Bridge of Sighs

  SHE STARTED AWAKE when she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  “Your stop, young lady,” the conductor said. “That’s pretty good. You do it yourself?”

  And there in her lap was the drawing of Bobby. She had no memory of removing it from its zippered compartment before falling asleep, but there it was, so she must have.

  “I’m guessing you must know that young fella,” the man added. She thought he must mean Bobby until she saw he was nodding at the dirty window, where her boyfriend’s grinning face was framed. Feeling herself flush, she quickly slid the drawing back into her portfolio. Had Lou seen? Was it possible to see inside the coach through such a dirty window? His expression suggested he was seeing his own reflection as much as her.

  Outside on the platform he gave her the same big brother’s welcome-home hug he did every year, and she would’ve been disappointed by his lack of passion if he weren’t clearly so delighted she was back. “Wow,” he said, sounding almost afraid, though admiring, too, as he stepped back to take her in. “You look…different.” Different. She felt some small disappointment in that word, too.

  “I was expecting my father,” she said.

  “I told you I had a surprise,” he said, beaming, and she remembered then that, yes, he’d mentioned something about a surprise when they’d spoken earlier that week. He puffed up with pride now, which made him look very like his own father. “I got my license.”

  “Wow,” she said, trying to sound excited. “That’s great.”

  “I went over to your dad’s and he said it was okay if I did the honors,” he told her, picking up a suitcase in each hand. “Actually, I think he might’ve forgotten which train you were on. We had to knock really loud to make him hear, and he answered the door dressed in his bathrobe.”

  “We?”

  “Actually,” he said as they emerged from the tiny station into the parking lot, “I’ve got two surprises.”

  He was beaming down at her again in that—well, let’s face it—goofy way he had. And there, getting out of the Lynch station wagon and grinding a cigarette out underfoot, was the very boy she’d just moments before zipped back into her portfolio, with the same crooked grin she’d given him in the drawing.

  “Hey, stranger,” she said, surprised at how easy it was to give an old friend’s hug to someone who wasn’t an old friend. She was also pleased to see how it flustered him.

  “You’re the one who’s been gone, not me,” Bobby reminded her.

  “But now I’m back, which means you’re going to have to shape up. Was that a cigarette I just saw?”

  “He’s not supposed to be smoking,” Lou said, beaming at Bobby now. “He’s on the football team. Starting fullback.”

  “You gonna tell on me?” Bobby said.

  “I might. You could pay me not to, though.”

  “How much do you want?”

  “A quarter.”

  He fished in his pocket, found a quarter and handed it to her.

  “Okay,” she said. “Now your secret’s safe.”

  And so, strangely, were her own. On the train she’d been terrified of them, by her inability to keep them, by their seeming desire to reveal themselves. Now they hardly seemed to matter. Bobby had taken on a dual existence, there before her in the flesh and safely tucked away in the dark. In adult life were realities so compartmentalized? At this possibility she felt her spirits, at low ebb on the train, buoyantly rise up again. If that were the case, she could manage it. She might even be good at it.

  “I’ll ride in back,” Bobby offered.

  “Nah,” Lou said, going around to the driver’s side. “You can ride up front with us. There’s room for three.”

  And he was right. There was.

  WINTER BIRDS

  ITALY IS CANCELED.

  I have protested, but feebly, I fear. It’s taken all my strength to convince my wife to take me home instead of to the emergency room, and there I’ve fallen into a fretful sleep on the sofa to the sound of her voice on the phone in the kitchen. By the time I wake up, it’s done. Flights, train reservations, hotels, all our plans up in smoke. When I notice the travel books and magazines that for so long threatened to take over the house have also vanished, I study her for signs of anger, because she’d be entitled. But no, she evinces only concern. She is ever Sarah, just as I, alas, am ever Lucy Lynch.

  Over a light supper, in the hopes of putting her mind at ease, I remind her about how these things work. My spells, like the valve on a pressure cooker, serve to safely release stress, after which it takes time for the pressure to build again. Years, sometimes. The worse the spell, the greater the relief, the longer between it and the next. What happened today is good news, I tell my wife. It means we won’t have to worry for a while. But what, Sarah wonders, if José hadn’t found me? What if he hadn’t phoned or if she hadn’t been able to come immediately to the junior high and summon me back? Grateful though I am to both of them, I remind her that it probably wouldn’t have made much difference. It’s true the episode could’ve lasted longer if she hadn’t come. I might have returned to myself in the middle of the night, locked in the school, disoriented and confused, but eventually I would’ve made it home. That was true of my first spell, and of every one since.

  When we finish eating, I offer to help with the dishes but am shooed away. I’m told I look exhausted, that I should go upstairs and lie down, fall asleep again if I can. Instead I retreat to my study to contemplate this latest humiliation in solitude. While I wish I could make myself believe that I have not betrayed my wife, not only today but in all the days leading up to today, I know better. It’s possible that I’ve been betraying her from the start, when she “drew us together” at Ikey’s. That, oddly enough, is where I left off writing my story. I’ve written far more than I imagined I would, filling two large notebooks, and I now take the second of these and reread the last page. Over supper I’ve promised her that I won’t be writing anymore. I know she fears it’s become an obsession that may have contributed to this spell. I suppose it’s possible, and anyway I’ve reached a good place to stop. Sarah has entered my life. She’s drawn Ikey’s and she’s drawn the two of us together, which is what we’ve been ever since. Bobby is about to enter, which he did, but only briefly.

  Our lives have continued, of course, and there’s more, much more, to say about them, but I’m content to end on Sarah’s drawing, that moment captured and frozen in time. Things would never again be so perfect, so poised between innocence and experience, between past and future. The events of senior year in high school would steal our innocence, after which the losses would commence, Sarah’s father to disgrace; her mother to tragedy; Bobby, for us, at least, to Europe and fame; my father…my father to malignancy. I meant to write it all because I believed my life to be a hopeful story with a happy ending, the sort my father would’ve liked, where hard work and faith are rewarded, and the American virtues he most admired are triumphant. After all, Ikey’s prospered in the end, vindicating what he’d seen all along. As did our family. Sarah and I bought one of the houses on my father’s old milk route in the Borough, just as he said I might one day, if that was what I wanted. She and I married, as he wished, and we’ve had a son who’s a good, gentle man. All of this, every word, is true. It’s just not the whole truth, and I suppose that’s another reason to leave my story as it stands. Now, today, after the Bridge of Sighs, if I continued to write, it would end up being the story of my betrayal of the woman who has saved my life not once but over and over again. A betrayal that began, I fear, with our marriage.

  After high school, Sarah went off to school in the city and I to the state university in Albany, with the unspoken understanding that we’d marry someday, perhaps after we took our degrees. Meanwhile, we’d spend holidays together, maybe even summers. Poor Sarah. Her letters that first autumn in New York were full of anxiety and self-doubt. She said everybody at Cooper Union was more talented than she would ever be, and she wondered out loud if ma
ybe her father had been right. An advocate of traditional liberal arts education, he’d long argued that what undergraduates needed most was to read, and to do so as broadly as possible. Art school, to his way of thinking, was little better than trade school, someplace you’d go if you wanted to learn to fix carburetors or refrigerators. Students required not a narrow set of skills but a broad, sturdy foundation upon which to build a real life of the mind. There’d be plenty of time for studio work later, in graduate study. Back in high school, Sarah’d had little trouble discounting his advice. She’d always known that he undervalued her gift, and also that no matter how sound his abstract argument might be, his underlying purpose was to undermine that gift in the hopes she’d discover another passion that was more to his liking.

  But now that he was gone, she began to remember, perhaps for the first time, his advice, and to torment herself with self-doubt. Typically we spoke on the phone on Sunday afternoons, when the rates were low. “What if I’m not that good?” she said one Sunday in late September. I knew she was thinking of her father, of the decade he devoted to his great novel only to have it rejected. “What if I spend years and nothing comes of it?” I told her she was as talented as anyone at CU, and my mother, overhearing, chimed in that otherwise she wouldn’t have been admitted. Before we hung up my father got on the line and said her drawing of Ikey’s still hung in the place of honor above the cash register and that people commented on it all the time. She was grateful for our reassurance, but her doubts persisted, and when one of her professors was harshly critical of a project she’d devoted many long hours to, she joked that when she flunked out, maybe she’d come join me in Albany, and God help me, I echoed her father’s arguments about the value of a broad educational foundation.

  And what did I tell Sarah about my own life that first semester at Albany State? The truth, mostly, but not—to borrow one of her father’s favorite phrases—“the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, so help me God.” I wrote her long letters in which I admitted missing her terribly, which was true. I said I was doing well in my classes (also true), that I attended them regularly and fulfilled all my academic obligations dutifully (true again), but I also gave her to understand that I’d adjusted to university life about as well as could be expected (not even remotely true). That first fall semester I was, in point of fact, a university student in name only. Sarah knew I returned home on weekends to help out at the store. Because I was needed, I told her, which was true enough, but less true than admitting I needed Ikey’s on weekends, that once classes were finished I couldn’t imagine staying on campus, where I hadn’t made a single friend. Worse, I resented Sarah’s courage and character: alone in a strange city, battling heroically to conquer her feelings of inadequacy. Whereas I hadn’t even tried. I came gradually to understand that this resentment mirrored that which I’d felt toward Bobby when we were boys. Like him, Sarah was dead game, metaphorically willing to surf blind in the rear of any truck, nor would she cry if she got tossed around. But I was still playing it safe, right up front where I could see the dangerous curves well in advance and hold on if I needed to.

  Bobby might have been gone that autumn, but he was far from forgotten. I’d hated to see him go, especially after what happened between him and his father. Now that he wasn’t around, however, it had occurred to me that things might be better for me without the constant comparison he offered. While Sarah never mentioned him unless I did first, I knew she hadn’t forgotten him either, and why should she when, in the endless nights of my lonely dorm room, even I had to wonder if they belonged together. When Sarah wrote that by coming home every weekend I wasn’t socializing and making new friends at school, I read into her concern a secret hope that I’d find a new girlfriend so she could be shut of me and available for Bobby, should he ever return. I knew these were crazy ideas, but that didn’t make them any easier to banish.

  By mid-November, tormented in this fashion by my own unworthiness, I began to sense our future, Sarah’s and mine, slipping away. I looked forward starting Monday to our Sunday phone calls, though these often deepened my doubts, because I could tell that every week she was happier, more at home in the city, less fearful of its foreignness, more competent to navigate its treacherous waters. She claimed she was still looking forward to spending the holidays with us, but the same professor who’d been so hard on her earlier in the term had now taken Sarah and another first-year student under his wing and had invited them to come back early, right after the first of the year, to help him install a show. My heart plummeted when she told me she’d agreed, thus lopping off over a week I’d been planning for us to spend together. I both dreaded and longed for Christmas, desperate to see Sarah yet terrified she’d use the occasion to break off our engagement, though we weren’t, of course, officially engaged.

  Naturally, my fears couldn’t have been more unwarranted. From the moment she stepped off the train four days before Christmas, I saw my folly for what it was. She was my Sarah again, or perhaps “our Sarah,” as my father called her. She arrived laden with presents and proclaiming it was wonderful to be home, that she’d forgotten what clean air tasted like, and the squealing hug she gave my father had him beaming like Father Christmas the rest of the day. Later, though, when we were alone, she did allow that everything looked smaller than she remembered, which suggested to me it looked shabbier, too. Probably even Ikey’s. In our phone calls Sarah had often gone on about how city people dressed, and I was now aware, as never before, of how we Lynches might look to them. My father happened just then to be wearing one of his louder plaid shirts, purchased not at Calloway’s, as he’d told my mother, but at our cheaper West End men’s store. His cowlick was in full bloom, and the grin he wore at the sight of “our girl” was his very goofiest. I felt my throat constrict with love and embarrassment. But if she felt any embarrassment at all, she gave no sign. She told us, in fact, that on days when she felt low, she imagined all of us going about our daily routines at Ikey’s and before long she felt better. “I swear to God, Lou, if you cry I’m going to swat you,” my mother warned my father, when she saw his eyes welling up.

  But much had changed since graduation. We both felt it. Somehow, Sarah and I weren’t quite the same with Bobby gone. We’d always been a threesome, even when he was with Nan Beverly. Sometimes he’d take Sarah’s side against me, sometimes my side against her, but he was always there, always trump in whatever game we happened to be playing. When he wasn’t actually present, we were busy anticipating his arrival. Everybody else who’d gone off to college and now come home for the holidays wanted news of him, and of course they came to Sarah and me, his closest friends. She didn’t appear overly troubled to admit she knew no more than anybody else, but I’d always been proprietary where Bobby was concerned. I did notice, though, that when the bell rang over the door at Ikey’s, she always looked up expectantly, and I suspected it was Bobby she imagined would saunter in, because that’s exactly who I kept expecting myself. “We’ll probably never see him again,” I once ventured to say, by which I guess I meant he’d be crazy to come back under the circumstances. Perhaps sensing my feelings were hurt that he hadn’t contacted us since fleeing town, Sarah invented a game for us to play. Bobby, we decided, planned to return sometime during the holiday, sneaking back into the country in disguise and just showing up at Ikey’s. Anybody who came into the store was Bobby in disguise. “Look, there he is!” Sarah would exclaim when a tiny, elderly woman came in, leaning heavily on a walker. “I recognized him first!”

  But, no, he was gone, and he wasn’t the only one. Three Mock had been home briefly after boot camp before being sent overseas. Nan Beverly and Perry Kozlowski went off to college in September like the rest of us, but they wouldn’t be coming back, their parents having moved away. Jerzy Quinn and Karen Cirillo were still around, though I saw them so seldom that when they did appear they seemed like characters from a novel I’d read long ago and half forgotten. One day I ran into Karen outside the beauty
parlor and she had a toddler in tow. “So, Lou,” she said, looking at me, or maybe at something behind me, “you still love me, or what?” I told her I was sort of engaged to Sarah Berg. “Never heard of her,” Karen said. “She must not be from around here.” Rather than explain, I said, “I guess you’re married now.” Her kid was grinning up at me, fascinated, as kids always used to be with my father. “Married,” Karen snorted. “You always were a scream, Lou.” I half expected one of the skinny wraiths who’d always attended Karen in junior high to walk up, but none did, causing me to wonder what happened to all of them. When she and her little girl went into the salon, I remember looking around and thinking that half the town, in one fashion or another, had disappeared.

  Sarah’s Christmas was also made awkward by the fact that, with her father gone, she had nowhere to stay. There wasn’t room in our house, which wouldn’t have been appropriate anyway, so she’d wangled an invitation from an old girlfriend she’d never been particularly close to and as a result was duty bound to spend time with her and her family, and even then the girl told Sarah she felt used, that next time she wanted to visit the Lynches she’d have to find someplace else to stay. Maybe it was this unpleasantness that cast a shadow over our last few days together, but more likely it was just my sense of unworthiness kicking into high gear as our holiday drew to a close. I was bitterly jealous of how excited Sarah was about the show she was going to help install as soon as she got back to New York. During the two weeks we had together, I’d felt not so much happy as—what?—complete. I’d ask Sarah if she wanted to go out, look up old friends and do things, but she’d said no, she’d rather be at Ikey’s most, which caused my mother to shake her head at my father and me, the two of us standing there moist eyed. I didn’t know how I’d be able to face her leaving.