Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  Eventually I hear Sarah calling to me. I turn toward her voice reluctantly, not wanting to refuse her anything she might want, even though I just now remember what I hid in my desk drawer and am terribly, terribly ashamed.

  “Lou,” my wife says. “I’m right here.”

  “Where?” I try to say, but I know this isn’t the sound that comes out. I turn toward the door, expecting her to enter the art room, but what I see framed in its tiny rectangular window is my uncle’s face. But this makes no sense. Uncle Dec hasn’t lived in Thomaston for years. Then when I blink, I recognize the face as belonging to José Ocariz, our junior high history teacher. He looks nothing like Dec, but his expression is the one my uncle wore the first time I had a spell in his presence: “This is some weird shit, Bub.”

  “This is some weird shit, Bub,” I say, or something like that, or maybe I’m only thinking it. I turn away from José to Sarah’s painting, since this must be where she is and I should join her there, so I do. Inside the Bridge of Sighs it’s dark and I’m alone, stepping carefully on the smooth stones. I hear Sarah call my name again, but now her voice is farther away. I try to resolve this paradox. If I’m moving toward her, if she’s here on the Bridge of Sighs, how can her voice be retreating? I keep moving, though her voice, each time she calls, is fainter and more distant. Should I turn around, return to the art room and await further instruction? No, I think. I love my wife. I do. But I think again of the letter and am too ashamed to face her. The direction I’m traveling in is the right one. I feel sure of this, though I can’t say why. I will cross this Bridge of Sighs even though I now realize Sarah won’t be there to greet me. On the other side of the bridge is profound darkness, but I’m not afraid. Whatever lies beyond the Bridge of Sighs will be my new life.

  I’m in the middle of Sarah’s bridge when I see a man leaning over the railing and staring down at the red water below. I recognize him, of course, and yet again I am ashamed. I try to sneak by, but he says, “Is that you, Louie?” so I go over and stand beside my father. After a moment he says, “You promised,” and of course I know which promise he’s talking about, though I made it long ago. “You promised you’d never do like you’re doing,” he explains, unnecessarily. Allowing myself to just drift away, is what he means. On that long ago day when he gave me a tour of the Borough in his milk truck, I promised him I’d never do that, and here I am breaking my oath.

  “But you’re gone,” I tell him. “You died.” How can I be bound by my promise when my father is dead?

  “You always done good till now,” he says sadly, as if he can’t understand what’s come over me.

  I’d like to tell him no, he’s wrong, that I’ve not always done as I should, that I’ve failed as a son, as a father and especially as a husband, but of course he’d never believe any such thing, any more than he’d have believed I gave Karen Cirillo free cigarettes from Ikey’s. “It’s just that I’d rather stay here with you,” I tell him in my small, whiny child’s voice, hoping he’ll let me have my way, as he so often did when he was alive.

  “I miss you, too,” he tells me. “It ain’t that. It’s just…”

  I wait for him to complete his thought, but instead he reaches down and takes my hand.

  “Here, Lou,” my wife says, her voice close now. “Open your eyes.”

  Are my eyes closed? I don’t think so, but then I open them and there she is, my Sarah, on her knees next to my chair. It’s she, not my father, who’s squeezing my hand. She is, literally, “at hand,” a phrase that takes on a magical new meaning. And I must be saying something—maybe trying to explain that I’ve actually been inside her painting, perhaps the finest one she’s ever done, because I can feel words, like pebbles, in my throat.

  ALL AND SUNDRY

  SARAH WAS mostly proud of how she’d handled her parents’ breakup. She hadn’t cried or pouted or gotten angry with them. They were, after all, two strong-willed people who’d made up their minds. She herself was not strong-willed, nor was her mind made up as to whether the separation was a good or bad thing, so she quickly recognized the futility of attempting to alter the course of unalterable events. Enduring what couldn’t be cured, she supposed, was what people meant by being adult, though it was ironic that so few of them—including her parents—had mastered the skill themselves. By age twelve she’d already learned to cut her losses and derive what comfort she could from doing so. Generally she was happy or, failing that, reasonably content, though she sometimes wondered if she’d conceded the inevitable too quickly. What if the only thing concessions got you was the habit of conceding?

  Still, what remained after the separation was not nothing. Both her parents cared for her, and she mostly succeeded in trying not to think that their happiness apparently counted for more than her own. She divided her time unequally between them—residing in Thomaston with her father during the school year, on Long Island with her mother every summer, which arrangement hadn’t been discussed with her but worked as well as any she herself might’ve proposed had anyone asked her opinion. By the time she entered junior high she was used to it, the rhythm of her comings and goings feeling natural or at least familiar. The only real difficulty was the transition, when the baton was passed between her father and mother in mid-June and then again over the Labor Day weekend.

  Her parents’ lives couldn’t have been more different. Her father was an ascetic by nature and nurture, and her life with him was regimented and predictable. The hours after school were much the same as those in school, where a glance at the wall clock told you where you were and what you were meant to be doing: ten o’clock, chem lab; eleven, study hall; noon, lunch. At home, they alternated cooking duties, though following the same dozen or so recipes, and they ate at six sharp. Fridays they went out for pizza. Saturday mornings they went to the supermarket.

  At her mother’s you could search in vain for any structural principle. They shopped when they ran out, her mother purchasing whatever struck her fancy. If the produce looked good, she’d fill the cart with fruits and vegetables, most of which would be thrown out later in the week once they’d spoiled. She shopped until she grew bored, whereupon she’d proclaim, “That’s enough for today,” and promptly join the checkout line, which was why they were forever running out of necessities, like milk or toilet paper, and having to improvise. Her mother’s tiny kitchen was full of cookbooks that she’d read around in, as if they contained poems, for an hour or so before deciding to order Chinese takeout. “What?” she said when Sarah hinted that a little organization in their lives might not be amiss. “You want me to be all buttoned up, like your father?” A little buttoning up, Sarah thought, might not have hurt. On hot sunny days, her mother often came home early from her studio and took a sweating shaker of martinis up onto the roof of the apartment house to sunbathe in the nude, a habit that altered the flight path of many a small aircraft. Entering her mother’s world each summer, after the inflexible routine of her father’s, gave Sarah vertigo, and swapping again in September was no easier. She tried not to think about the genetic implication that one day she would have to confront and resolve their contradictions or else lose her mind.

  The apartment house was called the Sundry Arms, and it catered, by design or serendipity, to recently divorced men. “All and Sundry. That’s who lives here,” her mother joked, because the landlord’s name was Harold Sundry. Though not much below medium height, Harold, thanks to a very large head, seemed dwarflike. His legs were of unequal length, which gave him a strange, rolling gait, and by watching him you couldn’t quite tell where he was heading until he arrived there, though it was probably someplace in the Sundry Arms. Sarah never once saw him outside the complex, and he appeared to spend his every waking moment getting a recently vacated apartment ready for a new tenant. He himself lived in the outsize front unit that doubled as the complex’s office. Every June Sarah was amazed that no one, except for her mother, remained from the previous summer. Where did they all go? Anywhere and ever
ywhere, apparently. A few, those willing to grovel, returned to their permanently aggrieved wives and distrustful children. Others found apartments in the city. The luckiest moved in with new women. Still others moved to the Sundry Gardens, which was owned and operated by Harold’s ex-wife Elaine, who’d gotten it in the divorce and now lived in the large front unit directly across the street from her ex-husband’s. “Kiss my ass, Elaine,” he often could be heard calling on warm evenings when the traffic had died down and he imagined his ex-wife’s window might be open.

  According to Sarah’s mother, both complexes owed their existence to the fool’s errand institution of marriage, which since she left hers had become her favorite subject, one she could riff on for hours. One of the stranger things about her parents’ separation was how it had loosed her mother’s tongue. Back when they were still together, she had mostly just stared at her husband in disbelief. Sometimes she’d open her mouth as if to say something, or a big bunch of somethings, but then she’d glance at her daughter and close it again. Now she just talked and talked. It was as if she’d committed to memory every single thing she’d meant to say for all those years and was letting it all loose in a flood. Away from her husband, she just hemorrhaged words and ideas, and whole philosophies on pretty much any topic, though marriage remained her favorite.

  Matrimony, she explained, was based on two fallacies, both real doozies. The first was the ridiculous notion that people knew what they wanted. There was no evidence in support of this contention and never had been, but they seemed to enjoy believing it anyway, blinded as they were by love and lust and hope, only the last of which sprang eternal. The second fallacy, built on the shifting sands of the first, was equally seductive and even more idiotic—that what people thought they wanted today was what they’d want tomorrow. Sarah’s mother filed this under the general heading of “Failures of Imagination,” which was probably the biggest category in the entire history of categories, its origin almost certainly divine. Human beings, she believed, were a failure of God’s imagination. “Look around the Sundry Arms,” she was fond of saying, “and tell me God intended this shit.” Divorce, she maintained, made a better sacrament than marriage, if you had to have one. It signaled that at least one person and probably two had come to his or her senses and taken a long hard look at not only their spouse but the institution that had encouraged such irrational behavior. Thinking clearly at last, such people embraced freedom, usually in the guise of adultery, and shortly thereafter you had need of the Sundrys, Arms and Gardens.

  Elaine’s Sundry Gardens was the better of the two complexes, both newer and larger, with unfurnished two-and three-bedroom apartments. The divorced men who moved in there had been clever enough to see what was bearing down on them in time to make modest preparations and draw up an evacuation plan. They’d hired lawyers (or were lawyers themselves), squirreled money away in accounts their wives knew nothing about, taken careful inventory of what they could and couldn’t live without when the inevitable day arrived, making plans to secure what they could and replace what they couldn’t. What they managed to salvage usually fit into a small U-Haul truck that took no more than an afternoon, with the help of an old college friend or two, to load and unload. On the other hand, the shell-shocked walking wounded who moved into the furnished one-bedroom units of the Sundry Arms arrived with little more than a suitcase or two, packed under the supervision of a woman whose Hell Hath No Greater Fury was her lone parting gift. Yet something about them appealed to Sarah’s mother. “Here comes another one,” she’d say when she spotted a bewildered man in the courtyard below, trying hard to follow Harold Sundry’s rolling gait, zigging when Harold zagged. “No idea whether to eat shit, chase rabbits or bark at the moon.” Most of them didn’t look like they possessed enough energy, wit or imagination for adultery, but here they were, so they must have. For weeks they’d be like bugs on their backs, her mother explained, their little legs churning dutifully in the air, seeking traction where there wasn’t any and not even realizing what they really needed, which was for someone to come along and flip them over so they could scurry off again.

  Why her mother actually liked the Sundry Arms and preferred such men to their craftier, more self-sufficient counterparts across the street was something Sarah didn’t like to think about too deeply. One reason, she suspected, had to do with the fact that one of the many things the Sundry Arms men arrived without were the younger women who’d wrecked their marriages, whereas Sundry Gardens men were alone only until their secretaries found someone to sublet their apartments in Chelsea. At any rate, her mother seemed to consider it her duty to cheer up her new neighbors, to help them understand that their stay, though brief, needn’t be joyless. Most of them seemed grateful for her efforts on their behalf. When they left—a month, two months, six months later—it was Sarah’s mother and not their more immediate neighbors to whom they bequeathed what wouldn’t fit into those same suitcases: the half-empty bottle of Drambuie, the like-new Teflon-coated frying pan, the apartment-sized stereo unit. Thanks to their generosity, she was constantly upgrading her possessions, and over the years she’d learned the wisdom of helping these sad, beleaguered men outfit themselves in the first place, knowing that one day soon whatever they purchased would be hers, so why not go top of the line?

  Harold liked Sarah’s mother, too, and his fondness was also profitable. There was a lot of breakage at the Sundry Arms, whose residents seemed to grasp immediately that they’d found a port in a storm. They also imagined that port to be temporary, that they’d be staying only until their wives came to their senses. When they discovered how wrong they were, furnishings tended to go airborne. Whenever a tenant moved out and Harold had to replace a lamp or chair, he put the new one in Sarah’s mother’s apartment and rotated her used one into the newly vacant space. “Wow,” the new arrivals said, when she showed them her apartment, “yours is nice.” They didn’t quite know what to make of it; she could tell. The layout was identical to their own, as was much of the furniture, but she had been given a special dispensation from Harold to replace the heavy, dark drapes with fancy blinds and the Motel 6 artwork with her own colorful designs. Harold himself couldn’t get over how nice her place looked. “These men are all deeply and easily confused by sleight of hand,” her mother explained.

  Summers, she insisted that Sarah take the bedroom. “Most of the time I fall asleep in front of the TV anyway,” she reasoned, which was true enough, even if it wasn’t the whole story. Sometimes Sarah woke to conversation that wasn’t on the television and realized that what had awakened her was someone knocking. Once she thought she recognized the male voice in the front room as belonging to Harold, but she couldn’t be sure, and other times the voices were definitely not his. These half-overheard conversations were always short, and when Sarah heard the front door open and shut again, she felt certain that she was now alone in the apartment. Sometimes, an hour or two later, she’d hear her mother return. One morning she’d awakened at the usual time and found the sofa empty, only to discover her mother snoring there when she emerged from the shower. Another day, up early for a babysitting job, she’d dressed in the dark and moved quietly around her mother’s sleeping form, slipping out the front door, closing it quietly behind her, then kicking over the two martini glasses somebody had thoughtfully returned, leaving them on the step.

  “How much does your father know about this place?” it occurred to her mother to ask one day. The answer, in fact, was very little. (They were still separated then, and it would be years before her mother got around to filing for divorce.) “That Sundry place?” he asked each September. “She’s still living there?” He was jumping, just as her mother knew he would, to precisely the wrong conclusion. If she still had the same furnished one-bedroom apartment, then she must still be having a tough go of it. Sarah never let on that she spent far more every month on her studio than she did on her apartment. She’d changed studios three times, actually, each time to a larger, better li
ghted space. And of course her father had no idea about the men—all and Sundry—or the martini glasses, or the large bottle of Beefeater gin she replaced weekly, or that she always bought the largest jar of green olives available at the supermarket, or that she was forever running out of toothpicks.

  As she was about most things, Sarah was of two minds about such behavior. Sometimes she was embarrassed by her mother’s freewheeling promiscuity, but was it any more discomforting than her father’s celibacy? Since his wife’s departure, he hadn’t been out on a single date. Once, when she told him she wouldn’t mind if he had a woman friend, he’d just looked at her funny and said he was still married to her mother. That would’ve been romantic had it not been totally devoid of affection, had Sarah not known that while her father looked forward to the day when economic reality would force her mother to return, he didn’t really miss her. “Being married to your father was a lot like being a nun,” her mother had observed more than once, and Sarah suspected that even if he’d known about the men at the Sundry Arms, it wouldn’t have inspired sexual jealousy. No, he wanted his wife back out of I-told-you-so spite.

  Her father didn’t date or drink, but there was something. Sometimes, when she returned home after spending the evening with Lou at Ikey’s, she’d find him asleep in his chair, the phonograph needle bumping the label of one of his jazz records, a strange, sweet smell in the air. Or she’d wake up in the morning and there’d be a stale version of that same cloying aroma lingering in the house. She was about to ask her father about it when she remembered the very first time she’d smelled it in the parking lot one Friday night outside Angelo’s Pizza. There a skinny, shabbily dressed Negro was idling near the entrance, and he’d nodded familiarly at her father. “Got what you be needin’, brother, whenever you be needin’ it,” the man said, seemingly to no one in particular. A group of people was coming out of the restaurant as they were going in, and Sarah’s first thought was that he’d been addressing one of them, but once inside, the longer she thought about it, the more certain she was that he’d been talking to her father, a conclusion reinforced by the fact that he’d taken no notice whatsoever of the man. Her father always went out of his way with Thomaston’s Negroes, starting up conversations whether the occasion warranted it or, to judge from their startled reactions, not. Yet that evening he’d ignored the skinny black man entirely, and they’d passed close enough for her to catch a whiff of the sickening sweet odor that clung to his clothes. Was it possible that such a man had something her father wanted, or needed, as he’d claimed? If so, Sarah wasn’t sure she wanted to know what it was. “Promise me,” her mother had told her that first summer Sarah stayed at the Sundry Arms, “that if you ever see a syringe lying around the house, you’ll tell me.” Frightened by the prospect of stepping on a needle, Sarah promised she would, but she never saw a syringe “lying around” and couldn’t find one in the medicine cabinet either, though she routinely looked to make sure. But what would she do if she found one? Keeping her mother’s secrets meant she was honor bound to keep her father’s, too, didn’t it? Assuming he had any?