Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  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 catch sight of them down there among the trees where they smoked cigarettes and, according to rumor, drank whiskey. During most of the school year it was dark by seven, so we weren’t able to actually see them, but we knew they were there by their eerie, distant laughter and the angry red glow of their cigarette tips. But during the last half hour of those dances, after the person stationed at the top of the stairs closed the cashbox, they began to filter in, cool and casual, as if to suggest they’d forgotten there was a dance until that moment. We’d spot one of them across the gymnasium, moving, wraithlike, through the crowd, and when we turned to share this thrilling news with whomever stood next to us, we’d discover that another grinning wraith had materialized at our elbow. They’re here. You could trace this knowledge surging around the gym like an electric current. I wonder now what we were thinking. Did anybody imagine that this Friday would be different?

  Even the music changed, or at least seemed to, becoming darker, more dangerous. There was a line dance the West End boys were famous for, called the stomp, which required a particular beat to execute. Certain records, we knew, were stomp songs, and the opening bars were all it took for Borough and East End jitterbuggers to clear the floor so that the stomp lines, exclusively male, could form. Usually, sometime during the first hour of the dance, whoever was spinning the records would give us East End wannabes such a song so we could practice, in hopes we might later join the line and thereby gain grudging acceptance when the real stompers appeared. But the step was intricate, its moves subject to continual innovation, its orders barked out by someone at the head of the line. If the call came too late it couldn’t be carried out, if too early, then the rank broke down.

  What the stomp resembled most was a military exercise, its dancers jackbooted in their aggressive precision, each move executed with a deadpan lack of emotion, fifty or a hundred boys all turning to face in a new direction on the downbeat. Turn the wrong way and you’d be facing an advancing army, then the jeering and laughter of the encircling crowd. At the heart of the stomp wasn’t courtship, the basis of most dancing, but a tightly controlled rage. Its signature move was always withheld until the last few bars of the sequence, at which point every boy in the line, instead of simply turning on his heel in a new direction, brought that heel down hard on the floor in a thunderclap that shook the gym. There was no mistaking its intent. It was a declaration of war.

  The last song of the night, though, was always slow, and the lights always came down, signaling, as if we didn’t know, that time and opportunity were slipping away. Karen Cirillo, ever faithful, got her reward then as Jerzy Quinn, ever cool, would touch her elbow and wordlessly lead her onto the floor. Nan Beverly would already be there with whatever Borough boyfriend on whom she’d chosen to bestow her changeable affections. In my memory, if not in reality, the first verse of that last song belonged to these two most public of couples—the Borough pair radiant, laughing and touching discreetly, Nan tossing her blond head, her new boyfriend as happy as a kid can be who knows his days of grace are numbered, and their counterparts silent, nearly motionless, an angry, emaciated boy, drawing to him a seventh-grade girl who was already a woman.

  How beautiful they were, both couples, and how beautiful this moment we’d been waiting for all week, the pairing off for that last slow dance. Two couples became four, four became sixteen, sixteen became thirty-two, we East End boys alternately eyeing lusty West End girls on one side of the gym and pristine Borough girls on the other, each group requiring a type of courage we didn’t possess. Which was why we ended up asking a girl from down the block, someone we were pretty sure wouldn’t say no. And who among us had any idea what was in that East End girl’s heart? How many times in the last two hours—or the last two minutes—had her heart been broken?

  Back outside the Y, the rule of law was quickly reestablished. In the parking lot the parents of Borough and East End girls flashed their headlights or tooted as their daughters emerged. Who was that boy you were with? Nobody. Well, he must be somebody. No, nobody. Then, as the cars dispersed, suddenly there’d be a rumor 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.

  AFTER 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 chatting with the Elite Coffee Club. Finally, the stench emanating from the commode brought her back to reality, and we returned to the front room.

  “Wasn’t the place inspected when you bought it?”

  She shook her head. “Knowing Lou, he probably waived that.”

  We stood staring at the scorch mark again. “That’s what I’d take care of first,” he said. “That wiring.”

  That night my mother found the inspection report in the packet of papers involving the purchase, and sure enough, every single problem they’d listed that afternoon had been duly noted. And as her contractor friend had feared, the wiring throughout the store was judged to be “substandard and potentially hazardous.”

  “It’s why we got the place so cheap, probably,” my father said when she finished quoting the concluding paragraph.

  “You, Lou,” she reminded him. “It’s why you got the place so cheap.”

  I couldn’t help noticing, though, that both their signatures were affixed to the bottom of the closing statement. My father’s handwriting was straight up and down. I had to admit it looked like the writing of a child who was doing all he could do to stay between the lines. My mother’s hand was small and graceful, professional in appearance. Teresa Louise Lynch, it said, surprising me. Until that moment, I’d had no idea what her middle name was, or even if she had one.

  IT TOOK nearly six months to make all the necessary repairs, and I had no idea where my parents found the money. Finally, though, they got new tenants, and they were in the midst of moving in one gray, rainy November afternoon when I got home from school. That morning their possessions had arrived, not in a moving van but in a flotilla of pickup trucks and rusted-out station wagons. These were parked right in front of Ikey Lubin’s, making it difficult for my father’s customers to dart in and out like they usually did. Nothing was boxed up or organized in any way. It looked to my mother like things had simply been carried out of wherever the renters had been living and tossed into the beds of their vehicles. Some unloading had been done by the time I got home, but several of the trucks were still piled high with furniture and mattresses that had been tied down with old clothesline, this despite the fact that it had been rainy all day. “The Grapes of Wrath,” my mother muttered, staring out from between the blinds.

  The new tenant, Nancy Salvatore, was an old high school friend of hers, and the identically beer-gutted men who owned the curb-parked vehicles were her brothers. They took beer breaks under the sloping second-story roof every half hour, crushing their empty cans and tossing them, or trying to, into the bed of one of the pickups on the street below. They might have started out with pretty good aim, but by midafternoon the street near the truck was littered with flattened beer cans. According to my mother, they’d brought a case along with them, run out before noon and made a trip to the A&P for more, even though my father sold beer.

  My mother would’ve been even madder if she hadn’t been up a stump. She didn’t usually feel sorry for anybody, but she did for Nancy, who worked at a beauty salon downtown and was having a hard time. She’d been divorced twice, and as a result had given up on marriage, if not men. She was raising her daughter with the help of a series of “uncles,” the most recent a deadbeat named Buddy Nurt. It was Buddy, she told my mother, she was hoping to escape by moving into our flat.

  My father hadn’t wanted to rent to Nancy, who’d lived her whole life in the Gut. To him, it made no sense to spend good money fixing up the place only to turn around and rent to someone who’d have it looking and smelling like a tenement again in short order. My mother had talked him into it, and I could tell she was already regretting doing so.

  When I went over to help out at the store, like I always did after school, my father had just about had it with the brothers, who at this pace would still be unloading sog
gy mattresses this time tomorrow. Leaving me to man the register, he went outside and started picking up the beer cans littering the street. He’d gathered up about half of them when one of the brothers called down from the upstairs porch, “Hey, leave them cans alone.”

  Apparently they were all drinking different brands of beer and keeping some kind of score, which my father was messing up. How could they figure out who had to pay for the next case? My father stood his ground, reminding the brothers that this wasn’t the Gut, that East End people didn’t toss empty beer cans into the street, to which the man responded that if this was true, then he was damn glad he didn’t live here. But they took no further exception to my father’s cleaning up, and half an hour later another brother came down to say they were sorry about how they’d been behaving, and to make amends they’d buy their next case of beer from my father. “How much longer you fellas think you’ll be?” he asked.

  The man shrugged, as if to say it was hard to predict given this many variables, but when he was gone my father ventured a guess that the job would be done when the beer was gone, along with the money to buy more.