Bridge of Sighs

grandparents, afraid that our little house on the corner of Third and Rawley might have come at too high a cost. The responsibility of ownership, of mortgage payments, of not having a landlord, frightened her, I’m sure, at least at the beginning. A leaky faucet or a running toilet worried her unduly, because they represented what just might turn out to be the tip of some terrible iceberg, or perhaps the first in a series of small but unrelenting expenses that couldn’t be anticipated or, therefore, budgeted. Often I’d find her in the cellar worrying over a puddle of water that had formed after a hard rain, or up in the attic studying the roof for telltale signs that she’d done a foolish thing by putting every egg we had in this particular basket.
    My father, having no such misgivings, couldn’t get over how good luck had found us out so suddenly. His experience had been that houses were something people lost, as his parents had lost their farm, and the notion that he himself might own one someday hadn’t occurred to him until it happened. That first year on Third Street, every minute he wasn’t on his milk route he spent scraping and painting the trim, shoring up the collapsing garage (even though at that time we still had no car to put in it), or encircling the porch with bushes, adding small, inexpensive and, according to my mother, garish touches to the property. He’d have filled our tiny terrace with lawn ornaments had she allowed him.
    He was in good spirits not just about us and our prospects but also about our country. Here, he reminded me proudly, anybody could become anything, and we ourselves were living examples of how America worked. Though I wasn’t sure what we’d “become” by moving out of Berman Court and into the East End, I liked our new neighborhood and could see that while we weren’t rich, we were better off. And I was especially comforted by my father’s belief that we were living a story whose ending couldn’t be anything but happy.
    Interestingly, the nature and moral of that story began almost immediately to evolve. As we settled into the East End, our sudden good fortune seemed rooted less in luck than in the sober industry that I was being taught in school was the key to success in a free society. And for my father hard work and virtue were two sides of the same coin. The only families who were truly stuck in the West End, he now believed, were headed by dissolute men who couldn’t manage to find their way past the gin mills after their shifts, gave their money to the bookies who haunted the tannery and spent their weekends at the racetrack while their wives and children went hungry. In America, he maintained, if you kept your nose clean, good things were eventually bound to happen to you.
    Not surprisingly, my mother’s take on our better life, as well as her estimation of America, was more complex and, to my way of thinking, far less satisfying. She never publicly contradicted my father’s joyous outbursts, though later, when they were alone, she’d remind him that what got us out of Berman Court was not virtue but a loan from her parents, nor had hard work been much of a factor. True, he always worked hard, she’d grant him this much, yet that was no excuse to go around talking nonsense about good things happening to good people, because bad things happened to good people all the time. In fact, the bad thing that had happened to me was more responsible for our move to the East End than our industry and virtue combined.
    On those rare occasions when she took my father to task, he always hung his head woefully and claimed she hadn’t understood what he meant. “All I’m saying is, what if this was Russia? Over there you got no chance. You just gotta take what they give you.” To which my mother would roll her eyes. “How much do you really know about Russia, Lou? Did you go to Russia once and not tell me?” Which would make him even more sheepish. “It’s what they say,” he’d reply lamely, which would elicit, predictably, my mother’s trump observation, that she couldn’t care less what “they” said. It was what
he
said that was giving her a headache.
    None of which is to suggest that she was a pessimist. She would concede that both our family and our nation were making progress. In large part that was due—speaking of bad things—to the war, which she said had made us all Americans first, Catholics or Protestants or Italians or Irish second.