Bridge of Sighs

what could only have been a Hudson cab idling somewhere nearby. I woke up again at six when my father overcame his aversion to the telephone and called my mother. He’d gone over to Ikey’s to open the store as usual and found the door leading up to the apartment wedged open. Buddy must have been pretty surprised when he pushed on that door. Too late he must have felt the shim my father had nailed to the floor, the bottom of the door riding that smooth, gentle incline before dropping down an inch into a groove, immovably ajar. He then must have panicked, because you could see where the door had splintered when he tried to pull it shut again by force.
    It was my mother who called the police and explained how we’d caught him red-handed. When they arrived at the store, my father looked embarrassed, like
he’d
been snared in her trap, not Buddy. I knew how he felt. I despised Buddy, but there was something especially humiliating about getting caught in the act, and realizing that for all your care and stealth and cleverness—and Buddy’s thievery
had
been clever—somebody out there was smarter than you were, and now the whole world would know you for what you were. That, I thought, must have been what Buddy Nurt couldn’t face, what caused him to bundle his belongings into the backseat of a Hudson cab, and rattle away, leaving sleepy-eyed Karen and Nancy to answer the door when my mother, flanked by two burly policemen, knocked.
    While this transpired, my father and I remained in the store below, too cowardly to bear witness to what was happening upstairs. When the early morning coffee drinkers began filtering in, I didn’t even have the stomach to listen to my father’s explanation of the police car out at the curb. I retreated into the back room to take charge of the morning’s deliveries of bread and milk.
    Try as I might, I couldn’t stop thinking about Buddy. He had been, for most of his adult life, a sneak and a thief, and the worst moments of his sorry life were surely the result of being exposed for what he was. Why didn’t he just stop? To my surprise, I no sooner asked the question than the answer came to me. Buddy Nurt wasn’t a thief because he stole; he stole because he was a thief. Each time he got caught, he added that mistake to the growing list of those he wouldn’t make again, but it wouldn’t occur to him to stop stealing. The solution, he imagined, would be to get better at it. That first day he’d arrived at our store in a Hudson cab and studied his reflection in the glass, what I’d seen there was the real Buddy Nurt, a man who simply did what he did, because of who he was. What I’d recognized in his expression was self-loathing, but there was also something I’d missed: the futility of struggling against his fundamental nature. The man he saw reflected in our storefront that day would continue doing the very things that had brought him to this point in his life. And he must have known, too, what the consequences would be, that before long another Hudson cab would arrive, this time in the middle of the night, to bear him away to further misadventure and disgrace. That’s what his terrible grin had meant—surrender to the inevitable.
    Even more chillingly, I recalled going outside myself and studying my own reflection in the glass, and being startled to see Buddy Nurt’s terrible self-loathing mirrored in my own features. What, I now wondered, if we all just were who we were? What if we were kidding ourselves if we believed otherwise? Was that what my mother had wanted to convey when she said I needed to get smarter about people if I was going to survive in the world? Did she want me to understand that we have little choice but to slog forward through life, repeating our worst mistakes without ever learning from them or, worse yet, without being able to use what we’d learned?
    Before I was able to resolve these issues, my mother came back downstairs with the two policemen. All three stood talking outside Ikey’s until one of the cops, glancing at the apartment above, shrugged as if to say
Fine, if that’s how you want to play it.
When they got back in the cruiser and pulled away, she came inside and regarded my father’s coffee drinkers darkly until they became self-conscious and left. Then she turned her attention on me, studying me so intently that I wondered if I was supposed to leave, too. I still wasn’t used to seeing her in Ikey’s, and I could tell my father