Bridge of Sighs

then my mother came around the corner and caught him.
    “I was visiting the ladies, is all,” he said when we were back inside our house. “Ask Louie.”
    My mother glanced at me, saw I was prepared to take my father’s side as usual and went back to glaring at him.
    “Or ain’t I allowed to talk to them either?”
    “Keep it up, Lou,” she warned him. “Just keep it up and see what happens.”
    “It’s him I feel bad for,” he said later, over dinner. “All them mouths to feed, another on the way.” He was picking at my mother’s hamburger casserole, normally one of his favorites. But I could tell by the look on his face that he was wondering what the Marconis were eating and that the food on his own fork had no taste.
             
     
    W ITH ALL THAT comparing going on, I was glad my father wasn’t the sort of man to compare children, because Bobby Marconi had it all over me. Though half a head shorter, Bobby was a natural athlete, always first to be chosen when teams were picked, whereas I, despite my size, was among the last, at least on those rare occasions I allowed myself to be drawn into a game. My father enjoyed sports on television, but he’d grown up on a farm and had a farm boy’s awkwardness when it came to handling balls of any description. Those meant to be caught he fumbled, those meant to be dribbled he’d end up kicking, an ineptitude he passed down to me. He hoped I might play Pop Warner football, something he’d wanted to do himself when he was my age, and given my size I suppose I could have managed one of those interior line positions that didn’t require any ball handling. But my mother thought football was dangerous, so that was out, and in truth I was glad.
    As an only child I was a voracious reader and did better in school than Bobby, but that didn’t count for much among boys our age. Besides, I went to St. Francis, which everyone knew was easier than Bridger, the East End elementary school that Bobby now attended, and while he didn’t distinguish himself, his teachers all agreed that he was one of their smartest students. When he felt like applying himself, they pointed out, he did fine. As I said, my father would never have compared me with Bobby. I doubt he would have known how, his devotion to me and pride in my accomplishments being as complete as mine toward him. But for some reason I felt certain that Mr. Marconi
was
the sort of man to compare sons and as a result didn’t think much of me. He never said anything, of course, but now that we were neighbors again, I had the impression he was just as happy that Bobby and I were going to different schools.
    So the boundaries of our friendship, much to my disappointment, weren’t very different from what they were on Berman Court. When I again pressed to expand them, I met with the same resistance and was offered the same unsatisfactory explanations I’d been given before. The Marconis were different from us. (How?) They preferred to keep to themselves. (Why?) Bobby wasn’t allowed as much freedom as I was. (Why not?) Back then I’d had to content myself with a walk-to-and-from-school friendship. Now I had to be satisfied with a few hours on Saturdays. Even so, this might have been enough except for my vague sense that there was something I wasn’t being told. Bobby was forever getting grounded, allowed to leave the apartment only to go to school or deliver his newspapers, and for some reason I got it into my head that these punishments had something to do with me, perhaps because whenever I asked what he’d done wrong, he said he couldn’t talk about it. What could the reason be if it wasn’t me? “Lou, look at me,” my mother said when I floated this theory. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you, sweetie.”
    “But what did I
do
?” I said plaintively, at the time unaware of how much I must have sounded like my father. (“What did I ever do to
him,
is what I’d like to know.”)
    She gave me a big hug. “Lou, sweetie. You’re not listening to me. It has
nothing…to do…with you.
” Then she added ominously, “There are things going on in that house that you know nothing about, but they have nothing to do with you—
or
your father.”
    What things, I asked, but she wouldn’t say any more, just that they weren’t any of our business. “And I don’t want you quizzing Bobby either, do you understand?”
    But it wasn’t fair. Whatever was going on next door, my mother knew about