Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  Modest as it was, I think our tidy little house instilled in my father the notion that “getting ahead” was both possible and desirable, and so, without knowing exactly how or why, he entered into a paradox he never was able to resolve. On the one hand, he was content with what he saw as our great good fortune. Over the years, when he told me there was no reason I couldn’t have a house in the Borough one day, I truly believe he was expressing as best he could what he imagined I might want, not something he himself yearned for or even necessarily wanted for me. That was the paradox. He discovered that embracing the notion of getting ahead trailed an unexpected obligation: to instill in me my right as an American to dream big, if that’s what I had a mind to do. So he did his duty.

  My point, though, is that my father already had what he wanted, and when he implied to Mr. Marconi that he didn’t think we’d ever move to the Borough, it wasn’t sour grapes. And that afternoon, when we returned to our own neighborhood and he said that the East End was the right place for us, I truly believe he meant every word. We don’t always want what we compete for. Sure, he believed in getting ahead just as he feared falling behind, and believed he had every right to want more. He just couldn’t imagine what that might entail. I don’t doubt he hated losing any competition to Mr. Marconi, but that didn’t mean he was jealous of the spoils with which the victor was crowned. Those grand Borough houses didn’t make ours look small and shabby, not to him. I repeat: my father had what he wanted.

  Below, Owen has finished filling his plastic jugs. As he stacks them in the club cab behind the seat of his pickup, I try to decide whether what I’m feeling is some vague disappointment, and I hope it isn’t, because that would be terrible. More likely I just wish I knew him better. After all, he’s not a complicated man, and often I know what he’ll do or say next, maybe even before he does. I know, for instance, that before he drives off with his water supply, he’ll come inside and help himself to milk from our refrigerator. He’ll drink it straight from the carton, though his mother wishes he wouldn’t, and feel mildly guilty when I catch him at it. I know him. I do. But if someone were to ask me what my son wants out of life, what he dreams of, what he fears, I wouldn’t have a clue. I know he loves Sarah and me, and that he’s devoted to Brindy. Nobody could’ve been kinder or gentler when she miscarried last year. And should they eventually have children, Owen will be a good, patient father. But there is and has always been a curious lack of passion in him, and that’s what puzzles his mother and me. Years ago rental trucks had devices called “governors” that prevented speeding and reckless driving, and a similar mechanism seems to govern my son. Extremes of joy or anger or fear appear foreign to him.

  Nor, when he was growing up, did his teachers know quite what to make of him, the way he waited so patiently for school to be over, for people to stop pestering him to read books that didn’t speak to him, for the day to arrive when he no longer had to answer their odd questions or fill blank notebook pages with words he didn’t believe. Though he invariably defeated their efforts on his behalf, I can’t remember a single teacher who wasn’t fonder of Owen than of their prize students. Sweet and resigned by temperament, he never rebelled against or challenged them. If he doubted the wisdom of their assignments or the relevance of their subjects, he kept his own counsel. Even as a boy he was quicker to blame himself than others. I once asked Sarah if she thought a truly gifted teacher like her father might’ve gotten through to Owen, burrowed deep into his core and forced the private boy out into the open, but she just smiled and kissed me and said no, he was his father’s son. It’s always been my wife’s contention that I have a place deep inside me that is wholly mine, that it’s fortified and unassailable, a place no one, even herself, has ever entered. This, she further believes, is where I go when I have one of my spells. Does my son have such a place? Don’t we all?

  Owen may have thwarted and frustrated his teachers, but not because he was lazy, and this, more than anything else, reassures me and makes me proud. From the time he was big enough to handle a mower, he tended our lawn as well as neighbors’, and when snowplows piled the driveways high with heavy, compacted snow, Owen was there to dig us out, even when the drifts were taller than he was. He neatly folded the dollar bills he earned and deposited them at the Thomaston Savings and Loan and each month reconciled the bank’s numbers with his own, pleased when they tallied exactly and when they grew, though he never seemed to be saving for anything specific. And of course, as soon as he was old enough, he worked at the store, fulfilling his duties there with care and diligence. Am I wrong to wish he loved the store as I do? To see it as I see it? Am I even sure he doesn’t? In truth, I’m not, though I worry. When his mother and I are gone, will he and Brindy sell their inheritance? It’s possible.

  Some years ago I learned, well after the fact, that Owen had his heart set on buying an old fishing camp up in the Adirondacks. The list price made it seem like a bargain, but the dozen or so lakeside cabins were so neglected that it would’ve been extravagantly costly to restore them. The remote location was a plus in the summer and fall, but after the first snow anyone living in the main house would be a virtual prisoner for the next five months, miles from the nearest store or doctor, hours to the nearest hospital or school, no place for a child. It was Brindy, I suspect, who made him see how impractical it was, but I was pleased to know that my son had wanted something bad enough to be heartbroken when he was denied it, even if he didn’t share that heartbreak with me. It didn’t seem fair, somehow, that someone who’d never known quite what to want should be refused when he finally discovered it. I tell myself he’ll want something else, and that next time he’ll be luckier. If he has to sell his inheritance to get it, so be it. To insist that he love what I love is asking too much. I know. I know.

  In truth, I wouldn’t mind if they sold the West End store on lower Division Street, which has no sentimental value to me. We purchased it after my father died, and while it outperforms our East End store, we’ve been robbed at gunpoint several times, and for a long time now I’ve had reservations about how revenue is generated there. We sell the usual convenience store items, of course—bread and milk and other things people run out of and don’t want to run all the way to the supermarket for. But it’s the Lotto machine that pulls them in. For the last several years Division has been one of the top-five stores in the entire state in terms of Lotto ticket sales. “Desperate people who can’t wait to pay the taxes” is how my mother describes it. She’s always considered gambling, especially the legal state-sponsored variety, to be a tax on ignorance, and Division’s success may well be, as she claims, an accurate barometer of that ignorance. I’m not sure my father would’ve seen it in exactly those terms, but I know he would have been troubled not just by the robberies but also by the long lines of shabby people that form in front of the Lotto machine, especially late at night, after the bars close, waiting patiently for their luck to change. He wouldn’t have felt much pride in owning the kind of store that had to hire an extra clerk just for the purpose of taking such people’s last two dollars. Nor do I.

  Of course if it’s up to Brindy, it won’t be Division they’ll sell. Why sell the moneymaker, she’d say, and it’s hard to fault her logic. It’s the busier store, no doubt about it, and she likes to be busy, especially now. Since the miscarriage she seems a different young woman, though when I remarked on the change to my wife, she reminded me that this was to be expected. She’s naturally sympathetic to Brindy, having herself miscarried, early in our marriage. “Don’t you remember how long it took me to bounce back? We need to be patient with her.” And I understand all that. I do. But I worry that their loss has driven some sort of wedge between herself and Owen, whom she treats coolly now, I think, as if he’s constantly trying her patience or blocking her way and making her wait for him to move so she can do whatever needs to be done, though too many errors are born of this impatience, or so it seems to me. Naturally, I keep that opinion to myself. The house the
y bought out in the country, the one she wanted, she now claims is too isolated. She’d like to “unload it,” so they could move back to civilization and have friends again. “Civilization?” my mother said when Brindy voiced that wish a few months ago. “Thomaston?” She’s never made it much of a secret that she’s not overly fond of her granddaughter-in-law. “You can take the girl out of the West End,” she says, then lets her voice trail off.

  “Pop,” Owen says, when I find him with the carton of milk at his lips. “I didn’t know you were home.” He puts the milk back in the fridge and closes the door. “Sorry.”

  “Why don’t you take what water you need from the store?” I ask, seeing what a mess he’s made of his pants.

  “That water costs money.”

  “What about your time and effort?” I say for the sake of argument, though in truth I admire his frugality. “Isn’t that worth something?”

  “I guess,” he says. “That’s probably how I should think of it?”

  You don’t have to agree with me, I’d like to tell him. You don’t always have to give in.

  “Mom says you’re writing your life story up there.”

  “Nothing quite so grand as that,” I tell him, though it’s true I’ve written far more than I expected to, having underestimated the tug of the past, the intoxication of memory, the attraction of explaining myself to, well, myself.

  “Am I in it yet?”

  “No, not yet. Your mother hasn’t even shown up yet.”

  “Wow,” he says, genuinely impressed, I can’t be sure at what—that I had a life before his mother, or that there was so much worth recording before his appearance.

  “Did you hear from your friend yet?” he says, amazing me, as he so often does, by tacking so easily from one thing to the next, almost as if he fears getting trapped with a single idea if he lingers too long with it. “The one who lives over there?”

  “Not yet,” I tell him.

  “And you haven’t seen him since…”

  “Senior year of high school.”

  “Wow,” he says. “And he really almost killed his father?”

  And what’s with this second “wow”? Wow, it’s really been that long since I’ve seen Bobby? Or, wow, near patricide? “Who told you—”

  “Mom, of course.”

  Writing about Bobby, I realize, has made me grateful that Owen has never lacked for friends. Easy and outgoing, he’s both made and kept them effortlessly. Many have gone off to college and made lives elsewhere, but when they’re in town for the holidays, visiting their parents, they always get in touch. Several of these boys from the Borough have done well, and now rent or own second homes on the Sacandaga Reservoir or even Lake George, to which Owen and Brindy are frequently invited for a long summer weekend. So far as I can tell, these friendships are rewarding and uncomplicated, untroubled and full of straightforward affection. They’ve gone out of their way to welcome Brindy, too, though I gather from various things Owen has said that she’s uncomfortable with them, probably because of who they were in high school and the relative ease of their present lives. She prefers her own West End friends. They’re real, she claims. They don’t put on airs.

  “Who’s minding the store?” it occurs to me to ask.

  “Brindy,” he says, surprising me.

  “I thought she preferred Division.”

  He shrugs. “Did she tell you that?”

  I try to remember. Maybe not. Maybe it’s just my impression. “Did Mr. Mock make it in last night?”

  Owen shakes his head. “He didn’t look too good last time I saw him.”

  “I know,” I say, resolving to investigate.

  When Owen is gone, I go back upstairs and read over the last page or so of what I’ve written, reliving that ride through the Borough in my father’s milk truck. How magical, how far away, those streets seemed to me then. And magical they still are in memory, though they’re as familiar to me as the back of my hand, since I’ve walked them most of my adult life. Again I hear, my eyes tearing up, my father explaining who lives where along his route, though they don’t anymore and haven’t, with few exceptions, for a great many years.

  Only one thing rings false. When I said my father had everything he wanted, that isn’t true. He wanted one more thing. He just didn’t know it yet.

  WE HADN’T BEEN in the East End long before a brand-new A&P opened out on the highway bypass, and overnight, it seemed, the tin milk cases that once decorated every back porch from the Borough to the West End began to disappear. There were rumors that my father’s dairy was about to be sold and that the new owners would cancel home delivery. My father maintained that people buying their milk at the A&P was just a phase. Why, he reasoned, would they trek to the store to buy milk in waxy cardboard cartons when it could be delivered right to their door in bottles? He said Borough folks especially liked the convenience of home delivery. Maybe the dairy would do away with service to the West End, where people would want to save a penny or two at the supermarket. West Enders were famous for their willingness to burn a tank of gas searching out the lowest prices, as if gas were free, but my father credited East Enders and Borough residents with being smarter than that. My mother, predictably, saw things differently. Wanting to save a penny, to her way of thinking, was human nature, and she urged my father to prepare for a future that didn’t include milk trucks or, for that matter, milk bottles.

  As usual, she was right. “The Old Man,” who owned the dairy and liked my father, swore he’d never sell, but then did so and promptly moved away. The new owner immediately curtailed deliveries in the West End and let it be known that our East End might be next. Publicly my father didn’t waver in his stated belief that his lucrative route through the Borough was in no danger, but the milk boxes continued to disappear until finally there was no denying his route was shrinking. By midmorning he’d be back home, where he’d change out of his all-white uniform and head down to the Cayoga Diner for coffee with the seasonally unemployed men who loitered there, many of them laid off from the tannery. These were stoical men who went on unemployment every spring and patiently awaited the inevitable call back to work, a summons that came later and later each autumn.

  Those days, talk at the diner was increasingly about the future of Thomaston and whether there was one. Many thought not, and my father took it upon himself to cheer up these defeatists. People had tanned leather in Thomaston since before the Revolution, he liked to remind them, so he expected they’d continue awhile longer. These things ran in cycles, like the moon, waxing and waning and waxing again. Another year and everybody’d be back working full-time, even overtime, probably. Weren’t famines followed by feasts? That he was willing to spring for a cup of coffee or float a small loan to a fellow who’d be good for it come the end of the week, along with his jovial good nature, made him popular at the lunch counter, where his optimism for the most part went unchallenged, except, ironically, for his younger brother, Declan. Uncle Dec always had answers for my father’s rhetorical questions. What followed famine? Death. What followed death? Decomposition. In Uncle Dec’s opinion, which he offered loudly whenever he ran into his brother in public, Lou Lynch would be next in the unemployment line. “I hope you’ve saved up, Biggy,” he’d say, clapping my father on the back. He never called him by his name, preferring Big Brother or, more often, Biggy, which he knew my father hated. “You do know what happened to the dinosaurs, don’t you?” Death. Decomposition.

  Much as my father enjoyed the company of men, he wouldn’t step foot in the diner, the barbershop or the cigar store if Dec was inside. He had little use for his brother, who was constantly in and out of trouble, in and out of the newspaper, in and out of jail, giving us Lynches, my father said, a bad name. Though he was a year younger, Uncle Dec, at age sixteen, had left the doomed family farm and joined the army (from which he was later discharged for dealing in contraband), leaving my father trapped there until he finished high school and turned eighteen. According to my m
other, he still resented his brother for escaping, and if he saw Uncle Dec holding court over by the diner’s cash register, he’d just return home and take his ease on the front porch. If somebody down the block happened to be painting or doing repairs, he’d visit with them and offer advice, standing at the bottom of the ladder and carrying on a vertical conversation, or saunter down the street to Tommy Flynn’s and shoot the breeze there. By midafternoon he’d finish his rounds and return to the front porch, where he and I would spend a contemplative hour or so, me with a book, my father with the Thomaston Guardian, which was always delivered about this time. Through the screen door, we could hear my mother starting dinner in the back of the house, and for me this was the most peaceful time of day, when everything felt right with the world.

  But all was not right, and I knew it. As milk boxes continued to disappear from porches throughout Thomaston, my father became quieter and less social. He never changed his public stance, maintaining to all who would listen that his route was secure, but he was worried that the dairy’s new owner, a man from Albany, didn’t like him. The actual rules hadn’t changed, but suddenly they were enforced. My father was no longer allowed to park the truck at the curb in front of our house when he finished his route, and its personal use was now grounds for dismissal, as was allowing unauthorized people to ride in it. Since each of these rules directly affected him, my father couldn’t help wondering if they were imposed with him specifically in mind. Had the new owner heard about Bobby Marconi’s accident? Or had Mr. Marconi himself reported it, hoping to get him fired? He couldn’t inquire, of course, not without admitting to having broken the rule in the first place.