Bridge of Sighs (15 page)

Lichtner polished off his Campari with a sneer. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you.”

“Actually,” Noonan said, summoning as much sincerity as he could muster, “I don’t care one way or the other. Leave or stay. Divorce or stay married. Do what makes you least miserable.”

“I never said I was miserable,” Lichtner replied, his back up now.

“I’m sorry, I thought you did.”

“Maybe right this second,” he conceded miserably. “But Eve and I have weathered worse than you. Far worse.”

“You aren’t going to tell me about it, I hope.”

“And it’s not like I’ve been a hundred percent faithful to her,” he added proudly.

“What percentage would you estimate?”

Lichtner ignored this. “I’ve never screwed the wife of a friend, though. That’s where I draw the line.”

“We’re friends, you and I?” Noonan said.

“We’re not?”

It was amazing to watch a man so all over the emotional map, each new feeling at war with the preceding as well as the subsequent, each important without being satisfying, sustainable or, for that matter, even reliable. Noonan couldn’t be sure whether he was observing a person or a condition common to men their age. “It hadn’t occurred to me, I guess,” Noonan said. Not that it would have mattered.

“That day in church, you broke my heart, Noonan. I felt really close to you then.”

“How close
were
you? How many pews?”

Lichtner shrugged, looking pitiful. “Hey, you don’t want to be friends? Nobody’s forcing you.”

When the waiter came by, Noonan shook his head. A second drink would reinforce Lichtner’s notion that they were friends, something he was determined to avoid. The other man took out some money. “I’m sorry I punched you,” he said.

“Me, too,” Noonan said. It still felt like the other man’s fist was trapped in his chest.

“You’re sorry you screwed my wife, or you’re sorry I punched you?”

Just sorry, Noonan thought, no more able to pin it down now than he’d been earlier with Evangeline. Did you get credit for being sorry if you couldn’t explain what you were sorry about? Noonan had spent enough time in catechism as a kid to doubt it. There you learned to diagram sins like sentences, and unless you could explain what you’d done wrong and why, forgiveness was withheld.

The students were still chanting when they rose to leave.
“Dottore! Dottore!”
they shouted. “Fuck yourself! Fuck yourself!” A girl dressed like a wood nymph chugged her flagon of beer, then set it down triumphantly. Nearby, the penis who’d been chugging when they entered was now slumped forward in his chair, flaccid.

Outside in the
campo,
Lichtner looked like he might cry. “I can’t go home.”

“Sure you can,” Noonan said. He’d gone out for a drink with a man who’d just bushwhacked him because it seemed like the decent thing to do, but enough was enough. “Just don’t punch Evangeline, because then you
will
be sorry. That I can pretty much guarantee.”

“The thing is, I’m not supposed to be here. In Venice. My plane doesn’t land until morning. How about letting me crash on your sofa? It’s really the least you can do, if you think about it.”

Noonan did think about it, and arrived at the opposite conclusion. Still. “How come you don’t have a suitcase?”

“It’s in a locker at the Ferrovia.”

“Go get it, if you want. I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

“Yeah, right,” Lichtner said. “Like I can trust you.”

IKEY’S

I
’M UPSTAIRS
working in my study when I hear water running outside and realize Owen must be drawing water. And over at the window I see I’m right. My son is down on his knees, surrounded by gallon plastic milk jugs. (How appalled my father would’ve been by those!) His hair is thinning, as my father’s did in that same spot on his crown, and so, of course, has mine. Owen is filling one of the plastic jugs at our outside spigot. When it overflows, he sets it down, screws the plastic cap on tight and places another under the stream. He’s quick and efficient in his motions but doesn’t bother to turn the water off between jugs, so the knees of his pants are soaked. I count seven one-gallon containers, a week’s worth of water for drinking and making coffee and cooking spaghetti and potatoes or whatever.

He and Brindy, his wife, live just over the town line in a tidy, modest house not far from Whitcombe Park. They’ve recently discovered their well is poisoned, its water safe enough to shower in but definitely not potable. Sarah and I urged them to have this tested before they bought the place two years ago, but Brindy had fallen in love with the house, and they waived some inspections once they’d learned that another interested couple was about to make an offer. Apparently, their realtor advised them that in multiple-offer situations, sellers often take the “cleanest,” that is, the offer with the fewest contingencies. Therefore, clean offer, dirty water. State-mandated inspections had already revealed lead-based paint throughout the house, as well as asbestos in the attic and marginally unsafe levels of radon, but Brindy, a West End girl from a large family, loved the idea of living out in the country and couldn’t imagine ever finding another house she’d love as much, so we gave them enough money for a down payment, and they signed on the dotted line. When the other offer never materialized, Sarah was suspicious. After all, the county’s population has been in steady decline since the sixties. Every third or fourth house in Thomaston has a
FOR SALE
sign on its terrace and usually stays on the market for two years, even longer out in the country. So what were the odds that Owen and Brindy really had to compete for the place that caught her eye?

I myself had hoped they’d stay in town. Once our Third Street renters’ lease was up, I could’ve put them in there rent-free. The house has been nicely renovated, and it was big enough, even if they had a child, as they were planning back then. And I’ll admit it: I liked the idea of my son and his wife raising a family in the same house where I myself grew up—the symmetry, I guess. But as Sarah pointed out, it was my symmetry, not theirs. Owen grew up in our Borough house, of course, and never spent a minute on Third Street, so it couldn’t possibly mean to him what it did to me. And the neighborhood isn’t, alas, what it once was. I thought they might see the practical side of it, but I don’t think Brindy warmed to the idea of being so close to the store. “It’s their life,” Sarah reminded me when she saw how disappointed I was. “Let them live it.”

Still, when Brindy miscarried last winter, we blamed ourselves for not insisting on complete inspections. We could’ve made it a condition of giving them the down payment, but at the time that seemed unkind and manipulative. Besides which, everyone we’ve talked to since has agreed that while the arsenic discovered in their well might have contributed to Brindy’s miscarriage, it’s impossible to assign a single cause with anything like certainty. Find a well anywhere in the county
without
arsenic, was how one inspector, an old friend of my father’s, had put it. Find a house over twenty years old
without
lead-based paint, or an attic that
wasn’t
insulated with asbestos. Never mind the Cayoga Stream, the real culprit in our lives. Radon and low-level arsenic are the least of our problems.

If my son and his wife were foolish or careless in the purchase of their house, I understand. I do. I remember vividly my father’s pride in our house at the corner of Third and Rawley. Sometimes, early on Sunday mornings, he’d wake up first, get dressed, cross the street and sit there on the curb and just look at the house, as if he couldn’t wrap his mind around it without the necessary distance. Thinking about what I’ve written so far concerning his rivalry with Mr. Marconi, I wonder if I’ve done him a disservice. Like so many men of his generation, he was a creature of postwar optimism who looked around and saw things getting better and not a single reason they shouldn’t continue to do so. Wasn’t our move from Berman Court to the East End proof of how things worked, that such optimism was justified? Not that he’d been unhappy in the West End. I doubt he’d have been unhappy anywhere, as long as we were all together, he and my mother and me. But moving to the East End had changed everything.

Modest as it was, I think our tidy little house instilled in my father the notion that “getting ahead” was both possible and desirable, and so, without knowing exactly how or why, he entered into a paradox he never was able to resolve. On the one hand, he was content with what he saw as our great good fortune. Over the years, when he told me there was no reason I couldn’t have a house in the Borough one day, I truly believe he was expressing as best he could what he imagined
I
might want, not something he himself yearned for or even necessarily wanted
for
me. That was the paradox. He discovered that embracing the notion of getting ahead trailed an unexpected obligation: to instill in me my right as an American to dream big, if that’s what I had a mind to do. So he did his duty.

My point, though, is that my father already
had
what he wanted, and when he implied to Mr. Marconi that he didn’t think we’d ever move to the Borough, it
wasn’t
sour grapes. And that afternoon, when we returned to our own neighborhood and he said that the East End was the right place for us, I truly believe he meant every word. We don’t always want what we compete for. Sure, he believed in getting ahead just as he feared falling behind, and believed he had every right to want more. He just couldn’t imagine what
that
might entail. I don’t doubt he hated losing any competition to Mr. Marconi, but that didn’t mean he was jealous of the spoils with which the victor was crowned. Those grand Borough houses didn’t make ours look small and shabby, not to him. I repeat: my father had what he wanted.

Below, Owen has finished filling his plastic jugs. As he stacks them in the club cab behind the seat of his pickup, I try to decide whether what I’m feeling is some vague disappointment, and I hope it isn’t, because that would be terrible. More likely I just wish I knew him better. After all, he’s not a complicated man, and often I know what he’ll do or say next, maybe even before he does. I know, for instance, that before he drives off with his water supply, he’ll come inside and help himself to milk from our refrigerator. He’ll drink it straight from the carton, though his mother wishes he wouldn’t, and feel mildly guilty when I catch him at it. I know him. I do. But if someone were to ask me what my son wants out of life, what he dreams of, what he fears, I wouldn’t have a clue. I know he loves Sarah and me, and that he’s devoted to Brindy. Nobody could’ve been kinder or gentler when she miscarried last year. And should they eventually have children, Owen will be a good, patient father. But there is and has always been a curious lack of passion in him, and that’s what puzzles his mother and me. Years ago rental trucks had devices called “governors” that prevented speeding and reckless driving, and a similar mechanism seems to govern my son. Extremes of joy or anger or fear appear foreign to him.

Nor, when he was growing up, did his teachers know quite what to make of him, the way he waited so patiently for school to be over, for people to stop pestering him to read books that didn’t speak to him, for the day to arrive when he no longer had to answer their odd questions or fill blank notebook pages with words he didn’t believe. Though he invariably defeated their efforts on his behalf, I can’t remember a single teacher who wasn’t fonder of Owen than of their prize students. Sweet and resigned by temperament, he never rebelled against or challenged them. If he doubted the wisdom of their assignments or the relevance of their subjects, he kept his own counsel. Even as a boy he was quicker to blame himself than others. I once asked Sarah if she thought a truly gifted teacher like her father might’ve gotten through to Owen, burrowed deep into his core and forced the private boy out into the open, but she just smiled and kissed me and said no, he was his father’s son. It’s always been my wife’s contention that I have a place deep inside me that is wholly mine, that it’s fortified and unassailable, a place no one, even herself, has ever entered. This, she further believes, is where I go when I have one of my spells. Does my son have such a place? Don’t we all?

Owen may have thwarted and frustrated his teachers, but not because he was lazy, and this, more than anything else, reassures me and makes me proud. From the time he was big enough to handle a mower, he tended our lawn as well as neighbors’, and when snowplows piled the driveways high with heavy, compacted snow, Owen was there to dig us out, even when the drifts were taller than he was. He neatly folded the dollar bills he earned and deposited them at the Thomaston Savings and Loan and each month reconciled the bank’s numbers with his own, pleased when they tallied exactly and when they grew, though he never seemed to be saving for anything specific. And of course, as soon as he was old enough, he worked at the store, fulfilling his duties there with care and diligence. Am I wrong to wish he loved the store as I do? To see it as I see it? Am I even sure he doesn’t? In truth, I’m not, though I worry. When his mother and I are gone, will he and Brindy sell their inheritance? It’s possible.

Some years ago I learned, well after the fact, that Owen had his heart set on buying an old fishing camp up in the Adirondacks. The list price made it seem like a bargain, but the dozen or so lakeside cabins were so neglected that it would’ve been extravagantly costly to restore them. The remote location was a plus in the summer and fall, but after the first snow anyone living in the main house would be a virtual prisoner for the next five months, miles from the nearest store or doctor, hours to the nearest hospital or school, no place for a child. It was Brindy, I suspect, who made him see how impractical it was, but I was pleased to know that my son had wanted something bad enough to be heartbroken when he was denied it, even if he didn’t share that heartbreak with me. It didn’t seem fair, somehow, that someone who’d never known quite what to want should be refused when he finally discovered it. I tell myself he’ll want something else, and that next time he’ll be luckier. If he has to sell his inheritance to get it, so be it. To insist that he love what I love is asking too much. I know. I know.

In truth, I wouldn’t mind if they sold the West End store on lower Division Street, which has no sentimental value to me. We purchased it after my father died, and while it outperforms our East End store, we’ve been robbed at gunpoint several times, and for a long time now I’ve had reservations about how revenue is generated there. We sell the usual convenience store items, of course—bread and milk and other things people run out of and don’t want to run all the way to the supermarket for. But it’s the Lotto machine that pulls them in. For the last several years Division has been one of the top-five stores in the entire state in terms of Lotto ticket sales. “Desperate people who can’t wait to pay the taxes” is how my mother describes it. She’s always considered gambling, especially the legal state-sponsored variety, to be a tax on ignorance, and Division’s success may well be, as she claims, an accurate barometer of that ignorance. I’m not sure my father would’ve seen it in exactly those terms, but I know he would have been troubled not just by the robberies but also by the long lines of shabby people that form in front of the Lotto machine, especially late at night, after the bars close, waiting patiently for their luck to change. He wouldn’t have felt much pride in owning the kind of store that had to hire an extra clerk just for the purpose of taking such people’s last two dollars. Nor do I.

Of course if it’s up to Brindy, it won’t be Division they’ll sell. Why sell the moneymaker, she’d say, and it’s hard to fault her logic. It’s the busier store, no doubt about it, and she likes to be busy, especially now. Since the miscarriage she seems a different young woman, though when I remarked on the change to my wife, she reminded me that this was to be expected. She’s naturally sympathetic to Brindy, having herself miscarried, early in our marriage. “Don’t you remember how long it took me to bounce back? We need to be patient with her.” And I understand all that. I do. But I worry that their loss has driven some sort of wedge between herself and Owen, whom she treats coolly now, I think, as if he’s constantly trying her patience or blocking her way and making her wait for him to move so she can do whatever needs to be done, though too many errors are born of this impatience, or so it seems to me. Naturally, I keep that opinion to myself. The house they bought out in the country, the one
she
wanted, she now claims is too isolated. She’d like to “unload it,” so they could move back to civilization and have friends again. “Civilization?” my mother said when Brindy voiced that wish a few months ago. “Thomaston?” She’s never made it much of a secret that she’s not overly fond of her granddaughter-in-law. “You can take the girl out of the West End,” she says, then lets her voice trail off.

“Pop,” Owen says, when I find him with the carton of milk at his lips. “I didn’t know you were home.” He puts the milk back in the fridge and closes the door. “Sorry.”

“Why don’t you take what water you need from the store?” I ask, seeing what a mess he’s made of his pants.