Bridge of Sighs

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.
             
     
    N OT 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