Swimming Across the Hudson Read Online Free PDF

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, resthis 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.
    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 .

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    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.
    â€œMr. 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.
    â€œThat’s why you’re here?”
    â€œI think fatherhood would suit me.”
    â€œAll 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?