Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  Then one night that delicious recklessness nearly cost them their lives. They’d gone to a rowdy roadhouse near the Pine Mountain summit, and though they hadn’t drunk a lot, maybe two or three beers each, they’d lost track of the time. Roaring back down the mountain well past Tessa’s curfew, Dec had tried to pass a whole line of slow-moving vehicles on the narrow, two-lane blacktop. They’d sailed by about half of them when Tessa saw the truck round the curve below, its headlights blinding them. Both of them had known instantly that they weren’t going to make it. The truck driver laid on his horn, but Dec kept the Indian right on the yellow centerline and Tessa put her forehead between his shoulder blades and closed her eyes tight, waiting for the impact that didn’t come. When she opened her eyes again the road was clear. Dec, she realized, hadn’t even slowed down, and they howled with joy and adrenaline all the way back into town.

  That night, though, alone in bed, Tessa remembered what hadn’t really registered fully at the time, that in the split second they were between the truck and the sedan they were passing, when her eyes were closed, she felt how close they’d come, the tug of both vehicles on her knees, and then, finally, she was afraid. Shivering in the dark, she tried to calm down by telling herself that in the morning, in the clear light of day, the terror would evaporate, but it didn’t, not even a little, and so she came clean with her father, telling him not only that she’d been seeing Dec Lynch but also that things had gotten out of hand and she didn’t know how to stop.

  Dec was then living on the third floor of a rooming house in the Gut, and her father paid him a visit. It being morning, Dec was still asleep, and he came groggily to the understanding that his girlfriend’s father was seated on the edge of his bed holding a gun and telling him before he was fully awake that he was never to see his daughter again. “I got one of those myself,” Dec told him, nodding at the gun. Very matter of fact, not at all threatening, just a tidbit of information the other man might find interesting. Tessa’s father replied that he didn’t care what the boy had or didn’t have, just so long as he agreed he’d never have his daughter. According to Tessa, Dec hadn’t been particularly frightened by the handgun. Though he had no idea what life held in store for him, he doubted he’d be killed by a pale insurance agent who didn’t know enough to flip the safety off when threatening somebody with a gun. But the occasion did give Dec the excuse to step back and assess the wildness that came over himself and Tessa whenever they were together. “Could be we’re not that good for each other,” he said the next time he saw her, more than a little worried about how she’d take this admission. Maybe she’d conclude that, having had his way with her, he was now tossing her aside. She might just go home and get her father’s gun, and if she ever pointed it at him he’d by God take that seriously. Being shot dead by an angry woman squared better with his overall sense of how life might one day end for him, so he was glad when Tessa, too, confessed to misgivings about the volatility of their relationship. Maybe cooling it wouldn’t be a bad thing.

  Later that year she met Lou, and her first thought had been: these boys are brothers? Dec was quick witted and sharp tongued. He never actually smiled but wore a perpetual smirk, and his talk was layered with sarcasm. By contrast, Big Lou Lynch smiled from ear to ear every time she walked in the door, and his deliberate speech radiated straightforward kindness and goodwill unleavened, at least intentionally, by humor. Where Big Lou always thought things were bound to get better, his brother, whose cynicism ran deep and wide, assumed that in the end things would go badly, though perhaps not so badly for him as for others. If he believed in anything it was his ability to land, catlike, on his feet. “My brother,” he warned Tessa when he heard they’d started dating, “will land on his fat ass half the time and on his pointy head the other half.”

  Tessa’s parents had been no more enthusiastic about Lou than they’d been about Dec, but her father realized he couldn’t go around pointing a gun at every boy his daughter showed an interest in. Lou, unlike his brother, was by reputation sober and industrious, and he didn’t seem the sort of boy who’d pressure his daughter into having sex, as Dec, he suspected, had already succeeded in doing. And Lou was clearly crazy about Tessa, so her father decided his best bet might be to let them go on about their business of being young and stupid, in the hopes that one day she’d wake up, see her new boyfriend for the big doofus he was and wonder what on earth she’d been thinking. He never truly understood, she told Sarah, how deeply she’d been touched by her husband-to-be’s simple, good-natured optimism, his reluctance to say an unkind word about anyone. He neither had a devious bone in his body, nor recognized duplicity in others. If some smooth talker conned him out of a quarter, he’d just shrug and say “How come he just didn’t come out and ask me for it? I’d have loaned him a quarter.” Tellingly, even then Tessa had felt compelled to explain the world to him. “I don’t think he wanted to borrow it, Lou. He wanted to own it free and clear. Later, if you felt foolish for giving it to him, that was a bonus.” To which Big Lou just shook his head, sadly acknowledging that he guessed there were people like that. In fact, he regarded his own brother as exhibit number one when it came to con artists. “Don’t have nothin’ to do with him unless you want to lose your shirt,” he advised Tessa, unaware she’d already lost that and a lot more. “I’m going to check back with your old man in about twenty years,” Dec told her when she and his brother got engaged. “See if he still thinks he pointed that gun at the right Lynch.”

  Over the years Sarah came to understand that Tessa’s confidences served a dual purpose. Most of what she revealed to her daughter-in-law she’d never told another soul, and Sarah sensed what a relief it was to finally disburden herself to another woman. But she also realized that when Tessa talked about her husband and her marriage, she was, by extension, also talking about her son and his marriage to Sarah. Father and son were that much alike. Tessa was offering her not just the wisdom of long, difficult experience but also the comfort that derived from realizing she wasn’t alone, that in the end there was nothing to be done about Lou and his father, who weren’t likely to change. It had taken a while for that last part to really sink in. When Tessa told her about the brief, nearly tragic fling with Dec, Sarah had not only been relieved to learn that Dec had preceded Big Lou but also imagined her husband might be comforted as well. After all, he couldn’t very well blame his mother for something that had happened before she’d even met his father. But when she indicated this, Tessa just smiled and gave her a look that suggested she still had a lot to learn. “Tell him if you want, but it’s not the way he thinks. The chronology won’t matter. He won’t want to think about me and Dec together, period.”

  Here, too, Sarah understood that her mother-in-law was talking about sex. Tessa talked only indirectly about her married life, but with Big Lou there’d clearly been no motorcycle involved, no thrilling abandon. He would’ve been driving one of those slow-moving vehicles she and Dec had flown by coming down the mountain. Her husband, Tessa let on, didn’t dislike sex, but was embarrassed by it, by its necessity, by how other people seemed so obsessed with it. Wanting to be a good husband, he recognized that he had duties in this regard, yet the physical act itself seemed to confuse and obscure his feelings for his wife rather than clarify or intensify them. While he’d grown up on a farm and knew there was nothing more natural than sex—and, when his son was born, understood even more fully its benefits and wisdom—he seemed surprised to learn he was expected to continue the practice once they’d achieved their goal.

  Sarah was even more circumspect with her mother-in-law about her own married life, partly because it was private but also because there was no need. Tessa understood Lou as well as anyone and how he both was and wasn’t like his father. In fact, Sarah grew increasingly certain the only reason Tessa confided as much as she did was to help her understand that if her husband didn’t always “lean into the curves” it had nothing to do with her. His devotion would reveal itself in other
ways, and his commitment would never waver. Their marriage would be happy, and Sarah, unless she was expecting ecstasy, would suffer few regrets.

  “Did you have any regrets?” Sarah asked after Tessa’d explained about Dec, and was surprised by her one-word answer.

  “Never.”

  “You were never tempted? Afterward?”

  “Oh, sure,” she admitted. The flame of their brief passion guttered, then flared up at odd moments, mostly in memory, never entirely extinguished. Even years later, when Dec came to work at Ikey’s, she’d feel that old jolt of electricity in a glancing, accidental touch. Whenever this happened, Dec would invariably grin or even wink at her, as if to say Yeah, I felt it, too. But it was more than either of them wanted, and for perspective there was also the memory of that truck’s headlights and blaring horn.

  Perhaps because they kept these conversations secret from Lou, Sarah felt guilty, almost as if she were committing an infidelity, but she was also grateful for every one of them. She felt like she’d been given not just a friend but a second mother to replace the one who’d bled to death in the snow. Better yet, Tessa was able to provide things her own mother hadn’t—sound advice about life and the living of it, the benefit of a wise woman’s experience. Her mother hadn’t been wise, of course. That was the point. She’d leaned into the curves right to the end, long after the road turned into the long, dull straightaway of Harold Sundry. Neither Tessa nor Sarah would’ve characterized their marriages as such. They’d both loved their husbands more than anyone even suspected, and in return had been adored. But each of them had walked through an open door, then heard it slam shut behind them and the mechanism lock. While neither regretted her decision, knowing the door was locked was disconcerting just the same, as was the fact that their husbands, if they’d heard that same slam and click, seemed untroubled by it. If anything, knowing there was no turning back was reassuring to them. They never felt trapped, never wondered about the mountain road not taken, never felt as though some important part of them was withering as another flourished, never were greedy for what they didn’t have and would never experience.

  Tessa was grateful for the love she’d been given but also understood how it had trapped her. She’d never had the opportunity for what Sarah was doing now, escaping that loving trap, even temporarily. “Go,” she’d said when Sarah started, unnecessarily, to explain her need to get away for a while. “Find yourself. In fact, keep an eye out for me. I’m out there somewhere.”

  Which meant that if she gave up and returned home just because she’d lost the knack of being alone, she’d be betraying Tessa as well. No, she’d give it another day here, at least, and then maybe a few more in the city. If all this was foolish, well, maybe something less foolish would occur to her. She ate a bowl of cereal standing up and then went to bed hoping to feel more optimistic tomorrow.

  IN THE MORNING, however, her sense of futility had, if anything, deepened. Fortunately, this wasn’t the first time she’d suffered from low spirits, which was why she never went anywhere without her sketch pad. It was as a girl, living across the street at the Sundry Arms, that she learned it was easier to draw than to think her way out of confusion. How low she’d been that last summer until she finally gave in and drew Bobby and how easily, how joyfully he’d leapt from the blank paper. Not that it had relieved her anxiety, of course, or solved the fundamental problem. She’d been in love with two boys, in all probability because each offered her something different, something she needed, or at least she thought they did. Indeed, clarifying the problem should have deepened her crisis. Instead she’d felt intense joy in knowing the truth, even if it was an impossibility: I love two boys. Its corollary was even more thrilling: That’s who I am. The kind of girl who can love two boys. Every other painting and drawing she’d done that summer had been suffused with that confidence. She saw everything more clearly for the simple reason that she knew who was holding the brush or pen. Her mother had recognized her transformation in a glance. “I’m so, so sorry,” she’d said. At the time Sarah thought she was sorry about what the drawing of Bobby had revealed, but now she knew better. She’d been worried about the gift itself and the potential for misery that accompanied it.

  Locating the sketch pad in the big sleeve on the side of her suitcase, she left the Sundry Gardens and didn’t realize she was heading back to the Arms until she was halfway across the street. At this early hour the courtyard was oddly peaceful, with only the sounds of sleepy children and televisions on low leaking out the open doors and windows. A low, cinder-block wall surrounded what had been the swimming pool, so Sarah sat down there and opened her pad to a fresh page. She did a quick sketch of the window box outside her mother’s former apartment and felt a little better, if no less foolish, for the effort. She did a couple more sketches on the same page, then got up and moved down the wall to frame the window box within the rusty swingset. That somehow made both objects more interesting. It might be the basis for a painting later, when she returned home. If she returned. (“You want the LIRR,” the woman had insisted.) She started a new page. She’d only been there for half an hour, but could feel in her blood and busy hand that she was, well, getting warmer. Again, the child’s game. Was she losing her mind? Wasn’t it enough to just sit here and let her pen fly over the rough paper, instead of indulging a fantasy that had already proved futile? On the other hand, what could she lose as long as she acknowledged that it was a fantasy?

  Sarah was only vaguely conscious of the passage of time, of doors opening and closing, of children emerging into the courtyard, of snatches of adult conversation. “She doin’ down there?” “Same woman as the other day?” “She crazy?” There was also the sound of a tricycle with big plastic wheels thumping over cracks in the pavement to the cadence of adult instructions: don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t. Eventually she became aware of someone watching her, close by, and she turned and saw it was the lanky black girl who’d returned her smile the day before, the one who should’ve been in school. She was standing awkwardly on one leg, regarding the sketch pad and Sarah herself with a kind of terrible longing.

  “Can you teach me?” she said.

  Sarah started to say no, felt the word forming on her lips, and saw the girl accept her answer even before it was given and start to leave. Where had she seen that mixture of longing and immediate resignation before?

  “Of course I can,” she said, though in truth she was none too sure what she meant. That drawing was a skill that could be taught? That she herself had been a teacher most of her adult life? That she could spend the rest of the morning showing the girl a few basics, maybe even go out and get her an inexpensive sketch pad and a starter pen-and-pencil set? Or was she suggesting the girl could actually learn, even in a place like this, if she really wanted to?

  “Really?” the girl said, not quite sure she’d heard right, her eyes now big and round.

  Really? That’s what the Mock boy had said, in exactly that same way. “Really? You would? With me?” In fact, she hadn’t even said yes. What she’d said was that she’d ask her father, then warned him not to get his hopes up, because she was never allowed to go out with boys. At the time she thought she was being kind by allowing him to believe the only impediment was her father, that she would’ve gone with him to the matinee if the choice had been hers, but it wasn’t. It had nothing to do with him personally. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, or that what he was proposing wasn’t permitted because he was a Negro. He’d been expecting one kind of no and she’d given him another, a no that had some yes in it, and didn’t include the humiliation he’d expected. But a moment earlier the look of yearning and surrender on his face was the same as the one on this girl’s in the split second before Sarah changed her mind. How awful it must be, she thought, to ask for something you knew you’d be denied. How much courage it took to ask anyway, instead of just slinking away and adding this new refusal to the stew of countless others.

  “When?” the girl sa
id, thinking perhaps this was where the no would come.

  Sarah turned to a fresh page in the sketchbook and motioned for her to sit down on the wall. “How about we start with that window box? The one by the blue door.”

  The girl took the pad and balanced it on her knee like she’d seen Sarah do, then took the pen almost fearfully.

  “Like this,” Sarah said, showing her how to hold it. “Don’t worry about making a mistake. We’re going to draw it over and over.”

  “What comes first?”

  “You’re the one holding the pen. That means you get to decide.”

  Sarah couldn’t remember seeing anyone more terrified. Finally, the girl drew a tentative horizontal line and immediately looked up at her, as if to ask if the time had come already to give up.

  “Good,” Sarah told her. “But maybe you’d better tell me your name.”

  IT WAS KAYLA. And her daddy? “Well, her daddy is anybody’s guess, but even if you guessed right, then what?” This was according to Miss Rosa, the small, round black woman who’d spoken to Sarah the afternoon before. “Her mama? Got the HIV. You know where and how. Whole lass year, this girl been bouncin’ from one relative to the nex’ till they brung her to me. Bringin’ me children now, like a cheap toy the wheel come off of. Seventy-three-year-old woman. You tell me,” she said with a hint of bitterness that made Sarah like her even more. “You tell me what Jesus thinkin’ this time, ’cause I doan know.”

  If asked to guess Miss Rosa’s age, Sarah would’ve said late fifties, not seventy-three, and she’d been living here for more than thirty years. In fact, she’d been the Sundry Arms’ first black resident. Ten years ago, after she’d been “feeling poorly,” her doctors had found a tumor the size of a grapefruit in her abdomen, but she’d prayed to Jesus and the tumor shrank and then disappeared altogether. Since then Miss Rosa just left everything to Jesus—money worries, health problems, all of it—and He provided, and not just for her either. She began to use her apartment as a used-clothing distribution center for young neighborhood mothers, most of them single. Many worked as hotel maids or at other menial jobs on the more prosperous North Shore or in the city while their own mothers, forty-year-old grandmas, looked after their kids. That’s why Miss Rosa’s apartment was stacked floor to ceiling with all manner of clothing and shoes. She’d traded in her double bed, which she didn’t need now that her husband was deceased, to make a little more room. Then people started bringing her other things, too, furniture and food and broken toys, and suddenly she was full to bursting.