Bridge of Sighs

to have given her money—besides, she and her friends did discover the means to get in—but I felt dispirited, too. My weakness, my inability to deny Karen what she wanted, I knew, was my only connection to her, and strength, if that’s what my lie represented, pretty much removed any hope of reestablishing our old Ikey’s intimacy. She was, as she’d always been, Jerzy Quinn’s girl.
    During this same period, the second half of eighth grade, Jerzy himself became even more of a phantom, disappearing from view for weeks at a time. It wasn’t unusual for him to be absent from school, of course. He often skipped or left by the gym door after attendance was taken in homeroom, behavior that sometimes, perversely, resulted in suspension. But he was also less visible around town. He still commanded his army of pale wraiths, but they often congregated outside the pool hall or along the banks of the Cayoga without him. He’d been only tangentially involved in what happened to Three Mock, who remained comatose for weeks after his beating, but he’d taken some of the blame for it, perhaps because he was the one the cops had found kneeling beside him there in the parking lot. Even at the time I found it ironic that he should emerge victorious from the whipping he’d taken at the hands of Bobby Marconi, only to be undone in the end by a skinny Negro who’d never thrown a punch. Overnight, it seemed, everyone understood that Jerzy and his gang were a junior high phenomenon that could not survive the transfer to high school, where thick-necked football players ruled.
    Not long after the fight, the Kozlowski family did move to the East End, just as Perry predicted. For some reason I’d concluded that as a natural consequence of those events they wouldn’t be permitted to cross Division Street, but one Monday morning Perry showed up in school wearing a plaid short-sleeved shirt. His new uniform drew immediate derision from a boy in Jerzy’s gang, but Perry grabbed him by the throat, lifted him off his feet and offered to put him in the hospital bed next to Three Mock, and when the boy said he’d just been kidding, Perry let him go. For days after this incident we expected to hear that Perry’s former friends had caught him alone somewhere and showed him who was boss, but it never happened, further evidence that Jerzy’s reign of terror was coming to an end. No sooner did we imagine it
could
end than it did. Thinking back on it, we seemed to recall almost weekly beatings and humiliations, but how many had there actually been? When we tallied them now, the number wasn’t large. And how many gang members were there? Too many to count, it had seemed a month earlier, until we counted them, and again the number wasn’t so large. It had been well known that all the West End boys who had sworn allegiance to Jerzy carried knives, but had we ever seen one?
    Then, in late May, with summer vacation just a few weeks away, a rumor that explained Jerzy’s mysterious absences began to circulate. He was sick. He needed to have an operation. When he showed up on the last day of school, he looked so thin and weak that we knew it had to be true, which aroused a new fear. It had never occurred to any of us East Enders that illness would have the temerity to attack Jerzy Quinn or, if it dared, it would make headway.
    Without school to foment rumors, and with high school and its new terrors to consider, Jerzy disappeared from our collective consciousness that summer. I know he hadn’t crossed my mind in a month when, in late July, Perry Kozlowski stopped in at Ikey’s for a soda. “You heard about Jerzy, right?” he said. And when I confessed I hadn’t, he shrugged. “The doctors cut his left nut off. I guess he’s not so tough anymore.”
             
     
    I NSTALLING MY UNCLE as the butcher of choice for Borough housewives did draw shoppers from beyond our East End neighborhood, but it had some unintended consequences as well. With a larger store and longer hours, we found ourselves stretched thin. My father didn’t like to leave Ikey’s when there was work to do, but there always was, and he couldn’t be there every minute, not seven days a week. He opened the store in the morning and closed up at night, but my mother insisted he get out for a while in the middle of the day. Sometimes he’d just go across the street and make himself a sandwich and read the paper on the front porch. Or he’d head down to the Cayoga