Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  The continued uncertainty over his future definitely clouded our family planning. In Thomaston, junior high was seventh and eighth grades, and that year (sixth grade) one of the many things my parents argued about (they called their arguments “discussions”) was whether I would remain at St. Francis or transfer to the public junior high. Unlike most of their “discussions,” this one confused me, partly because each seemed to be arguing the other’s point of view. My mother was the one who’d always wanted me in parochial school, not that she was committed to Catholic education but because the public schools were so rough. The boys who’d abducted me were good examples (though Jerzy Quinn was no longer a threat, having by then landed in reform school), not that my being in St. Francis had protected me from them. I wasn’t a scrapper like Bobby Marconi, and my mother didn’t want me to become one. To her way of thinking, in public school I’d either be brutalized or grow brutal myself. My father didn’t worry much about this. He’d been bused in to these same schools from the farm, and nothing terrible had happened to him, unless you counted being made fun of all the time, which my mother did. When we moved to the East End I assumed, as he did, that I’d be going to public school, but my mother put her foot down. I was doing well where I was and was being looked after—whatever that meant—and I would stay put until starting high school in the ninth grade.

  But now my mother began wondering out loud if next year might not be the best time to leave St. Francis. All the public school kids would be in the same boat—that is, moving from familiar elementary schools into the new environment of the junior high. And Cardinal Fulton High, she hated to admit, would be out of the question. We simply couldn’t afford both private high school and college, and the latter was more important. My mother had put her foot down about that, too. I was going to college, and that was the end of the story. No discussion allowed. My father could wonder all he wanted about where we’d ever come up with that kind of money, but every time he did so out loud she’d stop dead and stare at him until he relented and said sure, of course I’d go to college, he’d rob a bank if he had to. Only after she’d left the room would he grumble that robbing a bank was the only way he could see it happening. So it was strange to hear my father arguing that I should stay in St. Francis two more years.

  Finally it dawned on me that they weren’t discussing schools. This dispute was really an extension of their ongoing argument about whether my father was going to lose his job. My mother, who wanted me in parochial school, thought he was, which meant that the St. Francis fees, though not large, were a luxury we could no longer afford. My father, who’d always maintained that there was nothing wrong with public schools, remained adamant that he wasn’t going to lose his job, which meant there was no reason I couldn’t continue at St. Francis if that’s what she wanted.

  DIAGONALLY ACROSS THE STREET from our house sat Ikey Lubin’s corner market, where it was well known that a man could play a number or daily double. In fact, Uncle Dec, who played both, was a regular visitor, though he never seemed to purchase anything. When he pulled up in front of the store, my father would invariably fold his newspaper and take it inside until he left, lest Uncle Dec spot him sitting there and saunter over to ask him if he remembered what happened to the dinosaurs, which he sometimes did anyway. My mother exhibited a weary tolerance for her ne’er-do-well brother-in-law, probably because he called her gorgeous, which she wasn’t, and invited her to come find him if she ever got tired of that stiff she was married to. To this she always replied that she doubted she’d ever get that tired, to which Uncle Dec responded that you never knew.

  I wanted to like Uncle Dec but distrusted him, mostly because he reminded me of the man at the trestle. It had been dark when I’d awakened in the trunk, and I’d never actually seen him, nor did I remember their voices being similar, but they did have several expressions in common, and whenever my uncle remarked that so-and-so wasn’t such a bad egg or that people in hell wanted ice water, I couldn’t get it out of my head that the two might be the same man. Also, Uncle Dec was forever promising to buy me something or take me someplace, and he never did. “That’s your uncle in a nutshell,” my father explained to me early on, after I’d gotten my hopes up and been disappointed. “Full of promises.”

  “He just likes to make people feel good,” my mother said, her tone gentler than was customary. But then her voice regained its usual judgmental edge. “If he’s a little short on results, well, he’s a Lynch.”

  As the worrisome months wore on, I couldn’t help noticing my father’s increasing interest in Ikey Lubin’s. It seemed like every time I raised my eyes from my reading, he’d be staring at the store over the top of the Thomaston Guardian, sometimes rubbing his chin thoughtfully, as if he were calculating how much people were spending inside by guessing the weight of the paper sacks they emerged with. His interest struck me as particularly strange because for our family Ikey’s had long been a kind of joke. Weather permitting, Ikey liked to keep his fruit in bins under an awning out front, and my father and I often wagered on how many neighborhood dogs would stop in front of the store, cock a leg and pee on the cantaloupes. We were friendly with Ikey, but the only business we ever gave him was last-minute items that had slipped my mother’s mind when she made out her grocery list. His market wasn’t nearly as good as Tommy Flynn’s at the lower end of Third, where we did most of our shopping, and it seemed only a matter of time before Tommy would put his nearest rival out of his misery. Of course, according to my mother, it was also only a matter of time before the A&P did the same to Tommy Flynn. The new A&P was what people called modern. You didn’t have to wait there for the butcher to slap a pound of ground beef into a paper tub, then wrap it in pink paper and tie it off with string like Tommy Flynn did. At the new A&P, unlike the old smaller one downtown, it was already safely under cellophane, which people seemed to prefer.

  By August my father was finding excuses to visit Ikey’s every day. Sometimes I went along but more often not, because I got the feeling he didn’t want me there. A knot of newly retired men who referred to themselves as the Elite Coffee Club loitered around the register keeping Ikey company—he was a dark little fellow, almost a dwarf—and telling jokes they’d break off in the middle of if a woman or kid came in. My father said they were the kind of jokes I didn’t need to hear, that I was better off back on the front porch reading. But what I heard of them, they didn’t seem so different from the ones that got told in the barbershop or the Cayoga Diner.

  My mother had also noted my father’s new interest in Ikey’s, and one day after he folded his newspaper and headed across the street, she appeared at the screen door in her apron, drying her hands on a dish towel and staring rather malevolently at the market. “I swear to heaven,” she muttered, “if he’s betting horses over there, it’ll be the last straw.” She was always pronouncing one thing or another was the last straw, and there were enough of these, it seemed to me, to make a haystack big enough to lose the proverbial needle in.

  OCCASIONALLY, whenever I found myself at loose ends, I’d get on my bike and pedal out to Whitcombe Park, where I’d help Gabriel Mock Junior paint his fence. Gabriel insisted on calling me Junior, though I’d explained several times that my middle name was different from my father’s. “Don’t care about that,” he told me. “You look just like him. Talk like him. Act like him. Spittin’ image.”

  It had been my impression, based on our first meeting, that it had been my mother he’d known when they were young, but apparently he knew my father, too. “Everybody know Lou Lynch,” he added, making me feel proud to be so like a man everybody knew and wishing I was Lou Lynch Junior instead of Louis Charles Lynch, who was notable mostly for having a girl’s nickname. The real reason Gabriel Mock called me Junior was that everybody called him Junior, a burden he felt should be shared. Early on I’d asked what I should call him, and he said he didn’t care. “Any name you want,” he said. “Call me something nasty, if that suit you. You can’t hurt my f
eelin’s no matter how hard you try. Anything ’cept nigger. Call me that, I’ll have to cut out your gizzard. I got me a knife, too, don’t think I don’t.”

  I had no intention of calling him that, and I’m sure he knew it. “What’s a gizzard?” I said, wondering if its similarity in sound gave it some mysterious connection to the word “nigger.”

  “A spare part,” Gabriel explained unhelpfully. “Don’t your mama feed you chicken?”

  I said she did, lots of different ways.

  “She prob’ly thown out the gizzard. Not good enough for white folks. Call me Gizzard, you want. Can’t hurt my feelin’s.”

  As soon as I showed up, he’d hand me a spare brush. “Slap that lacquer on good and thick,” he always reminded me. “Don’t be thin wit’ it. Ain’t gonna run out, don’t you worry.” Sometimes we painted along together, him on his side of the fence, me on mine. Other times he just stretched out on the grass and gave me instructions. “I be the job foreman today,” he’d say. “I’m a rest my eyes while you work. Don’t think I’m sleepin’, ’cause I ain’t.” It seemed to both please and amuse Gabriel that I’d just show up like I did, ready to paint his fence. He said my helping him out gave him more time to howl. “You know what I mean by howlin’?” He asked me this question every time I visited, and each time I pretended not to. “Sneak out the house some night,” he suggested. “Come by after the sun go down, you hear me howlin’.”

  He also wanted to know what I planned to do when I grew up, and I always told him I was still thinking about it. Apparently I was going to college, which meant I wouldn’t be a milkman like my father. Probably I wouldn’t live in Thomaston either, since according to my mother that would be a terrible waste of an education. Her idea was that I would venture out into the wide world, do things that people in Thomaston didn’t do, see things that people around here didn’t see. “Experience life” was how she summed it up. When I made the mistake of mentioning that maybe I’d return one day and live in a house in the Borough, as my father had suggested I might do, she looked at me hard. “You’re trying to break my heart, right? That’s why you say such things?”

  “All women like that,” Gabriel said, nodding. “They all got that go about ’em. Go here. Go there. Us? We stay put. Howl right where we’re at. Twist the cap off that bottle, drink it down, howl at the moon. Moon’s in the same place no matter where you’re at. Now if you could go to the moon, that might be worth it. Look down at the whole earth from up there. I’d do that.”

  I wasn’t sure about the wisdom or feasibility of that idea and said so. For one thing, I pointed out, if you were on the moon, you’d be looking up at the earth, not down. For another, you wouldn’t be looking for long, because on the moon there wasn’t any oxygen, which meant you’d asphyxiate before you had much of an opportunity to appreciate your privileged position. Gabriel conceded I was probably right about the air. He’d heard there wasn’t any on the moon, but it didn’t make sense that you’d be looking up at the earth. I tried to explain that down was all about gravity. On the moon, down would be the ground, where your feet were, and up would be the sky, same as on Earth. But Gabriel said it was more like a ladder. If you climbed up to the top and looked back at where you’d been, you’d be looking down. And if that ladder went all the way to the moon, you’d still be looking down.

  I knew there was something wrong with his logic and tried for about an hour to convince him he was wrong, but he was sure he knew up from down and was having none of it. In fact, he thought I’d do well to stick close to home and not lead the wanderer’s life my mother had in mind for me. Anybody who couldn’t tell up from down had no business traveling very far. He wouldn’t let go of the subject even when I stood up, handed him his brush back and said I was going to look for the caves he claimed were in the park. “Tell me this,” he said as I climbed on my bike. “Suppose you walkin’ along and you find one of ’em and you fall right in. You gonna fall up or down?”

  More than a little peeved that he was laughing at me when he, and not I, was wrong, I conceded, not very gracefully, that I’d more likely fall down than up.

  “Down’s where I’ll look then,” Gabriel said. “If you was gonna fall up, I’d of looked for you in the treetops. But now I can concentrate my efforts on the ground.”

  I reminded him that on the day we met he warned me that he had no intention of looking for me if I fell into a cave.

  “That was back before we was friends,” he said, which both surprised and pleased me. I also felt bad that I’d gotten mad at him for being so stubborn. It hadn’t even occurred to me that we could be friends. He was as old as my parents and as odd as anyone I’d ever run across, and that seemed to me to preclude the idea of friendship. This must have registered on my face, because he quickly added, “’Less you don’t want no brown-skinned friends.” Which made me feel even worse, because that, too, had occurred to me.

  Though my mother was anxious for me to explore my world’s boundaries, she was surprised to discover how far I’d gone and whom I’d met. One night, when I said I’d spent half the afternoon helping Gabriel Mock paint his fence, she told me that at about my age he’d had a crush on her and hadn’t understood this wasn’t allowed. His father had explained things to him with his belt.

  It was a disturbing story, and for that reason I wasn’t sure I believed it. That Gabriel might’ve fallen in love with a white girl was plausible enough, but with all the white girls in Thomaston to choose from, how had he settled on my mother? And why would a man who’d given his son his own name then turn around and whip him for choosing the wrong girl?

  When I raised these less-than-convincing points, my mother gave me one of those looks she reserved for similar circumstances, when she wanted to impress on me just how much I had to learn about the workings of the world. Of course Gabriel Mock Senior had first tried to explain, but the boy had been adamant. His father, she assured me, hadn’t taken any pleasure in giving his son a licking. He did it so somebody else wouldn’t have to, and do it worse, because there were white people in Thomaston back then—and probably now, she admitted—who wouldn’t think twice about visiting the Hill to teach the same lesson to every boy Gabriel’s age, thereby ensuring they hadn’t somehow missed the one they were after. No, Gabriel Mock Senior had strapped his son, and afterward he’d appeared, hat in hand, on her father’s front porch with a swollen-eyed Junior in tow, so my grandfather would know he was being told the truth. Senior wouldn’t look directly at my grandfather, and when he saw his son was looking past them at my mother, who stood just inside the door, he cuffed him sharply and said, “Don’t you be lookin’ in there. You got no business with nothin’ in this man’s house.” To my grandfather, he just repeated, over and over, that he didn’t have no cause to worry. All took care of. Boy knew better now. Nothin’ to worry about. All in the past.

  I could tell the incident was still fresh in my mother’s memory, that young Gabriel Mock was standing right there in front of her with his swollen eyes as she relived the awful moment, and she would’ve let it rest there if I hadn’t pressed her on the second point. “Why me?” she said, and shook her head. “Who knows?” What she wanted, clearly, was to be done with the subject, then I saw her change her mind. “Actually, that’s not true. He liked me because I was kind. And do you want to know the oddest thing of all? It wasn’t even him I was kind to. It was his sister.”

  I didn’t even know Gabriel had a sister, and said so.

  “She died of leukemia when we were in high school,” my mother explained. “Lord, I haven’t thought of her in years. Kaylene Mock. She was in my class. Gabriel was a year older. I remember in first grade all us girls were crazy to be in the Brownies, and I asked Kaylene if she was going to join. She just smiled and said she was already a Brownie, but later she admitted the real reason was that her parents didn’t have the money for the Brownie uniform. The uniforms weren’t even required, but Kaylene’s dad didn’t want her to join if she couldn’t h
ave what all the other girls had. I’d been saving my allowance, so I begged your grandparents to buy Kaylene a uniform when they got mine. We were the same size, so it would be easy. At first they refused, since the uniform cost more than I’d saved, but when they saw how heartbroken I was they said they’d make up the difference if Kaylene’s parents said it was okay. I knew from the start they wouldn’t hear of it, but I think they appreciated the gesture and remembered it, too. And the licking Gabriel got was so bad because it was me he kissed, not some other white girl.”

  “He kissed you?” I said, astonished.

  “It was a very foolish thing to do. He came right up to me on Hudson Street, about half a block from the Four Corners, and kissed me, right in front of everybody.”

  “Why?”

  “Because by then he was about your age. Because boys get crushes. Because his sister and I made fun of how little he was, and he wanted to show me he wasn’t. All kinds of reasons, Louie. Don’t just stand there frowning at me. Use your imagination.”

  Actually, I had been using my imagination. What I wanted was to stop.

  “Think of it. Taking a belt to an eleven-year-old,” she said, shaking the memory off. Then she looked at me again, and it was her turn to frown. “Also, you needn’t look so surprised that someone other than your father might’ve wanted to kiss me, okay?”