Swimming Across the Hudson (29 page)

“I understand. I never thought you did.”

“We just wanted to make things easier for Ben, although I realize now that we probably made them harder.”

My mother brought back four cups of coffee from a machine. “We heard about your son,” she told Susan. “We're very sorry.”

“I appreciate it,” Susan said.

“No one should have to go through that.” My mother's voice was loud and emphatic.

The three of them grew quiet. The thought of Scottie's death appeared to unite them. They'd all been parents, and they knew what every parent knows—that nothing is more awful than the death of one's child.

“I want to thank you for making things easier for me,” Susan said.

“How do you mean?” my mother asked.

“You haven't interfered in my relationship with Ben. Scottie can never be replaced, but getting to know Ben has been very important to me.”

“We should thank you too,” my father said. “You gave him to us, after all.”

I had the odd feeling of not being there—the impresario of this reunion, the focus of this conversation, who had, however, receded.

“Tell me something,” my mother said, “did you ever regret giving Ben up?”

This question startled me. I saw no purpose to it other than to upset Susan. Perhaps it was a lapse in my mother's judgment. Although I think she was hoping Susan would say no. My mother didn't want to feel bad for having taken me from Susan.

“What's done is done,” Susan said. The cliché made me cringe. But it also summed up what had happened between us, everything I felt right then.

Jenny and I got married in Tilden Park on a beautiful Sunday in March. We stood on a hill and said our vows in front of the justice of the peace. Jonathan took out a glass for me to step on. I was touched that he'd thought of this Jewish tradition. I turned toward my father, who made no motion to object. I trusted that God—whoever He was, wherever He was—would allow me this connection to my people.

I smashed the glass with my foot. In the quiet of the Berkeley hills, Jonathan shouted, “
Mazel tov
!”

Jenny and I kissed. She'd opted for a straw hat instead of a veil, which tipped over as she leaned into me. Laughter rose and then subsided. We kissed long and hard. We were alone, it seemed. Jenny's knees pressed against my shins. Her dress billowed behind her in the breeze.

When the ceremony was over, we mingled with our families. My parents had met Jenny's only an hour before the wedding, and now they were talking to each other. I'd been so focused on my parents' meeting Susan that I hadn't paid much attention to my new in-laws. They felt almost incidental, as if Susan were the new parent I was welcoming to the family.

Later, while we all ate lunch, I remembered a bar mitzvah I'd gone to at the Pierre in New York. The bar mitzvah boy wore a velvet suit and had his name printed on the after-dinner mints. It was a lavish affair, which my parents didn't approve of, but I loved the feel of velvet against my hands and wanted to have a bar mitzvah like that.

My parents refused.

“It's a waste of money,” my father said.

“At your wedding,” my mother said, “if you still care about these things, you can wear as many velvet suits as you like.”

I wondered whether my parents remembered that now. It's funny looking back at what we once argued about—a velvet suit, names on mints—when everything that's happened since then has been so much weightier and more difficult.

I remembered what my father had begun to say when Jenny and I announced our engagement. He seemed to want to remind me about the Millsteins.

For this was the end of my father's story. Peter Millstein married the Swedish girl from the kibbutz, and for a while they were happy, for a while things went well. But a while, my father said, doesn't make a lifetime. Peter, who thought he didn't care about being Jewish, slowly began to feel like a Jew. He went back to synagogue and learned Hebrew. He started to celebrate the Jewish holidays. He looked at his children, who knew nothing about being Jewish, and wondered why he'd thought he didn't care.

It's hard to know why Peter got divorced, but the Millsteins had an idea. They looked at the portrait of Golda Meir, which still hung on the wall in their living room. They thought about the trees they'd planted in the Negev. They couldn't read Hebrew; they went to synagogue just on Yom Kippur. But they felt Jewish, and so did their son. Sometimes a feeling runs so deep it's inside you without your even knowing it.

I would have listened to my father repeat his story. I'd have
stared up at the Hebrew books that lined the shelves, the volumes of the Torah and Talmud, all those words he'd hoped would protect me.

And I would have said, “But the Millsteins aren't real.”

“To me they are,” he would have said.

And I'd have understood him.

I had no illusions, I would have told him, my father who said marriage was more than love, who said it was shared history and culture, who taught me years ago about my
bashert
, until I believed that she'd been picked for me by God, that she was floating in the air like those molecules we'd learned about in science class. I'd have told my father I stood by my decision; I loved Jenny and we were going to make a life.

During my spring break, Jenny and I set out on a short honeymoon, camping in Glacier National Park. Tara stayed home with a babysitter. The day before we left, Susan came over to say good-bye to me. She handed me an envelope. Inside was a check for three thousand dollars.

“I can't accept this,” I told her.

“It's your wedding gift. May you have only happiness.”

“Susan, this is way too much money.”

“Think of it as the violin lessons I never paid for, or as eighteen years of back allowance.”

“You're leaving, right?” I wasn't sure how I knew this. I just did. “You're flying home to your husband.”

Susan nodded. “We're going to try to work things out.”

That was what I'd wanted. It was part of the reason I'd written Frank. So why were there tears in my eyes?

I forced myself to laugh. “Look at me, I'm crying.”

“I'll be back to visit. Besides, you can always come see me in Indiana.”

“What about your earrings? The stores in San Francisco that sell your work?”

“Ben,” she said, “a person isn't the sum of her accomplishments.”

I realized then what I should have all along, what I suspect I did realize. There were no stores selling her earrings. She'd come to San Francisco simply to see me but had been too embarrassed to admit it. For all I knew, she didn't make earrings. The one I'd found in her apartment might have been made by someone else. She'd become a part of me. Even if I never saw her again, I'd count her as a friend. In ways that are too complicated to express, she has changed my life. But sometimes I think I will never know her—never know what was the truth and what were lies. Some people might say the same about me. Although, at core, I consider myself honest. The boy who walked the rest of the way to school instead of reusing his bus pass is still lodged within me.

“I'll miss you,” I said.

“I'll miss you too.”

The tears came again. “What is it about me? I've never learned how to say good-bye.”

I took Susan to the door and watched her descend the stairs. I stood at the window facing the street, my nose pressed to the glass as she walked away.

 

I
saw my parents three months later. Summer had come, and my mother was redecorating the apartment. She wanted Jonathan and me to clear out our old bedrooms.

We found things we should have thrown away years before: school IDs, autograph books, Dairylea milk coupons good for New York Mets tickets, a notebook from the year we started taking Spanish with the words “I hate French” scrawled in the margins. I found my high school basketball uniform and decided to keep it; maybe I'd have a son who'd want to wear it. Or maybe I'd give it to Tara.

We came across the books my parents had read us.
Horton Hears a Who. Pierre. Where the Wild Things Are. Are You My Mother?

“Here's
The Story of Babar
,” Jonathan said. He held the book open on his lap. My mother had read it to us, always skipping the same page so we wouldn't know Babar's mother dies. I felt a touch of sadness at giving these books away; Jonathan clearly did also.

Saturday night, when the sabbath was over, my father said
havdala
. We smelled the spices and closed our eyes, waiting for the new week to begin.

“We can check the smoke alarm,” Jonathan said.

My mother smiled. “The smoke alarm's doing fine.”

“You never know,” I told her.

I flipped the lights on and off, the way I'd done as a child to celebrate the end of sabbath restrictions.

Then we all went into my parents' bedroom. My father opened the file cabinets across the room; my mother stood next to him.

“Everything's here.” He ran his hand over the papers.

“All the important records,” she said.

I'd known there were records in the cabinets, but I'd never given any thought to them. They were mostly tax documents, I'd supposed. My parents didn't own any property; they still rented their apartment. They had some stocks and bonds, but I didn't know what they'd invested in or how much these investments were worth.

“Here's a copy of our wills.” My mother touched her finger to a sealed manila envelope, then drew it back quickly, as though the paper were hot.

“You should know where they are,” my father said.

“I've drawn up a living will,” said my mother.

It was as if my parents were on their deathbeds, leaving us instructions about what to do.

“I don't want to be resuscitated,” she said. “No heroic measures. No excessive pain. No being kept alive as a vegetable.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Dad feels differently. He's willing to put up more of a fight.”

Maybe it was because he was religious and believed God would decide when it was time for him to die. Or maybe it was because he didn't feel pain. That's what I'd imagined when I was a boy, when I pictured him in World War II, hiking twenty-five miles carrying a rifle and a backpack, thinking about nothing but beating the Germans, holed up in the bunkers reciting poetry.

The next day, my father took Jonathan and me to the cemetery in New Jersey where his parents were buried. Although he visited their graves every year, Jonathan and I hadn't been there since the funerals, almost twenty-five years before. My father wanted us to come along.

He stood at his father's tombstone with his head bowed. He was seventy-five and his shoulders were stooped, but to me he was the
man who'd shagged fly balls with me, Cleon Jones to my Tommie Agee, who never was as happy as when I turned sixteen and finally beat him in four-wall handball.

He kissed the ground beside his parents' tombstones. Jonathan and I followed his lead.

All three of us stood up. My father had tears in his eyes. He looked at us and shrugged. “
Adam yisodo may'afar vi'sofo le'afar
.”

Man is made from dust and returns to dust.

“I'll be buried here,” he said.

I'd never heard him say this before, never heard him admit he was going to die. It scared me to hear it, as if his saying it would make it happen, as if, suddenly, he'd given up the fight.

“You're still young,” I said.

He smiled. “You're right. Forty-five more years until I'm a hundred and twenty.”

I looked around me. New Jersey was just miles from where I'd grown up, but I'd spent so little time there it felt more like an idea, a state writ large by my imagination.

“I have a plot for myself,” my father said, “and a plot for Mom. We can get plots for you guys too, if you'd like. We can all be buried together.”

“I want to be buried with Jenny,” I said.

“We can get a plot for her as well.”

Jenny couldn't be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Was it possible my father had forgotten?

“Sandy too,” he told my brother.

I wanted to ask him to get a plot for Susan, as if it mattered, as if you were anything but dead when you died. I'd once learned that when the Messiah comes all Jews go to Israel, the dead as well as the living, and that the farther you are from Israel the harder the trip, the longer the distance your bones have to roll.

“I'm not going to die,” Jonathan said.

“Good,” my father said. “I'm not either.”

If you prepare for the worst, he'd told us once, maybe it won't happen. He'd been talking about mundane things—studying for school, buying car insurance—but now I realized it was a general principle. It was why he'd shown us his will and why he was talking about burial plots. He was looking death in the eye. He would live forever, he was telling us. For an instant I let myself believe it.