Bridge of Sighs

  On the drive to Hudson I panicked and let all my insecurities come flooding out. I told Sarah how much I loved and missed her, how at times I couldn’t help feeling like maybe I was losing her to a better world, the one her father had wanted for her and that would never include me, or Ikey’s, or Thomaston. Instead of being repulsed by this display of weakness and mistrust, Sarah just kissed me on the tip of my nose and, looking at me cross-eyed, said I was being silly, although it was a good silly and I was forgiven. She loved me, too, she said, more than ever these last two weeks. She loved not only me but also my mother and father, and dear old Ikey’s, and even, when he behaved himself, Uncle Dec. I just had to believe her.

  I did. Of course I did. Being Sarah, she wouldn’t have said what she didn’t mean. She’d given me as unambiguous a declaration of devotion as anyone could hope for, yet when I put her on the train back to the city the thought crossed my mind that even if she did mean every word, even if it was the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even if it was so help me God, it wasn’t the guarantee I sought. Because I could still lose my Sarah, our Sarah, to some new passion, to someplace she’d never been, to someone she’d never met but would come to love even more than she loved me and us.

  Or even someone she’d already said goodbye to, who was gone, but maybe not for good. How could I prevent that? I couldn’t. I simply could not.

  THAT NEW YEAR was when my father was really diagnosed for the first time. There’d been the earlier scare, his cyst with the “abnormal cells.” Afterward he’d gone in for regular exams, but they were expensive and he was feeling good, so gradually he stopped. But that fall he tired easily, and my mother said he’d been sleeping poorly. What I noticed was that he was forever rubbing his right side, just above his ribs, and wincing. “It ain’t nothin’,” he kept saying. “Just a knot. It’ll work out.” Except it never did. And then Sarah, who had the advantage of not having seen him every day, immediately remarked that he’d lost weight. “That’s it,” my mother said, fixing him with the stare that always made him look at his shoes. “Monday morning, you’re going to the doctor.”

  It wasn’t until after the holidays, though, that he could get an appointment with a specialist, who located the tumor under his arm, right where the cyst had been removed years earlier. My mother was furious, convinced that he’d known for months that something was wrong and refused to do anything about it. The operation to remove the growth was relatively simple, but the chemotherapy that followed exhausted him, making me even more indispensable at home than I’d been the first semester. In mid-January, with the reluctant aid of my academic adviser, I dropped two required courses that met on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, replacing them with Tuesday/Thursday electives that allowed me to catch the late bus and work a four-day weekend at Ikey’s, then take the afternoon bus back to campus. Predictably, my mother was livid when she heard what I’d done. “What’s the point of college,” she demanded, “if you’re only there three days a week?”

  “It’s just this one semester,” I countered, the same promise I’d made to my adviser, who’d dutifully warned me that putting off required courses might jeopardize my graduating with the rest of my class. Once my father got his strength back, I told my mother, once he was out of danger, I’d cut back at Ikey’s and rededicate myself to becoming a university student in earnest. This argument I knew I could win. After all, I was on scholarship, not wasting the money she’d put aside that now was paying for my father’s operation, hospital stay, post-op treatments and convalescence. My mother could argue until she was blue in the face, but they did need me and I knew that for a fact.

  This victory, however, came at a cost. The conflict that had simmered for so long between my mother and me now came to a rolling boil, and we were at each other constantly. Like so many of the family conflicts I’d witnessed since I was a boy, what we were really arguing about couldn’t be acknowledged: in this case, whether my father was going to recover. His surgeon was optimistic. The operation had been a success, he told my mother. They’d caught the malignancy early, before it could spread. Had he waited another couple of months, well, the situation might’ve been entirely different. Of course he couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be subsequent tumors, but neither was there any cause for undue pessimism. That last was the part my father heard most clearly. “Quit worryin’ every minute,” he told my mother when she said he was returning to work too soon or trying to do too much. “I ain’t gonna die from this little bit I’m doin’, and Louie’s right here if I need any help.” She clenched her teeth and said nothing. My mother prided herself on being what she called realistic and always defended her realism vigorously, but now she couldn’t because she knew that optimism, which came to her husband and son naturally, was exactly what a sick man needed to get well. But I knew she was seething inside, and she took out her frustration on all of us. “What the hell do you want from me, Tessa?” I heard my uncle ask her one day.

  “What do I want?” she exploded. “What do I want? What I want is for somebody in this family to—” But she stopped there, glaring homicidally at Uncle Dec, and then at me, before storming out.

  “Go easy on her, Bub,” he said, somehow aware of how angry I was at her. “If she ever snaps, you can kiss this place goodbye.”

  “You’re full of shit,” I told him, the only time in my life I’d ever said such a thing to my uncle, or perhaps to anyone.

  For an instant he looked ready to come around the meat counter and teach me some manners, but then thought better of it. “Fine,” he said. “Just keep going like you are, ignoring your college work and spending every waking minute in this store. Break her heart, if that’s what you want. What the hell do I care?”

  THAT MARCH my uncle decided he needed a vacation. He hadn’t been back to California since leaving the army and thought he might like to see what was going on out there. There were a couple of good horse tracks he wanted to check out, and you could bet on dogs as well. And if you crossed the border in Tijuana, you could wager on something called jai alai, a lightning-fast sport that men played with big, curved baskets that looked like wicker bananas on their wrists. “Plus,” he told my mother, “me being gone will give you and Little Biggy here a chance to see if you’ve learned anything.” This was one of a half-dozen nicknames Uncle Dec alternated between when he wasn’t calling me Bub. He’d been training the two of us behind the meat counter for over a year, and we knew everything he did, though the Borough ladies who came into Ikey’s still preferred to have him cut their crown roasts. “It’s not your fault you aren’t sexy like me,” he’d kid when they left the store. “Try not to cut your hand off while I’m gone. There’s a limited demand for one-armed butchers.”

  “He’s not going to be a butcher,” my mother said, as if worried I might pursue this new career.

  “You be careful your own self,” Uncle Dec warned her. “These days you’re trying to think about at least five things at once, and when you’re holding a meat cleaver you ought to be thinking about just one, the right one.”

  “Well, with you out of the way, there’ll be fewer things going wrong,” she assured him.

  “What do you think, Bub?” he said. “You figure you can survive without me for a month?”

  I told him I thought I personally was up to the challenge, at which he snorted and said he imagined I was.

  My father, looking pale and thin, happened just then to be sitting on the tall barstool we’d installed so he could work the register more comfortably. “You’ll be back in a week if you bet dogs and horses and them mai-tai fellas, too.”

  “You could be right,” said my uncle, who since the operation had been going easy on my father. It was poor sport, he claimed, ridiculing a man in such a weakened condition. “On the other hand, I might win a fortune and buy a house on the beach.”

  “Send for me if you do,” my mother said.

  “I can’t promise anything,” he told her. “I’ll probably be surrounded by
gold diggers. They say they’re all over out there. Just the sort of women a man like me might fall prey to.”

  “The other thing they say about California is it’s due to fall in the ocean,” she said, striding out and letting the door swing shut behind her by way of punctuation.

  Uncle Dec looked at me and shrugged. “Work on your mother’s disposition while I’m gone, will you? It used to be sunnier before she met your father and had you.”

  WITH MY UNCLE away for the month of March, Sarah would have a place to stay over spring break, which may have been why he chose March over February or April for his vacation. I’d never known him to do anything out of kindness or consideration, but he was very fond of Sarah, so I supposed it was possible. Either that or my mother suggested it. As soon as he was gone, she went upstairs, turned off the heat and flung open the windows to expel what she called the reek of bachelordom, a heady mix of cheap frying oil, too-strong cologne, stale cigarettes, flatulence and old goat. Actually, for a man who’d always lived alone, Uncle Dec was surprisingly clean and tidy. My mother thought the army must have rubbed off on him, because there were no stacks of dirty dishes in the sink, no clothing heaped on the floor at the foot of the bed, and the bathroom, while it would’ve depressed a woman, at least wasn’t gross. No ring around the bathtub, no shaving stubble in the sink, no dried, misadventure urine spattered around the commode.

  Given that he’d be gone for the month, my mother decided it would be a good time to paint the whole apartment. The walls were beginning to look dingy, as light-colored walls will when there’s a serious smoker in residence. Worse, the scorch mark caused by the electrical fire had again started showing, so there was nothing to do but give it another coat. When I heard her schedule the painter, I asked why she was doing all this. Sarah would only be with us for two weeks, and it wasn’t like Dec cared. And he certainly wasn’t going to stop smoking.

  “Don’t you want things to be nice for Sarah?” she said. “In fact, we might as well make a nice guest bedroom out of that storage room.” She then proceeded to buy a new queen-size frame, box springs and mattress as well as a nice vanity and chest of drawers. The bathroom got an upgrade, too, as well as a good scrubbing.

  All of which made exactly no sense. After all, money was tight. I tried to press my mother on the subject, but she got so angry that I let it slide, because by then we were bickering over everything. Most recently she’d gotten furious when she overheard part of a Sunday phone conversation I had with Sarah about the possibility of her transferring from Cooper Union to Albany for the following year. My father’s diagnosis and subsequent operation had frightened her, and she wondered if we might need her closer by to help out.

  My mother glared at me when I hung up. “You’d let her do that?”

  “Albany has a good art department,” I told her weakly. “They’ll probably offer her a full ride.”

  “But it’s not Cooper Union, Lou,” she said. “Do you have any idea how talented you have to be to get in there? How many kids get turned down?” I reminded her that Sarah was old enough to make up her own mind, but of course she’d have none of it. “If you told her not to, and meant it, she’d stay in New York.”

  Nor had she been enthusiastic, at least initially, about Sarah spending her spring break with us, an idea I’d floated on New Year’s Day, as soon as I returned to Ikey’s after putting her on the train. When I entered the store, my impression was that my parents, and even Uncle Dec, had used my absence to argue about Sarah and me, and that I hadn’t been gone long enough for them to arrive at a consensus.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” my mother said when I mentioned spring break. “It wouldn’t be a kindness.”

  My father objected with his customary shrug. “You saw what a good time she had here.”

  “I saw what a good time you had,” she told him, which won her another shrug. My father wasn’t about to deny how much he liked having Sarah around Ikey’s.

  “She had a great time, too,” I said. “She told me so.”

  “We’re the only family she’s got left,” my father pointed out.

  “Exactly,” Uncle Dec chimed in from behind the meat counter.

  My mother sighted him along her index finger. “Don’t you start in.”

  “Is this a new rule, Tessa? I don’t get to talk?”

  “No, it’s an old one,” she said. “I just haven’t been enforcing it. I wish the three of you would quit ganging up on me every time we discuss something.”

  “It takes all three of us to argue with you,” my uncle objected, “and we still lose.”

  “She had a good time,” I repeated weakly, causing my mother to spin her attention on me.

  “You’re sure about that?” she said. “You can tell the difference between affection and gratitude?” But even she seemed to realize that this was a low blow.

  “You seen how she was—” my father began.

  “Okay,” my mother interrupted. “Okay. She enjoyed herself over the holidays. My point is that it’s no kindness to offer security to somebody who’s learning to love independence. Sarah is a brave girl. She’s just beginning to understand she doesn’t need a safety net.” She turned to me now. “Don’t play on her fears. That’s not what you do when you love somebody.”

  Later that night, my parents were still arguing, their voices coming up through the heat register just as they’d done when I was a boy.

  “You have to think of her, too, Lou.”

  “I ain’t sayin’ that, Tessa. I’m just sayin’—”

  “I know what you’re saying.”

  “He ain’t had a single one of them spells since—”

  “I know what you’re saying.”

  “She’s been good for him. That’s all I’m—”

  “I know what you’re saying. I know, I know, I know.”

  BUT FOR MY FATHER’S ILLNESS, the conflict over Sarah’s spring break would’ve been even more heated. My mother knew that the last thing he needed was worry. While his chemo dosage was supposedly low, it made him sick to his stomach and weak for days afterward. He’d just start feeling better, and it was time for another round. His appetite disappeared, and he continued to lose weight. For a while it looked like Uncle Dec would have to postpone his trip, but then in late February my father’s system seemed to adjust. He began to eat again and regained a little weight and some of his former strength and stamina. A visit from “our girl” in March, he decided, was just what the doctor ordered, even if his doctor hadn’t ordered it. A few days before Sarah was to arrive, the argument surfaced again when my mother gave my father strict orders not to pressure her about where she’d be going to school next year. “If she doesn’t bring the subject up, leave it alone. Let her make up her own mind. She’s got her whole future ahead of her, and she doesn’t need you telling her what to do.”

  “Hell, I ain’t gonna say nothin’,” my father said. “She can do whatever she—”

  “Spare me,” she snapped. “You know perfectly well what you’re going to do, and so do I. When she walks in that door, your face is going to light up like a Christmas tree, and you’re going to say, Welcome home, sweetness, just like you always do. This is not her home, Lou. Her home is a dorm room in New York. Saying otherwise just confuses the poor girl.”

  “A person can have two homes,” he said. “Look at Louie here. He’s home with us half the time and down to his school home the other half.”

  But of course this wasn’t true. I spent half my time at the university, but home was Thomaston. Home was Third Street. Home, when you came right down to it, was Ikey Lubin’s. This, after all, was what my mother and I had been fighting about.

  But over spring break Sarah again became part of our family, though instead of working with my father and me in the store, she spent most of her time helping my mother renovate the upstairs flat. On the weekends they went to garage sales and flea markets all over the county looking for good fixtures and other odd items. Dur
ing the first week they pulled up the ratty carpet, rented a sander to do the hardwood floor underneath, then put down two coats of varnish.

  “There ain’t no point in talkin’ to your mother once her mind’s made up,” my father told me one afternoon when, thanks to a lull, we had the store to ourselves and the leisure to listen to the droning activity overhead. I could tell he was trying to puzzle it through—why she was spending money sprucing up the flat when it was just Dec living up there. But his March trip, he’d confided to my mother, was a trial run designed to prepare us for his final exit. He’d already stayed longer than he planned, and after all this time anything he hadn’t been able to teach us about butchering a pig, we were probably just too stupid to learn.

  Of course I knew, or thought I did, what the renovations upstairs were really all about. I just didn’t have the heart to explain it to my father, who was still weak, still trying hard to get his strength back. Not wanting to undermine his recovery, I held my tongue and tried to ignore my rising rage every time I thought about what my mother was up to, that she’d do something like this now, when my father was too feeble to offer any opposition, that she refused to come clean about her intentions even to me, that she’d stoop to using Sarah against me.

  MY PARENTS HAD PROMISED each other not to pressure Sarah about her decision, and in each other’s company they stuck to their pledge of neutrality. But my mother knew it would be impossible for my father not to convey to Sarah his fondest hopes—that she and I would marry, that we’d settle down in Thomaston, that he’d be able to pass Ikey’s on to us and to the grandchildren we’d give him. His cancerous brush with mortality had concentrated those hopes, and expecting him not to voice them was like asking him not to breathe. He knew better than to do so when my mother was around, but if she wasn’t and I happened to be working out of earshot in the back room, he’d tell Sarah he wished her school wasn’t so far away, that Ikey’s wasn’t the same without her, that I was never so happy as when she was around, that she never had to worry about not having a home and family as long as Ikey’s was there, which he figured it would be for a good long time. People would always need things—a half gallon of milk, a four-pack of toilet paper—things they wouldn’t make a special trip to the supermarket for. They liked coming into a store like Ikey’s, he reiterated, where they knew people, where they could find what they were looking for and there was somebody to ask if they couldn’t.