Bridge of Sighs

hours I was away, and while it seemed like only a few minutes to me, I now know that from the time my wife joined me in the art room and spoke my name, a good half hour elapsed before my return was complete. So if a scan will put their minds at ease, I’ll submit to yet another.
    “Is she furious with me?” I ask, because I realize that like everyone else, she’d seen this spell coming.
    “Of course not,” Sarah tells me. In her opinion I’ve always sold my mother short, which of course is true, and always has been.
    “She must’ve said something,” I venture, though in truth I’m not sure I want to hear her take on today’s events, not that her conclusions would be any harsher than my own.
    “She thinks there’s a part of you that never got out of that trunk,” Sarah says, adding, unnecessarily, “the one those boys locked you in.” My mother means this observation compassionately, I know. She’d like to absolve me of blame, and not just for Italy, but it’s an absolution I cannot accept. What those boys did to me was cruel, yes, though in fact they’d played the same prank on other kids, and I was the only one to suffer lasting consequences. My mother has always considered that a watershed event in my young life, one I never got over, but tell me who hasn’t, in one fashion or another, been victimized or found himself imprisoned in this life? Wasn’t Jerzy Quinn, the boy most responsible for what happened to me, himself the victim of a childhood far worse than mine? And what about the rest of his gang? In junior high we East Enders believed they were too tough, too cool, to attend our dances at the Y, but the truth was much simpler and more cruel than we understood. How old was I when it finally dawned on me that they simply didn’t have the price of admission? They congregated out of sight at the footbridge—
their footbridge
! S—within hearing of our pounding music, making a gift of their mocking laughter to those of us who had the necessary fifty cents. They joined us in the gym only after our parents had closed the cashbox and flung the doors wide open. Is it any wonder they came in angry and stomped their way through what little remained of the proceedings? Unlike us, their families lived in close proximity to the toxic stream, ensuring that they would grow exotic tumors later in life, or else they died in Vietnam, while those of us who danced, or nervously looked on, went off to college. I knew every one of those boys in Jerzy’s gang, and, except for Perry Kozlowski, they’re dead, every one of them. Jerzy himself was the last to go, as always the toughest one, still grinning like a wolf, or so I imagine, when the Jaws of Life pulled him from the wreckage of that fatal head-on. I wept when I read his obituary and wept when I stuffed it into the envelope my wife addressed to Bobby in place of her letter. So tell me, how is it that
I’m
the one who’s damaged, who isn’t right?
    Breaking the silence, Sarah says, “When you were coming out of your spell, you kept trying to tell me something about Lou-Lou.”
    After a moment I say, “He was there.”
    “On the bridge?” Clearly she’d prefer to be wrong about an intuition as strange as this one. Over supper I’d explained, trying to make light of it, how I believed I’d actually entered her painting, that I was crossing over the bridge when I heard her calling me, but I’d left out the part about my father being there. I’d wanted her to believe it was she who was responsible for my return. For some reason it seemed important for her not to feel that her power to restore me to myself had been diminished.
    “I think he’s disappointed in me,” I tell her, realizing as I do how crazy this sounds. “I mean, he would be, if he was still here.”
    “Your father was always proud of you,” Sarah replies. “You know that.”
    Yes. I know this. I do. But I also know his pride was sustained by his refusal, as my mother put it, to know what he knew. And so, taking a deep breath, I do what I should’ve done weeks ago and open my desk drawer. “Bobby never received your letter,” I say, handing it to Sarah, and her expression, as she takes it, is, I think, the saddest I’ve ever seen on a human face.
    Dear Bobby.
Though for weeks I’ve repressed its very existence, I discover I can now recite the letter verbatim.
Remember that drawing I did of Ikey’s back before we met, how I put you at the front door about to enter?