Phil Donahue show. If I ever get to be famous enough that my personal life becomes relevant to American history, then we can talk about my marital status.”

  Their first year in San Francisco, Jonathan and Sandy broke up. Jonathan went out with several other men. Again I worried about his health, but I knew better than to say anything to him.

  Six months later, he and Sandy got back together. They’ve stayed with each other ever since. In the fall of 1987, Jonathan enrolled in UCSF Medical School. He has since completed his geriatrics residency. Medicine suits him well. The results are tangible and the pay is high. Sandy started Wiper-Up, a window-washing company. Now he employs three workers. He and Jonathan take vacations in the Bahamas and buy bottles of fine wine.

  Meanwhile, my parents have aged. My father is fifteen years older than my mother. He was almost sixty-six when I graduated from college; he turned seventy-five this past year. He was always older than our friends’ fathers. Perhaps that’s why Jonathan chose geriatrics.

  When Jonathan and I moved to San Francisco, we started going out to dinner together once a week. Several times each summer we watched the Giants play, sitting in the Candlestick bleachers eating nonkosher hot dogs. On Sunday afternoons when we were younger, we’d watched the Mets at Shea Stadium—my father sitting between us keeping score, my mother preparing us for summer camp, needle and thread across her lap, sewing name tapes on our underwear.

  “Do you remember that?” I asked Jonathan once.

  “Sure.”

  “Remember how we used to think Sandy Koufax was our birth father?”

  But Jonathan wasn’t interested in talking about adoption. It had been our shared language, but he’d moved on. I stopped raising the subject with him. I still thought about it—still thought that someday we’d go on a search—but I didn’t talk about it with anyone.

  Until I met Jenny. She wanted to know every detail about me.

  We would stay up talking past five in the morning, when one of us would fall asleep midsentence. Jenny’s rings and bracelets lay like scrap metal on the nightstand. Her earrings hung on hooks beside the vanity, swaying in front of the window. Sometimes she would leave her closet door open, and I would run my fingers along the pile of folded sweaters and the rows of pressed blouses. Pinned to the wall above our bed was a Venezuelan flag she had brought back from a trip to South America. Glass jars were spread around the room, holding Jenny’s odds and ends: matchbooks from across the country, silk scarves, a rabbit’s foot, a Tootsie Roll keychain.

  An office was attached to the bedroom. On the cork board above the desk were old political buttons Jenny collected. “Henry Wallace for President.” “54-40 or Fight.” On the walls were photographs Jenny had taken of Tara and me. For a while Jenny thought about a career as a photographer. She still walks through the apartment with her camera around her neck, taking pictures. On the bookshelves were her casebooks and her legal manuals from the public defender’s office.

  My books were also on the shelves. We share the office; I live here too. But I travel light, Jenny says. I could fit all my possessions into a couple of suitcases. Why get attached to objects? I was happy to have Jenny decorate our home. It felt no less mine for her doing so.

  Novels lay throughout the bedroom. Jenny loves Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov; when she was a girl, she told me, she pretended she lived in nineteenth-century Russia. Sometimes at night we read aloud to each other before we go to sleep.

  “Tell me what you were like as a child,” she asked me once. “Make it so real I can see you.”

  On the floor sat a huge oak chessboard, made in England in the eighteenth century. It had been passed down through Jenny’s family. As a child, she had played chess with her parents; now she played with Tara.

  I told Jenny stories about being adopted, how much it had meant to me as a child. I said that someday I might look for my birth mother.

  “Why not look for her now?” Jenny said that if I knew where I came from I’d be able to get on with my life.

  “Get on with my life? What makes you think I’m not getting on with my life?”

  “You’re a dreamer, Ben. It’s like your life is out there in the future, but it’s anyone’s guess what that life is. Sometimes it’s like you’re watching yourself. It’s as if you’re not in your own body.”

  “I’m in my own body.” I slapped the floor to show her I was there. I pounded my fists against my chest. “I’m here, Jen. Look at me. I’m in my own body.”

  “You should try being like Jonathan. He goes to work every day and comes home at night. He and Sandy make plans. They may be gay, but they live a more normal life than we do.”

  “We live a normal life. I go to work and come home every day. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  But I understood what she was saying. Though I’d moved into her apartment in January, almost two years after we’d started to go out, it hadn’t been as simple as that. I moved in incrementally, shirt by shirt. One day I realized all my clothes were there and it made no sense to keep paying rent on my apartment.

  In smaller ways too, I couldn’t make a clear decision. I waited until the last minute to pay my bills. Once my phone line got disconnected. I didn’t keep a date book, and I hated to make plans. Did I think I would die before the weekend came? Did I believe my birth mother would show up and everything else would become irrelevant?

  “Live a life,” Jenny said. “Get a life.”

  “I have a life.”

  “All right,” she said. “All right.” But she wondered whether maybe I should look for my birth mother, whether that might help me sort things out.

  “It’s possible,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

  But I didn’t think about it any more than usual.

  “Things just take time.” I ran my hand along Jenny’s neck, down past the open buttons of her blouse, to the pale, freckled hollow between her breasts. “You don’t plan a life. You grow into it. You only understand it when you’re looking back. Besides, what’s the point of making plans? Man plans and God laughs.”

  There I was, believing in my own way that everything was fine, that my life was moving ahead.

  A month later the letter came, forwarded to me from my old address.

  Dear Ben Suskind,

  Almost thirty-one years ago I gave birth to you. I was sixteen and terrified, I was completely alone. Your father and I had no future together. I thought about keeping you. I had to keep you once I held you in my arms, and for the two months I had you I kept you by my side in a laundry basket in my bedroom. But I was a teenager and I had no money, and my parents insisted that we find a good home for you.

  Thirty-one years is a long time. I know that. But I’m still your mother. I’m your flesh and blood. Not a week goes by when I don’t think about you. Every year on your birthday I cry.

  Eventually I got married to someone else. I moved to Indianapolis with my husband. But I’ve kept photographs of you from those two months we had together. I’m holding you in my parents’ house, your hair’s so soft and yellow, and my mother teaches me how to nurse you, while my father’s on the phone, he’s talking to agencies, he’s placing ads in the paper, he’s getting me to do what he says must be done.

  I gave birth to a son nine years after you were born, but h
e got killed in a car accident last year (Scottie, my baby, rest his soul!), just before his twenty-first birthday. We haven’t recovered, I don’t think we ever will. Now more than ever I really need to meet you.

  I’ll be visiting California next month. I hope this isn’t the wrong thing to say, but I feel like I love you (I know I love you, even if we haven’t seen each other in more than thirty years), and I want to meet you when I come to visit.

  Until then, you’re in my heart and thoughts. With hopes for a happy reunion—

  Your birth mother,

  Susan Green

  I didn’t know what to do other than stand still. All my life I’d imagined this day, but now that it had come I couldn’t feel anything.

  Then I did something that surprised me, something I hadn’t done in a long while. I went to synagogue. It was a Saturday morning, and I drove across the bay to Berkeley, to a synagogue I often passed on my way to work. Services were almost over by the time I got there, but I took a prayer book and joined the worshippers, although I didn’t pray. I stared down at the words and listened.

  Much has happened since then. But when I think about that day, what I recall beyond the letter is being back at synagogue, the familiar unfamiliarity, the rhythmic motion of prayer and the smell of kiddush wine, the rabbi’s hand warm against my own as he wished me a good shabbes.

  Jenny had made some phone calls on my behalf and gotten the name of a social worker who specialized in adoption; I could contact her for an appointment.

  The social worker, who was in her mid-thirties, had grown up in Marin County, she told me when I met her. She had gone to good private schools and had parents who loved her, but until she found her birth mother she felt vaguely lost.

  On the walls of her office were posters of eagles flying over the American prairie and of children of different races holding hands. Books lined the shelves—Shakespeare plays and some novels, a psychology text on parent and child. A few marbles rested on the floor. Next to the marbles stood a miniature yellow Mack truck.

  “Mr. Suskind,” she said, “what brings you here?”

  I had come for Jenny, although Jenny would have denied that she cared whether I came or not. “You can just talk to her,” Jenny had said, but what was there to talk about? I was going to meet my birth mother—I’d made up my mind.

  I told the social worker the first lie that came to me. I said I wanted to adopt a baby.

  “That’s why you’re here?”

  “I think fatherhood would suit me.”

  “All right,” she said, and she took out some brochures and outlined the possibilities. There were public and private adoptions; there were lawyer’s fees. Some people, she said, had specific preferences. Did I care about gender? Was I willing to adopt a black baby? A Cambodian? A Vietnamese? “You’re married, aren’t you, Mr. Suskind?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then you want to adopt a baby on your own?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you gay?”

  “No.”

  “How old are you, Mr. Suskind, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Thirty. That’s not very old. Have you considered waiting?”

  “I’ve considered it.”

  “I don’t mean to dissuade you, Mr. Suskind, but you’re going to have some difficulty. You’re an unmarried man. There are people’s prejudices to contend with. Have you thought of other options? Maybe you could get a friend to help you out.”

  Jenny wasn’t home when I returned from the social worker’s, and I was immediately disappointed. She’d had a trial that afternoon; I’d forgotten that she would be late at work. I wanted her to be there so we could talk about what had happened, even though I understood that nothing really had happened. A week had passed since my birth mother’s letter had arrived, and I’d been reduced to the infant she’d given up, needy and petulant.

  These feelings surprised me. I don’t mind being on my own. When I was twenty-three, I hiked the Appalachian Trail by myself. Occasionally I get into my car, drive up the coast, and spend time alone among the redwoods. But something had happened to me in the wake of getting that letter. I wasn’t being myself.

  I fixed dinner for Tara. She had turned eleven recently and had taken to eating only certain foods, although it was hard to determine which ones. She claimed to be a vegetarian, but once, at a Chinese restaurant, she sneaked a piece of mu shu pork from Jenny’s plate when she thought we weren’t looking. For the past month, she’d been eating little else but Kraft macaroni and cheese. I don’t like macaroni and cheese, but I made a big pot of it anyway.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “At work,” I said. “She’ll be home soon.”

  “She better. She promised to help me with math.” Tara dipped her finger into the pot and dropped a gob of melted cheese into her mouth.

  “I can help you with math.”

  She shook her head. “Mom knows fractions, and you don’t.”

  I considered defending my knowledge of fractions, but thought better of it. “Well, she’ll be here soon.”

  It was hard to predict how Tara would act, especially when the two of us were alone. She’d become more difficult since I’d moved in, although, when the move had become official, she’d been a big advocate of mine, decorating the apartment with Welcome signs. Several times before drifting off to sleep, she had murmured “I love you” in a state of semiconsciousness. She’d even told me that she preferred me to her father, although it was hard to know what that meant, since she saw him only once a year.

  But she could be abrupt, turning sharp-tongued toward Jenny and me. She locked the door to her bedroom. Sometimes at dinner she placed a bandanna over her eyes, as if to say she didn’t want to see us. She kept her CD player on loud late at night when she was supposed to be asleep, when Jenny and I thought she was asleep, Soul Asylum blasting through the apartment at eleven o’clock.

  Still, I loved her. I’d courted her too when I’d first met Jenny, taking them to the circus and the San Francisco Exploratorium. I’d given Jenny white roses and bottles of French wine and bought comic books for Tara; I’d watched cartoons with her on Saturday mornings. On weekends, she and I had gone to museums, and to long animated movies in which hairy creatures beat each other over the head. As we sat at the back eating strands of red licorice, I worried about Tara the way a father would, all that violence, even in cartoons.

  But I wasn’t her father. Sometimes I wished he’d come and take her and leave me with Jenny for a while. I liked the time after Tara went to bed, when Jenny and I were too tired to speak, when we lay together in our room and listened quietly to music.

  Now, though, Jenny wasn’t home. I looked at the photographs she’d taken, some framed, some not, on our bedroom walls. In the morning I would come out of the shower and there she’d be, sitting on the floor in her bathrobe, taking photographs of me without my clothes on.

  “Be careful,” I told her once. “That’s the kind of thing that will get you arrested. Drugstore clerks turn in photos to the FBI. Then you get charged with pornography.”

  “This is San Francisco,” Jenny said. “That’s why I moved here. No one cares what you do.”

  For her, San Francisco had been the answer to everything. She’d wanted to live here since she was a child, in the days when her family was zigzagging across the country and she dreamed that someday she’d have a real home. She liked the warm weather; she swore she’d never bring children up in a place where they needed a winter coat. As a teenager, she’d seen San Francisco on TV and been struck by the sheer beauty of it, but also by the people who were fighting for what was right. Even as a child, she’d had an exquisite sense of social justice. In Norman, Oklahoma, where she’d lived when she was twelve, she’d organized a food drive to help feed the hungry. In high school, in Billings, Montana, she volunteered after school at legal aid, licking and stamping envelopes. She moved to the Bay Area in the fall of 1980
to go to U.C. Berkeley. She met Steve there freshman year. They got married when they were juniors; the year after that, Tara was born. The next fall, separated from Steve, Jenny started Stanford Law School.

  Now she was a public defender for the City and County of San Francisco. She spent her time defending habitual criminals—thieves, drug addicts, prostitutes, assault-and-batterers. Although most of her clients had done what they’d been charged with, Jenny had no qualms about defending them. There was some fun in beating the system, she admitted, but that was only a small part of it. Everyone was entitled to the best defense possible. Better that a hundred guilty people go free than that one innocent person be convicted. The legal process was what mattered. You fought for your clients as hard as you could, if only to raise some reasonable doubt, because your clients needed you and were entitled to your help. What chance did they have against the power of the state? Prison just made them worse, in any event. They came out a few years later more dangerous than before. And when you heard about their lives, your heart went out to them. In light of where they’d come from and what they’d endured, it would have been surprising had they not turned to crime. Jenny wouldn’t have been any different; she was convinced of that. Besides, once you got to know them—once you got to know anyone, Jenny said—you couldn’t look at them the same way. They might have committed a terrible crime, but they had a sense of humor, they were kind to their parents, they were capable of moments of grace. This was a cliché, she knew; Hitler, after all, loved kittens and little children; how many times had she heard that? But it was true. It was like reading a novel. You became involved in someone’s life; you saw the person’s humanity; you sympathized with human beings you wouldn’t have expected to sympathize with.