Bridge of Sighs

to be happy, Louie?” he wondered out loud, as if he thought I might actually know the answer. “You lived in that house, wouldn’t you be happy?”
    I said I would, and meant it.
    “Anybody would,” he nodded, glad to have produced such a sensible kid. “How could you not be happy if you had all that?”
    When my father and I were alone, sometimes I could hear my mother’s responses to things he said, and now I heard her say,
You think people are geared to be content, Lou? And you came to this conclusion how?
    I was pretty sure this wasn’t a skill my father possessed, or he wouldn’t have said half the things he did. “When you’re all grown up, if you live in a house like that, be happy. Don’t let nobody tell you you ain’t got it made neither.”
    I promised I wouldn’t.
    “You don’t even need all this to have it made,” he went on. “Your uncle and me? We grew up in a house didn’t have no running water or electricity. You ain’t gotta have everything to be happy.”
    Across the street, the front door opened, and Mr. Beverly emerged, followed by a slender, well-dressed woman I took to be Mrs. Beverly, then finally Nan herself, radiant and clean, her blondness highlighted in the morning sunlight. They were clearly on their way to church, and all three seemed to notice us at once, which made me want to slide down in my seat. How out of place we must have looked sitting there. Borough streets were extra wide, but ours was the only car visible on this one, the others all safely tucked away in their garages or on gleaming display in their doublewide driveways. I think my father also realized we didn’t belong, and I felt bad for him because, as a route man, he
had
once belonged here, at least certain hours of the day.
    If the Beverlys wondered who we were and why we were parked there, they gave no sign. They didn’t stare at us like East Enders did at strangers who didn’t belong, openly wondering who they were and who they might be visiting. Instead, father, mother and radiant daughter just got into their shiny Cadillac, the rear window of which, I noticed, had been repaired. I saw Mr. Beverly adjust his rearview mirror, perhaps to get another look at us but more likely to have the best view possible while backing out. When their Cadillac disappeared around the corner, my father looked stricken, as if they were leaving town for good, right that minute, not just going to church.
    Reluctant as our Ford was to quit running, it was equally loath to start up again, but eventually it did. Though I figured we’d now head back home, we took another slow tour of the Borough, just as we’d done in his milk truck the day he told me which important people lived where. Probably he was just reassuring himself about how many prominent families there’d still be, even if the Beverlys moved, but I wondered if he was also puzzling over how to get here from where we were. Would a corner market, once we were better at running it, bring us here, or did Ikey Lubin’s just mean we could stay where we were and not have to return to Berman Court?
    When we’d exhausted all the Borough streets, we drove on out of town and slowed down at Whitcombe Park. There was no sign of Gabriel Mock. Beyond the fence the Hall looked both grand and decrepit, and I wondered if it suggested to my father, as it did to me, that my mother was right, that up wasn’t the only direction you could go in America—that what was won could be lost again, that Gabriel’s fence enclosed little more than a magnificent ruin. If it was true, as my father steadfastly maintained, that down was followed by up, then didn’t it stand to reason that up was followed by down?
    “I guess the fellow that lived there was about the first one to get rich around here,” he said. “I don’t know how he done it, but people must’ve liked him.” In the end, that was how my father always measured things. If you were rich, it meant people liked you and wanted to do business with you and not some other fellow. Maybe it even meant God liked you.
    Before returning home, we stopped at the Cayoga Diner. Usually we sat at the counter where my father could shoot the breeze with Stan, who worked the counter, and whoever else was idling there, so I was surprised when he steered us to an empty booth at the rear. We sat next to a window that overlooked the stream below, which was water colored today, the tannery being closed on Sundays, though the bank was