Bridge of Sighs (56 page)

T
HE REALIZATION
that she had one came to Sarah gradually. She suspected it when she left Thomaston in June. By August, she was sure. But did he really qualify as a secret? How could he? She’d only met him once, and briefly, at Ikey Lubin’s. He wasn’t what you’d call remarkably handsome, nor did he seem exceptionally bright or charismatic. In fact, she was at a loss to explain how he’d managed to impress her, unless it was because of Lou, who’d prepared her for someone truly extraordinary. Maybe she’d heard so many of her boyfriend’s stories about Bobby Marconi’s exploits that by the time she actually met him it was no longer possible to take him at face value. That was the only explanation she could come up with.

Thinking that he might feel like less of a secret if she spoke his name out loud, she brought him up, ever so casually, shortly after she arrived at her mother’s. “It’s like he’s one person,” she said, trying to put her vague sense of the boy into words, “but deep down he’s trying to be another.”

“Careful,” her mother cautioned. “He sounds like your father.”

“Five-yard penalty,” Sarah told her.

Her mother was an avid pro-football fan and the year before had dated a Sundry Arms tenant named Frank, who’d claimed to play for the New York Giants. Well, not exactly
play.
He said he was on something called the taxi squad, the function of which, he stressed, was
not
to drive players to the game. He described being on the squad as a kind of limbo where you might get the call to suit up on any given Sunday, though probably not. Sarah had wondered if her mother might be getting serious about him, but then he’d disappeared, as Sundry Arms men always did, and her mother explained that no, they’d just had some laughs. Now all that remained of Frank were the football metaphors she and her mother used to establish and enforce boundaries. Her mother threw flags when Sarah was too inquisitive about the exact nature of her relationships with various men, whereas she whistled her mother’s disparaging remarks about her father. She let her mother skate when she offered general remarks like “Never trust a man who lives in his head” or “Don’t, whatever you do, marry out of pity.” More than likely these
were
oblique allusions to her father, but not necessarily. However, direct references—“that pencil dick”—drew flags every time. It was a game, of course, but also a means of dealing with important things without making them Important Things. At one level it was an invitation to disclosure, to greater intimacy, but it also contained built-in checks and balances that could be invoked when necessary. Sarah’s mother seemed to want, perhaps even need, to tell her daughter about her Sundry Arms boyfriends, though her partial confessions were often more confusing than illuminating. She wanted her to understand that at long last she was having a little fun, which life owed you, right? And when the time came, she hoped Sarah would have a rich, rewarding sex life. “You’re going to like sex
a lot,”
she said more than once, though she wouldn’t say precisely what she’d like about it. The joys of sex aside, the men actually in her mother’s life mostly offered a large and varied list of male character traits to identify early and then avoid. For this reason she hoped that when Sarah was her age, she wouldn’t still be “playing the field,” though of course she wasn’t advocating marriage either, far from it. More like a life partner, the sort of person you’d be
tempted
to marry. But
anything,
and she did mean
anything,
was preferable to being married to an arrogant, egomaniacal snob. A flag on that one—“Fifteen yards! Unnecessary roughness!”

Sarah thought she understood her mother’s need to both surrender and withhold information. She felt the same conflicting impulses herself, though their circumstances were different. What her mother needed to share was experience, her long suit. If she could tell her daughter what she’d learned about men, maybe Sarah might be spared some heartache. Sarah’s long suit—as she knew better than anyone—was her lack of experience. She needed to talk about a boy she’d only just met and knew nothing about, beyond what her boyfriend had told her. But that wasn’t all. She would also have liked to discuss Lou and what wasn’t happening between them, about how his respect for her seemed to preclude much in the way of passion before marriage. In fact she would’ve liked to talk about boys in general, and what sort her mother imagined her falling in love with. She’d gotten explicit advice from her father, who claimed to know exactly the kind of boy who would make her happy. He’d explained more than once how things would go. She’d meet her future husband at Columbia, probably during her junior year. He’d most likely be a graduate student, probably in English. They’d wait for her to finish her degree, then marry and live for a year in graduate student housing before getting a small apartment in Park Slope, which was safe and nice and more affordable than Manhattan. Sarah’s husband would be ambitious, a young man with aspirations that were alien to Thomaston. Sure, it was hard for her to understand all this now, but in the end
she’d be glad she waited.
That was the point her father wanted to stress.

Sarah saw flaws in this blueprint, though she never told him so. First, it shortchanged boys like Lou Lynch and Bobby Marconi, and maybe even places like Thomaston, New York. After all, it wasn’t just people in big cities who had big dreams. Wasn’t her father himself a perfect example? Though he considered himself an urbanite, he’d grown up, as her mother had delighted in reminding him back when they were still living as husband and wife, on Staten Fucking Island. The other problem was that he seemed to be confusing her life with his own. That is, the boy/man he envisioned her marrying was a better companion for him than for her. She’d made the mistake, last summer, of sharing her father’s advice with her mother, who immediately launched into one of her riffs.

As an English major, she predicted, Sarah’s future husband would be not only a brilliant scholar, but also that rarer breed, a genuine arbiter of taste, which would manifest itself primarily in an unbounded appreciation of her father’s work. He might even make his reputation by writing about her father’s novel, which by then would have been published to glowing reviews and perhaps a prize, but which Sarah’s future husband thought deserved an even wider audience. Of course a man of such literary discernment would have a half-completed novel in his own desk drawer, and with trepidation he would eventually show this to her father, who would offer the kind of knowing criticism that can only come from a practitioner. Such advice would be difficult to implement because it would go straight to the heart of the matter, but in the fullness of time her husband’s book would be completely revised, and Sarah’s father would recommend it to his editor. This would lead the younger man to the most difficult decision of his life—whether to dedicate the book to his loving wife, the painter Sarah Berg (who’d of course kept her maiden name), or to his wife’s father, without whom, etc., etc. As her mother riffed, Sarah had called penalty flag after penalty, but she was having too much fun to quit, and Sarah secretly had to admit that her father’s scenario for her future probably wasn’t so very different from her mother’s satire of it.

The problem was that her mother had little to offer beyond parody. She was both specific and thorough when advising her daughter about what to avoid in men, but seemingly uninterested in the subject of what she
should
be looking for. Her commandments all took the form of “Thou Shalt Not.” Her own vision of her daughter’s future was so vague as to appear thoughtless. She wouldn’t rule out Thomaston as a source for a future husband, but she conceded it was possible her father might be right—“Even a blind sow finds an acorn now and again.” Five-yard penalty—that she’d meet someone in college. Wasn’t it possible she’d already met him in Lou Lynch? Her mother had left Thomaston long before Sarah started dating, but she knew the Lynch family and thought they were nice enough. She had considered it odd that people didn’t take more note of Mrs. Lynch, who was so smart and funny, but then she laughed at herself for saying something so patently ridiculous. Smart and funny might be fine qualities in unattractive men, but they were the final nails in the coffin of any woman who didn’t happen to be drop-dead beautiful as well. And though there was no denying he was a genial fellow, she hadn’t been quite so fond of Big Lou. She’d just never taken to big, lumbering men who had to be taught how to work the cheese dip. Out of loyalty, Sarah made an exception to her rule of penalizing only insults to her father, to which her mother replied, “You’re right, that wasn’t very nice, but he
is
a bit of a doofus, isn’t he?” And was promptly awarded another hefty one.

To convince her mother that she was wrong to think poorly of her boyfriend’s father, Sarah related the story Lou had told her early on about how, when he was little, some neighborhood toughs had taken him to an abandoned railroad trestle, locked him in a trunk and pretended to saw him in half, a cruel act which had precipitated the first of the terrible spells that had plagued his childhood. Actually, her mother had a vague recollection of the incident. The boy’s disappearance had precipitated a panic, everyone in town fearing that he’d been taken by some sick sexual predator. Sarah explained how it had been the middle of the night before Lou came out of his trance. Sluggish and confused, he’d known enough to follow the stream back the way they’d come, and there, waiting on the footbridge to take him home, was Big Lou. It was as if his father’d had some sixth sense and known right where to wait.

Her mother had waited patiently for Sarah to finish, then said, “Sweetie, think about it. That’s what a dog would do. With all of that going on, what kind of man goes out and stands in the middle of a footbridge for hours just waiting for something good to happen?”

“But he was right,” Sarah insisted, though her mother’s reaction did catch her off guard. Having heard the story from Lucy, she’d accepted not just his facts but also his conclusions. “He knew where to wait.”

“Sweetie, think,” her mother replied. “What was he
doing
on that bridge? You’re saying he was there because he
knew
something, had some powerful intuition. But doesn’t the opposite make more sense? That he was there because he had no idea what to do? Instead of joining the search and helping his wife and the police, he left her alone to cope.”

“That’s not what Lou thinks.”

“Well, boys love their fathers.”

Her mother remembered the Marconis, too. Whispers, mostly. Something wrong with the woman, wasn’t there? A little too much left rudder? (That phrase borrowed from another Sundry Arms man who’d served in the navy.) Disappeared for a while and then was magically back home again, put under some sort of house arrest for her own good? Talk about the husband, too, though she couldn’t recall what. She
did
remember the dark birthmark on his forehead, though, and the way he had of leaning toward you, too close, and cocking his head, like you’d just said something that made him want to punch you. Or, if you were a woman, maybe do something else. The kind of man who made you wonder what the something else would be like. Anyway, a strange couple, no doubt about that. What sort of kid would be the product of such a union? A pup bred from a rottweiler and a lapdog. At best a deeply conflicted human being, but who knew? Maybe the boy would resolve the conflict and be all right. At worst a volatile, unstable compound, in which case the boy would have to be put down.

“What an awful thing to say!” Sarah blurted, feeling unexpected tears well up.

“I’m just thinking out loud, sweetie,” her mother said. “Don’t pay any attention.”

“But you never even met him,” Sarah said.

“If you don’t want to know what I think, don’t ask.”

That was the problem with her. What Sarah wanted was to know what her mother thought
after
she’d given it some thought. Just once, instead of ranting, it would be nice for her to
reflect
on something and maybe respond the next day. That would suggest that the subject Sarah had introduced actually merited serious deliberation. She realized, of course, that this ran contrary to her mother’s nature.

“Besides,” she reminded Sarah, “you’ve only met the boy once yourself, so there’s no reason for you to get all red faced.”

“I’m
not
all red faced,” Sarah insisted, though she could feel herself glowing with righteous indignation.

Later that night her mother came into her room and sat on the edge of the bed. “Are you unhappy with Lou?” she asked, and Sarah quickly answered no, though she did sometimes wonder if maybe she was in love with the whole Lynch family, who were a package somehow greater than the sum of its parts, and she thought again of that South Shore family, the fifth chair at their round table that she’d so hoped might be hers. She was aware that her boyfriend, like his father, had a reputation for being a bit of a doofus, but people who believed this didn’t know him like Sarah did. Still, she wasn’t sure exactly what it meant for one boy to worship another as Lou did Bobby Marconi. Lou was prone to it, of course. He worshipped his father and, she knew, worshipped her, which was nice. Better than nice. If he thought better of people than perhaps they deserved and then proceeded to love them accordingly, didn’t she benefit as much as anyone? Even if her mother was right—and Sarah was by no means conceding the point—that Big Lou Lynch wasn’t entirely worthy of his son’s unquestioning adoration, so what? Didn’t that make it like God’s grace? Something you might not be worthy of, but would be a fool to reject?

At some point, having failed to explain to her mother (or herself) precisely what was troubling her, it dawned on Sarah that perhaps she could
draw
her way out of this maze of conflicting thoughts and feelings. Why hadn’t this solution occurred to her sooner? For years now she’d been drawing her world and in the process discovering her deepest, truest feelings. Until she’d drawn Ikey Lubin’s, for instance, she hadn’t known that the Lynch corner market represented a yearning—for refuge, a small, safe place in the wider, hostile world. Since then she’d drawn all the Lynches, even Dec, and found in their portraits a deep need for, what? Stability? Belonging? Love? She knew her parents both cared deeply for her, yes, loved her, but they loved her separately, as discrete beings. She’d come to think of their affection for her as Berg Love, something very different from Lynch Love, which was expanded exponentially by the fact that its source was a family. Was it Lynch Love, she wondered, that she most yearned for? In the highly unlikely event that Bobby Marconi might one day fall in love with her, what
sort
of love would it be? From what she knew of his family, it certainly wouldn’t be Lynch Love. The boy seemed alone in the world. In her drawing of Ikey’s, she’d pictured him outside, about to enter. But what if he never did? Maybe she already knew he wouldn’t. Maybe her subconscious had told her right where to put him. Which, if true, might mean he’d never be able to offer what she craved most.