Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  Gradually, even I came to understand that the purpose of the map had metastasized. Somehow I’d expanded my definition of cancer to include any malignancy, any poison, any wickedness, until what I had was a map of cruelty, of violence, of human frailty, a map so full of personal significance that it was devoid of objective meaning. It was Sarah who helped me realize it had become like the drawing I’d done of Ikey Lubin’s as a boy, shading everything so that the longer I worked on it, the darker and murkier it became, and ultimately even the thing I loved most—Ikey’s itself—would have disappeared in the prevailing blackness. This was precisely what happened to my enlarged map, the black pins engulfing my entire town. Absent white space, there could be no pattern, no meaning, no significance, except that I’d succeeded in mapping my own despair. I didn’t come to this difficult realization all at once but slowly, patiently, over long months as Sarah gently coaxed me back to my life, just as my father had done after my spells.

  What occurs to me tonight, though, is this: sure, it’s the business of adults to rescue children, but what sort of grown man needs to be repeatedly hauled back into his own life? Wouldn’t it be kinder to cut him loose and let him finish his journey? What I told Sarah over supper tonight—that I’d have eventually returned on my own, even if she hadn’t been there to help me—may not, this time, be true. Before encountering my father, I’d been deeply content to make that journey across the Bridge of Sighs, and even now I feel the gentle downward slope of the smooth stones beneath my feet, the gentle and insistent pull of gravity. Keeping my promise to my father not to drift away? That had been uphill, hard. And had he not been there to remind me of my duty…

  AFTER A TIME, Sarah joins me in the den. I swivel in my chair, and she places another chair right in front of me so we can face each other, knee to knee. Much like an adult would sit with a child, it occurs to me.

  “I’ve been talking to your mother,” she says, which doesn’t surprise me. “She thinks you should have another scan.” Sarah knows I won’t like this idea. How many MRIs and CATs have I endured over the years, and to what end? My spells may resemble strokes, but in fact they are not, as the doctors mostly agree, as the scans all show. But this was a bad episode. Three full hours I was away, and while it seemed like only a few minutes to me, I now know that from the time my wife joined me in the art room and spoke my name, a good half hour elapsed before my return was complete. So if a scan will put their minds at ease, I’ll submit to yet another.

  “Is she furious with me?” I ask, because I realize that like everyone else, she’d seen this spell coming.

  “Of course not,” Sarah tells me. In her opinion I’ve always sold my mother short, which of course is true, and always has been.

  “She must’ve said something,” I venture, though in truth I’m not sure I want to hear her take on today’s events, not that her conclusions would be any harsher than my own.

  “She thinks there’s a part of you that never got out of that trunk,” Sarah says, adding, unnecessarily, “the one those boys locked you in.” My mother means this observation compassionately, I know. She’d like to absolve me of blame, and not just for Italy, but it’s an absolution I cannot accept. What those boys did to me was cruel, yes, though in fact they’d played the same prank on other kids, and I was the only one to suffer lasting consequences. My mother has always considered that a watershed event in my young life, one I never got over, but tell me who hasn’t, in one fashion or another, been victimized or found himself imprisoned in this life? Wasn’t Jerzy Quinn, the boy most responsible for what happened to me, himself the victim of a childhood far worse than mine? And what about the rest of his gang? In junior high we East Enders believed they were too tough, too cool, to attend our dances at the Y, but the truth was much simpler and more cruel than we understood. How old was I when it finally dawned on me that they simply didn’t have the price of admission? They congregated out of sight at the footbridge—their footbridge! S—within hearing of our pounding music, making a gift of their mocking laughter to those of us who had the necessary fifty cents. They joined us in the gym only after our parents had closed the cashbox and flung the doors wide open. Is it any wonder they came in angry and stomped their way through what little remained of the proceedings? Unlike us, their families lived in close proximity to the toxic stream, ensuring that they would grow exotic tumors later in life, or else they died in Vietnam, while those of us who danced, or nervously looked on, went off to college. I knew every one of those boys in Jerzy’s gang, and, except for Perry Kozlowski, they’re dead, every one of them. Jerzy himself was the last to go, as always the toughest one, still grinning like a wolf, or so I imagine, when the Jaws of Life pulled him from the wreckage of that fatal head-on. I wept when I read his obituary and wept when I stuffed it into the envelope my wife addressed to Bobby in place of her letter. So tell me, how is it that I’m the one who’s damaged, who isn’t right?

  Breaking the silence, Sarah says, “When you were coming out of your spell, you kept trying to tell me something about Lou-Lou.”

  After a moment I say, “He was there.”

  “On the bridge?” Clearly she’d prefer to be wrong about an intuition as strange as this one. Over supper I’d explained, trying to make light of it, how I believed I’d actually entered her painting, that I was crossing over the bridge when I heard her calling me, but I’d left out the part about my father being there. I’d wanted her to believe it was she who was responsible for my return. For some reason it seemed important for her not to feel that her power to restore me to myself had been diminished.

  “I think he’s disappointed in me,” I tell her, realizing as I do how crazy this sounds. “I mean, he would be, if he was still here.”

  “Your father was always proud of you,” Sarah replies. “You know that.”

  Yes. I know this. I do. But I also know his pride was sustained by his refusal, as my mother put it, to know what he knew. And so, taking a deep breath, I do what I should’ve done weeks ago and open my desk drawer. “Bobby never received your letter,” I say, handing it to Sarah, and her expression, as she takes it, is, I think, the saddest I’ve ever seen on a human face.

  Dear Bobby. Though for weeks I’ve repressed its very existence, I discover I can now recite the letter verbatim. Remember that drawing I did of Ikey’s back before we met, how I put you at the front door about to enter? Well, now the tables are turned and it’s we who are on your doorstep. Lou and I will be visiting Italy for two weeks in May. Rome first, then Florence. Venice we’re saving for last. We’ve booked a room at Hotel Flora, which we understand is small but nice. We arrive by train on the 17th of next month. Will you invite your old friends across the threshold and into your world? Will you show us your studio and what you’re working on? Will you guide us through your city, its Titians and Tintorettos? You remember Lou’s mother Tessa, I’m sure. She’s on record as believing there’s too much water under the bridge for you to be interested in a visit from us. But Venice, I reminded her, is a city of bridges ( forgive me, ponti). Surely, I told her, you’ll be glad to tell us which ones lead to you. Either way, you’ll settle a bet. Yours, Sarah.

  Yours, Sarah.

  I feel my throat constrict at this familiarity. Sarah. No need to add “Lynch.” Dear Bobby will know. Forty years? Twice forty? He’d still know.

  And the postscript. When you see me, you’re not to comment on the fact that I’m no longer the skinny girl you knew. I will ask you to believe that my hair is really the color you see. Of course you’re probably a sad, broken-down specimen yourself. If so, I will pretend not to notice.

  And the postpostscript: Do you still have the drawing I did of you? The one where you’re not completely ugly? Of course not. One of your many wives will have destroyed it. Which, I wonder?

  A love letter. Is there another way to interpret it? That playful, intimate tone is one Sarah hasn’t used since we were young, and even then she employed it only with Bobby, which means that
in writing to him she became that girl again—sporting, flirtatious, her whole life before her. Who does she miss more, I wonder, the boy she once loved or the girl who loved him?

  I don’t doubt my wife’s faith, innocence or devotion to me, her husband. It’s not that. But the human heart, well, it inclines this way and that without permission, ever unruly, ever wayward. It’s this I’ve always wished otherwise, the flawed human heart. My mother’s, Bobby’s, Sarah’s and especially my own. Was my father’s heart flawed as well? I suppose it must have been, though to me it always beat strong and true.

  When Sarah finally looks up, her eyes are full.

  “I steamed the envelope open,” I confess, feeling my cheeks burn.

  “I wondered,” she says. “It wasn’t like Bobby to ignore us.” To ignore her, she means. I can see myriad emotions warring within her, but the one that triumphs is relief, and at this my heart sinks even further. At last she says, “Are you going to tell me why?”

  “I was afraid,” I explain, but I can see she doesn’t understand, and I’m visited by an unwanted memory of the day I peered in through the smoky window of the passenger train and saw on Sarah’s lap the drawing she’d done of Bobby, the same one she alluded to in her postscript. I knew immediately what it meant, but in a heartbeat I’d hidden both the drawing and its significance away where it would trouble me no further. I think I’ve remembered it no more than half a dozen times in all the years since.

  “Afraid you’d fall in love with him,” I manage to tell her. “With Bobby. Again.”

  CATHEDRAL

  HUGH WAS SEATED on the grand terrace of his hotel, his bags piled next to the balustrade, when Noonan finally arrived, an hour late. “Dear God, look at you,” he said.

  Noonan had been at work for hours and was covered with paint. There was even some in his hair.

  “What time is it?” Lichtner had asked when he shook him awake at dawn.

  “Time for you to go home,” Noonan told him. “Get up. I need you out of here.”

  The man sat up on the sofa, blinking at his watch in disbelief. “This is so fucking cruel. I’ve only been asleep for two hours.”

  Ignoring his complaints, Noonan busied himself setting up his spare easel. Outside, the newly risen sun was a dull red ball, the same size and shape as the dome of the Salute. A Turner, he thought, if there’d been a Turner handy to see it.

  “I could go get us some coffee,” Lichtner said wistfully after he’d pulled on his clothes, but Noonan was already going through his supplies and hadn’t even responded. If the fool had volunteered to fetch him a big tube of cadmium yellow, he might’ve taken him up on it, but coffee? A few minutes later Noonan heard the door slam in the courtyard below.

  “I’d just about given up on you,” Hugh told him now.

  “I started something new this morning,” Noonan said. “A better painter would’ve stayed in the studio.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’ll be the best painting in the show.”

  “A whole new canvas? That you can finish in time?”

  “It’ll paint itself.”

  Hugh grinned. “Excellent. Now can we lose the self-portrait?”

  “It’s not a self-portrait. It’s my father.” There, he thought. You said it. And he realized it didn’t matter that Hugh knew; it was no longer a secret worth keeping and probably never had been. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The new one comes first.”

  He already had a title: Sarah at the Window. He’d dreamed the painting whole last night and woke up weeping with gratitude. It had happened before—dreaming a painting—though maybe only ten times in his entire life. The first time he wasn’t even a painter yet, had never picked up a brush. It would be the better part of a decade before he’d understand that such dreams were paintings trying to emerge, or, if not an actual painting, the feeling that would be contained within the painting, its source and center on the canvas. Sometimes a single powerful dream would result in half a dozen canvases, a sequence of seemingly unconnected works, though he himself always recognized an emotional linkage, despite being powerless to articulate it. The good news was that he’d never felt much need to explain. When the fit was upon him, as it was now, he had but one need, and that was to paint.

  “Your father,” Hugh repeated. “Well, I did say it wasn’t you, didn’t I.”

  Noonan consulted his watch. “You’re going to miss your plane.”

  “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?” Right on cue, the waiter arrived with Hugh’s bill, which he signed with a flick of his wrist. “Walk me to my taxi?”

  Noonan supposed that was the least he could do, so he grabbed the larger of his friend’s bags, and the two men headed down the terrace to where several water taxis bobbed.

  “So,” Hugh said, “will you go back to it? After this new one?”

  Noonan couldn’t help smiling. Yesterday he’d advised him to burn the damn thing; today he was afraid he wouldn’t return to it. “It’s possible,” he said. It was hard to explain how something could be important one minute, irrelevant the next. “Once I know this new one’s safe.”

  Hugh shrugged, accepting what he must, as he’d always done, because what else could he do? “Well, you’re behaving like a lunatic this morning. Fortunately, for you that’s a good thing. Are you going to be okay?”

  Strangely enough, Noonan thought he was. He wouldn’t have been given this new painting if he weren’t well enough to paint it. Perverse logic, maybe, but there you were. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Is there anything you need? Anything I can do?”

  Yes, Noonan thought. Go.

  Hugh smirked, as if he’d just read Noonan’s thoughts, and stepped into the taxi. When Noonan handed the bag to the driver, Hugh, instead of offering to shake hands, sighed, consulted his watch and said, “You might as well come on board.”

  What? Was the man insane? Did he expect Noonan to accompany him to the airport? He had a fucking painting to get back to.

  “We’ll run you over to the Giudecca,” Hugh said, then gave instructions to the driver in Italian. “It’ll save you ten or fifteen minutes’ waiting for the vaporetto.”

  “Really?” Noonan said, stepping aboard. He could’ve kissed him. “I’d hate for you to miss your flight.” But he didn’t say this until they were under way and there was no chance for Hugh to change his mind. This was pure selfishness, he told himself, but in truth he didn’t care and never had. Not when there was canvas waiting and paint to put on it.

  NOONAN WAS SEVENTEEN when he had the first of what he would come to think of as his “paint dreams.” He’d just moved out of his parents’ house in the Borough and into a cavernous space above the old Rexall drugstore downtown on Hudson Street. At one time it had been partitioned into small offices, though the interior walls had come down and the whole floor gutted right down to its wood planks. There were tall, soot-blackened windows in both the front, which overlooked the street, and the rear, with a view of the back alley and an abandoned glove shop. The place was unheated and dirty, but the building’s owner, a friend of Dec Lynch’s, had let Noonan have it for nothing so long as he didn’t throw parties or drag in bums off the street. His friends envied him having his own pad until they saw it, after which they couldn’t fathom why he preferred sleeping on the cold, hard floor to a nice, soft bed in his parents’ home. Only Sarah had immediately seen the beauty of it. After spending the better part of an afternoon scrubbing the rear windows, she’d set up an easel there. Noonan would later come to think of it as his first studio, though it had been someone else who’d painted there. One thing he was sure of: if he hadn’t moved out of his parents’ house he never would’ve dreamed the cathedral, and if he hadn’t had that first powerful dream, he never would’ve become a painter.

  The cathedral was more vivid than any dream he’d ever had, including the ones that involved sex. Lacking narrative, it had felt more like a vision. He couldn’t even be sure how long it had lasted. In drea
m time it had felt like hours, but he knew that in reality it had probably lasted no more than a minute or two, as the sun streamed in on him through the tall, clean windows, causing his eyelids to flutter and him to swim toward consciousness. He remembered being aware that he was asleep, of both wanting and not wanting to wake up. Awake, he could share his vision, and he didn’t want to be the only one to see something so beautiful; but if he woke and called to somebody—maybe Sarah, who’d love it—the wondrous cathedral might disappear. Something told him it would, so he wandered from room to room, breathless, on the verge, simultaneously, of joy and tears.

  Cathedral? That was as close as he could come to characterizing the place, which he sensed was not of this world. Its vaulted ceilings were impossibly high, the arched passageways leading between its chambers numberless. It would take years to explore them all, and he wanted nothing more. Not food or drink or love or anything he’d ever tasted in his life so far. In each new chamber he was torn between wanting to stay where he was, to commit every detail to memory, and the even stronger impulse to move on, quickly, from one breathtaking wonder to the next, to discover where each new passageway led, to map the entire cathedral, if something so vast could ever be charted. Though all one building, it was the size of a city, of twenty cities. You could spend a lifetime going from room to room and maybe never again revisit the one you were currently in. Some of the passageways were so narrow he had to turn sideways, others so low he had to crawl on his hands and knees, but each new chamber was bathed in a golden light so soft and radiant that he could feel his heart contract within his chest at its terrifying beauty. Remember this, some inner voice kept whispering. Never, ever forget.