Bridge of Sighs

of a fight in the stairwell, and then flight—twenty, fifty, maybe a hundred seventh and eighth graders, roiling up Hudson and across Division Street, on the other side of which lay safety. Were we being chased? No one knew. Nor did anyone want to turn around to find out. Just run and keep running. Make it across Division. They wouldn’t dare cross Division, not even Jerzy’s gang would be so bold, except sometimes they did, so we kept on running, those West End wraiths in hot pursuit. In reality? In our imaginations? It was simply impossible to know.
    Bobby could’ve told us. But Bobby was gone.
             
     
    A FTER WE BOUGHT Ikey Lubin’s it was a good six months before my father was able to rent the upstairs flat. The old tenants had moved out—skipped in the middle of the night, as my mother put it—before he’d even been able to talk to them about their lease. He told my mother not to worry, they’d get new renters soon enough. His mistake was in allowing her to inspect the premises. Apparently her refusal to set foot in the store didn’t apply to the apartment, and my father agreed that she should look it over before they decided how much rent to charge. The expression on her face when she came back down suggested that the Great War over Ikey Lubin’s had entered a new phase. “Did you even
go
up there, Lou?” she asked that night over dinner.
    Well, yeah, he had, he said, but no, he hadn’t really inspected it or nothing. It was the store that mattered, not the upstairs. Sure, he figured it would need a good cleaning. After all, they knew the last several tenants who’d lived there, West End refugees, so yeah, he’d expected it to be dirty. But he had some leftover paint down in the cellar and would use that to brighten the place up.
    “Dirty?” my mother said. “Paint? Lou, there’s been a fire up there.”
    This was news to my father, I could tell.
    “A fire? Where?”
    “In the front room.”
    “I didn’t see no fire.”
    At this my mother massaged her temples the way she always did when he voiced doubts about something she wanted him to understand. “Tell me, Lou,” she said. “Did it strike you as odd that they left that big painting on the wall? They took everything else, including half the fixtures, but that they left. What does this suggest to you?”
    “They didn’t want it?”
    “No, Lou. It suggests you should’ve looked behind the painting. That’s where the electrical fire started, in the wall behind the painting.” She allowed this to sink in. “Another thing. Did you raise the toilet lid?”
    “No.”
    “Lucky you.”
    “What?”
    “Two words. Black and full.”
    My father and I both stopped eating. “I’ll go up and flush it,” he said.
    “I tried that, Lou, but maybe you’ll have better luck.”
    “You’re fortunate,” the contractor told my mother the next day, after he’d examined the wiring in the wall behind the giant scorch mark. “Fortunate they didn’t burn down the whole building.”
    “That’s a matter of opinion,” she answered, causing him to knit his brow in puzzlement. I knew exactly what she was getting at. If the former tenants had burned the place down, my father wouldn’t have been able to buy it. “What would cause that kind of fire?”
    “Off the top of my head, I’d say whoever lived here was tapping into the store’s current, getting their electricity for free. Probably did the wiring theirself. Some people, huh?”
    They went through the rest of the flat, the man jotting notes in a tiny spiral notepad. When they finished, he did some arithmetic and showed my mother the notepad. Whatever he’d written there shocked her sufficiently to make her sit down on the very commode that had so repulsed her the previous afternoon, whose condition had not materially improved overnight.
    “Course that’s if you do things right,” he admitted. “Union plumbers and electricians.” He paused here, as if trying to decide whether to go on. “Makes you wonder about the downstairs, too.”
    “Dear Lord” was all she could say.
    “Well,” the man said. “I like you, Tessa, and you’ve always done a good job on our books, so the inspection’s free. You want to hire us, I’ll give you every break I can, and you can pay in installments. I wish I had better news for you.”
    My mother continued to stare at the floor, as if she had X-ray vision and could see right through to the store below, where my father was