Bridge of Sighs

probably just from before,” he says, meaning the miscarriage. “It got Mom down, right?”
    “Yes,” I say, remembering.
    “But she got over it.”
    In fact it was Owen’s birth, as much as anything, that got her over it, though I can hardly say this to my son, not if Brindy can’t conceive again. “You’ll tell me if there’s anything I can do?”
    “Sure, Pop,” he says, “but there isn’t.”
    He sounds very sure of this, and I wish he wasn’t. I open my mouth to tell him so, then close it again. He has resumed counting.
             
     
    G ABRIEL M OCK LIVES in our Berman Court building in the small ground-floor apartment below the one the Marconis once occupied. He’s lived here rent-free for over a decade, in return for which he acts as caretaker. He’s old now but still spry and useful with a wrench or a paintbrush, and to observe him, you’d never guess he was older than my mother. He also helps out at our West End market, though according to Owen he hasn’t been by in several days, which is why I’m anxious to make sure he’s all right. I’d call, but he doesn’t have a phone.
    Though it takes a while, Gabriel finally answers my knock. “Junior,” he says, his red eyes spiderwebbed and dull. He opens the door wide so I can enter, but I remain in the hall. It troubles me that Gabriel seems to think I have a right to enter his home on a whim, just because I own the building. I’ve tried to explain that it’s his apartment and he has as much right to tell me to go away as he would anyone else, but he sees it differently. And he’s as stubborn in his advanced years as he was back in the days when we argued about up and down.
    “Mr. Mock,” I say. Over the years I’ve settled on this mode of address, though he insists he doesn’t care what I call him. Call him Gizzard, if I want to. “I was just checking to see if you’re okay.”
    “Be back at work tomorrow,” he assures me. “Had me a little setback, is all.”
    I can smell his humid solitude even out in the hall, and also the fact that he hasn’t left the apartment in days or even opened a window. Gabriel doesn’t drink anymore (“Done howlin’. My howlin’ days is all in the past. You got to howl for the both of us now, Junior. Even though you still a ama-teur.”), except when something reminds him of his son: the boy’s birthday, perhaps, or news of some black kid from the Hill getting roughed up behind the new YMCA. These setbacks usually last a few days, but Gabriel emerges none the worse for wear, and he seldom misbehaves in public anymore, even when egged on. Seeing him on the street, some Thomaston wags still shout “Send him out!” though most of them are too young to remember what happened at Murdick’s that night. There’s a story attached to it, but they don’t recall what it is. Other people ask Gabriel for matches, a half-joking reference to the commonly held belief that he set the fire that burned down Whitcombe Hall so many years ago.
    “Is there anything I can do?” I ask him now, though I know there isn’t.
    “Just leave everything go,” he tells me, meaning whatever has piled up in his absence here at Berman Court and at the market. “Be back in the mornin’.”
    “Are you sure you don’t need to go to the doctor?”
    “What for?” he says. “She just inform me I’m stupid. Tell me somethin’ I don’t already know, I might go see her sometime.”
    “You’re an original, Mr. Mock,” I tell him.
    “Not me,” he says, suddenly, unexpectedly adamant. “I’m just a copy. You, too.”
    Which makes me smile.
    “In fact, you a bigger copy than me. You your daddy all over again. Big Lou Lynch in the flesh. Big Lou Junior. You gonna grin at me like that, go on away. You makin’ my teeth hurt.”
    I stop grinning.
    “Your mama doin’ okay?”
    I tell him she is.
    “Good woman, your mama. Prob’ly don’t remember me.”
    “Of course she does, Mr. Mock. She often asks after you.”
    “Woman like that enough to make a man good an’ ashamed of hisself. You married to another one, so you know what I mean. There you go, grinnin’ again.”
    And with that he shuts the door.
    Since I’m here, I make a circuit of the property to check for trouble, particularly in the foundation. I’ve been warned that some rainy spring the whole building could tumble down the steep bank into the stream. Probably not in my lifetime, though, which means that’s another thing Owen can deal