Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  “Bobby!” Nan cried, leaping to her feet when she saw who it was, her chair tipping over backward as she ran to him. Her eyes, he saw, were red and almost swollen shut. “I hate her!” she sobbed, burying her contorted face in his chest. “I hate her, I hate her, I hate her.”

  His only thought was how ugly she looked.

  IT HAD BEEN CLEAR from the moment her mother got off the plane in Albany that absence hadn’t made her heart grow fonder, of her father or even her daughter. In fact, she was spoiling for a fight. Once her suitcases were loaded in the trunk and they’d turned toward Thomaston, she’d made one hateful statement after another, her husband, for the most part, suffering this in silence. By the time they got home, she’d turned her anger on Nan, calling her vain and shallow and spoiled. “If you weren’t such a selfish brat, we’d all be living together someplace nice.” Last spring, she reminded her daughter pointedly, they’d had a decent offer on their Borough house. But no, Little Miss Special had to finish her senior year with her friends. Why? Because she was scared she wouldn’t be the prettiest girl, or even the fifth prettiest, in some new school. In Atlanta, her daddy wouldn’t be anybody special, and neither would she. “Well, you know what, little girl? That’s life. Get ready for it.” Disappointments, she continued, were right around the corner, legions of them. The college sorority she’d have her heart set on? Forget about it. That handsome Sigma Nu? He wouldn’t know she was alive. The new convertible she was expecting as a graduation gift? Think again. And that’s only what they’d lost by not selling the house when they should’ve. For the far more significant losses she could thank her beloved father, who was more mouse than man. Did Nan have any idea what he’d made them? Poor. That’s what they were now, so get used to it, little girl.

  This narrative was far from coherent and broken up by sobs and fury, but Noonan was to hear it several times over the course of the evening. As he listened to it at Ikey’s, he felt sorry for the Lynches, who were clearly being treated to the same story all over again, Nan having been there for about an hour by now. Determined to punish both her parents, she’d left home without telling them where she was going. “Let them think I froze to death in a snowbank,” she said darkly.

  “Aw, you don’t mean that,” Lucy’s father said. But in truth he seemed truly shocked by her recital. Noonan couldn’t tell which surprised him more—that anyone would say such things about people as important as the Beverlys, even if the speaker was a Beverly, or that Thomaston’s long-time first family, who lived in the finest house in the whole county, should exhibit the same resentments and marital recriminations as other people. It was almost as if they were no better than anybody else.

  “Mind your own business, Lou,” his wife said.

  “I ain’t sayin’ it’s my business,” Big Lou told them all. “I’m just sayin’—”

  “Well, don’t,” Tessa said. “Don’t say a thing. Pretend you don’t have an opinion.”

  Dec Lynch came in then, smelling of aftershave, his black hair slicked wetly back. “What the hell’s all this?” he said, taking in the situation at a glance.

  “Pretend you don’t have an opinion either,” Tessa told him.

  “I don’t,” Dec said. “I’m pretty sure I’ll disagree with Biggy when all the facts are known, but other than that…”

  Noonan was afraid Nan would deliver the narrative once more for this new listener, but fortunately all the sobbing had given her the hiccups. “I hate my mother,” she said. “She’s ruining my life.”

  “Oh, that,” Dec said.

  “I mean it,” she said, and hiccupped loudly.

  “Yeah, I know, Cupcake,” he said. “But try to keep things in perspective. In a hundred years, we’ll all be dead.”

  “I’m going to go home and take a whole bottle of aspirin,” Tessa said when the door closed behind her brother-in-law. “Whatever you kids decide to do, you better do it quick.” She pointed outside, where it was now snowing so hard they could barely see the streetlamps.

  OBVIOUSLY, the thing to do was to take Nan back home, but she was adamantly opposed to that. “I’d rather freeze to death in a snowbank,” she repeated. They’d recently read Ethan Frome in honors, and the story must’ve taken firm root in her mind. Lucy, taking a tip from his mother, decided that he should get Sarah home while the roads were still passable. Noonan went with him to get the car, leaving Sarah to hold Nan’s hand until they returned.

  “Poor Nan,” Lucy said. “I feel sorry for her.”

  “I guess.” Maybe he had high standards when it came to parental discord, but to Noonan this dispute seemed pretty mundane. After all, Mr. Beverly hadn’t cocked his fist at Mrs. Beverly, hadn’t called her a dumb cunt or broken open her suitcase and strewn her intimate apparel out the car window on the drive home from the airport. As far as he knew, Nan’s father didn’t have another woman on the side. And while he didn’t doubt that her mother’s fury was real, at least that anger was evidence that she was in full possession of her faculties. If you sat her down in front of a clothes dryer, she wouldn’t lose her train of thought while watching her own bras spin around. Before leaving Ikey’s he’d tried to suggest as much by reminding Nan that other people of her acquaintance had it worse. She’d grudgingly allowed that this might be true, but then remarked that this made them lucky, because they were used to it, whereas her parents had thoughtlessly insulated her against every sort of unpleasantness and now, at the eleventh hour, were unfairly piling their misery on her shoulders. Couldn’t they at least have waited until she was safely off at college?

  Was it possible Lucy actually sympathized with this absurd argument? Did he really feel sorry for her? If so, Sarah’s father had a point. Gullibility and innocence, unmitigated by even a smidgen of healthy cynicism, might not represent everything that was wrong with America, but it was a grotesque combination.

  He tossed his laundry bag in the back of the Lynch station wagon and climbed in front with his friend, who put the key in the ignition and then just sat there. After a moment he broke into his goofiest grin. “Remember how we used to surf my dad’s truck?”

  God, Noonan thought. Gullibility, innocence and nostalgia. “I remember breaking my wrist.”

  Lucy nodded seriously, embarrassed by this part of the story. “I should have called the turn.” Then, after a moment: “Things were simple back then, huh?”

  Before girls? Is that what he was getting at? Or something else?

  “Don’t you ever wish things just stayed the same?” Lucy said. “That we didn’t all have to go off to college and—”

  “I can’t wait, actually,” he answered, trying to cut this off.

  “What if it means we never come back? What if we forget?”

  “Forget what?”

  “All of it.”

  “I imagine we’ll remember the important stuff.”

  “What if it’s all important?”

  “And there’s a quiz?”

  He meant this as a joke, of course, and Lucy did grin sheepishly, as if at his own foolishness. But Noonan couldn’t shake the feeling that his friend was serious and, for reasons he himself couldn’t begin to imagine, had concluded that every single detail of their lives so far was of vast importance. That there would, in fact, be a quiz.

  WHEN THEY PULLED UP in front of Ikey’s, Nan and Sarah got into the backseat, and Lucy drove slowly downtown. The snow was already halfway up the wheels. Nan was calmer now, her hiccups having subsided, and she suggested they all go out for pizza, but Lucy said the station wagon wasn’t all that good in snow, and he didn’t want to get stuck. Noonan said pizza sounded good to him, which cheered Nan up a little. When they pulled up in front of the Rexall, he trotted upstairs with his laundry while the others waited in the car, though Sarah, looking worried, was waiting on the landing when he came back down.

  She took his hand as she had that night he’d given her a lift home on the Indian. “Be nice to her tonight.”

  “I thought I w
as supposed to break up with her. Tell her we should just be friends.”

  “Not tonight.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know, Bobby. Just not tonight.”

  Was it because her hand was in his that he leaned forward and kissed her? Or because it was dark there on the landing, the single bare bulb meant to light the stairs having burned out months earlier? Or because Lucy had just shared his profound wish that things would never change. There, Noonan thought when his lips touched Sarah’s, they just did. Or was it because he’d been wanting to for so long? He couldn’t say, but one thing was certain. The kiss surprised him a lot more than it did Sarah, who now gave him a maddening smile.

  “God,” he said, stepping back. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why?”

  He had no ready answer for that, since he wasn’t, of course, sorry at all.

  “Actually,” she said, “you’ve been working up to that for a while.”

  “I have?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “Because I’m a girl. It was nice.”

  “But—”

  “Go take care of Nan. She needs you.” She was pushing him down the steps now, toward the street. “And don’t look like you did something terrible. It was just a kiss.”

  BY THE TIME Lucy dropped Nan and Noonan at the Cayoga Diner and then drove on to take Sarah home, the snow was already up to the top of their boots. They’d stopped first at Angelo’s, where there was a handwritten sign taped to the door: CLOSED FOR BLIZZERD. Indeed, the only restaurant open was the diner, and to Noonan’s astonishment Nan had never been there, though that made sense once he thought about it. This was the domain of rough, disgruntled men her father had laid off, who blamed him for poisoning their water and causing the cancer that ran through their diminished lives. “My mother would be furious if I went there,” Nan said, forgetting for a moment that she hated her, but then her face brightened. “Let’s go!”

  They had the place to themselves, so they slid into the corner booth where they could watch the street fill up with snow. “Yuck,” Nan said when she saw the big plate of greasy fries drenched in brown gravy that came with their burgers, though she was soon lapping them up. Living so recklessly seemed to have improved her spirits, but in no time she was back to recounting her tale of woe for—what?—the fourth time? “Oh, I forgot to tell you this part,” she’d say to propel it forward, her face pink with recollected outrage, despite the fact that she had told him, twice. Confident he could recite the complete narrative himself, Noonan allowed his mind to drift back to the dark landing. That Sarah considered what happened there “just a kiss” was as unnerving as the kiss itself. He’d long ago recognized that Sarah either had no aura or had found a means of cloaking it, but this reaction was taking ambivalence too far. He’d kissed her when he shouldn’t have, and in doing so betrayed both his best friend and his own girlfriend, if that’s what the girl chattering at him across the booth actually was. At the very least, kissing Sarah should’ve clarified matters. Instead he was more confused than ever. He couldn’t tell if she’d wanted him to kiss her, nor if she wanted him to do it again. On the one hand, she didn’t look like she did, particularly. But neither did she look like she didn’t. She hadn’t slapped him, or pushed him away. She’d even said it was nice, though this was hardly a ringing endorsement.

  The most infuriating thing was that he couldn’t remember whether she’d kissed him back. He hadn’t known he was going to kiss her until he did, and somehow at the critical moment managed not to pay attention. It was a little like reading a passage in a book, then realizing your mind had wandered and that you couldn’t remember a single thing about what you’d just read, though your eyes had passed dutifully over every word. If the kiss had been a paragraph, he’d have gone back and read it again to see if anything rang a bell. But it wasn’t a paragraph, and nothing did.

  The kiss did have one unforeseen and deeply mysterious consequence, however. As he sat in the Cayoga Diner listening to Nan retrace the day’s events, he felt a softening toward her. Back at Ikey’s, she’d truly seemed ugly in her rage and sorrow, but now her beauty was largely restored and she was once again the prettiest girl in town. It made exactly no sense to Noonan that kissing one girl should make another more attractive, though right then a lot of things made no sense. Maybe it had to do with the fact that the girl he’d kissed and wanted to kiss again, paying closer attention next time, had specifically asked him to be nice to this other girl, and Lucy—the friend he’d betrayed by kissing the girl he wanted to kiss again—had implied as much himself. By granting their wish, that is, he could make amends for his betrayal. Grant them that much, at least. Because, okay, maybe Nan was vulnerable. She’d had what was for her a rough year. Sarah and Noonan were veteran observers of marital dysfunction, and Lucy’s parents had struggled mightily for a long time to keep Ikey’s afloat. But to Nan economic uncertainty and parental discord were brand-new. They’d thrown her for a loop, and why not? Sure, she’d been coddled and protected and encouraged to be self-centered, but she wasn’t stupid. Though most of the books Sarah’s father had assigned for honors were subversive to everything she’d been raised to take comfort in, she’d read them diligently, with more wide-eyed innocence than outrage, and occasionally had interesting things to say about them. Take away the trappings of her Borough upbringing, and she was more daring than Lucy, which admittedly wasn’t saying much. Still, if Lucy and Sarah wanted him to be nice to Nan tonight, he would.

  By the time they finished their burgers and had several cups of coffee, the street outside was deserted except for the groaning snowplows. Larry, who worked the grill and liked chatting with his customers when it was slow, came over and, without invitation, slid into their half-moon booth, confident of a warm reception but not offended in the least when Nan scooted all the way around to Noonan’s side. He hated to see good food go to waste, so he finished the last of their soggy fries. He was wearing a gravy-stained T-shirt so thin that his nipples and belly button were plainly visible underneath, and Nan regarded him with undisguised wonderment. What he thought he’d probably do tonight, he confided, was close up early and curl up on a pallet in the back room so he could open on time in the morning, assuming it had stopped snowing by then, the streets were plowed, people could dig themselves out of their driveways, downtown had electricity and all sorts of other assumptions that would probably prove contrary to fact. He seemed determined to explain not only his intentions but also the reasons that buttressed them. He apologized again for having to close early, then sat there smiling benevolently until Noonan said they’d better be going.

  Outside, the first thing they noticed was how quiet it had become. The snowplow laboring two blocks up the street was making the only sound, and even that was muffled by the thick blanket of snow. Finally, it seemed, Nan was talked out. They walked in the plowed street as far as the Rexall. There she stopped and looked up at the tall dark windows of his flat, her expression a mix of fear and confusion. Finally she said, “How do you do it?”

  He assumed she meant how did he live up there in such a horrid place, all by himself. But apparently not.

  “How do you not care?” she elaborated. “Your parents. They don’t love each other, right?”

  Actually, he’d never discussed them with Nan, so he assumed she must’ve gotten this from Sarah or Lucy.

  “How can you stand that?”

  “You just decide,” he said, surprised by his own answer.

  “You mean you pretend you don’t care?”

  “No, I mean you decide you don’t care, and then you stop caring.”

  She looked doubtful, as if he’d just told her the secret of flight was making sure you had plenty of elevation, that you should climb to the top of the tallest building you could find and then just take the leap. “Do you think I could do that?”

  “I don’t know. It took me my whole childhood. You’d have to want to.�
�

  “I wonder if I could just not care for the rest of tonight,” she said, apparently excited by the idea. “Or the rest of the week.”

  “And then go back to caring? I’m not sure that’s how it works.”

  “But maybe if they saw I didn’t care, they would.”

  “I don’t think it works that way either.”

  “Well, I’m going to try. I just decided. I’m not going home tonight. I want you to show me more places like the diner.” She took a deep breath. “I want you to show me the whole West End.”

  Noonan was tired and would rather have called her father and tell him where he could collect his daughter, but then she put her arms around his neck and said “Please” in the pouty little-girl voice she seemed to think was all she needed to get whatever she wanted.

  “They won’t believe this when I tell them!” she said when he’d agreed.

  “Oh, they will,” Noonan predicted, “and they’ll blame me.”

  They followed the snowplow down Division Street. When they passed Berman Court, he pointed out the second-floor apartment where he’d lived as a boy, before his father got on full-time at the post office. For some reason Nan found it hard to comprehend that both the Marconis and the Lynches had lived there, that he and Lucy had originally been West End kids. He couldn’t tell whether she believed that people who started out in places like Berman Court always stayed in them, or that some cosmic screwup had landed them there, a mistake belatedly discovered and rectified.

  Next she wanted to see the Hill, where the Negroes lived. “There’s nothing there,” he told her. “It’s just a bunch of houses. There won’t be anybody out in this.”

  “I still want to see it,” she said.

  So they trudged the half-dozen blocks through deepening snow. When they got to Pine Street, they had to stop because the plows hadn’t come here and likely wouldn’t before morning.