Bridge of Sighs

was home. He regarded this as one of the many fine things we had to offer visitors. He preferred a baseball game, if there was one, some other sporting event, if there wasn’t. He gave me to understand that professional wrestling was fake, but this in no way diminished his appreciation of it. He wasn’t much interested in the shows my mother liked—dramas like the
Philco Television Playhouse
—but offered no objection to her watching them, snoring peacefully in his armchair when she did.
    That the Spinnarkle sisters should jump up and turn off their TV whenever anyone knocked at their door also struck my father as strange. “You ain’t gotta turn that off,” he’d say. “It don’t bother me.” To which the Spinnarkles, who always finished each other’s sentences, would reply that they “weren’t really watching” (Edith), “just passing the time” ( Janet). When left in their company, I quickly assured them that the TV didn’t bother me either, especially if
Tales of the Texas Rangers
was on, but the sisters had firm ideas about how guests should be entertained. “Let’s converse,” they’d suggest, smoothing their skirts down over their knees and looking at me hopefully. They rented their upstairs flat, coincidentally, to our old friends the Marconis.
    Well, perhaps not coincidentally. When I discovered that one of the houses my parents were thinking about buying was next door to the Marconis, I lobbied hard for that one, and I could tell my father liked the Third Street neighborhood best. My mother had mixed feelings. She and Mrs. Marconi were friends, but she may have felt that having the Marconis so close by lessened the symbolic significance of our move. All-new neighbors were probably more what she had in mind. But she did feel sorry for Mrs. Marconi, who was pregnant again and seemingly every bit as trapped here in the East End as she’d been in Berman Court. “I’d forgotten how much I despised that man,” I overheard my mother tell my father. Mr. Marconi had apparently come out onto the porch the weekend my parents first looked at the house, and according to my mother his expression had clouded over when he saw who was looking at the house next door, the purple birthmark on his forehead darkening.
    “We’re not buying that house unless you promise me to leave him alone,” my mother said when they got home. “Do you understand? Mind your own business. You aren’t in competition with him. He didn’t like you before and he doesn’t like you now. You’re just going to have to live with it.” My father opened his mouth to object, then saw the look on her face and shut it again. “I mean it, Lou,” she told him, then fixed me as a witness. “What did your father just promise me?” she said. “Not to bother Mr. Marconi,” I said, angry with her and not caring that she knew. I hated it when she made my father promise things, almost as much as I hated it when she made me promise things. She regarded us both dubiously, as if she knew better than to put much faith in either of us. “What’d I ever do to him, is what I’d like to know,” my father said when she was gone.
    In the end we settled on the Third Street house, Marconis or no Marconis. Its owner, desperate to leave Thomaston, came down dramatically on his asking price, so that was that. But the real reason, I suspect, was me, since I’d overheard a conversation my mother had with Doctor Boyer, who convinced her that Third Street was the best place for the simple reason that I’d have a friend there.
             
     
    M Y FATHER wouldn’t have intentionally broken any promise to my mother, but I think even she knew he wouldn’t be able to honor the one she extorted from him as a condition for buying the house on Third Street. It was like asking him not to breathe, or to stop loving me so much. If that was what she wanted, he’d try, but it ran contrary to his nature. What she was probably hoping for was to modify his behavior by small degrees. To her way of thinking he was like a puppy that chewed shoes. You probably couldn’t break him of so rewarding a habit, but you could make him feel guilty, at least, keep him from doing it every time you turned your back, and that was something.
    Until she made the point about my father and Mr. Marconi not being in a contest, it hadn’t occurred to me that he might have seen it like that, but of course when I thought about it, it made sense. Weren’t our families