Bridge of Sighs (31 page)

What he did next was call my mother. I remember the phone waking me up, ringing there on the end table in the living room. My mother was downstairs reading, and with her back to the window, she had to rotate in her chair to pick up the phone, and that’s when she saw. “Lou!” she said. “There’s a fire next door!”

That, he informed her, was what he was calling about.

“Did you call the fire department?”

“You do it, okay?” he said. “I’ll be right over.”

This, of course, was in the days before 911. The fire department number was in the front of the phone book, but you had to look it up, then dial all seven digits. Further—how odd this seems now—the telephone was one of the things my father generally left to my mother. At home he always let her answer. If he wanted to talk to someone, he preferred to go see them, either that or say, “Tessa, call the plumber, would you?” There was a phone in the store, but he found all sorts of excuses for not answering it. One day my mother called and just let it ring until he finally picked up. “Don’t tell me that,” she said when he explained that he’d been too busy to get to it. “I’m standing right here in the front room looking at you. You’re all alone in there.”

“So, what do you want?”

“I want to know why you’re afraid of the damn phone.”

“I ain’t afraid of it—” he started, but she hung up.

My own theory is that he was less afraid of the phone than the phone
book.
I never knew my paternal grandparents, but I’m pretty sure my grandmother was illiterate. Grandpa could read just enough to get by. As a result my father was so far behind by the time he started school that he never caught up, which was probably why he was so proud of how I devoured books and so embarrassed when my mother accused him of moving his lips when he read the newspaper. The Thomaston phone book was pretty slender, but I could tell that its long columns of similar names, the one he wanted buried among so many others, frustrated him. In an emergency, he might not have remembered that the fire department’s listing was in the front, and even if he
had
remembered he’d have found at least a dozen other emergency numbers listed there and would’ve concluded the thing to do was call my mother.

When she hung up after calling the fire department, she saw that I’d come downstairs and was rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and staring stupidly out the window at the flames next door. By then you could actually
hear
the fire. “Get dressed, Lou,” she said. “Hurry, in case the fire jumps.”

“Where’s Dad?”

“Get dressed!”
she repeated, pushing me up the stairs. I did as I was told but apparently not fast enough, because a moment later she burst into my room and grabbed me by the elbow.

By the time we got out of the house, the neighbors were standing on their porches, pointing at the flames, which had spread to the second floor, and sirens were heading our direction. Across the intersection, the lights were all still on in Ikey Lubin’s, but there was no sign of my father. Nancy Salvatore, her robe pulled tightly across her chest, and Buddy Nurt, in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, had come out onto their upstairs porch to view the proceedings.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked again, but my question was drowned out by the fire engine screaming around the corner, and my mother just pulled me closer.

The flames were now dancing in the vacant windows of the Marconi flat. “Hurry up, before it jumps the roof!” one fireman shouted. Another connected a thick coil of hose to the hydrant conveniently located on our own terrace. I mowed around it every week, thinking of the plug as an inconvenience and wondering why it was there at all. “Is anyone inside?” I heard a fireman ask my mother.

She couldn’t have taken more than a second to respond, but the question, together with the fierce hug my mother was giving me, was enough for me to understand that my father was inside the burning house.

“Two women live on the first floor,” my mother said. “I think my husband’s gone in after—”

Several windows exploded outward just then, causing us to move farther back and everyone along the street to gasp.

“Where are the bedrooms?”

In the back, my mother said, and two of the firemen started around the far side of the building.

“Wet this one down,” one shouted to the big fireman operating the hose, which he then swung around to begin soaking our roof and back porch just a few feet from where the flames were licking at the Spinnarkle eaves, the force of the water dislodging a window screen that clattered onto the walk below.

“There!” someone shouted, and I saw that the front door to the Spinnarkles’ downstairs flat was now open, black smoke billowing out. A moment later a child emerged.

That’s what it looked like, though of course no child lived there, and it took me a moment to realize that this figure, doubled over choking, was one of the sisters. (I never could keep them straight.) She was blackened with smoke and soot and, I realized with a shock, completely naked. My brain immediately supplied a reason. The fire had burned her clothes off.

“This way, Edith!” she screamed back into the house (which made the screamer Janet). “This way, Mr. Lynch! Hurry!”

Several firemen ascended the steps now, and one of them threw a blanket around her, drawing her down the porch steps by force when what she intended, it seemed to me, was to go back into the burning house. Another fireman started in and then stopped in the doorway, reaching inside for Edith Spinnarkle’s hand and pulling her, also sooty and naked, out onto the porch.

What happened next surprised me even more than their nakedness. Just as the fireman was pulling her out of the house, Edith was reaching back and pulling with her other hand. I fully expected that when my father emerged, he’d be naked, too. After all, if the sisters had had their clothes incinerated, it followed that he’d likely be in the same condition, and as I remember it now across the years, I think I was more worried about the fact that he’d be naked in front of all our neighbors than about the possibility that he’d been injured in the blaze. So I was very surprised when he emerged fully clothed. His white short-sleeved shirt was black with soot, of course, but it wasn’t on fire.

“Lou!” my mother cried, bolting past firemen who were holding everybody at a distance, and I heard my father, blinded by the smoke and trying to locate her voice by sound, then bellow, “Tessa!” Now that he was safe, the tears started streaming down my face, and it seemed like I stood there forever, alone and forgotten on the sidewalk. I saw my parents embrace at the foot of the porch steps, then lost them in the encroaching crowd.

At this point the remaining windows of the Spinnarkle house exploded, glass raining down over the street. The entire structure was now engulfed in flame, and we were all herded to safety across the road. The firemen, cutting their losses, concentrated on trying to save the adjacent houses. As I pushed among the crowd of onlookers, I heard Edith Spinnarkle, hugging her sister close on a neighbor’s porch, cry out, “Our home! Our home, Janet! Look! It’s gone!”

I finally located my parents one porch farther down the block. My mother was clutching my father to her as one would a big, overgrown child. He was wrapped in a blanket and shivering violently, his tears leaving tracks down his sooty cheeks. Neither seemed to notice when I climbed the steps and sat down next to them. My father looked odd, and then I realized why. His eyebrows had been singed off. “Louie,” he said, finally recognizing me and drawing me close, glad for somewhere else to look, because he couldn’t bring himself to face the blaze. “Is our house going to burn down, Tessa?” he asked.

“No, Lou,” she assured him, though she wasn’t looking at the fire either, just at him.

“What’ll we do?” he wanted to know.

“It’s not going to burn down, Lou,” she said. “You saved it. If you hadn’t seen what was happening—”

“Is the store okay?” he said, causing me to glance over at Ikey Lubin’s. Why wouldn’t the store be okay, I wondered, since it was way on the other side of the street.

“The store’s fine, Lou. The house is fine. You saved Janet and Edith both. You saved their
lives,
Lou.”

My father looked over at them, huddled together on the steps of the porch next door, as if to ascertain whether seeing them there was full and sufficient evidence to warrant such a conclusion. “Then why is Louie crying?” he wondered.

“I don’t know,” my mother said, regarding me for the first time and laughing, which made me laugh, too, or rather to make some sound composed of relief and wonder and residual terror.

In twenty minutes the Spinnarkles’ home burned to the ground, the whole neighborhood watching.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I woke up so exhausted that I wondered if I’d had a spell in my sleep, since these sometimes took the form of vivid dreams. But when I pulled back the curtain of my bedroom window, I was surprised to find myself looking at the Gunther house, which hadn’t been part of the view until now. All that remained of the Spinnarkle house was the smoldering foundation and tipping chimney. My mother was in the shower, so I dressed quickly and went outside to inspect the ruins. It had rained in the night, and soot was draining in wide streams into the sewer grate. My father was already up and over at the store, where a police car at the curb didn’t strike me as odd, given last night’s dramatic events, though something did tickle at the edges of my memory. I tried to bring it front and center, but it wouldn’t budge.

Our own house had sustained more damage than I’d thought. The heat from the blaze had bubbled the paint along the near side, and the roof and cornice of the back porch were badly scorched. The night before, despite the fears voiced by both my mother and the firemen, the idea that the fire might leap from the Spinnarkle house to ours had seemed far-fetched, but I now saw how close we’d come, which in turn made me remember Edith Spinnarkle whimpering, “Our home!…Our home!” What, I wondered, would happen to them now? I hoped they wouldn’t be moving in with us, because that would be the end of our television viewing.

Thinking about all this I recalled the heat register conversation I’d heard late that night, after everything had finally calmed down and I’d been sent up to bed. “That’s how I found them,” I heard my father say. To which my mother replied, “Well, I’m not that surprised.” I’d fallen asleep shortly after that, too tired from all the excitement to consider what my mother hadn’t been that surprised by.

She was sitting at the table in her robe and staring into a cup of murky coffee when I went back inside. Seeing I was up and dressed, she said, “You should shower before we go to Mass.” We hadn’t been going to church much since my mother laid down the law to Father Gluck, but I understood why this morning might be different. God had looked out for us, so we’d go and give thanks. “Do I have to?” I said, prepared to be told to march.

“No.”

I sat down across the table from her, suddenly remembering the police car.

As if she’d read my mind, she said, “The store was robbed.”

“When?”

“While everybody was watching the fire. Your father never had a chance to lock up….”

“How much money—”

“Whatever was in the till. Saturday’s our best day, so…” She shook her head, as discouraged as I’d ever seen her. “What kind of person…”

The answer to her question came to me in the shower. When she and I had gone out into the street last night, I’d looked over at Ikey Lubin’s, expecting my father to come bursting out of the store, but what I saw was Nancy Salvatore in her robe and Buddy Nurt in his boxer shorts and sleeveless T-shirt up on their porch. Later, when my father asked if the store was going to be okay, I looked there again and saw Buddy standing with his hands in his trouser pockets on the sidewalk out front. Which meant that in between he’d gone inside and gotten dressed. At the time I concluded, if anything, that he must’ve come down to the street for a better view of the fire. Except that made no sense. From their upstairs porch they already had the best view possible.

Buddy Nurt had robbed us.

T
HE FIRE OCCURRED
late Saturday night, so it was Monday before my father appeared on the front page of the
Thomaston Guardian.
In the photo he’s holding up his two bandaged hands for the camera and, as I mentioned, without eyebrows. Otherwise, his hair was basically unharmed—Brylcreem, apparently, didn’t burn—and combed into his signature pompadour, which my mother must’ve done for him, given the condition of his hands. As a boy I always thought my father handsome, the sort of man people considered special in appearance as well as conduct, though I suppose this is how all boys regard their fathers. Now that he exists most vividly in my memory, the old newspaper photo sometimes catches me off guard, and I can’t help thinking that while this man is perfectly my father, perfectly Big Lou Lynch with his broad, good-natured smile and his big, awkward body, the picture doesn’t do him justice.

I still have the article, of course. Old and yellow and brittle, but safely under glass, it hangs on the wall in my study. At one point we had dozens of copies, because neighbors all along Third Avenue saved them for us. I remember the stack of newspapers in the corner of the living room, and also going through them, one after the other, proud yet disappointed, too, that the photograph and story were identical and thinking how much better and more just it would’ve been to have a different picture of my father in each copy, like baseball cards, so we could collect them all. By the next day, of course, there was other news, and that didn’t seem fair either.