Bridge of Sighs

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