Bridge of Sighs

clear again. Utterly vanished as well was the terrible bitterness that had been gnawing at me for days without my being entirely aware, along with the sour taste on the back of my tongue.
    “That’s what I want,” I assured her.
             
     
    H OW DISTANT these events seem tonight as I sit alone in my den in the aftermath of a spell powerful enough to blow Italy to smithereens. And as distant as they are in time, they feel even more remote in sentiment. How odd to recall that what I felt that late-March evening so long ago, when Sarah took my hand and banished my spell before it could happen, was
cured.
All my life I’d wanted to believe that my father was right in saying, “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with our Louie.” My mother knew better, knew as I did that there
was
something wrong with me, something that
was
me and that would never go away unless I went with it. No matter how long it is between spells, the next is always lurking, hidden like a malignant cell and awaiting coded instructions to divide, then divide again, until it gains the required mass to steal me away and take me captive. Only then, after it’s done what it must, can I be called back. My father was particularly good at this, at making the world feel right and safe for me when I returned.
    But not even he had been able to
prevent
a spell. Nobody had ever cast one off once it was under way, as Sarah did when she took my hand in the restaurant. In the depths of despair just moments earlier, I immediately felt giddy with optimism, and so, amazingly, did she, as if she was as stunned by her own power as I was. Even more amazing, having now seen me at my worst, she seemed even more committed to our future than before. We stayed at the restaurant until it closed, mapping out the rest of our lives. Sarah would do one last semester at Cooper Union, then transfer to Albany. There, she’d be a full-time student and stay on campus when I went home on weekends. I’d continue to do whatever I could to help my parents save the store, but Sarah’s talent—and suddenly I sounded like my mother—must not be compromised or sacrificed.
    Drunk with hope, we determined not only things that were ours to decide but also things that weren’t. We concluded that my father’s operation had been an unqualified success, just as his doctor proclaimed, and that my mother’s apprehensions were born of love, not reason. Before long he’d have his old strength back, and life would return to normal. Then we resolved that Ikey’s would prosper, so there’d be no need to sell the house. Further, we figured that the money spent on renovations wasn’t being wasted. Now that Sarah had straightened out my thinking, I saw what I’d been blind to before: that as soon as she and I were married, we’d move into the apartment ourselves and stay there until we could manage a down payment on a house of our own. I’d been right that my mother and uncle had been conspiring, but wrong about their intent. They were preparing a place for Sarah and me to live. Later, after she finished her degree, she’d teach art in the local schools and continue to draw and paint. She’d work at Ikey’s only when she wanted to. At some point, when it was safe to do so, I’d go back to school and finish my own degree, because that’s what my mother had always wanted and sacrificed for. We’d have two children, Sarah and I, a boy and a girl, who would take turns bouncing and giggling on their grandfather’s knee. All this we decided, all this and more.
    Tonight, our myriad decisions seem as remote as youth itself. Yet I can’t bring myself to regard them as folly. As I stare at the grainy newspaper photo of my hero-father that hangs above my desk, I’m more disappointed in myself than anything else. Still shaken by my encounter with him on the Bridge of Sighs, I’m again visited by a feeling of profound shame, first because I tried to sneak past my father, then because I begged him to let me stay there on the bridge instead of returning to Sarah, my life and my duties. In the final stage of his illness, when he weighed all of a hundred and twenty pounds and all that was left was pain and worry, he still loved his life. “I don’t want to die,” he told me one afternoon, his lower lip trembling, when my mother was out of the room. “I ain’t afraid. It ain’t that. I just want to stay here with you, is all.” Bedeviled by perplexity, he kept saying, “I don’t