Bridge of Sighs (29 page)

Anxious as he’d been to go, my father now seemed reluctant to leave me alone in the store, even briefly. “I warned your mother something like this would happen,” he said, putting Nancy’s tab back under the cash drawer. There was no bitterness to the observation, though, not like there always was when my mother said her I-told-you-so’s.

After my father finally went across the street, a truck driven by one of the brothers pulled up in front. Jerzy Quinn was with him. They went upstairs and returned a few minutes later with Karen, Buddy Nurt following at a respectful distance. There was no sign of Nancy. With the door closed I couldn’t hear exactly what was being said, but Buddy seemed to be arguing that Karen didn’t have to run off on his account. She was lugging an old cardboard suitcase, and when she tried shoving it behind the pickup’s seat, the clasp sprang open, spilling clothes into the gutter. Only then did she begin to cry. When Buddy came over to help, she screamed at him to keep away. I couldn’t tell if Jerzy and the brother felt the same admonition applied to them, or whether they just weren’t sure she wanted them touching her underthings, but at any rate they just stood there watching her cram things back into the suitcase. When she was finished, of course, it wouldn’t close, and she had to hold it shut as best she could on her lap. I hoped that maybe she’d remember I was there and look over at me, but she stared straight ahead as her uncle and boyfriend climbed in on either side of her. Buddy waved as the truck pulled away, though nobody waved back.

I actually felt kind of sorry for him, standing there alone at the curb, knowing, as he surely must’ve, that his mere appearance was enough to make people scatter. But then he turned toward Ikey Lubin’s, and the expression on his face scared me. It wasn’t anything like he’d looked when he was trying to borrow his cab fare. This face was sneaky and mean, and looking right at me. For a moment the irrational thought entered my mind that for some reason Buddy Nurt blamed me for what had just happened.

When he was gone, though, I went outside where he’d been standing, because by then it had occurred to me that he probably hadn’t been looking at me at all. In the early evening it was still bright enough outside for the windows to reflect light. Was it possible that the cold, contemptuous and frightening expression was the one that greeted him every day in the mirror? This was somehow even scarier than thinking it was me he’d been mad at. My own face, I couldn’t help noticing, had unconsciously mimicked Buddy’s expression.

Heading back inside, I saw the three dogs my mother had shot at, loping up the street toward me. Inside, I found the gun under the counter and took it back outside with me. All three stopped in their tracks when they saw me, and when I raised the gun they turned and hightailed it back toward the West End. For all I knew they were East End dogs, but I thought of them that day as West End mutts and, because they had no business in our neighborhood, I filled the air around them with pellets.

T
HE NEXT EVENING
my mother was working on her books, which she did when there was nothing good on TV and it was quiet and my father was at the store. Eyes fixed on her open ledger, her fingers flew over the keys of the adding machine she always set up in the middle of the kitchen table. At times like these her powers of concentration were so great that I suspected she wasn’t really listening to anything I said, which was why I sometimes tried to slip in awkward bits of information—a poor performance on a math test, say, or a B on a science project—when she was so engaged, though the strategy seldom worked. That particular night I had something on my mind, so I joined her there at the table. I’d been thinking about what Nancy Salvatore had said, how in no time, even though she knew better, she’d be loaning Buddy Nurt money and falling back into the very habits she’d hoped to escape by moving to the East End with her daughter. It struck me that anybody smart enough to figure out what the future held ought to be smart enough to avoid it. In Nancy’s case it seemed merely an issue of self-control, a concept the nuns of St. Francis had famously drummed into us. If Nancy knew that Buddy Nurt was bad for both her and Karen, then it was simply a matter of acting upon that knowledge. Hadn’t she sat right here in our kitchen the day after her brothers moved her in, proclaiming loudly that she’d finally learned her lesson and was done with Buddy Nurt, that if he ever showed up in the East End she wouldn’t even let him in the door? What good did it do, I asked my mother, to talk like that if you were just going to give in without a fight later? I’d looked Buddy over pretty carefully and concluded that any woman in her right mind should’ve been able to resist his charms. In fact, I couldn’t even imagine what his charms might be. My mother let me go on like this for some time before she stopped pounding numbers and regarded me critically.

“You’re going to have to get smarter about people if you want to survive in the world, Louie,” she said, so seriously that my feelings were hurt. “You don’t really think just because somebody says they’re going to do something, that means they’re going to do it?”

“But why?” I said. “Why would she take him back?”

“You know the answer, Lou.”

“I don’t,” I said, peevish now. In truth I was puzzled not just by Nancy Salvatore but by adult behavior in general. Though Gabriel Mock had expressed what I took to be genuine contrition about his drunkenness in the library parking lot, I’d seen him drunk twice since then, once outside the pool hall and again across the street from the Y after the dance let out. My parents’ ongoing disagreements were annoying, too. If
I
could predict what each would say on any given topic, why couldn’t they? Why did they feel it necessary to repeat themselves, to stake out the same positions time after time? Would I become like that when I got older, retracing my steps over and over, unaware that I was doing so or, worse, not caring?

My mother raised her eyebrow at me like she always did when she suspected willful incomprehension. “Look, when the Marconis moved, Bobby promised you he’d call, right? But he didn’t. That wasn’t very nice, and you were mad at him.”

I shrugged, unwilling to admit that, yes, I
had
been mad at him.

“But if he showed up tomorrow wanting to be friends, you’d forgive him, wouldn’t you?”

I shrugged again.

“Why?” she said, and when I didn’t answer, she continued, “Because there’s nothing worse than being alone. In your heart you know that’s true, don’t you?”

I nodded reluctantly. “But Buddy Nurt?”

She was having none of it. “What’s worse, bad friends or no friends?”

I said I didn’t know.

“Yes,
you do.
Don’t be one of those people who go through life pretending not to know what they know.” The implication was
Like your father,
who’d known for a full year he was going to lose his milk route but pretended not to. I wanted to object, but then the fingers of her right hand were racing over the adding machine keys, while those of her left tracked figures up and down the columns.

“Is that why you and Dad…” I couldn’t complete the sentence.

“Your father and I are together because we love each other. Also because we love you.”

That was the answer I’d been hoping for, of course, and to hear the words made me feel good. Better, I think, than they made her feel, because when I got up from the table to head upstairs she said, “Don’t go trying to figure out love.”

I promised I wouldn’t.

“And don’t waste time wishing the world was different than it is. You aren’t going to change it. Don’t expect people to be something they can’t. Or yourself for that matter.”

“What can’t I be?” I asked her, because lately I’d been thinking a lot about that very thing.

She looked up at me, and our eyes met. I had the distinct impression she was going to tell me something, but then she went back to her numbers, which always added up in the end.

Unlike love.

FACE VALUE

T
HESE DAYS
my mother likes to eat early. Lunch at ten-thirty, dinner at five. I understand. I do. She’s rarely able to sleep much past five-thirty, when Owen arrives to open Ikey’s, so everything gets pushed forward, including meals. Friday, though, is our regular luncheon date, and so she’s willing to postpone the midday meal until eleven-thirty “to fit my schedule,” though in truth that’s when Dot’s Sandwich Shoppe, downtown, starts serving. A new place, the Top Drawer Café, has opened out on Old County Road, not far from Whitcombe Park, and I’ve offered to take her there, but she prefers Dot’s, probably because the food is plain and old-fashioned. We’re usually the first ones seated, which means we get the window seat overlooking Hudson Street and the old Bijou Theater, the restoration of which is nearly complete. It won’t show movies, as it used to, but instead will be used for concerts and special events. The grand opening is when Sarah and I are in Italy, and I’ll be sad to miss it.

I arrive at Ikey’s a few minutes early, so I decide to pop in and say hello to Brindy, who’s at the register. “Hi, Pop,” she says in that abstracted way she has, when my arrival is signaled by the same bell above the door that used to announce Karen Cirillo back when I was minding the till. I’ve lost count of how many new registers we’ve had during this span, this most recent a thin, light computerized model, but the little bell soldiers on heroically. “You all packed?”

“You’d have to ask Sarah,” I tell her, taking a quick inventory and suppressing, or trying to, a smile of pure satisfaction. Good old Ikey’s. I half expect my father to come in from the back room with a big box of toilet paper for me to shelve. What I wouldn’t give.

“I wish it was me going,” Brindy says.

“That makes two of us,” I tell her. “Where’s Owen?” I expect her to say he’s in the back room, the door to which is open and shouldn’t be, not if no one’s in there.

“Down at the West End store,” she says. “God, who doesn’t want to go to Italy?”

“Sarah says I’ll be fine once I’m there.”

“Then you probably will. She knows you best.”

“That’s what
she
says.” I know her observation is vaguely insulting in that it suggests a lack of self-knowledge, but I can’t help smiling anyway. To have someone you love know you better than you know yourself is a compliment, I believe, and so did my father when people said the same thing about my mother. When someone knows your deepest self and still loves you, are you not a lucky man? Having spent much of the last month or so dwelling on the past, I’m particularly pleased to consider that there’s someone who knows me so well and yet doesn’t regret a lifetime spent in my company, much of it in this very store.

“Is everything okay down there?” I ask. The register hasn’t been ringing out right lately, and Owen’s thinking about firing the manager.

“Owen’s the one who’d know,” Brindy says, in a tone that gives me pause. For some time Sarah’s been worrying that things aren’t right between the two of them. I don’t want to believe this is true. I’d rather think, as I have in the past, that my daughter-in-law’s coolness is directed at me, or Sarah and me, and not our son.

“Have him call me if he needs anything,” I tell her, and she says she will. These days, my job is to go wherever I’m needed in what Owen calls the Lynch Empire, which includes Thomaston’s three remaining corner markets—“convenience stores” now—plus our video rental store and, in summer, the Thomaston Cone. I take uncovered shifts when someone calls in sick or has a problem with a child. In truth, I wish there were more of these shifts. The video store has its own manager and staff, and the tiny ice-cream store is seasonal, so sometimes I feel—what’s the word that’s so in vogue these days?—marginalized. But I do understand Owen’s thinking. One day he’ll oversee all three of our markets, whether or not I’ve prepared him for that responsibility. I have to allow him to do things his way and make his own mistakes. I’m determined not to meddle, either with him or Brindy, who’s far more sensitive to interference. Which is why I won’t go over and close the door to the back room, no matter how much I want to.

Upstairs, my mother answers the door a split second after I knock, and she already has her coat on and buttoned, which means she’s been standing on the other side of the door waiting impatiently for my arrival. God knows for how long. I could ask, but I still wouldn’t know, because she’d say she saw me pull up outside or heard me clomping up the stairs, both of which are no doubt true, though that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been ready for an hour, anxious, I fear, for this to be over. It would be different, more pleasurable, if Sarah were able to join us. My wife has been, lo these many years, an excellent buffer between my mother and me, somehow able to remind us, despite our many disagreements, of how close we are.

But on Fridays Sarah teaches at the junior high. She’s been a fine teacher for over two decades now, cobbling together as many part-time gigs at the junior and high schools as our dwindling budget will allow. She has fewer classes this year, after her illness, and has rediscovered her old passion, painting up a storm in the junior high art room long after her students have gone home. Of course she denies it is or ever was a passion. Real painters, she says, become painters. That’s what
makes
them painters. Nothing comes between them and paint. Not circumstance, not life. Like Michelangelo and Titian and Caravaggio and the other masters whose work we’ll see in Italy; like Bobby, she sometimes adds, matter-of-factly. At any rate her Friday class leaves my mother and me to our own devices, devices that haven’t changed, I sometimes think, since I was a boy. Maybe it’s just how it goes with mothers and sons. Had my father lived, well, who can say?

She gives me a dry peck on the cheek and steps out into the hall, quickly closing the door behind her, but not before I glimpse the dark smudge on the wall behind her sofa where the fire was so many years ago. That wall’s been painted half a dozen times over the intervening years, even wallpapered once, but eventually the faint outline of the old burn comes through, followed gradually by something darker and uglier. Original sin, my mother likes to call it, by which she means my father’s purchase of Ikey Lubin’s. A bitter thing to say, I’ve always thought, though she claims it’s a joke. There’s no denying Ikey’s changed our lives, that it was a terrible risk my mother never would’ve taken. And it’s true we had bad luck for a while when my father fell ill and we lost our house, forcing my mother to break her steadfast vow and move in above the store. But it’s unfair to suggest that Ikey’s was the first domino to fall against our family. All human events lead to other human events, and my mother’s damning Ikey’s is arbitrary. One could just as easily blame my father’s illness, the polluted stream that caused it or the mountain of medical bills that resulted. Why not pin it all on the old dairy discontinuing home delivery, or the public school boys who locked me in that trunk? But for them we might never have left Berman Court. What would our lives have been like if we’d never crossed Division Street? There are a great many sins in the world, none of them original.

“Why don’t you use the chair?” I suggest when I see how stiff my mother is today, but she immediately starts down the steep, narrow steps, clutching the banister grimly with her twisted fingers. I installed the mechanized chair two years ago, over her strident objections, when the arthritis started getting worse and the stairs were clearly becoming both a trial and a hazard. Her right foot turns in now, and her balance is not what it should be. I feared she’d fall but instead should have foreseen her stubbornness. “That damned contraption” is what she calls it, claiming the chair’s dangerous, that it will come loose from the wall while she’s aboard or its gears will strip and send her plummeting backward to the bottom of the stairs. I argued, of course, that it would restore her freedom, that she could come and go as she pleased, without waiting for someone to help her. “And where would I go?” was her reply. Which did make me smile at how the tables had turned. When she and my father got me that first bike, her idea had been to get me out of the house and into the world. “Where should I go?” I remember asking. “Out,” she replied. “Away. Anywhere.” Having paid good money for the chair, I’d have liked to say the same to her, though of course I didn’t, and so it has remained, except on rare occasions, useless at the bottom of the stairs.

Which is where my mother says, “There.” Which is shorthand for
I told you so,
for
I can manage the stairs just fine,
for
You wasted your money.
And, unless I’m mistaken, for
I enjoy my prison, the ugly smudge on my living room wall. Because some things in life can’t be painted or papered over, or fixed.
Which is what, she maintains, I’ve never understood.

I help her into the car, where she sits staring down at her knees, refusing, as always, to look across the street at the house where we’d lived for most of my childhood. Five years ago, when it came back on the market, I bought it with the idea of showing her it wasn’t lost after all, but she would have none of that. “What would I do,” she said, “all alone in that big house?”

“Live?” I suggested. “Like you used to?”

But no. “It’d be too much work. I’m better off where I am.” Then the clincher. “Besides, it’s too late.”

So, for now, a renewed tactic. “Would you like to try the new restaurant? The Top Drawer?” I ask her. “The food’s supposed to be good.”

As if I didn’t know the answer.

A
T THE CURB
outside Dot’s is a car whose bumper sticker sets my mother off. “Support our troops,” she says, her voice oozing disgust.

This is a topic I’d rather avoid, because her opinions on impersonal matters of national and international scope have a way of becoming personal. She despises our president as a dishonest fool whose lies and stupidity have cost over two thousand American lives, but her deepest contempt is reserved for those who voted for him—her son, she suspects, among them, though I’ve never told her who I voted for. Sarah says my mother doesn’t intend for her political observations to be so personal, but how many times as a boy did I hear this same withering sarcasm applied to my father and, by extension, to me? “Lou. Why would you believe such a thing?” Well, my father would reply, because this guy swore it was true. “You’re telling me you believe it because he said it? That’s the reason?” He don’t have no reason to lie that I know of, my father would reply weakly. “Right. But he’s got about a hundred you don’t know of and will never find out about, because you take everything at face value. It’s what’s called being gullible, Lou.”

Even more personal is her claim that our president’s stupidity is apparent in his physical appearance, particularly his facial expressions. All you have to do is look at him, she claims. Here, no doubt, Sarah’s right. I’m internalizing my mother’s attack on the president, who does, I admit, bear a striking resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman. But in general I reject the notion that what’s inside a person can be determined by his exterior. Large, slow-moving men like my father and me are often assumed to be slow witted as well, and in school it always took my teachers a while to realize I was bright. I’m the first to allow that my intelligence isn’t quick, but I am observant and methodical and, I believe, fair-minded. To me, it’s always seemed ironic that people who take the trouble to stop and think are often judged obtuse. When I was a boy, my mother had a habit of snapping her fingers when she asked me a question. “Come on, Lou, you’re smart. You know the answer. Don’t pretend you don’t.” That is, don’t pretend to be like your father, which was what she always seemed to be saying, and this made me even more deliberate. Even if it were true that I’m smarter than my father, who had none of my advantages, would that make me a better man?

So I say, “Let’s not talk about the president.”

“Fine,” my mother says agreeably. “If you’ll admit you voted for him, it would give me great pleasure never to utter his name again.”

It’s tempting to give her the answer she wants, to confess to being who she thinks I am, but I can’t and she knows it. She used to hound my father on the same subject, telling him sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, whom he should vote for, and later badgering him to reveal whether he’d acted on her advice. I sometimes think that what he did in the voting booth was the sole secret of his married life, or at least the only one he was able to keep. He liked to try to sneak little things by her from time to time, like buying that cheap shirt in the West End store and telling her he’d gotten it at Calloway’s, but she always knew better, which only deepened his respect for her powers of cognition. He knew better than to lie, so when it came to voting he simply refused to say anything, an example I’ve always followed. Indeed, I alone know what my father did in the voting booth. He confided it to me shortly before he died, one of his final acts of love. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said, unnecessarily. “Don’t tell nobody,” he added, his eyes filling with tears. By then he was in constant pain, the effectiveness of the drugs he was taking intermittent, at best.

“Fine,” my mother says when I pretend to study my menu, leaving her challenge in the air between us. “If you think you have a secret, keep it.”

“I will, thanks,” I assure her.

My mother orders what she always orders, a grilled-cheese sandwich and a cup of thin tomato soup. In addition to being inexpensive, the food at Dot’s is bland, which she also appreciates. She suffers, like many women her age, from acid reflux, and spicy foods keep her awake at night. In turn, I order my usual burger and fries. For a while we eat in silence, until the clock strikes twelve and the shopkeepers and clerks from the few remaining businesses along Hudson and Division begin drifting in. Most of them like to sit at the counter where they can chat with Dot and each other, but many stop at our table to say hello. “I hope he’s picking up the tab,” they tell my mother, and she says she hopes so, too. It’s a standing joke in town that I’m a skinflint who routinely loses his wallet in his deep pockets. “Has he taken you out to the Top Drawer yet?” they want to know, to which she responds no, not yet, feeling no need to elaborate. “Make him,” they suggest. “Who else around here can afford those prices?”