Bridge of Sighs (20 page)

My father, of course, promised he wouldn’t.

DIVISION STREET

M
Y FATHER’S LOSING
his dairy job and buying Ikey Lubin’s at least resolved the issue of where I’d go to school that fall. When he heard of our intention, Father Gluck paid us a visit and tried to dissuade my parents from taking me out of St. Francis, reminding them that it teetered on the brink and couldn’t afford to lose good Catholic students like me. We had, he said, an obligation—to our faith, to the diocese, to the good sisters who taught us. He addressed these remarks to my father, perhaps in the hope that he was the one who required convincing. “
My
only obligation,” my mother told him, deftly dispelling that misconception with a single pronoun, “is to this family. St. Francis will have to fend for itself.”

“You don’t mean that—” Father Gluck began, but my mother cut him off.

“But I do.”

The priest, deciding on another tack, turned his attention to me. “You’ve done well at St. Francis.” He was smiling benevolently, but I’d never liked the man, the way his eyes bored into you as if you’d done something wrong, or were about to. “You’ve been happy there? You like the sisters? Sister Bernadette takes good care of you?”

I allowed that all of this was true. A priest was saying it, so what choice did I have? And I did like Sister Bernadette, though it was also true I’d lately told my mother often that I’d be glad to get out from under her too-watchful eye and I was looking forward to public school. I suppose I might have repeated all of this to Father Gluck but, coward that I was, instead held my tongue.

“And you’re feeling better now?”

I glanced over at my mother. Had I been feeling poorly? I saw her eyes narrow dangerously. My father looked as perplexed as I was.

“Those public school boys did a bad thing to you, didn’t they?” Father Gluck said, his smile even more empathetic now, as if the incident at the trestle had been on his mind more or less constantly since it happened.

“Don’t you dare try to frighten him,” my mother said, her hands starting to tremble.

The priest regarded me for a beat before turning back to my mother, a pause apparently intended to suggest that he was unused to taking orders, particularly from a woman. If so, he must have been even more surprised when another command came right on its heels.

“And don’t try to frighten me.”

“Tessa,” the priest said, now showing
her
his benevolent smile. “I’m not the enemy.”

When my mother looked away, unable to meet his eye, I suddenly feltill. She’d begged my father to call the rectory and tell Father Gluck not to come, after he’d cornered my father at Mass on Sunday—my mother staying home to nurse a cold—and explained that he wanted to discuss my leaving St. Francis with all three of us. “Tell a priest he can’t come?” my father had said. “How am I gonna do that, Tessa?”

“Okay, fine,” she conceded. “But I swear to God you better not take his side.” So far my father hadn’t said a word, but she now seemed to realize she was on her own, the poor woman. Raised Catholic, she had no reason except perhaps her own rebellious nature to believe she could do battle with a priest and win. I could see she was lost, an apology forming on her lips, when Father Gluck made an unexpected and welcome mistake. “We both want what’s best for Luce—” he said.

I saw my mother stiffen. The man had started to call me by my nickname. Was it my imagination, or did the blood drain out of his face when he realized what he’d done?

“I have a small discretionary fund for emergencies…,” he went on, trying valiantly to regroup. “I’m sure we can find some compromise.”

But my mother had risen to her feet. She crossed the room, took the priest’s half-full coffee cup and stood looking down at him. She was trembling all over now, whether in rage or fear or a combination of the two I couldn’t tell. I saw my father’s jaw drop, and I suspect mine did as well.

When my mother spoke, though, her voice was surprisingly steady. “The compromise is this: we will continue to attend Mass on Sundays and drop the envelope we can no longer afford onto your collection plate. Unless you’d prefer we didn’t.”

Father Gluck turned back to my father, who made the mistake of looking up at that moment, and the two of them shared a look of devout commiseration.

“The compromise,” my mother continued, “is that from time to time your housekeeper will stop at our store and buy a quart of milk.” Then she went over to the front door, opened it and pointed across at Ikey Lubin’s. “We’re located on the same street as Tommy Flynn, so she shouldn’t have any trouble finding us.”

“Tessa,” Father Gluck replied, reluctantly getting to his feet. “I’m disappointed—”

“Join the club,” my mother told him. “We’re disappointed, too. My husband was disappointed to lose his job. When we were living in Berman Court and
Lou
wanted to be an altar boy and you didn’t select a single one from the West End,
he
was disappointed. As for my own disappointments, don’t even get me started.”

It took my mother about twenty minutes to stop shaking after Father Gluck had left. She paced back and forth between the kitchen and living room like a caged animal, stopping, opening her mouth to speak, then closing it and pacing again. My father remained seated during that whole time as if he didn’t trust his legs to support him just yet. “Don’t look at me like that,” my mother finally said, then shot a look at me. “You either.”

“I ain’t sayin’ you were wrong,” my father conceded. “It ain’t that. It’s just…he was offerin’—”

“A loan. It was a loan he was offering, Lou. We’d have had to pay it back. With interest, if I know him.”

“I ain’t sayin’—”

“He’s lucky I didn’t go get that gun.”

At this my father’s eyes widened, and he looked over at me as if I might confirm what he thought he’d heard her say. Who was this person who looked so much like his wife but was acting like a crazy woman? A few days earlier, when my mother had produced that pellet gun and calmly shot those dogs with it, he couldn’t have been more astonished. Well, now it turned out that wasn’t quite true. Here was that same crazy woman—an impostor, surely—expressing regret that she’d missed a golden opportunity to shoot a priest.

She took pity on him then, which would’ve been good except this meant it was my turn. “Laugh” was her suggestion to me.

I must have looked as confused as my father, because she looked up at the ceiling and muttered “Dear God” before fixing me again. “That’s what you do when something’s funny; you laugh.”

It took me a moment to realize what she meant. The idea of seeing Father Gluck leap in the air like that dog had, with a cold steel pellet chewing on his big fanny,
was
funny, I had to admit, and part of me
did
want to laugh. It was a small part, though, and the bigger part was still too scared.

J
UNIOR HIGH
was where the lives of both West and East End kids began to merge with those of Borough kids. The school itself was located on Division Street, which ran perpendicular to Hudson, our main commercial thoroughfare. The irony that it should represent the border between west and east in our asymmetrical town didn’t strike me until I was an adult, but even then I knew that Division Street was real and to cross it meant something. The eight square blocks of downtown Thomaston were themselves considered neither one nor the other, but most businesses there, regardless of which side of Division they were located on, catered to either an East or West End clientele. (Borough residents tended not to shop in Thomaston at all but rather “down the line,” as everyone referred to Albany and Schenectady.) We had two of everything. Two jewelry stores: a cheap one for West Enders, a slightly more upscale store for us. East End women like my mother generally shopped at Cheryl Lynn’s House of Fashion, whereas West Enders had Elsa’s Dress Shop. For men’s and boys’ there was Calloway’s, which displayed in its window a tiny sign advertising the Botany 500 line my grandfather had always favored. My father hated to spend money on clothes and often snuck into Foreman’s, the cheaper West End store, then told my mother he bought the shirt or pants in question at Calloway’s, but she always knew better. That she could tell where he’d bought something after he’d removed the tags and thrown away the bags was akin to knowing which thimble the pill was under in a street scam. It was just the damnedest thing.

Thomaston’s bars were similarly segregated. East End neighborhood bars, called taverns, were the sort of places where men met after softball games, where a woman could safely go with her husband, where even kids were welcome with their parents before sundown. You could order a hamburger at the bar, along with inexpensive tap beer, and on weekends a cold-cuts-and-potato-salad buffet was provided at no charge on long folding tables. The free food sometimes attracted shabby, hungry-looking West Enders who were generally received coolly, the bartender idly asking how things were “back home.”

West End bars were rougher—gin mills, people called them—and most of them were located down in the Gut, which was also home to the pool hall and two pawnshops, both of which called themselves music stores, an illusion fostered by the scarred electric guitars as well as the odd accordion or trombone set up in the front window. Into these gin mills West End women often went unattended. At the diner I once overheard my uncle Dec, one of the few men equally at home on both sides of Division Street, talking about the previous Saturday night at a West End dive, when a woman named Gina—odd how memory works, her name racing back to me across five decades—entered, pulled her blouse off over her head and spent the remainder of the night with her bare breasts resting on the bar. Of course I immediately pictured the woman who’d opened the trunk and peered in at me that night so long ago, her naked breasts huge and pendulous.

“Yeah, you never know what’s going to happen across Division,” Uncle Dec concluded, chuckling appreciatively when the other men finally quit trying to get him to admit he was exaggerating. “In her bra, you mean,” one said in a last attempt. No, Uncle Dec insisted, he could tell the difference between tits in a bra and tits not in a bra, and these were the latter. So the rest of them then lapsed into sullen regret at not having witnessed so stunning an event.

It wasn’t the Berlin Wall, of course. West End families that had prospered, like ours, moved across Division into new and better lives, just as families in reduced circumstances sometimes found themselves slipping in the opposite direction. Most families had cousins, aunts and uncles on both sides of Division, but visiting them
was
like traveling to another town, even another country, with its own set of customs. Naturally, such separateness occasioned fear and mistrust, yet just as often yearning. Take, for instance, the dime stores. We East Enders had Woolworth’s, which had wide aisles and bright, fluorescent lighting as well as a lunch counter that specialized in toasted-cheese and tuna-salad sandwiches and canned tomato and chicken-noodle soup. Woolworth’s catered to downtown shop clerks who wore neatly pressed short-sleeved white shirts regardless of the weather and would leave the waitress a quarter or thirty-five cents under their plates. One of the front windows was always devoted to expensive toys, and here West End kids would congregate, pressing their runny noses up against the glass until their parents hustled them down the block to J.J. Newberry’s.

This, the West End dime store, both attracted and frightened me. It was full of cheap plastic toys whose ruptured packaging was held together by Scotch tape. Newberry’s aisles were narrow and crowded, its bins of tacky, exotic merchandise lit, at least in my memory, by little more than the light from the street outside. Most of the stuff I was attracted to there—lurid magazines like
Weird Tales
and motorcycle caps like the one Marlon Brando wore in the movie poster of
The Wild One
—was for sale at Newberry’s and nowhere else. The whole store was permeated by the smell of the popcorn that cranked more or less constantly out of a stained, cloudy, antiquated machine near the front door, each kernel of exploded corn as bright yellow as a rabid dog’s eyes. It didn’t just look yellow, it
tasted
yellow. Needless to say, it was delicious, the reason being, according to local legend, that the machine was never cleaned, its oil never changed. When my mother and I passed Newberry’s, she’d wrinkle her nose and say, “Lord, that
smell.
” Little did she know how I yearned for the day I’d be old enough to go inside on my own and spend hours investigating its dark, delicious mysteries. Even then I seemed to know that all this would begin to happen in junior high.

So it was in seventh grade that all but the most sheltered of us began to share space and air with kids outside our own neighborhoods. Monday through Friday, from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon, kids from all over mingled in the halls—if not the classes—of the junior high on upper Division, but this was just the beginning of a new kind of social commerce that took place on weekends. Saturday afternoons, for instance, we all came together, trailing customs and baggage we were scarcely aware of, at the Bijou Theater. We East End kids would buy popcorn at Newberry’s, and oddly enough the theater’s management didn’t seem to mind. Their own popcorn, in addition to being expensive, was fluffy and albino white, tasting of air. It was a point of pride among East End and Borough kids that we purchased our Sno-Caps, Jujubes and soda (no ice, we insisted) at the theater’s concession stand, whereas West End kids filled their pants pockets with stale, off-brand candy stolen as often as purchased from Newberry’s and generally went thirsty. Just from the detritus we left beneath the seats, the truth of those Saturday matinees would’ve been plain as day—that West End kids congregated on the left-hand side of the theater, we East Enders and Borough kids on the right. But the sticky floor would also have revealed another truth, because among the West End candy wrappers, there would be the odd Sno-Caps box, the shoe-flattened Jujube. We knew it was happening. As soon as the lights went down in the theater, shadows began to move stealthily along the bottom of the screen, left toward right, right toward left. And when the lights came up again, nervous new constellations had formed, though they held together only inside. Once we were out in the late-afternoon light, the separation would occur again, beads of oil scurrying on water.