Bridge of Sighs (13 page)

They were moving because the post office had unexpectedly promoted Bobby’s father. Normally it took years to move up through the postal ranks, but that spring there’d been some sort of scandal that resulted in a general housecleaning. The new postmaster brought in from downstate had replaced most of the staff, including several senior letter carriers. Mr. Marconi had been promoted precisely because he’d remained aloof from everyone else and was thus untainted. Some people whispered that he’d ratted out his fellow workers.

According to my mother, the reason Mr. Marconi had been so livid about Bobby’s broken wrist wasn’t that my father had ignored his warning but that he suspected he’d done it on purpose, out of jealousy at their good fortune. This charge was ridiculous, of course, though it may be true that Mr. Marconi’s promotion and his decision not just to move but to buy a house in the Borough—on my father’s route!—may have upset their delicate equilibrium. My mother remembers that instead of simply congratulating him, my father let on that he didn’t think we Lynches would ever move to the Borough even if we could afford to. We liked the East End just fine, he said, and guessed we had everything we needed right where we were. Mr. Marconi made no secret of his opinion that my father’s attitude was nothing but sour grapes. This simmering animosity, according to my mother, was the backdrop to the surfing accident.

One thing was certain. Mr. Marconi’s fury had not diminished a jot the next day. We’d seen Bobby return from the hospital that morning with his right forearm in a cast up almost to his elbow. My mother advised my father to wait before going next door, but he argued that would make it look like we didn’t care. I suspected, though, that he was anxious to convey what he’d started to say twice the day before, when Mr. Marconi had held up his index finger. That he’d warned us over and over to be careful or somebody’d get hurt, that he hadn’t been driving fast, that, hell, he never meant for nothing like that to happen, that a freak accident like that could just as well have happened to me as Bobby, that he hoped there wouldn’t be no hard feelings—all the wrong things.

That there were going to
be
hard feelings was obvious from the moment Mr. Marconi opened the door and saw who was standing outside in the hall. Bobby was lying on the sofa, looking weak and pale, his cast resting heavily on his chest. He made no attempt to rise when he saw who his visitors were. I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Marconi’s ashen, frightened face, peering in from the kitchen. I fully expected her husband to address my father insolently, with something like
What the hell do you want?
Instead, he looked him up and down, then me, then my father again. “Good, it’s you,” he said. “Wait here.” Then he closed the door in our faces.

We didn’t have to wait long before he returned. He had several sheets of pale green paper, and he handed these to my father. When he unfolded them, I saw the
THOMASTON REGIONAL HOSPITAL
letterhead, with a column of numbers down the right side of the page, and my father swallowed hard. “Hell, I’ll take care of it, if that’s what you want,” he said, looking past Mr. Marconi to where Bobby lay on the sofa. I think the “if you want” reflected my father’s surprise. It was this man, after all, who worked for the government and had such great medical benefits.

“Well, I should hope so,” Mr. Marconi said.

“I ain’t saying I can do the whole thing right now,” my father admitted, regarding the long column of numbers sadly.

“Why’s that?” Mr. Marconi said. “You’re always going on about you’re gonna buy this and that, and go here and there. To hear you talk, any-body’d think you could just take it out of petty cash.”

“If they could work with me…,” he said.

“Work with you? Why would they do that?”

“I ain’t saying they won’t get their money. In a few months—”

“How
many
months, do you figure?”

My father shrugged, as if it was impossible to say, that simple subdivision was woefully inadequate to such complex financing. What he needed, of course, was to consult my mother, who could figure exactly how long it would take, but he wasn’t about to say that. “If they’ll work with me…”

Mr. Marconi grabbed the hospital bill back and shook his head in disgust. “Tell you what,” he said. “Go home.”

My father weakly held his hand out for the bill. “Hell, I ain’t sayin’—”

“It’s paid for,” Mr. Marconi said. “It’s all taken care of.”

“You ain’t gotta—”

“Just go home.”

I wanted to, desperately, but he wouldn’t. My father just stood there, looking about half his normal size. He still hadn’t met Mr. Marconi’s eye and was peering in at Bobby with an expression of terrible longing. He hated being on the outside of anything, and right now he wanted to be inside that flat, not out in the hall. What he couldn’t figure out was how to get Mr. Marconi to, if not welcome him, at least step aside. What he’d planned on, I realized, was having the opportunity to talk to Bobby. He was good with boys, and in no time he’d have had him laughing and remembering how much fun we always had in the truck, and telling him it wouldn’t be no time before the cast came off, and Bobby would admit it didn’t hurt so bad now that the bone was set and immobilized. Before long, my father imagined, we’d all be friends again. Maybe we’d be first to sign Bobby’s cast. He was an amiable man who believed in amiable solutions, who forgave easily and couldn’t understand that other people derived pleasure from withholding the very thing he always gave so freely.

Which probably was why he didn’t notice me pulling on his sleeve, trying to make him understand that even though we hadn’t gotten what we came for, we should leave. It embarrassed me to comprehend so clearly what my father couldn’t seem to grasp, that he could stand there forever and Mr. Marconi still wouldn’t let him in, or take pity, or relent in any way. Even when the door finally closed, with the two of us standing there on the welcome mat, he didn’t budge, and when he opened his mouth to speak, my first thought was that he hadn’t realized Mr. Marconi wasn’t there anymore. Because he just stood there staring at the closed door, I didn’t immediately understand he was talking to me. “Don’t never be like that, Louie.”

I said I wouldn’t.

“You ain’t gotta treat nobody like that, is what I’m saying,” he continued.

Anxious for us to be gone, I said I understood.

“Don’t never treat people like you wish they were dead.”

Afraid that my responses were rooting us to the spot, I said nothing this time, because I couldn’t bear to stand there one more second.

Downstairs on the porch we met the Spinnarkle sisters returning from church. “Why, hello, Mr. Lynch. Good morning, Louie,” they said in tandem.

“Isn’t this just…,” one of them began.

“…the most glorious day?” the other finished.

They both beamed at us, neither registering that anything was wrong.

“Yes, it is,” my father agreed, because he liked to agree with people, especially about the weather, or that people were mostly good, or that things were bound to work out okay in the end.

H
E WAS QUIET
the rest of the day and, after dinner, said he was going out for a while, something he never did on Sunday night, which was Ed Sullivan, whose show we watched religiously, though we rarely agreed on which acts were the good ones. My mother and I watched the show listlessly without him, and when it was over she got up and turned the set off. “So what happened over there?” she said, and I told her how mean Mr. Marconi had been, how when my father had offered to pay he’d snatched the hospital bill right out of his hand. None of which seemed to surprise her. When I finished, she was quiet for a bit, then said, “Your father…,” but fell silent again, apparently having thought better of whatever she’d been about to impart.

“When will he come home?” I asked, because he’d been gone a long time and I couldn’t imagine where he might be.

“Oh, I’m sure that by the time you wake up in the morning, he’ll be back. Don’t worry. He just needs some time to make the world right again. Once he’s got things back the way he wants them…” Her voice trailed off.

Normally such a remark would have sounded like a criticism, which I would’ve resented, but this time my mother didn’t seem angry or annoyed, as she sometimes was, just sad about how things had turned out. And I thought I understood what she meant about him making the world right again so he could live in it. My own world had been out of kilter all day, and I knew why, though I didn’t know what to do about it. Actually, I
did
know but didn’t want to do it. All day I’d been picturing Bobby on that sofa, pale and sick and not at all like himself, and I couldn’t help remembering how I’d hoped for something like this to happen, how jealous I’d been of his refusal to cry. He
still
hadn’t cried, and now I felt even worse. And there was more. Finally, I heard myself say, “I didn’t call the turn.”

My mother regarded me seriously. “I don’t understand.”

“It was my fault,” I said, and explained how Bobby always surfed behind me, needed me to call out the turns so he could prepare, and how I always did, except this once. I told her I didn’t know why I hadn’t called that turn, that I never wanted Bobby to get hurt so bad, that it was all my fault and that he’d said as much, so now we’d never be friends again.

“Of course you will,” she said, causing me momentarily to hope she was right, before realizing she wasn’t. “He’ll forgive you.”

I shook my head. “No, he won’t.”

“He will,” she insisted. “You forgave him, didn’t you?”

“For what?”

She was looking right at me, and I couldn’t meet her eye. “You know what.”

“I don’t,” I said, barely able to speak.

“You don’t
want
to,” she replied, “but you do.”

“I
don’t,
” I probably shouted.

“Okay,” she said, looking away, disappointed in me. “Okay, Lou.”

My father didn’t come home that night until late. I heard him trip on the front steps, fumble through the door and finally lumber heavily up the stairs and into the bedroom next to mine. My mother was still awake, and I could hear them talking quietly in the dark, though I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Probably she was just telling him to come to bed, that everything would be all right, that he needed to get some sleep, because in a few hours he’d have to get up and go to work. The other possibility was that they were talking about me.

The reason I was awake to hear my father return was that I was still turning over in my mind what my mother had said about what I knew but wouldn’t acknowledge. And there in the dark I’d made up my mind. In the morning I’d tell her again that she was wrong, that there was nothing I knew and didn’t want to know. I would keep on insisting until she had no choice but to agree that Bobby had
not
been there at the trestle and hadn’t laughed with the others as I pleaded with them not to saw me in two. No, I had
not
forgiven him. Because there was nothing to forgive.

T
HE AFTERNOON
the Marconis’ possessions were loaded onto the bright yellow moving van, I watched morosely from the front steps, having been specifically instructed not to get in the way of the movers. I kept expecting Bobby to come over and keep me company, on our last day together, but my mother said it was probably his job to look after his little brothers while his parents organized the move. In the middle of the afternoon he appeared at an open window, and I waved, but he didn’t wave back, and when his father passed by the same window a moment later, he drew the shade.

My mother had been right about one thing. Bobby apparently did forgive me for not calling the turn, or at least we never spoke of it again. That last month before they moved, he still came over to our house a few times, but it seemed he’d no sooner arrive than Mrs. Marconi would call and say to send Bobby home. And of course we never again rode in the milk truck.

Since the day Mr. Marconi made us stand in the hall, my father’s good spirits had returned, but the two of them hadn’t spoken. To my surprise, and relief, my father didn’t try to insinuate himself back into his good graces, my mother having apparently convinced him it was a lost cause. During a stretch of hot, humid days when everyone had their windows thrown open, I heard Mr. Marconi remark, his voice suddenly very near, that in his opinion they were getting Bobby away from Third Street just in time. While there’d been no context for this remark, I couldn’t help thinking that they’d been talking about us Lynches. As their move drew closer, I asked Bobby what his new phone number was, but he said he didn’t know yet. As soon as they found out, he’d call, but something in his tone made me think he wasn’t going to. I didn’t even know where their new house was, except that it was somewhere in the Borough.

At any rate I must have looked pretty dejected sitting there all alone as they moved out, because when my father came home for lunch he suggested we go inside and help my mother, something we never did. Meals were her job, and our kitchen was tiny. She didn’t like us in there, underfoot, until she had the food on the table. On this occasion, though, she seemed to understand his reasoning and stopped what she was doing to make us a pitcher of lemonade, remarking that the day was ferociously hot and she felt sorry for the poor moving men.

She set down two tall, sweating glasses in front of my father and me. “You and Bobby wouldn’t be seeing that much of each other in another week or so anyway,” she said. It was only one more week until Labor Day, and once school started, with me at St. Francis and Bobby back at Bridger, we’d have other things to occupy us. “Besides,” she went on. “The Borough isn’t the end of the world.”