To Noonan, it was unsettling to be so confused. He could read most girls, whose level of interest in him was like a visible aura. They could be as coy as they wanted, but he still knew. It was almost cheating, really, like shooting fish in a barrel. With Sarah, though, it was different. She made no secret of how glad she was they were friends. That should’ve clarified matters, but instead it confused them. Could it be that her undisguised affection was the source of his confusion? It was possible. Most of the girls who were drawn to Noonan didn’t like him very much. At the beginning they didn’t know that, which was good, and even after they learned it, they sometimes forgot, which could be nice, too. Was it the fact that Sarah actually liked him that muddled things?
The other possible explanation was even more distressing. What if it had nothing to do with her affection for him, but rather his for her? Tessa Lynch, damn her, had warned him that he’d be interested in Sarah once he got to know her. Had he fallen for her? He’d been attracted to lots of girls before without ever really falling for one. The solution was obvious. He simply wouldn’t fall for Sarah Berg. It shouldn’t even be that difficult, now that he’d made up his mind. Maybe she wasn’t the bony, angular girl who’d left in June, but she wasn’t exactly a ravishing beauty either. And besides, she was Lucy’s girlfriend. There. It was settled.
Still, he looked forward to school starting and wondered if they’d have any classes together. Probably not. His academic record at the academy hadn’t warranted advanced placement, which was why, when Sarah advised him on the drive back to Thomaston to drop Mrs. Summers and sign up for her father’s honors English class, he’d feigned uninterest, not wanting to admit he wouldn’t qualify. With any luck, Sarah had a weak subject herself, maybe math, that would land her in one of his regular-track classes. Or else he could elect an art class. He’d never taken one—art hadn’t even been offered at the academy—but how hard could it be? During the summer he’d often studied Sarah’s drawing of Ikey Lubin’s and even wondered what role it might’ve played in pulling him, against his better judgment, into Lynch World. Would he have enjoyed Ikey’s as much if he hadn’t seen it through her eyes? He liked the idea of getting people to see things as he did without them even being aware of what he’d done. Now that would be a trick worth knowing.
A DREAM OF FISH
MRS. SUMMERS, Noonan’s homeroom teacher, regarded him blackly over the top of her bifocals, her mouth drawn into a thin line. Was it possible she disliked him already on the basis of how he’d said “Here” when she called his name? “See me before you leave for first period,” she told him, eliciting a nasty chuckle from Perry Kozlowski. Ten minutes into the new school year and Marconi’s already in trouble, the chuckle seemed to signify. Same old Bobby.
“There’s been a change in your classes,” the teacher informed him as the other students filed out of homeroom. “You’ve been added to Mr. Berg’s roster.” She was holding what he assumed was his revised schedule.
“Really?” he said, surprised, then thought: Sarah. So, even as he’d been hoping they might have a class together, she’d been doing the same thing. At last, a clear signal.
“I don’t blame you for being surprised,” Mrs. Summers said, clearly annoyed, though apparently not at him. “Honors is supposed to be reserved for our best and brightest students.”
“Right,” he said, half expecting her to realize she’d just insulted him and apologize.
“That man thinks the rules are for other people,” she went on, growing red faced. “That he is exempt.”
“Well,” Noonan said, holding out his hand for the schedule, then dropping it again when he saw it wasn’t forthcoming.
“It’s not bad enough I have to spend my summer explaining to every Jewish mother I meet on Hudson Street why her child wasn’t selected for honors English, while he hides at home pretending to write that stupid book,” she told him, clutching the schedule close to her massive bosom. She seemed to understand that it was the only thing that held him there and after surrendering it she’d be talking to herself.
“If—”
“It’s not bad enough he hogs all the honors classes for himself, as if the rest of us were unqualified. It’s not bad enough—”
“Uh…I’m going to be late?” he ventured. He wasn’t sure how many more “bad enough’s” there might be, but he guessed quite a few.
Reluctantly, she handed over the schedule. “I’ve got my eye on you, mister,” she warned him.
Outside in the hall, Lucy was waiting for him, beaming. “Mr. Berg’s honors?”
Noonan nodded, feeling guilty that his friend should be so pleased on his behalf. Anybody but Lucy would be suffering a pang of jealousy, or at least vague misgivings, that his girlfriend was pulling strings for another boy. Hadn’t it dawned on the poor bastard why she’d done it? “What do you have for first?” he asked, trying to conceal his elation.
“Calculus. You?”
“Geometry. See you in third.”
“Be prepared,” Lucy said. “He’s pretty weird.”
Two periods, then, before he’d see Sarah. He thought again of her drawing, the meaning of which had now subtly shifted. Instead of being about to enter Ikey Lubin’s and Lynch World, he now saw himself on the verge of entering Sarah’s affections.
Two hours later, though, he would conclude that Mrs. Summers had been right. He wasn’t one of the brightest kids in the school. Why in the world had he assumed Sarah would be taking her father’s class? Sure, she was smart and industrious, an honors student, but the class was being taught by her father. Of course he couldn’t select his own daughter. What had Noonan been thinking? And that wasn’t even the worst part. Sarah, it turned out, was in Mrs. Summers’s class. She’d moved him out of the one class they otherwise would’ve shared. Speaking of clear signals.
HIS HOMEROOM TEACHER HAD BEEN right about something else, too. The best and brightest of the senior class seemed to have been purposely excluded from Mr. Berg’s honors seminar on the American Dream, which resembled some weird social experiment whose purpose wouldn’t be revealed until the study was concluded. A case might be made for Lucy, Noonan supposed. He had good grades, and he was a reader, though his taste in books tended toward the juvenile. Worse, his thinking was relentlessly conventional. He had not only been taught by nuns, he’d actually listened to them.
But what was Nan Beverly doing there? Had her old man pulled strings? It was possible. Nan was good-looking, but there was also something a little bit off about her—something green, unseasoned—that Noonan couldn’t quite put his finger on. She had a good body, so that wasn’t it. What, then? She’d dated every eligible boy in town, some two or three times, and not one, if the rumors were true, had gotten anywhere with her. But that, he guessed, might have less to do with her than them. Pretty girls who had rich daddies often inspired cowardice in their social inferiors, which in Nan’s case was pretty much everybody.
Just as he arrived at this conclusion, she glanced over and met his eye, then looked away with indifference, feigned, he was certain, because her aura told a different story. If she looked at him again before the end of the period, he’d be sure, and he was already sure. She’d make an excellent diversion, he decided, and he was going to need one now that he’d come a cropper with Sarah. Green or not, Nan was the prettiest girl in the school. He wondered if she expected his courage to fail him, as it had her other boyfriends. For her sake, he hoped not, because it wouldn’t.
But of all the kids in Mr. Berg’s honors class, Perry Kozlowski was the most inexplicable. He wasn’t so much dumb as sullen, a boy who seemed to embrace his reputation as a lout. Noonan supposed his attitude had something to do with the lush garden of acne on his face, in full bloom at the moment, zits on top of zits, crowding each other angrily for space, their tendrils tapping into some deep reservoir of pus. According to Lucy, the experience of nearly killing the Mock kid had briefly chastened him. Public opinion, in the weeks and months that followed,
had unexpectedly turned against the Kozlowskis. To get Perry out of town and away from social scrutiny, they’d enrolled him in a Catholic summer camp. Mr. Kozlowski had been against so drastic a measure, unwilling to make a mountain out of the Three Mock molehill, but their buttinsky parish priest had told Mrs. Kozlowski that their son had committed a mortal sin by beating that colored boy into a coma, and damned fool that she was, she’d believed him. “Let him pay for camp, then,” her husband said when he found out how much it cost. Wasn’t it just like a priest to come up with a penance that put money into the church’s coffers? “What do you wanna bet he gets a cut?”
To their surprise—again, according to Lucy—Perry actually liked the camp and learned from the Brothers who ran it the seriousness of his offense and how lucky he was not to have committed it against a white boy, which would not have been a summer camp matter. After six short weeks he returned to Thomaston sunburned and rehabilitated, actually thinking he might have a religious vocation. The Brothers were big, robust men with florid faces and a fondness for brutal full-court basketball, played outdoors in the noonday sun. They employed sports metaphors to explain faith and morality to teenage boys who hadn’t much interest in either one. They also liked to drink and intimated they’d have been ladies’ men, too, had women been allowed. The Brothers were, in short, the antithesis of every wimpy, pansy-ass priest he’d ever encountered. Brother Jacob was his favorite, perhaps because he was built powerfully and low to the ground, like Perry himself, and his rugged fifty-year-old face bore the pockmarked ravages of Perry’s own affliction. But what he’d liked most was the man’s attitude, his willingness to admit that some things could neither be helped nor changed. His favorite expression was “That’s the way it goes. First your money, then your clothes.” Returning from camp that August, the whole Three Mock incident a distant memory, all Perry Kozlowski could talk about was Brother Jake, and even now, years later, he never missed an opportunity to remind people of how things went: money first, clothing afterward.
In the long run, though, he’d decided against the priesthood. In high school he discovered that football offered many of the same advantages as religion—structure, unlimited zeal, a uniform. Much as he’d enjoyed the Brothers’ hard-hitting brand of basketball, football was even better. Here, within clearly defined parameters, you could stick people as hard as you wanted and get praised for so doing. Instead of people looking at you like you were some sort of criminal, they applauded your better efforts and shouted gratifying things like “Hell of a shot, Koz!” If the boy you stuck gave you attitude, you kept sticking him until he got tired of it, then the two of you were friends and teammates. Some different from the situation with Three Mock, to whom he’d apologized—“No hard feelings” were his exact words—and been given a blank stare in return, as if the kid imagined it was easy to humble yourself to a Negro who’d brought everything on himself to begin with.
Perry Kozlowski in honors?
Then there was Noonan himself, whose history was only slightly less violent, his claim to fame being sent away to a military reform school. With a mother who tried to flee her family every time she got knocked up, and a father who made no secret of the woman he kept on lower Division Street. What must his classmates think of his inclusion? He could imagine Nan Beverly telling her parents over dinner, “You’ll never guess who they let into honors English. Robert Marconi. I’m not kidding.” Maybe that in itself was reason enough to tough this out.
LUCY HAD TALKED about Mr. Berg all summer long, but even if Noonan hadn’t heard a word, he’d have known at a glance that the man was batshit. He arrived in class cave dweller pale, looking like he’d sworn off both sunlight and solid food for the entire summer. His belt had additional holes punched in it, inexpertly, with an awl, but even so his trousers rode dangerously low on his nonexistent hips. He held his scuffed, boxy briefcase to his chest, and when he set it down on the desk Noonan saw why: its handle had apparently snapped off. What sort of man didn’t buy himself a new briefcase or just fix the old one?
Three Mock, whom he had heard was Mr. Berg’s constant companion, slipped in behind him, silent and vacant as always. The teacher’s interest in the Mock boy was a matter of considerable speculation. Having reluctantly come to terms with him as a tragedy, most people were taken aback when he abruptly awoke from his six-month coma, much of it spent in a facility in Schenectady. Peacefully asleep in another town, he was someone they could feel bad about, whereas shuffling through the streets of Thomaston he was a constant accusation. Then, when Mr. Berg took him under his wing, hiring him to do odd jobs and helping him enroll in vocational night classes, many imagined it was because he felt responsible, as well he might. Had he prevented his daughter from going to that matinee with a colored boy, the whole unfortunate incident never would have happened. Others—Mrs. Lynch among them—had a different interpretation. Far from feeling guilty, Mr. Berg took perverse pleasure in parading Three Mock around town, enjoying the effect he had on people. The whole town, in Mr. Berg’s view, was responsible for this outrage. Maybe the Kozlowski kid had administered the actual beating, but he’d done so with the town’s implicit blessing, indeed with half of Thomaston looking on. That no charges were ever filed served as the community’s final benediction. It was simple justice, as Mr. Berg saw it, for the victim to remain in full view of his victimizers. It was even rumored that the assault on Three Mock was a central event in Mr. Berg’s novel.
What, Noonan couldn’t help but ask, did the boy himself think about being put to such ironic use? If he had any views on the subject, or indeed any other subject, he gave them no voice. While no actual tests had been run, because of his slowness of speech and manner it was generally conceded that brain damage had occurred, though with a Negro you couldn’t be sure. He did follow instructions well enough, had no trouble completing simple tasks and seemed to have an aptitude for anything mechanical, the very sort of thing Mr. Berg himself had little patience for. Some people were convinced the boy liked to hang around the Berg house because of Sarah, but according to Lucy, he was oblivious to her presence and never even looked at her. No, if the boy loved anybody, it was the girl’s father.
Today, he was carrying a portable record player, which he went about setting up while Mr. Berg wrote a poem—at least Noonan supposed that’s what it was—on the portable blackboard that had been wheeled in on casters earlier.
He rose up on his dying bed
and asked for fish.
His wife looked it up in her dream book
and played it.
Was Mr. Berg himself the author of these lines? Noonan wondered. If so, had he written them out from memory or composed them on the spot? Noonan sort of liked the poem, though it didn’t make much sense. Why would a dying man want fish? Who had to look that word up and how had the wife played it? Like a song on a piano? Had Mr. Berg left out a word? Was she supposed to play “with” it? Feeling Lucy’s eyes on him, he glanced over, and sure enough, his friend was grinning at him as if to say Pretty weird, huh? Noonan raised an eyebrow. Yup, pretty weird.
Their classmates were also studying the poem, with expressions ranging from confusion to alarm. Noonan had little trouble reading their thoughts, since they weren’t that dissimilar to his own. Was it too late to drop honors and return to Mrs. Summers’s class? She was beyond dull but at least, by Thomaston standards, sane. She was also his homeroom teacher and by returning to her own class he might get back into her good graces. Outweighing these considerations, though, was the difficulty of explaining such a decision to Sarah.
Mr. Berg stepped back and examined what he’d written, then slashed the word “hope” onto the board with such force that the chalk broke. Was that the poem’s title? And what did these lines have to do with hope? Three Mock, who’d plugged in the record player, now turned the power on and placed the arm on its rest, awaiting further instruction.
“Take a seat,” Mr. Berg suggested. When the boy started toward the back of th
e room, he added, “No, right up here in front. This isn’t a Birmingham bus, Mr. Mock. You can tell, because it’s not yellow and it doesn’t move.”
This, Noonan guessed, must be a joke, because then he smiled, his mouth full of thin, wolfish teeth the same shade of yellow as the inside of his collar and the underarms of his otherwise grayish-white short-sleeved shirt. This was Sarah’s father? He searched Mr. Berg’s features for genetic resemblance, half hoping to find some. Meeting a girl’s parents was like getting an unauthorized glimpse of the future. If he looked at Sarah and saw her father, or vice versa, that would be enough to banish her attractions for good—whatever those attractions might be, since he hadn’t figured them out yet.
Three Mock did as he was told, taking a seat near the door. Perry Kozlowski, who apparently expected him to leave once he’d set up the record player, cast a sullen, resentful look in the teacher’s direction. “Mr. Berg?” he said, still staring at the boy.
But the man was shuffling through the stack of records he’d brought, finally slipping one from its sleeve and balancing it on the spindle. When the record dropped onto the turntable and the tone arm lowered gently onto the vinyl, there was a loud hissing. The record had clearly been worn scratchy, a problem Mr. Berg seemed to believe could be remedied by turning the volume up, causing everyone to wince. Spreading his feet wide, he began snapping his fingers to the beat, bobbing his head and grinning his yellow grin. Was this another joke? Nobody seemed to know.