Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

Sure, cancer, if that’s what it was, would mean fewer canvases when he’d have preferred more, but a decade hence, at seventy, that would still be true, as it would again at eighty. Nobody ever got enough, but if this was it, Noonan wouldn’t feel cheated. He’d never imagined he’d be long-lived, nor did he particularly feel he deserved to be. There was no law that good painters got to live longer than bad ones or, for that matter, lawyers. He had little to complain about.

  Okay, so forget cancer. It was the bouts of uncontrollable grief, even more than the occasional night terrors, that scared him. That mysterious sorrow, its source unfathomable. He was simply grieving. But for what, he couldn’t say. Had some internal switch broken, slipping his emotions off their tether, out of their natural context? If so, why just sorrow? Why not joy? He hadn’t had any sudden, inexplicable, overwhelming attacks of that. Or jealousy, or lust, or shame. One minute the grief wasn’t there, the next it was, rising in him like nausea. The afternoon in dell’Orto he’d seen Lichtner coming toward him up the Fondamenta della Sensa, but by then Noonan was already lost, utterly overcome. Pretending not to hear the man call his name, he’d ducked down a narrow calle and hurried into the church, where he’d knelt for nearly half an hour before Tintoretto’s The Last Judgment, waiting for the waves of ridiculous, comic sorrow to subside. He knew from experience they eventually would, just as he knew he’d be left exhausted, mystified and, yes, frightened.

  While he knelt there, the church’s front door had opened several times, flooding the somber interior with soft light, but it hadn’t occurred to Noonan that Lichtner had followed him inside. How long had the little putz observed him? And since that afternoon—what, five months ago? more?—how many people had he told about the incident at how many dinner parties and in what dramatic detail? He’d probably made a parlor game out of it. “You’ll never guess who I saw sobbing his guts out in Madonna dell’Orto last week. I’ll give you a hint. A local painter.” Everyone would play along, of course, and the guesses, by the time the pasta course had been cleared, would have become increasingly far-fetched, until someone finally said, in disbelief, “Don’t tell me it was Noonan.” And Lichtner, triumphant, “All right, I won’t tell you, but that’s who it was, nevertheless.” “Beneath The Last Judgment, you say?” one of the women at the table would offer. “Oh, I do like that. That’s lovely. Who says there’s no justice?”

  “I’ve been telling you for months he’s losing it,” the hostess of the party would chime in then, and if Harvey Bellows was there, he’d recall how one morning, on his way to the Ferrovia at four-thirty, he’d rounded a corner and practically run into Noonan, who offered little more than a grunt for greeting or apology, hurrying off into the Venetian night as if the devil himself had been after him. Where could he have been coming from or going to at such an hour? Not the airport or the train station, the wrong direction for either of those; besides, he hadn’t had any luggage. Probably visiting some married woman. Most of the women at the dinner party would have been married, and odds were good that at least one could testify from personal experience to Noonan’s prowess in this regard.

  “Weeping before The Last Judgment,” that first woman would’ve repeated. “I do like that.” Though she wouldn’t say why, not with her husband sitting next to her.

  At any rate, by now the tale had probably reached across the Atlantic. Venice’s expatriate community of wanderers—writers, artists and visiting academics—was tight-knit, and Noonan could imagine how swiftly the story would have traveled. It also explained why, though he’d done his best to discourage it, Hugh had insisted on coming right before his show in New York. His excuse had been that he was worried about Anne, who was high maintenance, no doubt about it, so Noonan hadn’t doubted him. Now it appeared that he himself was the true object of Hugh’s concern. And maybe even that wasn’t the worst of it. Maybe Hugh hadn’t really wanted to visit at all. Maybe he’d just come to find out if Noonan was in any condition to proceed with the show. Having heard that something was wrong, possibly from a number of different sources, he’d decided to find out.

  Declining Hugh’s halfhearted offer of a nightcap at his hotel, he returned to the Giudecca at loose ends, having drunk too much to work but wanting to work anyway, and not knowing what he’d do with the night if he didn’t. Undraping the portrait, he studied his father. Had he admitted this to himself before tonight, that the figure on the canvas was his father? He’d begun the painting a month earlier, as a self-portrait, then realized they were his father’s eyes, not his own, looking back at him. In retrospect, reason enough to quit right then, but he hadn’t. Over the next few days he found himself emphasizing the physical features they shared, minimizing those he’d inherited from his mother, marveling that as he did these things the man in the painting somehow became less his father and more Noonan himself, as if by subtracting his mother he was arriving at his own essence. The process wasn’t unlike telling a police sketch artist “I think his nose was a little wider,” except that he was making suggestions to himself that were based on distant, not recent, memory. He’d added the birthmark last, on a whim, the final damning detail, though for the life of him he couldn’t decide which of them it damned. Nothing about what he was doing made any sense. How could giving the figure the features of one man make him more recognizably another? Was he losing his mind or going someplace new and exciting, where no other painter had ever gone before? Would the result be art or just creepy exhibitionism?

  This, he now realized, was surely why he’d wanted Hugh to see the canvas. And his reaction—that the painting was a lie—was, in a sense, exactly what Noonan had hoped for. I am not my father. Yet hadn’t Hugh, his old friend, recognized it as a self-portrait? The possibility that the man in the painting could be anyone other than Noonan himself hadn’t even occurred to him.

  Hugh had been right about one thing, though, much as Noonan hated to admit it. Given that the left side of the face was in shadow, what was over his left shoulder—the painting within the painting—shouldn’t have been illuminated. Normally, there was nothing Noonan was more conscious of or meticulous about than light. How had he missed something so elementary?

  “I don’t know,” Evangeline confessed. “How did you miss it?”

  Intent on the canvas, Noonan hadn’t heard her come in. Or, for that matter, realized he’d been speaking. “Hey,” he said, trying to cover his surprise at her sudden appearance. She was dressed for the gallery, which, to judge by the time, she’d probably just closed. It had been a slow year, and she was staying open later. What he couldn’t quite decide was whether he was glad to see her. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Or call up the stairs?”

  “I guess not.”

  She came over to where he sat, put her hands on his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. When, he wondered, had he become the kind of man a woman could sneak up on?

  “How’s the Great One?”

  “I assume you refer to Hugh?”

  “No offense,” she said, “but yes. I see you broke out the good wine.” The empty Barolo still stood on the table next to the easel.

  “He doesn’t think I have cancer.”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed. For what it’s worth, neither do I. You’re losing weight because you forget to eat.”

  “He thinks I’m depressed. Suicidal, even, except he didn’t say that exactly.” He’d come pretty close, though, over the zabaglione at Harry’s. When Evangeline offered no response to this weighty diagnosis, he said, “Whereas you think…”

  “I think you’re just fucked up.”

  He couldn’t help but chuckle. “Thanks. That’s as close to a vote of confidence as I’ve had all day.”

  “People just slip into funks,” she said wearily, as if she knew firsthand whereof she spoke.

  “So this is just a phase I’m in? I wait for it to pass?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, Noonan. I really don’t.”

  “That’s the diffe
rence between you and Hugh Morgan. In the almost forty years I’ve known him, he’s never once used that particular phrase.”

  She came around now, unbuttoning her silk blouse. “That’s just one of the differences between us,” she said, letting the blouse drop to the floor and sitting down gently on his lap.

  “This, he claims,” he said, indicating the portrait, “is a study in self-loathing.”

  Kicking her shoes off, she used her big toe to rotate the chair a quarter turn so she, too, could study the canvas. “Well, it’s true you won’t be accused of narcissism.”

  She’d seen it before and, like Hugh, assumed it was a self-portrait, though if she’d been repulsed by it, she never said so. And something else now occurred to Noonan, that his father, near the end, had apparently gone batty in his solitude. The neighbors reported hearing him inside the house, cursing at no one in particular, or perhaps everybody. When he did emerge, his hair uncombed, his shirt untucked, his fly unzipped, he always managed to give the impression it was only a supreme act of will that prevented him from punching everyone he passed on the street. When people tried to engage him in conversation, he just glared at them, as if he didn’t trust himself to utter so much as a single syllable for fear that the dam would burst and swamp them in a torrent of abuse. Which made Noonan wonder. Late in life, long after he was gone, did his father also suffer episodes of inexplicable grief, or night terrors? And what would the cause have been? Something originating in the Cayoga Stream? Could it have been the water? If so, in what sense could anybody truly be blamed for anything?

  Evangeline turned away from the painting and regarded him through narrowed eyes. “Either we drape that,” she said, “or we drape me.”

  Noonan kissed her bare breast. “I was supposed to stop by the gallery, wasn’t I.”

  “You were.”

  “I’m a shit.”

  “You are.”

  “But you love me anyway.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “How far would you go?”

  “Downstairs. One flight.”

  As they started down to the bedroom, Noonan said, “I have a bone to pick with your husband. He witnessed one of my crying jags, and he’s been telling people about it.”

  “Yeah, well, if he had clue one, he’d have a bone to pick with you, too.”

  THE ROUTE MEN

  THE HOUSE my parents purchased on Third Street in the East End was plain and gray shingled. The residents of our new neighborhood were all working people, mostly Irish but with a healthy smattering of Italians and Poles and Slavs. Third Street was seven blocks long, anchored by Tommy Flynn’s corner market at the lower end and Ikey Lubin’s at the upper. Its single-family homes were modest and built close together on small lots, each with a thin grass terrace between the sidewalk and the street. Upstairs, typically, were two small bedrooms and a bath, downstairs the kitchen, dining room and living room, though, after the advent of television, most families wedged a dinette into one corner of the kitchen, thus converting the dining room into a TV-centered family room. The living room generally went unused, except when company came.

  For each single-family home, however, there were two or three larger houses divided into upstairs and downstairs flats. Often, in terms of square footage, they were as large as the single-family homes, but after Berman Court we felt privileged not to be sharing our dwelling. My father liked to remark to our new neighbors that he couldn’t live with somebody underfoot or overhead, though that was precisely what we’d been doing. My mother would scold him for such comments, but too gently to make much of an impression, so great was the pleasure he took in our change of fortune.

  Of the three of us, I think he was the one most deeply affected by our move. My mother was glad to be out of the West End but wary, too, afraid of how much money she’d had to take from my grandparents, afraid that our little house on the corner of Third and Rawley might have come at too high a cost. The responsibility of ownership, of mortgage payments, of not having a landlord, frightened her, I’m sure, at least at the beginning. A leaky faucet or a running toilet worried her unduly, because they represented what just might turn out to be the tip of some terrible iceberg, or perhaps the first in a series of small but unrelenting expenses that couldn’t be anticipated or, therefore, budgeted. Often I’d find her in the cellar worrying over a puddle of water that had formed after a hard rain, or up in the attic studying the roof for telltale signs that she’d done a foolish thing by putting every egg we had in this particular basket.

  My father, having no such misgivings, couldn’t get over how good luck had found us out so suddenly. His experience had been that houses were something people lost, as his parents had lost their farm, and the notion that he himself might own one someday hadn’t occurred to him until it happened. That first year on Third Street, every minute he wasn’t on his milk route he spent scraping and painting the trim, shoring up the collapsing garage (even though at that time we still had no car to put in it), or encircling the porch with bushes, adding small, inexpensive and, according to my mother, garish touches to the property. He’d have filled our tiny terrace with lawn ornaments had she allowed him.

  He was in good spirits not just about us and our prospects but also about our country. Here, he reminded me proudly, anybody could become anything, and we ourselves were living examples of how America worked. Though I wasn’t sure what we’d “become” by moving out of Berman Court and into the East End, I liked our new neighborhood and could see that while we weren’t rich, we were better off. And I was especially comforted by my father’s belief that we were living a story whose ending couldn’t be anything but happy.

  Interestingly, the nature and moral of that story began almost immediately to evolve. As we settled into the East End, our sudden good fortune seemed rooted less in luck than in the sober industry that I was being taught in school was the key to success in a free society. And for my father hard work and virtue were two sides of the same coin. The only families who were truly stuck in the West End, he now believed, were headed by dissolute men who couldn’t manage to find their way past the gin mills after their shifts, gave their money to the bookies who haunted the tannery and spent their weekends at the racetrack while their wives and children went hungry. In America, he maintained, if you kept your nose clean, good things were eventually bound to happen to you.

  Not surprisingly, my mother’s take on our better life, as well as her estimation of America, was more complex and, to my way of thinking, far less satisfying. She never publicly contradicted my father’s joyous outbursts, though later, when they were alone, she’d remind him that what got us out of Berman Court was not virtue but a loan from her parents, nor had hard work been much of a factor. True, he always worked hard, she’d grant him this much, yet that was no excuse to go around talking nonsense about good things happening to good people, because bad things happened to good people all the time. In fact, the bad thing that had happened to me was more responsible for our move to the East End than our industry and virtue combined.

  On those rare occasions when she took my father to task, he always hung his head woefully and claimed she hadn’t understood what he meant. “All I’m saying is, what if this was Russia? Over there you got no chance. You just gotta take what they give you.” To which my mother would roll her eyes. “How much do you really know about Russia, Lou? Did you go to Russia once and not tell me?” Which would make him even more sheepish. “It’s what they say,” he’d reply lamely, which would elicit, predictably, my mother’s trump observation, that she couldn’t care less what “they” said. It was what he said that was giving her a headache.

  None of which is to suggest that she was a pessimist. She would concede that both our family and our nation were making progress. In large part that was due—speaking of bad things—to the war, which she said had made us all Americans first, Catholics or Protestants or Italians or Irish second. Much of the ethnic rigidity that had been common to Tho
maston’s neighborhoods when she and my father were children had begun to break down. Take St. Francis Elementary. Though still predominantly Irish, there were also kids with Polish and Italian last names, some of them, like me, the products of what were then referred to as mixed marriages. Thomaston was indeed the melting pot we were taught to be proud of in school, and its East End neighborhoods in particular were organized more by people’s occupations and economic status than where they came from. If the West End was still primarily made up of more recent immigrants, that was because they happened to hold the poorest paying jobs in the tannery and nearby leather shops. More important, they could work their way out of the West End, as the Wilsons and the Lubins and the Gunthers and so many other East Enders had done.

  As I say, my mother conceded this much. But about other things she wasn’t so optimistic. At the economic extremes of Thomaston, she gave me to understand, there was little fluidity. If you were a Negro, of course, you’d remain in the two square blocks of the Hill, and if you lived in the Borough, that’s where you’d probably stay. In America, my mother claimed, the very luckiest were insulated against failure, just as it was the unavoidable destiny of the luckless to remain thwarted. When I asked if we’d ever get to the point where we’d be one of the lucky ones, she said we already were. The middle, she said, was the real America, the America that mattered, the America that was worth fighting wars to defend. There was just the one problem with being in the fluid middle. You could move up, as we had done, but you could also move down.

  I don’t know why it troubled me so much that my parents disagreed about how the world operated, but it did, and when I intimated as much to my mother, she replied, “Really, Louie? Which of us should think differently? Your father or me?” I had thought that went without saying. My father’s was a more reassuring interpretation of the known facts of our lives and a more elegant, satisfying story to boot. If you believed in America, then we would continue our ascent, and I wanted for all of us to agree that this was what would happen. From my vehemence on this point, my mother must have concluded that I was concerned about my own future, and she quickly conceded that after college I’d likely continue to rise even further, if that’s what I wanted, as a doctor or maybe a lawyer (my relentless cross-examinations of everything she said may have suggested this latter profession). But in her opinion, she and my father were done moving up in the world. Getting out of the West End was about as much as you could hope for in one generation.