Bridge of Sighs

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.
             
     
    H IS 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