Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  In addition to the blood, tellers of the tale, West and East Enders alike, agreed on one other fact. Bobby Marconi had won. This took my breath away. I wasn’t surprised to learn that my old friend was a tough and willing combatant. After all, the reason his parents had once enrolled him in St. Francis was that he kept getting into fights. And I had good reason to recall his tolerance for pain. But while Bobby could fight, his opponent was a fighter. In the years since Cayoga Elementary Jerzy Quinn’s reputation in this regard had only grown. He’d actually spent a year in reform school, where it was rumored he’d killed a boy in a knife fight. Gullible as I was, even I doubted this could be true, but that such a rumor would circulate about a boy was enough to give one pause.

  And then there was his appearance. At thirteen, Jerzy was stick thin, so lean in fact that you could see his ribs through his T-shirt. Though he’d been held back and was nearly two years older than the rest of us, his height was about average, and his hungry, undernourished look might under different circumstances have made him the sort of boy who would be culled from the herd and made a victim of predators. Not so Jerzy. Even Perry Kozlowski, who was much bigger and always spoiling for a fight, wanted no part of him, and we all knew why. You had only to look at Jerzy to know that here was a kid with nothing to lose, and that was what made him so lethal. From adults—his teachers in particular—he’d learned that he had no future, a judgment he seemed to embrace wholeheartedly. His wolfish grin acknowledged as much, and you didn’t want to see it directed toward you. That Bobby should have willingly fought him defied imagination. That he’d won defied reason.

  But somehow he had. By all accounts they’d fought savagely—punching, kicking, some even said biting—like dogs trained for no other purpose, until fatigue and pain made it impossible to continue, yet continue they did, more slowly, perhaps, but with the same steadfast resolve to do each other lasting harm, until Jerzy finally lay flat on his back, his eyes glazed over, no longer completely present. Bobby, on top of him now, used his knees to pin his arms to the sidewalk and continued to pummel him. At this stage, the story went, Jerzy was no longer struggling, though his wolfish grin seemed to say Don’t stop now. Eventually Bobby became so exhausted punching him with his right hand that he’d had to switch to his left. (With respect to this last detail I actually happened to know something even eyewitnesses couldn’t have—that he must’ve reinjured the wrist he’d broken in my father’s milk truck.) At any rate, one of the cops finally came over and lifted him off Jerzy’s chest and said, “That’s enough now. What’re you trying to do, kill him?”

  Apparently, Bobby’d had just enough strength left to answer that yes he was.

  ODD, HOW OUR VIEW of human destiny changes over the course of a lifetime. In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice. We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we’re faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we’ll do, but who we’ll be. Perhaps the sound of all those doors swinging shut behind us each time we select this one or that one should trouble us, but it doesn’t. Nor does the fact that the doors often are identical and even lead in some cases to the exact same place. Occasionally a door is locked, but no matter, since so many others remain available. The distinct possibility that choice itself may be an illusion is something we disregard, because we’re curious to know what’s behind that next door, the one we hope will lead us to the very heart of the mystery. Even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary we remain confident that when we emerge, with all our choosing done, we’ll have found not just our true destination but also its meaning. The young see life this way, front to back, their eyes to the telescope that anxiously scans the infinite sky and its myriad possibilities. Religion, seducing us with free will while warning us of our responsibility, reinforces youth’s need to see itself at the dramatic center, saying yes to this and no to that, against the backdrop of a great moral reckoning.

  But at some point all of that changes. Doubt, born of disappointment and repetition, replaces curiosity. In our weariness we begin to sense the truth, that more doors have closed behind than remain ahead, and for the first time we’re tempted to swing the telescope around and peer at the world through the wrong end—though who can say it’s wrong? How different things look then! Larger patterns emerge, individual decisions receding into insignificance. To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it in inevitability, drama’s enemy. Or so it sometimes seems to me, Louis Charles Lynch. The man I’ve become, the life I’ve lived, what are these but dominoes that fall not as I would have them but simply as they must?

  And yet not all mystery is lost, nor all meaning. Regardless of our vantage point, some events manage to retain their drama and significance. Bobby Marconi’s epic battle with Jerzy Quinn seems to me just such an event. Picturing Bobby atop his adversary, punching him with every ounce of his remaining strength, yes, trying to kill the other boy, I’m filled with wonder. Who could have guessed that one day this same boy would become the most famous man to hail from Thomaston, New York, even more so than Sir Thomas Whitcombe himself? I can’t help thinking that somehow Bobby actually managed to do what we all imagine we might back when we’re young, before time and repetition erode and render mundane the mystery of existence. Bobby alone, it seems to me, invented both a life and a self to live it.

  OBITUARY

  IT’S NOT a great couch,” Noonan conceded when they arrived on the third floor of his place on the Giudecca. Lichtner was staring at the sofa gloomily as if he’d independently arrived at the same conclusion. “I’ll get you a pillow and blanket.”

  When he returned, Lichtner was standing in his socks in front of the easel. Yet again the cloth had been thrown back. “It looks just like you,” he offered.

  “Thanks,” Noonan said. “I think so, too.”

  Lichtner flopped onto the sofa, clearly disappointed that his insult, after landing flush, hadn’t any discernible effect.

  “I should warn you. I sometimes have night terrors.”

  Lichtner blanched. “You what?”

  “That’s how Evangeline got the black eye. Trying to get me to calm down. Which doesn’t work.”

  Lichtner looked genuinely terrified. “What should I do?”

  “Run like hell.”

  “Tell me something,” he said when Noonan reached the stair. “Do you love her?”

  “No,” Noonan answered far too quickly, but the question had surprised him. “Do you?” When Lichtner just stared at him, he said, “You don’t have to answer tonight. Sleep on it and tell me in the morning.”

  “I don’t ever have to tell you.”

  “Get some sleep.”

  Downstairs, getting undressed, he glanced at the fat Columbia University envelope, thinking maybe he’d read through the material again as a sleep aid, but he managed to knock it down between his bed and nightstand. Retrieving it, he found another piece of mail—unopened by the look of it—had fallen into the same narrow space. Its return address immediately made him wish he’d left the envelope where it was: 37 Elm Street, Thomaston, New York, USA. It had arrived a couple weeks earlier, maybe a month, and there’d been no need to open it, at least not right away, because all Lucy letters were alike. Invariably occasioned by either death or fatal diagnosis, it would contain an obituary from the local newspaper and a handwritten note that could be summarized in a single word: remember? Often that was the very first word. Remember Scooter Walsh? Third Avenue? Well, his daughter has cystic fibrosis, and they don’t have any medical insurance, so anything you could do…I know you’re like me when it comes to kids, so… Always there was that implied intimacy, as if he and Noonan had remained best friends down through the long years, sharing the same bedrock values. Lou, Noonan remembered replying to that one, whatever gave you the idea I like kids? He’d sent a check nonetheless, but just as often he refused. Once, many years ago, Lucy had written as c
hair of the committee raising funds to restore Whitcombe Hall: Bobby, I know you haven’t been back home since senior year, but Sarah and I hope you can help out. It’s our history. Who will care if we don’t? Noonan had written back, No one, I hope. I know I sure don’t. Love to Sarah. Apparently he hadn’t been offended, as Noonan had half hoped he might be, because the appeals kept coming, at least one a year, usually on behalf of someone Noonan didn’t remember, though the old, faded school photos Lucy often enclosed sometimes jogged the faintest of recollections.

  He held the not-entirely-opaque envelope up to the light, shook it and saw a small square dislodge itself from the folded, lined notepaper inside: a school photo. There also appeared to be a narrow column of newsprint, the obligatory obit. But Noonan also noticed something that had escaped his attention back when the envelope arrived. The small neat hand that had addressed it was Sarah’s, not Lucy’s, and a guilty chill ran up his spine. Had something happened to Lucy? Noonan felt something very like fear at the idea that his boyhood friend—fussbudget and general pain in the ass that he’d become—had left this earth, that the photo contained in the envelope might be of him. Fortunately, an instant’s reflection suggested how unlikely this was. Sarah would have contacted him immediately. No, the envelope might have been addressed by Sarah, but its contents were pure Lucy.

  Tearing it open, he saw not one but two yearbook photos. He didn’t expect to recognize their subject but immediately did: Jerzy Quinn. According to the obit, sixty-two-year-old Jerzy had been drunk when he crossed the median and hit the other vehicle head-on. For a moment, as Noonan read the lurid details, he was no longer in Italy, a grown man, but a boy in Thomaston, New York, kneeling on Jerzy’s shoulders and punching him in the face, with his fist dangling from a broken wrist. That fight had been the first time he’d ever lost control of himself so completely, and he remembered marveling afterward at the intense feeling of liberation. It was as if he’d temporarily become another person. Only when he finally returned to his own body and his right mind did he realize he’d rebroken his wrist, the one he’d snapped like a twig in Lucy’s father’s milk truck. Now, halfway around the world, it was throbbing again with pain delayed a good fifty years. Massaging it, he read Lucy’s note: Remember the footbridge? Remember how I never had to pay when I was with you? For Lucy, remarkably short. Usually there were a good dozen things he wondered if Noonan remembered.

  He returned to the photos, examining them more carefully now. In the first, nine-year-old Jerzy was identified as a third grader at Cayoga Elementary, but he already looked like a kid who regarded the world with deep suspicion. They’d been secret friends back then. Of necessity, all Noonan’s friendships had been secret. His father—who now stared out from the canvas upstairs—had been a rigid, angry man whose rigidity derived from military discipline, his anger from not having seen combat, or at least that’s what Noonan now supposed. Arriving in Europe after the end of the Second World War, he’d been stationed in Germany for a year, most of it spent behind a desk. When he finished his hitch, he had no real choice but to return home to Deb Noonan, the East End girl he’d knocked up before he learned self-control. She’d been living with her parents while he was overseas, and by the time he returned she barely recognized him as the easy, charming fellow who’d talked her into bed. Grim and unyielding, he explained the discipline he now practiced in all things. It demanded that they be strict about both time and money, and he informed her as well about his newfound belief that sex between husband and wife was about procreation, not pleasure. He was severe with himself, with her, with the little boy who’d arrived in his absence. He was particularly vigilant in the matter of his son’s friends. Jews, Negroes, Poles, Slavs and the Irish were all unsuitable. In his view they occupied the lowest rungs of society for a reason. Truth be told, he didn’t have much use for Italians and Catholics either, though to his shame he was both.

  The Quinns, who lived in an unpainted ruin of a house on lower Division Street, couldn’t have been more Irish, of course. Their only talent seemed to be producing feral children they couldn’t afford, one right after the other. Jerzy’s father was a good-natured if maudlin drunk who was always getting tossed out of bars, not for fighting, like so many other denizens of the Gut (a term he’d forgotten until Lucy used it in one of his letters), but rather for singing. Early in the evening someone would suggest he give them a tune, and he’d oblige, then someone else would buy him a drink, which always made him feel like singing another. Before long people would be heckling him to shut the hell up, but by then he’d hit his stride and was convinced the majority wished him to continue. To ensure he could be heard above the din, he liked to stand on the bar and seemed never to recollect that climbing up there invariably resulted in his ouster, often rude and violent, from the premises. He usually arrived back home after the bars closed, sporting a fat lip, his chin scraped and oozing from a hard landing on the sidewalk, all the song gone out of him and in its place a heartbroken self-awareness. Waking his wife, he’d hand her a dull paring knife from the kitchen drawer and say, “Put me out of my misery, Peg. You and the kids will be better off without me.” Which of course was true, but the woman apparently was susceptible to bathos because she invariably disarmed him and led him to bed, evidently with an eye toward filling the whole town, or at least the West End, with little Quinns.

  The second photo, from junior high, looked to Noonan like an early Polaroid, the sort included in the yearbook only if its subject had skipped school both on the day the official photos were taken and when the reshoots were done. By now a transformation had occurred, the boy’s eyes revealing not just suspicion but knowledge of both death and betrayal, and Noonan remembered the horrific story of how the boy’s father had died. By then his wife had reluctantly come to share his conclusion that she and her brood were better off without him. He’d been living above the pool hall, but sometimes, when he was drunker than usual, he forgot this and returned home. That particular snowy night the door was locked, and he hadn’t been able to raise his wife despite singing a love song directly beneath her bedroom window, which had been known to work, if not recently. However, he did raise a neighbor, who informed him the police had been called, whereupon the elder Quinn slogged around back through the deep snowdrifts to hide from them. When the cops were gone, he put his hand through a pane of glass in the back door, cutting himself badly in the process. When the door continued to resist entry, he apparently sat down on the step to consider his options, of which he was out, though he didn’t know it. His wife and children found him sitting right there two days later, frozen solid and covered with snow, when they returned from visiting her parents in North Bath. In that condition the children didn’t recognize their father, so their mother, thinking quickly, told them it must be a tramp, a lie they all believed, except for Jerzy. He must’ve been eleven, maybe twelve. Below the photo, his name was followed by a colon, then a chunk of white space where, presumably, you’d list extracurricular activities—CYO, the debate team, science club. There wasn’t a single notation for Jerzy. Rather cruel, Noonan thought, to include that colon.

  Their fight that day had been about far more than either of them comprehended at the time. In Jerzy’s utter lack of fear and his total disregard for consequence there lurked the frozen “tramp” on the back porch and an understanding of a world in which that sort of thing could happen. No wonder something had hardened in him, causing the boy to navigate the world with red, cynical rage. No wonder he wanted to share it.

  But hadn’t the same been true of Noonan himself? This was the same summer his own hard education had begun, and he learned the reason for his mother’s terrible unhappiness, the West End woman his father visited most days after finishing his mail route and before returning home to the Borough. He later learned that his mother had been aware of this since they’d lived in Berman Court. His father had made no great secret of the affair, nor had he been the least flustered the afternoon he looked out the apartment w
indow in the West End and saw his oldest son sitting on his bike, watching from across the street. At dinner he’d fixed the boy with a dark look and asked what he’d been doing on lower Division Street, a place he had no business being. At that moment Noonan learned several valuable lessons, including the fact that right and wrong were beside the point, what mattered was power. His father’s authority derived only from that. Otherwise, why would Noonan feel guilty under his gaze? It was his father who had no business on lower Division Street, but that simply didn’t matter. And he’d also learned, to his utter surprise, that it was possible not to love your own father. To hate him, in fact, with a kind of purity that filled up the void of love’s loss and gave purpose to your own life. A hate that gave you the necessary determination and patience to wait for the day when the power shifted, when you were old enough and big enough to usurp it and secure for yourself an authority equal to his own.

  The West End woman’s apartment was next door to where the Quinns lived, which was how Jerzy had come to know of the affair before he himself did, knowledge Jerzy likely wouldn’t have shared until he heard that Bobby had talked his girlfriend—who happened to be Noonan’s second cousin—into a game of strip poker. The idea that Noonan had seen his girlfriend’s bare breasts, a sight he himself had not yet been treated to, was what their fight had ostensibly been about, but it was really about their fathers, the dead one wished alive, the living one wished dead, with no possibility of either wish being granted.