Bridge of Sighs

once, but not twice. Some witnesses belatedly recalled he’d warned that, when Bobby was pulled off him, it wasn’t over between them, which explained why Mr. Marconi had sent him away. Probably Bobby had asked his old man to do it. Besides, he hadn’t come home the next summer and over Christmas had remained holed up in his parents’ house. Why? Because he knew what would happen if he showed his face on the street.
    With history carefully revised, Jerzy Quinn’s stranglehold on the junior high was even tighter than it would’ve been had he won the fight. All during seventh grade we East End boys held out hope that Bobby would return to defend his honor and ours, but finally, dispirited, we too saw the lay of the land and sadly began to have our own doubts. Though Bobby had fought heroically, his victory had been a fluke. There was really no other way to look at it.
    And Jerzy was, in his own way, beautiful. Most every boy, including many of us East Enders, imitated him. His walk, for instance. He was always up on his toes, and we were forever mimicking the little hitch in his stride. Had our parents allowed it, we would’ve copied everything about him. Our hair would have been shiny, wet and ducktailed, hanging over our collars. Indeed, many of us left home in the morning with one hairstyle only to arrive at school with another. We’d have worn thin black cotton pants “pegged” tight, and white T-shirts under worn leather jackets like the boys in his West End gang. For us, these were “undershirts,” made to be worn beneath the embarrassing plaid or checked shirts our clueless aunts and uncles had given us for Christmas, tucked into baggy, scratchy wool pants that flapped in the breeze, like our fathers’ did. We’re not raising hoodlums, our parents reminded us. We East Enders were almost glad Bobby was gone, since he looked so much like us.
    Jerzy’s girlfriend was Karen Cirillo—needless to say, a West Ender. Just as his gang was too cool for the Y dances, he was also too cool for a conventional relationship. Everyone understood that Karen belonged to him, since she wore his ring, as girls did back then, wrapped with masking tape until it fit snugly over her ring finger, but part of Jerzy’s mystique derived from the fact that he seldom offered her even the slightest public affection. They were never seen kissing or even holding hands. To the rest of us, this could only mean one thing: they were “going all the way.” Other junior high schoolers who “went steady” made a great show of necking in the Bijou, holding hands (strictly prohibited) between classes at school and dancing all the slow dances at the Y, her arms locked around his neck, his joined at her waist, in more of a slow-motion embrace, really.
    Karen attended the Y dances with her West End girlfriends, their eyes so darkened by mascara that they looked beaten up, their dark hair helmeted by spray. Where Jerzy was, as I said, thin to the point of emaciation, she was voluptuous and, at twelve, already had the body of a woman, full bosomed beneath the same pale blue angora sweater she wore every Friday night, her voice husky and deeper than most boys’, the most beautiful girl in town. Her only serious rival was a blond-haired girl named Nan Beverly from the Borough, whose father owned the tannery. Boys were always fighting over Nan, in the courtyard of the school, outside the Y or behind the theater, often in defense of her honor, after some overheard or imagined slight. Nan was always going steady. By the time we heard she’d broken up with her boyfriend, she’d already replaced him with somebody else. Still, she seemed completely artless, and the word we used to describe her, and girls like her, was “clean.”
    Nobody fought over Karen Cirillo. She had no honor to protect, for one thing, but more important, nobody dared. She was Jerzy’s girl, and at the Y she jitterbugged only with her girlfriends until the much anticipated slow numbers, and then, when her girlfriends moved, one by one onto the dance floor, she stood alone while across the floor a hundred cowardly boys looked on with yearning, imagining, insofar as we were able, what it must be like to be Jerzy Quinn, who sometime later that night, we were certain, would slip his nicotine-stained fingers up under her soft angora sweater.
    Jerzy’s gang never appeared at these dances until late in the evening. The Cayoga Stream snaked behind the Y, and sometimes we’d