Bridge of Sighs

hard,” he said when I confessed I had no idea, then turned them over to reveal their pale undersides, one of which sported a penis, the other breasts and a tiny vagina that looked like a grain of barley. The frogs had been a gift, I later learned, from Uncle Dec, who’d gotten a lot of mileage out of my father’s inability to tell the difference either. Owen, no doubt, will toss it all, but better him than me.
    I understand why my mother might want to divest herself of such dubious possessions. I do. Still, it occurred to me one day last year how little was left in her apartment to remind her of him, or even their marriage. Was she trying to erase him? Many times over the last eighteen months she has offered me something with the excuse of having no room for it but which, like this photograph, takes up no room at all. It’s as if the dark smudge over the sofa is full and sufficient reminder of their lives together, and this possibility, I admit, has made me increasingly bitter.
    Which may be why, when she asked if I had “any interest” in the photo of her and my father and Uncle Dec, I felt my resentment rise up, like bile. I told myself to swallow it as I always do, today of all days, so soon after the upset of Buddy Nurt and less than a week before Sarah and I leave for Italy. My mother is old and frail and she has her reasons, not all of which can be known to me or, for that matter, even to herself. Maybe it has less to do with my father than her own mortality, and this gifting is her grim acknowledgment that we don’t in the end get to take anything with us. Still, I heard myself say, “Mom, does it ever seem to you that no matter what we’re discussing, we’re always arguing about Dad?”
    When she didn’t immediately respond, it occurred to me that perhaps she’d been thinking the same thing, maybe for years. “Why,” I went on, “is it so important to you that I remember him as you do? That I not love him?”
    And just that quickly she was trembling with rage. “I
never
wanted you to not love your father,” she declared. “I wanted you to love
me.
”
    Did I speak then? I don’t remember. I think probably not.
    “Did it ever occur to you, even once during all those years, that you might have taken
my
side? That
I
might have needed a friend?”
    How long did we sit there staring silently at the smudge above the sofa, both aware that we’d crossed a new line? Finally my mother said, “Go home, Lou.” As quickly as it had come, her rage had leaked away, and left her hollowed out, almost as if she’d had one of my spells, and of course I wished that I could take back every word. “Sarah will be missing you.”
    “You’ll be all right?”
    “My life is what I made it,” she said. “No fault of yours. I wish it were.”
    At the door I said, “I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you,” and I’m sure I said this partly to give her the opportunity to deny it.
    “I did hope,” she admitted, “you’d see things differently after your father died. Instead, all your beliefs have hardened. But I never wanted you not to love him.”
    Do I believe this? I suppose I do. I know I do.
    And have I, over time, become stubbornly calcified in my beliefs? That, I suppose, is also true.
             
     
    A FTER SARAH AND I FINISH the dinner dishes, I go into my study and read over the last few pages of my story, trying to square the past as I remember it with today, this day. Should I continue writing? Is the urge to relive the events of my childhood rooted in the desire to see things clearly, just as my mother has always claimed she wants me to do? Or is my intention merely to etch my hardened conclusions into stone? How does one know? And in the end, what difference does it make? Who cares about a single life beyond the one whose task it is to live it? Am I not as entitled to my life as my mother is to hers? Must there be a version that reconciles all the versions, large or small?
Can
there be?
    But her accusations trouble me, in part because they’re not new but also because I feel their truth. I wish I could deny that I’ve missed opportunities to be my mother’s friend. And of course I
have
chosen my father’s side. But at the core of her accusations is the belief that I’m willfully dishonest, always seeing what I want to see rather than what is. My father never once thought this. Did I choose him, his side, because he thought better of me?
    At this particular moment, as I review