Bridge of Sighs

liked, something visually extravagant. Beyond that, she hadn’t given it much thought. “Ma,” Owen kept saying at the train station in Albany, “you’re sixty. What’re you gonna
do
?”
    She supposed he didn’t mean to be insulting. He was concerned about her recent illness, so she made an honest effort not to take offense. “I know how old I am,” she said. And had she ever mentioned how much she disliked “Ma,” instead of “Mom”?
    “I know Pop screwed up,” he conceded. “I’m mad at him, too.”
    “I’m
not
mad,” she corrected him. Disheartened, it was true, maybe even heartbroken, but if she was angry with anyone it was herself. After all, she knew what Lou could and couldn’t do. She’d seen this recent meltdown coming and chose to ignore it.
    “Ma,” Owen said. “You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t pissed. I just wish you’d let me into your plan. I’m on your side, remember? Why don’t you let me help?”
    “You want to help?” she said. “Grab that bag.”
    Because in fact she had no idea where she’d go or what she’d do when she got there, or when she’d tire of it and return to her life. Or if. Not long ago she’d read a magazine article about a woman, a photographer, who left her life and work in Boston and moved to New Mexico, where she purchased some land and a modest house out in the desert. There she’d experienced what she claimed was an artistic and spiritual rebirth. Had she left her husband, or had he recently died? Sarah couldn’t remember. But this woman was a decade older than Sarah, which proved something of the sort could be done. Sarah couldn’t decide what she liked most about the idea, the magnificent desert solitude or just the absence of men, their neediness and willful incomprehension. Maybe she’d consult the onsite travel agent at the Waldorf. She’d packed her passport. She could go anywhere she wanted.
             
     
    O N THE TRAIN she opened the new biography of Frida Kahlo she’d bought, read the first page three times without comprehension, then decided the book would be most useful as a prop. Without it, someone might be tempted to engage her in conversation, which she was determined to avoid. Once under way, she found herself recalling those earlier train rides to and from the city all those years ago. These days, her mother was never far from her thoughts. She’d been forty-six when she died. Just beginning menopause, Sarah supposed. At the time, though, Sarah had been too young to understand what that meant to any woman, much less one like her mother. As a girl, Sarah had always believed her parents’ separation had been caused by her little brother’s death, the result of grief and loss. Her mother had often intimated as much. “After Rudy,” she’d begin, but then the thought would trail off in her typically maddening fashion. Other times she’d say, “Well, the truth is your father and I were never compatible.” Sarah had supposed she meant that her father was an intellectual, a man who lived not only for ideas but also the words necessary to compose them, whereas her mother was different. She thought in images, and once she got those to her liking on a canvas or in her sketchbook, any words at all were redundant. What she’d done was either good or it wasn’t, and no amount of arguing—her husband’s greatest skill—could make it otherwise. The differences between her parents, Sarah imagined, were a lot like those between her father and herself.
    She’d been wrong, of course. It went much deeper than that. Sarah didn’t have many vivid memories of the time before their separation, but there’d been arguments. “It wouldn’t kill you to read a book every now and then,” he’d snap. “Any more than it would kill you to put yours down,” she’d snap right back. At home, in private, her father belittled everything from her mother’s logic to her fondness for TV. In public, often at parties, she scorned his poor social skills and his ignorance of anything that didn’t come out of a book. She had been very attractive and loved to dress provocatively and have fun. When her husband held forth on some literary or political subject, she’d pretend to listen with rapt attention until he finished, then she’d laugh and say, “He certainly does
talk
a good game, doesn’t he?” Sarah was herself a married woman before it dawned on her that the real reason for her parents’ separation had