Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  I could tell my mother was fond of Sarah, too, though she was also wary. We were young, she reminded us all through high school. It was great that we were such good friends, but the world was large and we shouldn’t discount that just because we as yet had no notion of it. Sometimes, when Sarah and I were together, I caught my mother studying us—or was it just me?—with perplexed concern. I couldn’t imagine what caused this, which may be why it troubled me. Sarah’s father never overtly objected to our friendship, but I could tell Sarah had been right. He wasn’t fond of me. When I told my mother, she said it was probably nothing personal, that no boy would ever be good enough for his little girl. He was a Jewish father, and I shouldn’t let his opinion worry me. Somehow, though, he’d learned my nickname, and he enjoyed calling me by it, always in an ironic, joking way, but still.

  By the end of eighth grade Sarah and I were, just as she’d portrayed us, together and inseparable. It was my mother who noticed the other thing, the significance of which had escaped even me—that since meeting Sarah I hadn’t had a single spell. “Grown out of them is what happened” was my father’s optimistic assessment. “There’s nothing wrong with our Louie,” he said, beaming at me. “There never was.” Because I wanted desperately for that to be true, now more than ever, I made no mention to Sarah of the spells that had punctuated my childhood and early adolescence. Nor did I tell her about my ordeal in the trunk, an event that at long last was receding into insignificance. If I was well, what difference did it make?

  At the time I paid no attention to the third customer in Sarah’s drawing, the one about to enter the store. It was the most generic figure in the drawing. Though I’d always assumed it was male, you couldn’t really even be sure of its gender. Years later, when my father was diagnosed, I came to think of the dark figure as representing that illness on our very doorstep, with us still unaware of its presence. I don’t remember how old I was, or even if Sarah and I were married yet, when I asked if she’d had anyone particular in mind. The figure had a curiously wide stance, as if he needed to hold on to the open door to keep from losing his balance. I’d expected her to say that, no, she’d just imagined a random customer, so I was surprised to learn that she had placed in the foreground a person she’d never seen but had heard me speak of so vividly that she hoped one day to meet him.

  Bobby Marconi.

  GHOST IKEY’S

  WHEN OWEN COMES into the store, he finds me staring at his mother’s drawing of Ikey Lubin’s on the wall behind the register, yellowing and brittle now, behind glass. Sunk deep in reverie, I didn’t hear the old bell above the door, which is just as well because I’d likely have turned around expecting to see a young Bobby, or Karen, or Uncle Dec. Even my father.

  “Pop?” Owen says, startling me. “You having a spell?”

  Trying not to sound irritated, I tell him no, I’m not. I’d have spared my son all knowledge of these episodes if I could, but at least I wish he’d react to the possibility more appropriately. Had I actually been having a spell, asking me would’ve been useless. Better to just go away and come back in half an hour. But it’s unfair to get annoyed about this. In his entire life he’s only witnessed two or three, and it was so long between them that he can be forgiven for forgetting what to do, or rather that there’s really nothing to be done. Only two people—my father and my wife—have ever had much influence over the severity or duration of my spells. Poor Owen, who knows better, or would if he thought about it, can’t help thinking he should do something.

  “Your eyes are all red,” he says when I turn around. He studies me carefully, which gives me the opportunity to study him back. My son looks like me, more with each passing year, though I don’t know how he feels about the resemblance. As a boy, being told how much I resembled my father was a source of pleasure and pride to me, and later in life I enjoyed being mistaken for Big Lou Lynch on the street. Apparently Owen was recently mistaken for me, and my impression was that he didn’t feel complimented.

  Be that as it may, he’s clearly embarrassed to have caught me gathering wool. “Mom’s going to be fine,” he assures me. “I was just out at the house. She looks great.”

  “I know,” I tell him.

  “They got it all,” he continues, as if I’ve disagreed with him. “There’s no reason—”

  “I know.”

  Tomorrow she and I meet with the oncologist to confirm this and, assuming there are no surprises in the blood work, we’ll be officially cleared for international travel. There can be little doubt that the promise of Italy has accelerated Sarah’s return to health and contributed significantly to her renewed sense of general well-being. Her physical strength and stamina improve daily, so much so that my warnings not to overdo now seem more grumpy than caring.

  I probably should tell Owen that he’s mistaken the cause of my melancholy, but concern for his mother’s health is a far better excuse for my puffy eyes than the actual reason, which I’m not sure I could explain anyway. Owen’s as good-hearted as they come, though he’s impatient, as the young are, with emotional complexity. Not that he’s so young anymore, as Sarah is always reminding me. Anyway, I let it go.

  What I doubt I could explain is how his mother’s drawing amplifies my profound sense, much aggravated of late, that another, alternate version of my life exists, that I’m trapped in this one when I really belong in the other. My alternate life, though ethereal, is somehow truer than the one I know to be factual and real. The shadow version contains everything that should be there—Ikey’s itself, my father and mother, my wife and me, with Bobby poised outside, about to enter. Since Sarah drew our world so long ago, two things have happened that shouldn’t have. My father died of cancer, and Bobby fled Thomaston for the wide world, never to return.

  “What do you mean?” Sarah said, genuinely puzzled, when I asked not long ago if she, too, ever sensed another reality where things existed as they were supposed to, where providence hadn’t been thwarted. “People lose their fathers, Lou. And what would have happened to Bobby if he hadn’t left when he did? You don’t really think he’d be with us here at Ikey’s?”

  Which did make me smile. When Sarah uses that particular tone with me, I’m reminded of my mother’s attempts to straighten my father out when she caught him meandering hopelessly in the labyrinths of what should be, a world where milk still comes in bottles, where meat’s still wrapped in butcher paper, not cellophane, and tied off with string. And of course my wife’s right. It was thoughtless of me to give the impression that my loss was special, or that I alone should’ve been exempted from something so universal as the loss of a parent. After all, Sarah lost both her parents, and her little brother, too. Nor had I meant to suggest that Bobby could or should have remained in dear old Thomaston when fame and fortune awaited him elsewhere. Embarrassed, I must’ve looked just as sheepish as my father always did when my mother shredded his logic, shining the light of reason on his foolishness. I remember vividly wishing she wouldn’t do that, that she’d let him arrange his thoughts and feelings the way he wanted. After all, how does one invalidate a powerful feeling? Not with logic, surely.

  Still, who doesn’t suspect that providence has somehow been thwarted, that the true narrative of one’s life is proceeding merrily along but on a strictly parallel track and therefore inaccessible? What I was trying without success to explain to Sarah was not that I think my father shouldn’t have died, but rather that he didn’t, that he lives on, as full of life as ever, in some other Ikey’s, the real Ikey’s, truer than ours for the simple reason that he’s there, a part of it. He’s aged, of course, in that next-door world, and the rest of us worry about his health. It’s not a perfect world, this alternate one. Nothing in it is idealized. He could be diagnosed with some terrible malignancy tomorrow. As it is, he has good days and bad. He’s failed, as people do, as even my mother has. Some days he’s more of a hindrance than a help at the store, wanting to do everything like he always has, jotting notes on scraps of paper
and stuffing them under the cash register drawer, refusing to do his inventory on the computer and thereby causing no end of confusion. And of course he’s never come to terms with the Lotto machine that saved Ikey’s and enabled us to buy the other two markets. When my father purchased Ikey’s all those years ago, he promised my mother he’d never make book or sell numbers there, and even though betting horses and playing Lotto numbers is now not only legal but state sponsored, he sometimes feels like he’s broken that promise.

  If this narrative seems whimsical simply by virtue of its being untrue, all I can say is that it’s more realistic than the truth, and Bobby’s presence heightens that realism even further. When the bell above the door jingles and we see it’s Bobby entering with his new girlfriend, where’s the implausibility? Of course he, too, has aged. He’s got a bit of paunch now, his former athleticism having yielded to years of high living. He sports some gray at the temples but still has a full head of hair, and he has a way with the local girls, women now, all of them. He brings a different one to the store every week, and each of them understands that she’s auditioning for a foursome—Sarah and me, Bobby and this new woman—and also that it won’t work out, that we’re naturally three and there’s nothing to be done about it. He’s still hot tempered, of course, still willing to mix it up, and even men my son’s age know better than to trifle with him. Though they know nothing of his legendary battle with Jerzy Quinn, they have only to look at him to know he’s brave and willing, a dangerous combatant.

  I don’t dwell in this alternate world, or even on it. I’m not crazy. But at odd moments I do sense its existence, and more frequently of late, I’ll admit, but for a very good reason. I’ve been living in the past these weeks, working long hours to write my story, and Bobby will return to it soon, if I continue. I’d hoped to be finished before we left for Italy, but I’m not sure that’s possible.

  My point about the alternative Ikey’s is that, as a narrative, it holds together. It makes sense. Though untrue as regards its facts, it has the ring of truth—Bobby still here, swinging by the store after work on Friday with a hearty “Hello, you Lynches” and introducing the new girl to my father, who jokingly warns her against him. By contrast, it’s reality that feels far-fetched—Bobby running off like he did, taking his mother’s surname, drifting and brawling his way from London to Paris, Barcelona to Rome and, finally, to Venice, through a maze of marriages and affairs, finding fame and disgrace in equal measure and (to me the strangest part) never returning, not once, to those of us who cared for him. How plausible is that?

  I’m not sure what I was thinking when I tried to explain all this to Sarah. I certainly didn’t expect her to believe literally in this other Ikey’s. I guess I just hoped she’d see the story’s inner truth and beauty. Even taken as pure whimsy, wouldn’t my Sarah have as much reason as I to indulge it? Seen in a certain light, didn’t Bobby hijack a destiny that was rightfully hers? It was she who went off to study art at Cooper Union in New York, all expenses paid; she who got scholarship offers from so many universities; she whose talent was so large, so full of the most extraordinary promise. When Bobby fled Thomaston, he’d put neither pencil to paper nor brush to canvas. What would be more natural than for Sarah to look at our old friend’s life and conclude that somehow their destinies had been switched, like babies in adjacent bassinets? But as Sarah was quick to point out, once a thing has happened, the odds of its happening become moot. Realism and plausibility aren’t reality’s poor cousins. No doubt this was what all those arguments between my parents were about. No wonder my father lost them all.

  “What happens in this story you’re writing?” Sarah asked me earlier this week as we lay in bed, catching each other up on our day. I could hear the worry in her voice. “Does Lou-Lou live?” Lou-Lou. Her fond name for my father.

  “No, he dies,” I assured her. Our bedtime conversations are mostly playful and tender, and this was the tone I adopted, or tried to. “Bobby leaves and never returns. He becomes a famous painter and lives in Venice. We visit him there. Except I haven’t gotten to any of that yet.”

  She seemed relieved to hear that I’m sticking to the facts, though still worried about something, probably that I’m obsessing about my story despite my promise not to. It’s true I’ve already spent more time than I ever imagined would be necessary to recount the particulars of a life as uneventful as mine, and also that I’ve far exceeded the hundred pages I judged would be sufficient to my purpose. I go into my den and close the door behind me so I won’t hear the telephone or the TV. Sarah can’t help recalling what we now refer to as my Map Days, and they were dark indeed. I’ve tried to reassure her that this is different, but I can’t blame her for worrying. My surprising devotion to this enterprise probably also reminds her of her father, the poor man. Forever writing a story with no ending, a story that consumed instead of enriching. But of course I don’t have her father’s ambition. He thought his story was important, that fame and fortune would be its natural consequence, whereas I’m doing this only for my own amusement and edification. For Sarah’s father only the grandest dreams were worth the effort of dreaming. Ikey’s wouldn’t have counted. Moreover, far from making my mind uneasy, my narrative journey has proven therapeutic, I think, a welcome diversion. “I’m just passing the time until we leave. I need to remember it all. I don’t want to be confused.”

  “About what?”

  “Our lives. What happened to us. Why we’ve lived as we have, instead of some other way.”

  “Oh, Lou,” my wife said, taking my hand. “I wish you wouldn’t take things to heart so.”

  Exactly what my mother always said to my father.

  “If we don’t hear from Bobby soon—”

  “There’s still time,” I told her, though my heart sank to see hers so set.

  “His studio’s here,” she pointed. The map of Venice was spread out on our bed. “Somewhere around here.” Her index finger traveled lightly over the whole of Giudecca Island, suggesting—sadly, I thought—that Bobby could be anywhere, that without explicit directions we’d never find him.

  BACK IN IKEY’S—the real one—Owen says, “You’re driving Mom nuts. You know that, right?”

  “I am?”

  “She’s all packed. You haven’t even started.”

  “It won’t take long.”

  “Is it true you threw your passport away last week?”

  “It came in an unmarked envelope. I didn’t know what it was.”

  The look he gives me implies he isn’t buying that explanation any more than his mother did. “You think I threw it away on purpose?” I ask once again. “Why would I do that?”

  What have I done to merit such unkind suspicion? We have our airline tickets, our hotel reservations, all of it paid for, a small fortune.

  “It’s not something you’d do up here,” Sarah had conceded, kissing the spot on my forehead that didn’t worry her. “It’s what goes on back here,” she explained, playfully fixing with her thumb the very spot on my skull beneath which I’ve always imagined my spells originate, small and dark, a single bent gene at first, then a cluster of twisted cells growing like a migraine until they overload and shut me down. “It’s the part you don’t have access to, that I’m keeping an eye on.” My son, too, apparently.

  He and I switch places now, Owen coming around the counter just as my father and I used to, and the pleasure of this simple act is so overwhelming, so intense, that I’d like to share it with him. But I know I should control this impulse, and so I do, though it leaves me momentarily without purpose, on the wrong side of the counter, while my son opens the register and checks the drawer to make sure he has everything he needs. He does. I made sure.

  “Have you been to the studio?” he says, lips continuing to move as he counts.

  “The where?” I say, remembering how his mother’s fingertips floated over Venice in search of Bobby’s studio.

  “The art room. At the junior high. Mom’s finishing
a new painting, and it’s pretty good. You should stop by.”

  I tell him I will and make a mental note to follow through later today. It will please Sarah to know I’ve taken the trouble when I could’ve just waited for her to bring it home. Earlier in the week she said something about “the painting going well,” and I’m afraid I looked blank for a second, trying to guess what she meant. I was thinking of rooms, of course, one of ours in the Borough or maybe the Third Street house or one of the West End apartments. I covered my mistake as quickly as I could, but not quickly enough, and I saw the hurt register, just a flicker, across her face. So later today I’ll not only visit the studio but also take time to memorize this new work, so we can discuss it in detail over dinner.

  “Where’s Brindy?” it occurs to me to ask. She’s listed on Ikey’s schedule for today, not Owen.

  “She’s in Albany,” he explains, or half explains, telling me where she is but not why. Perhaps consulting the doctor who told her she was unlikely to get pregnant again. Or maybe a specialist who can tell her something different. Or else she just went shopping.

  “Does she dislike me?” I hear myself ask. Owen’s still counting, the change now, and it takes him a while to respond.

  He squints at me, and I can’t tell if it’s the oddness of the question or just that it’s come out of left field, surprising even me. “Why would she dislike you?”

  “She just seems impatient sometimes. I try not to meddle, but—”

  “That’s just her way, Dad,” he reassures me. “You should know by now. You should see how she is with me.”