Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  “I ain’t gonna—” my father began.

  “Tessa got it right away,” my uncle interrupted, his fingers snapping to attention, four, five. “She explained it to me as soon as I told her Manooch was history.” Right hand now, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

  “When did you see Tessa?”

  Back over to his left hand, eleven, twelve, thirteen. “Just now. She told me you were probably down here eating french fries and gravy.” Right hand, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.

  It means he wants you to give him a job. I tried to send my father this telepathic thought, as my uncle’s cruel fingers continued to stiffen. I thought for sure he was going to start over again a third time when he got to twenty, but he just shook his head at my father. “We’d still be sitting here an hour from now, wouldn’t we?” he said. “What it means,” he said, lowering his voice now, “is that all your rich friends in the Borough have no place to buy their crown roast for Sunday dinner.”

  “How about the A&P?” my father said.

  “They slice pork chops with a band saw, is what they do,” Uncle Dec said with contempt.

  “We don’t have none of what we’d need,” my father said. “A meat case. Slicer. Scale. I don’t know what else. All them things cost.”

  “They’re expensive new,” his brother conceded meaningfully.

  “Where you gonna find good used ones?”

  Uncle Dec just stared at my father for two good beats, then swiveled to regard me. “Okay,” he said. “You got the same pointy head as your old man, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess you’ve got that figured out.”

  I hated taking his part against my father, but I did have it figured out, and I just couldn’t pretend I didn’t. “Manucci’s?” I ventured.

  “And you’re how old?” he said, looking back at his brother, who at the moment was beaming at me, full of pride.

  “Thirteen.”

  “Thirteen,” he repeated. “Okay, I gotta go. Tessa can explain the rest of it to you. Truth? I don’t care if you do or you don’t. I know how to cut a crown roast, but I can also cut pork chops with a band saw. The A&P’s been trying to get me to come work for them for a year, so do what you want.”

  “I’ll think about it,” my father said, regarding him suspiciously as he slid out of the booth.

  “Fine. Think all you want. You don’t have much time, though, so I don’t recommend your usual pace.”

  “No way,” my father said when he was gone. “I hire him and before I turn around he’s making book and running numbers out the back door.”

  Actually, I thought this could be one time when my parents might actually agree about something, given how undependable Uncle Dec was. It would be just like him to get us to spend money we didn’t have and then back out at the last minute, leaving us in the lurch. But I could tell my father was thinking it over. Despite his brother’s relentless teasing, he had often remarked on his brother’s overall shrewdness, how he always managed to land on his feet, prospering about as well as a man with no ambition possibly could.

  At the cash register, though, we discovered that Uncle Dec had paid for neither the coffees nor my ice cream. “This right here,” my father said, holding up the unpaid check, “is why we don’t want nothing to do with him.”

  WHEN WE RETURNED HOME, the kitchen table was still crowded with the apparatus of my mother’s bookkeeping—the adding machine with its long scroll of paper, the spiral tablet with its columns of numbers, the stack of worn ledgers from True Plumbing and Supply, Angelo’s Pizza, Bech’s Flowers—but she herself wasn’t there. For a frightening moment I remembered Mrs. Marconi’s serial disappearances. I didn’t think my mother would do anything like that, though I also had the distinct feeling she hadn’t just stepped out either. My father called her name and went upstairs to see if she might be taking a nap, but I knew she wasn’t up there, just as I knew she hadn’t gone to visit a neighbor. She hadn’t even turned the adding machine off, which suggested that she’d interrupted one important task to attend to something even more important.

  When my father reappeared at the foot of the stairs, he stopped and scratched his head thoughtfully, a gesture that just then annoyed me, perhaps because Uncle Dec had lately referred to us both as having pointy heads, and here he was scratching the very spot where the point would’ve been, had there actually been one.

  “She’s over at Ikey’s,” I told him, suddenly sure that this was true, whether it made sense or not, and I could tell that possibility alarmed him as much as it did me. Having sworn never to set foot in the store, my mother had been good to her word all this time. If she needed to speak to my father during the day, she’d either telephone or cross the street, open the door and summon him outside. Which meant that if she was over there now, she must have a pretty good reason, and I could tell that whatever that reason might be worried him.

  We found her standing in the middle of the store with a tape measure. “That’s the wall that’ll have to come down,” she said when we entered, pointing at the one she had in mind. “You’ll lose a parking space. Maybe two.”

  She was planning where the meat counter would go. My father understood that much.

  “We don’t want nothing to do with Dec,” he said. “You can’t depend on him.” To illustrate his point, he told her about the diner, how he’d offered to buy the coffee and ice cream and then stiffed us.

  “But don’t you see, Lou? Your brother is dependable. You can depend on him to do exactly what he always does. In his own way, he’s as dependable as you are. You’re always you, and your brother’s always your brother. There isn’t a nickel’s worth of surprise in either one of you.”

  I thought about pointing out that my father had certainly surprised her when he bought Ikey Lubin’s, then decided to hold my tongue.

  “But I don’t want him here, Tessa.”

  “That’s the good news,” she said. “In six months he won’t be. When have you ever known Dec Lynch to stick with anything? That gives us six months to learn what he knows.”

  I noticed the pronoun right away, but I’m pretty sure my father didn’t. He was too chagrined by the direction she was taking us. “He comes in here, people will think it’s his store, not mine.”

  “Right now your problem is that Buddy Nurt thinks it’s his,” my mother said, confusing him further. She motioned for us to follow her into the back. The storeroom was dark, lit only by one small, high window, but when my father went to flip the light switch, she turned on a flashlight instead. I started to say something, but she held a finger to her lips. “I found our leak,” she whispered, shining the beam on a door I’d always assumed must lead down into a cellar. Directly in front of it sat a couple of crates, blocking access. “Guess where that leads.”

  As soon as she said it, I knew. It didn’t lead down but up, into the apartment. My father also saw what she was driving at. “It’s locked, Tessa,” he said, leaning around the crates to give the padlock a tug.

  “Shhhh!” she said, motioning for him to step aside. Handing me the flashlight, she went over to the door, pressed her ear against it and listened. In the silence, we could hear muted voices—Karen’s, I thought, and her mother’s—and footfalls from the apartment above. Finally, when she was satisfied, my mother, to our astonishment, swung the door open. Not how you’d expect, of course, because it was padlocked, but rather on its hinged side, just wide enough for a man to slide through. The crates, I realized, weren’t directly in front of the door, as I’d thought, and they blocked the door only if it opened as it was designed to. This other way, the crates didn’t even come into play.

  Taking the flashlight back, she used its beam first to locate the two pins that had been removed from the hinge where they lay on the first step, then the makeshift handle attached to the door so it could be opened and closed from the inside, finally the footprints leading up and down the dusty stairs and the wood shavings on the floor and lower steps. My father and I watched slack
jawed as she closed the door again, the upper and lower sections of the hinge sliding neatly into place. If you looked close, you could see that with the door shut they didn’t line up exactly, but why would you?

  “He must’ve taken the door off at some point so he could plane it,” my mother explained when we were back in the store. “The only thing we can’t figure is how he managed to take the pins out to start with. That could only be done from this side. He must have slipped in during a delivery, when you and the driver were both in the front.”

  This time my father caught the pronoun. “We?” he said.

  “It was your brother who figured it out, not me,” she told him.

  I couldn’t tell whether my father was more discouraged that Buddy Nurt had been systematically stealing from us or that it was his brother who had figured out how. He sank heavily onto the stool he kept behind the counter. He said nothing for a long time, and my mother seemed content with the silence. Finally, he said, “What do we do?”

  “That,” she told him, “is the part I figured out.”

  THAT VERY NIGHT Buddy Nurt paid us his last visit. At dawn I awoke to the sound of what could only have been a Hudson cab idling somewhere nearby. I woke up again at six when my father overcame his aversion to the telephone and called my mother. He’d gone over to Ikey’s to open the store as usual and found the door leading up to the apartment wedged open. Buddy must have been pretty surprised when he pushed on that door. Too late he must have felt the shim my father had nailed to the floor, the bottom of the door riding that smooth, gentle incline before dropping down an inch into a groove, immovably ajar. He then must have panicked, because you could see where the door had splintered when he tried to pull it shut again by force.

  It was my mother who called the police and explained how we’d caught him red-handed. When they arrived at the store, my father looked embarrassed, like he’d been snared in her trap, not Buddy. I knew how he felt. I despised Buddy, but there was something especially humiliating about getting caught in the act, and realizing that for all your care and stealth and cleverness—and Buddy’s thievery had been clever—somebody out there was smarter than you were, and now the whole world would know you for what you were. That, I thought, must have been what Buddy Nurt couldn’t face, what caused him to bundle his belongings into the backseat of a Hudson cab, and rattle away, leaving sleepy-eyed Karen and Nancy to answer the door when my mother, flanked by two burly policemen, knocked.

  While this transpired, my father and I remained in the store below, too cowardly to bear witness to what was happening upstairs. When the early morning coffee drinkers began filtering in, I didn’t even have the stomach to listen to my father’s explanation of the police car out at the curb. I retreated into the back room to take charge of the morning’s deliveries of bread and milk.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t stop thinking about Buddy. He had been, for most of his adult life, a sneak and a thief, and the worst moments of his sorry life were surely the result of being exposed for what he was. Why didn’t he just stop? To my surprise, I no sooner asked the question than the answer came to me. Buddy Nurt wasn’t a thief because he stole; he stole because he was a thief. Each time he got caught, he added that mistake to the growing list of those he wouldn’t make again, but it wouldn’t occur to him to stop stealing. The solution, he imagined, would be to get better at it. That first day he’d arrived at our store in a Hudson cab and studied his reflection in the glass, what I’d seen there was the real Buddy Nurt, a man who simply did what he did, because of who he was. What I’d recognized in his expression was self-loathing, but there was also something I’d missed: the futility of struggling against his fundamental nature. The man he saw reflected in our storefront that day would continue doing the very things that had brought him to this point in his life. And he must have known, too, what the consequences would be, that before long another Hudson cab would arrive, this time in the middle of the night, to bear him away to further misadventure and disgrace. That’s what his terrible grin had meant—surrender to the inevitable.

  Even more chillingly, I recalled going outside myself and studying my own reflection in the glass, and being startled to see Buddy Nurt’s terrible self-loathing mirrored in my own features. What, I now wondered, if we all just were who we were? What if we were kidding ourselves if we believed otherwise? Was that what my mother had wanted to convey when she said I needed to get smarter about people if I was going to survive in the world? Did she want me to understand that we have little choice but to slog forward through life, repeating our worst mistakes without ever learning from them or, worse yet, without being able to use what we’d learned?

  Before I was able to resolve these issues, my mother came back downstairs with the two policemen. All three stood talking outside Ikey’s until one of the cops, glancing at the apartment above, shrugged as if to say Fine, if that’s how you want to play it. When they got back in the cruiser and pulled away, she came inside and regarded my father’s coffee drinkers darkly until they became self-conscious and left. Then she turned her attention on me, studying me so intently that I wondered if I was supposed to leave, too. I still wasn’t used to seeing her in Ikey’s, and I could tell my father didn’t quite know what to make of her presence either.

  “Well,” she finally said, “at least he’s gone.”

  “What about the money?” my father said, referring, I supposed, to the cost of all the stolen beer and cigarettes.

  “Think of that as gone, too, since it is.”

  “Maybe they’ll catch him,” I ventured. Buddy didn’t strike me as the sort of person who’d have much luck evading the police.

  “What good would that do?” she said. “You’d sooner get blood from a turnip than restitution from Buddy Nurt.”

  “What about her?” my father said, nodding at the ceiling.

  It was my mother’s turn to shrug now. “She claims she had no idea what he was up to.”

  Outside, the dogs my mother had shot with the pellet gun came trotting up the street. When they got close, all three actually crossed the street and continued to watch the store nervously out of the corners of their eyes, a sight that seemed to cheer her up, and I have to admit it cheered me, too. Thinking about Buddy, I’d just about concluded that everything was pretty pointless, but these dogs suggested otherwise. Their behavior had changed as a direct result of their experience. True, they were probably smarter than Buddy, but still.

  “Anyway,” my mother said, turning to my father, “you wanted a partner in this venture. I guess you got one.”

  My father looked like he might cry. “How come he has to be my partner? How come I can’t just pay him, like they do down at Manucci’s?”

  She rubbed her temples vigorously. “I’m not talking about your brother, Lou. I’m talking about me.”

  AFTER LUNCH I was left in charge of the store while my parents went to the West End to look over Manucci’s meat case and the other equipment we’d need if we were going to install Uncle Dec as our new specialty butcher. The next day they’d meet with a contractor to discuss how much it would cost to expand into the parking lot.

  Early afternoon was usually the slowest time of the day at Ikey’s, but I kept busy with the steady stream of neighbors who ostensibly came in for a half gallon of milk but were actually curious about the police cruiser that had been parked outside for so long that morning. Around two, a battered pickup truck squealed to a halt at the curb out front, and then another, and then a third, the brothers all piling out and lumbering up the stairs to Nancy’s apartment. Ten minutes later a crushed beer can rattled into one of the truck beds and bounced out onto the street, followed by a second that managed to stay in and a third that missed altogether. Fortified in this fashion for physical labor, they began hauling down the same possessions they’d hauled up to their sister’s apartment less than a year ago. Nancy herself came down to supervise and, seeing I was alone in the store, came in to buy a pack of cigarettes. Her eyes
were red and swollen, but she’d clearly made a successful transition from shame to anger.

  “I hope nobody thinks it’s gonna break my heart to leave,” she said, as if she suspected I might be such a person. “People around here seem to think their shit don’t stink.”

  I gathered that by “here” she meant the whole East End, not just our immediate neighborhood. As to our shit not stinking, it was my impression we just thought ours probably didn’t stink as bad as Buddy Nurt’s, but I held my tongue.

  “I could tell you a thing or two about that mother of yours if I felt like it,” she continued, “but I don’t. You think my Karen’s wild? You should’ve known your mother back when. Your father never knew what hit him. He wasn’t the only one either, just the least prepared. You don’t believe me, ask your uncle.”

  But then she made a zipping motion across her lips to suggest that she’d said too much and I couldn’t get anything further out of her. She went over to the door and shouted at her brothers, who were balancing her box spring and mattress in the back of one of the pickups, “You’re joking, right?”

  I was surprised to see the fattest of the brothers turn around and unzip an imaginary zipper of his own, this one at his crotch, from which he yanked an imaginary penis and began stroking it feverishly.

  Nancy seemed to make no connection between the two zippers and turned back to me. “Then on top of it she’s got the nerve to make out like I knew Buddy was stealing beer and shit from this so-called store. Like I didn’t tell her from the start he was a thief. Like the whole town doesn’t know Buddy Nurt’s got magic fingers. Like my own damn purse doesn’t come up light every other morning.”

  Listening to Nancy Salvatore, I began to understand where Karen’s curious logic came from. If I understood her correctly, Buddy Nurt was, or should’ve been, a shared burden. Sure, he’d been stealing from us, but in refusing to let him continue we were shirking our fair share of the responsibility, which meant she’d have to shoulder her share and ours, too.