Bridge of Sighs

it. If our families were estranged, this wasn’t true of my mother and Mrs. Marconi.
Their
friendship, as far as I could tell, was exempted. True, it was largely clandestine. Mrs. Marconi was still supposed to stay in their flat and tend to Bobby’s little brothers, but once her husband and my father were off on their routes, she and my mother could meet secretly, and I was pretty sure they did. When I returned from school, my mother would sometimes be on the phone and hang up as soon as she saw me, and later, after I’d changed out of my school uniform, I’d find her staring abstractedly out the living room window, and if she saw Mr. Marconi returning from work, his empty mail bag over his shoulder, her face would darken, and I suppose mine did, too. If she could have a secret friend, why couldn’t I?
    One day near the end of the school year, I came home and discovered my mother wasn’t there. In our house, a window at the top of the stairs faced the Marconis’ second-floor flat, and that day, thanks to an unseasonable heat wave, my mother had opened every window in the house, as Mrs. Marconi apparently had, and the houses were close enough that I could hear what I was pretty sure was whimpering, followed by my mother’s soothing voice saying, “There, there, it’ll all work out,” and then I saw my mother’s hand reach out and pat Mrs. Marconi’s. A few minutes later, when my mother returned looking both shaken and angry, I asked her where she’d been, and she said down to Tommy Flynn’s, but this wasn’t a very good lie because she didn’t even have any groceries.
    That night, in bed, I heard a brief snippet of conversation between my parents float up through the heat register. “Just because she says it don’t make it so,” my father said. “That woman ain’t right, you know.”
    “I know she’s slow,” my mother replied. “But that’s no reason to treat her like a dog. He might as well chain her to a stake.”
    One morning later that month, my mother phoned her and was surprised when Mr. Marconi, who should’ve been out on his route, answered. There were children crying in the background. “What do
you
want?” he said when she identified herself, explaining that she’d called to see if Mrs. Marconi was feeling better. Now in her ninth month, she’d been ill with the heat and humidity.
    “D.C. went to visit her sister.”
    “I didn’t know she had a sister,” my mother said.
    “Why should you?” came his rude reply.
    “Will you have her call me when she returns?”
    “I’d just as soon you stayed away from her, actually.”
    “I don’t think she even has a sister,” my mother told my father over supper that night, still so upset she didn’t try to conceal any of this from me. “Certainly not around here.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because if that woman had an option, she’d have taken it long ago.”
    My father opened his mouth to say something, regarded me, then shut it again.
    “Plus,” my mother continued, “she was in no condition to go anywhere.”
    My father considered this. “How come I gotta mind my own business and you don’t?” he said, which was exactly what I’d been wondering. And if my mother had an answer to that, she wasn’t sharing it.
    A few days later, the Marconi station wagon pulled up to the curb with a dazed-looking Mrs. Marconi in the passenger seat. When her husband came around and opened the door for her, she just sat there staring up at their flat. “Help her out, you miserable son of a bitch,” my mother said, watching from the front window and apparently not caring if I heard. “Help her, or so help me God…”
    But now Mrs. Marconi was out of the car and waddling toward the porch, where she put one hand on the railing, the other under her enormous belly. Two days later she gave birth, yet another little brother for Bobby. As soon as her husband shouldered his leather bag and headed for the post office, my mother had my father give her a lift in the milk truck out to the new hospital so she could pay her friend a visit. That night, over another hamburger casserole, she reported that Mrs. Marconi seemed to be feeling better, that whatever had been weighing down her spirits had lifted. She’d assured my mother she was fine, never better, that there was no reason to be concerned. In fact, she was anxious to return home and hated being away from her children. My father listened, apparently enjoying this hamburger casserole