Bridge of Sighs

for Italy and my mother won’t want to trouble Owen.
    “I’m not sure I’d bring it up,” I tell Sarah. “I think the whole thing upset her.”
    Another untruth, or half-truth. I don’t
think
the episode upset her; I know it did. Upstairs in her flat, she collapsed into her reading chair without taking off her coat and just sat there staring at the dark smudge on her wall as if it had suddenly taken on new meaning, leaving me to make tea, a task I’m usually not allowed. My mother doesn’t like anyone in her kitchen, which is why it took me longer than it should have to find what I needed. By the time I returned to the front room, she’d taken off her coat and composed herself. “I was going to throw this away unless you want it,” she said, handing me a photograph.
    I set her cup down and took the photo, immediately perplexed. In it, my mother’s seated playfully on the counter of Ikey Lubin’s, my father and Uncle Dec standing behind her. All three are smiling at the camera, and I’m struck by how different their smiles are. Uncle Dec has his usual, knowing smirk, entirely in character. My father’s in character also, his smile too broad, too unguarded—a smile that reveals the fact that he has everything he’s ever dreamed of and is at a total loss to explain how he got so lucky. The smile that unkind people so often described as “goofy,” and one I’m said to have inherited. My mother’s smile is the most intriguing. The fact that the three of them were together in the store dates the photo as being taken shortly after she’d broken her vow and joined my father in his venture. I remember it as a happy time, but I have no idea what, specifically, would have provoked such a playful attitude. Who talked her into climbing up on the counter and posing like a calendar girl, with one knee over the other? Her smile suggests not only that she’d laid down some burden but also that she’d just been told she was beautiful and believed it. Out of character, in other words. Usually my mother refused to be photographed at all, and on those rare occasions when she did agree she seemed to be trying to make herself disappear and mostly succeeding.
    And where was I? Holding the camera? That would make sense, but I don’t recollect the incident, even though my memories of the period, as my little history suggests, are encyclopedic. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before,” I told her. “Of course I want it.”
    “I was going through an old album,” she said.
    “I hope you wouldn’t ever throw anything like this out without asking me,” I said, to which she replied, “I
did
ask you. Didn’t I.”
    This gifting process troubles me. It began a couple of years ago, my mother producing some item that belonged to my father and asking if I had “any interest” in it. Some of this I could understand. My father was a pack rat. For thirty years he brought stuff home from flea markets and yard sales, even the dump. “Wonderful. More crap,” my mother would say when he arrived home, telling her to come look at what somebody was going to throw out if he hadn’t happened by. But eventually even she admitted he had a good eye for the kind of thing somebody’d pay money for, maybe not today, but someday: the right baseball card, an old campaign button. And later, when he was ill and it looked like we’d lose everything, we sold many of his treasures to help with costs, which left only the junk he’d been wrong about, that cost a quarter or fifty cents twenty years ago and was still worth a quarter or fifty cents. After he died, I put box after box of flea market bric-a-brac in storage, unable to part with it, especially if I recalled the day he brought it home or his explanation of why it would one day be valuable. I still go through this stuff from time to time. Now it’s boxed up in our cellar, where, one day, Owen will find it.
    It’s hard to know what my son will make of items like the frogs. My father had little use for dirty jokes or anything pornographic, but one evening when I came into Ikey’s to relieve him on his supper break, he asked if I could tell the difference between a male and a female frog, and pushed two ceramic figures across the counter at me. I was at the age when any question having to do with sex made me apprehensive, not wanting to appear stupid on so important a subject, and I remember looking at the identical frogs with genuine misgiving. “It ain’t that