Bridge of Sighs (36 page)

That the cause we were now to be united in might be the wrong one didn’t really register with me. Despite my mother’s palpable fears, and even after witnessing in the person of Nancy Salvatore how swiftly reversals of fortune could happen, it never occurred to me that we wouldn’t succeed in the end. After all, no Buddy Nurt was dragging us down. Our move from Berman Court to the East End had seemed only natural, progress that one day might carry us all the way to the Borough, if we were fortunate. Sure, there’d be setbacks. But ultimately we would prevail.

Despite her innate caution, my mother must have shared this desperate conviction, this blind faith, at least long enough to sign for the expansion loan and the second mortgage. I doubt she seriously feared we’d ever have to return to the West End like her old friend. Rather, the fate she feared was the apartment itself, and as we stood there in its small, dark, empty rooms, I think now that my mother may have had a premonition, envisioning the day when our luck would fail utterly and the little house she’d purchased with money borrowed at such a heavy cost from my grandparents would be lost, as well as her argument with them. They’d not wanted her to marry my father or, for that matter, anyone from Thomaston. They intended for her to go away to school and meet a better class of boy, a more suitable mate who’d take her to live in a place where the streams and rivers were the color of water, not blood. But she’d sided with my father, and in doing so had broken their hearts. Now here she was, years later, reaffirming that decision, siding with him yet again in a venture she’d once believed to be foolish, this time risking everything.

What was
I
doing while my mother contemplated our future? Brooding over the past. Hers. Or rather Nancy Salvatore’s version of it. Could it be true what Nancy had said, about how wild she’d been? I remember trying to square all this with the woman I’d known only as my mother, with my own very different version of my parents’ history. I’d never thought about their courtship before. Somehow I’d always imagined my father’s asking her to marry him as the beginning. He’d simply shown up, a stranger on her doorstep, and asked her, and of course she’d said yes, just as any other Thomaston girl would’ve done if she’d been lucky enough to be asked by a man everyone knew and liked.
She
was the one who hadn’t known what hit her.

This was what I was mulling over when I heard footsteps on the back stairs, and as my uncle appeared in the doorway I knew who our new renter would be. Maybe it was the surprise, especially since I should’ve seen it coming, that made me aware of the aura—the fuzziness at the perimeter of my vision, the tingling of my extremities—I’d been ignoring since yesterday. This was no new phenomenon, of course, nor was the fact that when I saw my uncle standing there, I again had the irrational thought that he was the same man I’d heard when I awoke in the trunk so long ago. What
was
new this time was the sudden certainty that the woman who’d been with him, who’d opened the trunk and stared in at me, was my mother.

Even now I marvel at our ability, at certain odd moments, to embrace the most contradictory logic, as if truth and falsehood were not the opposites we know them to be but rather sly brothers under the skin. In my mind’s eye I could still see the woman who opened the trunk that night and gazed in at me with such innocent, drunken astonishment: “It’s a little boy!” I’m sure I needn’t state here, though I do, emphatically, that this woman was
not
my mother. Though backlit, she had been large and pale and fleshy and blond, and their voices had nothing in common. Why, then, when my uncle appeared, did a tiny door open in my brain and allow so bizarre a notion to enter? And why, in view of conclusive evidence to the contrary, was it so difficult to dispel?

“What’s the matter, Bub?” my uncle wanted to know. For some reason he wasn’t standing in the doorway anymore but next to my mother, both of them staring at me curiously. I guess I must have been staring at them, too, or perhaps at nothing at all. Realizing that I’d just suffered one of my spells, I tried to say something, but as was so often the case when I “awakened,” my disorientation was too profound, and I couldn’t find the right words. Sometimes, if I tried to speak too soon, unable to form the right combination of sounds to make familiar words, I’d spout gibberish. Less severe episodes would leave me in possession of the right words but no sense of how to arrange them in the right order, which was almost as frightening. Usually I was able to gauge the severity of a spell by studying the people who’d witnessed it, and I was pretty sure this one hadn’t lasted very long because Uncle Dec was standing just a few feet away from where he’d been before and my mother’s posture suggested she’d only this moment become aware that something was wrong. She squatted in front of me and took my hand, saying, “Lou? Are you back?”

I nodded, unwilling to trust language just yet, not with Uncle Dec there. He’d never witnessed one of my spells, and he now regarded me suspiciously, as you might if someone pronounced dead at the scene of an accident suddenly sat up and started looking around.

“You’re cold,” my mother said, rubbing my hands together in her own. “You want to go downstairs and see Dad?”

This was what I always wanted after a spell, so she wasn’t surprised when I nodded again. As usual I was exhausted and thirsty, as if I’d been walking along a dusty road for days, so tired I wasn’t sure I could make it down the stairs, but I didn’t want to be carried or even helped, especially by Uncle Dec. “This is pretty weird, Bub,” he remarked as we descended. “You know that, don’t you.”

“He’ll be all right,” my mother assured him. “He hasn’t had one of these in a while.”

In the air outside I could feel the vagueness begin to dissipate, though I still felt stupid and uncertain. My father knew what had happened as soon as we entered the store. “You have a spell, Louie?” he said, more an acknowledgment than a question. I closed my eyes, allowing the sound of his voice to soothe it all away. Not much remained now but the tingling in my fingertips and toes, that and the thirst. He got me settled on the stool next to the register. “You want a soda?”

“Me,” I said, the word “yes” not yet where I needed it to be.

“Shouldn’t—” Uncle Dec began. I knew how he would’ve finished, too. Shouldn’t I see the doctor?

“No, he just needs to sit quiet a minute, don’t you, Louie?”

I was determined to say “yes” and tried hard to do so, but again all that came out was “me.”

“Me, right,” Uncle Dec repeated, rolling his eyes.

Unwilling to speak again, I focused on my father’s white shirt as he went over to the cooler, returning with a bottle of grape soda. I drank half of it down in one huge gulp, then closed my eyes and concentrated on the big, gentle hand my father had placed on my shoulder. When I opened my eyes again, I saw that it was over. My uncle was just my uncle, not the man outside the trunk, and my mother was just my mother. And I was myself again: Louis Charles Lynch.

CROSSING THE LINE

T
HAT’S PITIFUL,
really. He shouldn’t even be on the street,” Sarah says when I tell her about our encounter with Buddy Nurt. I wouldn’t even have mentioned it except she’s already observed that I seem out of sorts, and I’d rather have her blame Buddy than my mother, whom she’ll now question about it, though I wish she wouldn’t. Saturday is Sarah’s day to look in on her, to gauge what she’ll need for the week. She’ll pick up the few things we don’t stock at Ikey’s, plus whatever she needs from the drugstore and Kmart, a bigger list than usual tomorrow because by next Friday we’ll be on a plane for Italy and my mother won’t want to trouble Owen.

“I’m not sure I’d bring it up,” I tell Sarah. “I think the whole thing upset her.”

Another untruth, or half-truth. I don’t
think
the episode upset her; I know it did. Upstairs in her flat, she collapsed into her reading chair without taking off her coat and just sat there staring at the dark smudge on her wall as if it had suddenly taken on new meaning, leaving me to make tea, a task I’m usually not allowed. My mother doesn’t like anyone in her kitchen, which is why it took me longer than it should have to find what I needed. By the time I returned to the front room, she’d taken off her coat and composed herself. “I was going to throw this away unless you want it,” she said, handing me a photograph.

I set her cup down and took the photo, immediately perplexed. In it, my mother’s seated playfully on the counter of Ikey Lubin’s, my father and Uncle Dec standing behind her. All three are smiling at the camera, and I’m struck by how different their smiles are. Uncle Dec has his usual, knowing smirk, entirely in character. My father’s in character also, his smile too broad, too unguarded—a smile that reveals the fact that he has everything he’s ever dreamed of and is at a total loss to explain how he got so lucky. The smile that unkind people so often described as “goofy,” and one I’m said to have inherited. My mother’s smile is the most intriguing. The fact that the three of them were together in the store dates the photo as being taken shortly after she’d broken her vow and joined my father in his venture. I remember it as a happy time, but I have no idea what, specifically, would have provoked such a playful attitude. Who talked her into climbing up on the counter and posing like a calendar girl, with one knee over the other? Her smile suggests not only that she’d laid down some burden but also that she’d just been told she was beautiful and believed it. Out of character, in other words. Usually my mother refused to be photographed at all, and on those rare occasions when she did agree she seemed to be trying to make herself disappear and mostly succeeding.

And where was I? Holding the camera? That would make sense, but I don’t recollect the incident, even though my memories of the period, as my little history suggests, are encyclopedic. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before,” I told her. “Of course I want it.”

“I was going through an old album,” she said.

“I hope you wouldn’t ever throw anything like this out without asking me,” I said, to which she replied, “I
did
ask you. Didn’t I.”

This gifting process troubles me. It began a couple of years ago, my mother producing some item that belonged to my father and asking if I had “any interest” in it. Some of this I could understand. My father was a pack rat. For thirty years he brought stuff home from flea markets and yard sales, even the dump. “Wonderful. More crap,” my mother would say when he arrived home, telling her to come look at what somebody was going to throw out if he hadn’t happened by. But eventually even she admitted he had a good eye for the kind of thing somebody’d pay money for, maybe not today, but someday: the right baseball card, an old campaign button. And later, when he was ill and it looked like we’d lose everything, we sold many of his treasures to help with costs, which left only the junk he’d been wrong about, that cost a quarter or fifty cents twenty years ago and was still worth a quarter or fifty cents. After he died, I put box after box of flea market bric-a-brac in storage, unable to part with it, especially if I recalled the day he brought it home or his explanation of why it would one day be valuable. I still go through this stuff from time to time. Now it’s boxed up in our cellar, where, one day, Owen will find it.

It’s hard to know what my son will make of items like the frogs. My father had little use for dirty jokes or anything pornographic, but one evening when I came into Ikey’s to relieve him on his supper break, he asked if I could tell the difference between a male and a female frog, and pushed two ceramic figures across the counter at me. I was at the age when any question having to do with sex made me apprehensive, not wanting to appear stupid on so important a subject, and I remember looking at the identical frogs with genuine misgiving. “It ain’t that hard,” he said when I confessed I had no idea, then turned them over to reveal their pale undersides, one of which sported a penis, the other breasts and a tiny vagina that looked like a grain of barley. The frogs had been a gift, I later learned, from Uncle Dec, who’d gotten a lot of mileage out of my father’s inability to tell the difference either. Owen, no doubt, will toss it all, but better him than me.

I understand why my mother might want to divest herself of such dubious possessions. I do. Still, it occurred to me one day last year how little was left in her apartment to remind her of him, or even their marriage. Was she trying to erase him? Many times over the last eighteen months she has offered me something with the excuse of having no room for it but which, like this photograph, takes up no room at all. It’s as if the dark smudge over the sofa is full and sufficient reminder of their lives together, and this possibility, I admit, has made me increasingly bitter.

Which may be why, when she asked if I had “any interest” in the photo of her and my father and Uncle Dec, I felt my resentment rise up, like bile. I told myself to swallow it as I always do, today of all days, so soon after the upset of Buddy Nurt and less than a week before Sarah and I leave for Italy. My mother is old and frail and she has her reasons, not all of which can be known to me or, for that matter, even to herself. Maybe it has less to do with my father than her own mortality, and this gifting is her grim acknowledgment that we don’t in the end get to take anything with us. Still, I heard myself say, “Mom, does it ever seem to you that no matter what we’re discussing, we’re always arguing about Dad?”

When she didn’t immediately respond, it occurred to me that perhaps she’d been thinking the same thing, maybe for years. “Why,” I went on, “is it so important to you that I remember him as you do? That I not love him?”

And just that quickly she was trembling with rage. “I
never
wanted you to not love your father,” she declared. “I wanted you to love
me.
”

Did I speak then? I don’t remember. I think probably not.

“Did it ever occur to you, even once during all those years, that you might have taken
my
side? That
I
might have needed a friend?”

How long did we sit there staring silently at the smudge above the sofa, both aware that we’d crossed a new line? Finally my mother said, “Go home, Lou.” As quickly as it had come, her rage had leaked away, and left her hollowed out, almost as if she’d had one of my spells, and of course I wished that I could take back every word. “Sarah will be missing you.”

“You’ll be all right?”

“My life is what I made it,” she said. “No fault of yours. I wish it were.”

At the door I said, “I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you,” and I’m sure I said this partly to give her the opportunity to deny it.

“I did hope,” she admitted, “you’d see things differently after your father died. Instead, all your beliefs have hardened. But I never wanted you not to love him.”

Do I believe this? I suppose I do. I know I do.

And have I, over time, become stubbornly calcified in my beliefs? That, I suppose, is also true.

A
FTER SARAH AND
I
FINISH
the dinner dishes, I go into my study and read over the last few pages of my story, trying to square the past as I remember it with today, this day. Should I continue writing? Is the urge to relive the events of my childhood rooted in the desire to see things clearly, just as my mother has always claimed she wants me to do? Or is my intention merely to etch my hardened conclusions into stone? How does one know? And in the end, what difference does it make? Who cares about a single life beyond the one whose task it is to live it? Am I not as entitled to my life as my mother is to hers? Must there be a version that reconciles all the versions, large or small?
Can
there be?

But her accusations trouble me, in part because they’re not new but also because I feel their truth. I wish I could deny that I’ve missed opportunities to be my mother’s friend. And of course I
have
chosen my father’s side. But at the core of her accusations is the belief that I’m willfully dishonest, always seeing what I want to see rather than what is. My father never once thought this. Did I choose him, his side, because he thought better of me?

At this particular moment, as I review the events of this day in the dark of night, I incline toward her assessment. There is, after all, recent evidence. Over dinner I told Sarah about our encounter with Buddy Nurt and how it upset my mother, but I said nothing about how we’d argued, nor did I repeat her accusations. I’ve kept them secret because I know my mother will never tell a soul, not even Sarah, of whom she’s extraordinarily fond. They will remain locked safely away unless I myself decide to reveal them, and I’ve already decided I will not.

It is the nature of some things, I believe, to remain locked away for the simple reason that revealing them serves no earthly purpose. For instance, I’ve never told anyone, even Sarah, what my father confided to me when he was ill. I’ve wanted to. His secret has weighed heavily on me, especially these last few years. I tell myself that he didn’t mean I shouldn’t tell Sarah, whom he loved and whose kind heart he trusted. But his instructions were “Don’t tell nobody,” and so I haven’t. I’ve told no one that when my father entered the voting booth each Election Day, he stayed there for as long as he judged it would take to complete a ballot, then returned his to its protective sleeve, unmarked. Unable or unwilling to follow my mother’s advice, he wasn’t confident enough of his own conclusions to act on them. He felt the burden of democratic responsibility and believed that decisions of such magnitude should not rest with men like him. Because he was a proud American, he knew he had the right to vote. But he also knew he had the right not to, and he exercised both of these rights each Election Day.

Have I kept his secret so long because I’m ashamed of him, as my mother would’ve been if she’d known? Or because it would break Sarah’s heart to hear it? Or because it broke my own, to know that he considered voting to be something for my mother, and later for me, but not for him? I don’t know, but his secret is mine to keep, and so I will. I am not Buddy Nurt. I don’t mine humiliation for gold. That said, what then can be the point of telling my story? Why scan the past for the shapes and meanings it surrenders so reluctantly if you mean to suppress some and exaggerate others?

But is the living of life so different from the telling of it? Do we not, a hundred times a day, decide
not
to bear witness? Do we not deny and suppress even at the level of instinct? Today, for instance, my mother and I both saw something in that haunted alley that was almost certainly responsible for our bitter quarrel over my father, though neither of us acknowledged it then or afterward. My mother may be old, but her vision remains sharp, and I’m sure she noticed the old moth-eaten varsity jacket Buddy was wearing, saw that the threads used to stitch the original owner’s name below the cloth collar had been removed, leaving behind a ghostly reminder like the smudge that manages to seep through repeated paintings of the wall behind her sofa—that the jacket had once been the proud possession of someone who announced himself to the world as
BIG LOU
. Are we not complicit in each other’s secrets?

I will have to make a concerted effort not to brood about the fact that Buddy’s walking around Thomaston in my father’s old coat. After all, things like this happen all the time in small towns. When I was growing up it wasn’t difficult to trace the provenance of a particular item of clothing. A blue blazer, for instance, might be purchased for a junior high or high school boy by his Borough parents; by the following summer he would have outgrown it, and the blazer would then be donated to their church’s clothing drive, after which it would reappear on the back of some East End kid, whose parents would take it the following year to Goodwill, where a West End mother would purchase it for her son. Nor will I ever forget the senior prom when a Borough girl, a friend of Nan Beverly’s, came over specifically to tell Sarah how pretty she looked, that the dress she was wearing really looked much better on Sarah than it had on her at last year’s junior prom.

Is it any wonder our adult lives should be so haunted? Over and over we go up and down the alley between the theater and the dime store, as my mother and I did today, moving through space, yes, but also through time, meeting ourselves, as Owen always says, coming and going. How beautiful Sarah looked in that dress. How important it must have been to that Borough girl, who wasn’t pretty, to undermine her beauty. How she must have wanted to tear the dress right off her.