Bridge of Sighs

it seemed, could be dissolved. The real reason the Mulroneys down the street were leaving Thomaston, it was whispered, wasn’t that he’d been offered a new job downstate but rather that he’d found a new woman in Amsterdam. My father’s purchase of Ikey Lubin’s brought home to me that my parents were now in a new conflict, that the stakes were higher, that the story of our family was being written without any guarantee of the happy ending I’d always taken for granted. My mother’s anger and fear might be as powerful as her affection for him and even for me. What was happening to other families might one day happen to ours.
    Rather than contemplate any of this, I absented myself by spending as much time as possible at the store, where I knew my mother wouldn’t step foot. There I learned how to take deliveries, keep the storeroom organized and the dairy case rotated so the food in it wouldn’t spoil, stock shelves and operate the big cash register. With so little business at first, my father could have handled all these chores by himself, but he liked having me around. He seemed to know that right from the start I loved the store as much as he did—its dry, warm smell, its crowded, sloping shelves and the fact that it was ours, though we kept Ikey Lubin’s name to avoid having to spend money on a new sign. Strangely, with so much to worry about, I had fewer spells during this period, and never a single one when I was at Ikey’s.
    When I wasn’t helping out at the store, I continued to explore on my bicycle, sometimes visiting Gabriel in Whitcombe Park, where I helped paint his fence and searched, without success, for the caves he insisted riddled the estate. That summer I also became a denizen of the Thomaston Free Library. Always a reader, I now borrowed six books every Saturday morning—the maximum allowable. At night I’d read until my mother made me turn out the light, then wake up early and read until it was time to bathe and eat breakfast and go to school. My father, who wasn’t a reader, regarded my voracious habit with wonder and pride. “You couldn’t hardly believe it,” he’d report to anybody who happened into the store and showed the slightest interest, “the books he read just last week. Not skinny ones neither.” If I happened to be there, he’d call me over and quiz me in front of his customers. “Tell ’em the books you read,” he’d say, and I’d proudly tick them off—books by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Sometimes the neighborhood men who congregated at Ikey’s would be suspicious and ask questions designed to trip me up, but I’d read the books and they hadn’t, so I had an unfair advantage. In the end they’d nod and agree that I’d done what I said, hard though it was to believe, and I’d bask in my achievement until the talk turned to baseball and stock-car racing.
    My mother, true to her word, never ventured into the store, though she worked part of every Sunday on the books, shaking her head and rubbing her temples at my father’s way of doing things. It was immediately clear that she’d been right about the nature of the business. What Ikey Lubin had been was a bookie, and the exodus of so many regular customers unnerved my father, who kept up a brave front for a while, shrugging his shoulders and saying, “Business is bound to pick up,” to which my mother would reply, without looking up from the ledger, “Really, Lou? Why’s that?” She knew perfectly well he couldn’t explain why, because he had no idea. He was
hoping
it would, just as he was hoping she’d soon relent and take up the pencil and show him what he was doing wrong and how to do it differently. He’d already done what he shouldn’t have done in buying Ikey Lubin’s, and he’d done it without consulting her, knowing full well that if he
had,
she’d have advised him not to, probably forbidden it. What she was doing now was showing him the consequences of his behavior. He wanted to do things his way? Fine. He could just go on ahead and let her know how it all worked out. It was like she enjoyed watching him suffer.
    What I didn’t understand at the time was
her
strategy, too, was doomed to failure. She couldn’t teach him this particular lesson, not really, for the simple reason that if
he
failed, we all failed. Even his suffering—and he did suffer, waiting for her to share her solution with him—was not his alone. Anxious for