Bridge of Sighs

They’ve recently discovered their well is poisoned, its water safe enough to shower in but definitely not potable. Sarah and I urged them to have this tested before they bought the place two years ago, but Brindy had fallen in love with the house, and they waived some inspections once they’d learned that another interested couple was about to make an offer. Apparently, their realtor advised them that in multiple-offer situations, sellers often take the “cleanest,” that is, the offer with the fewest contingencies. Therefore, clean offer, dirty water. State-mandated inspections had already revealed lead-based paint throughout the house, as well as asbestos in the attic and marginally unsafe levels of radon, but Brindy, a West End girl from a large family, loved the idea of living out in the country and couldn’t imagine ever finding another house she’d love as much, so we gave them enough money for a down payment, and they signed on the dotted line. When the other offer never materialized, Sarah was suspicious. After all, the county’s population has been in steady decline since the sixties. Every third or fourth house in Thomaston has a FOR SALE sign on its terrace and usually stays on the market for two years, even longer out in the country. So what were the odds that Owen and Brindy really had to compete for the place that caught her eye?
    I myself had hoped they’d stay in town. Once our Third Street renters’ lease was up, I could’ve put them in there rent-free. The house has been nicely renovated, and it was big enough, even if they had a child, as they were planning back then. And I’ll admit it: I liked the idea of my son and his wife raising a family in the same house where I myself grew up—the symmetry, I guess. But as Sarah pointed out, it was my symmetry, not theirs. Owen grew up in our Borough house, of course, and never spent a minute on Third Street, so it couldn’t possibly mean to him what it did to me. And the neighborhood isn’t, alas, what it once was. I thought they might see the practical side of it, but I don’t think Brindy warmed to the idea of being so close to the store. “It’s their life,” Sarah reminded me when she saw how disappointed I was. “Let them live it.”
    Still, when Brindy miscarried last winter, we blamed ourselves for not insisting on complete inspections. We could’ve made it a condition of giving them the down payment, but at the time that seemed unkind and manipulative. Besides which, everyone we’ve talked to since has agreed that while the arsenic discovered in their well might have contributed to Brindy’s miscarriage, it’s impossible to assign a single cause with anything like certainty. Find a well anywhere in the county
without
arsenic, was how one inspector, an old friend of my father’s, had put it. Find a house over twenty years old
without
lead-based paint, or an attic that
wasn’t
insulated with asbestos. Never mind the Cayoga Stream, the real culprit in our lives. Radon and low-level arsenic are the least of our problems.
    If my son and his wife were foolish or careless in the purchase of their house, I understand. I do. I remember vividly my father’s pride in our house at the corner of Third and Rawley. Sometimes, early on Sunday mornings, he’d wake up first, get dressed, cross the street and sit there on the curb and just look at the house, as if he couldn’t wrap his mind around it without the necessary distance. Thinking about what I’ve written so far concerning his rivalry with Mr. Marconi, I wonder if I’ve done him a disservice. Like so many men of his generation, he was a creature of postwar optimism who looked around and saw things getting better and not a single reason they shouldn’t continue to do so. Wasn’t our move from Berman Court to the East End proof of how things worked, that such optimism was justified? Not that he’d been unhappy in the West End. I doubt he’d have been unhappy anywhere, as long as we were all together, he and my mother and me. But moving to the East End had changed everything.
    Modest as it was, I think our tidy little house instilled in my father the notion that “getting ahead” was both possible and desirable, and so, without knowing exactly how or why, he entered into a paradox he never was able to resolve. On the one hand, he was content with what he saw as our great good fortune. Over the years, when he told me there was no reason I couldn’t have a house in the