Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  “No, Lou,” she assured him, though she wasn’t looking at the fire either, just at him.

  “What’ll we do?” he wanted to know.

  “It’s not going to burn down, Lou,” she said. “You saved it. If you hadn’t seen what was happening—”

  “Is the store okay?” he said, causing me to glance over at Ikey Lubin’s. Why wouldn’t the store be okay, I wondered, since it was way on the other side of the street.

  “The store’s fine, Lou. The house is fine. You saved Janet and Edith both. You saved their lives, Lou.”

  My father looked over at them, huddled together on the steps of the porch next door, as if to ascertain whether seeing them there was full and sufficient evidence to warrant such a conclusion. “Then why is Louie crying?” he wondered.

  “I don’t know,” my mother said, regarding me for the first time and laughing, which made me laugh, too, or rather to make some sound composed of relief and wonder and residual terror.

  In twenty minutes the Spinnarkles’ home burned to the ground, the whole neighborhood watching.

  THE NEXT MORNING I woke up so exhausted that I wondered if I’d had a spell in my sleep, since these sometimes took the form of vivid dreams. But when I pulled back the curtain of my bedroom window, I was surprised to find myself looking at the Gunther house, which hadn’t been part of the view until now. All that remained of the Spinnarkle house was the smoldering foundation and tipping chimney. My mother was in the shower, so I dressed quickly and went outside to inspect the ruins. It had rained in the night, and soot was draining in wide streams into the sewer grate. My father was already up and over at the store, where a police car at the curb didn’t strike me as odd, given last night’s dramatic events, though something did tickle at the edges of my memory. I tried to bring it front and center, but it wouldn’t budge.

  Our own house had sustained more damage than I’d thought. The heat from the blaze had bubbled the paint along the near side, and the roof and cornice of the back porch were badly scorched. The night before, despite the fears voiced by both my mother and the firemen, the idea that the fire might leap from the Spinnarkle house to ours had seemed far-fetched, but I now saw how close we’d come, which in turn made me remember Edith Spinnarkle whimpering, “Our home!…Our home!” What, I wondered, would happen to them now? I hoped they wouldn’t be moving in with us, because that would be the end of our television viewing.

  Thinking about all this I recalled the heat register conversation I’d heard late that night, after everything had finally calmed down and I’d been sent up to bed. “That’s how I found them,” I heard my father say. To which my mother replied, “Well, I’m not that surprised.” I’d fallen asleep shortly after that, too tired from all the excitement to consider what my mother hadn’t been that surprised by.

  She was sitting at the table in her robe and staring into a cup of murky coffee when I went back inside. Seeing I was up and dressed, she said, “You should shower before we go to Mass.” We hadn’t been going to church much since my mother laid down the law to Father Gluck, but I understood why this morning might be different. God had looked out for us, so we’d go and give thanks. “Do I have to?” I said, prepared to be told to march.

  “No.”

  I sat down across the table from her, suddenly remembering the police car.

  As if she’d read my mind, she said, “The store was robbed.”

  “When?”

  “While everybody was watching the fire. Your father never had a chance to lock up….”

  “How much money—”

  “Whatever was in the till. Saturday’s our best day, so…” She shook her head, as discouraged as I’d ever seen her. “What kind of person…”

  The answer to her question came to me in the shower. When she and I had gone out into the street last night, I’d looked over at Ikey Lubin’s, expecting my father to come bursting out of the store, but what I saw was Nancy Salvatore in her robe and Buddy Nurt in his boxer shorts and sleeveless T-shirt up on their porch. Later, when my father asked if the store was going to be okay, I looked there again and saw Buddy standing with his hands in his trouser pockets on the sidewalk out front. Which meant that in between he’d gone inside and gotten dressed. At the time I concluded, if anything, that he must’ve come down to the street for a better view of the fire. Except that made no sense. From their upstairs porch they already had the best view possible.

  Buddy Nurt had robbed us.

  THE FIRE OCCURRED late Saturday night, so it was Monday before my father appeared on the front page of the Thomaston Guardian. In the photo he’s holding up his two bandaged hands for the camera and, as I mentioned, without eyebrows. Otherwise, his hair was basically unharmed—Brylcreem, apparently, didn’t burn—and combed into his signature pompadour, which my mother must’ve done for him, given the condition of his hands. As a boy I always thought my father handsome, the sort of man people considered special in appearance as well as conduct, though I suppose this is how all boys regard their fathers. Now that he exists most vividly in my memory, the old newspaper photo sometimes catches me off guard, and I can’t help thinking that while this man is perfectly my father, perfectly Big Lou Lynch with his broad, good-natured smile and his big, awkward body, the picture doesn’t do him justice.

  I still have the article, of course. Old and yellow and brittle, but safely under glass, it hangs on the wall in my study. At one point we had dozens of copies, because neighbors all along Third Avenue saved them for us. I remember the stack of newspapers in the corner of the living room, and also going through them, one after the other, proud yet disappointed, too, that the photograph and story were identical and thinking how much better and more just it would’ve been to have a different picture of my father in each copy, like baseball cards, so we could collect them all. By the next day, of course, there was other news, and that didn’t seem fair either.

  What I found interesting about the article, even at the time, was that the Spinnarkle sisters, who after all had lost their home in the fire, didn’t feature in it all that much. They were named, of course, but there were no photos, even on the inside pages. Nor, apparently, was the Albany television station that sent a camera crew to Thomaston the following Monday much interested in them. It was my father they’d come to see. He was, at best, a reluctant hero, one who needed to be talked into giving interviews by my mother. His reluctance was born less of modesty than acute embarrassment over what had transpired inside the Spinnarkles’ flat, which he feared was bound to come out if he talked to reporters.

  For one thing, the Spinnarkles had as much rescued him as he them. By the time he managed to awaken them in the back of the house, their bedroom filling with smoke, he’d become disoriented. The sisters, of course, could’ve found their way blindfolded, which, with the black smoke billowing, was precisely what was required. And one of them apparently knew enough to get down and crawl along the floor. But somewhere my father encountered an obstacle of some sort, and one of the sisters actually had to go back to get him, and this was what shamed him.

  “What if they find out?” he asked my mother, meaning the reporters.

  “You saved their lives, Lou,” she reminded him. “Who led who doesn’t matter. If you hadn’t gone in after them, they’d have burned alive.”

  “But they were the ones—”

  “No, Lou. You were the one. That’s why they want to talk to you. People want you to be a hero.”

  But his embarrassment had another source as well, though I was much older before I was able to piece together the surprising nakedness of the Spinnarkles when they emerged from the burning house, my mother’s “I’m not that surprised” comment later that same night and the fact that afterward, instead of finding a new place in Thomaston, the sisters moved away. Because my father was in many ways an innocent himself, I’ve often wondered how much of what he’d witnessed he understood and how much my mother had to explain. A trusting man, he must’ve found it difficult
to believe that people could not just tell but actually live so profound a lie. “Face value,” she was always saying. “Why do you insist on taking things at face value?” Perhaps it was his innocence that I loved most, and the reason I’ve been reluctant, all my life, to hear a word spoken against him, and why I’ve not only kept that heroic photo safe under glass all these years, but also, when I show it to people, always explain that it doesn’t do him justice.

  KAREN CIRILLO’S MOTHER WAS right. A month after shoving her ruptured suitcase into her uncle’s pickup, Karen was back. I was alone at Ikey Lubin’s, immersed in a book, the front door propped open to catch a breeze, so I never heard her come in.

  “So, Lou,” she said, “did you miss me?”

  “Sure,” I said, setting my book facedown and taking her in. If anything she was more breathtakingly beautiful than before. Wearing her usual bored expression, she picked up my book, riffled through its pages as if to see how many there were, then set it back down, her curiosity completely satisfied, losing my page in the process, not that I cared.

  “What?” she said. “I got a booger dangling?”

  “No,” I said, startled. This image was simply too incongruous to visualize.

  “Why you looking at me like that?”

  Having no idea what she meant, I said, “I’m not.”

  “Are too.”

  It was the kind of conversation she liked best, full of unresolvable conflict. If I continued to deny looking at her funny, she’d just keep saying “are too” forever. “Okay,” I said, “you’ve got a booger dangling.”

  “Funny,” she said. “Wait till I tell Jerz what you said.” I must have blanched then, because she quickly added, “Don’t piss yourself, Lou. I was just kidding.”

  “Oh,” I said, “right.”

  “There’s all kinds of shit I don’t tell Jerz,” she said, provocatively.

  “Like what?”

  “You know, secrets.”

  “What kind of secrets?” I said, my heart pounding at the possibility she might share one with me.

  “Why would I tell you if I don’t tell him?”

  I had no ready answer for this.

  “You’re saying what? I could trust you?”

  “I guess.” I shrugged.

  For a long moment, she seemed to consider this. “Okay, you first.”

  “Me first what?”

  “Tell me a secret, then I’ll tell you one.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Everybody’s got secrets. I bet you got a ton of ’em.”

  “Why?”

  “You got the look,” she informed me. “Okay, I’ll start. Ask me anything, and I’ll tell you the truth.”

  “How come you came back?”

  “I missed you,” she said, looking right at me, challenging me to deny the plausibility of this.

  “I thought you were going to tell the truth.”

  “Know what, Lou? You got low self-esteem. I know ’cause I got the same thing.”

  “You?” I said, unable to disguise my surprise.

  She shrugged. “Sure. I got these going for me”—she cupped her hands under her breasts here, giving them some additional loft—“but what else?”

  Fortunately, this question appeared to be rhetorical. “What about…,” I started, glancing up at the ceiling, above which Buddy Nurt might or might not actually be. I’d seen little of him lately. He’d gotten a job driving the drunk shift for Hudson Cab, which did a brisk business in the Gut when the gin mills closed, and he slept during the day. He hadn’t come into the store since the fire. Sometimes he’d stop outside and look in wistfully, before tromping upstairs, and a few minutes later Karen’s mother would come down and purchase whatever he’d been tempted by, usually a six-pack of cheap beer or a pack of cigarettes. Other times, he’d come out onto their rickety porch, allowing the screen door to clap shut behind him. Shirtless, he’d scratch his belly thoughtfully, much as another man would scratch his head, then return inside, the screen door banging again. My mother said she fully expected him to unzip and pee right over the railing one day, but so far he hadn’t. Now I was tempted to share with Karen my suspicion that Buddy had robbed our store. “I thought—”

  “He tries anything, Jerz will kill him. Or maybe you. You’d do that for me, wouldn’t you?”

  I felt myself flush at this suggestion. “I don’t think I’d kill him,” I said, implying, I hoped, that I’d stop just short of homicide, out of mercy.

  “So, you’re saying you’re not my friend?”

  “No, I’m your friend, it’s just—”

  “Then how about some cigs? Give me a pack of Parliaments, and I’ll let you slide on the other. Jerz would be way better at killing Buddy anyhow.”

  When I took a pack down from the rack, she opened her purse, and for a moment I thought she might actually pay, but she just slipped them inside. “And a pack of Camels for Jerz,” she added without looking up.

  “I really shouldn’t. My father…”

  She looked straight at me, her eyes smoldering. “Hey, it’s okay. I thought we were pals, is all.”

  When I handed her the Camels, I saw she’d used her best trick on me. In the month she’d been gone I’d forgotten her ability to look right at me and then, seemingly at the same moment, at some spot over my shoulder. I could either be there or not, she seemed to suggest, according to her whim.

  Halfway out the door, Karen paused as if something had just occurred to her. “Didn’t there used to be a house over there?” she said, pointing at the empty space between our house and the Gunthers’.

  “It burned down.”

  “No shit.”

  “My father rescued the two ladies who lived there,” I told her, hoping one day to be just like him, even if it meant going through life pretending not to know things I knew.

  “Jeez. I wish I’d been here,” she said, not bored now, but as if she actually meant it.

  LATER THAT NIGHT I realized that our thrilling, vaguely sexy conversation had really been about the cigarettes. Karen couldn’t just come in and ask for them. She first had to establish that we were friends, that there was intimacy between us. I’d never suspected the whole thing was a cat-and-mouse game until it was too late, which meant that being smart wasn’t the advantage it should have been. I was smart, as my mother was always insisting. Certainly smarter than Karen. But being smart wasn’t much use if I could get suckered so easily.

  Or maybe there were two kinds of smart, and Karen was the other, and maybe that kind was more advantageous than mine. I remembered my mother telling me that I had to get smarter about people if I was going to survive in the world, yet something in me rejected that notion, not so much because it was untrue but because it wasn’t my preference. I preferred to think that Karen Cirillo was, or could be, my friend, who might one day need me to rescue her from Buddy Nurt. I preferred to think that her casting me in this role wasn’t absurd. After all, I was my father’s son, and he was brave enough to enter a burning building, so maybe I was braver than I knew. That night I spent most of my last hour before falling asleep trying to envision the complex set of circumstances necessary for me to become Karen’s rescuer. Jerzy Quinn, Karen’s mother and my own parents would all have to be away somewhere. Alone in the store below, I would hear her cries for help. If I was afraid of what might be happening upstairs, and what might happen to me if I interfered, I’d swallow my fear and start up through the darkness. Maybe the pellet gun that put the fear of God into the mangy neighborhood dogs would have the same effect on mangy Buddy Nurt. I could almost form a mental picture of the rescue. Then it would vanish, and I’d be alone in the dark with only my mother’s advice—that I needed to get smarter if I was to survive.

  Ironically, that advice did make me suspicious, not of Karen Cirillo but of my mother. She, I realized, would’ve been one step ahead of Karen, not behind, as I’d been. She’d have recognized each devious ploy for what it was. Why? Because, well, she wa
s sly herself. She was both kinds of smart—my kind and Karen’s. Why then, I wondered, did I not want to be like my mother? Why did I know that the next time Karen wanted a pack of cigarettes, I’d give them to her, so I could keep believing we were friends?

  Lying there in the dark, I tried over and over to visualize climbing those stairs and rescuing Karen from the pervert Buddy Nurt, my mother’s voice echoing in my head with each upward tread. Don’t be one of those people who go through life pretending not to know what they know…. Don’t waste time wishing the world is different than it is…. Don’t expect people to be something they can’t….

  THAT SPRING the Albany newspaper ran a series of articles about pollution in the Hudson, a river where salmon had once run but that was now contaminated by all manner of industrial waste. The paper had been critical of big polluters like General Electric but also cited smaller, particularly lethal ones that were poisoning the big river’s tributaries. They’d even mentioned our tiny Cayoga Stream, noting there were no longer any fish downstream of the tannery and going so far as to call for a study to determine whether the tannery’s chemical dyes had impacted our groundwater, hinting at a link to the county’s alarming cancer statistics. The Thomaston Guardian responded with an editorial ridiculing the Albany paper and stopping just short of claiming the charges were a Communist conspiracy designed to undermine our only viable industry, a conclusion applauded by the majority of Thomaston residents.

  But not long after the Albany series a FOR SALE sign appeared on the terrace of Jack Beverly’s house, the grandest in the Borough, and this news roared through town like a tidal wave. It had long been rumored that the tannery would soon close for good, and it certainly employed fewer workers each year, the seasonal layoffs coming earlier and lasting longer. If the Beverlys were selling their house, then maybe the rumors were accurate. My father, true to form, was more optimistic. He doubted the tannery would close anytime soon, and in support of his hopefulness he marshaled many of the same arguments he’d used for why the dairy wouldn’t discontinue home delivery. After all, leather had been tanned in Thomaston for longer than anybody could remember. Maybe things had been slow for a while, but they were bound to pick up again. Why? Because these things ran in cycles. Up follows down. Has to. He always saved what he considered his most powerful argument for last. “If the tannery closes,” he’d say, pausing for emphasis, “what’re people around here gonna do?” For him, the more disastrous something was, the less likely it would occur.