BERMAN COURT
First, the facts.
My name is Louis Charles Lynch. I am sixty years old, and for
nearly forty of those years I’ve been a devoted if not terribly exciting
husband to the same lovely woman, as well as a doting father to Owen,
our son, who is now himself a grown, married man. He and his wife are
childless and likely, alas, to so remain. Earlier in my marriage it appeared
as if we’d be blessed with a daughter, but a car accident when my wife was
in her fourth month caused her to miscarry. That was a long time ago, but
Sarah still thinks about the child and so do I.
Perhaps what’s most remarkable about my life is that I’ve lived all of it
in the same small town in upstate New York, a thing unheard of in this day
and age. My wife’s parents moved here when she was a little girl, so she has
few memories before Thomaston, and her situation isn’t much different
from my own. Some people, upon learning how we’ve lived our lives, are
unable to conceal their chagrin on our behalf, that our lives should be so
limited, as if experience so geographically circumscribed could be neither
rich nor satisfying. When I assure them that it has been both, their smiles
suggest we’ve been blessed with self-deception by way of compensation
for all we’ve missed. I remind such people that until fairly recently the vast
majority of humans have been circumscribed in precisely this manner and
that lives can also be constrained by a great many other things: want, illness,
ignorance, loneliness and lack of faith, to name just a few. But it’s
probably true my wife would have traveled more if she’d married someone
else, and my unwillingness to become the vagabond is just one of the
ways I’ve been, as I said, an unexciting if loyal and unwavering companion.
She’s heard all of my arguments, philosophical and otherwise, for
staying put; in her mind they all amount to little more than my natural
inclination, inertia rationalized. She may be right. That said, I don’t think
Sarah has been unhappy in our marriage. She loves me and our son and, I
think, our life. She assured me of this not long ago when it appeared she
might lose her own and, sick with worry, I asked if she’d regretted the
good simple life we’ve made together.
Though our pace, never breakneck, has slowed recently, I like to think
that the real reason we’ve not seen more of the world is that Thomaston
itself has always been both luxuriant and demanding. In addition to
the corner store we inherited from my parents, we now own and operate
two other convenience stores. My son wryly refers to these as “the
Lynch Empire,” and while the demands of running them are not overwhelming,
they are relentless and time-consuming. Each is like a pet that
refuses to be house-broken and resents being left alone. In addition to
these demands on my time, I also serve on a great many committees, so
many, in fact, that late in life I’ve acquired a nickname, Mr. Mayor-a
tribute to my civic-mindedness that contains, I’m well aware, an element
of gentle derision. Sarah believes that people take advantage of my good
nature, my willingness to listen carefully to everyone, even after it’s
become clear they have nothing to say. She worries that I often return
home late in the evening and then not in the best of humors, a natural
result of the fact that the civic pie we divide grows smaller each year, even
as our community’s needs continue dutifully to grow. Every year the arguments
over how we spend our diminished and diminishing assets become
less civil, less respectful, and my wife believes it’s high time for younger
men to shoulder their fair share of the responsibility, not to mention the
attendant abuse. In principle I heartily agree, though in practice I no
sooner resign from one committee than I’m persuaded to join another.
And Sarah’s no one to talk, serving as she has, until her recent illness, on
far too many boards and development committees.
Be all that as it may, the well-established rhythms of our adult lives will
soon be interrupted most violently, for despite my inclination to stay put,
we are soon to travel, my wife and I. I have but one month to prepare for
this momentous change and mentally adjust to the loss of my precious
routines-my rounds, I call them-that take me into every part of town
on an almost daily basis. Too little time, I maintain, for a man so set in his
ways, but I have agreed to all of it. I’ve had my passport photo taken, filled
out my application at the post office and mailed all the necessary documents
to the State Department, all under the watchful eye of my wife and
son, who seem to believe that my lifelong aversion to travel might actually
cause me to sabotage our plans. Owen in particular sustains this unkind
view of his father, as if I’d deny his mother anything, after all she’s been
through. “Watch him, Ma,” he advises, narrowing his eyes at me in what I
hope is mock suspicion. “You know how he is.”
Italy. We will go to Italy. Rome, then Florence, and finally Venice.
No sooner did I agree than we were marooned in a sea of guidebooks
that my wife now studies like a madwoman. “Aqua alta,” she said last night
after she’d finally turned off the light, her voice near and intimate in the
dark. She found my hand and gave it a squeeze under the covers. “In
Venice there’s something called aqua alta. High water.”
“How high?” I said.
“The calles flood.”
“What’s a calle?”
“If you’d do some reading, you’d know that streets in Italy are called
calles.”
“How many of us need to know that?” I asked her. “You’re going to be
there, right? I’m not going alone, am I?”
“When the aqua alta is bad, all of St. Mark’s is underwater.”
“The whole church?” I said. “How tall is it?”
She sighed loudly. “St. Mark’s isn’t a church. It’s a plaza. The plaza of
San Marco. Do you need me to explain what a plaza is?”
Actually, I’d known that calles were streets and hadn’t really needed an
explanation of aqua alta either. But my militant ignorance on the subject
of all things Italian has quickly become a game between us, one we both
enjoy.
“We may need boots,” my wife ventured.
“We have boots.”
“Rubber boots. Aqua alta boots. They sound a siren.”
“If you don’t have the right boots, they sound a siren?”
She gave me a swift kick under the covers. “To warn you. That the
high water’s coming. So you’ll wear your boots.”
“Who lives like this?”
“Venetians.”
“Maybe I’ll just sit in the car and wait for the water to recede.”
Another kick. “No cars.”
“Right. No cars.”
“Lou?”
“No cars,” I repeated. “Got it. Calles where the streets should be. No
cars in the calles, though, not one.”
“We haven’t heard back from Bobby.”
Our old friend. Our third musketeer from senior year of high school.
Long, long gone from us. She didn’t have to tell me we hadn’t heard back.
“Maybe he’s moved. Maybe he doesn’t live in Venice anymore.”
“Maybe he’d rather not see us.”
“Why? Why would he not want to see us?”
I could feel my wife shrug in the dark, and feel our sense of play running
aground. “How’s your story coming?”
“Good,” I told her. “I’ve been born already. A chronological approach
is best, don’t you think?”
“I thought you were writing a history of Thomaston,” she said.
“Thomaston’s in it, but so am I.”
“How about me?” she said, taking my hand again.
“Not yet. I’m still just a baby. You’re still downstate. Out of sight, out
of mind.”
“You could lie. You could say I lived next door. That way we’d always
be together.” Playful again, now.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “But the people who actually lived next
door are the problem. I’d have to evict them.”
“I wouldn’t want you to do that.”
“It is tempting to lie, though,” I admitted.
“About what?” She yawned, and I knew she’d be asleep and snoring
peacefully in another minute or two.
“Everything.”
“Lou?”
“What.”
“Promise me you won’t let it become an obsession.”
It’s true. I’m prone to obsession. “It won’t be,” I promised her.
But I’m not the only reason my wife is on guard against obsession. Her
father, who taught English at the high school, spent his summers writing a
novel that by the end had swollen to more than a thousand single-spaced
pages and still with no end in sight. I myself am drawn to shorter narratives.
Of late, obituaries. It troubles my wife that I read them with my
morning coffee, going directly to that section of the newspaper, but turning
sixty does that, does it not? Death isn’t an obsession, just a reality. Last
month I read of the death-in yet another car accident-of a man whose
life had been intertwined with mine since we were boys. I slipped it into
the envelope that contained my wife’s letter, the one that announced our
forthcoming travels, to our old friend Bobby, who will remember him
well. Obituaries, I believe, are really less about death than the odd shapes
life takes, the patterns that death allows us to see. At sixty, these patterns
are important.
“I’m thinking fifty pages should do it. A hundred, tops. And I’ve
already got a title: The Dullest Story Ever Told.”
When she had no response to this, I glanced over and saw that her
breathing had become regular, that her eyes were closed, lids fluttering.
It’s possible, of course, that Bobby might prefer not to see us, his oldest
friends. Not everyone, Sarah reminds me, values the past as I do. Dwells
on it, she no doubt means. Loves it. Is troubled by it. Alludes to it in conversation
without appropriate transition. Had I finished my university
degree, as my mother desperately wanted me to, it would have been in history,
and that might have afforded me ample justification for this inclination
to gaze backward. But Bobby-having fled our town, state and nation
at eighteen-may have little desire to stroll down memory lane. After living
all over Europe, he might well have all but forgotten those he fled. I
can joke about mine being “the dullest story ever told,” but to a man like
Bobby it probably isn’t so very far from the truth. I could go back over my
correspondence with him, though I think I know what I’d find in it-polite
acknowledgment of whatever I’ve sent him, news that someone
we’d both known as boys has married, or divorced, or been arrested, or
diagnosed, or died. But little beyond acknowledgment. His responses to
my newsy letters will contain no requests for further information, no Do
you ever hear from so-and-so anymore? Still, I’m confident Bobby would
be happy to see us, that my wife and I haven’t become inconsequential to
him.
Why not admit it? Of late, he has been much on my mind.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Bridge of Sighs
by Richard Russo
Copyright © 2007 by Richard Russo .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2007
Richard Russo
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-307-26790-0
