Bridge of Sighs

could return as well. Which was how he came to spend his senior year at Thomaston High, how he came to meet Sarah and how his conflict with his father came to a final, brutal resolution. He would often wonder if, had his mother imagined the sequence of events she was putting in motion, she still would’ve brought him home.
             
     
    T HE FIRST TIME he’d been—what, six? They were still living at Berman Court, and her husband was working at the hotel then, but she forgot that Fridays were different, that on that day he worked as a letter carrier. She’d turned a corner, suitcase in hand, and practically run into him coming out of an apartment house. Had she just lowered her head and kept going, she still might’ve made it, because he was riffling through a fistful of letters as he walked. Instead, she’d let out a little squeal of surprise, and when he looked up, that was that. Grabbing the suitcase, he tried to open it on the spot, but she’d locked it with its tiny key, so he smashed it open on a nearby brick wall and tossed her clothing into the street, flinging the case over a nearby culvert and down the bank. Shaking, she started down after it, thinking that this was to be part of her punishment, but he told her no, leave everything right where it is, the clothes, too, even her underthings, and get on home where she belonged. But they couldn’t afford new, she objected, to which he replied that she should’ve thought of that before. Now she could do without.
    Even before his mother left, Noonan, young as he was, had known something was wrong. She’d told him not to worry, that she was just going away for the day, that he should look after his little brothers until his father got home from work. If there was an emergency, he was to go upstairs and get Mrs. Lynch. He knew she was lying, that she wasn’t just going away for the day, so he was surprised when she returned so soon. When he asked where the suitcase was, she said it was gone and started crying. Finally, she told him what had happened. She didn’t want him to go fetch her things, and he knew that his father wouldn’t want him to either, but he did it anyway, never mind the consequences. It was the beginning, as Noonan now saw it, of a seemingly ceaseless contest of wills with his father.
    When he arrived on the scene, his mother’s clothes still lay scattered in the street. Some of them had been run over by cars. People came out onto their porches to watch him, just a kid, gathering up these items, and it felt particularly awful to retrieve her panties and bras, things he knew he shouldn’t be touching. The suitcase, its hinges sprung, lay at the edge of the stream below, but he fetched it and stuffed the clothing inside, after which, of course, it wouldn’t close. Hard as it was to carry in that condition, he’d made it back the few blocks to Berman Court. His mother was still sitting in the chair where he left her, one hand over her mouth, the other over her swollen stomach, with his little brothers at her feet, behaving for once, having somehow intuited the gravity of the situation.
    Over the years she got better at fleeing, just never good enough. On her second attempt she got as far as the cigar store at the corner of Hudson and Division where the Greyhound bus stopped, but the man at the ticket window knew her husband and called him at work. The time after that she called a Hudson cab and took it to the train station in Fulton, where she bought a ticket to New York. Her plan was to get off in Fordham and take the local into the city, in order to fool Noonan’s father, but she’d been so exhausted by all the planning and the sleepless nights preceding that she’d fallen asleep. The conductor woke her in Grand Central after everyone else had gotten off the train. He had two men with him, one of whom took her by the elbow, the other carrying the suitcase she’d purchased used the week before and hidden in the back of the closet. She half expected the men to open the suitcase and toss her clothes onto the tracks, but all they did was put her on another train headed back north. She might have gotten off, say, in Poughkeepsie, and simply resumed her journey, but by then her respect for her husband’s power and reach was too great, as if he’d managed to convince her that he had a network of spies and accomplices as vast as the U.S. Postal Service, all of them devoted to making sure she stayed where she belonged. He