Bridge of Sighs

  “I know that, Lou,” my mother said. “Leave him alone anyway.”

  But he couldn’t. Even I knew that. He kept an eye peeled and would waylay him by the mailboxes or in the hall, determined, I could tell, to be liked or know why he wasn’t. The subject he usually tried to introduce as an icebreaker was money and how much things cost anymore, that there seemed to be no end in sight and you had all you could do to keep up, never mind get ahead. These were subjects my father considered to be of universal appeal and easy enough for anybody to talk about and share as common ground. “What Tessa spent on winter clothes for our Louie this weekend?” he’d venture. “I couldn’t hardly believe it. And one kid’s all we got. With three, that’s gotta be rough.” Here he’d let his voice fall so Mr. Marconi could commiserate or, if he felt like it, compare notes about the cost of children’s coats and boots. I think my father suspected that Mr. Marconi, between his two jobs, made more money than he did at the dairy, but having three kids and another on the way, he figured, put them in pretty much the same boat, moneywise. Also, there were rumors the hotel was going to close. “I told Tessa she ain’t gotta pay Calloway’s prices,” he continued when Mr. Marconi declined to comment. “She could go down to Foreman’s for cheaper, but thinks cheaper’s more expensive in the long run, and I guess she’s right.” Actually, that wasn’t how he’d reacted the night before when he found out how much my winter clothes had cost, but now he’d slept on it, and I could tell spending all that money had become a source of pride. “Besides, if you’ve got the money, why shortchange your kids? If you ain’t got it, sure, that’s another thing, but if you do, why not spend the extra buck?”

  “Because you might need it tomorrow,” Mr. Marconi finally said, pushing past my father and closing the door in his face, rather more forcefully, it seemed to me, than was necessary.

  “Don’t always be bragging to that man,” my mother told him. “You know they dress those boys out of the thrift shop.”

  “Well, what’s he spend their money on, then?” my father said.

  “Lou, that’s none of our business. Leave him alone. He doesn’t like you.”

  “I just wish I knew why, is all. I never done nothing to him.”

  Which caused my mother to rub her temples.

  About the only thing the Lynches and the Marconis did have in common was a determination to leave the West End as soon as we could afford to. My mother in particular saw Berman Court as temporary. She’d wanted to rent in the East End from the start, but having grown up at the end of the Depression, she was wary and said she preferred to not have something at all than to have it today and lose it tomorrow. She felt bad for Mrs. Marconi, who was always pregnant. With each new baby, my mother claimed, the poor woman was tethered to the West End that much more securely.

  I remember knocking on the Marconis’ door late one afternoon and waiting in the hall for a long time. There were sounds inside, so I knew someone was home, someone, I sensed, was right on the other side of the door, listening and hoping whoever it was would go away. Only when I knocked a second time did Mrs. Marconi respond, her voice very near, “Who is it?” she wanted to know, her voice tremulous. “Bobby can’t come out,” she said once I’d identified myself, though I was there to return something my mother had borrowed the day before.

  “That woman is terrified,” she said when I told her what had happened. But when I asked what Bobby’s mother might be afraid of, she claimed not to know. I didn’t believe her, and it frightened me to think some unnamed thing in our own building could scare a grown woman, and I wondered if my father could protect us from it.

  ST. FRANCIS WAS Thomaston’s only parochial elementary school. After kindergarten my mother had been talked into enrolling me there by Father Gluck, our parish priest, and I suspect she also hoped—in vain—that my nickname wouldn’t follow me there. Bobby’s parents had reluctantly enrolled him in St. Francis in third grade because at Cayoga Elementary he’d fallen in with a group of rough boys and been suspended, more than once, for fighting, which particularly worried Mrs. Marconi. In one of their furtive hallway conversations, my mother may have suggested that St. Francis boys weren’t so combative, and that having Bobby there would be good for me, too. We could be friends and walk to and from school together. Mrs. Marconi liked that idea but didn’t think her husband would spend the extra money, so we were all surprised when she prevailed. My mother speculated afterward that Mr. Marconi may have been swayed by the fact that St. Francis boys wore uniforms, of which he heartily approved, believing that dress impacted behavior.

  Cayoga Elementary had been a short block from Berman Court, but St. Francis was a half-dozen blocks farther, in the opposite direction. It was also on the other side of the Cayoga Stream, which we crossed, coming and going, by means of a narrow footbridge. Both schools dismissed students by grade, ten minutes apart, lower grades first. If you were a first grader with a brother or sister in second or third grade, you were allowed to wait in the office until the higher grade was let out. Otherwise, you were to go straight home. The flaw in the system was that older kids in the public school were being let out at the same time as the younger ones from the parochial. St. Francis kids were already objects of scorn because we wore uniforms and were taught by nuns, and those who left by the front door often had to run a gantlet of ridicule. For others of us, though, the most direct route home was out the back and across the small school yard, then out through a gap in the fence. From there we followed a path through the trees down the steep bank of the Cayoga Stream, crossed the footbridge and climbed up the far embankment. From there it was, for Bobby and me, three short blocks home to Berman Court.

  The scary part of the journey was the bridge itself. Thanks to the depth of the ravine, it was visible from neither the school on one side nor the street on the other. The whole journey, down one bank and up the other, took only a minute, but if the public school boys arrived at the footbridge first, and no parents were around, St. Francis kids had to “pay a toll” in order to pass. The toll could be whatever you had: a penny, a marble, an old Necco Wafer. If you had nothing, or maybe just a broken pencil, you found yourself in a headlock and tossed over a hip and onto the hard ground and then laughed at as you raced toward safety back where you’d come from. Whenever Bobby Marconi stayed home from school, I made sure I had something for the toll.

  That was the thing about Bobby: he never had to pay the toll, nor did I when I was with him. The boys collecting the toll were the very ones Bobby had gotten in trouble with the year before, so they all knew each other. Their leader, a kid named Jerzy Quinn who was a year older, had been suspended with Bobby, and for some reason that had made them cautious friends, as well as rivals. Jerzy liked to tease Bobby about being a wimpy Catholic who only hung out with girls anymore—a reference to my nickname, I knew immediately—and Bobby asked Jerzy if he wanted to be a singer like his father, a drunk who liked to sing at the top of his lungs before passing out in the gutter by the tannery.

  The closest they ever came to actual hostilities was over me. At the beginning of the school year, the toll takers tried to shake me down, and one of them, Perry Kozlowski, put me in a headlock while the others went through my pockets. But Bobby said to leave me alone, that I was with him and didn’t have to pay. He didn’t question the authority of these boys to consider the bridge their own property, but did insist that I was exempt by virtue of our friendship. “Who says?” Perry wanted to know, as if there were rules governing such exemptions. They argued the fine points while I remained in the headlock, until Jerzy Quinn finally said, “Let him go. He’s not worth it.”

  When they were gone I asked Bobby why he didn’t have to pay, because of course that puzzled me. But Bobby just shrugged, as if I’d asked him to explain all the laws of nature. “Some people just don’t have to, Luce,” he said. “Other people…” We both knew what happened to other people and that I fell into that category. Which was one reason I was so glad to have Bobby’s friends
hip and also why, at the end of the school year, not long after Mr. Marconi got on full-time at the post office and they moved to the East End, I was so devastated.

  THE FOLLOWING YEAR, with Bobby gone, I knew the public school boys would be on the lookout for me. Most days my grade got out on time, which meant I’d arrive at the bridge before they did, and once safely across I’d scramble up the bank and head for Berman Court. Sometimes, as I emerged from the trees and turned toward home, I’d see or hear them coming, hooting and jeering, a couple of blocks away, and if it was too obvious that I was hurrying, they’d laugh and yell “Run, Lucy, run!” and the words would make me do it. Then they laughed all the louder. We all seemed to understand that it was just a matter of time before my teacher would keep our class a crucial minute or two longer, or for some reason they themselves would get out early, and then there’d be a reckoning.

  The day it finally happened, I had no one to blame but myself. I’d stayed late to help Sister Bernadette clap erasers, an honor, and when I started through the yard and along the path down to the stream, I caught a quick movement at the edge of the trees and thought I heard voices coming up from the green darkness below. I might, of course, have simply returned to the school and had Sister Bernadette call my mother to meet me, but as afraid as I was of the boys at the bridge, I was even more afraid of being a scaredy-cat. It was one thing to turn and hurry back to school after I’d seen the public school boys at the footbridge, a genuine threat, but it was another to run away from a shadow that might, for all I knew, be that of a first grader. My eraser duty had taken a good fifteen minutes, and then I’d talked with Sister Bernadette for a while, which meant the public school boys had probably come and gone by now. Or such was my reasoning as I continued along the path to the edge of the trees, where I stopped to peer down the bank into the darkness below, my head cocked, listening. There was the sound of the stream, of course, but was that all? Was some other utterance mixed in with or obscured by the burbling of the water?

  I don’t know how long I stood there before starting warily down the path, the trees and the darkness closing in behind me. In the middle of the footbridge lay a workbook. Public school workbooks were different from ours, used year after year, filled in with pencil and then erased at year’s end, the answers still visible on the page, ghostlike, along with the checkmarks identifying incorrect responses. Was it possible for this workbook to be sitting there without its owner nearby? An urgent whisper slipped out of the trees. Still I stood transfixed, waiting, but it was quiet except for the sound of the water and the wind in the upper branches. Stepping onto the footbridge, I immediately heard a sound behind me and, turning, saw a grinning boy come out from behind a large oak to block my retreat. Ahead, two others materialized, then two more.

  One was Jerzy Quinn, who grinned and said, “Hey there, Lucy-Lucy.”

  WE FOLLOWED the stream. Though it happened long ago, that afternoon’s journey is still vivid in my recollection. I was flanked on both sides to prevent escape. With one exception they made it clear that I would remain their prisoner until they chose to let me go. When I lagged or showed any reluctance to get too far from home, they shoved me forward, hard, and took turns cuffing me on the back of the head and asking if I was a girl, since I had a girl’s name. All except for Jerzy Quinn, who remained aloof from the fun. Each time I was pushed or tripped, he helped me to my feet, talking to me the whole time, explaining how I had public school kids all wrong, that they weren’t such a bad lot. How I was being treated in the meantime didn’t seem to Jerzy to undermine his case in the least.

  No, I was informed that he and his friends had started a charitable club, the purpose of which was to assist the unfortunate, cripples and widows and the like. The dues collected went to pay for their crutches and groceries and medical operations, and their club had already performed many good deeds. Did I know Janice Collier, the fourth grader in the wheelchair? Well, who did I imagine got her that chair? There was a good deal of smirking and snorting behind my back as all this was explained, then somebody tripped me again and I went sprawling in the stream, skinning the palms of both hands on the rocks, much to the delight of my captors. But again Jerzy Quinn helped me up and assured me that I was fine, after which he continued to recruit me for their club, as if he saw no reason I wouldn’t want to join. In the event I needed further inducement, I should know that my old friend Bobby Marconi was also a member. “We’re his best pals,” Jerzy gave me to understand. “Those East End kids are all fags, so he comes down here to hang out with us.”

  “Are you a fag, Lucy?” one of the other boys asked.

  “He doesn’t even know what it is,” said another, which was true.

  What a strange downstream journey it was. The juxtaposition of the other boys’ jostling ridicule with Jerzy Quinn’s feigned friendship was what scared me most, that their behavior and his soothing words were at cross-purposes—the boys making it clear that they’d hurt me, even as their leader assured me that I’d come to no harm. Stranger still, while I knew his kindness was part of the cruel joke being played on me, some part of me believed him, or desperately wanted to. His pretend kindness, his urgent hope that I would admit I’d been wrong about him and his friends, were at some bizarre level almost convincing, as if just beneath the game he was playing lurked another boy who wished he was the boy he was pretending to be. Maybe that good boy was real. Maybe he wouldn’t let the others harm me. I also wanted to believe he was telling the truth about Bobby, that when we got wherever we were going Bobby would be there, and then they’d find out who his best friend really was.

  Eventually we came to a blighted place where the bank on both sides was very steep, spanned overhead by a rickety railroad trestle and a dark, tilting structure that opened onto a rock quarry. This, it turned out, functioned as their clubhouse. At the far end several sheets of plywood had been arranged across the beams, and in the center of one of these sat an old steamer trunk. There we paused, the other boys forming a circle, with Jerzy Quinn and me in the center. Jerzy regarded the trunk, then me for a long beat, as if expecting me to draw from its mere existence some weighty inference. When he grinned, I saw in his yellow teeth that I’d been wrong, that there was no good boy.

  “So, you want to join our club?” he said, putting his hand on the back of my neck and squeezing hard.

  Balanced as I was on my railroad tie, even a gentle nudge would have sent me over the edge of the plywood and down onto the dark, jagged rocks below. Fearing that either a yes or a no might have equally disastrous consequences, I said maybe. I’d ask my parents. See if it was okay.

  Well, you see, that’s the thing, I was told. Theirs was a secret society whose first rule was that no parents must ever learn about all the good deeds they performed. So I’d have to decide myself and if I joined I’d be made to swear a solemn oath never to tell anyone. It may have been then, seeing that in reality I had no choice, that nothing I said or did would change what was about to happen, that my eyes began to leak. Yes, I told them. Yes, I’d join.

  “Look,” one of the boys said, pointing. “He’s so happy he’s crying.”

  All that remained, they said, was the initiation. Did I know what an initiation was? When I said I didn’t, they pulled up the lid of the trunk.

  Inside, it was dark except for a thin crease of light at a seam, and the air reeked of urine. “Hey, look who’s here,” I heard a voice say after the trunk’s lid was fastened. Had somebody new just arrived? Was I about to be rescued?

  “I just thought of something, Lucy.” Jerzy’s voice was confidential, mere inches away. “You can’t join our club. Take a guess why.”

  I tried to stop blubbering but couldn’t, because now that the possibility of membership had been withdrawn, I knew I should’ve agreed to join right at the start.

  “Tell him.”

  Came the chorus, “No girls allowed,” followed by much laughter.

  Then Jerzy’s voice again. “Guess what happens n
ext.”

  That was when the sawing began.

  WHEN I AWOKE, it was pitch black and the silence outside the trunk so profound that for a moment I wondered if I was home in bed, having dreamed my imprisonment. But my room was never this dark, the tree branches outside my window always reflecting the ghostly glow of the streetlamp in front of the building. Still, it was only when I tried to stretch out my legs that I knew I hadn’t dreamed the trunk.

  How long had I lain there in the dark? Probably not so very long, though upon awakening I remember feeling for the first time the dreamlike peace with which, over a lifetime, I would become so familiar. Exhausted from my earlier screaming and pleading, as well as from the panic of seeing sawdust filtering down through that thin crease of light, I’d waited in abject despair for the saw to finally come through the trunk’s lid and rip my flesh. But then a strange thing happened. Realizing that my struggles were fruitless, I’d surrendered and simply gone to sleep. I remember thinking of this as an actual solution, that if I could somehow will myself into unconsciousness, then perhaps what was happening would cease by virtue of my not, in a sense, being there to witness it. While I didn’t recall putting that plan into effect, I must have, because here I was, awake again, my ordeal apparently over.

  Gradually I became aware of two things: time had passed, and I was alone. The sliver of light was now gone, from which I deduced that night had fallen and, from the complete silence outside the trunk, that my captors had vanished. Instead of being terrified anew, I felt an exhausted, inexplicable, yet very real sense of well-being. Through some act of will, it seemed I’d made my tormentors, their laughter, the ripping of the saw, all of it, disappear. But if true, this begged an important question. If I’d banished the boys by falling asleep, would I now bring them back into existence by awaking? Would the whole process start over again? Somehow I thought not, and just lay there quietly, sleepily content for each moment to pass without additional terror. True, I was curious how much time had elapsed and whether my mother and father were out searching for me. These considerations seemed remote, though. I was locked in a dark trunk, and it was possible, even likely, that I’d never be released, which should have terrified me but didn’t. Rather, it seemed I’d simply entered a new, quite natural phase of my life inside the trunk, breathing the heady mixture of stale air and urine, some of which I understood to be my own, where I would await further developments. About these I felt more curiosity than fear, as if I’d already expended my entire store of the latter emotion.