Swimming Across the Hudson

by Joshua Henkin

  SWIMMING ACROSS THE HUDSON

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events; to real people, living or dead; or to real locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1997 by Joshua Henkin

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reprinted in any form without permission.

  Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  The text of this book is set in Goudy.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Henkin, Joshua.

  Swimming across the Hudson / Joshua Henkin.

  p.cm.

  ISBN 978-0-786-75552-3

  I. Title.

  PS3558.E49594199796-41235 CIP

  813′.54—dc20

  357910864

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Book design by Marysarah Quinn

  I am grateful to the following people for their assistance: Andrea Brott, Armin Brott, Jason Dubow, Miles Ehrlich, Anna Jardine, and Abby Rose. I’m especially appreciative of Lisa Bankoff, Laura Gaines, and Faith Sale for all that they have done on my behalf.

  Thanks finally to The Heekin Group Foundation and the Avery Hopwood and Jule Hopwood Fund for their financial support.

  TO MY PARENTS,

  ALICE AND LOUIS HENKIN,

  AND MY BROTHERS,

  DAVID AND DANIEL

  SWIMMING ACROSS THE HUDSON

  Contents

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  PART I

  There’s a story I was told when I was a child.

  My parents had friends who lived in Kansas. Their name was Millstein, and I pictured them clearly, swarthy and slow-afoot in the cornfield sun, a Jewish family camped in the heartland.

  We lived in New York City and were more Jewish than the Millsteins. That is what my father said: more Jewish, less Jewish, my father always quantifying things, spinning out the lessons that would shape my life. “They care about being Jewish,” he said, “but what do you do with all that caring?”

  My parents did this: They sent my brother, Jonathan, and me to Jewish day school; they kept a kosher home. On Friday nights my mother lit the sabbath candles. She placed her hands across her eyes and said a blessing to the sabbath queen.

  I liked the scent of the sabbath, the perfume on my mother’s wrists, my father’s dress shirts bleached and ironed. I could smell the challah in the kitchen, the marigolds, red and yellow, arranged in their vase. I stood next to Jonathan with my hands behind my back and watched the candles flicker. We wore navy slacks and white oxford shirts, the two of us like twins with our hair slicked back, wearing matching clothes for the sabbath.

  My mother had been born Jewish but grew up in a secular home. Her parents sent her to the Ethical Culture School and to summer work camp, where the kids stood in a circle before going to bed and sang “The International.”

  “Mom’s seen some weird things,” my father said once. My mother had studied anthropology in college, and had spent time in Bali after she graduated.

  She smiled. “I’ve seen some weird things right inside this apartment.”

  My father wanted Jonathan and me to be like him—to keep kosher and observe the sabbath, to pepper our conversations with the words of the Torah, the way his father and grandfather had done, generations of Jews speaking the same language, stretching back to Moses.

  “Think about that,” my father said. “All Jews are related to Moses.”

  My mother agreed to keep a kosher home even though she didn’t believe in God. She learned a little Hebrew; she went to synagogue on the holidays. She liked ritual, she said, and that pleased my father. When we grew up, she told us, we could live as we wanted.

  My father knew we’d live as we wanted. But I worried about what would happen if God spoke to him. In synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, we read about the binding of Isaac. I saw Abraham and Isaac in the land of Moriah, a butcher knife gleaming in Abraham’s hand.

  “Would you do that to me?” I asked my father.

  “Don’t be silly,” he said.

  “What if God commanded you?”

  “That’s impossible. God doesn’t speak directly to people anymore.”

  “He could start to.”

  “He won’t, Ben. It’s a counterfactual.”

  “It’s a counterfactual?”

  “Right. It’s counter to the facts.”

  Still, I worried. I pictured us in Riverside Park, my father and me on a hill, the kids on their sleds flying by us. Above us hung the trees, windblown and bare, and above them the heavens. I imagined my father holding a knife. He stood next to me with his eyes closed, listening patiently for God’s command.

  He taught Jonathan and me how to chant from the Torah. We learned prophets and Talmud; we read from “Ethics of the Fathers” after sabbath lunch. On the way to synagogue we conjugated Hebrew verbs, the three of us together keeping beat. Sometimes my mother would join us—amartee, amarta, amar, amarnu, amartem, amru—the four of us marching along Riverside Drive, one-two, one-two, the way my father had marched many years before, when he’d fought the Germans in World War II.

  The Millsteins, though, were undereducated. They went to synagogue just on Yom Kippur, in a city an hour from their home. They lived in a town of three thousand people where they were the only Jews.

  My father looked at Jonathan and me. He was a tall man—taller than I imagined I’d ever be—and I was sure he understood the world.

  “Do you know what synagogue is like in Kansas?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s like church,” he said.

  “They pray to Jesus,” said Jonathan.

  “No,” my father said, “they don’t pray to Jesus, but the services are in English and no one knows what’s going on. The cantor faces the congregants and sings to them. It’s like a performance.”

  “Like the opera,” Jonathan said.

  “Exactly,” said my father.

  The Millstein boys had had bar mitzvahs, but they weren’t bar mitzvahs as we knew them. They were more bar than mitzvah, my father said.

  “What does that mean?” my mother asked.

  “It means everyone got drunk,” I said.

  “It was an excuse for a party,” said my father.

  The Millsteins gave money to the United Jewish Appeal. They bought Israel Bonds and planted trees in the Negev and had a portrait of Golda Meir hanging in their living room. But this was cultural Judaism, my father said; it wouldn’t protect them.

  “Protect them from what?” I asked.

  “From intermarriage,” he said. “From Kansas.”

  For this was the heart of my father’s story. Peter, the Millsteins’ eldest son, graduated from college and took a trip around the world. He backpacked through Asia and North Africa, and ended up in Israel, where he worked on a kibbutz, picking melons in the fields. This pleased his parents—their son the Zionist, tilling the soil. They felt fortunate, they said, Peter in a country with all these Jewish girls, and now he might marry within the faith.

  But he didn’t, my father said. Even in Israel he found a non-Jew—a Swedish girl who worked on the kibbutz—and a year later they got married.

  For several seconds my father just stared at us. Then he said, “Do you see my point?”

/>   He was a smart man. He taught political science at Columbia University; he spoke Russian, Italian, German, and French. At night I would find him reading in the living room—books about countries whose names I didn’t know, about abstract painting and French literature, about memory, personality, and the workings of the brain. He was a genius, I thought, but I didn’t see his point. Marrying a Swede had nothing to do with Kansas.

  But I didn’t tell him that. And over time, I forgot about the Millsteins.

  Then, twelve years later, I too graduated from college and took a trip. I was with a friend driving west, and I called my parents when we got to Kansas. I wanted the Millsteins’ phone number.

  My father sounded nervous on the other end of the line. “Please, Ben,” he whispered, “don’t do this.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Just please don’t call them.”

  I was standing at a pay phone along the edge of the highway; I watched a stream of trucks drive by. And it occurred to me then, in this town I’d never been to, that all these years my father had lied to me. I pictured the Millsteins: hoe in hand, dreidel in pocket, Eastern Europe come to the Dust Bowl. But I could hear it in his voice, the Millsteins weren’t real. They were nothing but a lesson.

  I’m thirty-one years old now. I live in San Francisco with Jenny and her daughter, Tara; Jonathan lives a mile away from us. Sometimes from my balcony on a clear afternoon I imagine I can see his house.

  Jonathan and I are adopted. It’s something we’ve always known, as much a part of us as our bodies, what we have been and always will be. For a while we were embarrassed, for a while we were proud, for a long time Jonathan has been indifferent. Throughout it all my parents considered us their children, said they loved us no less for how we’d arrived.

  But last year, without warning, I got a letter from my birth mother. Since then everything has changed.

  Sometimes, even now, I think about the Millsteins. I try to remember the things my father taught us, the prayers he said, his wishes for our lives. But Jenny isn’t Jewish, and Jonathan is gay, and I see my father in our old apartment, asking my mother where he went wrong, how things might have been different.

  I’m only five months older than Jonathan. We were in the same nursery school class. We were in the same class in Jewish day school from kindergarten through twelfth grade. We were in the same class at Yale, where we arrived in September 1982, our dorms facing each other across Old Campus.

  This is the story my parents told us: I came along first, but then Jonathan came too, and they took us both because each of us was beautiful.

  I liked that story. I liked picturing my parents searching through hospitals, combing the wards filled with babies. I liked imagining the moment they brought us home. I liked pretending that adoption was their first choice, that they didn’t want their own children.

  But the truth was different.

  For several years my mother had tried to get pregnant, and when she finally did, she miscarried. I was nine when she told me this.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Sorry about what?”

  “I’m sorry I killed the baby.”

  “You didn’t kill the baby. You weren’t even born. Besides, it wasn’t a baby yet. It couldn’t have survived.”

  My room was across the hall from Jonathan’s. At night, from our beds, we whispered to each other through a telephone we’d fashioned, a long length of cord between two paper cups. “I killed Frances,” I said.

  “Who’s Frances?”

  “The dead baby.”

  After school, we stood against Jonathan’s bedroom wall and measured how tall we were. Jonathan got on tiptoe and fluffed up his hair; he pretended he was taller than I was. Then we played zoo. I placed him inside a laundry basket, and through the mesh of orange plastic fed him Froot Loops one by one. When we were done playing, I told him that we were brothers by birth, that we’d come from the same family.

  “That’s impossible,” he said. “We’re too close in age.”

  “No we’re not.” I opened The Guinness Book of World Records and showed him a picture of the smallest surviving infant, a baby so shriveled it looked like a fig; you couldn’t tell it was human. “That’s you,” I said. “You were born premature.”

  “No I wasn’t.”

  “We were adopted together. We were a package deal.”

  “You’re lying,” Jonathan said.

  “They put you in an oven until you were done.”

  “Like a piece of meat?”

  “Like a brisket.”

  Earlier that year, I’d begun to take karate. One night I came home from school, put on my gi, and ran about the apartment making grunting noises, flailing at the furniture.

  “Ha-ya!” I shouted.

  “You’re a white belt,” Jonathan said. “You can’t break anything.”

  I karate-chopped his bureau. I hit it with both hands again and again, until my palms turned red and my skin grew tender and the pain was too much for me to bear.

  “You’re crazy,” he said.

  “We’re adopted.”

  “So what?”

  “So self-defense is important.”

  I went into my parents’ bedroom, where I found my mother’s sewing kit. I returned to Jonathan’s room a minute later with a needle. I pricked my left index finger, and a drop of blood welled up. I pricked my middle finger too. Then I handed the needle to Jonathan.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “It’s a blood pact. It’s our promise to protect each other.”

  In school I’d learned about the power of blood, how lineage was everything in Jewish law. I watched the men in synagogue chant from the Torah, Shmuel the son of Zvi, Yosef the son of Peretz, the Levites and Israelites, everything going back to Mount Sinai. Where, I wondered, did I fit in all this? Where did Jonathan fit?

  “Am I Jewish?” I asked my father.

  “Of course you are.”

  “But was I born Jewish?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Jonathan too.”

  Still, I didn’t know where I came from. I’d read about kidnappings, children abducted from their homes, their organs removed and donated to science.

  “I might have been kidnapped and given to you,” I said.

  “You weren’t,” said my father. “Trust me.”

  “What if I get kidnapped now?”

  “You won’t.”

  “It happened to Patty Hearst.”

  “Patty Hearst was kidnapped by some nuts who said they were political, but all they wanted was her father’s money. No one’s interested in our money.”

  But at night, through our telephone, I told Jonathan to be on guard. “Watch out for kidnappers,” I said. I pulled on the cord to make sure he was holding the other end. “Be strong and loyal. Always keep an eye on who’s behind you.”

  He came out to me our sophomore year of college. It was a Saturday night. We were about to see Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. Jonathan spoke to me as the lights started to dim, hoping, it seemed, to break the news without giving me a chance to react.

  “I’m gay,” he said.

  I’d suspected the truth, but now that I’d heard it, I felt oddly disappointed. In summer camp, as teenagers, we’d made out with our girlfriends in adjoining pagodas; we’d once dated identical twins. Already I missed that bond we’d had, that teenage tie of hormones and discovery, of growing up together.

  “You’re my brother,” I said. “That’s the only thing that matters to me.”

  But throughout the movie I thought about his news. I imagined the moment he’d tell our parents, the instant everything would change. I could see them in the middle of the night, gray-haired and spent, in faded pajamas, numb, cast-off, sleepless.

  On the screen before us, Gene Wilder was in love with a sheep.

  “You can tell Mom and Dad that,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Tell the
m you’re in love with a sheep.” I reached into the box of popcorn, where Jonathan’s hand was. The touch of his fingers startled me. “Then tell them the truth. It will sound good by comparison.”

  At brunch the next day, I asked him whether he had a boyfriend.

  He did, he said. His name was Sandy.

  “How long have you two been going out?”

  “Since Thanksgiving.”

  “Thanksgiving? That’s almost three months ago. You should have told me. I’d have understood.”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “Was Sandy your first?”

  “My what?”

  “You know. The first guy you slept with.”

  “There have been a few others.”

  “A few? What does that mean? Three? Twenty?”

  “It’s none of your business. I don’t ask how many girls you’ve slept with.”

  This was early 1984. AIDS was in the news. I reached across the table and touched Jonathan’s hand. “You could die.”

  “You could too. Straight people get AIDS also. Besides, I can take care of myself.”

  His gaze was blank. He seemed to be staring right through me, toward somewhere, something, I couldn’t understand.

  A month later, in March, he came out to my parents by mail. Before sending his note, he showed me what he’d written, wanting to know what I thought.

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  I’m gay. I have a boyfriend. His name is Sandy. I don’t want to have to hide this from you.

  Love,

  Jonathan

  The note was written on a postcard, oddly public for what he was telling them. Everyone read other people’s postcards. He was coming out to the mailman; he was coming out to my parents’ next-door neighbors, to the world. On the front of the postcard was a picture of a boy balanced on the railing of a sandbox. Jonathan had done that as a child, walking along the Riverside Park sandbox railing across the street from our home. Was he sending my parents a message, telling them that he was still the boy he’d been?

  “Talk to them,” I said. “It would be better that way.”