Bridge of Sighs

  At the restaurant Sarah’s misgivings grew. There was nothing her mother loved more than a grand entrance—men’s heads turning when she passed, their wives noticing, too—but today she seemed uninterested, which was just as well, Sarah thought, because, so far as she could tell, the only heads that turned when they crossed the dining room were appraising her. The two of them were escorted to a table on the deck that had a RESERVED sign on it, though the hostess deftly whisked it away. “That was lucky,” Sarah remarked, imagining that whoever had booked the best table in the restaurant must have canceled at the last moment. Her mother smiled vaguely, as if puzzled by her logic, and when she ordered herself a martini and her daughter a rum and Coke the waitress didn’t even give Sarah a second glance. A young couple was seated at an adjacent table, and Sarah’s mother, taking a camera from her purse, asked the man if he minded taking a picture of them. This was also a tradition. Her mother kept all their last nights in a scrapbook.

  While they waited for their drinks, her mother surveyed the deck rather impatiently, and Sarah once again was visited by the vague sense she’d had off and on all summer, that her mother was waiting for something, a knock on the door, the telephone to ring, something. When the drinks came, she drained half of her martini as if she’d been crawling all day through the desert and just arrived at a watering hole she’d feared was a mirage. It seemed to do the trick, though, because she took a deep breath, regarded Sarah directly and said, “Well, sweetie, I don’t know how to do this, so I guess I’ll just say it.” Unfortunately, Sarah didn’t hear what came next because just then she saw Harold Sundry talking to the hostess, who was pointing, she could’ve sworn, toward their table. “Sarah?” her mother said. “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes,” Sarah lied, trying to scroll back.

  “Well, I wish you’d say something.”

  And now Harold was rolling toward them, sweating profusely in his dark wool, hopelessly out-of-season sport coat, his shirt collar buttoned so tight that his face was beet red.

  “There you are,” her mother said.

  “Sorry,” Harold said. “I had to stop for gas.”

  “Well, sit down. This isn’t going well.”

  “I warned you,” Harold said, looking right at Sarah, who, already confused, felt a strong impulse to deny that he’d issued her any warnings whatsoever. They’d barely spoken half a dozen words all summer. Marry? Had her mother used that word?

  “It’s okay, honey,” Harold said, speaking to her for real this time. “I’m not such a bad fella once you get to know me.”

  For the rest of her life Sarah would be thankful she didn’t say what was on the tip of her tongue, that she already had a boyfriend, that she was too young to marry, that in any case her father wouldn’t stand for anyone except a graduate student in English from Columbia University. She’d actually opened her mouth to say these things when the facts reconfigured themselves in her head. No, her mother wasn’t angry with her for growing up and becoming a woman, nor had she arranged for her to marry Harold Sundry as a punishment. How could such a ridiculous notion have taken root even for a second? Was it because the truth was only slightly less bizarre? Sarah turned to her mother, but she refused to come into focus. There was a loud bang—a single shot to a snare drum—that seemed to originate inside her skull. Then nothing.

  “WELL, that’s an evening I won’t soon forget,” her mother said when they were safely back in the apartment. She touched Sarah’s cheek with the back of her fingers. “You’re still clammy. You should lie down.”

  “I’m okay now.” She felt suddenly incapable of uttering anything that wasn’t completely false. She felt yet another lie already forming on her lips when the phone rang.

  “She’s okay, Harold,” her mother said. “Nothing’s happened in the two minutes since we saw you last.” Sarah recognized this tone of voice as the same one she’d used on her father. “I will. I will, Harold. Drink a beer and relax. Oh, one won’t kill you. All right, go to a movie then. Do whatever. Go across the street and tell Elaine, see if she faints. I know you feel bad. Sarah does, too, and I feel worse than either of you, believe me. You’re absolutely right about that, Harold. It is a crummy way to begin. No, she likes you fine. Plus you’ll grow on her, just like you did on me. I didn’t like you at all in the beginning, remember? Well, I didn’t, but now I do. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay? No, I haven’t changed my mind. Don’t forget what we talked about, what you said you were going to work on. Being needy, right. Now’d be a good time to start. No, breakfast isn’t a great idea. Tomorrow’s our last day together. I will, Harold. I promise. Just as soon as I get back from the city.”

  She hung up, came over and took her daughter gently by the chin. “Oh, sweetie, I hope you aren’t going to come out of this with two black eyes.”

  That snare drum in her head, Sarah now understood, had been her forehead hitting the table. According to her mother, she’d been out only a few seconds, but when she’d awakened she was flat on her back staring up at a ring of faces, her mother’s in the foreground, Harold Sundry’s among the others, looking like he hoped she’d be able to pick him out of the lineup. Though bathed in perspiration, she otherwise felt fine and in fact was hungry and would’ve liked to have eaten something. But an ambulance had been called and her mother thought she should get checked out. Harold followed the ambulance in his Buick, and afterward they’d returned to the restaurant for her mother’s car. “I’m famished,” Sarah told them. “Can we order something?”

  “No way I’m walking back in that restaurant,” her mother said. “Ever.” Back at the Sundry Arms, she ordered a pizza. “Was it really that much of a shock?”

  “No,” Sarah said. Liar. “I mean, sort of. You hate marriage. You’re always making fun of people who get married. You say they’re delusional.”

  Her mother made a pained face. “Oh, sweetie, that was just me talking. You know how I love to talk, right? Please tell me you don’t believe all the dumb things I say.”

  There didn’t seem to be a polite answer to that question, or even a way to know if it was a question. “So, you want to be married again?”

  “I don’t know,” her mother admitted. “I had this revelation back in the spring, thinking about how great it was going to be, you coming for the summer, and suddenly I realized I really hadn’t been myself since your brother died. I mean, if that hadn’t happened, I’d probably still be with your father. It was losing Rudy that made me so desperate, made me want to be a whole different person. Deep down I think I’m really more like the woman you remember, back when we were all together, than the person I am now. Losing your brother made me realize how tired I was of the person I’d become, but now I’m even more tired of this new person. Oh, don’t cry, baby. Please don’t.”

  It was the mention of her brother that had done it, of course. How many years had it been since anyone had mentioned his name? He’d been the one they couldn’t do without, not and still be a family, and she’d tried for a long time to keep him alive, but with a stab of guilt she realized how long it had been since she’d drawn him. She hadn’t even brought a picture of him along this summer.

  “But marriage?” she said, still trying to make sense of it. “Couldn’t you…”

  “Oh, I’d be just as happy to live in sin,” her mother admitted, “but Hal’s dead set on getting hitched. That damned fool woman across the street’s getting remarried, so now he’s got to.”

  Okay, then. Harold Sundry (Hal, now) had entered the conversation. But how to phrase the obvious question: Of all the men at the Sundry Arms you’re marrying him? “Do you love him?”

  Her mother sighed. “I don’t know, darlin’. I really don’t. I’ve been trying to make up my mind all summer. He loves me, though. I’m sure of that much. And it’s time I quit living like this, don’t you think? You’ve been so sweet not to judge me, all those men dropping by, but I’ve been judging myself right along. Hal helped me realize that. I need something stable.
I need to quit drinking so much, too, and he’s promised to help me. Hal’s an alcoholic himself, so he knows how to quit.”

  “What do I tell Daddy?”

  “That’s not your job, sweetie,” she said. “I’ve been trying to telephone him all week.”

  “He disconnects the phone,” Sarah reminded her. He also canceled the newspaper, refused to answer the door and stacked the unopened mail on the dining room table. No interruptions, none. That was the rule of summer, once the typing began.

  “I know, I know,” her mother said, rubbing her temples. “But who lives like that? I mean, what if something happened to you, and I had to reach him?”

  These were rhetorical questions, Sarah knew, and so felt no obligation to provide answers.

  “Maybe Hal and I can drive up in October. He wants to go look at the leaves in Vermont, so maybe we can kill two birds with one stone.”

  Sarah tried to imagine any part of this scenario actually happening: Harold abandoning the property an entire weekend, the two of them driving to Vermont and staying in some country inn, stopping in Thomaston to share their plans with her father. The last part simply defied imagination. There was no way her mother would ever allow him a good look at Harold Sundry with his big head and his special shoe. “October?” she said. “I can’t say anything until then?”

  Her mother sighed. “That’s not fair, is it? Okay, then I’ll just have to tell him over the phone. I’ll call tomorrow night after you get back. He’ll be expecting me to call then anyway, to make sure you got back safe.”

  Sarah shook her head. “No, it’ll be better if I tell him.”

  “You really think so?” she said hopefully, and Sarah could tell this was how she wanted it. “Here’s another idea! Tell him I died in a car wreck!”

  The pizza arrived then, but Sarah found that her mother’s failed attempt at humor had routed her appetite. The box looked like it contained the results of a head-on collision, the big lumps of Italian sausage now brain matter, the mushrooms various interior organs, the anchovies strips of flesh and skin. “I didn’t realize how hungry I was,” her mother said, digging in.

  Suddenly energized, she explained how things would be. Not that different, she wanted to stress. Better, really. She’d be keeping her studio in town, she assured Sarah, as if this were weighing heavily on her mind. She conceded that Harold didn’t fully understand what she did for a living and would’ve preferred that they partner in the Sundry Arms and share its myriad duties, but in the end he didn’t want her to give up something she loved. He was proud that she’d been able to make a go of it all these years, and he could hire help at the Arms as he needed it, just like always. Of course, Sarah would still spend summers with them on the South Shore. There were always vacancies, and Harold promised to set aside the best apartment for the two of them every June, July and August.

  And this year’s changes, she went on, would be nothing compared with next year’s, with Sarah graduating from high school and heading off to college. Okay, right this minute maybe Sarah felt like she was losing her mother to Harold Sundry, but it was more the other way around. If you really thought about it, it was her mother staring loss dead in the face. In no time Sarah would have a husband and family of her own, whereas she’d be alone in the world. It wasn’t that she regretted the freedom she’d found here these last few years. She’d needed that after Pencil Dick. No, she’d had all kinds of fun and didn’t regret any of it, but having fun wasn’t the same as having a future. You couldn’t count on fun to last, that was the thing. Sarah understood that you had to make plans, didn’t she? And, if you weren’t very good at making plans—and she allowed she wasn’t—then you had to rely on someone else to do it for you. Harold saw the future clearly, and he made excellent plans.

  Sarah tried hard to focus on what she was saying, but it all came down to words. Her mother was using them, as she so often did, to create a plausible narrative, a story she could live with and embellish, but Sarah had never trusted them. While they’d waited for the pizza to arrive, her mother had shed the nice clothes she’d worn to the restaurant, taken off her makeup and slipped into her robe. In so doing she’d become the very woman in the drawing, and as she talked, the words piling up and running together, her daughter realized she’d been working on this narrative all summer long, all those nights spent pacing in the front room. She’d probably been working on it the morning Sarah had sketched her, catching on paper her sudden loss of confidence, the erosion of her courage, her sheer exhaustion. No wonder she’d felt violated. How cruel that drawing must have seemed. That her mother was at this moment its living embodiment seemed a poor, shabby excuse for what she’d done, and Sarah felt a fissure in herself that she hadn’t even known was there, but that was now widening further. She recalled, too, what her mother had told her that night about her one day becoming that woman herself, and she almost hoped this would come true, because she deserved it. How lonely her mother had been. How brave to keep up a strong front for so long. And how little Sarah had intuited of her fear of growing old and ending up alone.

  Nor did the irony escape her. Wasn’t this searing intimacy exactly what she’d been hoping for this summer? For so many summers? Hadn’t she wanted her mother to tell her what she really thought and felt from the bottom of her heart? When she’d asked for advice about her own future, about whether her feelings for Lou were full and sufficient or somehow lacking, wasn’t this sort of soul baring what she’d had in mind, her mother’s hard-won acknowledgment that one thing was more important than another? Earlier that summer she’d brought up Bobby Marconi without really being able to articulate the question she wanted to ask, yet here her mother was answering it. Passion and independence, she seemed to be saying, were all fine and good, but ultimately not sustainable. In the end it came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise. Hadn’t Sarah known this all along? Suddenly she understood the question she’d really been trying to ask all summer. Which was more important: to love or be loved?

  “Anyway,” her mother finally concluded. With very little help from Sarah, she’d reduced the pizza to a stack of thin edges in the middle of the greasy box, “if I’m wrong, I’m no worse off than I was, right? Please say yes, so I can go to sleep.”

  That night, as sometimes happened when she had too much to think about, Sarah fell immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep, awaking with a guilty start at first light, the events of the previous day both surreal and immediate. Her mother was marrying Harold Sundry? This ending made the whole summer seem implausible, as did the fact that by late afternoon she’d be back in Thomaston living her other life. Her stomach knotted at the thought. Outside her mother’s bedroom window it was still gray, almost black. How long before the sun actually came up? They’d set the alarm for seven-thirty, still almost two hours away. She’d packed everything the night before, even her sketch pad. Her suitcases, portfolio and the bag containing gifts for her father and Lou and the other Lynches was sitting in the front room near the door. Sarah closed her eyes, feeling them spill over, and tried to imagine Ikey Lubin’s, telling herself she’d be there soon, soothed by both the store and the Lynches, but the image refused to form. Concentrate, she told herself. You know it. You know everything about it. Where the register is and the meat counter, too, and the big coolers full of milk and beer along the back wall, though she was arguing with herself in words and could feel the panic rising in her chest until, in the next room, she heard her mother stir. Had she fallen asleep?

  Rolling over, she saw a crease of light beneath the bedroom door. Was there a lamp on in the front room? Then a sound like the page of a book turning, except louder. And finally she knew what her mother was doing.

  “These are wonderful!” she said when Sarah sat down beside her on the sofa she’d apparently not bothered to unfold that night. All of Sarah’s recent drawings and watercolors lay spread out on the coffee table. The sheer volume would have been impressive enough; in just
the last few weeks she’d doubled her entire output, and this no doubt contributed to her mother’s stunned disbelief. But what she was really responding to, Sarah understood, was the quality. These most recent efforts represented a quantum leap forward, every single one better, far better, than the very best ones from earlier in the summer. “My God, they’re all wonderful.” She was studying Sarah now, with an expression that was almost fearful, as if she suspected that her daughter had made a pact with the devil. “Weren’t you going to show them to me?”

  She’d meant to, of course, when they returned from dinner last night, or maybe this morning before they headed into the city, when there’d be less time for questions, for explanations. A miscalculation, she now saw. Maybe someone who didn’t know any better wouldn’t intuit the questions this new work raised, but her mother did know better, and she also knew there were reasons for such quantum leaps, even if the artist herself couldn’t explain them. While Sarah could pretend not to understand what had happened, at the very least her mother would want to know why she’d been so secretive about work as good as this, when normally she was so open. “I don’t understand,” she said now, scrutinizing Sarah so closely that her cheeks began to burn with an emotion that seemed equal parts pride and embarrassment.

  “I know,” she whispered.

  “Tell me,” her mother said, taking her hand. “How did this happen?”

  Her portfolio was leaning up against the coffee table, so Sarah unzipped the inner sleeve and took out the drawing of Bobby she’d finally done back in early August. Feeling guilty in advance, she’d allowed herself just half an hour for his portrait, though she hadn’t needed even that long. It was as if the boy already existed on the blank page of her sketchbook and had been patiently waiting there for her pen to locate him. He’d appeared before her so quickly, so effortlessly, that she was almost as startled as she would’ve been to look up and find him standing there in the flesh. She’d immediately hidden the sketch away in the zippered compartment where she knew her mother wouldn’t look, nor would she look at it herself. That was the promise she made and then broke, time and again, slipping it out whenever she had a private moment to study what she’d done, trying to account for what had happened. Had the magic been in her hand or in the subject? There was no telling. What she did know was this: her drawing of Bobby Marconi affected everything she did thereafter. It was as if, having been liberated from the blank page, he now had partial control of her pen.