Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  “Is that why you and Dad…” I couldn’t complete the sentence.

  “Your father and I are together because we love each other. Also because we love you.”

  That was the answer I’d been hoping for, of course, and to hear the words made me feel good. Better, I think, than they made her feel, because when I got up from the table to head upstairs she said, “Don’t go trying to figure out love.”

  I promised I wouldn’t.

  “And don’t waste time wishing the world was different than it is. You aren’t going to change it. Don’t expect people to be something they can’t. Or yourself for that matter.”

  “What can’t I be?” I asked her, because lately I’d been thinking a lot about that very thing.

  She looked up at me, and our eyes met. I had the distinct impression she was going to tell me something, but then she went back to her numbers, which always added up in the end.

  Unlike love.

  FACE VALUE

  THESE DAYS my mother likes to eat early. Lunch at ten-thirty, dinner at five. I understand. I do. She’s rarely able to sleep much past five-thirty, when Owen arrives to open Ikey’s, so everything gets pushed forward, including meals. Friday, though, is our regular luncheon date, and so she’s willing to postpone the midday meal until eleven-thirty “to fit my schedule,” though in truth that’s when Dot’s Sandwich Shoppe, downtown, starts serving. A new place, the Top Drawer Café, has opened out on Old County Road, not far from Whitcombe Park, and I’ve offered to take her there, but she prefers Dot’s, probably because the food is plain and old-fashioned. We’re usually the first ones seated, which means we get the window seat overlooking Hudson Street and the old Bijou Theater, the restoration of which is nearly complete. It won’t show movies, as it used to, but instead will be used for concerts and special events. The grand opening is when Sarah and I are in Italy, and I’ll be sad to miss it.

  I arrive at Ikey’s a few minutes early, so I decide to pop in and say hello to Brindy, who’s at the register. “Hi, Pop,” she says in that abstracted way she has, when my arrival is signaled by the same bell above the door that used to announce Karen Cirillo back when I was minding the till. I’ve lost count of how many new registers we’ve had during this span, this most recent a thin, light computerized model, but the little bell soldiers on heroically. “You all packed?”

  “You’d have to ask Sarah,” I tell her, taking a quick inventory and suppressing, or trying to, a smile of pure satisfaction. Good old Ikey’s. I half expect my father to come in from the back room with a big box of toilet paper for me to shelve. What I wouldn’t give.

  “I wish it was me going,” Brindy says.

  “That makes two of us,” I tell her. “Where’s Owen?” I expect her to say he’s in the back room, the door to which is open and shouldn’t be, not if no one’s in there.

  “Down at the West End store,” she says. “God, who doesn’t want to go to Italy?”

  “Sarah says I’ll be fine once I’m there.”

  “Then you probably will. She knows you best.”

  “That’s what she says.” I know her observation is vaguely insulting in that it suggests a lack of self-knowledge, but I can’t help smiling anyway. To have someone you love know you better than you know yourself is a compliment, I believe, and so did my father when people said the same thing about my mother. When someone knows your deepest self and still loves you, are you not a lucky man? Having spent much of the last month or so dwelling on the past, I’m particularly pleased to consider that there’s someone who knows me so well and yet doesn’t regret a lifetime spent in my company, much of it in this very store.

  “Is everything okay down there?” I ask. The register hasn’t been ringing out right lately, and Owen’s thinking about firing the manager.

  “Owen’s the one who’d know,” Brindy says, in a tone that gives me pause. For some time Sarah’s been worrying that things aren’t right between the two of them. I don’t want to believe this is true. I’d rather think, as I have in the past, that my daughter-in-law’s coolness is directed at me, or Sarah and me, and not our son.

  “Have him call me if he needs anything,” I tell her, and she says she will. These days, my job is to go wherever I’m needed in what Owen calls the Lynch Empire, which includes Thomaston’s three remaining corner markets—“convenience stores” now—plus our video rental store and, in summer, the Thomaston Cone. I take uncovered shifts when someone calls in sick or has a problem with a child. In truth, I wish there were more of these shifts. The video store has its own manager and staff, and the tiny ice-cream store is seasonal, so sometimes I feel—what’s the word that’s so in vogue these days?—marginalized. But I do understand Owen’s thinking. One day he’ll oversee all three of our markets, whether or not I’ve prepared him for that responsibility. I have to allow him to do things his way and make his own mistakes. I’m determined not to meddle, either with him or Brindy, who’s far more sensitive to interference. Which is why I won’t go over and close the door to the back room, no matter how much I want to.

  Upstairs, my mother answers the door a split second after I knock, and she already has her coat on and buttoned, which means she’s been standing on the other side of the door waiting impatiently for my arrival. God knows for how long. I could ask, but I still wouldn’t know, because she’d say she saw me pull up outside or heard me clomping up the stairs, both of which are no doubt true, though that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been ready for an hour, anxious, I fear, for this to be over. It would be different, more pleasurable, if Sarah were able to join us. My wife has been, lo these many years, an excellent buffer between my mother and me, somehow able to remind us, despite our many disagreements, of how close we are.

  But on Fridays Sarah teaches at the junior high. She’s been a fine teacher for over two decades now, cobbling together as many part-time gigs at the junior and high schools as our dwindling budget will allow. She has fewer classes this year, after her illness, and has rediscovered her old passion, painting up a storm in the junior high art room long after her students have gone home. Of course she denies it is or ever was a passion. Real painters, she says, become painters. That’s what makes them painters. Nothing comes between them and paint. Not circumstance, not life. Like Michelangelo and Titian and Caravaggio and the other masters whose work we’ll see in Italy; like Bobby, she sometimes adds, matter-of-factly. At any rate her Friday class leaves my mother and me to our own devices, devices that haven’t changed, I sometimes think, since I was a boy. Maybe it’s just how it goes with mothers and sons. Had my father lived, well, who can say?

  She gives me a dry peck on the cheek and steps out into the hall, quickly closing the door behind her, but not before I glimpse the dark smudge on the wall behind her sofa where the fire was so many years ago. That wall’s been painted half a dozen times over the intervening years, even wallpapered once, but eventually the faint outline of the old burn comes through, followed gradually by something darker and uglier. Original sin, my mother likes to call it, by which she means my father’s purchase of Ikey Lubin’s. A bitter thing to say, I’ve always thought, though she claims it’s a joke. There’s no denying Ikey’s changed our lives, that it was a terrible risk my mother never would’ve taken. And it’s true we had bad luck for a while when my father fell ill and we lost our house, forcing my mother to break her steadfast vow and move in above the store. But it’s unfair to suggest that Ikey’s was the first domino to fall against our family. All human events lead to other human events, and my mother’s damning Ikey’s is arbitrary. One could just as easily blame my father’s illness, the polluted stream that caused it or the mountain of medical bills that resulted. Why not pin it all on the old dairy discontinuing home delivery, or the public school boys who locked me in that trunk? But for them we might never have left Berman Court. What would our lives have been like if we’d never crossed Division Street? There are a great many sins in the world, none of them original.

 
; “Why don’t you use the chair?” I suggest when I see how stiff my mother is today, but she immediately starts down the steep, narrow steps, clutching the banister grimly with her twisted fingers. I installed the mechanized chair two years ago, over her strident objections, when the arthritis started getting worse and the stairs were clearly becoming both a trial and a hazard. Her right foot turns in now, and her balance is not what it should be. I feared she’d fall but instead should have foreseen her stubbornness. “That damned contraption” is what she calls it, claiming the chair’s dangerous, that it will come loose from the wall while she’s aboard or its gears will strip and send her plummeting backward to the bottom of the stairs. I argued, of course, that it would restore her freedom, that she could come and go as she pleased, without waiting for someone to help her. “And where would I go?” was her reply. Which did make me smile at how the tables had turned. When she and my father got me that first bike, her idea had been to get me out of the house and into the world. “Where should I go?” I remember asking. “Out,” she replied. “Away. Anywhere.” Having paid good money for the chair, I’d have liked to say the same to her, though of course I didn’t, and so it has remained, except on rare occasions, useless at the bottom of the stairs.

  Which is where my mother says, “There.” Which is shorthand for I told you so, for I can manage the stairs just fine, for You wasted your money. And, unless I’m mistaken, for I enjoy my prison, the ugly smudge on my living room wall. Because some things in life can’t be painted or papered over, or fixed. Which is what, she maintains, I’ve never understood.

  I help her into the car, where she sits staring down at her knees, refusing, as always, to look across the street at the house where we’d lived for most of my childhood. Five years ago, when it came back on the market, I bought it with the idea of showing her it wasn’t lost after all, but she would have none of that. “What would I do,” she said, “all alone in that big house?”

  “Live?” I suggested. “Like you used to?”

  But no. “It’d be too much work. I’m better off where I am.” Then the clincher. “Besides, it’s too late.”

  So, for now, a renewed tactic. “Would you like to try the new restaurant? The Top Drawer?” I ask her. “The food’s supposed to be good.”

  As if I didn’t know the answer.

  AT THE CURB outside Dot’s is a car whose bumper sticker sets my mother off. “Support our troops,” she says, her voice oozing disgust.

  This is a topic I’d rather avoid, because her opinions on impersonal matters of national and international scope have a way of becoming personal. She despises our president as a dishonest fool whose lies and stupidity have cost over two thousand American lives, but her deepest contempt is reserved for those who voted for him—her son, she suspects, among them, though I’ve never told her who I voted for. Sarah says my mother doesn’t intend for her political observations to be so personal, but how many times as a boy did I hear this same withering sarcasm applied to my father and, by extension, to me? “Lou. Why would you believe such a thing?” Well, my father would reply, because this guy swore it was true. “You’re telling me you believe it because he said it? That’s the reason?” He don’t have no reason to lie that I know of, my father would reply weakly. “Right. But he’s got about a hundred you don’t know of and will never find out about, because you take everything at face value. It’s what’s called being gullible, Lou.”

  Even more personal is her claim that our president’s stupidity is apparent in his physical appearance, particularly his facial expressions. All you have to do is look at him, she claims. Here, no doubt, Sarah’s right. I’m internalizing my mother’s attack on the president, who does, I admit, bear a striking resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman. But in general I reject the notion that what’s inside a person can be determined by his exterior. Large, slow-moving men like my father and me are often assumed to be slow witted as well, and in school it always took my teachers a while to realize I was bright. I’m the first to allow that my intelligence isn’t quick, but I am observant and methodical and, I believe, fair-minded. To me, it’s always seemed ironic that people who take the trouble to stop and think are often judged obtuse. When I was a boy, my mother had a habit of snapping her fingers when she asked me a question. “Come on, Lou, you’re smart. You know the answer. Don’t pretend you don’t.” That is, don’t pretend to be like your father, which was what she always seemed to be saying, and this made me even more deliberate. Even if it were true that I’m smarter than my father, who had none of my advantages, would that make me a better man?

  So I say, “Let’s not talk about the president.”

  “Fine,” my mother says agreeably. “If you’ll admit you voted for him, it would give me great pleasure never to utter his name again.”

  It’s tempting to give her the answer she wants, to confess to being who she thinks I am, but I can’t and she knows it. She used to hound my father on the same subject, telling him sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, whom he should vote for, and later badgering him to reveal whether he’d acted on her advice. I sometimes think that what he did in the voting booth was the sole secret of his married life, or at least the only one he was able to keep. He liked to try to sneak little things by her from time to time, like buying that cheap shirt in the West End store and telling her he’d gotten it at Calloway’s, but she always knew better, which only deepened his respect for her powers of cognition. He knew better than to lie, so when it came to voting he simply refused to say anything, an example I’ve always followed. Indeed, I alone know what my father did in the voting booth. He confided it to me shortly before he died, one of his final acts of love. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said, unnecessarily. “Don’t tell nobody,” he added, his eyes filling with tears. By then he was in constant pain, the effectiveness of the drugs he was taking intermittent, at best.

  “Fine,” my mother says when I pretend to study my menu, leaving her challenge in the air between us. “If you think you have a secret, keep it.”

  “I will, thanks,” I assure her.

  My mother orders what she always orders, a grilled-cheese sandwich and a cup of thin tomato soup. In addition to being inexpensive, the food at Dot’s is bland, which she also appreciates. She suffers, like many women her age, from acid reflux, and spicy foods keep her awake at night. In turn, I order my usual burger and fries. For a while we eat in silence, until the clock strikes twelve and the shopkeepers and clerks from the few remaining businesses along Hudson and Division begin drifting in. Most of them like to sit at the counter where they can chat with Dot and each other, but many stop at our table to say hello. “I hope he’s picking up the tab,” they tell my mother, and she says she hopes so, too. It’s a standing joke in town that I’m a skinflint who routinely loses his wallet in his deep pockets. “Has he taken you out to the Top Drawer yet?” they want to know, to which she responds no, not yet, feeling no need to elaborate. “Make him,” they suggest. “Who else around here can afford those prices?”

  When we’ve finished eating, I say “Will you be all right while we’re gone?” and she says of course she will. “Owen and Brindy are right downstairs most days. One or the other.”

  But not both. My mother shares Sarah’s fear that all is not well between them.

  “And you’ve written down that cell phone number?” Sarah has rented one from a store in Schenectady, and the clerk, who she claimed looked all of fifteen, swore it would work on our trip. To each question Sarah asked, the boy had responded, “Absolutely.” She pinned him down as best she could. Anywhere in Europe? “Absolutely.” Italy is where we’ll be. “Really? Awesome.” And you’re sure it’ll work there? “Absolutely.”

  We’ll see.

  “I’ll be fine,” my mother tells me. “Will you?” She asks because last week I made the mistake of sharing my worry about having one of my spells in a foreign country, a concern I’ve not even mentioned to Sarah, though she’s probably guessed.

/>   When I tell her I’ll be fine, that I’m more concerned about the long flight, she relents and reaches across the table to put her hand on mine, a gesture that makes a boy of me again. This may be why I told her in the first place. Whenever I’m in jeopardy, real or imagined, she allows herself to suspend judgment. In fact, I’ve suspected that our relationship has become increasingly contentious partly because it’s been so long since my last spell. Odd that my old affliction should still be a trump card in our relationship—indeed, my only trump—and I realize how wrong and unmanly it is to play it.

  Though it’s not a lie, this fear I’ve confided. In advance of a spell I often feel slightly “off,” as if at the periphery of my vision or awareness there’s something I can’t quite bring into focus, a fuzziness not unlike what I’ve heard migraine sufferers refer to as an aura. This has been especially true of those I’ve had as an adult, though this same effect was probably present when I was a boy, had I known what to look for. Back then my mother could predict an upcoming event when she noticed a remoteness, some part of me that couldn’t be engaged, making me seem confused or conflicted. But neither one of us could ever be sure. Sometimes my abstraction was simply worry about a big math test or something I’d overheard or possibly misinterpreted in conversation between my parents as it came filtering up into my bedroom late at night through the heat register. A temporary worry, in other words, of the sort that would expire of its own volition, predictive of nothing and indicative only of the human condition.

  Which may well be the case now. In writing my story I’ve brought myself back to that period when my spells were more frequent, and this may explain the aura I’ve felt of late, especially when I quit writing and return to my real, present life. At such times I can’t help but wonder whether a spell is imminent, or if my slight disorientation is nothing more than the past colliding with the present, as they will when people my age attempt to see the figure in the carpet of their lives, which we can’t help but do. The human condition, as I say, as opposed to the peculiar condition of Lucy Lynch. In confiding my fears about Italy, I guess I’m asking my mother if she’s observed any of the old symptoms, if she still has the knack of knowing.