Bridge of Sighs

  But not this day. Today he was still a boy, and he was quaking violently now, waiting, as he had been for ten hours, for what would happen next. He wasn’t stupid. He knew the thing to say was I’m sorry. For his own good as well as his mother’s. I’m sorry. Say he didn’t know what she wanted the money for. She’d back him up, no matter what he said. Though his father wouldn’t believe either of them, that’s what he wanted to hear, and once he did then things would gradually get better. I’m sorry was the right thing to say, the only thing, really. Instead he heard himself say, the words nearly lost in his sobs, “You’re why she runs away. If you were nice to her, she wouldn’t want to. It’s you she hates.”

  As he said this, his father stood over him flexing his big fists, the birthmark along his hairline dark purple now with rage. Scared as he was, Noonan remembered thinking, almost with relief, All right then. This was the day the terrible blow would finally come. By now his brothers had begun to cry, and his mother was pleading urgently on his behalf, imploring her husband not to strike him, telling him he was just a boy, that he hadn’t had any idea what she wanted the money for, that he didn’t mean what he’d just said. And besides, it wasn’t true. She didn’t hate him and didn’t want to leave her family, not really. It was just that sometimes she got so tired and confused that she was afraid she’d just start screaming in front of the children. “He’ll apologize,” she said. “Bobby will apologize right now. You will, won’t you, sweetie?” She’d come over to where he stood and gotten down on her knees. She’d taken his hand and was kissing it, wetting it with her tears. How ugly she was, he remembered thinking, her face contorted with need and fear. “Tell him you didn’t mean what you said, okay? Do that for Mommy?”

  Noonan hadn’t yet learned that his father would not strike him. That understanding would come to him years later at the academy, a blinding, utterly transformative revelation. For all his threats to thrash the boy within an inch of his life, he’d never once struck him or, now that he thought about it, his mother. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that adults could be like school-yard bullies? Sure, his father was a holy terror when it came to inanimate objects. Earlier that year he’d taken a Pyrex dish containing a casserole his mother had scorched and scraped the food directly into the trash, refusing to let anyone taste it. Then, to make his point—that the dish itself was ruined—he smashed it on the edge of the counter, in the process slicing open the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger, and a look of horrible satisfaction had come over his features as the bright blood pumped into the sink. “See?” he kept saying, showing the wound first to his mother, then to Noonan. “See?” Sure, the blood’s mine, he seemed to be saying, but next time it could be yours. Next time, if you aren’t careful, it will be yours. For years Noonan had watched his father kick trash cans, rupture suitcases, throw bottles across the room so they smashed on impact, their contents oozing down the wall.

  But what his father had always wanted him to fear was the day he’d lose control, when the blood would really flow. His mother’s surely, and probably his own. Maybe even his little brothers’. Noonan’s realization at the academy, that his father would run a bluff with his own blood, was liberating, though it came at a price. If he could figure this out at fifteen, what was wrong with his mother? Why had the penny never dropped for her? After all the years of cowering, had it never once registered that she was married to not just a bully but also a coward? How could she, a grown woman, fall for the same trick day after day, year after year?

  And why hadn’t he realized then, the day his father stood over him clenching his big fists, that he didn’t have to say the words, that nothing would happen if he didn’t? How could he have been so stupid? In his room at the academy he remembered the terrible quaver in his voice when he did what his mother had asked and said, “I’m sorry, Daddy.” In that moment he felt something harden inside him, and in time he’d recognize it for what it was—a resolution. To be more like him than her.

  HIS MOTHER HAD farther to travel, coming from Jacksonville, Florida, so he arrived home before she did. His father took the opportunity to lay down some ground rules. “You want to stay here, you turn over a new leaf. You do what I say, when I say it,” he said, holding his index finger an inch from Noonan’s nose, his brothers looking on. “I say jump, the only question you ask is how high. You understand?”

  “Yes, I do,” Noonan said. It was a strange sensation to be threatened by a man he’d feared all his life but no longer did. Though it was tempting to grab the finger and snap it back, he didn’t. It was true he’d had his troubles at the academy, but one of the things he’d learned there was the difference between what was worth fighting over and what wasn’t. For his own part, his father seemed to understand that something had changed, even if he wasn’t quite sure what. It wasn’t that his son was suddenly two inches taller than he was. No, he had a new calmness about him. Was it docility? Had the boy’s stubborn spirit finally been broken? Noonan could see his father’s mind working, observing, weighing evidence, trying to form a valid conclusion, but not guessing, at least not yet, the unthinkable truth.

  The next afternoon Noonan drove to Fulton to meet his mother’s train. “I almost didn’t recognize you, you’ve grown so,” she said when he took her, big as a house, into his arms. The journey had been arduous, and she looked pale and weak. “I forgot you have your driver’s license,” she told him. “I thought I’d have to wait here until your father got off work.”

  He took her suitcase, and when they passed the dumpster in the parking lot he said, “Dad told me to toss this in, but to hell with him.” When he realized she’d taken him seriously, he added, “That was a joke, actually.”

  “You shouldn’t say such things,” she told him.

  “Why’s that, Mom?” he asked, genuinely curious as to why he should exercise such caution when it was just the two of them.

  “You shouldn’t provoke him. You know how he is.”

  “Yeah, I do,” he told her, thinking about what he now knew, and what she still didn’t and probably never would.

  When she told him she’d run out of money and hadn’t eaten since the day before, he insisted they stop at a drive-in on the outskirts of Thomaston, where she inhaled a burger, a bag of fries and a big vanilla shake. Between bites, she told him why she thought things would be better now. His own return to Thomaston hadn’t been her only condition. When she delivered this baby—of necessity by Cesarean section, since that’s what the last two had been—she meant to have her tubes tied. “I made him promise,” she said, proud that she’d stood her ground. In return for this long overdue consideration, she agreed not to pester her husband about that woman anymore. Noonan hadn’t been aware she ever had even acknowledged the other woman’s existence, but she admitted she’d pestered him plenty, especially when she was pregnant. But now she wouldn’t be pregnant again.

  “And you trust him?” he asked, the question catching her off guard.

  “He promised,” she said. “He’s never done that before. He’s never promised me anything.”

  It stayed on the tip of Noonan’s tongue that once upon a time his father had promised to love, honor and obey.

  By the time they arrived, Noonan’s brothers were home from school, his father from work. The boys, while glad to have their mother home, were muted in their welcomes, perhaps because she looked so unwell or because they knew better than to be too effusive in front of their father, who neither rose from the table nor looked up from his newspaper, though he did say, “Welcome home, D.C.,” as was his well-established custom on these occasions.

  This, the moment of his mother’s homecoming, had been what Noonan had been waiting for. He’d spent the whole morning and early afternoon cleaning the house. He’d actually started the night before, but his father had told him to leave it. Whenever his wife fled, he was adamant that nothing be done in the house, so that when she returned all of her work would be waiting—the dishes accumulated in the sink
, dirty clothing mounded on the laundry room floor, the garage stinking of garbage. But as soon as his father had left for work that morning, Noonan had started in and worked right straight through until it was time to meet his mother’s train. He hadn’t been able to do everything. She’d been gone too long and the squalor was too great, though he’d done most of it and found the work powerfully and unexpectedly pleasing. Cleaning up after his father had forbidden him to was disobedience bordering on rebellion, but he’d known instinctively that the old man couldn’t call him on it because he could claim to be turning over that new leaf, as promised. That defiance and contempt could be cloaked so completely in apparent virtue made the housework doubly satisfying.

  Yet when he turned to his mother, hoping to enjoy her surprise and pleasure at returning to a clean house, she’d stopped in the doorway with one hand under her abdomen, the other clutching the doorframe and her eyes clenched tightly shut. “Mom?” he said.

  “It’s wonderful to be here,” she told them, after the contraction passed. “And I’m sorry I can’t stay, but I have to go to the hospital now.”

  She had the baby by natural childbirth half an hour later, before her doctor could get to the hospital. After the fact, he took Noonan’s father aside to tell him about the damage that had been done. “You have to understand,” Noonan heard him say, “that it would be catastrophic for your wife to become pregnant again.”

  Later, when his brothers were in the nursery admiring the littlest Marconi, leaving him alone with his father, he took the opportunity to lay down some ground rules of his own. “I’ll do what you say, when you say it,” he promised his father. “You tell me to jump, I’ll ask how high. Just know this. You ever get my mother pregnant again, or call her D.C. in my hearing, I’ll kill you.”

  That was the other realization he’d come to at the academy. His mother’s first name was Deborah, but her middle name was Margaret, so why D.C.? He’d asked his father once, in her presence, and had never forgotten the look on her face. “Your mother knows what it means,” he’d chuckled. “She can tell you herself sometime, if she wants.”

  He’d awakened in his dorm room in the middle of the night, suddenly knowing. Dumb Cunt.

  NOT LONG after returning home, Noonan got a call from his old friend Lucy Lynch, who’d heard, somehow, that he was back in town. Noonan had been expecting the call, dreading it, really, because he could think of no good reason to renew their friendship, which had always been based, it seemed to him, on their mothers’ secret friendship and Lucy’s terrible neediness.

  Since confronting his father, though—his brow had darkened, but he’d just smiled at his son’s threat—he’d decided to focus on his future, whatever that might entail. His senior year, he understood, was a trial to be gotten through. Once he turned eighteen and had his high school diploma, his father would have no further control over him. He could head out west somewhere, get a job, take some night classes and begin some sort of life far from Thomaston, New York. Toward that end, he’d do well to keep busy and stay out of trouble, the latter always a challenge. He’d already decided to try out for the football team, which would provide both structure and the release of pent-up energy and animosity. And he planned to get as many part-time jobs as he could handle so he’d have some money saved for when he left town and be financially independent in the meantime. He was determined to ask his father for nothing.

  But he also felt an equally strong impulse to remain in Thomaston at least until their conflict reached a satisfying conclusion. His loathing of the man had deepened at the academy, distilling itself into a pure and satisfying essence, a reason for being that would vanish if he lit out for the West after graduation. He supposed it was possible this intense loathing was just the affection he felt for his mother turned upside down. After all, didn’t he have an obligation to protect her from further harm? And was it fair to abandon his brothers to the old man’s bullying? Attractive as these rationalizations were, the ugly truth was that his black hatred for his father was far more satisfying than the affection and obligation he felt toward his mother, which, though real enough, was also tinged with pity and, face it, something like the contempt one feels for a dog that continues to love the owner that beats it with a stick.

  The thing was, renewing his friendship with Lucy Lynch fit with neither the impulse to flee nor the one to stay. If the plan was to leave at the end of senior year and stay busy and out of trouble in the meantime, then friendships of any sort were probably counterproductive. If the plan was to stay until the conflict with his father was resolved, whatever that meant, then it was important to stay focused on that goal. Friendship, in all likelihood, would be a distraction. So when Lucy called and invited him to stop by his parents’ market—still called Ikey Lubin’s after they’d owned it for five years, its previous owner now dead of cancer—Noonan made an excuse, saying he had a job interview.

  “Too bad,” Lucy replied, surprisingly restrained in his disappointment. When they’d been boys and Noonan hadn’t been allowed to go next door and play, Lucy had always been inconsolable. “Why not?” he’d whine, never satisfied with “My dad said no.” Always demanding to know why he’d said no.

  “Maybe another time,” Noonan said, and thought to himself, Or maybe not.

  “I just wanted you to meet my girlfriend,” Lucy explained.

  Lucy had a girlfriend? Noonan couldn’t help being intrigued.

  Her name was Sarah Berg, the boy told him proudly, and she was leaving the next day to spend the summer with her mother. Her father, he continued, was a legendary Thomaston High English teacher. “She’s anxious to meet you,” he added, “but she’ll be back on Labor Day.”

  “Why would she want to meet me?” Noonan wondered.

  “She drew you.”

  Drew him?

  “Back in junior high, actually,” Lucy said, explaining that Sarah was an artist who, when they first started dating, had drawn the Lynch market, including his old friend. “Stop in sometime, I’ll show you. It’s cool.”

  Again, no pleading. By midafternoon Noonan’s curiosity, together with his need to get out of his parents’ house before his first part-time job began the next day, had gotten the better of him. It was a nice, warm afternoon, and the walk from the Borough to Third Street was pleasant, though it struck Noonan that he was going to need some kind of wheels and soon. One of his summer jobs was downtown, the other two over a mile away on the arterial highway. A car was out of the question if he meant to save money. A bike would be better than walking, but not a lot. Maybe a used motorcycle?

  He hadn’t been back to the old neighborhood since his family had moved, so he was surprised that the house they’d lived in wasn’t there anymore. Ikey Lubin’s, by contrast, had expanded. Otherwise, the neighborhood seemed unchanged. When he entered the market, Big Lou Lynch, at the register, looked just the same, except he wasn’t wearing his milk delivery whites anymore. Noonan recognized the man behind the meat counter as his brother, Declan. Clearly, neither one had any idea who he was.

  “Didn’t there used to be a house over there?” he asked Lucy’s father, pointing across the intersection.

  “Burned down six years ago,” the man said, smiling, for some reason, at the memory.

  Noonan nodded, trying to remember if he’d ever been told about this. “Then I guess we moved just in time,” he said, expecting him to put two and two together.

  Big Lou blinked and studied him, on the very precipice of comprehension, but only when Noonan assumed his old surfer’s stance, feet wide apart, arms out for balance, did he break into his wide, goofy grin. “Well, I’ll be,” he said. “Louie! Look who’s here!” He didn’t take his eyes off Noonan, as if he feared he might be an apparition.

  “I see him,” Lucy said, coming in from the back room with the identical goofy grin. “Wow,” he said. “You’re different.”

  “Well, you’ve changed, too.” Noonan chuckled, and they shook hands. Actually, Lucy looked pretty
much the same, except bigger. He was almost as big as his father now, still soft looking, though more comfortable in his skin, somehow.

  “I thought you said you couldn’t come by,” Lucy said, just a hint of the old whining and grievance coming through.

  “I got the job, so…”

  Big Lou leaned across the counter and gave his hand a vigorous shake. “How’s that wrist?” he said, as if the injury had occurred just last week and been on his mind ever since.

  “It healed,” Noonan said.

  “How’s your dad?”

  “The same,” Noonan told him, hoping that would be the end of the subject.

  “He done good down at the post office, didn’t he,” Mr. Lynch said. “People must like him there.”

  “You going out for football?” Dec Lynch interrupted.

  “I plan to,” Noonan admitted.

  “Can you block or tackle or hang on to the damn ball? Or will you be like the rest of the team?”

  “I guess we’ll see.”

  “Talk your buddy here into going out. He could use some toughing up.”

  “Come out from behind that meat case,” Lucy said, to Noonan’s surprise, “and we’ll see who’s tough.”

  “Watch yourself now,” his uncle advised. “Somebody’s about to come through that door who’s tougher than the both of us. Meaner, too.”

  The bell above the door tinkled then, and Tessa Lynch came in carrying a big stainless-steel tub of what looked like potato salad. She recognized Noonan immediately, and the thought crossed his mind that, unlike his own mother, it would have taken Lucy’s about two seconds flat to peg his old man for the bullying coward he was. On the other hand, she’d married Lucy’s father, so go figure.

  Only when Tessa Lynch stepped aside to hold the door did he realize there was a girl his age standing behind her, also holding a salad bowl. She too took him in with a single glance and broke into a wide smile. “Well,” Sarah Berg said, setting the salad down and giving him an unexpected hug. “It’s about time.”