Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  Sarah saw flaws in this blueprint, though she never told him so. First, it shortchanged boys like Lou Lynch and Bobby Marconi, and maybe even places like Thomaston, New York. After all, it wasn’t just people in big cities who had big dreams. Wasn’t her father himself a perfect example? Though he considered himself an urbanite, he’d grown up, as her mother had delighted in reminding him back when they were still living as husband and wife, on Staten Fucking Island. The other problem was that he seemed to be confusing her life with his own. That is, the boy/man he envisioned her marrying was a better companion for him than for her. She’d made the mistake, last summer, of sharing her father’s advice with her mother, who immediately launched into one of her riffs.

  As an English major, she predicted, Sarah’s future husband would be not only a brilliant scholar, but also that rarer breed, a genuine arbiter of taste, which would manifest itself primarily in an unbounded appreciation of her father’s work. He might even make his reputation by writing about her father’s novel, which by then would have been published to glowing reviews and perhaps a prize, but which Sarah’s future husband thought deserved an even wider audience. Of course a man of such literary discernment would have a half-completed novel in his own desk drawer, and with trepidation he would eventually show this to her father, who would offer the kind of knowing criticism that can only come from a practitioner. Such advice would be difficult to implement because it would go straight to the heart of the matter, but in the fullness of time her husband’s book would be completely revised, and Sarah’s father would recommend it to his editor. This would lead the younger man to the most difficult decision of his life—whether to dedicate the book to his loving wife, the painter Sarah Berg (who’d of course kept her maiden name), or to his wife’s father, without whom, etc., etc. As her mother riffed, Sarah had called penalty flag after penalty, but she was having too much fun to quit, and Sarah secretly had to admit that her father’s scenario for her future probably wasn’t so very different from her mother’s satire of it.

  The problem was that her mother had little to offer beyond parody. She was both specific and thorough when advising her daughter about what to avoid in men, but seemingly uninterested in the subject of what she should be looking for. Her commandments all took the form of “Thou Shalt Not.” Her own vision of her daughter’s future was so vague as to appear thoughtless. She wouldn’t rule out Thomaston as a source for a future husband, but she conceded it was possible her father might be right—“Even a blind sow finds an acorn now and again.” Five-yard penalty—that she’d meet someone in college. Wasn’t it possible she’d already met him in Lou Lynch? Her mother had left Thomaston long before Sarah started dating, but she knew the Lynch family and thought they were nice enough. She had considered it odd that people didn’t take more note of Mrs. Lynch, who was so smart and funny, but then she laughed at herself for saying something so patently ridiculous. Smart and funny might be fine qualities in unattractive men, but they were the final nails in the coffin of any woman who didn’t happen to be drop-dead beautiful as well. And though there was no denying he was a genial fellow, she hadn’t been quite so fond of Big Lou. She’d just never taken to big, lumbering men who had to be taught how to work the cheese dip. Out of loyalty, Sarah made an exception to her rule of penalizing only insults to her father, to which her mother replied, “You’re right, that wasn’t very nice, but he is a bit of a doofus, isn’t he?” And was promptly awarded another hefty one.

  To convince her mother that she was wrong to think poorly of her boyfriend’s father, Sarah related the story Lou had told her early on about how, when he was little, some neighborhood toughs had taken him to an abandoned railroad trestle, locked him in a trunk and pretended to saw him in half, a cruel act which had precipitated the first of the terrible spells that had plagued his childhood. Actually, her mother had a vague recollection of the incident. The boy’s disappearance had precipitated a panic, everyone in town fearing that he’d been taken by some sick sexual predator. Sarah explained how it had been the middle of the night before Lou came out of his trance. Sluggish and confused, he’d known enough to follow the stream back the way they’d come, and there, waiting on the footbridge to take him home, was Big Lou. It was as if his father’d had some sixth sense and known right where to wait.

  Her mother had waited patiently for Sarah to finish, then said, “Sweetie, think about it. That’s what a dog would do. With all of that going on, what kind of man goes out and stands in the middle of a footbridge for hours just waiting for something good to happen?”

  “But he was right,” Sarah insisted, though her mother’s reaction did catch her off guard. Having heard the story from Lucy, she’d accepted not just his facts but also his conclusions. “He knew where to wait.”

  “Sweetie, think,” her mother replied. “What was he doing on that bridge? You’re saying he was there because he knew something, had some powerful intuition. But doesn’t the opposite make more sense? That he was there because he had no idea what to do? Instead of joining the search and helping his wife and the police, he left her alone to cope.”

  “That’s not what Lou thinks.”

  “Well, boys love their fathers.”

  Her mother remembered the Marconis, too. Whispers, mostly. Something wrong with the woman, wasn’t there? A little too much left rudder? (That phrase borrowed from another Sundry Arms man who’d served in the navy.) Disappeared for a while and then was magically back home again, put under some sort of house arrest for her own good? Talk about the husband, too, though she couldn’t recall what. She did remember the dark birthmark on his forehead, though, and the way he had of leaning toward you, too close, and cocking his head, like you’d just said something that made him want to punch you. Or, if you were a woman, maybe do something else. The kind of man who made you wonder what the something else would be like. Anyway, a strange couple, no doubt about that. What sort of kid would be the product of such a union? A pup bred from a rottweiler and a lapdog. At best a deeply conflicted human being, but who knew? Maybe the boy would resolve the conflict and be all right. At worst a volatile, unstable compound, in which case the boy would have to be put down.

  “What an awful thing to say!” Sarah blurted, feeling unexpected tears well up.

  “I’m just thinking out loud, sweetie,” her mother said. “Don’t pay any attention.”

  “But you never even met him,” Sarah said.

  “If you don’t want to know what I think, don’t ask.”

  That was the problem with her. What Sarah wanted was to know what her mother thought after she’d given it some thought. Just once, instead of ranting, it would be nice for her to reflect on something and maybe respond the next day. That would suggest that the subject Sarah had introduced actually merited serious deliberation. She realized, of course, that this ran contrary to her mother’s nature.

  “Besides,” she reminded Sarah, “you’ve only met the boy once yourself, so there’s no reason for you to get all red faced.”

  “I’m not all red faced,” Sarah insisted, though she could feel herself glowing with righteous indignation.

  Later that night her mother came into her room and sat on the edge of the bed. “Are you unhappy with Lou?” she asked, and Sarah quickly answered no, though she did sometimes wonder if maybe she was in love with the whole Lynch family, who were a package somehow greater than the sum of its parts, and she thought again of that South Shore family, the fifth chair at their round table that she’d so hoped might be hers. She was aware that her boyfriend, like his father, had a reputation for being a bit of a doofus, but people who believed this didn’t know him like Sarah did. Still, she wasn’t sure exactly what it meant for one boy to worship another as Lou did Bobby Marconi. Lou was prone to it, of course. He worshipped his father and, she knew, worshipped her, which was nice. Better than nice. If he thought better of people than perhaps they deserved and then proceeded to love them accordingly, didn’t she benefit as much as any
one? Even if her mother was right—and Sarah was by no means conceding the point—that Big Lou Lynch wasn’t entirely worthy of his son’s unquestioning adoration, so what? Didn’t that make it like God’s grace? Something you might not be worthy of, but would be a fool to reject?

  At some point, having failed to explain to her mother (or herself) precisely what was troubling her, it dawned on Sarah that perhaps she could draw her way out of this maze of conflicting thoughts and feelings. Why hadn’t this solution occurred to her sooner? For years now she’d been drawing her world and in the process discovering her deepest, truest feelings. Until she’d drawn Ikey Lubin’s, for instance, she hadn’t known that the Lynch corner market represented a yearning—for refuge, a small, safe place in the wider, hostile world. Since then she’d drawn all the Lynches, even Dec, and found in their portraits a deep need for, what? Stability? Belonging? Love? She knew her parents both cared deeply for her, yes, loved her, but they loved her separately, as discrete beings. She’d come to think of their affection for her as Berg Love, something very different from Lynch Love, which was expanded exponentially by the fact that its source was a family. Was it Lynch Love, she wondered, that she most yearned for? In the highly unlikely event that Bobby Marconi might one day fall in love with her, what sort of love would it be? From what she knew of his family, it certainly wouldn’t be Lynch Love. The boy seemed alone in the world. In her drawing of Ikey’s, she’d pictured him outside, about to enter. But what if he never did? Maybe she already knew he wouldn’t. Maybe her subconscious had told her right where to put him. Which, if true, might mean he’d never be able to offer what she craved most.

  But what if she had it all wrong and there was no such thing as Lynch Love? What if, in the end, Lou brought only himself? What if the context she’d identified was an illusion conjured out of need? What if Ikey Lubin’s was just a store, not a family, and the Lynches didn’t add up to more than the sum of their parts? Lou himself had admitted they weren’t a perfect family, that his mother had been furious when Big Lou bought Ikey’s, that in fact Tessa and her husband seldom saw things the same way. But to Sarah the salient fact was that they’d stayed together and worked out their disagreements. Mrs. Lynch might get angry with her husband, but she didn’t walk out on him and their son. Was that because she loved the man, or because she wasn’t, unlike Sarah’s mother, attractive enough to alter the flight path of small aircraft by sunbathing in the nude? It seemed an important question, yet Sarah had to admit she didn’t know the answer.

  Drawing Bobby might be dangerous. What if she learned something she preferred not to know? It could happen. It did happen. Every time she drew her father he came out looking like Ichabod Crane. Several times during the course of the summer she’d drawn her mother, a couple times at her suggestion. One sketch had featured her modeling a new two-piece bathing suit, and it buoyed her mother’s spirits when Sarah showed it to her. “Not bad for an older broad,” she said. “I was right to buy that suit, wasn’t I?” But another time Sarah had caught her unawares, early in the morning before she was completely awake. She’d been seated at the breakfast nook in her bathrobe, in front of a steaming cup of coffee, and in her right hand she held a cigarette, the long ash of which had begun to tip. That was the detail Sarah had been most proud of because it suggested how long her mother had sat there, staring off into space. In another second, the viewer couldn’t help thinking, the ash would fall. Her mother had taken one look at the drawing, another at Sarah, then gone into the bathroom and shut the door. Sarah expected the shower to come on, but it didn’t, and after a few minutes she inquired outside the door if everything was all right. “What you don’t understand,” came her mother’s voice, “is that one day you’ll be that woman.”

  In the end, Sarah decided to compromise. She’d draw Bobby Marconi, but not until the end of the summer, by which time maybe it wouldn’t be so important. After all, she knew from experience that moving down to the South Shore was never a clean, smooth emotional transition. For weeks Thomaston’s insular concerns continued to occupy her waking thoughts, her nightly dreams. Sometimes, even in early July, as she moved from one babysitting job to the next, from a summerhouse to the beach and back again, she was still imagining the Lynches’ comings and goings at Ikey’s and her father’s daily routine without her. But then gradually the world would turn on its fulcrum, and even though she still missed her father and the Lynches, her South Shore life would assume its rightful if temporary primacy and feel less like a seasonal aberration. She was always grateful when that happened, when her other life lost some of its power to haunt. It felt like setting down a big suitcase crammed with all the things you loved. You didn’t love them any less, but it was nice not to have to lug them around. And since this was the way of things, why not let nature work in her favor? By August the strong impression Bobby Marconi had made on her might fade. Maybe by then she wouldn’t even want to draw him. Maybe, if she let it, the spell would break itself.

  LABOR DAY

  LOU’S GOING TO BE one happy boy when he gets a look at you in September,” her mother remarked one morning in early August. Sarah had just stepped out of the shower and was toweling off, unaware that her mother, brushing her teeth at the sink, had been watching her.

  “He’s not going to see me like this,” Sarah assured her.

  “He won’t have to. Trust me.”

  When her mother was gone, she studied herself in the mirror with a mix of pleasure and apprehension. Never before that summer had she spent so much time in front of the mirror. It wasn’t vanity that drew her so much as wonder. Though well ahead of girls her age in emotional and intellectual maturity, she’d lagged cruelly behind them physically. She got her period late, and her figure remained boyish right through her junior year. Her mother had often reminded her that she, too, had been a late bloomer, but she’d always assumed she was just trying to make her feel better. She still felt certain she’d never have the same generous hips and breasts, though there was no longer any doubt that her mother had been right. The girl who greeted her in the mirror each morning seemed frighteningly new. What if her boyfriend preferred the skinny girl he’d kissed goodbye in June? And there was also the ridiculous notion she couldn’t seem to shake, that her belated physical maturity might somehow be related to Bobby Marconi’s unexpected appearance. She knew it was beyond crazy. Her father had made a game of the major logical fallacies and drilled her on them back in junior high, so she knew that just because B follows A, it doesn’t mean that A caused B. But it felt as if her body had been waiting for a reason to do what other girls’ bodies had done years before.

  Was it because she was so preoccupied with the girl in the mirror that Sarah didn’t fully register the striking changes in her mother? She’d noticed on arriving in June that she’d lost weight. “I needed to,” she explained, when Sarah remarked on it. But over the summer she lost even more, and her facial features began to look drawn. When she knew she was being watched or photographed, she smiled broadly, sometimes even mugged, but to Sarah it felt wrong, as if her mother were trying to remember what her smile had been like so she could imitate it. When the camera caught her off guard, she looked like the woman Sarah had sketched in her bathrobe, not so much unhappy as anxious, like someone waiting for the doctor to call with test results. Also, she didn’t appear to be sleeping well. Previous summers, once her mother stretched out on the sofa with a novel or a movie on TV, she usually zonked out shortly afterward. Sarah would find her the next morning with the book she’d been reading still in her hand, or the television snowy. This year Sarah would often awake at night to the sound of pacing in the front room. And had she really thought about it, there were fewer late-night knocks on the door. Were these things related? This question she would ask herself only later, by which time the answer was obvious.

  AS ALWAYS, Labor Day weekend ended their summer. To celebrate the renewed intimacy they’d spent these months nurturing, they usually took the train into New
York late on Friday afternoon and splurged on a hotel room, a fancy dinner and, if the summer had been especially good, a Broadway show. The city was typically empty, so there were lots of deals to be found. Besides, this made Sarah’s departure for upstate on Sunday that much easier. So this year Sarah was surprised by her mother’s suggesting they stay on the South Shore. Had she lost a client? She hadn’t seemed any more strapped for cash than usual, but maybe something had happened in the last few days or hours that she didn’t want Sarah fretting about. Then, for dinner on Saturday, she chose Nick and Charlie’s, a nearby waterfront restaurant she didn’t even like, claiming it was overpriced and full of tourists who didn’t know any better and elderly diners who liked food they didn’t have to chew. When Sarah reminded her of this, she just shrugged and said maybe she was getting old herself. That particular comment made Sarah wonder if she was still upset about that sketch of her in her bathrobe.

  When Sarah asked if they were going to dress up, as they liked to on their last night together, her mother said hell yes, and the prospect seemed to cheer her up a little, though she didn’t show as much skin as she normally did on this occasion. Looking Sarah over she announced that since her daughter looked every bit of eighteen, legal drinking age, they’d put it to the test by ordering her a cocktail. Out in the parking lot, as they backed out, Sarah noticed Harold Sundry leaving his apartment in a jacket and tie. “Did someone die, do you think?” she asked her mother, nodding at him. She’d never seen Harold dressed up before, and unless she was mistaken, he was wearing a special shoe that made his rolling limp less pronounced. At any rate, it seemed he was actually departing the premises, so something had to be up.