Bridge of Sighs (30 page)

When we’ve finished eating, I say “Will you be all right while we’re gone?” and she says of course she will. “Owen and Brindy are right downstairs most days. One or the other.”

But not both. My mother shares Sarah’s fear that all is not well between them.

“And you’ve written down that cell phone number?” Sarah has rented one from a store in Schenectady, and the clerk, who she claimed looked all of fifteen, swore it would work on our trip. To each question Sarah asked, the boy had responded, “Absolutely.” She pinned him down as best she could. Anywhere in Europe? “Absolutely.” Italy is where we’ll be. “Really? Awesome.” And you’re sure it’ll work there? “Absolutely.”

We’ll see.

“I’ll be fine,” my mother tells me. “Will you?” She asks because last week I made the mistake of sharing my worry about having one of my spells in a foreign country, a concern I’ve not even mentioned to Sarah, though she’s probably guessed.

When I tell her I’ll be fine, that I’m more concerned about the long flight, she relents and reaches across the table to put her hand on mine, a gesture that makes a boy of me again. This may be why I told her in the first place. Whenever I’m in jeopardy, real or imagined, she allows herself to suspend judgment. In fact, I’ve suspected that our relationship has become increasingly contentious partly because it’s been so long since my last spell. Odd that my old affliction should still be a trump card in our relationship—indeed, my only trump—and I realize how wrong and unmanly it is to play it.

Though it’s not a lie, this fear I’ve confided. In advance of a spell I often feel slightly “off,” as if at the periphery of my vision or awareness there’s something I can’t quite bring into focus, a fuzziness not unlike what I’ve heard migraine sufferers refer to as an aura. This has been especially true of those I’ve had as an adult, though this same effect was probably present when I was a boy, had I known what to look for. Back then my mother could predict an upcoming event when she noticed a remoteness, some part of me that couldn’t be engaged, making me seem confused or conflicted. But neither one of us could ever be sure. Sometimes my abstraction was simply worry about a big math test or something I’d overheard or possibly misinterpreted in conversation between my parents as it came filtering up into my bedroom late at night through the heat register. A temporary worry, in other words, of the sort that would expire of its own volition, predictive of nothing and indicative only of the human condition.

Which may well be the case now. In writing my story I’ve brought myself back to that period when my spells were more frequent, and this may explain the aura I’ve felt of late, especially when I quit writing and return to my real, present life. At such times I can’t help but wonder whether a spell is imminent, or if my slight disorientation is nothing more than the past colliding with the present, as they will when people my age attempt to see the figure in the carpet of their lives, which we can’t help but do. The human condition, as I say, as opposed to the peculiar condition of Lucy Lynch. In confiding my fears about Italy, I guess I’m asking my mother if she’s observed any of the old symptoms, if she still has the knack of knowing.

“I just don’t want to ruin things for Sarah,” I say. “You know how I am afterward. If I had a spell over there, she’d have to do everything herself. I just keep hoping we’ll hear from Bobby before we go. That way if something happens…”

This is exactly the wrong thing to say, of course, since it makes me seem childlike, even more in need of reassurance. Saying his name out loud to my mother has the unintended effect of allowing the needy boy I was to creep back into my voice, an echo across the decades. All over again I’m telling her
I just wish
Bobby’d call with his new phone number like he promised, or
I just wish
he hadn’t been sent off to school downstate, or
I just hope
he’ll call during the Christmas break. And my poor mother, beyond exasperation, telling me for the umpteenth time that I have to stop depending on him, that my just wishing and just hoping are pointless, since I don’t even know for sure that he’ll be coming home for Christmas, or that his father will allow him to call even if he wants to. And finally, that if I don’t stop worrying these same things over and over in my head, I’ll end up having a spell.

So the sad look she gives me when I say I wish for my wife’s sake that we’d hear from Bobby Marconi—who doesn’t even exist anymore, at least not by that name—is the one I knew I’d get, the one that says I’m deluding myself, now as always. But kind, as well, as she sometimes was with my father when she took a break from trying to change him and accepted both who he was and even the fact that she loved him. She leaves her hand on top of mine, and it
is
a comfort, I must admit, though shameful. Is it a comfort to her as well? To be able to let go, however temporarily, of whatever unease has been between us, mother and son, for so long?

“Oh, Lou,” she says, squeezing my hand so hard that it has to hurt her gnarled, arthritic fingers, “why must you be so…”

I can’t say, any more than I can explain why I said that about Bobby writing back before we leave. Because I do know that’s not going to happen.

I
PARKED
in the lot behind the movie theater, planning to fetch the car after lunch and save my mother the walk, but now she says she’d prefer the exercise, so we cross the street and walk slowly and silently up the alley between the Bijou and the now-abandoned Newberry’s. For me this alley is one of the most haunted places in Thomaston. Here, though it’s been nearly forty years since the last yellow kernel was popped, I can still smell the dime-store popcorn and Karen Cirillo’s cheap perfume. Here, too, is the rusty fire escape leading up to the exit that was always chained shut for Saturday matinees to prevent West End kids who’d paid from sneaking up into the condemned balcony and letting their friends in for free. From the second step of this fire escape I witnessed one of the most shocking events of my youth, and I suppose I’ll have to commit it to paper sometime next week if I continue writing my story. Even so many years later, I’m deeply ashamed to recollect what happened that afternoon and tempted to either skip the episode or put the whole undertaking aside.

We’re halfway up the alley, each in our own thoughts, my mother clutching my elbow to steady herself, when I feel her stiffen and see a shambling, pear-shaped old man coming toward us. Backlit as he is, I don’t immediately place him. He’s dressed in ratty thrift-shop clothes, including a Thomaston High letterman’s jacket with a faded blue wool body and gold leather sleeves that has to be over thirty years old. He’s about my mother’s age, sporting a full head of wiry salt-and-pepper hair. It’s the cowlick I finally recognize.

It’s a narrow alley, and Buddy Nurt has stationed himself foursquare in the middle. There’s room for my mother to navigate around him on one side and me on the other, but that would involve her letting go of my elbow, something I can tell she has no intention of doing. We have no choice but to stop and regard Buddy as he’s regarding us and apparently enjoying our predicament.

“I know you,” he says, looking first at my mother and then me. “You got something for me?”

When I reach for my wallet, my mother says no, as much to me as to him.

He’s seen my hand move, then stop moving, and now he’s waiting to see if it’ll start moving again. “Give me something and I won’t tell,” he says. This isn’t really a personal threat, as my mother well knows. It’s just how Buddy has greeted people ever since he went batty. All he wants is a dollar or two, which I usually give him, after which he says okay, he won’t tell. I have no idea what he thinks he knows, or even if he actually recognizes either one of us. He’s just convinced people will pay him to keep their secrets, whether or not he has any idea who they are.

“No one’s going to give you anything,” my mother tells him. “Will you kindly move out of our way? You smell.”

Buddy waits a beat, then does as he’s told. “You think I don’t know about you, but I do,” he tells her as we pass. “You think I won’t tell, but I will.”

“Keep walking,” my mother says, reading my mind, because I’m tempted to go back and give the man a dollar.

“Lynch,” he calls after us. “
That’s
your damn name.” And then he laughs his nasty old laugh, as if once upon a time he’d caught
us
stealing from
his
store, instead of the other way around, and that knowing our name proves he knows all about us, including every wrong thing we’ve ever done or imagined doing.

My mother and I don’t speak until we arrive back at Ikey’s. In the hallway she settles onto the lift chair and, with what appears to be her last ounce of will, presses the button that pulls the “damned contraption” upstairs. I follow, in case her irrational fears turn out to be real.

I
DIDN’T SEE
Karen Cirillo in school the next day, but since we had no classes in common, it didn’t dawn on me until the end of the week that she was gone and not just from the flat over the store. On Saturday, when her mother came in for cigarettes, I had a chance to inquire.

I’d noticed that Nancy never visited my mother anymore and seldom came into Ikey Lubin’s when my father was behind the counter because, I suspected, they’d recently had words. He’d learned from my uncle Dec, who knew such things, that she hadn’t been exaggerating about Buddy Nurt, who over the years had been arrested on charges ranging from shoplifting to felony theft to attempted blackmail, though the latter charge had been dropped. Hearing this, my father certainly didn’t like the idea of him living upstairs, and he especially didn’t want him in the store, a message Nancy must have conveyed, since whenever she came in now Buddy loitered outside, trying to smooth his cowlick.

In the week since he’d moved in, Buddy had made no effort to find a job. He was a short-order cook by profession, but two of the three Thomaston restaurants that employed these were located out by the highway, too far to walk, in his view, and neither he nor Nancy owned a car. The hair salon where she worked now, on lower Division Street, was about the same distance from Ikey’s as the highway, though somehow she managed to walk there every day. The Cayoga Diner was downtown, of course, but he’d already worked there on various occasions and been fired each time.

“She goes to school over in Mohawk now,” Nancy explained, and she must’ve seen the disappointment on my face because her own expression became sly. “Don’t worry, she’ll be back,” she added. “Karen don’t like my sister any more than she likes me, and her uncle’s no prize either. That Quinn kid gets sent back to reform school where he belongs, you could be next in line.” Having voiced this possibility, she looked me over more carefully. “You one of the smart ones, like she says?” When I didn’t deny this, she shrugged. “Your ma’s smart, so I guess you come by it naturally.”

“My dad’s smart, too,” I told her.

“I’ll have to take your word for that,” she said. “You get good grades and all?”

“Pretty good.”

“B’s?”

“And A’s,” I said, because it was true.

“Too bad. My daughter prefers idiots.”

Outside, Buddy impatiently knocked on the glass, urging her to hurry.

“Speaking of things coming naturally,” she admitted, reading my mind.

L
ATER THAT AUTUMN,
my father became a hero.

It came about because he was doing as my mother advised, keeping the store open until midnight on weekends and, as a result, selling more beer between ten and twelve on Friday and Saturday nights than the rest of the weekdays combined. There was trouble sometimes, underage kids wanting to buy alcohol and getting belligerent when my father wouldn’t sell it to them, and their peeling out from in front of the store angered the neighbors, who complained it had never been so noisy at Ikey Lubin’s back when it was really Ikey Lubin’s. Others still resented that my father had closed down the book that had operated so conveniently out of the back room. Ikey himself was in the hospital being treated for a lung tumor, and it was widely reported that he intended to buy his business back just as soon as he was cured. “If only,” my mother remarked.

On the night in question, it was almost midnight, and my father was going over the day’s racing form and listening to the recap of the harness races at Saratoga on the radio. He seldom bet the horses, but like almost everyone in Thomaston, he followed them, needing to be able to talk results with his regulars, almost all of whom wagered daily. I also happened to know he kept a spiral binder of imaginary wagers, dutifully noting which of his picks would’ve won and how much each paid, as well as all the losers, so he could tell how much money he saved by keeping his bets imaginary. Somehow Uncle Dec found out about this binder and ribbed my father unmercifully, claiming that everything he did was imaginary for the simple reason he was too cheap to spend the two dollars necessary to make it real. Which was why, my father replied, he always
had
two dollars, whereas his brother was always looking to borrow two.

Be that as it may, the print on the racing form was tiny, which meant my father had to wear his glasses, and it was in the corner of the lens that he gradually became aware of an orange flickering. At first he imagined this to be a trick of the store’s fluorescent lighting, until he looked up and saw, across the intersection, a tongue of flame licking out from under a partially open window on the ground floor of the Spinnarkles’ house. The upper flat, which the Marconis had rented, was still vacant.