Bridge of Sighs

It galled me that she should be able to stay in touch with Mrs. Marconi when Bobby was off limits to me. Junior high, I hoped, would change all that.
    Every day that week Bobby Marconi’s name was called, and every day Mr. Melvin marked him absent on his attendance sheet. Finally, on Friday, Perry Kozlowski, who always lounged in the back row, looking bored, with his feet up on the desk in front of him, groaned audibly and said, “He’s gone.” Mr. Melvin seemed to have already concluded from Perry’s slouch and dramatic boredom that he was to be neither trusted nor encouraged. Earlier in the week, when my own name had been read in homeroom, Perry had called out, “He likes to be called Lucy,” causing everyone to laugh, as expected. “Then
he
can tell me,” the teacher said. “Or maybe you’d enjoy having him give you a nickname?” To which Perry had just shrugged. “He could try.”
    Mr. Melvin now regarded the boy with undisguised loathing. “And how would
you
know?” Meaning, probably, that Bobby and his family lived in the Borough, whereas Perry was a West End kid.
    “Everybody knows,” Perry replied, but did not elaborate.
    I’d immediately swiveled around in my seat. Gone where? Had the Marconis moved again? Suddenly I could feel the blood pounding in my temples. I tried telling myself that Mr. Melvin was right. How would a boy like Perry Kozlowski know anything about Bobby Marconi? But I could tell by the smug look on his face that he
did
know something.
    Halfway between us sat a thin Negro boy whose name—Gabriel Mock—was called next, and our eyes met briefly. Was it possible that even he knew where Bobby was? At the end of homeroom period we emerged into the corridor at the same moment, and I blurted out my question even before saying hello. Did he know where Bobby Marconi had gone? The look he gave me suggested I’d violated some rule by speaking to him, and I felt myself flush. “People call you Three, right?” I said, and I was about to explain how I, a white boy, happened to know his nickname, that I’d spent many a pleasant hour with his father, out at Whitcombe Park, when, looking straight ahead, Gabriel Mock the Third said, “I don’t have a father.”

    M Y PARENTS CLAIMED not to know anything either, and after interrogating both of them all that weekend I was convinced they were telling the truth. The following Monday, when roll was taken and Bobby’s name wasn’t called, I worked up the necessary courage to approach Perry Kozlowski and ask what he’d meant about Bobby being gone.
    “You didn’t hear?” he said, contemptuous of my ignorance. “You live where—in a cave?” Bobby, he told me, had been sent downstate to the Payne Academy, a military school known locally as the House of Payne. It was rumored to be worse than reform school.
    “Why?” I said, instantly frightened for my old friend.
    “You’re telling me you didn’t hear about the fight? Him and Jerzy?”
    Having no public school friends was the equivalent of living in a cave, so of course I hadn’t. I was to discover over the next few days that everyone else knew all about the fistfight between Bobby and Jerzy Quinn, an event so dramatic, so heroic, that its inevitable conversion from fact to legend was well under way. The details varied according to the teller, but its skeleton was pretty much the same as what Perry Kozlowski reported that day. The fight had taken place, amazingly, right outside the police station, with two uniformed cops looking on. What had occasioned the hostilities? Well, that was part of the story’s romance, because there apparently
was
no reason. Every witness agreed that there’d been no preliminaries, no swapping of insults, no goading, no shoving, no gradual escalation, all of which were the traditional prelude to a Thomaston fistfight. But given how the two boys had come up to each other in the street, you’d have imagined they meant to shake hands. Instead, as if someone had said go, they’d simultaneously thrown punches, though neither landed flush. Within minutes a large, enthusiastic crowd had gathered, West End kids egging Jerzy Quinn on, East Enders and Borough kids cheering Bobby. Hearing the commotion, other cops came out of the station, and that normally would have brought the hostilities to a halt, yet not on this occasion.
    How long the sidewalk battle raged—two minutes? ten? half an hour?—depended on who you talked to. But this was to be expected.