Bridge of Sighs

it my imagination, or did the blood drain out of his face when he realized what he’d done?
    “I have a small discretionary fund for emergencies…,” he went on, trying valiantly to regroup. “I’m sure we can find some compromise.”
    But my mother had risen to her feet. She crossed the room, took the priest’s half-full coffee cup and stood looking down at him. She was trembling all over now, whether in rage or fear or a combination of the two I couldn’t tell. I saw my father’s jaw drop, and I suspect mine did as well.
    When my mother spoke, though, her voice was surprisingly steady. “The compromise is this: we will continue to attend Mass on Sundays and drop the envelope we can no longer afford onto your collection plate. Unless you’d prefer we didn’t.”
    Father Gluck turned back to my father, who made the mistake of looking up at that moment, and the two of them shared a look of devout commiseration.
    “The compromise,” my mother continued, “is that from time to time your housekeeper will stop at our store and buy a quart of milk.” Then she went over to the front door, opened it and pointed across at Ikey Lubin’s. “We’re located on the same street as Tommy Flynn, so she shouldn’t have any trouble finding us.”
    “Tessa,” Father Gluck replied, reluctantly getting to his feet. “I’m disappointed—”
    “Join the club,” my mother told him. “We’re disappointed, too. My husband was disappointed to lose his job. When we were living in Berman Court and
Lou
wanted to be an altar boy and you didn’t select a single one from the West End,
he
was disappointed. As for my own disappointments, don’t even get me started.”
    It took my mother about twenty minutes to stop shaking after Father Gluck had left. She paced back and forth between the kitchen and living room like a caged animal, stopping, opening her mouth to speak, then closing it and pacing again. My father remained seated during that whole time as if he didn’t trust his legs to support him just yet. “Don’t look at me like that,” my mother finally said, then shot a look at me. “You either.”
    “I ain’t sayin’ you were wrong,” my father conceded. “It ain’t that. It’s just…he was offerin’—”
    “A loan. It was a loan he was offering, Lou. We’d have had to pay it back. With interest, if I know him.”
    “I ain’t sayin’—”
    “He’s lucky I didn’t go get that gun.”
    At this my father’s eyes widened, and he looked over at me as if I might confirm what he thought he’d heard her say. Who was this person who looked so much like his wife but was acting like a crazy woman? A few days earlier, when my mother had produced that pellet gun and calmly shot those dogs with it, he couldn’t have been more astonished. Well, now it turned out that wasn’t quite true. Here was that same crazy woman—an impostor, surely—expressing regret that she’d missed a golden opportunity to shoot a priest.
    She took pity on him then, which would’ve been good except this meant it was my turn. “Laugh” was her suggestion to me.
    I must have looked as confused as my father, because she looked up at the ceiling and muttered “Dear God” before fixing me again. “That’s what you do when something’s funny; you laugh.”
    It took me a moment to realize what she meant. The idea of seeing Father Gluck leap in the air like that dog had, with a cold steel pellet chewing on his big fanny,
was
funny, I had to admit, and part of me
did
want to laugh. It was a small part, though, and the bigger part was still too scared.
             
     
    J UNIOR HIGH was where the lives of both West and East End kids began to merge with those of Borough kids. The school itself was located on Division Street, which ran perpendicular to Hudson, our main commercial thoroughfare. The irony that it should represent the border between west and east in our asymmetrical town didn’t strike me until I was an adult, but even then I knew that Division Street was real and to cross it meant something. The eight square blocks of downtown Thomaston were themselves considered neither one nor the other, but most businesses there, regardless of which side of Division they were located on, catered to either an East or West End clientele. (Borough residents tended not to shop in Thomaston at all but rather “down the line,” as everyone referred to Albany and Schenectady.) We had two of everything. Two jewelry stores: a