Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  DESTINATION

  I SEE HER BIKE first, near the stone pillars that frame the entrance to Whitcombe Park, leaning up against what I still think of as Gabriel Mock’s fence. It gives me a bad moment, seeing only the bike, because bad things happen to children, especially when they don’t think anything will, and Kayla—God love her—is fearless. Also a child who has become, in record time, more dear to me than I can say.

  I pull in at the gate, turn off the ignition and just sit, talking myself out of my unnecessary worry before getting out to look for her. We have forty-five minutes until we need to be at Ikey’s for the unveiling of Sarah’s new, well, painting, I assume, though it’s all very hush-hush. Kayla, having seen whatever it is, has tremendously enjoyed knowing something I don’t. We will drink a glass of celebratory Prosecco, which she has informed me is Italian champagne. Actually, the adults will have a glass, and Kayla will be allowed only half, mixed with some juice.

  I don’t notice old Gabriel Mock sitting in the shade of the pillar until he moves. “Mr. Mock,” I say, climbing out. I study him carefully and his eyes are clear, if a little sleepy, and there’s no sign of a bottle. “Had me a little nap in the shade,” he admits.

  I wonder what he’s doing out here if he’s not “howling,” though it’s none of my business and he has as much right to be here as anybody. More, actually, considering how many hours he’s spent repainting the fence, back when there was a hall for it to surround. “It’s a good day for it,” I say, and it’s true. We’ve been blessed with a beautiful June afternoon. “You walk all the way out here, Mr. Mock?”

  “Partway. Fella give me a lift,” he says. “My regular chauffeur’s off today. You lookin’ for the child belongs to that bike, I bet.”

  I tell him that’s exactly what I’m doing, and that as soon as we’ve found her I’ll give him a lift back into town if he likes.

  “Soon as you found her,” Gabriel corrects me, and he remains seated to further drive home that point. “I’m too old to be chasin’ after children, and I never seen legs longer than that girl got. Like a racehorse.”

  I ask if he has any idea where she might be. Whitcombe Park is huge.

  “Out explorin’,” he says unhelpfully. “Lookin’ for caves. Like somebody else used to do. Tole her what I tole you. Don’t go callin’ when you fall in a hole. Up to me, she have to live her whole life down in the dark and damp. Get married down there and raise a whole family under the damn ground.” He peers around at my new van. “That your vehicle?”

  He’s seen it before, a couple of times at least, but obviously forgotten. I nod and tell him again it’s a minivan, that the rear seats fold down into the floor to make room for Kayla’s bike, a feature we’ll need once we’ve located her. In fact she helped me pick it out, lobbying for a deep purple color that wouldn’t have been my choice but that’s been growing on me, as has the van’s other purpose: to allow us to take trips. One of the first things Sarah made clear when she returned was that we’d be showing Kayla more of the world than Thomaston. We’ve already taken her to see the library in nearby Canajoharie, which boasts a marvelous art collection, as well as to several museums and galleries in Albany, and we’re planning a week in Boston this fall. Even Italy is back on, though not until next summer, and of course we won’t be driving there. By then we’ll know if Kayla is ours and also have the documents required to leave the country.

  Those two have made a running joke out of my reluctance to leave home, and naturally I play along. When the time comes for us to go somewhere, Kayla takes me by the hand and drags me to the front door, where I grab hold of the frame, and she grunts until she finally gets me outside and strapped into the van, and away we go to wherever they’ve planned. When we get there I pretend not to like it, and Kayla patiently explains why I should. Finally I give in and say I’m glad to have come, though I like home, too, and Kayla agrees that where we live is a good place. It’s a good game, partly, I suppose, because it’s rooted in truth. Anyway, the idea is that I’m gradually being made a traveler; and so far, so good. I’m an old dog with a new trick. I am, I realize, the same man I’ve always been: Lucy Lynch. But this child, this late gift, has worked a remarkable transformation, taking me out of myself for longer periods than I’ve ever known.

  “Mr. Mock,” I say, “your fence has fallen into disrepair.” No one has gone near it in at least a decade, and the old, flaking lacquer has been replaced by red rust, a fact that would’ve given Sarah’s father great pleasure. Actually, of late he’s been much on my mind. I still remember his vitriolic lectures about our revered ancestor, starting with the delight he took in reminding us that he was a slaveholder who sold arms and liquor to the local Mohawks, whipping them into a bloodthirsty frenzy before loosing them on German and Dutch neighbors as far away as Albany. Tory to the bone, he fled to Canada on the eve of the Revolution, fully intending to return once the insurrection was quelled. Sarah’s father believed that on occasion Sir Thomas himself partook of his savages’ pagan rites, running naked through the woods with his body painted as garishly as any Mohawk’s. His fellow settlers had no idea who it was that buried the tomahawk in their skulls with such force and relish. There was no evidence he played a role in the Cayoga Massacre, but Mr. Berg believed he had, so that when the stream ran red that first time, he became, in a sense, its first polluter. We moderns simply esteemed his wealth, poor pathetic creatures that we are. Gathered at the fence designed to keep us out, we stared with longing at his vast shell of a house, imagining the grand parties to which our own ancestors never would have been invited.

  Which always reminds me of the day my father took me here after yet another tour of the Borough. How odd we must’ve looked, sitting in a milk truck at this very gate, as if intending to make a delivery to a house that hadn’t been inhabited in over a century. “I don’t know what he done to be so rich,” I remember him saying, “but people must’ve liked him.” As he saw it, that’s where wealth came from—people liking you more than they did the next fellow. I’ve always thought the greatest difference between Sarah’s father and my own wasn’t that one was highly educated, the other not at all. No, their most cherished beliefs were based not in knowledge or its lack, but in temperament. It was my father’s habit to give people more credit than they had coming, whereas Sarah’s gave them less. I don’t think either tendency necessarily makes a man a fool, but both our fathers were anxious that the world conform to their belief. Each was happy when it did, unhappy when it didn’t, and neither seemed able to accommodate any contrary evidence, which I know from my own experience can be unhealthy in the extreme. Odd, how I grew up thinking my parents were opposites, my father the optimist, my mother the cynic. In reality, she occupied the middle ground between his willfully blind faith in the basic goodness of his fellow man and Mr. Berg’s equally blinkered and needy belief in its corruption.

  I’m about to start looking for Kayla when she calls “Lou-Lou!” and I see her coming down the fence at a dead run. Need I say how much it pleases me that she uses the pet name Sarah once gave my father?

  A moment later she’s hanging off me, her spindly arms locked around the back of my neck. “You’re getting heavier every day,” I say when she finally lets go.

  “And faster,” she says, as if I’ve altogether ignored the most important part. “Watch!” And then she dashes off, sprinting a good fifty yards to the nearest large oak, her arms churning, and then back again, out of breath now, resting her forehead on my breastbone. Most days she wants me to see how much faster she’s gotten than the day before, as if I had a stopwatch and had measured the various distances in advance.

  “Girl makes me tired just watchin’,” Gabriel says.

  “You and me both, Mr. Mock,” I agree, gathering her in. When she finishes hugging me, she goes over and gives Gabriel another, which I can tell makes his day. The first time she told him he stank, but since then he’s passed hygienic muster, so I’m not the only one who’s been transformed
by Kayla’s arrival in our midst. For nearly a decade Gabriel’s merely been going through the motions, living more meaningfully in memory’s twilight than reality’s noonday sun.

  “I think I might be an Olympic track star,” she tells us with a sigh, adding this possibility to the long, long list we’ve been cataloging. Energy restored, she begins to skip. “I’m really good at a lot of things, huh?”

  “Better not let your grandma Tessa hear you bragging,” I warn her.

  At the mention of my mother, her face clouds over. “How come she doesn’t like me?”

  “She likes you fine,” I assure her, just like I do every day. In this respect Kayla could be a direct descendant of my father. She just can’t understand why anybody wouldn’t like her, an opinion that could derive only perverse obstinacy. In truth, I don’t know why my mother hasn’t warmed to her. I doubt it has anything to do with Kayla herself, only in what Sarah and I are attempting: to adopt her and to finish the job of raising her in Thomaston, an experiment doomed, in her view, to failure. “You haven’t seen enough heartbreak?” she said when I first explained this. She was referring to Gabriel Mock, of course, and his son, and to every other black kid she’d known growing up, most of whom still live on the Hill. She seems to think our purpose is a social experiment akin to Mr. Berg’s, though nothing could be further from the truth.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” I tell Kayla, “I was never sure she liked me either.”

  But she misses most of my attempted reassurance because she’s gotten hold of my left hand and is straightening out my fingers, which curl up again as soon as she lets go.

  “What do you think?” I ask. “Better today?”

  “Definitely,” she says, though what we have here is another subjective measurement, like her sprint to the oak.

  “I think so, too,” I say, winking at Gabriel. “What do you think, Mr. Mock?”

  “Never mind them fingers,” he advises her. “Fix that crooked grin. Makes him look even more like his daddy and he looks enough like him already.”

  She comes up on tiptoe, puts an index finger to the corner of my mouth and pushes up, so my smile isn’t lopsided anymore. The slightly cramped fingers on my left hand and my asymmetrical smile are the only effects remaining from my stroke last month. At the end of the day my left foot will sometimes drag a little, but otherwise I’m back to normal and I feel better than I have in a long while. The cholesterol medication seems to be doing the trick, and Kayla has made it her personal mission to make sure I don’t cheat on my new diet. People don’t seem to realize that for me, the stroke was a gift, a demonstrable physiological event that actually left some evidence in its wake. For the first time a CAT scan did reveal damage. Not severe or irreparable, of course, and I’m grateful for that, but proof something had happened, something that could be documented. Instead of my not being right, something was wrong with me, a tiny semantic difference to anyone except me. Ironically, on the basis of this sole event, it’s now been decided that I’ve probably been suffering from ministrokes all along. TIAs, they’re called, common enough, if rare among children. The other possible explanation for my spells is even more esoteric, something called organic brain syndrome, which so far as I can tell is a grab bag of symptoms that remain unexplained by any other diagnosis. The most honest of the numerous specialists I’ve consulted just shrugged and admitted, “There’s so much we don’t know.”

  The rear seats of our van fold down into the floor with minimal effort, a job Kayla loves to perform, so I let her do it while I help Gabriel Mock into the middle seat. Then she and I lift her bike into the newly created space and close the door. But once I’m behind the wheel and she’s belted into the seat next to me, she remembers something so exciting she almost triggers the air bags. “I found the cave!” she practically shouts.

  My heart flutters even more frantically than it did when I pulled up and saw her bike leaning up against the fence and no Kayla. “Did you go in?” I finally ask.

  She stares at me wide eyed. “No way!” she says, shuddering at the mere thought, which makes me happy, knowing that her brashness has limits.

  Also, I take heart in the knowledge that we’re not so different, she and I. Because I remember vividly the day I found the cave entrance myself. I’d been searching for it all that summer, and I felt hugely disappointed that it was just a hole in the side of the hill, small enough to be hidden by a bush, nothing like the caves you saw in movies, with openings large enough for a warrior to ride into on a great steed. I also recall standing there in despair, having found what I’d been searching for for so long yet was now afraid to explore. I got down on my hands and knees to squint into the dark opening, trying to see inside, but it was like staring straight down into a pool of black water, and I caught a whiff of something rancid inside. And it occurred to me that whatever made that stink might be just inside, staring back out at me. Next summer, I remember telling myself. Next summer I’d be bigger and braver. I’d bring a flashlight. I’d do it. I would. Of course I never did.

  All of which reminds me of my unfinished story. I’ve done no more work on it since the afternoon I made it halfway across Sarah’s Bridge of Sighs painting, but I still think about it, especially when, like now, something from those early years occurs to me that I haven’t included. Still, the urge to put it all down, to have my complete record, has mostly dissipated, and this I credit to Kayla, who’s made the present more urgent than the past. Indeed the present, most days, is all I can handle, all I have need of.

  BEFORE GOING to Ikey’s we drop Gabriel off at Berman Court. En route he tells Kayla how slow witted I was as a child, how I’d insisted that if you climbed up a ladder to the moon, you’d still be looking up at the earth when you got there. Naturally, Kayla took my side, making the same argument I’d made so many years ago that up was determined by gravity, not direction, but Gabriel was still having none of it, though he winked at me in the mirror to indicate how much fun he was having with all this.

  “This is where you used to live when you were a boy,” Kayla says after I’ve helped Gabriel step out of the van and up the walk to the apartment house, and she’s pointing up to where our apartment was, as well as the one where Bobby and his family lived.

  “Maybe you’ll be our family historian,” I joke, putting the van in gear and heading for Ikey’s.

  Kayla, though, takes this possibility seriously. “Maybe,” she says. In case she isn’t a painter or an Olympic sprinter or any of the myriad possibilities we’ve discussed of late. Then, once we pull up in front, “Sarah’s here,” she says excitedly. “Mama, I mean,” she quickly corrects herself.

  Referring to Sarah as Mama isn’t something we’ve particularly encouraged, since her real mother’s still alive and it’s possible, if unlikely, she’ll one day enter the picture again. But Kayla has a mind of her own and announced shortly after arriving in Thomaston that Sarah would henceforth be “Mama,” and she has been, except when things happen unexpectedly or just too fast for Kayla to handle.

  Owen’s at the register, chatting with a couple of the guys from the Elite Coffee Club, which still gathers at Ikey’s in the morning, the sons and even grandsons of the original gang, most of them. This morning I mentioned there’d be an unveiling of a new work of art in the afternoon, and they all promised to be here, and a couple of them actually remembered. Sarah’s new piece, draped, has been hung just to the right of her old drawing of Ikey’s, a place of honor in the store.

  “Kayla,” my son says when she skips around the counter to give him a kiss and a hug. “What’s shakin’, sugar?”

  “I found the cave!” she tells him. “Mr. Mock says I don’t know up from down and neither does Lou-Lou, but he’s the one that’s confused, not us.” Owen chuckles and shoots me a glance. Kayla’s enthusiasm seldom allows for niceties of transition. We’ve been trying to get her to slow down by asking, “What belongs between those two sentences?” and offering various suggestions: “becau
se,” “nevertheless,” “still,” “also.”

  On the other side of the wall I hear the whirring vibration of my mother’s mechanical chair. That she, too, is to be present for the unveiling testifies to how historic an event this has become. I have to admit I’m puzzled, because Sarah usually refuses any hint of fanfare about her work, which means that this has to be more about us than the object itself. Kayla, who’s already seen what lies under the drape, has been excited about showing me all day long and apparently feels she’s waited long enough. She hops up onto a stool and is about to do the unveiling herself until Owen says, “Hold on, sugar,” and loops his arm around her waist and gently lowers her back to the floor, her long legs churning in the air. “We’re supposed to wait for Mom and Grandma Tessa.”

  But Kayla doesn’t want to wait, and she hops right back up on the stool, determined to uncover what’s hidden from view right this second. Again Owen prevents her, and this time her eyes flash with anger that’s real and bright as he sets her back down. We don’t see this often, though when Kayla’s overexcited or unexpectedly thwarted she can lose control. “Let me go,” she says to Owen, who’s now standing between her and the stool, and she tries again to dart around him.

  “Hey,” he says, his expression serious now. “Who’s bigger, you or me?”

  And for a moment it seems as if Kayla will push or strike him, anything it takes to remove this obstacle to her will. Since she’s decided what she wants to do before Sarah and my mother appear, nothing will make her happy but doing so, and time is running out. We hear the mechanical chair come to rest, and Kayla turns to me, her face a mask of rage. “Tell him!” she says.