Bridge of Sighs

before, despite the fears voiced by both my mother and the firemen, the idea that the fire might leap from the Spinnarkle house to ours had seemed far-fetched, but I now saw how close we’d come, which in turn made me remember Edith Spinnarkle whimpering, “Our home!…Our home!” What, I wondered, would happen to them now? I hoped they wouldn’t be moving in with us, because that would be the end of our television viewing.
    Thinking about all this I recalled the heat register conversation I’d heard late that night, after everything had finally calmed down and I’d been sent up to bed. “That’s how I found them,” I heard my father say. To which my mother replied, “Well, I’m not that surprised.” I’d fallen asleep shortly after that, too tired from all the excitement to consider what my mother hadn’t been that surprised by.
    She was sitting at the table in her robe and staring into a cup of murky coffee when I went back inside. Seeing I was up and dressed, she said, “You should shower before we go to Mass.” We hadn’t been going to church much since my mother laid down the law to Father Gluck, but I understood why this morning might be different. God had looked out for us, so we’d go and give thanks. “Do I have to?” I said, prepared to be told to march.
    “No.”
    I sat down across the table from her, suddenly remembering the police car.
    As if she’d read my mind, she said, “The store was robbed.”
    “When?”
    “While everybody was watching the fire. Your father never had a chance to lock up….”
    “How much money—”
    “Whatever was in the till. Saturday’s our best day, so…” She shook her head, as discouraged as I’d ever seen her. “What kind of person…”
    The answer to her question came to me in the shower. When she and I had gone out into the street last night, I’d looked over at Ikey Lubin’s, expecting my father to come bursting out of the store, but what I saw was Nancy Salvatore in her robe and Buddy Nurt in his boxer shorts and sleeveless T-shirt up on their porch. Later, when my father asked if the store was going to be okay, I looked there again and saw Buddy standing with his hands in his trouser pockets on the sidewalk out front. Which meant that in between he’d gone inside and gotten dressed. At the time I concluded, if anything, that he must’ve come down to the street for a better view of the fire. Except that made no sense. From their upstairs porch they already had the best view possible.
    Buddy Nurt had robbed us.
             
     
    T HE FIRE OCCURRED late Saturday night, so it was Monday before my father appeared on the front page of the
Thomaston Guardian.
In the photo he’s holding up his two bandaged hands for the camera and, as I mentioned, without eyebrows. Otherwise, his hair was basically unharmed—Brylcreem, apparently, didn’t burn—and combed into his signature pompadour, which my mother must’ve done for him, given the condition of his hands. As a boy I always thought my father handsome, the sort of man people considered special in appearance as well as conduct, though I suppose this is how all boys regard their fathers. Now that he exists most vividly in my memory, the old newspaper photo sometimes catches me off guard, and I can’t help thinking that while this man is perfectly my father, perfectly Big Lou Lynch with his broad, good-natured smile and his big, awkward body, the picture doesn’t do him justice.
    I still have the article, of course. Old and yellow and brittle, but safely under glass, it hangs on the wall in my study. At one point we had dozens of copies, because neighbors all along Third Avenue saved them for us. I remember the stack of newspapers in the corner of the living room, and also going through them, one after the other, proud yet disappointed, too, that the photograph and story were identical and thinking how much better and more just it would’ve been to have a different picture of my father in each copy, like baseball cards, so we could collect them all. By the next day, of course, there was other news, and that didn’t seem fair either.
    What I found interesting about the article, even at the time, was that the Spinnarkle sisters, who after all had lost their home in the fire, didn’t feature in it all that much. They were named, of course, but there were no photos, even on the inside pages. Nor, apparently, was the Albany television station that sent a camera crew to Thomaston