Bridge of Sighs

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 the 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