Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  “I ’spect at lease one drawin’ a week. Want you to draw me this town you goin’ to and I specially want to know what this lady’s man look like, so draw me a good one there. Anything else catch your eye, you juss draw it for me. Good drawin’s a powerful thing, no mistake. Juss don’t make it so good I fall down in a faint and get me two black eyes, like some folks.” She let the girl go and turned to Sarah. “That remind me,” she said, “you ain’t looked up at that blue door even once. I guess you’re gon be okay.”

  “I think so,” Sarah said. “I hope Mrs. Feldman will be, too.” The old woman’s terrified face, partially obscured by her foggy oxygen mask and haloed by a cloud of wild white hair, had been the first thing Sarah saw when she came to on the floor of the apartment. That’s what she felt worst about. What if her passing out like that had given the old woman a heart attack? Her nose had bled copiously, and her blouse was a sticky sheet of bright red blood. How horrifying for the poor old woman. Except for the people who brought her noon meal and cleaned her apartment and replaced her oxygen tank, no one was allowed beyond the blue door. At the urging—badgering, most likely—of Miss Rosa, she made an exception for Sarah, and this was the result. A bloodstained carpet.

  “Know what I think?” Miss Rosa said. “I think the good Lord forgot about that old woman, livin’ all alone like she does and never talkin’ to Him. He’s gon remember her real soon, though, because I’m gon remind Him.”

  “You don’t like her?”

  “What kind of person live like that? Like she in a cave. Never stick her head outside. Doan say hello to nobody.”

  “Didn’t you ever want to be alone, Miss Rosa? Just worry about yourself instead of spending all your time making things right for other people?” That, of course, was what Sarah had intended to do when she left Thomaston, what the fantasy of moving to New Mexico had been about. And here she was, about to return home with yet another person to worry about.

  “Too lonesome. Ain’t how it ’sposed to be. No ma’am. I gon remind the good Lord ’bout that old woman. I think she done slip His mind.”

  Sarah couldn’t help but smile. She’d noticed more than once during the last month that although Miss Rosa was the soul of generosity, when she didn’t understand something, she responded by not wanting to. That Mrs. Feldman chose to live her life locked up in her apartment, refusing to speak even to her neighbors, simply made no sense, and that was the end of it. “Aren’t you afraid? What if Jesus has forgotten you?”

  “He ain’t forgot me,” she said, patting the pocket where she’d put Sarah’s check. “He send me somethin’ new every day to let me know He’s cogitatin’ on how to use me. I doan forget Him and He doan forget me. That’s the deal we got.” She studied Sarah critically. “How come you didn’t take it? She said you could have it. Belong to your mama. What she want with a picture of two folks she doan even know?”

  “She told me her own daughter died at about the age I was in the drawing. I guess I reminded her of the girl. That’s why she’s kept it all these years.”

  Miss Rosa shrugged, unconvinced. “Doan matter,” she said. “Nothin’ gone happen to it. When her time comes, I’ll make sure it doan go nowhere. ’Less you doan want it.”

  “No, I do,” Sarah said. The drawing had put the worst of her guilt to rest. She knew now that her mother’s last months hadn’t been all regret and despair, that she’d not completely lost her sense of herself, which in turn meant Sarah needn’t blame herself for it. The drawing belied all that. It was full of pride, and not just of Sarah, by making clear where Sarah’s beauty came from. And while her mother hadn’t romanticized herself by diminishing the effects of age, it certainly suggested Harold Sundry had just won the lottery and, if he didn’t appreciate that, he’d lose it in a heartbeat. And if she’d been jealous of her daughter’s youth and beauty, this would have found its way into their portrait, and there wasn’t a trace. Moreover, a despairing woman wouldn’t have done the drawing at all. A work of art, any work of art, is a hopeful thing, and this had been her way of telling her daughter not to worry. She’d probably hung the drawing in the apartment meaning to surprise her the following summer, but then she’d died. Sarah had never been a fan of ghost stories, though if that’s what this was, it was a dandy. Had her mother’s ghost haunted her old apartment, she was a loving spirit who, once her job was done, had fled.

  “Won’t coss you nothin’ either,” Miss Rosa was saying, eyeing the blue door rather malevolently, Sarah thought. “I got my ways, you know I do.”

  Together, the three of them walked out to the street, Kayla pulling her new wheeled suitcase behind her. Sarah was packed, but she had to return to Sundry Gardens to collect her own luggage and give her key to Harold’s daughter. At the curb Miss Rosa gave Kayla another hug and elicited another promise to be good and say her prayers. When she turned back to Sarah, she seemed to have something on her mind. “I juss wish you’d say how you knowed it was in there,” she said.

  “I didn’t,” Sarah told her. “I didn’t know the drawing even existed.” She’d gone through all this before, that at the end of her last summer with her mother they’d gone to dinner at a nearby restaurant, where her mother brought out her camera and asked a man to take their picture. To judge from the clothes they had on in the drawing, she’d then used this photo as a basis for the drawing that hung in Mrs. Feldman’s apartment. She’d also told Miss Rosa that a minute after the photo was taken she’d fainted upon hearing that her mother was going to marry Harold Sundry, and that in the forty years between then and now she hadn’t fainted once, not until she walked into Mrs. Feldman’s apartment and saw her mother’s face framed on the wall.

  But Miss Rosa wasn’t buying it. “Must’ve known and you forgot,” she’d said when she first heard this story. “Your mama told you about that picture and said she was gon put it up on the wall. You juss forgot. Too spooky otherways. Thass why I believe in Jesus. Ain’t nothin’ spooky ’bout Him. Know what you gettin’ and it ain’t no voodoo neither.”

  Which she repeated now. “Jesus doan spookify things. Got all the trouble we needin’ in this neighborhood without ghosts. No haints allowed nowhere I live, an’ thass final. Tell you what, though. I get back inside, I’m gon look blue door up in my dream book and play the number. Could be a sign. Could be Jesus got it in His mind for me to be rich and He’s just now gettin’ round to it. Fine with me.”

  “And me,” Sarah told her.

  “Me, too,” Kayla said, beaming. “I like money.”

  HOME

  NOONAN WAS already on his third draft beer when he saw Hugh grinning at him in the mirror that ran along the back wall. Dressed all in black when he visited Noonan in Venice, he was now in white, this being spring in New York, and from his breast pocket he took a silk handkerchief and swatted it theatrically at the stool before sitting down.

  He surveyed the Soho bar with distaste and pushed away the wooden bowl of in-the-shell peanuts. “You might’ve picked someplace where we could order champagne, at least.”

  “I don’t like champagne.”

  When the bartender tore himself away from the ball game that was on above the bar, Hugh ordered a designer vodka Noonan had never heard of.

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” he said. “How did you find me?” Weary of the introductions and flesh-pressing, the unctuous praise and New York small talk, he’d sneaked out an hour ago, hoping that in his absence people might pay more attention to Anne. About the only truly enjoyable part of the event—and this was a complete surprise—had been talking with the small group of Columbia grad students who’d arrived in the wake of their professor, Popov, aka Irwin the Contrite, still a supercilious little putz, but mellower now, either that or Noonan was. The students were a motley crew, grotesquely tattooed and horribly stapled, some of them, in all looking like torture survivors who’d managed somehow to retain their innocence. They seemed to think he knew something they didn’t, whereas to Noonan, the opposite was likely closer t
o the truth. They kept referring, with great enthusiasm, to painters and other artists he’d never heard of, but they didn’t seem troubled in the least by his ignorance, as if he’d earned it, given his stature. “We’ll catch you up in no time,” one young woman predicted. That she and her friends, who paid hefty tuition, should be required to educate him, who would be paid a hefty salary, evidently didn’t bother her. “And what would I give you in return?” he asked, a question he wrongly thought might stump them. “You’ll tell us our work sucks and why,” one boy said gloomily, though without visible resentment. “Does your work suck?” Noonan had asked the boy. “Yes,” said a young woman who was apparently his girlfriend. “Definitely,” another young man said. “We all suck. But you’ll inspire us and whip us into shape. And on Friday afternoons we all go out drinking and you’ll buy the beer.”

  How could you not like them? Noonan doubted he’d make them worse painters, though doing no harm didn’t strike him as a particularly lofty academic goal. Did they know he couldn’t give them what they wanted most: a blueprint? Did they understand he couldn’t tell them how it was done, only how he’d done it? He could tell them he’d painted and had kept painting. He could look at their work and ask them questions about it. He could maybe correct a few bad habits. And, on Fridays, he could buy the beer.

  “I saw you turn right when you left the gallery,” Hugh was explaining, “so I did the same and entered the first dive where it looked like a man could get into a knife fight.”

  This last he said just as the bartender arrived with his vodka. “Pay no attention to this man,” Noonan told him. “He’s a homosexual.”

  “So am I,” said the bartender, glaring at Noonan pointedly. “What of it?”

  When he finally drifted back down the bar, Hugh said, “A New York fag with no sense of irony? Where do these people come from? I do rather like the cut of his jib, though.”

  “Irony isn’t everything,” Noonan noted, sliding off his stool so he could retrieve the bowl of peanuts, which he set between them. Extracting a nut from its skin, he tossed the empty shell over his shoulder onto the floor. The two men sat there grinning at each other until Hugh’s grin turned into a chuckle, and Noonan couldn’t help joining in.

  “Fantastic,” Hugh said.

  “Not bad,” Noonan agreed.

  “Not bad? Your ass, not bad. Did I or did I not tell you that Sarah would sell big?”

  The painting was actually titled Young Woman at a Window. He’d been calling it Sarah from the start but decided at the last minute on Young Woman in the unlikely event Sarah should ever see it or, worse yet, Lucy.

  Hugh had called from New York the day it arrived. “You weren’t kidding, were you? It did paint itself.”

  “Can you make room?”

  “You’re joking, right?” Hugh said. “Who is she?”

  “Just someone I knew a long time ago.”

  “A Robert Noonan painting with no worm,” Hugh marveled now, just as he had over the phone. “A first. Let me guess. The lovely Sarah escaped imperfection by not submitting to your charms?”

  “That might’ve had something to do with it,” he admitted.

  “Have you contacted her? Told her she exists on canvas, immortal, her virtue intact? That you’ve brought her quiveringly to life beneath your stiff but gentle brush?”

  “Oh, fuck off,” Noonan said. Though in truth he would have liked for her to see it.

  “Probably not a great idea, now that I think about it,” Hugh conceded. “Is she married?”

  “Last I knew.”

  “Paintings like that have been known to cause divorces. And speaking of divorces, I wouldn’t be anxious to show her to the girls either,” Hugh said. “One look and they’ll know why their marriages to you were doomed before they began. They’ll never loan you another dime. Of course, after today you won’t need to borrow money for a while.”

  Noonan had almost dropped the phone when he heard the price tag Hugh had in mind for Sarah.

  “I just wish I’d known about her a month earlier. I’d have gone back to the printer and raised the price of every other painting in the show.”

  “Even the Bridge of Sighs?” It had brought the second-highest price in the show, only a few thousand less.

  “Well, it’s not the same painting anymore, is it,” Hugh said smugly. No doubt he figured he himself was responsible. He was probably telling people he went to Venice a few months earlier and gave Noonan a good talking-to. What they were viewing was the result. Who knew? Maybe there was some truth to that.

  “Still a lot of worm in that one,” Noonan said defensively, but Hugh was right, of course. Though not very much had changed, it wasn’t the same painting. Sarah had changed it. He’d worked on the two canvases side by side, and it was as if the light from Sarah’s open window had illuminated the other painting. It fell first on the painting within the painting, of the Bridge of Sighs. Noonan had put it in the painting on impulse, then negated the impulse with shadows so dark that Hugh had seen a gallows there. Once it could be seen for what it was, Noonan had been free to accept it as the controlling metaphor, suggesting the painting had more to do with despair than justice. Up to that point he’d been painting the ogre of his childhood, a man who, though he didn’t know it, was about to get what he had coming to him. A portrait of a bully, controller, philanderer and epic hypocrite, whose fist was perpetually cocked in volcanic anger, the reason his mother kept running away, and the reason she needed to swallow those tiny pills with her morning coffee, the reason, long after Noonan had fled, she finally became so vague she’d swallowed one too many.

  Once bathed in the light of Sarah’s window, he had become someone who’d already gotten what was coming to him, who’d lost everything, whose crossing of the Bridge of Sighs simply made it official, who knew full well what Bobby Marconi, though old enough to occupy the barstool next to him, had been too young even to suspect—just how mortally tired of himself a man could become, how exhausting and demoralizing being true to one’s deepest nature could be, the terrible toll such fidelity exacted. Bobby Marconi had always considered his father’s other life with his West End woman evidence of his utter hypocrisy, his need to impose moral order on others, even while granting himself the latitude necessary to maximize his own comfort and pleasure. Now—why not admit it?—Robert Noonan had come to see it differently. His father, at some point, had simply grown weary of his life as a bully, grown weary of himself. When poor, sweet Willie insisted he was not only a good guy but “the best guy,” his father must almost have believed him. Had it not been for Bobby, who knew better and gave him to understand in a thousand unsubtle ways that he wasn’t fooled by his pretense of having changed, who knew? Maybe he’d have pulled it off. Maybe, with no angry son to contradict him, he actually might have become that “best guy.”

  This much was certain, Noonan thought, as he revised his portrait. Bobby Marconi had always treated his loathing of his father like a precious commodity, something to be hoarded, something you could run out of, or that could be stolen if you weren’t vigilant. Bobby had been a miser. Not really wanting to understand the man he hated, and fearing what sympathy might cost, he’d concentrated on protecting and growing his bitter stash, worrying, just as every miser does that there might not be enough to last, that the day would come when the coffers would be empty. Bobby had never recognized the real danger, that he’d die filthy rich. It was amazing, when you thought about it, how effortlessly hate slipped into the space reserved for love and vice versa, as if these two things, identical in size and shape, had been made compatible by design. How satisfying a substitute each was for the other. All art had its origins in passion, and Noonan knew he wasn’t the first artist to be motivated by rage. And it had worked. For a long time it really had, until one day it didn’t. Until it became, as Hugh said, “all worm.” His night terrors, Noonan now suspected, had been born of the unwelcome intuition that as an artist he’d reached the end, that if he was to
continue he’d have to find something new and cross over into unknown territory.

  “Okay, enough about paintings,” Hugh said, giving in to the bar peanuts. “Let’s talk about yesterday.”

  “We won’t know for sure until the tests come back,” Noonan said, “but cancer’s unlikely, given my symptoms. My former symptoms.” If it hadn’t been for Hugh, who’d insisted, he’d probably have canceled the tests. After all, the majority of his troubles—shit, was it legions or battalions?—had disappeared as suddenly and mysteriously as they’d arrived. Since the night Lichtner had punched him in the heart and he’d begun the Sarah painting, he’d experienced neither a night terror nor an episode of public grief. Even better, his appetite had returned, and food was again tasting like it was supposed to, or at least the way he remembered it. He was beginning to put back on some of the weight he’d lost, not entirely a good thing. “Curious, though. When I mentioned losing my sense of taste, one of the doctors asked if I was a painter.”

  “You probably had paint in your beard.”

  Noonan ignored this. “So cadmium poisoning is one working hypothesis.”

  “From the oils?”

  “Not all of them. Reds and yellows. They seem to think that might explain the night terrors.”

  “Okay, then. No more reds and yellows.”

  “Ah, fuck it. We die of what we love.”

  “Don’t we, though,” Hugh said, and Noonan couldn’t remember if he’d ever heard his friend say anything so seriously.

  If cadmium explained the tingling at extremities, the loss of taste and the night terrors, that still left the random bouts of grief. In order to avoid an I-told-you-so, he decided not to tell Hugh about yesterday’s other working hypothesis, that over the last nine months he’d been chronically depressed. He still had his doubts about this diagnosis. “Wouldn’t I know if I was depressed?” he’d asked. (Not necessarily.) “Wouldn’t I have to have something to be depressed about?” (Again, not necessarily.) Would it just appear, for no reason? (Not knowing the reason isn’t the same as not having one.) Would it just disappear for no reason? (Again…) Then, their turn to ask questions. Did it feel as if a weight had suddenly lifted? (Yes.) As if a dark cloud had passed, letting in the sun? (Yes, that too.) Was there anything unresolved in his life? Or something he’d recently put to rest? Was he aware that sixty could be a watershed year? That people began to see the figure in the carpet of their lives and that sometimes it threw them? And then his turn again: Would it all come back? (Possibly. Possibly not.) Should he worry? (Do you enjoy worrying?) Why did people pay money to go to doctors when priests were free?