Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  Upstairs, I was certain, a very different conversation was going on, and a very different picture of Ikey’s being painted. My mother did Ikey’s books every month and knew what a shoestring operation we ran, how small fluctuations and surprises could throw us for a loop, how hard we had to work for the slender living we made, how we ordered close to the bone so we wouldn’t incur losses. Even when we did everything right, we were often flummoxed by unforeseen and unforeseeable circumstances. Yes, we were making a go of it, but each year it was getting harder, not easier, and now there were rumors of a new supermarket coming to town, one that would obsolete the A&P. Ikey’s wasn’t the kind of star any sensible young person would hitch a wagon to.

  Nor was Thomaston. In the years since the tannery closed, no other industry had come in to give hope to those who’d lost their jobs there. FOR SALE signs, more of them every year, bloomed on West End, East End and even Borough properties. The Beverlys, who could afford to, had finally sold their house at a loss. Those who couldn’t afford to bail out consulted one demoralized realtor after another, plotting doomed strategies to sell their homes, first at “fair” prices that represented the owners’ diminished hopes and expectations, then at “reduced” prices designed to show how “motivated” they were. But only fire-sale pricing attracted serious buyers, of whom there were precious few, and fierce competition for them drove desperate sellers to slash prices further.

  So did the now-conventional wisdom that Thomaston had, in fact, been poisoned. Even our local newspaper had finally given up running editorials to counter the Albany whistle-blowers on the pollution of the Cayoga Stream and our tainted groundwater, instead arguing weakly that we weren’t that much worse off than our neighboring communities. On weekends, to reassure residents that the Cayoga now ran clean and pure, the paper printed photos of men fly-fishing in the shadow of the abandoned tannery. The problem was that people remembered their poisoning fondly. Back when the Cayoga ran red, they had money in their pockets. Now jobless, once their unemployment was exhausted, they signed up for welfare and drank their government checks in gin mills like Murdick’s. Division Street wasn’t really even the boundary between the West and East Ends anymore. The poverty and lack of opportunity that had once characterized everything west of Division was now encroaching on formerly respectable East End neighborhoods. Before long, my mother predicted, the banks would own every house and business in town, and then even the banks would leave. Of course Sarah already knew most of this, but I was sure my mother, fearing that her time away might’ve made her nostalgic, took every opportunity to remind her.

  To be honest, what tormented me most when they were alone together was what my mother might be saying to Sarah about me. My mother loved me, I knew that. Why, then, did I suspect her of warning my girlfriend against me? Though we’d never discussed them, Sarah knew when and how my spells had begun and that I’d battled them throughout my adolescence. My father believed they were a thing of the past, that I’d outgrown them like an ugly sweater forgotten in the back of the closet. Would my mother share with Sarah her fear—and, I confess, my own—that I’d never be free of them? Why did I imagine her warning Sarah about what she’d be in for if we married, that she’d spend the rest of her life trapped by not just my condition but also my temperament? “Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in that store?” I could hear her saying. At night, unable to sleep, I cataloged all the things my mother knew about me that I’d rather Sarah didn’t: how as a boy I’d been afraid to walk home from school alone after Bobby moved away from Berman Court, how I’d failed to call the turn in the milk truck and gotten Bobby’s wrist broken, how devastated I’d been when the Marconis moved to the Borough, how I’d allowed Karen Cirillo to steal cigarettes from Ikey’s.

  I knew that these were paranoid fears, evidence merely of self-doubt that at times bordered on self-loathing. These were the very things I should’ve been telling Sarah myself, if I hadn’t been so terrified of losing her. One night I worked myself into such a state that I actually made myself sick and woke my parents by retching violently into the toilet.

  The last day of her spring break, my father presented the two of us with a gift certificate to a fancy restaurant located out on the old Albany–Schenectady road that sat on a hill overlooking the canal. Below, in the waning light of evening, dense squadrons of winter birds dove in rigid formation at the water. It was late March, but spring came slowly upstate, its only signs of approach were the snow that had turned brown and water that could be heard tunneling underneath it.

  We were given a table by a window through which we could watch the diving birds. How beautiful Sarah looked that night. I can still see her, across the long years, in that lovely, high-necked navy-blue dress, and I remember everyone turning to look at her when we were seated. Our waitress mistook us for newlyweds, which I normally would’ve taken enormous pleasure in. But I’d been feeling out of sorts all day, as if I might be coming down with something, and conflicted, too, wishing Sarah weren’t leaving the next day but glad that my mother wouldn’t have further opportunities to poison the well of her affections against me. Also, I was afraid. It had occurred to me that this would be the perfect occasion for Sarah to confess that she was having second thoughts, that maybe we’d been unwise to commit ourselves so young.

  When she finally asked why I was so glum, I muttered something about wishing she didn’t have to leave tomorrow, and she responded that it wouldn’t be that long before we saw each other again, to which I replied spitefully that maybe it would seem a lot longer to me than it did to her. She then reminded me that I could visit her in the city anytime I wanted. In fact, there were people she wanted me to meet, and she’d like to show me her school, as well as all the sights. We could go to the top of the Empire State Building, take a cruise around Manhattan, see Radio City Music Hall. She rattled on like this for a while, her cheer causing my spirits to plummet even further. Of course she could make such offers safely, knowing that I couldn’t take her up on them, not with my father still weak from his treatments and Ikey’s needing me.

  Eventually she ran out of ideas, and when she did I asked what I’d been wanting to all week: what had she and my mother found to talk about up in the flat for the last two weeks? And just that quickly, her eyes were full. “Your poor mother,” she said. “She’s terrified, you know. She’s afraid the doctors aren’t telling the whole truth. She doesn’t trust Lou-Lou’s surgeon because a woman she knows said he lied about her husband, told her there was nothing to worry about, and six months later he was dead.”

  I’m afraid what I did then was give a harsh, bitter croak that tasted of last night’s vomit. “You don’t get it, do you? If that’s what happens, she gets her way. If they find another tumor, she’ll sell the store. She hates Ikey’s. She’s always hated it. Right from the start she said it would fail, that my father was stupid to buy it. Now she gets to be right. She’ll tell him there’s no choice. They either have to sell the store or lose the house. She doesn’t care what he wants or I want. Why do you think she’s spending all that money renovating the flat? Because she thinks that if it’s fixed up nice, Ikey’s will sell. Then, with the store gone, she’ll get her way with me, too. If I don’t have Ikey’s to come home to, I won’t have any choice, will I? I’ll have to do what she wants. Stay in school. In Albany. She gets her way about everything.”

  I might have stopped at any time. I saw the look of horror on Sarah’s face deepen with each bitter utterance. Little did she know how much more was right on the tip of my tongue. Like what Nancy Salvatore told me about my mother that day in the store years ago, about my father never knowing what had hit him, just like my uncle Dec before him. I could still see the woman’s obscene sneer, her eagerness to prove she knew my mother longer and better than I did and knew she wasn’t who I thought she was. And after that I’d tell Sarah about Uncle Dec, because it now seemed obvious he was the man on the trestle that night I’d woken up in the trunk, and th
at my mother had been there with him. Once Sarah was convinced of this, she’d understand everything my mother was up to now—renovating the flat over Ikey’s, namely preparing to sell the store, so that later, once my father was out of the picture…

  I might have said all this, but didn’t. What stopped me was the look of revulsion on Sarah’s face and the fact that I could feel the same obscene knowledge spreading across my features that I’d witnessed that day on Karen’s mother’s. So I just held my tongue and looked away, out the window, where the ridiculous birds continued diving at the now-black canal, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, flying in precise formation, low over the water, turning the already darkening sky black with their wings. Then they banked all at once and disappeared from sight, as if a living room blind had been yanked open, each blade too thin to register on the eye, until they banked back and the sky was again black with them. Everywhere, nowhere. Everything, nothing. No in between.

  I didn’t look at Sarah until I heard her say my name with more tenderness than I deserved. “Lou,” she said, “are you saying your mother wants Lou-Lou to die?”

  Hearing her give voice to that thought instantly made me see the lunacy of it. I started to say No, of course not, but wasn’t that precisely what I’d been saying? And wasn’t what I’d almost said even more insane? What evidence did I have that the man on the trestle that night had been my uncle, beyond that they shared a handful of common sayings? That so-and-so was a good egg. That people in hell wanted ice water. But evidence, of course, was not the issue. After all, I was positive that the woman who’d opened the trunk and peered inside at me was not my mother. I’d seen her. Why did something I knew to be false continue to haunt me with the terrible power of truth? Did I want it to be true? What possible benefit could derive from such a bitter, cruel falsehood?

  I must have sat there stunned and mute for a long time, Sarah regarding me with that same tender, confused expression, and I think that if I could’ve spoken then it would have been to do what I’d suspected my mother of doing: I’d have warned Sarah against me, against the life I was offering her; that her affection for me, and for the rest of us Lynches, was a trap; that this was her chance to escape and tomorrow she should leave Thomaston and never look back. But when I finally spoke, I said, weakly, “It’s just…,” and then I had to pause again, because suddenly I was aware that the restaurant was blurry around the edges, that it had been since we entered. Sarah herself was out of focus, with a halo encircling her dark curls. A spell, I thought. I’m having a spell. But this realization was less important than my need to explain, so I tried again. “It’s just…I don’t want her to sell Ikey’s.” I concentrated as hard as I could, wanting to get it right, to be as precise as I could. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want my mother to sell Ikey’s; I didn’t want her to be right about Ikey’s, to be right about anything. I wanted desperately for her to be wrong about every single thing she’d ever argued with my father, wrong about our family, our town, our country. I wanted her to be wrong about me. But it was more than any of that. “I don’t want my father to die,” I said.

  At which my Sarah, our Sarah, smiled. “Lou-Lou’s going to be fine,” she said, and she seemed so certain that in my vagueness and confusion I accepted her authority and felt something ponderous lift off of me. “He is?” I said.

  Sarah said, “Lou, listen to me. Your mother isn’t planning to sell the store. If anything has to be sold, she’ll sell the house. She knows how much you love Ikey’s, that it would kill you to lose it. Maybe she doesn’t love Ikey’s like you and Lou-Lou, but she loves that you love it. It’s true she doesn’t want to lose your house, but she knows it wouldn’t kill her if that’s what happens. Do you understand? She’s not getting her way. You’re getting yours. She wants you to have Ikey’s, if that’s what you want.” She paused then to let all this sink in. “She wants us to have Ikey’s, if that’s what we want.”

  Then she reached across the table and took my hand, and at her touch the spell’s aura was gone, the edges of everything sharp and clear again. Utterly vanished as well was the terrible bitterness that had been gnawing at me for days without my being entirely aware, along with the sour taste on the back of my tongue.

  “That’s what I want,” I assured her.

  HOW DISTANT these events seem tonight as I sit alone in my den in the aftermath of a spell powerful enough to blow Italy to smithereens. And as distant as they are in time, they feel even more remote in sentiment. How odd to recall that what I felt that late-March evening so long ago, when Sarah took my hand and banished my spell before it could happen, was cured. All my life I’d wanted to believe that my father was right in saying, “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with our Louie.” My mother knew better, knew as I did that there was something wrong with me, something that was me and that would never go away unless I went with it. No matter how long it is between spells, the next is always lurking, hidden like a malignant cell and awaiting coded instructions to divide, then divide again, until it gains the required mass to steal me away and take me captive. Only then, after it’s done what it must, can I be called back. My father was particularly good at this, at making the world feel right and safe for me when I returned.

  But not even he had been able to prevent a spell. Nobody had ever cast one off once it was under way, as Sarah did when she took my hand in the restaurant. In the depths of despair just moments earlier, I immediately felt giddy with optimism, and so, amazingly, did she, as if she was as stunned by her own power as I was. Even more amazing, having now seen me at my worst, she seemed even more committed to our future than before. We stayed at the restaurant until it closed, mapping out the rest of our lives. Sarah would do one last semester at Cooper Union, then transfer to Albany. There, she’d be a full-time student and stay on campus when I went home on weekends. I’d continue to do whatever I could to help my parents save the store, but Sarah’s talent—and suddenly I sounded like my mother—must not be compromised or sacrificed.

  Drunk with hope, we determined not only things that were ours to decide but also things that weren’t. We concluded that my father’s operation had been an unqualified success, just as his doctor proclaimed, and that my mother’s apprehensions were born of love, not reason. Before long he’d have his old strength back, and life would return to normal. Then we resolved that Ikey’s would prosper, so there’d be no need to sell the house. Further, we figured that the money spent on renovations wasn’t being wasted. Now that Sarah had straightened out my thinking, I saw what I’d been blind to before: that as soon as she and I were married, we’d move into the apartment ourselves and stay there until we could manage a down payment on a house of our own. I’d been right that my mother and uncle had been conspiring, but wrong about their intent. They were preparing a place for Sarah and me to live. Later, after she finished her degree, she’d teach art in the local schools and continue to draw and paint. She’d work at Ikey’s only when she wanted to. At some point, when it was safe to do so, I’d go back to school and finish my own degree, because that’s what my mother had always wanted and sacrificed for. We’d have two children, Sarah and I, a boy and a girl, who would take turns bouncing and giggling on their grandfather’s knee. All this we decided, all this and more.

  Tonight, our myriad decisions seem as remote as youth itself. Yet I can’t bring myself to regard them as folly. As I stare at the grainy newspaper photo of my hero-father that hangs above my desk, I’m more disappointed in myself than anything else. Still shaken by my encounter with him on the Bridge of Sighs, I’m again visited by a feeling of profound shame, first because I tried to sneak past my father, then because I begged him to let me stay there on the bridge instead of returning to Sarah, my life and my duties. In the final stage of his illness, when he weighed all of a hundred and twenty pounds and all that was left was pain and worry, he still loved his life. “I don’t want to die,” he told me one afternoon, his lower lip trembling, when my mother was out of the room. “I ain�
�t afraid. It ain’t that. I just want to stay here with you, is all.” Bedeviled by perplexity, he kept saying, “I don’t know what I done to deserve this,” as if someone could maybe explain it to him. But he was clear about what he wanted, at least. To remain with us, at Ikey’s, not to sneak off somewhere like I’d tried to do this afternoon on the Bridge of Sighs.

  I swallow the humiliation of my cowardice as best I can, reminding myself that tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep, I’ll be more myself, but right now the truth is that I’m about as dispirited as I’ve been since my father’s death, when I realized I’d have to navigate the long remainder of my life without his star to guide me. In the weeks and months after he was laid to rest, I slipped into what I now realize was a deep depression. My mother and Sarah seemed to understand what was happening but were powerless to prevent it. No doubt I refused to acknowledge that I needed help, even if they’d known what to offer. In my grief and rage I’d become obsessed with the poisoning of our town. I bought a blown-up map of Thomaston and mounted it on the wall, updating it daily by means of obituaries in the newspaper, placing a black pin where the newly deceased had lived. A nurse who worked in the hospital’s oncology ward helped me verify which deaths were due to cancer. In the beginning I stuck to the relevant facts, recording each subsequent cancer death with another black pin. But before long, impatient, anxious to indict, I started including people who’d recently been diagnosed as well as others, like old Ikey Lubin himself, who’d died when I was a teenager. I was mapping, I believed, the tendrils of cancer snaking outward from the polluted stream. In the end, however, my map took on a metaphorical quality. The black pin behind the Bijou Theater marked where Three Mock had been beaten into a coma, though he actually died years later in Vietnam. I put another on the street where David Entleman hanged himself. I even gave two black pins to the Spinnarkle sisters, who’d fled town rather than face neighbors who now knew their terrible secret.