Bridge of Sighs (57 page)

But what if she had it all wrong and there was no such thing as Lynch Love? What if, in the end, Lou brought only himself? What if the context she’d identified was an illusion conjured out of need? What if Ikey Lubin’s was just a store, not a family, and the Lynches didn’t add up to more than the sum of their parts? Lou himself had admitted they weren’t a perfect family, that his mother had been furious when Big Lou bought Ikey’s, that in fact Tessa and her husband seldom saw things the same way. But to Sarah the salient fact was that they’d stayed together and worked out their disagreements. Mrs. Lynch might get angry with her husband, but she didn’t walk out on him and their son. Was that because she loved the man, or because she wasn’t, unlike Sarah’s mother, attractive enough to alter the flight path of small aircraft by sunbathing in the nude? It seemed an important question, yet Sarah had to admit she didn’t know the answer.

Drawing Bobby might be dangerous. What if she learned something she preferred not to know? It could happen. It did happen. Every time she drew her father he came out looking like Ichabod Crane. Several times during the course of the summer she’d drawn her mother, a couple times at her suggestion. One sketch had featured her modeling a new two-piece bathing suit, and it buoyed her mother’s spirits when Sarah showed it to her. “Not bad for an older broad,” she said. “I was right to buy that suit, wasn’t I?” But another time Sarah had caught her unawares, early in the morning before she was completely awake. She’d been seated at the breakfast nook in her bathrobe, in front of a steaming cup of coffee, and in her right hand she held a cigarette, the long ash of which had begun to tip. That was the detail Sarah had been most proud of because it suggested how long her mother had sat there, staring off into space. In another second, the viewer couldn’t help thinking, the ash would fall. Her mother had taken one look at the drawing, another at Sarah, then gone into the bathroom and shut the door. Sarah expected the shower to come on, but it didn’t, and after a few minutes she inquired outside the door if everything was all right. “What you don’t understand,” came her mother’s voice, “is that one day you’ll
be
that woman.”

In the end, Sarah decided to compromise. She’d draw Bobby Marconi, but not until the end of the summer, by which time maybe it wouldn’t be so important. After all, she knew from experience that moving down to the South Shore was never a clean, smooth emotional transition. For weeks Thomaston’s insular concerns continued to occupy her waking thoughts, her nightly dreams. Sometimes, even in early July, as she moved from one babysitting job to the next, from a summerhouse to the beach and back again, she was still imagining the Lynches’ comings and goings at Ikey’s and her father’s daily routine without her. But then gradually the world would turn on its fulcrum, and even though she still missed her father and the Lynches, her South Shore life would assume its rightful if temporary primacy and feel less like a seasonal aberration. She was always grateful when that happened, when her other life lost some of its power to haunt. It felt like setting down a big suitcase crammed with all the things you loved. You didn’t love them any less, but it was nice not to have to lug them around. And since this was the way of things, why not let nature work in her favor? By August the strong impression Bobby Marconi had made on her might fade. Maybe by then she wouldn’t even want to draw him. Maybe, if she let it, the spell would break itself.

LABOR DAY

L
OU’S GOING TO BE
one happy boy when he gets a look at you in September,” her mother remarked one morning in early August. Sarah had just stepped out of the shower and was toweling off, unaware that her mother, brushing her teeth at the sink, had been watching her.

“He’s not going to see me like this,” Sarah assured her.

“He won’t have to. Trust me.”

When her mother was gone, she studied herself in the mirror with a mix of pleasure and apprehension. Never before that summer had she spent so much time in front of the mirror. It wasn’t vanity that drew her so much as wonder. Though well ahead of girls her age in emotional and intellectual maturity, she’d lagged cruelly behind them physically. She got her period late, and her figure remained boyish right through her junior year. Her mother had often reminded her that she, too, had been a late bloomer, but she’d always assumed she was just trying to make her feel better. She still felt certain she’d never have the same generous hips and breasts, though there was no longer any doubt that her mother had been right. The girl who greeted her in the mirror each morning seemed frighteningly new. What if her boyfriend preferred the skinny girl he’d kissed goodbye in June? And there was also the ridiculous notion she couldn’t seem to shake, that her belated physical maturity might somehow be related to Bobby Marconi’s unexpected appearance. She knew it was beyond crazy. Her father had made a game of the major logical fallacies and drilled her on them back in junior high, so she knew that just because B follows A, it doesn’t mean that A caused B. But it
felt
as if her body had been waiting for a reason to do what other girls’ bodies had done years before.

Was it because she was so preoccupied with the girl in the mirror that Sarah didn’t fully register the striking changes in her mother? She’d noticed on arriving in June that she’d lost weight. “I needed to,” she explained, when Sarah remarked on it. But over the summer she lost even more, and her facial features began to look drawn. When she knew she was being watched or photographed, she smiled broadly, sometimes even mugged, but to Sarah it felt wrong, as if her mother were trying to remember what her smile had been like so she could imitate it. When the camera caught her off guard, she looked like the woman Sarah had sketched in her bathrobe, not so much unhappy as anxious, like someone waiting for the doctor to call with test results. Also, she didn’t appear to be sleeping well. Previous summers, once her mother stretched out on the sofa with a novel or a movie on TV, she usually zonked out shortly afterward. Sarah would find her the next morning with the book she’d been reading still in her hand, or the television snowy. This year Sarah would often awake at night to the sound of pacing in the front room. And had she really thought about it, there were fewer late-night knocks on the door. Were these things related? This question she would ask herself only later, by which time the answer was obvious.

A
S ALWAYS,
Labor Day weekend ended their summer. To celebrate the renewed intimacy they’d spent these months nurturing, they usually took the train into New York late on Friday afternoon and splurged on a hotel room, a fancy dinner and, if the summer had been especially good, a Broadway show. The city was typically empty, so there were lots of deals to be found. Besides, this made Sarah’s departure for upstate on Sunday that much easier. So this year Sarah was surprised by her mother’s suggesting they stay on the South Shore. Had she lost a client? She hadn’t seemed any more strapped for cash than usual, but maybe something had happened in the last few days or hours that she didn’t want Sarah fretting about. Then, for dinner on Saturday, she chose Nick and Charlie’s, a nearby waterfront restaurant she didn’t even like, claiming it was overpriced and full of tourists who didn’t know any better and elderly diners who liked food they didn’t have to chew. When Sarah reminded her of this, she just shrugged and said maybe she was getting old herself. That particular comment made Sarah wonder if she was still upset about that sketch of her in her bathrobe.

When Sarah asked if they were going to dress up, as they liked to on their last night together, her mother said hell yes, and the prospect seemed to cheer her up a little, though she didn’t show as much skin as she normally did on this occasion. Looking Sarah over she announced that since her daughter looked every bit of eighteen, legal drinking age, they’d put it to the test by ordering her a cocktail. Out in the parking lot, as they backed out, Sarah noticed Harold Sundry leaving his apartment in a jacket and tie. “Did someone die, do you think?” she asked her mother, nodding at him. She’d never seen Harold dressed up before, and unless she was mistaken, he was wearing a special shoe that made his rolling limp less pronounced. At any rate, it seemed he was actually departing the premises, so something had to be up.

At the restaurant Sarah’s misgivings grew. There was nothing her mother loved more than a grand entrance—men’s heads turning when she passed, their wives noticing, too—but today she seemed uninterested, which was just as well, Sarah thought, because, so far as she could tell, the only heads that turned when they crossed the dining room were appraising her. The two of them were escorted to a table on the deck that had a
RESERVED
sign on it, though the hostess deftly whisked it away. “That was lucky,” Sarah remarked, imagining that whoever had booked the best table in the restaurant must have canceled at the last moment. Her mother smiled vaguely, as if puzzled by her logic, and when she ordered herself a martini and her daughter a rum and Coke the waitress didn’t even give Sarah a second glance. A young couple was seated at an adjacent table, and Sarah’s mother, taking a camera from her purse, asked the man if he minded taking a picture of them. This was also a tradition. Her mother kept all their last nights in a scrapbook.

While they waited for their drinks, her mother surveyed the deck rather impatiently, and Sarah once again was visited by the vague sense she’d had off and on all summer, that her mother was waiting for something, a knock on the door, the telephone to ring, something. When the drinks came, she drained half of her martini as if she’d been crawling all day through the desert and just arrived at a watering hole she’d feared was a mirage. It seemed to do the trick, though, because she took a deep breath, regarded Sarah directly and said, “Well, sweetie, I don’t know how to do this, so I guess I’ll just say it.” Unfortunately, Sarah didn’t hear what came next because just then she saw Harold Sundry talking to the hostess, who was pointing, she could’ve sworn, toward their table. “Sarah?” her mother said. “Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” Sarah lied, trying to scroll back.

“Well, I wish you’d say something.”

And now Harold was rolling toward them, sweating profusely in his dark wool, hopelessly out-of-season sport coat, his shirt collar buttoned so tight that his face was beet red.

“
There
you are,” her mother said.

“Sorry,” Harold said. “I had to stop for gas.”

“Well, sit down. This isn’t going well.”

“I warned you,” Harold said, looking right at Sarah, who, already confused, felt a strong impulse to deny that he’d issued her any warnings whatsoever. They’d barely spoken half a dozen words all summer.
Marry?
Had her mother used that word?

“It’s okay, honey,” Harold said, speaking to her for real this time. “I’m not such a bad fella once you get to know me.”

For the rest of her life Sarah would be thankful she didn’t say what was on the tip of her tongue, that she already had a boyfriend, that she was too young to marry, that in any case her father wouldn’t stand for anyone except a graduate student in English from Columbia University. She’d actually opened her mouth to say these things when the facts reconfigured themselves in her head. No, her mother wasn’t angry with her for growing up and becoming a woman, nor had she arranged for her to marry Harold Sundry as a punishment. How could such a ridiculous notion have taken root even for a second? Was it because the truth was only slightly less bizarre? Sarah turned to her mother, but she refused to come into focus. There was a loud bang—a single shot to a snare drum—that seemed to originate inside her skull. Then nothing.

“W
ELL,
that’s
an evening I won’t soon forget,” her mother said when they were safely back in the apartment. She touched Sarah’s cheek with the back of her fingers. “You’re still clammy. You should lie down.”

“I’m okay now.” She felt suddenly incapable of uttering anything that wasn’t completely false. She felt yet another lie already forming on her lips when the phone rang.

“She’s okay, Harold,” her mother said. “Nothing’s happened in the two minutes since we saw you last.” Sarah recognized this tone of voice as the same one she’d used on her father. “I will. I will, Harold. Drink a beer and relax. Oh, one won’t kill you. All right, go to a movie then. Do whatever. Go across the street and tell Elaine, see if she faints. I know you feel bad. Sarah does, too, and I feel worse than either of you, believe me. You’re absolutely right about that, Harold. It
is
a crummy way to begin. No, she likes you fine. Plus you’ll grow on her, just like you did on me. I didn’t like you at all in the beginning, remember? Well, I didn’t, but now I do. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay? No, I haven’t changed my mind. Don’t forget what we talked about, what you said you were going to work on. Being needy, right. Now’d be a good time to start. No, breakfast isn’t a great idea. Tomorrow’s our last day together. I will, Harold. I promise. Just as soon as I get back from the city.”

She hung up, came over and took her daughter gently by the chin. “Oh, sweetie, I hope you aren’t going to come out of this with two black eyes.”

That snare drum in her head, Sarah now understood, had been her forehead hitting the table. According to her mother, she’d been out only a few seconds, but when she’d awakened she was flat on her back staring up at a ring of faces, her mother’s in the foreground, Harold Sundry’s among the others, looking like he hoped she’d be able to pick him out of the lineup. Though bathed in perspiration, she otherwise felt fine and in fact was hungry and would’ve liked to have eaten something. But an ambulance had been called and her mother thought she should get checked out. Harold followed the ambulance in his Buick, and afterward they’d returned to the restaurant for her mother’s car. “I’m famished,” Sarah told them. “Can we order something?”

“No way I’m walking back in that restaurant,” her mother said. “Ever.” Back at the Sundry Arms, she ordered a pizza. “Was it really that much of a shock?”

“No,” Sarah said.
Liar.
“I mean, sort of. You hate marriage. You’re always making fun of people who get married. You say they’re delusional.”

Her mother made a pained face. “Oh, sweetie, that was just me talking. You know how I love to talk, right? Please tell me you don’t believe all the dumb things I say.”

There didn’t seem to be a polite answer to that question, or even a way to know if it
was
a question. “So, you
want
to be married again?”

“I don’t know,” her mother admitted. “I had this revelation back in the spring, thinking about how great it was going to be, you coming for the summer, and suddenly I realized I really hadn’t been myself since your brother died. I mean, if that hadn’t happened, I’d probably still be with your father. It was losing Rudy that made me so desperate, made me want to be a whole different person. Deep down I think I’m really more like the woman you remember, back when we were all together, than the person I am now. Losing your brother made me realize how tired I was of the person I’d become, but now I’m even more tired of this new person. Oh, don’t cry, baby. Please don’t.”

It was the mention of her brother that had done it, of course. How many years had it been since anyone had mentioned his name?
He’d
been the one they couldn’t do without, not and still be a family, and she’d tried for a long time to keep him alive, but with a stab of guilt she realized how long it had been since she’d drawn him. She hadn’t even brought a picture of him along this summer.

“But
marriage
?” she said, still trying to make sense of it. “Couldn’t you…”

“Oh, I’d be just as happy to live in sin,” her mother admitted, “but Hal’s dead set on getting hitched. That damned fool woman across the street’s getting remarried, so now he’s got to.”

Okay, then. Harold Sundry (Hal, now) had entered the conversation. But how to phrase the obvious question:
Of all the men at the Sundry Arms you’re marrying
him? “Do you love him?”

Her mother sighed. “I don’t know, darlin’. I really don’t. I’ve been trying to make up my mind all summer. He loves me, though. I’m sure of that much. And it’s time I quit living like this, don’t you think? You’ve been so sweet not to judge me, all those men dropping by, but I’ve been judging myself right along. Hal helped me realize that. I need something stable. I need to quit drinking so much, too, and he’s promised to help me. Hal’s an alcoholic himself, so he knows how to quit.”

“What do I tell Daddy?”

“That’s not your job, sweetie,” she said. “I’ve been trying to telephone him all week.”

“He disconnects the phone,” Sarah reminded her. He also canceled the newspaper, refused to answer the door and stacked the unopened mail on the dining room table. No interruptions, none. That was the rule of summer, once the typing began.