Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  But he’d also doubt my mother’s pessimistic view of our neighbors. “They ain’t gonna care,” I could hear him say, shrugging his big shoulders in incomprehension. When he was a younger man, before he’d been given his Borough route, he’d delivered milk on the Hill, and while he didn’t have his brother’s ease with the Negroes who lived there, he knew and liked many of them. Some still spoke to my father when they met on Division Street, and I couldn’t see where his conversations with these men were all that different from those he had with white men he met at the diner or the barbershop. A Negro man, asked how he was doing, might mention he’d won a daily double last week or quit playing a number he’d been betting for the last two years only to have it hit yesterday, and my father would commiserate and say he should’ve stuck with it one more day or ask the man what he did with his winnings, to which he’d reply, I spent it, whatchu think? I’d noticed my father didn’t shake hands with these men the way he did at the diner or the barbershop, but this reserve seemed to me as much theirs as his. He believed in polite behavior, and so did they. If people would just treat each other decent, he was fond of saying, there wouldn’t be near as much trouble in the world.

  “You ain’t gotta love each other,” he’d say.

  “Really, Lou?” my mother would interrupt. “Didn’t Jesus say that’s exactly what we’re supposed to do?”

  “Just act polite,” he’d go on, talking to me now, not her. “It don’t cost nothin’ to be nice to people.”

  He believed that people were basically good, and to prove his point he’d name half a dozen or so, some from the neighborhood—old Mr. Gunther, say, who was so sick with cancer but never complained—and others who were famous, like Mickey Mantle or John Wayne. Which always caused my mother to rub her temples and wonder out loud why she even tried.

  THE QUESTION of whether or not to hire Gabriel Mock turned out to be moot, because after his arraignment on a charge of criminal threatening, he packed a small bag and called Hudson Cab, whose driver, Buddy Nurt, after determining that Gabriel had the fare, drove him to the train station in Fulton, which left me even more friendless than ever. I saw Karen Cirillo from time to time at school or the Saturday matinee, but she almost never acknowledged me. Sometimes I’d think she was going to, only to have her play that trick with her eyes and make me disappear. Once we found ourselves pressed together on the stairs of the YMCA, waiting for the gym doors to open, and I tried to strike up a conversation by asking how things were over at Berman Court, reminding her that I’d once lived in the very apartment she now occupied with her mother and, I presumed, Buddy, but all she did was regard me strangely and say, “You’re weird, Lou. You know that?” Only after offering this personal observation did it occur to her to ask if I had any money. She and her girlfriends weren’t sure they had enough to get into the dance. I did but claimed I didn’t, feeling something shift inside me with that lie. I was glad not to have given her money—besides, she and her friends did discover the means to get in—but I felt dispirited, too. My weakness, my inability to deny Karen what she wanted, I knew, was my only connection to her, and strength, if that’s what my lie represented, pretty much removed any hope of reestablishing our old Ikey’s intimacy. She was, as she’d always been, Jerzy Quinn’s girl.

  During this same period, the second half of eighth grade, Jerzy himself became even more of a phantom, disappearing from view for weeks at a time. It wasn’t unusual for him to be absent from school, of course. He often skipped or left by the gym door after attendance was taken in homeroom, behavior that sometimes, perversely, resulted in suspension. But he was also less visible around town. He still commanded his army of pale wraiths, but they often congregated outside the pool hall or along the banks of the Cayoga without him. He’d been only tangentially involved in what happened to Three Mock, who remained comatose for weeks after his beating, but he’d taken some of the blame for it, perhaps because he was the one the cops had found kneeling beside him there in the parking lot. Even at the time I found it ironic that he should emerge victorious from the whipping he’d taken at the hands of Bobby Marconi, only to be undone in the end by a skinny Negro who’d never thrown a punch. Overnight, it seemed, everyone understood that Jerzy and his gang were a junior high phenomenon that could not survive the transfer to high school, where thick-necked football players ruled.

  Not long after the fight, the Kozlowski family did move to the East End, just as Perry predicted. For some reason I’d concluded that as a natural consequence of those events they wouldn’t be permitted to cross Division Street, but one Monday morning Perry showed up in school wearing a plaid short-sleeved shirt. His new uniform drew immediate derision from a boy in Jerzy’s gang, but Perry grabbed him by the throat, lifted him off his feet and offered to put him in the hospital bed next to Three Mock, and when the boy said he’d just been kidding, Perry let him go. For days after this incident we expected to hear that Perry’s former friends had caught him alone somewhere and showed him who was boss, but it never happened, further evidence that Jerzy’s reign of terror was coming to an end. No sooner did we imagine it could end than it did. Thinking back on it, we seemed to recall almost weekly beatings and humiliations, but how many had there actually been? When we tallied them now, the number wasn’t large. And how many gang members were there? Too many to count, it had seemed a month earlier, until we counted them, and again the number wasn’t so large. It had been well known that all the West End boys who had sworn allegiance to Jerzy carried knives, but had we ever seen one?

  Then, in late May, with summer vacation just a few weeks away, a rumor that explained Jerzy’s mysterious absences began to circulate. He was sick. He needed to have an operation. When he showed up on the last day of school, he looked so thin and weak that we knew it had to be true, which aroused a new fear. It had never occurred to any of us East Enders that illness would have the temerity to attack Jerzy Quinn or, if it dared, it would make headway.

  Without school to foment rumors, and with high school and its new terrors to consider, Jerzy disappeared from our collective consciousness that summer. I know he hadn’t crossed my mind in a month when, in late July, Perry Kozlowski stopped in at Ikey’s for a soda. “You heard about Jerzy, right?” he said. And when I confessed I hadn’t, he shrugged. “The doctors cut his left nut off. I guess he’s not so tough anymore.”

  INSTALLING MY UNCLE as the butcher of choice for Borough housewives did draw shoppers from beyond our East End neighborhood, but it had some unintended consequences as well. With a larger store and longer hours, we found ourselves stretched thin. My father didn’t like to leave Ikey’s when there was work to do, but there always was, and he couldn’t be there every minute, not seven days a week. He opened the store in the morning and closed up at night, but my mother insisted he get out for a while in the middle of the day. Sometimes he’d just go across the street and make himself a sandwich and read the paper on the front porch. Or he’d head down to the Cayoga Diner or the Thomaston Grill for a hamburger or a chili dog, over conversation with men who’d been laid off. The tannery was down to one shift now, but so far it hadn’t closed its doors completely.

  Having overcome her reluctance to enter Ikey Lubin’s for any purpose, my mother now worked almost as many hours as my father. In addition to handling inventory, she took Uncle Dec’s advice and started making salads—just potato and macaroni and three bean at first—to fill out the meat case, and she was pleased when Borough housewives preferred hers to the vinegary offerings at the A&P. She kept her bookkeeping clients as well, and when my father came home around midnight after closing the store, she often would be staring at a ledger, her fingers rattling over the keys of the adding machine, a pencil clenched so hard between her teeth that the bite marks pierced right down to the lead. He’d urge her to call it a day, and she’d say yes, she’d join him in a minute, though it was often another hour or more before I’d awake to the whisper of her slippered feet on the stairs. Most days she left t
he adding machine set up on the kitchen table, so we cleared space around it when we ate, usually just one or two of us at a time, family dinners long since a thing of the past.

  Uncle Dec continued to be more of an asset than I ever would’ve predicted. He had an easy, flirtatious way with the Borough women, who stepped into the store as if determined to spend as little time there as possible, often leaving their cars running outside at the curb, but they couldn’t hurry Uncle Dec. “Janice,” he’d say, “I know you think I should cut my thumb off just because you’ve got your knickers in a twist, but I’m not going to.” To which this Janice would say, “What do you know about my knickers?” “Just what I hear,” he’d reply, “I could tell you, if you’re interested.” Well, I’m not, the woman would insist, but you could tell she enjoyed the exchange. “Slow down, Bev,” he’d tell the next impatient customer. “I know the stiff you’re married to, and there’s no reason for you to be rushing home all the while.” “You are the slowest butcher in all creation,” Bev would inform him, and then she’d be told that people in hell wanted ice water. When he finally handed these women their crown roasts, he’d say, “Thanks, beautiful,” whether she was or wasn’t, thought she was or knew damn well she wasn’t. “I live right above the store, you know. In case you want to visit me some night.” My father, overhearing such banter, wasn’t sure his brother’s behavior was appropriate here in the East End, but my mother disagreed. “He’s just making those vain, foolish women feel good. I know, because he treats me the same way, and it makes me feel good. I’d have him give you lessons if I thought you’d be any good at it.”

  “If they tell their husbands—” he began.

  “They’re not going to tell their husbands,” my mother said with the sort of conviction I knew he found disconcerting.

  Once school let out for the summer, I worked long hours, too. My mother’s, father’s and uncle’s duties were well defined, whereas I was used as needed, according to the time of day. Late morning and early afternoon were when my uncle got busy, and sometimes he needed me to clean the slicer or tidy the meat case or replace a roll of butcher paper or the spool of string. I could handle the basics at the meat counter, a pound of ground beef or half a dozen precut pork chops, while he took care of complicated orders and difficult customers. Early mornings, it was my father who needed help, so I manned the register while he took deliveries, then, after he returned, broke down the cardboard boxes in the back room and stocked the shelves and cooler cases, pushing the dated items up front, placing the ones just delivered in back, though this didn’t prevent Borough women from reaching in up to their armpits for the half gallon of milk farthest back. Late in the afternoon, I made small neighborhood deliveries on my bike, and in the evenings I’d help my mother prepare salads. By the end of the summer I was better at these than she was, because her attention was frequently divided between her bookkeeping chores and whatever was on the stove. One evening I came in and saw our largest sauce pot glowing bright red and dancing on the stove over high heat. My mother had filled it with water and then forgotten all about it, allowing the water to boil off. “Don’t,” she warned me when I started to chide her for such dangerous inattention. “Just because you’re invaluable doesn’t mean you’re…”

  “Doesn’t mean I’m what?” I said, amused that she’d begun a sentence she couldn’t complete.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted, her eyes suddenly moist.

  I wasn’t officially on the payroll, but the tips I received for deliveries gave me walking-around money, and my mother had opened an account at Thomaston Savings and Loan in my name—my college fund, she called it—into which she deposited, every Friday afternoon, the money I would’ve earned if I’d been an actual employee. She wrote all of Ikey Lubin’s checks, paying not just the vendors but also my uncle, my father and, when we could afford it, herself. “God only knows what the IRS will make of this,” she’d say after writing them out each week. “If they ever take us to court and put you on the stand,” she told me, “you don’t work for us.”

  “What if they make me swear?” I asked.

  “Call ’em any names you want,” she said. “Just don’t tell the truth.”

  THOMASTON CONGREGATIONAL’S HALL was located on upper Division Street. The church itself had been razed a decade earlier, but its bell tower, deemed to be of historical significance, still stood. Ironically, it was the bell that had caused the church itself to be condemned when the rotting timber that held it collapsed one Sunday at the conclusion of services, the bell crashing down with a sound so richly horrifying that several parishioners were converted in that ringing moment to Catholicism. A subsequent inspection concluded that the entire structure was unsound, so the Congregationalists found a site across town and immediately broke ground for a new church. Now permanently padlocked to prevent high school kids from climbing up into the belfry for drinking and sex, the tower stood alone on the lot, looking every bit as foolish as people had predicted it would. Though the Congregationalists planned to build a hall next to their new church, they’d run out of funds and were still using the old one for church-related socials and renting it for civic functions like the annual art show.

  The latter always occupied both levels of the hall. Upstairs featured the work of the adult artists of greater Thomaston County, while the basement exhibited student artists, grades one through twelve, who’d been coerced into submission by their teachers. That year, my last in junior high, I’d submitted a pencil drawing of Ikey’s that I’d slaved over for the better part of a week. I’d started out thinking it was going to be good, but the more I worked on it, carefully shading, darker here, lighter there, the worse it had gotten, though I couldn’t say how or why. My father said it looked just like the store, which made me feel good, and my mother agreed, but I could tell she harbored misgivings she couldn’t put into words either, which made me resentful. I’d hoped to be present when the awards were handed out, but I’d been needed at the actual store, so the following day was my first chance to see if the judges had given my drawing a prize.

  The sign on the door of the church hall said the student exhibit would remain up for the rest of the month, and I expected plenty of curious people would be milling around admiring our efforts, but the room I entered was empty. A few paper plates with cake crumbs and plastic Dixie cups from yesterday’s festivities remained on folding metal chairs. The room, windowless and low ceilinged, was lit by bright fluorescent bulbs. The outer walls, along with several temporary cork partitions set up in the center of the room, were crowded with first-, second-and third-place winners, plus honorable mentions for all twelve grades. I could see at a glance that my drawing of Ikey Lubin’s hadn’t placed in the eighth grade, and I probably would’ve left right then if I hadn’t noticed the bins marked OTHER along the far wall. These, too, were arranged by grade, and I found my drawing halfway down the stack. In the harsh fluorescent light it looked smudgy, and all at once I was sick with embarrassment.

  Technically the drawing wasn’t that bad, especially compared with those done by other boys in my class, most of whom had drawn New York Giant football players or stock cars. But there was something “normal” about their efforts that I envied. After all, what kind of thirteen-year-old boy drew a picture of his family’s corner market? I remembered Karen Cirillo’s remark—“You’re weird, Lou. You know that?”—and felt the full force of her judgment. Worse, I’d made our store look exhausted and drab. It was as if, without meaning to, I’d managed to document why more people didn’t shop there. Suddenly grateful it hadn’t won, I wanted desperately to remove the evidence from public view. The OTHER bin wasn’t going to attract a lot of attention, but even so I was about to fold up the drawing and put it in my pocket when a voice at my elbow said, “It’s good.”

  I hadn’t heard her come in but immediately recognized the speaker as Sarah Berg, the girl who’d been sitting with Gabriel Mock the Third at the movie. In the weeks that followed the incident I�
�d seen her in the corridors at school, always alone and frightened looking, as she was now. The elbow to the nose she’d taken in the scuffle had resulted in two black eyes, and now, over a month later, one cheekbone was still a faint, greenish yellow.

  “You should trust your lines, though,” she said, taking my drawing from me and studying it critically. Perhaps because I didn’t understand what she meant by “trust your lines,” the remark irritated me, and I wished I’d been quicker about hiding the drawing. “You shade everything. It’s as if you’re afraid of the white.”

  Her index finger traveled over the surface without quite touching the paper, pausing here and there so I could see what she meant. And it was true. I had shaded everything right out to the edges, and this was responsible for what I’d earlier identified as the drawing’s smudginess. Strange, too, because when I’d been working on it, the subtle variations of the shadings, rendered so carefully with the side of my pencil, were what I’d been most proud of. What I’d thought of as the drawing’s principal strength I now saw was its primary weakness. I’d been blaming myself for not working on it harder, for somehow betraying Ikey’s, but I suddenly realized another hour or two or four would only have made it worse. That this should be true was disconcerting. Working hard at something, I’d learned in school, usually paid dividends.