Swimming Across the Hudson (2 page)

 

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 them 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.”

“I can't. I'm too afraid.”

“You can try.”

I'd always thought of us as related, assumed that whatever I felt he did too. Now I realized this wasn't so. We looked different from each other, more so than ever. He was taller and ganglier than I was, all elbows and knees. His skin was darker than mine, his eyes lighter. The whiskers were thick on his upper lip and chin, while I could still go a week without shaving. He'd become a leader in the movement to divest from South Africa. Sometimes at night I'd see him camped inside a shanty.

“They'll still love you,” I said, staring at the postcard.

“I'm not sure.”

“They will. Believe me.”

Perhaps this had to do with his being adopted. If he'd been born to them, he might have been more confident that they would love him for who he was, that he was their son and they wouldn't trade him.

“I wish they could find out by accident,” he said. “Maybe I'll fly to Europe and write them from there. I need to put an ocean between us.”

How long, I wondered, had he known he was gay? I wanted to ask him, but I was afraid—afraid he'd say it wasn't my business, afraid he'd tell me he'd always known and all these years he'd been faking it.

My mother wrote back before my father did. Jonathan showed me her letter, as if trying to include me in the correspondence.

Dear Jonathan,

We love you. That's most important. We hope you'll call us when you're ready. I was surprised by the news, but if this is who you are and you're sure of it, then I want you to know you have my support and I'll always stand up for you. You're our babies—you and Ben both. Nothing will ever change that.

Love,

Mom

My mother grew more adamant as the weeks passed, trying to demonstrate her support for Jonathan. She sent him magazine clippings about gay adult children and their parents; she went to the library and read gay fiction. It seemed to me that she was trying too hard. Sometimes I see this even now, my mother always doing what's right, as if this were another cause to fight for, pretending she isn't ambivalent about this—my mother who dreamed Jonathan would get married, who used to talk to us about grandchildren.

We're a family of letter-writers, and my mother wrote me too.

Dear Ben,

Jonathan told us he's gay. Dad and I will do our best to be there for him. But we're worried. We read about AIDS all the time. We'd like to say something to him, but Dad doesn't know how to, and I'm not sure what to say either. Maybe you can say something to him—if you feel comfortable.

Love,

Mom

I spoke to her a few days later, but I said nothing about her comment on AIDS, and I didn't mention that I'd already spoken to Jonathan. I refused to talk behind his back. I didn't want to be their intermediary.

When my father wrote Jonathan, he was more reticent than my mother. He danced around the subject of my brother's coming out. He was working on an article about 1950s Soviet culture, and he described the research he was doing and asked Jonathan about his work. He wrote about the social safety net and the mean-spiritedness of the Reagan budget cuts. But he only briefly mentioned Jonathan's announcement. “You shouldn't jump to any conclusions,” his letter
read. “You're still young and trying to figure things out. College is an exciting time, but a lot of what you think when you're in college won't mean anything twenty years from now.”

“Dad believes this is just a phase,” Jonathan said.

“Give him time,” I told him. “He'll come to terms with it eventually.”

Every letter my father sent us had the Hebrew date on top and the words “with the help of God,” written in Hebrew, in the upper right-hand corner. Sometimes he declared his love to us in Hebrew. He liked to allude to verses in the Torah, to remind us of everything the three of us shared. But this letter to Jonathan, more than others, was filled with such verses. Perhaps my father was being indirect, reminding Jonathan that the Torah prohibited him from having sex with another man.