Swimming Across the Hudson (30 page)

I stared at him standing at his father's tombstone, my grandfather and not my grandfather, a bearded man from Eastern Europe whom I hadn't known well but whose picture I'd studied. I'd convinced myself I looked like him. I stood next to Jonathan in that graveyard in New Jersey and watched my father whisper to the dead, his pants legs flapping in the wind as he turned back to face us.