Bridge of Sighs

not said. Worse, these regrets accumulate and become a kind of verbal dam, preventing utterance of any sort until the dam finally breaks and I blurt something with inappropriate urgency, the time for that particular observation having long passed. As a result, until people get to know me, they often conclude that I’m slow, and in this I’m also like my father.
    I don’t remember how old I was the first time I overheard somebody call Big Lou Lynch a buffoon, but it so surprised me that I looked the word up in the dictionary, convinced I’d somehow mistaken its meaning. This was probably the first time I recognized how deeply unkindness burrows and how helpless we are against it. At any rate, I’ve noticed that people who eventually come to like me often seem embarrassed to, almost as if they need to explain. Though I’ve been well and truly loved, perhaps more than I’ve deserved, my father is the only person in my life to love me uncritically, which may be why I find it impossible to be critical of him. In one other respect, I’m also my father’s son: we both are optimists. It is our nature to dwell upon our blessings. What’s given is to us more important than what’s withheld, or what’s given for a time and then taken away. Until he had to surrender it, too young, my father was glad to have his life, as I am to have mine.
             
     
    T HOUGH I GREW UP in Thomaston, my earliest memories are of living with my maternal grandparents in a tiny house three miles to the south, its backyard sloping down to the Cayoga Stream. When the winter trees were bare I could see the water sparkling from the upstairs windows, but I wasn’t allowed to play along the banks. My grandfather owned a car, and by the time I awoke in the bedroom I shared with my parents, he and my father had already left for work. I vaguely remember my mother being unhappy about living “in each other’s laps” and that we were saving for the day we could afford a flat of our own in town. With no other children nearby, I’d become a quiet, solitary child, and my mother was determined that I attend kindergarten in town and make friends. With a year of business school under her belt, she was confident she could get part-time work as a bookkeeper once I was in school.
    We couldn’t have saved much money, because when the time came to enroll me in kindergarten, the place my parents rented was in Thomaston’s West End on Berman Court. There were only five houses on Berman, two on each side of the street and another—a three-story building—at the dead end where the land fell sharply away to the Cayoga Stream. I remember having a hard time understanding how this was the same river I could see from my grandparents’ house, which felt like a different world to me. My new bedroom window, in the back of the building, was impossibly high, and I remember being afraid of falling from it, down the steep bank and into the stream. Most of the houses in our new neighborhood were slapdash affairs that almost from the day of their construction began to slope and tilt dangerously, their chimneys sporting large fissures and sometimes toppling onto the roofs of their neighbors’ sloping porches. I remember, too, the dank chemical smell of the Cayoga itself, which always permeated the stairwell that led up to our rooms, an odor that was nothing like the overheated apartments, which were ripe with pungent cooking oils and unbathed pets kept too long indoors.
    My father was a milkman. His dairy job had paid enough to support us when we lived with my grandparents, but not now, though I was unaware of this at the time. I was proud that everyone in Thomaston seemed to know and like my father, that no matter where we went people would toot their horns or call to him from across Division Street or want to shake his hand in the doorway of the barbershop. My mother, by contrast, lacked this great popularity, and though I loved her, I sometimes wondered why my father had married her. She was terribly thin and angular, and her eyebrows met in the middle of her forehead when she frowned, which was most of the time. Old photographs suggested that she had never been pretty. I don’t mean that she was homely, just the kind of girl you wouldn’t notice, and now that she was a woman people always seemed to be trying to place her. Whenever anyone offered the slightest hesitation, she would supply her name, as if she understood their predicament all too well.