Bridge of Sighs

anybody try to stop it? What did you all do, just stand there watching?” When I looked out the window, pink with shame, at where the Spinnarkles’ house had once stood, she said, “How many of you were just standing there?”
    I shrugged, as helpless now as I’d been the day before. “All of us,” I said. “Everybody.”
    “Everybody,” she repeated. “So it’s okay, because everybody was there?”
    “No,” I said, choking on that single syllable, the full force of my cowardice pressing down on me.
    “I know that boy’s
father,
Lou,” my mother said, and what entered my mind, unbidden, was He Kissed You.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, tears spilling out now.
    Of course, when she saw that, she took pity, sitting down across from me and taking my hand. “I don’t mean you had a bigger responsibility than anybody else,” she said.
    But her kindness was somehow worse than her fury had been. “Dad went into the Spinnarkles’,” I said. “It was on
fire.
”
    “Lou, listen to me,” she said, her brow furrowing and her own eyes filling. “Your father’s a man. You’re a boy. You can’t compare what a man does with what a boy does. Don’t worry. When you’re a man, you’ll be brave.”
    “Why?” I said, wondering what there was about me that made her think I’d be brave later when I wasn’t brave now.
    “Look, your father isn’t brave because he went into a burning house. He’s brave because…” She paused here, momentarily at a loss, it seemed, at how to explain my father’s courage. Then, when I’d just about given up on her ever completing the thought, she said, “It’s hard to believe in things, Lou, day in and day out. It’s hard to believe in Ikey’s every day, and it’s hard to believe in the town or the country you live in. You know how your father is, how he loves things? How sure he is that it’s better right here than all the other places he’s never been to? How he never doubts?”
    I nodded, thinking that one of the things he’d never doubted was me. “Louie’s okay,” he was forever saying, and his saying so made me believe it, too. That was why I needed him when I came out of one of my spells, needed him to put his big hand on my shoulder and say,
Don’t you worry none about our Louie.
Because until he said it, I knew deep down that I was
not
fine and never would be, not without his help.
    “I gave Karen Cirillo free cigarettes from Ikey’s,” I told her. For some reason I wanted her to know the truth, that I was a coward, not just yesterday but every day.
    But instead of making her even more unhappy, she just smiled that sad smile of hers, the one I always hated because it meant she knew the truth. “Oh, sweetie, of course you did.”
    Which did make me feel a little better. “Does Dad know?”
    “No,” she said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain. Your father prefers to see things a certain way. How they really are doesn’t come into it.”
    When she let go of my hand, I said, “Will he die?”
    She looked startled, then realized what I meant. “The Mock boy? I don’t know.”
    “What will happen to Perry Kozlowski?”
    “I don’t know that either,” she said, rising from the table.
    “He didn’t want to do it,” I told her, recalling Perry’s gloomy sense of duty. “He wanted to stop. But with everybody watching, he didn’t know how.”
    I didn’t expect my mother to understand this, not having been there, but apparently she did. “Oh, God,” she said. “If you’re trying to cheer me up, just quit, okay?”
             
     
    L ATER, at Ikey’s, I learned that the fight had led to other events that night. Gabriel Mock Junior, “drunk as a lord,” according to Uncle Dec, had turned up at Murdick’s, the West End gin mill, hunting for Perry Kozlowski’s father, who was seated at the far end of the bar and wondering out loud whether his son would have to go to jail for being the only boy in Thomaston willing to stand up and defend the honor of a white girl. The terrible injustice of this became clearer with each gin and tonic. Murdick’s bartender, hearing that Gabriel Mock was waiting outside and perhaps wearying of the maudlin Kozlowski, went out and found Gabriel leaning against the railing for support. “Go home, Junior,” he told the little black man. “I’m sorry about your boy, but you can’t come in here. You know why, too, so don’t make me explain it to you.”
    “Damn straight I know why,”