Bridge of Sighs

I thought it was a shame she didn’t have my father’s good-natured, jovial temperament, because at least that might have made some sort of impression.
    After we moved to Berman Court, when my father went out on his milk route, my mother worked at home, keeping the books for several small local businesses, the extra income allowing my father the largesse for which, in those early days, he was well known. “Acting like a big wheel” was what my mother called his willingness to loan a dollar or buy a cup of coffee. I don’t think it occurred to me that we were poor, but my parents often disagreed about money. My father loved to buy things for a quarter or fifty cents at yard sales, items that he claimed were worth far more than he paid for them and that my mother regarded as worthless because we had no use for them. He’d buy a tire for a dollar if it still had tread on it, even though at the time we didn’t own a car. (The milk truck he drove wasn’t for personal use, but he had special permission to use it to buy groceries at the A&P when he finished his shift on Saturday morning.) “I know a guy’ll give me two, three bucks for that, easy,” he’d tell my mother in reference to the tire, and most of the time he was right. When he brought what she called junk home from yard sales, she’d take one look and say, “What in the world did you buy
that
for,” and he’d reply, “A quarter.” Nor could he resist a lottery ticket or a fifty-cent chance on a Rotary Club raffle, even though my mother insisted that these were “taxes on ignorance.” Winning, which he seemed to do a lot, allowed him to feel vindicated, even when what he won wasn’t something we needed or even wanted. “What if first prize had been a head cold?” my mother would ask when presented with the fishbowl of jelly beans he’d won by guessing how many it contained. “Would you have bought a ticket? You don’t even like jelly beans.” He just replied that he supposed he could
learn
to like them. In fact, he’d have nine hundred and seventy-three opportunities. “Besides,” he continued, “our Louie here likes jelly beans, don’t you?” And I said I did, though in truth I wasn’t overly fond of them. “Great,” my mother said. “Fifty dollars’ worth of cavities, minimum.” But it was true, my father was always winning things, and if I had to explain why our family was so fortunate, I’d have said it was due to my father’s luck. I felt lucky just standing next to him, confident that I, too, would come up a winner.
    If my mother thought moving into town would guarantee me friends, she was mistaken. That first day of kindergarten, when I got my nickname, made me wary of the other children, and a year after we’d moved to Berman Court I was still nearly as solitary as I’d been in the country at my grandparents’. I say “nearly” because I did have one friend, of a sort, in Bobby Marconi, whose family lived on the second floor of our building. His father worked nights as a desk clerk at the hotel but was trying to get on at the post office, where he filled in whenever a letter carrier got sick. Ours was, alas, mostly a walk-to-and-from-school sort of friendship. Once we arrived back at Berman Court we seldom saw each other until the following morning, and we never played together on weekends. On Sundays, of course, the Marconis attended Mount Carmel with the Italians, and we Lynches worshipped with the Irish of St. Francis. It was exasperating to have my only friend right there in the building and yet have so little access to him. My mother explained that the Marconis preferred to keep to themselves, and when I asked why, she said it was just the way they were. You couldn’t make people want friends, and we certainly couldn’t make the Marconis want
us
for friends.
    Neither of these observations made much sense to me. My father always said you couldn’t have too many friends, so why would the Marconis consider them a liability, especially people as likable and interesting as us Lynches? But my mother explained that not everybody was like us. Other people went about things differently. It was our way—or my father’s, she said—to keep people abreast of what we were up to, especially when fortune smiled on us. If he won twenty dollars at a church raffle, he thought people should know. Somebody else, she concluded, might keep the lucky event a secret to ward off envy or requests for a small loan. To me, such