“I never should’ve let them do that,” he said, and I knew he meant the trunk.
His admission made me uncomfortable, as if I was the one who owed him an apology, not vice versa. “Will you write?” I asked, and I think maybe a little of the old, juvenile pleading crept back into my voice, like when his family moved to the Borough and I made him promise to call with his new phone number. “When you get where you’re going? Sarah will want to write you back. We both will.”
He nodded. “You should address the letter to Robert Noonan.”
My incomprehension must’ve been written all over my face. “Why?”
“Because that’s my name now. I filled out the paperwork on my eighteenth birthday, but it became official just a couple days ago.”
I could only repeat, “Why?”
He shrugged. “To piss him off. Seems like overkill now, I admit.”
I saw that he’d registered the word “overkill” and, if his father didn’t recover, its possible literal application.
I suppose I looked as horrified as I felt because he said, “Hey, it’s okay.” But how could that be true? How could it be okay to do something so horrible, so irrevocable? In its own way this was more shocking than the beating. When Bobby shouldered his duffel, I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask, “Aren’t you afraid?” And I’m not sure what I meant—afraid of going out into the wide world without a destination, or of going anywhere in his now-fatherless condition. To me, they amounted to much the same thing.
“What of?” he said, sounding genuinely curious, as if I had a better view than he of the road ahead and had glimpsed a dangerous curve coming, one it would be my duty to call. Instead, I just told him to take care of himself, and he told me to take care of Sarah, that I was lucky to have her, and I said I knew I was, and part of me knew right then I’d never see him again.
Sarah believes that if Bobby hadn’t died in New York when he did, we’d have seen him shortly thereafter. I would like to believe this. I would. I wish Ikey’s little bell could’ve jingled his reentry into our lives once more. I can see him plain as day in my mind’s eye, in his surfer’s stance, though we wouldn’t need that to recognize who it was. Yes, it would have been grand to see him one more time.
Except that would’ve necessitated yet another goodbye, and there have already been too many. How many times, after all, does the same person get to break your heart?
WHEN OWEN RETURNS from his session with Brindy and the counselor, I suggest we close the store early so he can join us for dinner, but he says no, thanks anyway, Pop. It’ll be slow tonight, and closing up at the regular time will do him good, he says. Though he’s glad he’s here and not at our West End market, which stays open until the gin mills close and people who can’t afford to lose start lining up to buy their Lotto tickets.
Owen is looking around the store, taking it all in, as I often do when I have the place to myself, and he ends up studying his mother’s two drawings—Ikey’s then and now. “This was a good idea Grandpa had,” he says.
“It was your grandmother who figured out how to make it work,” I feel compelled to remind him. But otherwise I agree. I do. Sometime in the not-too-distant future I’ll again raise the issue of selling the West End store, even though Owen’s right. It generates twice the income of Ikey’s, because of all those desperate people paying taxes on their ignorance, as my mother puts it. That market was one of the top five Lotto convenience stores in the state again last year, a fact that would have shamed my father and does shame me, though we’re doing nothing illegal and enjoy the full backing of the state of New York.
“I wish I’d known him,” Owen says, looking at my father in the first drawing.
“You would’ve liked him,” I say. “Just about everybody did.”
Owen surprises me then by coming around the counter and giving me a hug.
“Whenever I needed him,” I say, “he was right there.”
“You’ve been right there, too,” he says. “But now? This minute? You should go home. Even your good side’s starting to droop.”
“Okay, I will,” I tell him. It’s been a long day. A long, good day, with another coming tomorrow. “I’ll open in the morning, though. Sleep in if you feel like it.”
That’s how we leave it. I’ll open in the morning. It’s my favorite time of the day, before I unlock the store and let the world in. In that earliest hour Ikey’s is crowded with benevolent ghosts. For the rest of the week and all of the next I’ll open Ikey’s and enjoy every minute of it. The following week we’re taking Kayla to Boston, and I’m sure Sarah has planned some other short trips that I don’t know about yet. And in the summer, Italy. This time we’ll go. We will leave this small, good world behind us with the comfort of knowing it’ll be here when we return. But. We will go.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANKS TO Jeff Colquhoun and Kate Russo for their expertise, to Judith Weber, Alison Samuel and Emily Russo for their close, insightful readings. Special thanks to Barbara, my wife, who is always my first reader and often my last after I can no longer bear to look. Nat Sobel has made every single one of my books better, but he absolutely saved this one. And thanks for table space to the following: the Camden Deli, Fitzpatrick’s Café, Zoot and Boynton-McKay. And, finally, thanks to Donald Sweet for a great class, years ago, on Langston Hughes.
ALSO BY RICHARD RUSSO
BRIDGE OF SIGHS
Louis Charles Lynch (known as Lucy) is sixty years old and has lived in Thomaston, New York, his entire life. Lucy’s oldest friend, once a rival for his wife’s affection, leads a life in Venice far from Thomaston. Lucy writes the story of his town, his family, and his own life, interspersed with that of the native son who left so long ago and never looked back.
Fiction/Literature
MOHAWK
Mohawk, New York, is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the wrong side of the tracks. Dallas Younger, a star athlete in high school, now drifts from tavern to poker game, while his ex-wife, Anne, is stuck in a losing battle with her moth-er over the care of her sick father. Richard Russo explores these lives with profound compassion and flint-hard wit.
Fiction/Literature
NOBODY’S FOOL
Nobody’s Fool follows the unexpected operation of grace in the life of an unlucky man, Sully, who has been triumphantly doing the wrong thing for fifty years. Divorced and carrying on with another man’s wife, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has a new problem: a son who is in danger of following in his father’s footsteps. With humor and a heart that embraces humanity’s follies, this is storytelling at its most generous.
Fiction/Literature
THE RISK POOL
Ned Hall is doing his best to grow up, even though neither of his estranged parents can properly be called adult. His father, Sam, cultivates bad habits so assiduously that he is stuck at the bottom of his auto insurance risk pool. His mother, Jenny, is slowly going crazy from resentment at a husband who refuses either to stay or to stay away. As Ned veers between allegiances to these grossly inadequate role models, Russo gives us a book that overflows with outsized characters and outlandish predicaments.
Fiction/Literature
STRAIGHT MAN
William Henry Devereaux, Jr., is the reluctant chair of the English department at an underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. In the course of a week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, imagine his wife is having an affair with the dean, wonder if an adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threaten to execute a goose on local television. At the same time, he must come to terms with the dereliction of his youthful promise and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions. In short, Straight Man is classic Russo—side-splitting, true-to-life, and impossible to put down.
Fiction/Literature
THAT OLD CAPE MAGIC
It’s a perfectly lovely wedding weekend on the Cape, but for Griffin, the middle-aged father of the
bride, it marks the beginning of his descent into a failed marriage, a confrontation with his parents’ deaths, and the realization that his life does not measure up to the life he thought he wanted. With moments of great comedy alternating with ones of rueful understanding, That Old Cape Magic is unlike anything Richard Russo has ever written.
Fiction/Literature
THE WHORE’S CHILD
To this irresistible debut collection of short stories, Richard Russo brings the same bittersweet wit, deep knowledge of human nature, and spellbinding narrative gifts that distinguish his best-selling novels. A cynical Hollywood moviemaker confronts his dead wife’s lover and abruptly realizes the depth of his own passion. As his parents’ marriage disintegrates, a precocious fifth-grader distracts himself with meditations on baseball, spaghetti, and his place in the universe. And in the title story, an elderly nun enters a college creative writing class and plays havoc with its tidy notions of fact and fiction.
Fiction/Short Stories
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2007 by Richard Russo
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Alfred A. Knopf: Excerpt from “Hope [2]” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC and Faber and Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from “This Be the Verse” from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin, copyright © 1988, 2003 by The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC and Faber and Faber Ltd.
Ray Charles Enterprises, Inc.: Excerpts from “Hit the Road Jack” by Percy Mayfield, copyright © by Tangerine Music Corp. Reprinted by permission of Ray Charles Enterprises, Inc., by arrangement with the Ray Charles Marketing Group.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Russo, Richard, date.
Bridge of sighs / Richard Russo.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. City and town life—Fiction. 2. New York (State)—Fiction. 3. Italy—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Lifestyles—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.U812B75 2007
813'.54—dc22 2007027970
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26790-0
v3.0_r1
Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs
(Series: # )
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