Bridge of Sighs

possibility?”
    “Yes?”
    “Mr. Marconi has his doubts,” Mr. Berg said, responding to the guffaw Noonan wasn’t able to suppress. “Are you an agnostic in general, Mr. Marconi, or only where Miss Beverly is concerned?”
    “In general,” Noonan said, careful to sound very certain.
    “Are there other agnostics in this class, or is Mr. Noonan our sole practitioner?”
    No response.
    “How about you, Miss Beverly?”
    Nan started again. Having been called on once, she clearly didn’t expect to find herself in the crosshairs again so soon. “I don’t know?”
    “What don’t you know?”
    “What an agnostic is.” She was looking more alarmed by the moment.
    “I don’t understand you at all, Miss Beverly. When you know the answer you make it sound like a question, but when you have an actual question—what is an agnostic?—you don’t ask it. Is it that you don’t want to know what an agnostic is? Or are you afraid you won’t like the answer?”
    “How come you’re picking on her?” Perry blurted.
    “Now
there’s
a question in its true form,” Mr. Berg replied, as if Kozlowski had offered his comment with no other purpose than to be helpful. After a beat he turned to him again and said, “Which answer would you prefer?”
    “I don’t—”
    But Mr. Berg had already redirected his attention to Nan. “A doubter, Miss Beverly. An agnostic is a doubter. Someone who questions things, especially authority.” As a visual aid, he now pointed at Noonan, in case anyone had forgotten who was being alluded to. “Mr. Marconi claims to be one, and I believe him. How about you? Is he convincing on this point, or do you think it’s merely a pose?” Again he lowered his voice and leaned forward, as if this were just between the two of them. Nan Beverly leaned back in her seat, while everyone else leaned forward. “People adopt poses, don’t they? Pretend to be what they aren’t?”
    “I don’t—”
    Then just as quickly he was done with her. “What’s the opposite of an agnostic, Mr. Lynch?”
    Noonan looked over at his friend, expecting Lucy to be paralyzed by the sudden spotlight and relieved to discover he wasn’t.
    “A believer?”
    “Another answer in the form of a question. You and Miss Beverly should marry and have children,” Mr. Berg said, a suggestion that caused Lucy to blush deeply. “And which are you, Mr. Lynch, a doubter or a believer?”
    “I guess I’m a little of both,” Lucy said.
    “An equivocation, surely,” Mr. Berg replied, then regarded Nan rather pointedly.
    It took her a moment to realize what he might be driving at. “What’s an equivocation?” she finally said.
    Mr. Berg applauded. “Bravo, Miss Beverly. I take back everything I said about you. Except the part about being blond. You’re very blond.”
    “What’s wrong with that?” Perry wanted to know.
    “Which answer would you prefer?”
    “Why do you keep asking me that?”
    “Because I haven’t yet received a satisfactory answer. Or even an unsatisfactory one, come to that. The good news is that we have the whole semester, so I’m not discouraged by our lack of progress thus far, and I hope you aren’t either. Now, Mr. Lynch.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Why do you suppose you’re a bit of a doubter and a bit of a believer?”
    “I’m still learning?”
    “Not a bad answer, Mr. Lynch, even if stated in the form of a question, though I don’t believe it’s true. Do you want to know why? Yes,
excellent,
I knew you would. You may still be learning, as you say, but you aren’t learning much. Which is to say, you aren’t learning at the rate you were when, say, you were two or three years old. That’s when the real learning takes place. By the time we’re seventeen or eighteen our characters and attitudes are mostly formed. We’re basically looking for evidence in support of conclusions we’ve already arrived at regarding the world and our place in it. We like the
idea
of change even though we know it’s an illusion. We keep hoping for new experiences, but we’re frightened, because the next really new experience for us will be death, and we aren’t likely to learn much from that, are we? That little item’s pretty much the end of our education, though it will answer the question whether it’s better to doubt than believe, which reminds me of my original question, Miss Beverly. You and Mr. Lynch have so much in common—I speak here temperamentally—that I wonder if you can think