Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  “Kayla,” I say, and we stand in just this attitude until the bell rings over the front door, and this releases the spell. Kayla’s fury vanishes without a trace as my mother and Sarah step inside. I meet Sarah’s eye, and she takes in at a glance that we’ve just experienced what she and I refer to as a Kayla moment.

  The girl wasn’t with us very long before we realized the dark recesses in her personality contained the glowing embers of some past experience, embers that under the right conditions could ignite into a conflagration, only to disappear again so completely that you’re not exactly sure what you just witnessed. At first these flare-ups seemed to happen when she hadn’t gotten her way, but that explanation doesn’t square with all the other times when her will is thwarted without consequence. Rather, the infrequent episodes seem to occur when for some reason Kayla decides she isn’t loved, or that someone else is loved more.

  Whatever the cause, they have alarmed us sufficiently to discuss them with a social worker from Albany who specializes in children, and she alarmed us further by asking just how determined we were to proceed with Kayla’s legal adoption. “You don’t know what this child has suffered,” she said. “And you may never know the extent of the damage done.” Sarah doubts that Kayla has been sexually or otherwise physically abused, though there’s no doubt that the love she craved desperately has been withheld, until now. “People get broken,” the social worker concluded. “Sometimes they can be repaired, sometimes not. You might do everything right and this could still end badly.”

  “How will it end if no one does anything?” Sarah asked. She wasn’t trying to be confrontational or to deny anything the woman had said, but I’d heard that determination in her voice before and knew what it meant. The social worker herself seemed to suspect, because she then turned to me. “What do you think, Mr. Lynch? Because I can tell you this much for a certainty. You and your wife had better be on the same page.”

  What did I think? Right then I was thinking about my father, specifically his habit of treating everyone with courtesy and consideration, of how he used to stop on lower Division Street and converse genially with old black men from the Hill whom he knew from his early days as a route man. His kindness and interest weren’t feigned, nor did they derive, I’m convinced, from any perceived sense of duty. His behavior was merely an extension of who he was. But here’s the thing about my father that I’ve come to understand only reluctantly and very recently. If he wasn’t the cause of what ailed his fellow man, neither was he the solution. He believed in “Do unto Others.” It was a good, indeed golden, rule to live by, and it never occurred to him that perhaps it wasn’t enough. “You ain’t gotta love people,” I remember him proclaiming to the Elite Coffee Club guys at Ikey’s back in the early days. Confused by mean-spirited behavior, he was forever explaining how little it cost to be polite, to be nice to people. Make them feel good when they’re down because maybe tomorrow you’ll be down. Such a small thing. Love, he seemed to understand, was a very big thing indeed, its cost enormous and maybe more than you could afford if you were spendthrift. Nobody expected that of you, any more than they expected you to hand out hundred-dollar bills on the street corner. And I remember my mother’s response when he repeated over dinner what he’d told the men at the store. “Really, Lou? Isn’t that exactly what we’re supposed to do? Love people? Isn’t that what the Bible says?”

  So when the social worker asked if Sarah and I were in agreement about Kayla, I surprised myself by siding with my mother and saying we’re very much on the same page, that we were determined to love this child, that there’d be no half measures.

  Which may be why my mother and I have been doing better of late. At first I thought maybe my stroke had softened her, because for the entire time that Sarah was gone she could barely contain her anger and disappointment at what I’d allowed to happen. Perhaps the stroke raised in her mind the possibility that she might, despite her advanced age, outlive me. But more likely her softening toward me reflects my own softening toward her. I go over and give her a hug now, and she clings a beat longer than she used to, and when we release each other she looks me over almost fearfully, as if wanting to make sure I’m okay. I give her a smile to suggest that I am, realizing too late that my crooked smile isn’t necessarily my most reassuring feature, though this time it seems to do the trick.

  Kayla’s now pleading with Sarah to let her undrape this new work. “Please!” she begs, and Sarah says of course she can, now that we’re all here, letting her know she’d been wrong before, though Kayla’s far too happy to absorb that particular lesson. Again she hops up onto the stool, and with a flourish that would make a game-show hostess blush she announces, “Tada!” and off comes the cloth.

  At first glance it looks like Sarah has simply copied her old drawing of Ikey’s, this time using colored pens. The reds, greens, blues and purples of the new work, compared with the black and white of the old, give the impression of a color photograph placed for contrast next to a version done in black and white. But then I begin to notice the differences. Despite the welcome familiarity, the man by the cash register isn’t my father, it’s me, and the woman at his side is Sarah, not my mother. Over at the meat counter, where Dec stood in the old drawing, there’s Owen. I notice Sarah’s left enough space next to him to add Brindy later, if she returns, or someone else, if she doesn’t. Seated in a thronelike chair in front of the meat case that contains current, updated salads is my mother, looking more like the woman in the first drawing than she does in real life, a kindness she seems to appreciate. In this drawing, too, there’s someone on the threshold, about to enter, but instead of Bobby it’s Kayla, who in the next instant will complete our lives. There’s little to suggest her race, or how else she might differ from us Lynches. We are each of us drawn with a few deft lines that are more suggestive than descriptive. A stranger wouldn’t necessarily recognize me in the man at the register or my mother in that chair. We alone know who we are.

  Just so there’s no confusion, Kayla, continuing her role as hostess, gives us a tour of the drawing. “Ikey Lubin’s,” she proclaims with another sweeping gesture, before becoming specific. “Lou-Lou, Mama, Uncle Owen, Grandma Tessa.” She pauses here for dramatic effect, then identifies herself with an index finger and says, “Me.” She’s proud, and also challenging any rival interpretation. It’s she and no one else who’s about to enter our lives. Anyone who sees this differently need speak up now or forever hold his peace. No one does. A quiet group, we’ve come together in the present to recall the past and share a vision of the future.

  “Dear God,” my mother finally says, mock-disgusted, because of course tears are rolling down my cheeks and I’m sniffling audibly.

  AN HOUR LATER I have Ikey’s to myself. Owen has left to meet Brindy and the couples’ therapist they’ve been seeing once a week for the last few months in the hopes of ironing out their differences before giving in to the impending divorce. Why my son would submit to this particular counseling is beyond me. Brindy has freely admitted to the affair she’s been having with the West End man and shown no inclination to give him up. According to Owen, the woman who’s counseling them seems more concerned with his reluctance to show anger or even resentment than with Brindy’s behavior, as if to suggest that Owen has driven her to whatever she’s done. “Do you understand how hurtful your silences can be?” she asked at their last session. “Do you understand that stubborn silence can be a form of aggression? That you dehumanize Brindy by refusing to enter into the discourse, to articulate what you want from her? That your silences are a serious obstacle to true reconciliation? Brindy hasn’t given up on your marriage, Owen, but your silences tell her that you have. There’s another man in Brindy’s life now, Owen. Do you realize you haven’t even told her you want her to break it off with him? Do you realize how hurtful such coldness can be? If you want Brindy to be faithful to you and your marriage, you have to verbalize your feelings.”

  I study my son, or rathe
r the man in Sarah’s new drawing, and something about it conveys his genetic ambivalence. No doubt this marriage counselor reminds Owen of every well-intentioned teacher who ever tried to draw him out. His strategy was always to wait them out, and I doubt very much that it’s changed. Eventually, all those teachers gave up and went away, and I’m sure he thinks this counselor will, too. In their last session it was Brindy, not Owen, who snapped under her relentless questioning. “Look at him,” she told the therapist. “He’s not going to talk. Can’t you see that?”

  I can’t help wondering if the space Sarah’s left next to our son may one day be occupied by the therapist herself, because after that last brutal meeting, she’d asked Owen to remain behind, and surprised him by taking his hand and apologizing for being so rough on him. She was just doing her job, she said, trying, for his sake as much as Brindy’s, to achieve a breakthrough, to get him to at least acknowledge what he wanted. Surely he must want something, she added, giving his hand a squeeze. “I’d figured her for a lesbian,” he told us sadly, later that evening. “But I guess not.”

  What I suppose I like most about my wife’s new drawing is that its purpose, across the decades, is the same as her earlier drawing. She drew us—her and me—together in that one, which was how I’d known we were. Now she’s telling me that we’re still together, that she’s returned for good. I’m no longer on probation and probably never was. She has restated her vows, in a sense. In my darkest hour I imagined myself lost in Sarah’s Bridge of Sighs, and now she’s given me a work of art I can truly live in. This is no Ghost Ikey’s, no parallel world. It is our lives.

  “Are you okay with it?” Sarah asked before driving Kayla home and starting on our dinner. “I thought about putting your dad in. I mean, I feel his spirit in the store every day. It would’ve been the whitest of lies.”

  “No,” I told her. “You did exactly right. And putting Kayla where Bobby was…” But I promptly stopped, unable to continue.

  “That felt right, too,” she said, raising her index finger to touch Bobby in the old drawing, a gesture that would’ve troubled me before but doesn’t now, and not, I hope, because he’s gone. When the phone rang that morning two months ago, I’d expected it would be Sarah, telling me her train had been delayed, or that she and Kayla had decided to stay in the city another day. Instead it was a reporter from the principal Albany newspaper wanting my reaction to the unexpected death of Robert Noonan, the painter and former Thomaston resident who’d died of an aneurysm in New York. She’d called our local paper, where someone remembered that Bobby and I were friends once upon a time and that I could most reliably be reached at Ikey Lubin’s market. Bobby had died, the reporter filled me in, during a dinner celebrating his triumphant new show. He’d simply slumped forward in his chair and was gone.

  I, too, reach up to touch his figure on Sarah’s old drawing. Asked what he’d been like as a boy, I told the reporter how we’d surfed my father’s milk truck, that Bobby had been fearless and liked to shut his eyes going into the curves, that he wanted what was coming down the road to be a surprise, even if it meant he got hurt. That story must have struck a chord, because it was picked up in several other obituaries, including the one in Time. “Do you think that’s what artists have to do if they want to be great?” the reporter asked me, and I told her I didn’t know about that, only that Bobby had been brave, that I’d admired his courage and still did. Then she asked if I knew why he’d left Thomaston. Was it because he’d nearly killed his father in an altercation, as she’d heard, or had he left the country to avoid the draft? Was it true he’d gotten a girl pregnant and maybe ran away to avoid marrying her? I quickly made an excuse, telling her the store had gotten busy and I had to hang up. Was there anyone else in Thomaston she could talk to? Anyone who’d known Mr. Noonan well? No, I told her. No one.

  Bobby. Hearing that he’d died brought home to me that I’d spent most of my life saying goodbye to him: first when his family moved from Berman Court, and then again a few years later when the Marconis moved from the East End to the Borough. All of this I recounted in my story, and were I to continue it, I suppose I’d have to describe the day Bobby left Thomaston for good, how his mother, looking pale and frightened, had appeared unexpectedly at Ikey’s. My father and I were alone in the store, but it was my mother, her old confidante, that Mrs. Marconi had come to see, and my father agreed, like he always did, that if anybody could help, it would be my mother. “They don’t have to sit outside,” he told her. All of Bobby’s brothers were crammed into the family sedan that was parked outside, the oldest at the wheel. “They can come in and have a soda. I wouldn’t charge ’em or nothin’.”

  So in they all trooped and selected their free sodas from the cooler, while I went across the street to fetch my mother. When we returned, she shooed the boys back outside, then led Mrs. Marconi to the table by the coffeepot, where they sat down. My father looked as if he hoped we might be sent away as well. It had been a rough spring: Sarah’s mother dying, her father’s disgrace, the persistent rumor that Nan Beverly hadn’t returned to graduate with the rest of us because she was pregnant and now what had happened between Bobby and his father. All of it had sorely tested my father’s optimism, his deep conviction that things would work out all right in the end. “It’s like everything’s gone crazy,” I heard him say to my mother the night before, his voice once more coming up through the heat register. He didn’t want to hear any more bad news now, and you had only to look at Mrs. Marconi to know that was all she had.

  “The doctor says I could die,” we heard her whisper to my mother, who was holding both of her hands in her own, and I remembered the time I’d come home from school and seen them like this in the Marconi kitchen. “What should I do?”

  And my mother said, “I’ll go with you.”

  “He’ll be so angry.”

  Hearing this, I looked at my father, and he at me. Clearly, the reality of Mrs. Marconi’s circumstance hadn’t fully registered. Her husband was in critical condition in the hospital, being fed through a tube, but out of long, sad habit it was still his wrath she feared most, even when her pregnancy might kill her.

  “It’ll all be over,” my mother assured her. “He’ll have to accept it.”

  Frightened though she was for herself, there was something else that scared Mrs. Marconi even more. “They’re blaming Bobby,” she said, as if this were the height of unfairness. “What if they arrest him?”

  Actually, that morning we’d heard the police were just waiting for a judge to issue the warrant. “We’ll take care of Bobby,” my mother told her.

  “How?”

  “Lou will see to it,” she said, and Mrs. Marconi looked first at my father and then me as if trying to decide which one of us my mother was referring to, or whether either of us could perform such a miracle. “You go home,” my mother told her. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  My father’s line. Their roles had reversed. I glanced over at him and saw him thinking the same thing, and he seemed dubious, even though doubting was her job and not his.

  Once Mrs. Marconi and her brood drove away, my mother went over to the till and took out the money we always kept under the drawer and held it out to me, but I had money of my own saved up and didn’t want Ikey’s. When I hesitated, she said, “I’ll do this if you can’t.”

  “No, he’s my friend,” I told her. I’d only hesitated because I wasn’t sure Bobby wanted me or anybody else to help him. When I heard what had happened, I’d gone over to his place and knocked on the door. There’d been no answer, but I had the feeling he was inside and didn’t want to talk to me. That door was never locked, so I could’ve gone right in, but in fact I didn’t really want to talk to him either, mostly because I didn’t know what to say. “Besides, Sarah can come along.”

  “No,” my mother replied, sternly. “Just you.”

  THE PLAN WAS for me to take Bobby to Lake George, not Albany. There he could catch a bus to Montreal. Under
the circumstances, I imagined it would be a somber journey, and I couldn’t guess what we’d talk about. Would he tell me he was glad he’d done it, that his father had it coming? Or would he break down and say it was a terrible, awful thing? Would he do what until now he’d steadfastly refused to and admit how badly he was hurting? But I think I knew better than that, that he’d be the same Bobby of his surfing days, just as I was the same Lucy Lynch, as was demonstrated when I again knocked on his door above the Rexall, my eyes already brimming. Though I hadn’t told him I was coming, he seemed to be expecting me. He’d gathered his things into one small quadrant of that cavernous space, and his clothes were crammed into a duffel. When I told him what we’d be doing, he just nodded, and I knew we wouldn’t talk at all about what had happened.

  The drive to Lake George normally wouldn’t have taken much more than an hour, but I took a wrong turn and got lost, then found the right road again before getting lost twice more. By then we were laughing like a couple of fools, Bobby saying I had to be the worst driver of a getaway car in the history of crime. I offered to let him take the wheel, forgetting his right hand was in a cast, and that got us laughing even harder. At the bus station he didn’t want to take the money I’d withdrawn from the bank, but we both knew he had to, and finally he did. He told me to tell Dec he was sorry about the Indian, sorry he’d made such a mess of things in general, and I didn’t tell him he hadn’t because we both knew better.

  “Remember the footbridge?” I said, mostly for something to say. “How I never had to pay when I was with you?”