Bridge of Sighs (3 page)

Neither of these observations made much sense to me. My father always said you couldn’t have too many friends, so why would the Marconis consider them a liability, especially people as likable and interesting as us Lynches? But my mother explained that not everybody was like us. Other people went about things differently. It was our way—or my father’s, she said—to keep people abreast of what we were up to, especially when fortune smiled on us. If he won twenty dollars at a church raffle, he thought people should know. Somebody else, she concluded, might keep the lucky event a secret to ward off envy or requests for a small loan. To me, such logic was both new and disconcerting. Just before we’d moved to Berman Court, my grandparents had bought a television, perhaps as an inducement for us to remain with them. My father liked watching television almost as much as I did, and recently I’d overheard my parents talking about buying a used one for our flat. My father didn’t see why we couldn’t afford one, and my mother, who paid the bills and balanced the checkbook, did. I happened to know that the Marconis were also debating the same purchase, and I gave Bobby to understand that if we got ours first, we’d invite them up to watch our favorite shows. I made this offer, without consulting my parents, as a hedge against the possibility that they’d get one first, in which event we could watch with them until we could afford our own. Something like a television couldn’t help but draw people together had been my thinking, which I now understood to be flawed. Instead of opening their front door, it could in fact shut it tighter than before.

I got the distinct impression that, left to themselves, my mother and Mrs. Marconi might have been friends, like Bobby and me, but for some reason this was not allowed. Mrs. Marconi, a pale, nervous woman of Irish descent, seemed never to leave the apartment. When Bobby and I arrived home from school, we’d sometimes find our mothers in furtive conversation in the hall downstairs. Mrs. Marconi always had one of Bobby’s little brothers on her hip, and there was usually another small, liquid eye peering out from behind the cracked door, but when she saw Bobby and me, she quickly disappeared inside, as if she’d been doing something wrong and I might be a spy ready to report her indiscretion.

Being a child, I had a child’s intolerance of mystery and vagueness, so I kept after my mother relentlessly. Why couldn’t she and Mrs. Marconi be friends? Why was my own friendship with Bobby restricted to walking to and from school? Why couldn’t our
families
be friends? To which my mother responded, with yet more vagueness, that we had very different notions about how to go about doing things and therefore little in common. Little in common? Weren’t we mirror images of each other? My father was Irish, my mother Italian, the Marconis the reverse. When we first moved to Berman Court and met them I remember wondering if our families hadn’t somehow gotten tangled up. Mrs. Marconi had a softness about her that made her a better match for my father than the man she married, and I couldn’t help thinking she wouldn’t have been so nervous all the time if she lived with a man as good-natured as Big Lou Lynch. And while I wouldn’t have wished for this, my mother, a woman who knew her own mind and didn’t spook easily, seemed a better match for Mr. Marconi. That way, when they went to church at Mount Carmel and we went to St. Francis, everybody would be where they belonged. I was just a boy, of course, and it didn’t occur to me that had things been arranged in this fashion neither Bobby nor I would have existed. It just seemed like a more workable situation, and I was surprised nobody else had thought about it.

Gradually, I came to understand that the real reason Bobby and I couldn’t be better friends was that his father had something against mine. And since everybody liked my father, Mr. Marconi’s refusal to do so seemed willful and perverse. I studied him carefully every chance I got, hoping to understand what was wrong. He wasn’t nearly as large a man as my father, but he was compact and muscular, and he had a way of leaning slightly forward, his hands clenching into fists and then unclenching again, as if he had to remind himself not to be angry. On his forehead, just below the hairline, he had a purple birthmark that seemed to change in size and vividness, growing larger and darker when his fists were clenched than when he relaxed them. But what could he possibly have against my father? Of all the things I wanted to understand, this was the most urgent because it seemed the most inexplicable. It seemed to have something to do with the army. Mr. Marconi had served and my father hadn’t, and apparently he held it against him, though it was flat feet and not unwillingness or cowardice that kept my father out. He’d taken some pains to explain this to Mr. Marconi, who just smiled and said, “Funny how that works,” then claimed to know plenty of other flat-footed guys who’d managed to serve. “Too bad, anyhow,” he concluded. “We could’ve used a guy like you who knows the right way to do everything.”

“You’d think he was part of the Normandy invasion.” My mother snorted when my father told her about this conversation. From what Mrs. Marconi had said, by the time her husband had arrived in Europe the war was already over, which to my mother’s way of thinking explained why he was still fighting it. “Don’t you dare repeat that,” she said when she remembered I was in the room and taking it all in. “Bobby’s mother isn’t supposed to talk about the family, so I’m not supposed to know.”

Dressed in his postman’s uniform, Mr. Marconi did have a military bearing, and I half expected to look up one day and see him wearing a sidearm. According to my mother he ran his family on a military model, with the emphasis on discipline. In our house it was my mother who was in charge of that, though there was little need of it. I’d never been a willful or disobedient child, and a reproachful look was enough to improve my conduct. Neither of my parents had ever raised a hand to me. Apparently at the Marconis it was different. Mr. Marconi alone handled discipline, and my mother feared it was often harsh. Could that be another reason he didn’t like my father, a man who spared the rod?

If I had a hard time understanding Mr. Marconi’s resentment, I wasn’t alone. My father couldn’t understand it either, and whenever they met in the hall, he was even friendlier than he was with other people. “Lou,” my mother said, “leave the man alone. If he doesn’t like you, he doesn’t like you.”

“What’d I ever do to him, that’s all I want to know. I never done nothing to him.”

“I know that, Lou,” my mother said. “Leave him alone anyway.”

But he couldn’t. Even I knew that. He kept an eye peeled and would waylay him by the mailboxes or in the hall, determined, I could tell, to be liked or know why he wasn’t. The subject he usually tried to introduce as an icebreaker was money and how much things cost anymore, that there seemed to be no end in sight and you had all you could do to keep up, never mind get ahead. These were subjects my father considered to be of universal appeal and easy enough for anybody to talk about and share as common ground. “What Tessa spent on winter clothes for our Louie this weekend?” he’d venture. “I couldn’t hardly believe it. And one kid’s all we got. With three, that’s gotta be rough.” Here he’d let his voice fall so Mr. Marconi could commiserate or, if he felt like it, compare notes about the cost of children’s coats and boots. I think my father suspected that Mr. Marconi, between his two jobs, made more money than he did at the dairy, but having three kids and another on the way, he figured, put them in pretty much the same boat, moneywise. Also, there were rumors the hotel was going to close. “I told Tessa she ain’t gotta pay Calloway’s prices,” he continued when Mr. Marconi declined to comment. “She could go down to Foreman’s for cheaper, but thinks cheaper’s more expensive in the long run, and I guess she’s right.” Actually, that wasn’t how he’d reacted the night before when he found out how much my winter clothes had cost, but now he’d slept on it, and I could tell spending all that money had become a source of pride. “Besides, if you’ve got the money, why shortchange your kids? If you ain’t
got
it, sure, that’s another thing, but if you
do,
why not spend the extra buck?”

“Because you might need it tomorrow,” Mr. Marconi finally said, pushing past my father and closing the door in his face, rather more forcefully, it seemed to me, than was necessary.

“Don’t always be bragging to that man,” my mother told him. “You know they dress those boys out of the thrift shop.”

“Well, what’s he spend their money on, then?” my father said.

“Lou, that’s none of our business. Leave him alone. He doesn’t like you.”

“I just wish I knew why, is all. I never done nothing to him.”

Which caused my mother to rub her temples.

About the only thing the Lynches and the Marconis
did
have in common was a determination to leave the West End as soon as we could afford to. My mother in particular saw Berman Court as temporary. She’d wanted to rent in the East End from the start, but having grown up at the end of the Depression, she was wary and said she preferred to not have something at all than to have it today and lose it tomorrow. She felt bad for Mrs. Marconi, who was always pregnant. With each new baby, my mother claimed, the poor woman was tethered to the West End that much more securely.

I remember knocking on the Marconis’ door late one afternoon and waiting in the hall for a long time. There were sounds inside, so I knew someone was home, someone, I sensed, was right on the other side of the door, listening and hoping whoever it was would go away. Only when I knocked a second time did Mrs. Marconi respond, her voice very near, “Who is it?” she wanted to know, her voice tremulous. “Bobby can’t come out,” she said once I’d identified myself, though I was there to return something my mother had borrowed the day before.

“That woman is terrified,” she said when I told her what had happened. But when I asked what Bobby’s mother might be afraid of, she claimed not to know. I didn’t believe her, and it frightened me to think some unnamed thing in our own building could scare a grown woman, and I wondered if my father could protect us from it.

S
T.
F
RANCIS WAS
Thomaston’s only parochial elementary school. After kindergarten my mother had been talked into enrolling me there by Father Gluck, our parish priest, and I suspect she also hoped—in vain—that my nickname wouldn’t follow me there. Bobby’s parents had reluctantly enrolled him in St. Francis in third grade because at Cayoga Elementary he’d fallen in with a group of rough boys and been suspended, more than once, for fighting, which particularly worried Mrs. Marconi. In one of their furtive hallway conversations, my mother may have suggested that St. Francis boys weren’t so combative, and that having Bobby there would be good for me, too. We could be friends and walk to and from school together. Mrs. Marconi liked that idea but didn’t think her husband would spend the extra money, so we were all surprised when she prevailed. My mother speculated afterward that Mr. Marconi may have been swayed by the fact that St. Francis boys wore uniforms, of which he heartily approved, believing that dress impacted behavior.

Cayoga Elementary had been a short block from Berman Court, but St. Francis was a half-dozen blocks farther, in the opposite direction. It was also on the other side of the Cayoga Stream, which we crossed, coming and going, by means of a narrow footbridge. Both schools dismissed students by grade, ten minutes apart, lower grades first. If you were a first grader with a brother or sister in second or third grade, you were allowed to wait in the office until the higher grade was let out. Otherwise, you were to go straight home. The flaw in the system was that older kids in the public school were being let out at the same time as the younger ones from the parochial. St. Francis kids were already objects of scorn because we wore uniforms and were taught by nuns, and those who left by the front door often had to run a gantlet of ridicule. For others of us, though, the most direct route home was out the back and across the small school yard, then out through a gap in the fence. From there we followed a path through the trees down the steep bank of the Cayoga Stream, crossed the footbridge and climbed up the far embankment. From there it was, for Bobby and me, three short blocks home to Berman Court.

The scary part of the journey was the bridge itself. Thanks to the depth of the ravine, it was visible from neither the school on one side nor the street on the other. The whole journey, down one bank and up the other, took only a minute, but if the public school boys arrived at the footbridge first, and no parents were around, St. Francis kids had to “pay a toll” in order to pass. The toll could be whatever you had: a penny, a marble, an old Necco Wafer. If you had nothing, or maybe just a broken pencil, you found yourself in a headlock and tossed over a hip and onto the hard ground and then laughed at as you raced toward safety back where you’d come from. Whenever Bobby Marconi stayed home from school, I made sure I had something for the toll.

That was the thing about Bobby: he never had to pay the toll, nor did I when I was with him. The boys collecting the toll were the very ones Bobby had gotten in trouble with the year before, so they all knew each other. Their leader, a kid named Jerzy Quinn who was a year older, had been suspended with Bobby, and for some reason that had made them cautious friends, as well as rivals. Jerzy liked to tease Bobby about being a wimpy Catholic who only hung out with girls anymore—a reference to my nickname, I knew immediately—and Bobby asked Jerzy if he wanted to be a singer like his father, a drunk who liked to sing at the top of his lungs before passing out in the gutter by the tannery.

The closest they ever came to actual hostilities was over me. At the beginning of the school year, the toll takers tried to shake me down, and one of them, Perry Kozlowski, put me in a headlock while the others went through my pockets. But Bobby said to leave me alone, that I was with him and didn’t have to pay. He didn’t question the authority of these boys to consider the bridge their own property, but did insist that I was exempt by virtue of our friendship. “Who says?” Perry wanted to know, as if there were rules governing such exemptions. They argued the fine points while I remained in the headlock, until Jerzy Quinn finally said, “Let him go. He’s not worth it.”