Bridge of Sighs

logic was both new and disconcerting. Just before we’d moved to Berman Court, my grandparents had bought a television, perhaps as an inducement for us to remain with them. My father liked watching television almost as much as I did, and recently I’d overheard my parents talking about buying a used one for our flat. My father didn’t see why we couldn’t afford one, and my mother, who paid the bills and balanced the checkbook, did. I happened to know that the Marconis were also debating the same purchase, and I gave Bobby to understand that if we got ours first, we’d invite them up to watch our favorite shows. I made this offer, without consulting my parents, as a hedge against the possibility that they’d get one first, in which event we could watch with them until we could afford our own. Something like a television couldn’t help but draw people together had been my thinking, which I now understood to be flawed. Instead of opening their front door, it could in fact shut it tighter than before.
    I got the distinct impression that, left to themselves, my mother and Mrs. Marconi might have been friends, like Bobby and me, but for some reason this was not allowed. Mrs. Marconi, a pale, nervous woman of Irish descent, seemed never to leave the apartment. When Bobby and I arrived home from school, we’d sometimes find our mothers in furtive conversation in the hall downstairs. Mrs. Marconi always had one of Bobby’s little brothers on her hip, and there was usually another small, liquid eye peering out from behind the cracked door, but when she saw Bobby and me, she quickly disappeared inside, as if she’d been doing something wrong and I might be a spy ready to report her indiscretion.
    Being a child, I had a child’s intolerance of mystery and vagueness, so I kept after my mother relentlessly. Why couldn’t she and Mrs. Marconi be friends? Why was my own friendship with Bobby restricted to walking to and from school? Why couldn’t our
families
be friends? To which my mother responded, with yet more vagueness, that we had very different notions about how to go about doing things and therefore little in common. Little in common? Weren’t we mirror images of each other? My father was Irish, my mother Italian, the Marconis the reverse. When we first moved to Berman Court and met them I remember wondering if our families hadn’t somehow gotten tangled up. Mrs. Marconi had a softness about her that made her a better match for my father than the man she married, and I couldn’t help thinking she wouldn’t have been so nervous all the time if she lived with a man as good-natured as Big Lou Lynch. And while I wouldn’t have wished for this, my mother, a woman who knew her own mind and didn’t spook easily, seemed a better match for Mr. Marconi. That way, when they went to church at Mount Carmel and we went to St. Francis, everybody would be where they belonged. I was just a boy, of course, and it didn’t occur to me that had things been arranged in this fashion neither Bobby nor I would have existed. It just seemed like a more workable situation, and I was surprised nobody else had thought about it.
    Gradually, I came to understand that the real reason Bobby and I couldn’t be better friends was that his father had something against mine. And since everybody liked my father, Mr. Marconi’s refusal to do so seemed willful and perverse. I studied him carefully every chance I got, hoping to understand what was wrong. He wasn’t nearly as large a man as my father, but he was compact and muscular, and he had a way of leaning slightly forward, his hands clenching into fists and then unclenching again, as if he had to remind himself not to be angry. On his forehead, just below the hairline, he had a purple birthmark that seemed to change in size and vividness, growing larger and darker when his fists were clenched than when he relaxed them. But what could he possibly have against my father? Of all the things I wanted to understand, this was the most urgent because it seemed the most inexplicable. It seemed to have something to do with the army. Mr. Marconi had served and my father hadn’t, and apparently he held it against him, though it was flat feet and not unwillingness or cowardice that kept my father out. He’d taken some pains to explain this to Mr. Marconi, who just smiled and said, “Funny how that works,” then claimed to know plenty of other flat-footed guys who’d managed to serve. “Too bad,