Bridge of Sighs

said when he explained that he’d been too busy to get to it. “I’m standing right here in the front room looking at you. You’re all alone in there.”
    “So, what do you want?”
    “I want to know why you’re afraid of the damn phone.”
    “I ain’t afraid of it—” he started, but she hung up.
    My own theory is that he was less afraid of the phone than the phone
book.
I never knew my paternal grandparents, but I’m pretty sure my grandmother was illiterate. Grandpa could read just enough to get by. As a result my father was so far behind by the time he started school that he never caught up, which was probably why he was so proud of how I devoured books and so embarrassed when my mother accused him of moving his lips when he read the newspaper. The Thomaston phone book was pretty slender, but I could tell that its long columns of similar names, the one he wanted buried among so many others, frustrated him. In an emergency, he might not have remembered that the fire department’s listing was in the front, and even if he
had
remembered he’d have found at least a dozen other emergency numbers listed there and would’ve concluded the thing to do was call my mother.
    When she hung up after calling the fire department, she saw that I’d come downstairs and was rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and staring stupidly out the window at the flames next door. By then you could actually
hear
the fire. “Get dressed, Lou,” she said. “Hurry, in case the fire jumps.”
    “Where’s Dad?”
    “Get dressed!”
she repeated, pushing me up the stairs. I did as I was told but apparently not fast enough, because a moment later she burst into my room and grabbed me by the elbow.
    By the time we got out of the house, the neighbors were standing on their porches, pointing at the flames, which had spread to the second floor, and sirens were heading our direction. Across the intersection, the lights were all still on in Ikey Lubin’s, but there was no sign of my father. Nancy Salvatore, her robe pulled tightly across her chest, and Buddy Nurt, in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, had come out onto their upstairs porch to view the proceedings.
    “Where’s Dad?” I asked again, but my question was drowned out by the fire engine screaming around the corner, and my mother just pulled me closer.
    The flames were now dancing in the vacant windows of the Marconi flat. “Hurry up, before it jumps the roof!” one fireman shouted. Another connected a thick coil of hose to the hydrant conveniently located on our own terrace. I mowed around it every week, thinking of the plug as an inconvenience and wondering why it was there at all. “Is anyone inside?” I heard a fireman ask my mother.
    She couldn’t have taken more than a second to respond, but the question, together with the fierce hug my mother was giving me, was enough for me to understand that my father was inside the burning house.
    “Two women live on the first floor,” my mother said. “I think my husband’s gone in after—”
    Several windows exploded outward just then, causing us to move farther back and everyone along the street to gasp.
    “Where are the bedrooms?”
    In the back, my mother said, and two of the firemen started around the far side of the building.
    “Wet this one down,” one shouted to the big fireman operating the hose, which he then swung around to begin soaking our roof and back porch just a few feet from where the flames were licking at the Spinnarkle eaves, the force of the water dislodging a window screen that clattered onto the walk below.
    “There!” someone shouted, and I saw that the front door to the Spinnarkles’ downstairs flat was now open, black smoke billowing out. A moment later a child emerged.
    That’s what it looked like, though of course no child lived there, and it took me a moment to realize that this figure, doubled over choking, was one of the sisters. (I never could keep them straight.) She was blackened with smoke and soot and, I realized with a shock, completely naked. My brain immediately supplied a reason. The fire had burned her clothes off.
    “This way, Edith!” she screamed back into the house (which made the screamer Janet). “This way, Mr. Lynch! Hurry!”
    Several firemen ascended the steps now, and one of them threw a blanket around her, drawing her down the porch steps by force when what she intended, it seemed to me, was to go back into the burning house. Another fireman started in and then