Bridge of Sighs

ride through the Borough streets looking for the Marconis’ new home, determined to renew my friendship with Bobby. She even recalls getting a frightened phone call from Mrs. Marconi telling her that her husband was getting angry. Every time he looked out their front window, there I’d be, sitting on my bike and staring dejectedly at their house.
    This last part simply cannot have been true. For one thing, had I indulged in any such behavior, I’d be unlikely to forget it, but for another, I didn’t learn until the following spring exactly where the Marconis had moved because, as I feared, Bobby never called with his phone number and address. It’s true I did ride my bike through the Borough that last week in August and early September, hoping I’d “accidentally” run into him or see him playing outside, perhaps with his new friends, so I suppose it’s possible that Mr. Marconi may have looked out his front window one afternoon and been surprised to see me ride by, but the idea that I haunted them that autumn is ludicrous.
    What my mother may be remembering is one Saturday afternoon when I was out riding. My own very vague memory was that I’d been visiting Gabriel Mock, and the most direct route home from Whitcombe Park was through the Borough. At any rate when I came around a corner I was surprised to see my father’s milk truck pull up alongside. Since he would’ve finished his collections late that morning, my first panicky thought was that something must be wrong—either he was inexplicably angry with me or something had happened to my mother and he’d come to fetch me home. I must have appeared frightened, because when he stepped out of the truck, he looked as if in his mind he’d arrived in the nick of time.
    “Louie?” he said—awkwardly, I thought, his voice not falling quite right, as if there were some other boy here in the Borough who was a dead ringer for his East End kid, and he didn’t want to commit to anything until he was sure who I was. “Whatcha doin’ way over here?”
    I shrugged. Why
shouldn’t
I be here?
    “You want to ride home with me?” He opened up the back of the truck, and we lifted my bike inside, where I leaned it up against the tied-off crates.
    As I said, milk trucks in those days had no passenger seats. Usually, if I was alone with my father in the truck, I’d tip a couple crates upside down and perch myself on top, to the right of the big stick shift that stuck out of a hole in the floor. That day, though, when I started to grab a crate, my father patted his seat cushion, and when I balanced myself on its edge he put his arm around my shoulder, and I felt good for the first time in what seemed like weeks.
    “You know who lives in all these houses?” he said.
    When I admitted I had no idea, he put the truck in gear and took me on a slow tour of the Borough streets that until recently Bobby and I had surfed on Saturday morning, pointing out houses on either side of the street and telling me what doctor lived here, what lawyer there, which one belonged to the owner of the Bijou Theater and where the Beverlys, who owned the tannery, lived. This was
his
route, the best route in town, and I could tell how proud he was to know all this. He said many of these people had so much money they didn’t have to work anymore if they didn’t want to, though I found this hard to believe. A few Borough residents waved to my father as we passed, which clearly pleased him. Others, though, failed to return his wave, didn’t even appear to see us as we inched by, going slow, so he could keep his arm around me and not have to shift gears.
    “Thing is, people are the same everywheres,” he said, as if to explain the ones who didn’t wave back. “They’re just the way they are, and you can’t do nothin’ about it either.” Was he thinking about Mr. Marconi, too?
    I nodded.
    “You know how some folks in our neighborhood don’t like it when people from the West End come around?”
    I knew what he was talking about, of course. The Spinnarkle sisters in particular were adamant in their disapproval of visitors who didn’t belong there.
    “People are the same way here. They see somebody who don’t live in the Borough, and they say,
What’s he doin’ here?
Even if you ain’t botherin’ nobody. You understand?”
    “I shouldn’t ride my bike over here?” I said, thinking this was what he was trying to tell me.
    “It ain’t that exactly,” he said, reluctant now.