Bridge of Sighs

find a remedy, however partial. People like us were responsible for our own families, not other people’s. Sure, the Negro kids had every right to go to the theater on Saturday afternoons, to sit wherever they wanted, next to whomever they wanted. But his more deeply held conviction was that people should get along and not start trouble that could easily be avoided. That had been the heart of what he’d wanted me to understand so long ago when he’d taken me on that milk-truck tour of the Borough. Yes, I had every
right
to be there. This was America, and I was an American. To him, though, it wasn’t a question of rights or privileges. It was just better all around for a person to know where he belonged. He wanted me to understand that the East End was a good place and ours a good family. Sure, you had a right to want something different, or something you believed to be better, but that right shouldn’t spoil what you already were lucky enough to have. He wouldn’t dispute Gabriel Mock the Third’s right to want what he wanted, but the desire itself would mystify him. What about all those cute little Negro girls? he’d ask my mother. What’s wrong with them? What would possess the boy to
want
so foolishly? What good did it do you to want what was bad for you?
    But he’d also doubt my mother’s pessimistic view of our neighbors. “They ain’t gonna care,” I could hear him say, shrugging his big shoulders in incomprehension. When he was a younger man, before he’d been given his Borough route, he’d delivered milk on the Hill, and while he didn’t have his brother’s ease with the Negroes who lived there, he knew and liked many of them. Some still spoke to my father when they met on Division Street, and I couldn’t see where his conversations with these men were all that different from those he had with white men he met at the diner or the barbershop. A Negro man, asked how he was doing, might mention he’d won a daily double last week or quit playing a number he’d been betting for the last two years only to have it hit yesterday, and my father would commiserate and say he should’ve stuck with it one more day or ask the man what he did with his winnings, to which he’d reply,
I spent it, whatchu think?
I’d noticed my father didn’t shake hands with these men the way he did at the diner or the barbershop, but this reserve seemed to me as much theirs as his. He believed in polite behavior, and so did they. If people would just treat each other decent, he was fond of saying, there wouldn’t be near as much trouble in the world.
    “You ain’t gotta
love
each other,” he’d say.
    “Really, Lou?” my mother would interrupt. “Didn’t Jesus say that’s exactly what we’re supposed to do?”
    “Just act polite,” he’d go on, talking to me now, not her. “It don’t cost nothin’ to be nice to people.”
    He believed that people were basically good, and to prove his point he’d name half a dozen or so, some from the neighborhood—old Mr. Gunther, say, who was so sick with cancer but never complained—and others who were famous, like Mickey Mantle or John Wayne. Which always caused my mother to rub her temples and wonder out loud why she even tried.
             
     
    T HE QUESTION of whether or not to hire Gabriel Mock turned out to be moot, because after his arraignment on a charge of criminal threatening, he packed a small bag and called Hudson Cab, whose driver, Buddy Nurt, after determining that Gabriel had the fare, drove him to the train station in Fulton, which left me even more friendless than ever. I saw Karen Cirillo from time to time at school or the Saturday matinee, but she almost never acknowledged me. Sometimes I’d think she was going to, only to have her play that trick with her eyes and make me disappear. Once we found ourselves pressed together on the stairs of the YMCA, waiting for the gym doors to open, and I tried to strike up a conversation by asking how things were over at Berman Court, reminding her that I’d once lived in the very apartment she now occupied with her mother and, I presumed, Buddy, but all she did was regard me strangely and say, “You’re
weird,
Lou. You know that?” Only after offering this personal observation did it occur to her to ask if I had any money. She and her girlfriends weren’t sure they had enough to get into the dance. I did but claimed I didn’t, feeling something shift inside me with that lie. I was glad not