Bridge of Sighs

Much of the ethnic rigidity that had been common to Thomaston’s neighborhoods when she and my father were children had begun to break down. Take St. Francis Elementary. Though still predominantly Irish, there were also kids with Polish and Italian last names, some of them, like me, the products of what were then referred to as mixed marriages. Thomaston was indeed the melting pot we were taught to be proud of in school, and its East End neighborhoods in particular were organized more by people’s occupations and economic status than where they came from. If the West End was still primarily made up of more recent immigrants, that was because they happened to hold the poorest paying jobs in the tannery and nearby leather shops. More important, they
could
work their way out of the West End, as the Wilsons and the Lubins and the Gunthers and so many other East Enders had done.
    As I say, my mother conceded this much. But about other things she wasn’t so optimistic. At the economic extremes of Thomaston, she gave me to understand, there was little fluidity. If you were a Negro, of course, you’d remain in the two square blocks of the Hill, and if you lived in the Borough, that’s where you’d probably stay. In America, my mother claimed, the very luckiest were insulated against failure, just as it was the unavoidable destiny of the luckless to remain thwarted. When I asked if we’d ever get to the point where we’d be one of the lucky ones, she said we already were. The middle, she said, was the real America, the America that mattered, the America that was worth fighting wars to defend. There was just the one problem with being in the fluid middle. You could move up, as we had done, but you could also move down.
    I don’t know why it troubled me so much that my parents disagreed about how the world operated, but it did, and when I intimated as much to my mother, she replied, “Really, Louie? Which of us should think differently? Your father or me?” I had thought that went without saying. My father’s was a more reassuring interpretation of the known facts of our lives and a more elegant, satisfying story to boot. If you believed in America, then we would continue our ascent, and I wanted for all of us to agree that this was what would happen. From my vehemence on this point, my mother must have concluded that I was concerned about my own future, and she quickly conceded that after college I’d likely continue to rise even further, if that’s what I wanted, as a doctor or maybe a lawyer (my relentless cross-examinations of everything she said may have suggested this latter profession). But in her opinion, she and my father were done moving up in the world. Getting out of the West End was about as much as you could hope for in one generation.
    I still remember how much this upset me. It was our
family
I wanted to succeed, not me. There wasn’t supposed to
be
any limit to the benefits of hard work and honesty, and her saying there
were
limits implied that she didn’t believe in America, or, worse, in us.
    And I was particularly troubled by my mother’s notion of downward mobility. I wanted her to assure me that nothing of the sort would happen to us, not if we continued to do things right and follow the rules. “Oh, Louie,” she said, giving me a hug I didn’t want. “What am I going to
do
with you?”
             
     
    T HE HOUSE NEXT DOOR was one of those divided into upstairs and downstairs flats. The downstairs was occupied by spinster sisters, the Spinnarkles, both of whom worked at Montgomery Ward. They left the house together in the morning and returned together in the late afternoon. On Saturday nights they went to the movies. Neither, as far as we could tell, ever entertained a male visitor. They were fond of children, though, and seemed genuinely to welcome the opportunity to look after me on those rare occasions when my parents needed to be someplace else. When it was time to return me next door, they wished out loud that I was
their
little boy. I fear I must have conveyed in countless unsubtle ways how glad I was that this was not the case.
    Nothing at the Spinnarkles’ was even remotely interesting to a boy. They had no toys, no games, no books, no clue. There
was
a television set, but they always turned it off when company arrived, which struck me as downright rude. In our house, the TV we’d purchased shortly after moving to the East End was always on, at least when my father