Swimming Across the Hudson (24 page)

“All right,” I said, believing it was.

I telephoned my mother at work the next morning to tell her what I'd found out. I was still relieved, still angry.

She was quiet on the other end. Then she started to cry. “God, Ben, I've been so scared.”

“Me too.”

“I started to say something to him many times, but I could never do it.” She took a quick breath. “What about Sandy?”

“He's negative too.”

“Thank God.”

Then she asked me when Jonathan had found out.

“Last month.” I didn't have the heart to tell her the truth.

“Have you told Dad?”

“You tell him.” I couldn't imagine talking about this with him, talking with him about anything that had to do with sex.

My mother repeated an ancient Greek saying that my father had once told us: In times of peace sons bury their parents, but in times of war parents bury their sons. “I've thought a lot about that,” she said. “I've told myself that all over the world parents bury their kids. As if that would have made it any easier if something had happened to Jonathan.”

It was almost eight o'clock. I would be late for work. I told my mother I had to go.

“Talk to me a minute longer,” she said. “I need to hear your voice.”

 

B
ecause of vacation and members' kids going back to school, my adoptees' support group had been on hiatus. But in October, we started to meet again. I told everyone that I'd found Jonathan's papers, and this divided the group into two camps. Most members argued that Jonathan was entitled not to meet his birth mother. But a few people said he was denying his true self and it was my job to enlighten him.

“We should never support ignorance.” This was Phillip, a man about my age, who had met his birth mother when he was twenty, his birth father when he was twenty-five. “In any case, it's not just a question of what's best for your brother, but of what's best for you. It's a question of what's best for all of us.”

“For all of us?” I said.

“What your brother does has ramifications.” Phillip saw our support group as part of a movement. The greater the number of adoptees who found their birth parents, the more attention adoption would receive and the easier it would be to get birth records opened. In the process, society would be sensitized to the needs of adoptees and to the fact that there were many different kinds of families. We were like any other movement, he told the group. In a way we resembled the gay rights movement. He even used the word “closeted” to refer to Jonathan and suggested that he needed to be outed.

“My brother isn't closeted,” I said. “He's never denied that he's adopted.”

“He may not deny it in the narrow sense, but he denies it more fundamentally.”

Phillip appealed to my vanity, telling me that I had done the noble thing while Jonathan had taken the easy way out. And when I told the group that I was interested in meeting Jonathan's birth mother, I found an ally in Phillip.

“You can search for her yourself,” he said.

“Me?”

“Why not? If you think you should know, and I can see a good argument for that—he's your brother, after all—then you should do it.”

I kept thinking about this the next few weeks. Why shouldn't I search for her? Jonathan didn't have to find out. God knew he wasn't hesitant to keep secrets from me. We were both adults. We'd each do as we wanted.

I had off from school on election day, and I took Susan with me when I went to vote.

“Are you registered in San Francisco?” I asked. If she was, I thought, it would be a clear sign that she was staying indefinitely.

“No.”

“Did you vote absentee?”

“I should have. My husband has been giving me a hard time about it.”

So she was still in touch with him.

At her apartment, she made me lunch.

“I found Jonathan's birth records,” I said. I considered telling her I might search for his birth mother, but she would have been offended. I hadn't even searched for her.

“Where did you find them?”

“In New York.” I had an image of myself sitting in front of the storage closet, discovering that Jonathan had been called Michael. I asked Susan if she'd given me another name. It had never occurred to me before.

“Your name was Christopher.”

I let the word slide across my lips. “Christopher.” A Christian name.

“But I didn't call you anything for the first couple of weeks because I didn't want to get too attached to you.”

“And after that?”

“It seemed silly. I was attached to you already and you were still there. I hadn't found the right parents for you.”

I hadn't realized that she'd considered other couples. I'd simply imagined an adoption line with my parents at the front of it.

“Then I met your parents, and I liked them. They were responsible and financially secure. They seemed concerned about me.”

“You met them?” They'd made my birth mother out to be almost mythic, a mere metaphor for my dark past. I'd practically come to believe that I'd grown on a tree and that my parents had plucked me from it.

“They came to New Jersey,” Susan said, “and we spent the afternoon together.”

“Did they meet my birth father?”

She shook her head. “He was gone. He turned eighteen and was off to the Marines.”

Susan excused herself and left the kitchen, then came back a minute later with an envelope. “Open it,” she said.

Inside was an old photo, the colors bleeding across the paper. A girl was holding a baby. My mother and father stood on either side of her.

“It's you and me,” Susan said, “with your parents.”

Everyone looked so young. My parents were smiling, but Susan's face was drawn. She must have been thinking that this was the last
time she'd hold me. It was strange to see them together, the different reactions to the same event, as though two photographs had been blended. I was two months old, and asleep. It might have been the oldest picture of me that existed.

I tried to recall my first impression of Susan that day she'd walked into the Ethiopian restaurant. “You thought about keeping me, didn't you?” I asked.

“Of course I did.”

“But?”

“I didn't really have a choice. My parents wouldn't let me.”

“And if they had?”

“I probably still would have given you up. It was the right thing to do. For both of us. But I wish my parents hadn't forced me. That way I wouldn't have spent so much time persuading myself that I'd have made a different decision.” The lines near her mouth looked etched in; she seemed to have aged in the last several months.

“What about abortion?”

“I couldn't do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because for a long time I pretended I wasn't pregnant, and by the time I admitted it, it was too late. Besides, I'm Catholic.”

“You're opposed to abortion?”

“Except for rape and incest.”

“Well, I'm happy I wasn't the product of rape or incest.” I was trying to lighten the mood. But the words came out clunky and badly timed.

“Did you use contraception?” Some Catholics wouldn't, I knew.

Susan looked embarrassed. Could I blame her? I was asking her for answers I only half wanted, talking about things we shouldn't have been discussing.

But she answered me. Perhaps she felt she had to. “We used rubbers.”

A shudder of discomfort ran through me. Maybe this was a sign
that she really was my mother: I was embarrassed to think of her having sex.

“I don't want to discuss this,” Susan said.

She was right.

She told me she knew I'd written her husband. She spoke without a hint of emotion. She was making me wait. And I was behaving like the person I was—a squirming son, caught by his mother. “How did you get his address?”

“I assumed it was the same as yours,” I answered.

“Why did you write him?”

I could have told her I hadn't been thinking. But I had to do better than that. “I know this doesn't make sense to you, but I feel partly responsible for the problems in your marriage. You left your husband and came to see me.”

“That doesn't mean you caused our problems.”

“I was just trying to help.” Although this sounded absurd, it was true.

“If anything, it made matters worse.”

“Come on,” I said.

“Why did you think it would help? You're a stranger to Frank, and he doesn't like strangers knowing about his marital problems. I had to assure him that I hadn't set this up.”

“Set it up?”

“He thought I asked you to write the letter—that it was my way of telling him I was still thinking about him. Frank thought you were being patronizing.”

“I know. He wrote me.”

“He did?”

I nodded.

“Look how out of hand this is getting. You've gotten us into an absurd triangle.”

“I'm sorry. I shouldn't have written him. But I don't know why he thought I was being patronizing.”

“He didn't like your comment about
The American Spectator
.”

“What comment?”

She walked out of the kitchen and returned holding my letter. Frank must have mailed it to her. “‘I was at her apartment recently, and she was reading a copy of
The American Spectator
. She appreciates the subscription you gave her. She enjoys the magazine.'”

I told her she was right. It was a silly comment.

“It was also a lie. I don't enjoy the magazine, and you know it. Frank thought your comment was snide. He realizes your politics are different from his.”

“He has no way of knowing that.”

“Come on, Ben. You're a Jewish kid from Manhattan.”

I was tempted to tell her she was being anti-Semitic, but it was neither true nor to the point.

“The fact is, you
can
be patronizing. Like those comments about my earrings.”

“What comments? I've been supportive of your work. I've told you that. I feel bad that you got pregnant and your career was derailed.”

“You imagine my career was derailed. I never said anything about it. You like that I might have been a famous artist. As if having a birth mother who's just a normal person wouldn't be good enough for you.”

“Look, Susan, I'm sorry I wrote your husband. I don't know what else to tell you.”

 

I
continued to think about Jonathan's birth papers, so I called information in Chicago and asked for a listing for Alfred and Rebecca Harris. This was just exploratory. I was simply finding out what was possible.

No Alfred Harris was listed. Two Rebecca Harrises were, one of them with an unpublished number. The operator gave me the published number and address.

I considered throwing the information out, but changed my mind. Had Jonathan been interested in my past, he'd have done what I was doing—and without telling me. The man with a million secrets. And what were the chances of my finding his birth mother? He'd been born more than thirty years ago.

I could write this woman and tell her the truth—that she might have given birth to my brother and that I hoped to meet her. But that wouldn't work. She may not have wanted to meet Jonathan; she surely didn't want to meet me, someone who would remind her of what had happened without allowing her to see the child she'd given up.

So I wrote this letter.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Harris,

Almost thirty-one years ago in Chicago, I was born to you, I believe. I have often wondered who and where you are. I live in San Francisco, but I'd be willing to fly to Chicago to
meet you. Don't worry, I won't disrupt your life. I'm not looking for money or any other kind of help. I just want to ask you some questions. If you don't want to meet me I'll understand, but I hope you'll agree to my request. I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours truly,
           

Jonathan Suskind

I addressed an envelope and put my work address in the upper left-hand corner. I didn't want a response to come to the apartment.

I started checking the mail two days later. Everything, I imagined, was being sped up for me. The postal service had suspended other operations and was concentrating solely on my correspondence.

Already, after a week, I started to feel foolish. Of course I had the wrong Rebecca Harris.

In the days that followed, I again thought of confiding in Jenny. But every time I was about to, I changed my mind. The day she came home having lost her rape case, I knew I'd made the right decision. She was upset at herself for having let her client down. She was distracted and testy.