Swimming Across the Hudson (12 page)

I imagined my parents during World War II. What was my mother thinking while my father was in combat? How could she have known the danger he faced, this girl who wasn't yet a teenager, who lay in bed at night listening to the radio for news from the battlefront, who saved her allowance to buy provisions for the soldiers? Maybe those provisions reached my father. I saw him crouched in his foxhole, eating a can of beans my mother had sent him, grateful for her kindness.

For a while I thought he'd been injured in the war—and that was why my parents couldn't have children.

“Maybe Dad got his balls blown off,” I told Jonathan.

“He didn't get his balls blown off.”

“Maybe he has some kind of disease.” I read about diseases I'd never heard of, and convinced myself I had them. “I have Lou Gehrig's disease.”

“No you don't,” Jonathan said. “Only Lou Gehrig had that disease. That's why they named it after him.”

“Lots of people have Lou Gehrig's disease. Thousands of people in the United States.”

People with Lou Gehrig's disease had trouble swallowing, so in fifth grade I started eating my food without chewing it, in the hope that with practice I could improve my swallowing.

“You're a healthy boy,” my mother said. “People with Lou Gehrig's disease are much older than you.”

I didn't believe her. I read about rare neurological conditions, about bacteria-carrying insects, and viruses that existed only in the jungle. And I continued to eat without chewing.

“You'll choke,” Jonathan said. “That's what you'll die of—asphyxiation.”

He wasn't worried about disease, but he was happy to pretend he wasn't well, if only so we could be a team.

“I have whooping cough,” I said. I stood before my mother and whooped as I coughed.

“I have the mumps,” said Jonathan.

We knew about the mumps from
The Columbia Medical Encyclopedia
. People who had the mumps sometimes lost their hearing, so Jonathan pretended he was deaf. “I have to go to special mumps school,” he said.

“I have cervical cancer,” I said. Then I felt bad, because my grandmother had died of cervical cancer; now she was in heaven, looking down at us.

“Only girls get cervical cancer,” Jonathan said.

For months after that he pretended I was a girl. “You have breast cancer,” he said.

“No I don't.”

“You need to go to a gynecologist.”

Mostly we pretended we were sick so my parents would let us stay home from school. They rarely believed us, though. As a boy, my father had once had a subnormal fever; he placed the thermometer on top of the radiator so that it would look as though his
temperature had risen and he could go to school. Colds went away, he reminded us. Mind over matter.

In Riverside Park he played baseball with us, and explained the physics of a swing and how a pitcher could achieve maximum velocity.

“Step into the ball,” he said. “Think about physics.”

But I wasn't interested in physics. I was interested in playing for the New York Mets. In the park, as the sun began to set and the pigeons fluttered above us while my father hit us grounders, I could smell beer and peanuts. I pretended I was Tommie Agee and my father, in left field, was Cleon Jones. My mother waved to us from the balcony of our apartment. She looked like a fan in the bleachers. I pictured the whole neighborhood out on the balconies, everyone's mother rooting me on.

Over dinner, sweaty and spent, my father taught us how to chant from the Torah. That was our deal. He played baseball with us, and in return we agreed to learn the notes. My father's brother Marvin, who lived in Chicago, was the best Torah chanter my father had ever heard. He was the champion Torah chanter of the Windy City.

“There are no champion Torah chanters,” Jonathan said.

“He's my champion,” said my father.

We had potential, he said. We had good voices and good minds; with a little practice we'd chant as well as Uncle Marvin.

“Who cares?” said Jonathan.

“I do,” I said. Now I felt bad, because Jonathan and I were supposed to be in this together. But I did care. I wanted to be like Tommie Agee. I'd be the first Jewish center fielder the Mets had ever had, the only player who could chant from the Torah. I'd be older but the same, gazing up at the planes as they dipped toward La Guardia, and at the stands where my parents would be cheering.

I thought of my father growing up on the Lower East Side, where he'd played stickball on the streets. His family had come from White Russia, eleven consecutive generations of Eastern European
rabbis. As a child, he'd walked from kosher butcher to kosher butcher along Essex Street, past shops that sold mezuzahs and tefillin. At home he spoke Yiddish, on the streets English. On Passover, he said, you couldn't find bread—not a crumb in any store. He had a fantasy in which the president of the United States was Jewish and all the hot dogs at Yankee Stadium were strictly kosher.

This was my fantasy: I'd be the starting center fielder on the New York Mets, and at the peak of my career I'd boycott Shea Stadium. I'd boycott every stadium in major-league baseball until they all sold kosher hot dogs.

Then I thought of Roberto Clemente, who had died in a plane crash on a charity mission. What was the point of keeping kosher if God could let that happen? Was this the moment that I started to doubt God?

In ninth grade, Jonathan and I discovered girls. We each had a girlfriend, and sometimes the four of us went bowling together or stopped at Carvel to eat ice cream and play pinball, breaking up into teams.

“We could play couple against couple,” Jonathan said.

“Or brothers against nonbrothers,” I suggested.

Sometimes after school I went to the movies with my girlfriend. As the images flashed across the screen I dropped Raisinets into her open mouth and let her lick my fingers. I took her to
The Deer Hunter
, and when the scary scenes came on I rested my hand against her thigh until, gently but firmly, she removed it.

One time Jonathan met me when the movie was over. He had spent the afternoon at his girlfriend's apartment listening to Bruce Springsteen. Jonathan liked the line from “Born to Run”—“Strap your hands across my engines”—but he and his girlfriend had to leave the door open whenever they were in her bedroom alone.

“Can you believe it?”

“No,” I said.

“Springsteen never had rules like that.”

We knew the words to all of Springsteen's songs. We cut out articles about him. He was from New Jersey, where everyone had sex. We couldn't imagine he had any rules at all, or that he even had parents.

For months and months we listened to him. We played his music until the vinyl got scratched and his voice grew even raspier than it actually was. We sat in the living room listening to him, staring across the Hudson at New Jersey.

“We'll swim there,” I said.

Jonathan agreed.

We pressed our noses against the window. Our breath came back to us, frosty against the glass, in the puckered-up shape of our mouths. Across the river were refineries. Behind them, we imagined, New Jersey girls were waiting, saving themselves for the two of us.

 

A
t work, things were changing. There, especially, I found myself thinking about Susan. I'd lecture about family life in colonial America, and I'd think, I too have a family. I saw myself in everyone and everyone in me.

I began to feel great tenderness for children. Not only adopted ones, but children of all kinds. I smiled at children on the streets, expecting them to see me as a kindred soul, a male Mary Poppins. When I overheard them arguing with their parents, I instinctively assumed they were right. Adults were impatient, I thought. I failed to recognize that I was an adult and often impatient with Tara.

I sentimentalized my students and exaggerated my importance in their lives. Sixteen and seventeen years old, juniors in high school, they seemed fragile to me, as if they were toddlers and I was their parent, when in fact they were on the cusp of adulthood, many of them sexually active, the girls full-figured, the boys starting to sprout mustaches, several of them as tall as I was and able to compete with me on the basketball court.

At the same time, I was having a crisis of confidence. What good, I wondered, was American history? Even if it did some good, how much would my students remember in a year? Would they even remember me? I knew that feeling of running into an ex-student and watching him or her grope for my name. I'd forgotten many of my own teachers.

I was cramming my students with facts. But I wasn't sure any
longer what purpose these facts served. I knew a lot of facts myself. Evenings, I played along with
Jeopardy!
and got most of the answers right, but this didn't do me any good. I wasn't any less confused than before. I read a novel a week; I actually kept a list of the books I'd read. But even if I lived to be eighty-five, I would read fewer than three thousand more books. That wasn't much when you considered what was out there. What would I have to show for myself?

I wanted to make a difference in my students' lives. I can hear myself saying this, almost coaching myself—“Ben, you need to make a difference in their lives”—a notion so self-serious it makes me cringe, but I felt it quite strongly. In my mind, my status had been raised: history teacher, guru, personal savior. Years from now, my students would come back and tell me I'd changed their lives. But how? By teaching them about the Monroe Doctrine?

So I tried to turn my classes into something new. In one section of American history, I strayed from the syllabus and became confessional with the students. I stopped class early one afternoon and told them that history needed to be grounded in the present, that we'd been treating old laws simply as old laws and that these laws were embedded in a context.

I spoke about slavery as it related to genealogy; I talked about European feudalism, primogeniture, and the divine right of kings.

“This is American history,” one student said. “There are no kings in America.”

“That's true,” I answered. “But if we knew how the colonists felt about kings, specifically about King George of England, we'd understand a lot about American history. We'd understand the separation of powers and the struggle for the Bill of Rights. We'd know why the Articles of Confederation were ratified and why they lasted only a few years.”

I instituted a section on oral history, because, I told my students, history wouldn't make sense unless we personalized it. They would talk about their lives and relate them to their studies. I assigned
memoirs and personal correspondence. I told my students to read
The Diary of Anne Frank
.

“Anne Frank was Dutch,” a student said. “Why are we learning about her in this class?”

“American and European histories are intimately related,” I answered. In college, I told my students, interdisciplinary studies were the rage. “Boundaries are breaking down. Everything is being cross-referenced.”

“So what?” said the student. “This isn't college. Why can't we just be in high school for now?”

“Be patient. I promise you'll enjoy this experiment.”

At the end of the week, I told my students I had an announcement. “Something important has happened to me. I'm adopted, and recently, for the first time, I met my birth mother.”

The students looked uncomfortable. What had happened to the rigid guy in a suit, who made them memorize every secretary of state, not to mention every president and vice-president, who refused to say whether he was married or had a girlfriend, because it had nothing to do with American history?

“Ben's being weird,” one student said. “He's having an identity crisis.”

“I'm not having an identity crisis.”

But was I? I had a student named Paul who'd been adopted as an infant; his mother, concerned about his work at school, had told me this. Paul had never been one of my favorites. He was intelligent, but his grades were mediocre. He sat in class and looked out the window. Sometimes he composed limericks on the back of the school newspaper. His sole ambition, he told me once, was to play guitar with Courtney Love. Between classes, I would find him sitting in the student lounge, staring straight ahead, with his shoes off.

Now, however, I started to take a greater interest in him. He was the reason I'd chosen this class for my experiment. Sometimes after school I'd sit next to him while he played his guitar, doing my best
to sing along. He was adopted, and so was I. Aside from Jonathan, I'd never had an adopted friend. I would do my best to befriend Paul. I wanted him to know that I understood him.

May came, and with it the flowers in the rose gardens in Berkeley and along the bike paths of Golden Gate Park. The stores were filled with lilies and tulips, nature conspiring to remind everyone that Mother's Day was soon.

“This feels like a crucible,” I told Jenny.

I'd seen Susan once more, and things hadn't gone especially well. She'd had an extra ticket to a sneak preview of
Apollo 13
and had asked me to come along.