Bridge of Sighs (16 page)

“That water costs money.”

“What about your time and effort?” I say for the sake of argument, though in truth I admire his frugality. “Isn’t that worth something?”

“I guess,” he says. “That’s probably how I should think of it?”

You don’t have to agree with me,
I’d like to tell him.
You don’t always have to give in.

“Mom says you’re writing your life story up there.”

“Nothing quite so grand as that,” I tell him, though it’s true I’ve written far more than I expected to, having underestimated the tug of the past, the intoxication of memory, the attraction of explaining myself to, well, myself.

“Am I in it yet?”

“No, not yet. Your mother hasn’t even shown up yet.”

“Wow,” he says, genuinely impressed, I can’t be sure at what—that I had a life before his mother, or that there was so much worth recording before his appearance.

“Did you hear from your friend yet?” he says, amazing me, as he so often does, by tacking so easily from one thing to the next, almost as if he fears getting trapped with a single idea if he lingers too long with it. “The one who lives over there?”

“Not yet,” I tell him.

“And you haven’t seen him since…”

“Senior year of high school.”

“Wow,” he says. “And he really almost killed his father?”

And what’s with this second “wow”? Wow, it’s really been that long since I’ve seen Bobby? Or, wow, near patricide? “Who told you—”

“Mom, of course.”

Writing about Bobby, I realize, has made me grateful that Owen has never lacked for friends. Easy and outgoing, he’s both made and kept them effortlessly. Many have gone off to college and made lives elsewhere, but when they’re in town for the holidays, visiting their parents, they always get in touch. Several of these boys from the Borough have done well, and now rent or own second homes on the Sacandaga Reservoir or even Lake George, to which Owen and Brindy are frequently invited for a long summer weekend. So far as I can tell, these friendships are rewarding and uncomplicated, untroubled and full of straightforward affection. They’ve gone out of their way to welcome Brindy, too, though I gather from various things Owen has said that she’s uncomfortable with them, probably because of who they were in high school and the relative ease of their present lives. She prefers her own West End friends. They’re real, she claims. They don’t put on airs.

“Who’s minding the store?” it occurs to me to ask.

“Brindy,” he says, surprising me.

“I thought she preferred Division.”

He shrugs. “Did she tell you that?”

I try to remember. Maybe not. Maybe it’s just my impression. “Did Mr. Mock make it in last night?”

Owen shakes his head. “He didn’t look too good last time I saw him.”

“I know,” I say, resolving to investigate.

When Owen is gone, I go back upstairs and read over the last page or so of what I’ve written, reliving that ride through the Borough in my father’s milk truck. How magical, how far away, those streets seemed to me then. And magical they still are in memory, though they’re as familiar to me as the back of my hand, since I’ve walked them most of my adult life. Again I hear, my eyes tearing up, my father explaining who lives where along his route, though they don’t anymore and haven’t, with few exceptions, for a great many years.

Only one thing rings false. When I said my father had everything he wanted, that isn’t true. He wanted one more thing. He just didn’t know it yet.

W
E HADN’T BEEN
in the East End long before a brand-new A&P opened out on the highway bypass, and overnight, it seemed, the tin milk cases that once decorated every back porch from the Borough to the West End began to disappear. There were rumors that my father’s dairy was about to be sold and that the new owners would cancel home delivery. My father maintained that people buying their milk at the A&P was just a phase. Why, he reasoned, would they trek to the store to buy milk in waxy cardboard cartons when it could be delivered right to their door in bottles? He said Borough folks especially liked the convenience of home delivery. Maybe the dairy would do away with service to the West End, where people would want to save a penny or two at the supermarket. West Enders were famous for their willingness to burn a tank of gas searching out the lowest prices, as if gas were free, but my father credited East Enders and Borough residents with being smarter than that. My mother, predictably, saw things differently. Wanting to save a penny, to her way of thinking, was human nature, and she urged my father to prepare for a future that didn’t include milk trucks or, for that matter, milk bottles.

As usual, she was right. “The Old Man,” who owned the dairy and liked my father, swore he’d never sell, but then did so and promptly moved away. The new owner immediately curtailed deliveries in the West End and let it be known that our East End might be next. Publicly my father didn’t waver in his stated belief that his lucrative route through the Borough was in no danger, but the milk boxes continued to disappear until finally there was no denying his route was shrinking. By midmorning he’d be back home, where he’d change out of his all-white uniform and head down to the Cayoga Diner for coffee with the seasonally unemployed men who loitered there, many of them laid off from the tannery. These were stoical men who went on unemployment every spring and patiently awaited the inevitable call back to work, a summons that came later and later each autumn.

Those days, talk at the diner was increasingly about the future of Thomaston and whether there was one. Many thought not, and my father took it upon himself to cheer up these defeatists. People had tanned leather in Thomaston since before the Revolution, he liked to remind them, so he expected they’d continue awhile longer. These things ran in cycles, like the moon, waxing and waning and waxing again. Another year and everybody’d be back working full-time, even overtime, probably. Weren’t famines followed by feasts? That he was willing to spring for a cup of coffee or float a small loan to a fellow who’d be good for it come the end of the week, along with his jovial good nature, made him popular at the lunch counter, where his optimism for the most part went unchallenged, except, ironically, for his younger brother, Declan. Uncle Dec always had answers for my father’s rhetorical questions. What followed famine? Death. What followed death? Decomposition. In Uncle Dec’s opinion, which he offered loudly whenever he ran into his brother in public, Lou Lynch would be next in the unemployment line. “I hope you’ve saved up, Biggy,” he’d say, clapping my father on the back. He never called him by his name, preferring Big Brother or, more often, Biggy, which he knew my father hated. “You
do
know what happened to the dinosaurs, don’t you?” Death. Decomposition.

Much as my father enjoyed the company of men, he wouldn’t step foot in the diner, the barbershop or the cigar store if Dec was inside. He had little use for his brother, who was constantly in and out of trouble, in and out of the newspaper, in and out of jail, giving us Lynches, my father said, a bad name. Though he was a year younger, Uncle Dec, at age sixteen, had left the doomed family farm and joined the army (from which he was later discharged for dealing in contraband), leaving my father trapped there until he finished high school and turned eighteen. According to my mother, he still resented his brother for escaping, and if he saw Uncle Dec holding court over by the diner’s cash register, he’d just return home and take his ease on the front porch. If somebody down the block happened to be painting or doing repairs, he’d visit with them and offer advice, standing at the bottom of the ladder and carrying on a vertical conversation, or saunter down the street to Tommy Flynn’s and shoot the breeze there. By midafternoon he’d finish his rounds and return to the front porch, where he and I would spend a contemplative hour or so, me with a book, my father with the
Thomaston Guardian,
which was always delivered about this time. Through the screen door, we could hear my mother starting dinner in the back of the house, and for me this was the most peaceful time of day, when everything felt right with the world.

But all was not right, and I knew it. As milk boxes continued to disappear from porches throughout Thomaston, my father became quieter and less social. He never changed his public stance, maintaining to all who would listen that his route was secure, but he was worried that the dairy’s new owner, a man from Albany, didn’t like him. The actual rules hadn’t changed, but suddenly they were enforced. My father was no longer allowed to park the truck at the curb in front of our house when he finished his route, and its personal use was now grounds for dismissal, as was allowing unauthorized people to ride in it. Since each of these rules directly affected him, my father couldn’t help wondering if they were imposed with him specifically in mind. Had the new owner heard about Bobby Marconi’s accident? Or had Mr. Marconi himself reported it, hoping to get him fired? He couldn’t inquire, of course, not without admitting to having broken the rule in the first place.

The continued uncertainty over his future definitely clouded our family planning. In Thomaston, junior high was seventh and eighth grades, and that year (sixth grade) one of the many things my parents argued about (they called their arguments “discussions”) was whether I would remain at St. Francis or transfer to the public junior high. Unlike most of their “discussions,” this one confused me, partly because each seemed to be arguing the other’s point of view. My mother was the one who’d always wanted me in parochial school, not that she was committed to Catholic education but because the public schools were so rough. The boys who’d abducted me were good examples (though Jerzy Quinn was no longer a threat, having by then landed in reform school), not that my being in St. Francis had protected me from them. I wasn’t a scrapper like Bobby Marconi, and my mother didn’t want me to become one. To her way of thinking, in public school I’d either be brutalized or grow brutal myself. My father didn’t worry much about this. He’d been bused in to these same schools from the farm, and nothing terrible had happened to him, unless you counted being made fun of all the time, which my mother did. When we moved to the East End I assumed, as he did, that I’d be going to public school, but my mother put her foot down. I was doing well where I was and was being looked after—whatever that meant—and I would stay put until starting high school in the ninth grade.

But now my mother began wondering out loud if next year might not be the best time to leave St. Francis. All the public school kids would be in the same boat—that is, moving from familiar elementary schools into the new environment of the junior high. And Cardinal Fulton High, she hated to admit, would be out of the question. We simply couldn’t afford both private high school and college, and the latter was more important. My mother had put her foot down about that, too. I was going to college, and that was the end of the story. No discussion allowed. My father could wonder all he wanted about where we’d ever come up with that kind of money, but every time he did so out loud she’d stop dead and stare at him until he relented and said sure, of course I’d go to college, he’d rob a bank if he had to. Only after she’d left the room would he grumble that robbing a bank was the only way he could see it happening. So it was strange to hear my father arguing that I should stay in St. Francis two more years.

Finally it dawned on me that they weren’t discussing schools. This dispute was really an extension of their ongoing argument about whether my father was going to lose his job. My mother, who wanted me in parochial school, thought he was, which meant that the St. Francis fees, though not large, were a luxury we could no longer afford. My father, who’d always maintained that there was nothing wrong with public schools, remained adamant that he
wasn’t
going to lose his job, which meant there was no reason I couldn’t continue at St. Francis if that’s what she wanted.

D
IAGONALLY ACROSS THE STREET
from our house sat Ikey Lubin’s corner market, where it was well known that a man could play a number or daily double. In fact, Uncle Dec, who played both, was a regular visitor, though he never seemed to purchase anything. When he pulled up in front of the store, my father would invariably fold his newspaper and take it inside until he left, lest Uncle Dec spot him sitting there and saunter over to ask him if he remembered what happened to the dinosaurs, which he sometimes did anyway. My mother exhibited a weary tolerance for her ne’er-do-well brother-in-law, probably because he called her gorgeous, which she wasn’t, and invited her to come find him if she ever got tired of that stiff she was married to. To this she always replied that she doubted she’d ever get
that
tired, to which Uncle Dec responded that you never knew.

I wanted to like Uncle Dec but distrusted him, mostly because he reminded me of the man at the trestle. It had been dark when I’d awakened in the trunk, and I’d never actually seen him, nor did I remember their voices being similar, but they did have several expressions in common, and whenever my uncle remarked that so-and-so wasn’t such a bad egg or that people in hell wanted ice water, I couldn’t get it out of my head that the two might be the same man. Also, Uncle Dec was forever promising to buy me something or take me someplace, and he never did. “That’s your uncle in a nutshell,” my father explained to me early on, after I’d gotten my hopes up and been disappointed. “Full of promises.”

“He just likes to make people feel good,” my mother said, her tone gentler than was customary. But then her voice regained its usual judgmental edge. “If he’s a little short on results, well, he’s a Lynch.”