Bridge of Sighs (63 page)

I might have stopped at any time. I saw the look of horror on Sarah’s face deepen with each bitter utterance. Little did she know how much more was right on the tip of my tongue. Like what Nancy Salvatore told me about my mother that day in the store years ago, about my father never knowing what had hit him, just like my uncle Dec before him. I could still see the woman’s obscene sneer, her eagerness to prove she knew my mother longer and better than I did and knew she wasn’t who I thought she was. And after that I’d tell Sarah about Uncle Dec, because it now seemed obvious he was the man on the trestle that night I’d woken up in the trunk, and that my mother had been there with him. Once Sarah was convinced of this, she’d understand everything my mother was up to now—renovating the flat over Ikey’s, namely preparing to sell the store, so that later, once my father was out of the picture…

I might have said all this, but didn’t. What stopped me was the look of revulsion on Sarah’s face and the fact that I could feel the same obscene knowledge spreading across my features that I’d witnessed that day on Karen’s mother’s. So I just held my tongue and looked away, out the window, where the ridiculous birds continued diving at the now-black canal, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, flying in precise formation, low over the water, turning the already darkening sky black with their wings. Then they banked all at once and disappeared from sight, as if a living room blind had been yanked open, each blade too thin to register on the eye, until they banked back and the sky was again black with them. Everywhere, nowhere. Everything, nothing. No in between.

I didn’t look at Sarah until I heard her say my name with more tenderness than I deserved. “Lou,” she said, “are you saying your mother
wants
Lou-Lou to die?”

Hearing her give voice to that thought instantly made me see the lunacy of it. I started to say
No, of course not,
but wasn’t that precisely what I’d been saying? And wasn’t what I’d almost said even more insane? What evidence did I have that the man on the trestle that night had been my uncle, beyond that they shared a handful of common sayings? That so-and-so was a good egg. That people in hell wanted ice water. But evidence, of course, was not the issue. After all, I was positive that the woman who’d opened the trunk and peered inside at me was
not
my mother. I’d seen her. Why did something I knew to be false continue to haunt me with the terrible power of truth? Did I
want
it to be true? What possible benefit could derive from such a bitter, cruel falsehood?

I must have sat there stunned and mute for a long time, Sarah regarding me with that same tender, confused expression, and I think that if I could’ve spoken then it would have been to do what I’d suspected my mother of doing: I’d have warned Sarah against me, against the life I was offering her; that her affection for me, and for the rest of us Lynches, was a trap; that this was her chance to escape and tomorrow she should leave Thomaston and never look back. But when I finally spoke, I said, weakly, “It’s just…,” and then I had to pause again, because suddenly I was aware that the restaurant was blurry around the edges, that it had been since we entered. Sarah herself was out of focus, with a halo encircling her dark curls. A spell, I thought. I’m having a spell. But this realization was less important than my need to explain, so I tried again. “It’s just…I don’t want her to sell Ikey’s.” I concentrated as hard as I could, wanting to get it right, to be as precise as I could. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want my mother to sell Ikey’s; I didn’t want her to be
right
about Ikey’s, to be right about
anything.
I wanted desperately for her to be wrong about every single thing she’d ever argued with my father, wrong about our family, our town, our country. I wanted her to be wrong about
me.
But it was more than any of that. “I don’t want my father to die,” I said.

At which my Sarah, our Sarah, smiled. “Lou-Lou’s going to be fine,” she said, and she seemed so certain that in my vagueness and confusion I accepted her authority and felt something ponderous lift off of me. “He is?” I said.

Sarah said, “Lou, listen to me. Your mother isn’t planning to sell the store. If anything has to be sold, she’ll sell the
house.
She knows how much you love Ikey’s, that it would kill you to lose it. Maybe she doesn’t love Ikey’s like you and Lou-Lou, but she loves that
you
love it. It’s true she doesn’t want to lose your house, but she knows it wouldn’t kill her if that’s what happens. Do you understand? She’s not getting her way. You’re getting yours. She wants you to have Ikey’s, if that’s what you want.” She paused then to let all this sink in. “She wants
us
to have Ikey’s, if that’s what
we
want.”

Then she reached across the table and took my hand, and at her touch the spell’s aura was gone, the edges of everything sharp and clear again. Utterly vanished as well was the terrible bitterness that had been gnawing at me for days without my being entirely aware, along with the sour taste on the back of my tongue.

“That’s what I want,” I assured her.

H
OW DISTANT
these events seem tonight as I sit alone in my den in the aftermath of a spell powerful enough to blow Italy to smithereens. And as distant as they are in time, they feel even more remote in sentiment. How odd to recall that what I felt that late-March evening so long ago, when Sarah took my hand and banished my spell before it could happen, was
cured.
All my life I’d wanted to believe that my father was right in saying, “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with our Louie.” My mother knew better, knew as I did that there
was
something wrong with me, something that
was
me and that would never go away unless I went with it. No matter how long it is between spells, the next is always lurking, hidden like a malignant cell and awaiting coded instructions to divide, then divide again, until it gains the required mass to steal me away and take me captive. Only then, after it’s done what it must, can I be called back. My father was particularly good at this, at making the world feel right and safe for me when I returned.

But not even he had been able to
prevent
a spell. Nobody had ever cast one off once it was under way, as Sarah did when she took my hand in the restaurant. In the depths of despair just moments earlier, I immediately felt giddy with optimism, and so, amazingly, did she, as if she was as stunned by her own power as I was. Even more amazing, having now seen me at my worst, she seemed even more committed to our future than before. We stayed at the restaurant until it closed, mapping out the rest of our lives. Sarah would do one last semester at Cooper Union, then transfer to Albany. There, she’d be a full-time student and stay on campus when I went home on weekends. I’d continue to do whatever I could to help my parents save the store, but Sarah’s talent—and suddenly I sounded like my mother—must not be compromised or sacrificed.

Drunk with hope, we determined not only things that were ours to decide but also things that weren’t. We concluded that my father’s operation had been an unqualified success, just as his doctor proclaimed, and that my mother’s apprehensions were born of love, not reason. Before long he’d have his old strength back, and life would return to normal. Then we resolved that Ikey’s would prosper, so there’d be no need to sell the house. Further, we figured that the money spent on renovations wasn’t being wasted. Now that Sarah had straightened out my thinking, I saw what I’d been blind to before: that as soon as she and I were married, we’d move into the apartment ourselves and stay there until we could manage a down payment on a house of our own. I’d been right that my mother and uncle had been conspiring, but wrong about their intent. They were preparing a place for Sarah and me to live. Later, after she finished her degree, she’d teach art in the local schools and continue to draw and paint. She’d work at Ikey’s only when she wanted to. At some point, when it was safe to do so, I’d go back to school and finish my own degree, because that’s what my mother had always wanted and sacrificed for. We’d have two children, Sarah and I, a boy and a girl, who would take turns bouncing and giggling on their grandfather’s knee. All this we decided, all this and more.

Tonight, our myriad decisions seem as remote as youth itself. Yet I can’t bring myself to regard them as folly. As I stare at the grainy newspaper photo of my hero-father that hangs above my desk, I’m more disappointed in myself than anything else. Still shaken by my encounter with him on the Bridge of Sighs, I’m again visited by a feeling of profound shame, first because I tried to sneak past my father, then because I begged him to let me stay there on the bridge instead of returning to Sarah, my life and my duties. In the final stage of his illness, when he weighed all of a hundred and twenty pounds and all that was left was pain and worry, he still loved his life. “I don’t want to die,” he told me one afternoon, his lower lip trembling, when my mother was out of the room. “I ain’t afraid. It ain’t that. I just want to stay here with you, is all.” Bedeviled by perplexity, he kept saying, “I don’t know what I done to deserve this,” as if someone could maybe explain it to him. But he was clear about what he wanted, at least. To remain with us, at Ikey’s, not to sneak off somewhere like I’d tried to do this afternoon on the Bridge of Sighs.

I swallow the humiliation of my cowardice as best I can, reminding myself that tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep, I’ll be more myself, but right now the truth is that I’m about as dispirited as I’ve been since my father’s death, when I realized I’d have to navigate the long remainder of my life without his star to guide me. In the weeks and months after he was laid to rest, I slipped into what I now realize was a deep depression. My mother and Sarah seemed to understand what was happening but were powerless to prevent it. No doubt I refused to acknowledge that I needed help, even if they’d known what to offer. In my grief and rage I’d become obsessed with the poisoning of our town. I bought a blown-up map of Thomaston and mounted it on the wall, updating it daily by means of obituaries in the newspaper, placing a black pin where the newly deceased had lived. A nurse who worked in the hospital’s oncology ward helped me verify which deaths were due to cancer. In the beginning I stuck to the relevant facts, recording each subsequent cancer death with another black pin. But before long, impatient, anxious to indict, I started including people who’d recently been diagnosed as well as others, like old Ikey Lubin himself, who’d died when I was a teenager. I was mapping, I believed, the tendrils of cancer snaking outward from the polluted stream. In the end, however, my map took on a metaphorical quality. The black pin behind the Bijou Theater marked where Three Mock had been beaten into a coma, though he actually died years later in Vietnam. I put another on the street where David Entleman hanged himself. I even gave two black pins to the Spinnarkle sisters, who’d fled town rather than face neighbors who now knew their terrible secret.

Gradually, even I came to understand that the purpose of the map had metastasized. Somehow I’d expanded my definition of cancer to include any malignancy, any poison, any wickedness, until what I had was a map of cruelty, of violence, of human frailty, a map so full of personal significance that it was devoid of objective meaning. It was Sarah who helped me realize it had become like the drawing I’d done of Ikey Lubin’s as a boy, shading everything so that the longer I worked on it, the darker and murkier it became, and ultimately even the thing I loved most—Ikey’s itself—would have disappeared in the prevailing blackness. This was precisely what happened to my enlarged map, the black pins engulfing my entire town. Absent white space, there could be no pattern, no meaning, no significance, except that I’d succeeded in mapping my own despair. I didn’t come to this difficult realization all at once but slowly, patiently, over long months as Sarah gently coaxed me back to my life, just as my father had done after my spells.

What occurs to me tonight, though, is this: sure, it’s the business of adults to rescue children, but what sort of grown man needs to be repeatedly hauled back into his own life? Wouldn’t it be kinder to cut him loose and let him finish his journey? What I told Sarah over supper tonight—that I’d have eventually returned on my own, even if she hadn’t been there to help me—may not, this time, be true. Before encountering my father, I’d been deeply content to make that journey across the Bridge of Sighs, and even now I feel the gentle downward slope of the smooth stones beneath my feet, the gentle and insistent pull of gravity. Keeping my promise to my father not to drift away? That had been uphill, hard. And had he not been there to remind me of my duty…

A
FTER A TIME,
Sarah joins me in the den. I swivel in my chair, and she places another chair right in front of me so we can face each other, knee to knee. Much like an adult would sit with a child, it occurs to me.

“I’ve been talking to your mother,” she says, which doesn’t surprise me. “She thinks you should have another scan.” Sarah knows I won’t like this idea. How many MRIs and CATs have I endured over the years, and to what end? My spells may resemble strokes, but in fact they are not, as the doctors mostly agree, as the scans all show. But this
was
a bad episode. Three full hours I was away, and while it seemed like only a few minutes to me, I now know that from the time my wife joined me in the art room and spoke my name, a good half hour elapsed before my return was complete. So if a scan will put their minds at ease, I’ll submit to yet another.

“Is she furious with me?” I ask, because I realize that like everyone else, she’d seen this spell coming.

“Of course not,” Sarah tells me. In her opinion I’ve always sold my mother short, which of course is true, and always has been.