Swimming Across the Hudson

by Joshua Henkin

  “You lied?” I didn’t have a right to feel shocked by this. Everything I’d done since I’d written her had been a colossal lie.

  “It was awful. I had to go through a fake mourning, all the while knowing the real mourning lay ahead, when I’d have you in secret and give you up.”

  I felt a flash of anger, as if she really had killed Jonathan off. She stared back at me—amazed, it seemed, that I existed. Had she come to believe her own story?

  “Didn’t people suspect?”

  “Some did. I’m sure the neighbors wondered. But I stayed home all the time and the kids were still small. They were too young to understand what was happening.”

  “They still don’t know?”

  Mrs. Harris shook her head. “You lie to someone long enough and it gets harder to change your story.”

  I thought of my parents’ lie—how as time passed they probably started to forget, how it became easier to believe that I’d been born Jewish.

  “Besides, I never thought I’d see you.”

  She was right—she wouldn’t have. If I hadn’t flown here and pretended I was Jonathan, she wouldn’t be thinking about any of this. I felt terrible. I’d been so focused on lying to Jenny, so focused on deceiving Jonathan, that I hadn’t considered Mrs. Harris. She’d been an abstraction before I met her.

  “Three months after we gave you up,” she said, “your birth father got another job. Things worked out for us. I kept thinking that maybe we could get you back. But I knew it wouldn’t work. And besides, it didn’t seem fair to your new parents. Then Alfred died nine years later, and I knew we’d made the right decision. It was hard enough on your brother and sister. Why put another child through that?”

  “You did the right thing,” I said.

  “I did? I thought you came here because you were upset. You read about kids finding their birth parents and blaming them for giving them up.”

  “I don’t blame you. I love my parents. They’ve been good to me.”

  Mrs. Harris seemed relieved.

  “Tell me something,” I said. “Are you Jewish?” This was the question I’d most wanted to ask. But I didn’t know what answer to wish for. Instinctively I hoped that she’d say she was Jewish—that not everything my parents had told us had been a lie.

  “I don’t practice any religion.”

  “But were you born Jewish?”

  She nodded.

  “And my birth father?”

  “He was Jewish too.”

  Jonathan was a Jew. Why, then, did I feel disappointed? It may have been envy, or simply anticlimax. But it’s occurred to me since then that, until that moment, I’d allowed myself to believe that we really were related.

  “Tell me about you,” Mrs. Harris said. “How long have you lived in San Francisco? Do you have a career?”

  I tried to answer as Jonathan would. I wanted to protect myself and be honest with Mrs. Harris. I wanted to leave her with at least a shard of the truth.

  “I’m a doctor,” I said.

  “What kind?”

  “A geriatrician. I’ve been in San Francisco since I graduated from college.”

  “Do you have a family?”

  “A what?”

  “You know. A wife and children.”

  I hesitated. If Jonathan had known what I was doing, would he have wanted me to come out to her? Did I owe it to him to tell her the truth? Did I owe it to Mrs. Harris?

  “I’m not married,” I said.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “There’s still time,” she said, as if to comfort me.

  I smiled at her and told her she was right.

  I was spent. So was Mrs. Harris. Her gray hair was damp and matted to her forehead. Smoking wasn’t allowed in the restaurant, but a woman at the next table lit up a cigarette. She waved the smoke dismissively from in front of her face, as if she didn’t know how it had gotten there. A janitor was mopping the floor. This appeared to be a hint that it was closing time, but it was only two o’clock.

  “You had an older brother,” Mrs. Harris said.

  “That’s right.” I smiled like a child who has heard his name called out.

  “Is he still alive?”

  “Alive?”

  “He was sick,” she said.

  “He was?”

  “It’s been a long time. I could be confused. How much older is he than you?”

  “Five months.”

  “That’s what I remember. Your parents told me he was sick.”

  “Very sick?”

  “I don’t know. The doctors couldn’t agree on what was wrong, but they thought it might be something serious.”

  “My parents told you this?”

  Mrs. Harris nodded. “Your parents fell in love with you. They’d already adopted your brother, but they weren’t sure what would happen to him. I guess it was like insurance.”

  I got up from my seat and asked to be excused. I went into the bathroom and washed my face. I’d been a colicky baby, that I knew, but my parents hadn’t told me I’d been sick. I listened to my pulse. It was steady. My lungs felt fine. Maybe I’d been born with a hole in my heart. It had happened to a girl in my nursery school. Born with a hole in her heart, she’d had to have emergency surgery. I could still hear my parents’ voices: they’d adopted us both because each of us was beautiful. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. Had they adopted Jonathan to replace me?

  When I came back to the table, Mrs. Harris was gone and our trays had been bussed. All I found was a napkin and on it a note:

  Jonathan,

  I was glad to meet you, but today has been too much for me. Take care of yourself. Make the most of your life. Know that I’ll be thinking about you.

  Rebecca Harris

  Some people speak of a moment in their lives when everything changes. I’ve always been suspicious of such claims. They seem the product of retrospect, the urge to search for watersheds, to think of everything in terms of before and after, when in fact our lives are more haphazard than that and are made orderly only in the retelling.

  But that day in the restaurant I changed my mind. I knew it the instant I read Mrs. Harris’s note. It wasn’t a case of getting what I’d hoped for—of information provided and curiosity put to rest. It was more than that. I realized what a fraud I’d been. I’d lied to Jenny, Jonathan, and Mrs. Harris; perhaps most of all I’d lied to myself—all in the hope of achieving something impossible, something I couldn’t even put my hands on. My wish was as fanciful as the wish for time not to pass. I wanted my brother to be who he’d been years before; I wanted things to be the same between us. But I wasn’t sure any longer what there had been between us—wasn’t sure what was real and what I’d made up. The past year had been nothing but a string of lies: the lie that I was a Jew and that I wasn’t a Jew, my parents’ lying to me and my lying back, my identity slippery and slithering.

  I hadn’t realized this, but I might have searched for my birth father, despite what I’d told Susan. I might have disobeyed Mrs. Harris’s order (had any such order ever stopped me?) and found Jonathan’s brother and sister. There was no end to the searches I could have made if I was determined to make them. I’d hurt a lot of people. I didn’t want to continue on this path. I’d have been happy not to know what I already knew. I haven’t asked my parents whether I was sick as an infant, and I don’t expect I ever will.

  That evening, I ordered room service. At midnight on my nightstand lay a plate of scrambled eggs I hadn’t eaten and a half-empty martini glass. I rarely drank, and I didn’t feel like drinking now. But people were drinking in the movie on TV, and I was so lost I was imitating them, open to any suggestion.

  Jenny hovered above me. I saw her next to Tara in the kitchen, the two of them doing their work. I didn’t know why I wasn’t with them, home where I belonged; didn’t know what I was doing in this midwestern city, in a hotel room with a plastic card key in my jeans pocket, masquerading as so
meone I wasn’t. I felt like a fool.

  When I got home, Jenny wanted to know how the teachers’ meeting had gone.

  Of all the things that have happened between us, this is the most painful to recount. I had no choice but to lie to her, only now I was doing so without delusion.

  If I’d told Jenny the truth, I believe she would have left me. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had. Perhaps I deserved to be left, but I was convinced we were on a new path, and I refused to sacrifice our relationship. I could say what you don’t know can’t hurt you, but I’ve never believed that was so. Someday I hope to tell Jenny the truth. Maybe I’ll be able to tell Jonathan as well. For now I have to accept the lies I’ve told. They don’t sit well with me.

  Things improved between Jenny and me almost as soon as I got back. I can’t say how, exactly, but I began to feel this was my life: Jenny and Tara; our home; my teaching; San Francisco itself. Everything felt less temporary and contingent. I neither looked to the past for phantom guidance nor avoided the future.

  Jenny, in turn, must have sensed this. Our disagreements seemed less weighty. They were about what they were about, with less of a subtext. Jenny was more amenable to my spending time with Susan. Even my adoptees’ support group didn’t threaten her. It was a source of amusement more than anything else.

  We got engaged a month later. I waited that long to bring the subject of marriage up because I wanted to be sure I wasn’t doing this out of guilt, although I knew I wasn’t. I’d been brought back to my senses just in time, thanks to Jenny’s patience. All along I’d wanted to marry her. I can honestly say she saved me from myself; my life would be nothing without her.

  Tara guessed our news before we could tell her. We must have had that marriage glow.

  “How did you know?” Jenny asked.

  “I just did. It was about time, don’t you think?”

  “Why?”

  “Mom, you guys have been together for almost three years. How long were you going to just hang out?”

  “Well, aren’t you going to congratulate us?”

  “Congratulations.” Tara kissed Jenny, then me, on the cheek. She didn’t sound enthusiastic, but it was unhip at her age to show any feelings about us other than amused embarrassment. I’d become part of the family. I could tell she was happy for us both. I think she was happy for herself also.

  “Now will you finally let me go to boarding school?”

  Jenny shook her head. “Ben and I need you around here. We’d be lonely without you.”

  Telling my parents, especially my father, was going to be more difficult. I called them to say Jenny and I were coming to New York and needed to talk to them.

  “What’s wrong?” my mother asked.

  “Nothing. We just have something to tell you.”

  “We can play handball,” my father said.

  “Come on, Dad.”

  “Why not? I ride the stationary bike six days a week. I’m not so old.”

  I thought of him grading his blue books, a seventy-five-year-old man who still taught class, who came home at night and marked his papers, hunched over his desk now as always, the elbows of his jacket patched with suede, my father penciling in letters in the blue-book margins in secret Hebrew code.

  We left Tara with a friend and flew to New York. When we got to my parents’ apartment, my mother had lamb chops on the counter, ready to be broiled. Lamb chops used to be my favorite food, what I’d chosen every year for my birthday dinner. Sometimes my mother would call me “lamb chop” as she stroked my forehead before I went to sleep. She’d sit next to my father on the edge of the bed while he placed his hand like a yarmulke on my head and listened to me say the shma.

  My mother and Jenny sliced radishes for the salad. I sat on the stool where I’d eaten breakfast as a child and listened to the sound of their knives against the cutting board. I thought maybe this wouldn’t be as hard as I’d feared; maybe it wouldn’t be so painful.

  Jenny went to lie down before dinner. I set four places at the dining room table, then came back into the kitchen. My mother was making rice pilaf.

  “I like Jenny,” she said. “I hope you realize that.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I appreciate your saying it.”

  “Dad does too.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Whatever you think about what we think, I hope you know we have nothing against her.”

  She seemed to understand why we were here, and was preparing for our announcement. Her hands fluttered like sparrows above the stove. She’d lost weight, I thought. For a moment I saw her like the skulls behind the window in my high school biology lab, becoming teeth and bone: my mother growing old on the heels of my father, osteoporitic and arthritic, with the cautious gait of the old women in Riverside Park careful not to slip on the ice.

  “I know why you’re here,” my mother said.

  I could tell she did. But I didn’t want to talk about it. “Please, Mom, let’s wait until Dad comes home.”

  She stirred the pilaf with a wooden spoon, her right hand moving in concentric circles, one after the other, wider and wider. Her hair hung in wisps above her eyes; a few strands were stuck to her forehead.

  “I want to say something now,” she said, “because when Dad is here it will be harder for me to say it.”

  “Okay.”

  “When you were small, I always told you that when you grew up, you and Jonathan could live as you wanted.”

  “We have.”

  “I know. Let me finish. I meant it then and I mean it now. But there was a time when I truly believed it wouldn’t matter. I thought that as long as you were happy, one thing would be as good as the next.”

  “But it isn’t?”

  “It turns out to be more complicated. I know what you’re thinking.” She pointed at the adjoining sinks, one for milk and one for meat, then at the cabinet that held the sabbath candles and the unopened bottles of kiddush wine. “You wonder why this matters to me. You know how I grew up. God for me was ‘The International.’ I never thought I’d care about the Jewish laws.”

  “But?”

  “But I’ve grown to.” She untied her apron and set it down on the counter. It had “This Kitchen Is Kosher” written on it. Jonathan and I had bought it for her fortieth birthday. “In a way I still think these laws are archaic, and I don’t believe in God. But over the years I’ve come to care about these things.”

  A pigeon walked along the window ledge. My mother hated the sounds pigeons made. During sabbath lunch she used to rap her slipper against the window and shoo them away. She looked down at the street. She had an intent expression on her face, as if something were staring back at her, some answer to a question she was trying to ask. “More than half my life I’ve been married to Dad. That’s a lot of sabbaths together. Every time I cook a meal in this kitchen I’m aware of the kosher laws. He and I disagree about many things. But I’ve come to understand that Judaism is about continuity. Most religions are. By marrying Jenny—”

  “Please, Mom. Don’t try to preempt us.”

  “I’m not. I just want to explain what I’m feeling, and I want to do it now while I’ve got the chance. This is hard for Dad. I’m speaking for him because, although it’s hard for me too, it’s not as hard. And I don’t think he’ll be able to tell you this himself. This has nothing to do with Jenny. Both of us respect and admire her. We more than understand why you’ve fallen in love. I’m sorry we haven’t welcomed her as much as you’d have liked—surely not as much as we should have. But that will change—from my side, I promise. From Dad’s side too, I think, if you’re patient enough.”

  I wouldn’t have expected any different from her. She was my mother. I wanted to tell her I hadn’t planned it this way; I’d have done anything not to disappoint her and my father. I wanted to tell her I still dreamed about them, my parents who had loved Jonathan and me and taken us in, who thought about us now, three thousand miles away, and still saw the babies they’d adopted.<
br />
  We sat down to dinner when my father got home. My mother placed two lamb chops on everybody’s plate and ladled portions of rice pilaf. In the living room the lamps were lit, casting shadows along the grand piano. I could see across the water, to where Palisades Amusement Park had once been. At night, Jonathan and I used to watch the roller coaster, the climb and dip of lights, a flash of color and then darkness.

  Jenny sat across from me in Jonathan’s old seat. My father sat opposite my mother. He was on the antique chair; it had lasted for twenty-eight years. Once when Jonathan and I were taking turns sitting on it, we accidentally chipped a piece off one arm. We woke up at three in the morning and secretly, fearfully, Krazy Glued the wood back together.

  My father raised his wineglass in toast. “To seeing you, Ben.”

  “To seeing Jenny too,” my mother said.

  My father’s shirtsleeves were rolled up. He was almost completely bald, and what hair he had was as white as the inside of a coconut. But the hair along his arms was still dark. I’d stroked those arms when I was a child, asking him to make a muscle for me, then feeling my own muscle. I’d asked him how much he weighed when he was my age, how tall he’d been at ten, how old he was when he started shaving. I wanted to know what to expect from my life; I was waiting to see what would happen. Jonathan and I: the only kids in the fourth grade who knew the meaning of the word hirsute. I used to wonder what my father’s students thought about him, whether they compared themselves with him the way I did, whether in him they saw the unfolding of their world.

  “I’m glad we’re here,” Jenny said.

  “We’re glad you’re here too,” said my mother.

  “We have some news for you,” Jenny said. We hadn’t planned how we’d make the announcement. I assumed I’d tell my parents at dinner. But I realized now that Jenny was telling them. “Ben and I are getting married.”

  “Congratulations!” my mother said. She jumped out of her chair. Her enthusiasm was so high-pitched it seemed almost willed. She hugged Jenny hard. Then she hugged me.