Bridge of Sighs

more than he had the last one. “See?” he told my mother. “You got yourself all bent out of shape over nothing.”
    I was glad, as I always was when it turned out my mother was wrong about something. Since the evening my parents had agreed so easily that Mrs. Marconi wasn’t “right,” I’d thought about her a lot, probably because, thanks to my spells, the same had been said of me.
    “I also asked how her sister was,” my mother told him, pushing away her own uneaten food, and the glance they exchanged told me that Mrs. Marconi, as my mother suspected, had no sister.
             
     
    T HAT WAS the summer I got my first serious bicycle, the kind that in those days were called “English,” which meant it had three gears you could shift. It was an interesting gift, first because it was extravagant and second because I hadn’t even asked for it. I’d mentioned that Bobby was saving his paper route money for one, so I suspect my father saw an opportunity to one-up Mr. Marconi. My mother, however, had different reasons. In her opinion I needed to “get out and expand my world.” She’d always liked the fact that I was a reader, happy to while away hours in a book, but when she saw other neighborhood boys heading off to the American Legion Field with baseball bats over their shoulders, she worried that I stayed so close to home. I was putting on weight, and my mother said I was too young to be so sedentary.
    But the real reason they got me that bike, I believed, was that they hoped it might help wean me off Bobby’s friendship, or rather my continual dependency on it. For instance, his father knew someone in Parks and Recreation, and he’d enrolled Bobby in a free morning program and done it the last day you could sign up, so by the time I found out, it was too late. Afternoons, Bobby had to help his mother with the care and feeding of his little brothers, and early evenings he had his paper route. My mother didn’t want me moping around the house waiting for him to show up, and if I rode around our East End neighborhood, maybe I’d make new friends. Such must have been her reasoning.
    At first I was wary of both the bike and what I was meant to do with it. I knew how to ride, but felt odd about getting a gift I didn’t particularly want or need when my best friend both needed and wanted one, so the first thing I did was offer Bobby the bike to use on his route. He thanked me but said his father wouldn’t allow that. The following week, though, Mr. Marconi did get him a bike of his own, a used “American” one with bald tires, a torn plastic seat and a rusty chain.
    For the first few weeks I used my new bike for little more than sidewalk circumnavigations of our own block, one after another, which worried my mother even more than my hanging around the yard had done. Riding on the sidewalk was technically against the law, and gradually I ventured out into the street and expanded my travels, first to the two or three square blocks that made up our immediate neighborhood, then to half a dozen and beyond. By midsummer I’d discovered Whitcombe Park on the outskirts of town, at the center of which stood Whitcombe Hall, a mere shell, which at the time was owned by the county. Most of the park’s extensive grounds were surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence that was maintained by a tiny Negro man named Gabriel Mock, who lived in a small outbuilding behind the Hall. Gabriel regarded the fence as his because it was his job to paint it, from one end to the other. Close to a mile of it, he claimed proudly. Officially, he was caretaker of the entire grounds, but what that meant in reality was the fence, since the county had no money to maintain either the Hall or the park. The only budget they had was for painting the fence, which Gabriel kept from rusting by applying a thick black lacquer to it each year. It took him all spring, summer and fall, and after an upstate winter it would be time to start all over again. His only other duty was to keep vandals off the property.
    The day we met, I hadn’t even seen him painting away a few feet from where I’d leaned my bike up against the fence. The word he used to describe how I was standing there, my chin between the black railings as I stared across the sloping lawn toward the Hall, was “forlorn,” which he seemed proud to know the meaning of. “You the picture of forlornity,” he elaborated, when I finally noticed him.
    “How do you get