Bridge of Sighs (35 page)

“That,” she told him, “is the part
I
figured out.”

T
HAT VERY NIGHT
Buddy Nurt paid us his last visit. At dawn I awoke to the sound of what could only have been a Hudson cab idling somewhere nearby. I woke up again at six when my father overcame his aversion to the telephone and called my mother. He’d gone over to Ikey’s to open the store as usual and found the door leading up to the apartment wedged open. Buddy must have been pretty surprised when he pushed on that door. Too late he must have felt the shim my father had nailed to the floor, the bottom of the door riding that smooth, gentle incline before dropping down an inch into a groove, immovably ajar. He then must have panicked, because you could see where the door had splintered when he tried to pull it shut again by force.

It was my mother who called the police and explained how we’d caught him red-handed. When they arrived at the store, my father looked embarrassed, like
he’d
been snared in her trap, not Buddy. I knew how he felt. I despised Buddy, but there was something especially humiliating about getting caught in the act, and realizing that for all your care and stealth and cleverness—and Buddy’s thievery
had
been clever—somebody out there was smarter than you were, and now the whole world would know you for what you were. That, I thought, must have been what Buddy Nurt couldn’t face, what caused him to bundle his belongings into the backseat of a Hudson cab, and rattle away, leaving sleepy-eyed Karen and Nancy to answer the door when my mother, flanked by two burly policemen, knocked.

While this transpired, my father and I remained in the store below, too cowardly to bear witness to what was happening upstairs. When the early morning coffee drinkers began filtering in, I didn’t even have the stomach to listen to my father’s explanation of the police car out at the curb. I retreated into the back room to take charge of the morning’s deliveries of bread and milk.

Try as I might, I couldn’t stop thinking about Buddy. He had been, for most of his adult life, a sneak and a thief, and the worst moments of his sorry life were surely the result of being exposed for what he was. Why didn’t he just stop? To my surprise, I no sooner asked the question than the answer came to me. Buddy Nurt wasn’t a thief because he stole; he stole because he was a thief. Each time he got caught, he added that mistake to the growing list of those he wouldn’t make again, but it wouldn’t occur to him to stop stealing. The solution, he imagined, would be to get better at it. That first day he’d arrived at our store in a Hudson cab and studied his reflection in the glass, what I’d seen there was the real Buddy Nurt, a man who simply did what he did, because of who he was. What I’d recognized in his expression was self-loathing, but there was also something I’d missed: the futility of struggling against his fundamental nature. The man he saw reflected in our storefront that day would continue doing the very things that had brought him to this point in his life. And he must have known, too, what the consequences would be, that before long another Hudson cab would arrive, this time in the middle of the night, to bear him away to further misadventure and disgrace. That’s what his terrible grin had meant—surrender to the inevitable.

Even more chillingly, I recalled going outside myself and studying my own reflection in the glass, and being startled to see Buddy Nurt’s terrible self-loathing mirrored in my own features. What, I now wondered, if we all just were who we were? What if we were kidding ourselves if we believed otherwise? Was that what my mother had wanted to convey when she said I needed to get smarter about people if I was going to survive in the world? Did she want me to understand that we have little choice but to slog forward through life, repeating our worst mistakes without ever learning from them or, worse yet, without being able to use what we’d learned?

Before I was able to resolve these issues, my mother came back downstairs with the two policemen. All three stood talking outside Ikey’s until one of the cops, glancing at the apartment above, shrugged as if to say
Fine, if that’s how you want to play it.
When they got back in the cruiser and pulled away, she came inside and regarded my father’s coffee drinkers darkly until they became self-conscious and left. Then she turned her attention on me, studying me so intently that I wondered if I was supposed to leave, too. I still wasn’t used to seeing her in Ikey’s, and I could tell my father didn’t quite know what to make of her presence either.

“Well,” she finally said, “at least he’s gone.”

“What about the money?” my father said, referring, I supposed, to the cost of all the stolen beer and cigarettes.

“Think of that as gone, too, since it is.”

“Maybe they’ll catch him,” I ventured. Buddy didn’t strike me as the sort of person who’d have much luck evading the police.

“What good would that do?” she said. “You’d sooner get blood from a turnip than restitution from Buddy Nurt.”

“What about her?” my father said, nodding at the ceiling.

It was my mother’s turn to shrug now. “She claims she had no idea what he was up to.”

Outside, the dogs my mother had shot with the pellet gun came trotting up the street. When they got close, all three actually crossed the street and continued to watch the store nervously out of the corners of their eyes, a sight that seemed to cheer her up, and I have to admit it cheered me, too. Thinking about Buddy, I’d just about concluded that everything was pretty pointless, but these dogs suggested otherwise. Their behavior had changed as a direct result of their experience. True, they were probably smarter than Buddy, but still.

“Anyway,” my mother said, turning to my father, “you wanted a partner in this venture. I guess you got one.”

My father looked like he might cry. “How come he has to be my partner? How come I can’t just pay him, like they do down at Manucci’s?”

She rubbed her temples vigorously. “I’m not talking about your brother, Lou. I’m talking about me.”

A
FTER LUNCH
I was left in charge of the store while my parents went to the West End to look over Manucci’s meat case and the other equipment we’d need if we were going to install Uncle Dec as our new specialty butcher. The next day they’d meet with a contractor to discuss how much it would cost to expand into the parking lot.

Early afternoon was usually the slowest time of the day at Ikey’s, but I kept busy with the steady stream of neighbors who ostensibly came in for a half gallon of milk but were actually curious about the police cruiser that had been parked outside for so long that morning. Around two, a battered pickup truck squealed to a halt at the curb out front, and then another, and then a third, the brothers all piling out and lumbering up the stairs to Nancy’s apartment. Ten minutes later a crushed beer can rattled into one of the truck beds and bounced out onto the street, followed by a second that managed to stay in and a third that missed altogether. Fortified in this fashion for physical labor, they began hauling down the same possessions they’d hauled up to their sister’s apartment less than a year ago. Nancy herself came down to supervise and, seeing I was alone in the store, came in to buy a pack of cigarettes. Her eyes were red and swollen, but she’d clearly made a successful transition from shame to anger.

“I hope nobody thinks it’s gonna break my heart to leave,” she said, as if she suspected I might be such a person. “People around here seem to think their shit don’t stink.”

I gathered that by “here” she meant the whole East End, not just our immediate neighborhood. As to our shit not stinking, it was my impression we just thought ours probably didn’t stink as bad as Buddy Nurt’s, but I held my tongue.

“I could tell you a thing or two about that mother of yours if I felt like it,” she continued, “but I don’t. You think my Karen’s wild? You should’ve known your mother back when. Your father never knew what hit him. He wasn’t the only one either, just the least prepared. You don’t believe me, ask your uncle.”

But then she made a zipping motion across her lips to suggest that she’d said too much and I couldn’t get anything further out of her. She went over to the door and shouted at her brothers, who were balancing her box spring and mattress in the back of one of the pickups, “You’re joking, right?”

I was surprised to see the fattest of the brothers turn around and
un
zip an imaginary zipper of his own, this one at his crotch, from which he yanked an imaginary penis and began stroking it feverishly.

Nancy seemed to make no connection between the two zippers and turned back to me. “Then on top of it she’s got the nerve to make out like I knew Buddy was stealing beer and shit from this so-called store. Like I didn’t tell her from the start he was a thief. Like the whole town doesn’t know Buddy Nurt’s got magic fingers. Like my own damn purse doesn’t come up light every other morning.”

Listening to Nancy Salvatore, I began to understand where Karen’s curious logic came from. If I understood her correctly, Buddy Nurt was, or should’ve been, a shared burden. Sure, he’d been stealing from us, but in refusing to let him continue we were shirking our fair share of the responsibility, which meant she’d have to shoulder her share and ours, too.

“Buddy Nurt,” she spat contemptuously. “If you know what I did to deserve that asshole, I wish you’d tell me. It must have been in another life, that’s all I can say.”

Outside, the brothers had finished tying off the tippy springs and mattresses with an old clothesline. “Yeah, right, that’s secure,” Nancy muttered, then looked at me. “You don’t have no brothers, do you.”

She knew full well I didn’t but seemed to be waiting for an answer, so I admitted to being an only child.

“Lucky you,” she said, and left.

Where Karen was during all this I have no idea. I kept watch out Ikey’s front window, expecting her to appear, but she never did. Since I was by myself in the store, I figured she’d come in and say goodbye, maybe con me out of one last pack of cigarettes. But she probably felt guilty about Buddy and decided to let me off the hook. Around midafternoon, the brothers piled back into their pickup armada and sped off. The last truck took the corner too sharply, and the clothesline broke, allowing the box spring to tumble out right in front of our house. Our Ford was parked at the curb, and the cartwheeling box spring sheared off its side-view mirror, neat as could be, then came to rest up against the front bumper. When my father returned, I told him what had happened, and we waited the rest of the afternoon for the brothers to come back for it, so we could demand that they pay for the damage to our car, but they never did. When it began to rain, my father said, “Good,” and we let the box spring soak the rest of the afternoon. By evening it was so waterlogged we had all we could do to carry it around to the back of the house, where we decided to leave it until garbage day. The next morning, to our amazement, it was gone. “West End,” was all my mother had to say on the subject.

Later that day, she and I went up to inspect the apartment, none too sure what we’d find. Evidence of another fire? Another full, black toilet? My mother had said barely two words since breakfast. After sleeping on her decision, she seemed to be having second thoughts about throwing herself into Ikey Lubin’s. But things in the apartment were better than she feared. Buddy may have been a slob, but Nancy had kept the place clean, and there was no evidence of further damage, so I was surprised when my mother’s dark mood didn’t improve. Maybe she was just feeling bad for her old friend, who’d now have to move back to the Gut. Once you knew something better, my mother always said, it was hard to go backward in life because even if you’d once been happy with less, more—the knowledge of more—was always with you.

Or perhaps she was contemplating the possibility of her own diminished future. By tearing down the financial and psychological firewall she’d erected between herself and the store, she now realized just how vulnerable we all were. She was determined to keep as many of her book-keeping clients as she could, so we’d always have that income to fall back on. But she’d now committed herself to making Ikey’s succeed, even though she’d told me long ago that it
couldn’t,
that the best we could hope for was that the market would fail slowly, providing us with a marginal living until the inevitable time we’d be put out of our misery by the A&P or whatever came next.

Her reasoning must have been that by becoming a fully vested partner she could forestall that fate awhile, maybe until I finished college. If she was in the store, seeing things firsthand, she’d have more influence. She could watch our inventory, making sure we were ordering the right quantities and that slick salesmen weren’t talking my father into anything, that we weren’t being given what was left over on the back of the truck. She’d often voiced her suspicion that his fear of women discouraged female customers from returning to Ikey’s once they saw how flustered they made him. Her presence would alleviate that problem and also give him some much needed time away. The clincher, though, was her belief that for Ikey’s to succeed, we had to be special, to give people something they couldn’t get at either the A&P or other corner stores. Like a good crown roast.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that in order to expand Ikey’s along these lines, my parents not only took out a loan from Thomaston Savings but also put a second mortgage on our house. Had I known, of course, I would have applauded their decision, because I loved and believed in Ikey’s as much as my father did and wanted my mother’s complicity in the venture. I wanted for us to be a family and to be devoted to the same cause. I was even willing to expand my definition of “family” to include Uncle Dec, if that’s what it took, especially since, as my parents agreed, he likely wouldn’t last.