Swimming Across the Hudson (5 page)

Much has happened since then. But when I think about that day, what I recall beyond the letter is being back at synagogue, the familiar unfamiliarity, the rhythmic motion of prayer and the smell of kiddush wine, the rabbi's hand warm against my own as he wished me a good
shabbes
.

 

J
enny had made some phone calls on my behalf and gotten the name of a social worker who specialized in adoption; I could contact her for an appointment.

The social worker, who was in her mid-thirties, had grown up in Marin County, she told me when I met her. She had gone to good private schools and had parents who loved her, but until she found her birth mother she felt vaguely lost.

On the walls of her office were posters of eagles flying over the American prairie and of children of different races holding hands. Books lined the shelves—Shakespeare plays and some novels, a psychology text on parent and child. A few marbles rested on the floor. Next to the marbles stood a miniature yellow Mack truck.

“Mr. Suskind,” she said, “what brings you here?”

I had come for Jenny, although Jenny would have denied that she cared whether I came or not. “You can just talk to her,” Jenny had said, but what was there to talk about? I was going to meet my birth mother—I'd made up my mind.

I told the social worker the first lie that came to me. I said I wanted to adopt a baby.

“That's why you're here?”

“I think fatherhood would suit me.”

“All right,” she said, and she took out some brochures and outlined the possibilities. There were public and private adoptions; there were lawyer's fees. Some people, she said, had specific preferences.
Did I care about gender? Was I willing to adopt a black baby? A Cambodian? A Vietnamese? “You're married, aren't you, Mr. Suskind?”

“No,” I said.

“Then you want to adopt a baby on your own?”

“That's right.”

“Are you gay?”

“No.”

“How old are you, Mr. Suskind, if you don't mind my asking?”

“Thirty.”

“Thirty. That's not very old. Have you considered waiting?”

“I've
considered
it.”

“I don't mean to dissuade you, Mr. Suskind, but you're going to have some difficulty. You're an unmarried man. There are people's prejudices to contend with. Have you thought of other options? Maybe you could get a friend to help you out.”

Jenny wasn't home when I returned from the social worker's, and I was immediately disappointed. She'd had a trial that afternoon; I'd forgotten that she would be late at work. I wanted her to be there so we could talk about what had happened, even though I understood that nothing really had happened. A week had passed since my birth mother's letter had arrived, and I'd been reduced to the infant she'd given up, needy and petulant.

These feelings surprised me. I don't mind being on my own. When I was twenty-three, I hiked the Appalachian Trail by myself. Occasionally I get into my car, drive up the coast, and spend time alone among the redwoods. But something had happened to me in the wake of getting that letter. I wasn't being myself.

I fixed dinner for Tara. She had turned eleven recently and had taken to eating only certain foods, although it was hard to determine which ones. She claimed to be a vegetarian, but once, at a
Chinese restaurant, she sneaked a piece of mu shu pork from Jenny's plate when she thought we weren't looking. For the past month, she'd been eating little else but Kraft macaroni and cheese. I don't like macaroni and cheese, but I made a big pot of it anyway.

“Where's Mom?”

“At work,” I said. “She'll be home soon.”

“She better. She promised to help me with math.” Tara dipped her finger into the pot and dropped a gob of melted cheese into her mouth.

“I can help you with math.”

She shook her head. “Mom knows fractions, and you don't.”

I considered defending my knowledge of fractions, but thought better of it. “Well, she'll be here soon.”

It was hard to predict how Tara would act, especially when the two of us were alone. She'd become more difficult since I'd moved in, although, when the move had become official, she'd been a big advocate of mine, decorating the apartment with Welcome signs. Several times before drifting off to sleep, she had murmured “I love you” in a state of semiconsciousness. She'd even told me that she preferred me to her father, although it was hard to know what that meant, since she saw him only once a year.

But she could be abrupt, turning sharp-tongued toward Jenny and me. She locked the door to her bedroom. Sometimes at dinner she placed a bandanna over her eyes, as if to say she didn't want to see us. She kept her CD player on loud late at night when she was supposed to be asleep, when Jenny and I thought she was asleep, Soul Asylum blasting through the apartment at eleven o'clock.

Still, I loved her. I'd courted her too when I'd first met Jenny, taking them to the circus and the San Francisco Exploratorium. I'd given Jenny white roses and bottles of French wine and bought comic books for Tara; I'd watched cartoons with her on Saturday mornings. On weekends, she and I had gone to museums, and to long animated movies in which hairy creatures beat each other over
the head. As we sat at the back eating strands of red licorice, I worried about Tara the way a father would, all that violence, even in cartoons.

But I wasn't her father. Sometimes I wished he'd come and take her and leave me with Jenny for a while. I liked the time after Tara went to bed, when Jenny and I were too tired to speak, when we lay together in our room and listened quietly to music.

Now, though, Jenny wasn't home. I looked at the photographs she'd taken, some framed, some not, on our bedroom walls. In the morning I would come out of the shower and there she'd be, sitting on the floor in her bathrobe, taking photographs of me without my clothes on.

“Be careful,” I told her once. “That's the kind of thing that will get you arrested. Drugstore clerks turn in photos to the FBI. Then you get charged with pornography.”

“This is San Francisco,” Jenny said. “That's why I moved here. No one cares what you do.”

For her, San Francisco had been the answer to everything. She'd wanted to live here since she was a child, in the days when her family was zigzagging across the country and she dreamed that someday she'd have a real home. She liked the warm weather; she swore she'd never bring children up in a place where they needed a winter coat. As a teenager, she'd seen San Francisco on TV and been struck by the sheer beauty of it, but also by the people who were fighting for what was right. Even as a child, she'd had an exquisite sense of social justice. In Norman, Oklahoma, where she'd lived when she was twelve, she'd organized a food drive to help feed the hungry. In high school, in Billings, Montana, she volunteered after school at legal aid, licking and stamping envelopes. She moved to the Bay Area in the fall of 1980 to go to U.C. Berkeley. She met Steve there freshman year. They got married when they were juniors; the year after that, Tara was born. The next fall, separated from Steve, Jenny started Stanford Law School.

Now she was a public defender for the City and County of San Francisco. She spent her time defending habitual criminals—thieves, drug addicts, prostitutes, assault-and-batterers. Although most of her clients had done what they'd been charged with, Jenny had no qualms about defending them. There was some fun in beating the system, she admitted, but that was only a small part of it. Everyone was entitled to the best defense possible. Better that a hundred guilty people go free than that one innocent person be convicted. The legal process was what mattered. You fought for your clients as hard as you could, if only to raise some reasonable doubt, because your clients needed you and were entitled to your help. What chance did they have against the power of the state? Prison just made them worse, in any event. They came out a few years later more dangerous than before. And when you heard about their lives, your heart went out to them. In light of where they'd come from and what they'd endured, it would have been surprising had they not turned to crime. Jenny wouldn't have been any different; she was convinced of that. Besides, once you got to know them—once you got to know
anyone
, Jenny said—you couldn't look at them the same way. They might have committed a terrible crime, but they had a sense of humor, they were kind to their parents, they were capable of moments of grace. This was a cliché, she knew; Hitler, after all, loved kittens and little children; how many times had she heard that? But it was true. It was like reading a novel. You became involved in someone's life; you saw the person's humanity; you sympathized with human beings you wouldn't have expected to sympathize with.

Jenny was eloquent in defending her work. And one of the things she had liked about San Francisco was that for years her work hadn't needed defending. This was a liberal city, the ideal place to be a public defender. Jenny liked to run into her clients on buses and on BART; sometimes she would find them huddled on grates and would offer them a cup of coffee.

But times had changed. The former police chief was finishing his
term as mayor; even in San Francisco people were hunkering down. There was a sense of fatigue and of indifference to the poor. Let the criminals fry, people said. California had a three-strikes law. At dinner parties and parent-teacher conferences, people asked Jenny what she did for a living, and when she told them, they looked rebuking and uncomfortable. People used to ask, “Do you like what you do?” Now they asked, “How can you do that?” A colleague of Jenny's was being stalked by a client the colleague had successfully defended, and when Jenny told this story to a couple of friends, they had little sympathy for her colleague. You reap what you sow, they said.

Even my brother gave Jenny a hard time. Jonathan, who at Yale had slept in a shanty, who at fifteen had campaigned for Barry Commoner for president, who once could recite the ratings given to every senator by Americans for Democratic Action: my brother had become law-and-order. Gays had been assaulted in the Castro; neighborhood groups had banded in self-defense.

“Would you defend absolutely anyone?” Jonathan asked Jenny once. “How about Hitler or Mussolini?”

“That's a silly question,” she said. “Everyone uses Hitler as the absurd example.”

“Would you defend someone who shot your mom?”

“That's even sillier.” At law school, Jenny had learned that hard cases make for bad law. The same idea was true here. Some people were harder to defend than others. But it wasn't for her to decide.

I tended to agree with her. Although some of her clients were unsavory, I thought she was doing the right thing. Late at night in our bedroom I'd cup my hands over her small breasts, then place my ear to her sternum. “Jen,” I'd say, “I can hear your heart bleeding.”

She'd poke me gently in the forehead. “Don't patronize me.”

“I'm not patronizing you.” She did important work.

But late that night, when she finally came home, I wasn't feeling sympathetic toward the man whose case had kept her out late.

“Where were you?”

“At work,” she said. “You knew that.”

“Defending an ax murderer?”

“Drunk driving. What's gotten into you?”

“What's gotten into me is it's ten o'clock and you just came home. Tara had a fit because she thinks you're the only one who can do fractions. And I went to see a social worker because you wanted me to, and you know what we talked about?”

“You saw a social worker because
you
wanted to. It was your decision.”

“Do you know what we talked about?”

“What?”

“Nothing.” I paced around the bedroom in tight circles, then threw myself down on the bed.

“You're being a baby,” Jenny said. “Cut it out.”

I had waited to tell Jonathan about the letter. I didn't know how he would react. Now I handed it to him and watched him read it.

“Your birth mother?”

“So she claims.” Suddenly it occurred to me I was going on her word. It could have been a hoax. She might have been mistaken. I could ask her to provide ID—a lock of my infant hair, a piece of information only she could know. I could require her to take a blood test.

“I have a feeling you're going to meet her,” Jonathan said. He looked nervous, and that surprised me. I'd expected him to act indifferent, as he often does about family matters. Maybe the letter had awakened something in him. Maybe he was nervous because, although he wouldn't admit it, he too wanted to meet his birth mother.

“Do you want my advice?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Don't meet her.”

“Why not?”

“Because you have a life to live. You've got a girlfriend to love and her daughter to help take care of. You've got students to teach.”

“I'm not quitting my job or leaving Jenny. I'm just agreeing to meet this woman. We'll probably have coffee. It will be an hour out of my life.”