“I sent my mama a telegram,” he said the next day. “Datelined ‘Brooklyn Bridge.’”
“She’ll be glad of it,” Will said. “You ought to have sent one to Walt.”
“I’ll send one to him, too,” Tomo said, though he did not intend to do that. When he was still a boy, Will would take him to Camden to visit the old poet, a man who pinched Tomo every time he saw him, and demanded kisses like a bearded, bad-breathed aunt. Will went down to see him every year in January, on the anniversary of the stroke that had made an invalid of Mr. Whitman, half-paralyzing him.
They had their breakfast — steak for Tomo, apples and toast for Will — and Tomo talked excitedly of how the bridge was magnificent, of how he had jumped up and down in the middle, expecting it to bounce under him.
“Of course it did not,” Tomo said, and then continued to eat in silence. Moody Will was crying again, and it was best to let him alone when he got this way. When Tomo had returned earlier that morning, Will was sitting in a battered chair and looking down at the crowds walking home underneath the paper lanterns on Fulton Street. “No one remembers,” he said as soon as Tomo came into the room. “Not even you. I think that is the worst thing about it. Walt’ll kick off soon, and then it will be just Maci and I. He never forgot you, did he? He remained inside, when he might have come back out into the world. Why don’t you remember? Shouldn’t you be ashamed, to have forgotten him? And shouldn’t you be ashamed, to have forgotten what he did?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Will,” Tomo said. “Are you talking about Sam? Are you talking about Gob?”
“You should remember,” Will said sadly.
“But I do,” Tomo said. “What sort of person wouldn’t remember his own brother?” He pulled a chair closer to Will’s and put his hand on Will’s knee, thinking of their respective brothers, both dead in the war. He cried a little, too, thinking of Gob’s abbreviated life, but he could not keep up with Will, a champion mourner, and Will’s snuffling sobs turned to voices in Tomo’s head as he drifted to sleep in his chair, thinking again of the illuminations over the bridge.
He had stood under the millions of flashing stars, listening to every ship in the harbor blow its horn, and thought how Will must be standing with his face to a wall, so as not to see even the glimmer in neighboring windows. Next to Tomo, a little boy in a black suit and a porkpie hat was clapping his hands and laughing at the display, at the fountains of gold and silver stars roaring off the towers, and the hundreds of Japanese shells bursting in rapid succession into blue, red, white, and emerald sparks that fell, still incandescent, into the river. “Isn’t it sad?” the boy asked Tomo. “Isn’t it so terribly sad?”
Tomo was always very slow going up the stairs to the promenade. Sometimes he’d stop and lean casually against the rail, unfold the paper that he carried under his arm, and pretend to read. In a little while he’d be able to go on again, up to the top of the stairs, where he always found himself thinking of the people who’d died on the bridge during the big stampede. Every May he’d bring a little wreath over and lay it down to get trampled, too.
It was his custom to stop in the middle of the bridge and look down the river. It was pretty rare, these days, to see anybody jump, or even to read about it in the papers. But Tomo had been there when Odlum made his leap in 1885, and he still remembered very well how he jumped, with one arm raised up over his head, and how his fall was so easy to follow because of the startling red shirt he wore. Tomo had missed Steve Brodie’s supposed midnight jump, which had probably not ever really happened, anyhow, but he had been there in ’87, when a man named Hollow had leaped off wearing a pair of giant canvas wings. Tomo watched as the man glided down to land gently on the surface of the river, just in front of a friendly-looking tug. It plowed over him, crushing his wings, but he lived through that abuse.
“He’s dead!” the little boy had said, next to Tomo. He’d hauled himself up on the railing, and was looking down the river, his face all twisted up in dismay.
“No, child,” Tomo told him. “See there, he’s swimming away in the wake. It’s only his wings that have been injured.”
“He’s dead!” the boy wailed. “He has died, and nothing can bring him back!” Tomo reached out to console him, but the boy dropped off the rail and ran away.
“What do you remember of your youth?” Maci would ask him. It was a question she reserved for her rare solemn moods. A friend also to Tomo’s wife (she’d introduced them to each other), she was often a visitor at their house. She’d been visiting Tomo all his life, with such frequency, when he was younger, that she had been nearly a constant presence. Now her visits were more rare. Five or six times a year she’d take time off from her career of political agitation and come to Brooklyn.
“Not very much,” Tomo told her again at her last visit, the same answer he always gave her. “When we were small, Gob and I used to play in a clearing in the orchard behind the house in Homer. He liked to play games called Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville — we had scarecrows dressed up as Confederate soldiers at whom we would shoot with toy muskets made from apple boughs.”
“Yes,” Maci said, and was silent a moment. “My friend,” she said, “I don’t think memory is to be trusted. I used to think that madness was the chief enemy of joy, and then I thought it must be hypocrisy, and then it seemed very clear that it was mortality. But in my late days I think it is memory that keeps us all ever from being happy.”
“My dear lady,” Tomo said. “Learn from me. I am very happy.” It was the truth. Her visits made him happy. From the next room his wife threw off happiness like heat from her person. And yet, thinking of the orchard in Homer, he suddenly remembered how he had hurt his brother, how he had been a coward and refused to go along when Gob ran off to the war. Tomo closed his eyes and inhabited that moment, with Alanis Bell’s warbling ringing in his ears. Over and over he sent his brother off to die without him.
“Why are you crying?” Tomo asked the boy. He was three-fourths of the way across the bridge, and about one-fourth of the way to his destination, when he saw the boy, leaning against the railing and sobbing. Every other passerby seemed completely unmoved by the boy’s display. He was about seven years old, with long, shining brown hair that fell past his shoulders and down his back. He wore a neat, old-fashioned black suit. In that moment, he was not at all familiar to Tomo.
“He’s gone!” the boy said. “Gone forever!”
“Who?” Tomo asked. “Did somebody jump?”
“Who?” the boy asked him back, looking up at him with black eyes that had more anger than sadness in them. “Who do you think? They’re all gone. All of them, never to return, and before them all my brother is gone, gone for always.”
“There now,” Tomo said, reaching out to touch the boy on his head. “My brother, he died, too.” He leaned down slowly, sure he heard himself creaking, to better comfort the little fellow. “It is a difficult thing, the death of a brother,” he said. The boy smiled, then, and darted forward like a snake. He kissed instead of biting, a dry little peck, but it burned horribly where he planted it on Tomo’s cheek.
“It’s a difficult thing,” the boy said, and Tomo felt dizzy. He had a falling sensation, and he was certain he had managed somehow to tumble off the bridge. He raised his arm up over his head in the attitude of Odlum, and prepared to meet the water.
“Goodbye, my love,” he said, speaking to his wife. He heard a noise like the ocean, or the breathing of a giant, and he was overcome with desire — he opened his eyes and wanted the whole far shore of Manhattan and all the tall buildings on it; he wanted the bodies of every person passing him where he stood with his arm up over his head, still feeling as if he were falling through endless spaces of air, he wanted to put his hands under their dresses and shirts, to grab at their flesh with his dry old hands.