Bridge of Sighs

had taken early retirement from his job selling insurance, and the ramrod-straight carriage I remembered was a thing of the past. My grandmother, always a slender woman, was now rail thin, and she’d developed a tremor in her hand. We would have to walk home, they told us, since they no longer had a car. My grandfather had been in a minor accident the previous winter, and they’d decided that both the car and its insurance were expenses they could live without. He picked up the heavier of our two suitcases, but a hundred yards from the station had to set it down on the sidewalk and bend over, hands on his knees, to catch his breath. Even with my mother and me carrying the suitcases, we had to stop twice more, and he leaned heavily on my grandmother’s frail frame all the while. They looked not merely ill but scared, as if the world, including their own selves, could no longer be trusted. When we’d all lived together, it had been understood that it was because my parents needed their help, but now I saw, though I was too young to understand this exactly, that we’d provided them with something important in return. They’d weathered the Depression by drawing close, by tightening the inner circle, by trusting that all would be well if the family stayed together. With us gone, they now had one less financial burden, but that wasn’t the way they’d looked at it. Our leaving had rent the fabric, left them somehow vulnerable to a suddenly hostile world.
    They were now living in a dark two-bedroom flat not so different from ours on Berman Court. It was stuffed with the big, heavy furniture my grandmother had inherited from her family and couldn’t bear to part with, though there wasn’t enough room for all of it here. Her sister—the one they’d moved downstate to look after—had died several months earlier, and the spare bedroom my mother and I stayed in was stacked, floor to ceiling, with furniture
she
hadn’t been able to part with. The room was so crowded we had to sidle around the bed in order to get in and out. I could see my mother’s spirits sink as it became clear how her parents were living. We’d come in the hopes of borrowing money, but their shabby, overstuffed apartment, together with the fact that they no longer kept a car, demonstrated how little they themselves had.
    Over the next few days, my mother would learn why. My grandparents’ move downstate, done in part to punish my mother for her stubbornness, had been even more disastrous than our own move to Berman Court. My grandmother’s sister had died without life insurance, so they’d had to pay for her funeral. Also, though this wasn’t mentioned, they both had been ill, sick enough, in fact, to be hospitalized, she with pneumonia, he with a flare-up of his chronic asthma. The resulting medical bills had so far consumed more than half of the equity they’d garnered from the sale of their house. Realizing belatedly that he’d retired before he could really afford to, my grandfather tried to get his job back but found there was no chance of that. As a result they were now living on their meager social security and trying not to dip into what remained of their savings. They’d gone from a life with few emergencies, unless you counted us, to one in which emergencies were monthly events.
    Yet when we boarded the train to return home, my mother had the money she’d come for, enough for a down payment, she hoped, on a modest East End house. She’d not wanted to take it, given how desperate they were already. But I was trump, as she’d known all along, and once that card was played the game was over. She promised, of course, to repay them, and since she’d recently landed another bookkeeping account, she could probably send them fifty dollars a month. My grandmother asked only that we take some of the family furniture to furnish our new home, and my mother agreed, promising we’d rent or borrow a truck and come down for it once we were settled. I think my grandmother knew that “settled” would be defined by my mother, just as she knew the furniture she couldn’t part with was, in her daughter’s opinion, old-fashioned and ugly.
    My grandfather died first, a few short months after our visit. My mother again took the train south—I stayed behind with my father—to help with his funeral arrangements. Though he’d sold insurance all his life, it turned out he was himself underinsured, and the additional expense rendered my