Swimming Across the Hudson (27 page)

“He was forty-one years old,” Mrs. Harris said. “The same thing happened to his brother.”

“A heart attack?”

She nodded.

I worried for Jonathan. Arteriosclerosis. Clogged arteries. High cholesterol. I didn't know what his cholesterol was. We played basketball together; he was lean and in good shape. But he ate a lot of meat and cheese. I'd brought ice cream to dinner that night. I was helping to kill him.

Mrs. Harris took out her wallet. “That's your birth father.” She pointed at a photograph. “Twenty-two years later I still carry him with me.”

I was so startled I gasped.

“What's wrong?”

The picture looked so much like Jonathan it could have been of him. “He was a very handsome man.”

“Thank you.” Hearing me say this seemed to make her relax. She put her folder back on the floor. I wanted to ask what was inside it. Why she had placed it on the table like something she wanted to refer to?

“Mrs. Harris,” I said, “will you tell me what happened?” We'd
been at Pauline's for half an hour, and suddenly she was more attractive to me. Her face had opened up. People never look the way they do when you first meet them. No one stays the same.

“It's only fair,” she said. “You flew across the country. But you have to promise me something. You can't track any more of us down.”

“Any more of you?”

“Promise me.”

I had no idea what she meant, but I promised.

She looked around to make sure no one was listening, then leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I gave birth to you on December 21, 1964.”

“Right.”

“But everything happened in secret.”

“Why?”

She moved her hand back and forth across the table, like someone dusting crumbs into a pile. I realized how hard this was for her, how she was doing her best not to cry.

“Your birth father was an engineer,” Mrs. Harris said, “but he got laid off from his job and couldn't find another one. Times were bad. We had loans to pay and two kids to support. We were in serious trouble.”

“Two kids?”

“A boy and a girl.”

“I had a brother and a sister?”

“You still do.”

I couldn't believe it. Jonathan had two siblings he didn't know about. In a way I did too. I imagined the four of us living together, renting a house in Chicago. Perhaps Jonathan would feel a kinship with them, something deeper than he and I had.

“Where are they now?”

“I can't tell you that.” Her voice was firm. “They don't know you exist. No one does.”

She was six months pregnant, she told me, when her husband lost his job. It was too late to get an abortion. The family was in debt and had to sell the furniture. Collectors were knocking on the front door. Their only choice was to give me up. Her husband was embarrassed that he couldn't support the family, so he persuaded her to tell people she had miscarried.

“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

 

S
ome 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 someone 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?”