Swimming Across the Hudson (4 page)

“I don't care where I came from. I could have come from the stork, for all the difference it makes.”

“You don't mean that. You're just upset. Remember when we imagined we'd been flown to earth by spaceship? Don't you ever miss those times?”

“They were okay,” he said, “but I've stopped dwelling on them. I don't know why you think about them so much.”

We moved to San Francisco after graduating. I had no plans, so I went to California because Jonathan was going there with Sandy. I'd lived across the hall from him until we left for college, and across a courtyard all four years at Yale. He was the constant in my life, and I in his; I didn't see why anything should be different.

Also, I had a vague plan that we'd find our birth mothers. I never told him this. I didn't fully acknowledge it to myself. But the possibility was always there. We were living in the same city. Eventually we'd go on a search.

We arrived in San Francisco in September 1986. I held odd jobs for five years. I was a bike messenger, then a short-order cook at a taquería in the Mission district, then a proofreader for Stanford University Press, then a driver for the airport Supershuttle.

Eventually I got my teaching certificate at San Francisco State University. Since September 1992, I've taught American history to high school students in Berkeley at a progressive private school,
where the students serve on the disciplinary board and call their teachers by their first names.

I'd always thought of myself as countercultural (“Countercultural?” Jenny once said. “Give me a break, Ben. Your father's a professor at Columbia. You grew up in an apartment on Riverside Drive. You went to Yale. You teach kids who will also go to Yale. Who do you think you're kidding?”), but when I arrived at the school, I realized that representing the counterculture wouldn't be my role. The principal wore blue jeans, and some of the male teachers had long hair. It was hard to tell who was a teacher and who was a student.

This made me uncomfortable. I believed in appropriate professional boundaries. I also thought students should learn the fundamentals. As “Ethics of the Fathers” says, five years old for Scripture; ten years old for Mishnah; thirteen for the Commandments; fifteen for the Talmud; eighteen for the marriage canopy. I've ignored some of the particulars, but I believe in the principle. A person should learn certain things at certain times.

So I made my students memorize names and dates. I had them recite passages from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address. I made them learn the names of all the presidents, vice-presidents, and secretaries of state.

My students, understandably, thought I was uptight.

“We love you, Ben,” one of them said, “but you're a rigid guy in a suit.”

“I don't wear a suit,” I said. “I don't even own one.” I took foolish pride in that.

“Are you married?” a student asked.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” asked another.

“This is American history,” I said. “This is not the Phil Donahue show. If I ever get to be famous enough that my personal life becomes relevant to American history, then we can talk about my marital status.”

Their first year in San Francisco, Jonathan and Sandy broke up. Jonathan went out with several other men. Again I worried about his health, but I knew better than to say anything to him.

Six months later, he and Sandy got back together. They've stayed with each other ever since. In the fall of 1987, Jonathan enrolled in UCSF Medical School. He has since completed his geriatrics residency. Medicine suits him well. The results are tangible and the pay is high. Sandy started Wiper-Up, a window-washing company. Now he employs three workers. He and Jonathan take vacations in the Bahamas and buy bottles of fine wine.

Meanwhile, my parents have aged. My father is fifteen years older than my mother. He was almost sixty-six when I graduated from college; he turned seventy-five this past year. He was always older than our friends' fathers. Perhaps that's why Jonathan chose geriatrics.

When Jonathan and I moved to San Francisco, we started going out to dinner together once a week. Several times each summer we watched the Giants play, sitting in the Candlestick bleachers eating nonkosher hot dogs. On Sunday afternoons when we were younger, we'd watched the Mets at Shea Stadium—my father sitting between us keeping score, my mother preparing us for summer camp, needle and thread across her lap, sewing name tapes on our underwear.

“Do you remember that?” I asked Jonathan once.

“Sure.”

“Remember how we used to think Sandy Koufax was our birth father?”

But Jonathan wasn't interested in talking about adoption. It had been our shared language, but he'd moved on. I stopped raising the subject with him. I still thought about it—still thought that someday we'd go on a search—but I didn't talk about it with anyone.

Until I met Jenny. She wanted to know every detail about me.

We would stay up talking past five in the morning, when one of us would fall asleep midsentence. Jenny's rings and bracelets lay like scrap metal on the nightstand. Her earrings hung on hooks beside the vanity, swaying in front of the window. Sometimes she would leave her closet door open, and I would run my fingers along the pile of folded sweaters and the rows of pressed blouses. Pinned to the wall above our bed was a Venezuelan flag she had brought back from a trip to South America. Glass jars were spread around the room, holding Jenny's odds and ends: matchbooks from across the country, silk scarves, a rabbit's foot, a Tootsie Roll keychain.

An office was attached to the bedroom. On the cork board above the desk were old political buttons Jenny collected. “Henry Wallace for President.” “54-40 or Fight.” On the walls were photographs Jenny had taken of Tara and me. For a while Jenny thought about a career as a photographer. She still walks through the apartment with her camera around her neck, taking pictures. On the bookshelves were her casebooks and her legal manuals from the public defender's office.

My books were also on the shelves. We share the office; I live here too. But I travel light, Jenny says. I could fit all my possessions into a couple of suitcases. Why get attached to objects? I was happy to have Jenny decorate our home. It felt no less mine for her doing so.

Novels lay throughout the bedroom. Jenny loves Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov; when she was a girl, she told me, she pretended she lived in nineteenth-century Russia. Sometimes at night we read aloud to each other before we go to sleep.

“Tell me what you were like as a child,” she asked me once. “Make it so real I can see you.”

On the floor sat a huge oak chessboard, made in England in the eighteenth century. It had been passed down through Jenny's family.
As a child, she had played chess with her parents; now she played with Tara.

I told Jenny stories about being adopted, how much it had meant to me as a child. I said that someday I might look for my birth mother.

“Why not look for her now?” Jenny said that if I knew where I came from I'd be able to get on with my life.

“Get on with my life? What makes you think I'm not getting on with my life?”

“You're a dreamer, Ben. It's like your life is out there in the future, but it's anyone's guess what that life is. Sometimes it's like you're watching yourself. It's as if you're not in your own body.”

“I'm in my own body.” I slapped the floor to show her I was there. I pounded my fists against my chest. “I'm here, Jen. Look at me. I'm in my own body.”

“You should try being like Jonathan. He goes to work every day and comes home at night. He and Sandy make plans. They may be gay, but they live a more normal life than we do.”

“We live a normal life. I go to work and come home every day. I don't know what you're talking about.”

But I understood what she was saying. Though I'd moved into her apartment in January, almost two years after we'd started to go out, it hadn't been as simple as that. I moved in incrementally, shirt by shirt. One day I realized all my clothes were there and it made no sense to keep paying rent on my apartment.

In smaller ways too, I couldn't make a clear decision. I waited until the last minute to pay my bills. Once my phone line got disconnected. I didn't keep a date book, and I hated to make plans. Did I think I would die before the weekend came? Did I believe my birth mother would show up and everything else would become irrelevant?

“Live a life,” Jenny said. “Get a life.”

“I have a life.”

“All right,” she said. “All right.” But she wondered whether maybe I should look for my birth mother, whether that might help me sort things out.

“It's possible,” I said. “I'll think about it.”

But I didn't think about it any more than usual.

“Things just take time.” I ran my hand along Jenny's neck, down past the open buttons of her blouse, to the pale, freckled hollow between her breasts. “You don't plan a life. You grow into it. You only understand it when you're looking back. Besides, what's the point of making plans? Man plans and God laughs.”

There I was, believing in my own way that everything was fine, that my life was moving ahead.

 

A
month later the letter came, forwarded to me from my old address.

Dear Ben Suskind,

Almost thirty-one years ago I gave birth to you. I was sixteen and terrified, I was completely alone. Your father and I had no future together. I thought about keeping you. I
had
to keep you once I held you in my arms, and for the two months I had you I kept you by my side in a laundry basket in my bedroom. But I was a teenager and I had no money, and my parents insisted that we find a good home for you.

Thirty-one years is a long time. I know that. But I'm still your mother. I'm your flesh and blood. Not a week goes by when I don't think about you. Every year on your birthday I cry.

Eventually I got married to someone else. I moved to Indianapolis with my husband. But I've kept photographs of you from those two months we had together. I'm holding you in my parents' house, your hair's so soft and yellow, and my mother teaches me how to nurse you, while my father's on the phone, he's talking to agencies, he's placing ads in the paper, he's getting me to do what he says must be done.

I gave birth to a son nine years after you were born, but he got killed in a car accident last year (Scottie, my baby, rest
his soul!), just before his twenty-first birthday. We haven't recovered, I don't think we ever will. Now more than ever I really need to meet you.

I'll be visiting California next month. I hope this isn't the wrong thing to say, but I feel like I love you (I
know
I love you, even if we haven't seen each other in more than thirty years), and I want to meet you when I come to visit.

Until then, you're in my heart and thoughts. With hopes for a happy reunion—

Your birth mother,

Susan Green
           

I didn't know what to do other than stand still. All my life I'd imagined this day, but now that it had come I couldn't feel anything.

Then I did something that surprised me, something I hadn't done in a long while. I went to synagogue. It was a Saturday morning, and I drove across the bay to Berkeley, to a synagogue I often passed on my way to work. Services were almost over by the time I got there, but I took a prayer book and joined the worshippers, although I didn't pray. I stared down at the words and listened.