Bridge of Sighs

bastards,” Dec said, “and if they ever get loose in our secondary, it’s all over.”
    “We’ve got some speed,” Noonan said out of a loyalty he hadn’t known he felt until the words were out of his mouth. He, too, had heard the Puerto Ricans were quick.
    “Coach should be recruiting some of those Negro kids from off the Hill,” Dec said. “They can run, at least the ones that haven’t been beat up to the point of brain damage. I’m guessing even in his present state that Mock kid could run circles around you and Kozlowski.”
    “You should bet on Mohawk,” Noonan suggested, “if you think they’re so much better.”
    “I might,” he said. “But that’s assuming I could find somebody to bet on you.”
             
     
    M R. B ERG’S NEXT CLASS WAS even more disconcerting. The same poem was still on the blackboard, and he picked up right where they’d left off, with Lucy’s brainstorm about the wife betting on her husband’s dream.
    Perry still refused to see it. “That’s stupid,” he said. “Why would she bet on somebody else’s dream? Besides, the guy’s hallucinating. The whole thing’s crazy.”
    “Who remembers David Entleman?” Mr. Berg asked, and evidently Noonan was the only one who didn’t. The Entleman family, he learned later, had moved into a house in the East End shortly after he’d been sent to the academy. One morning about a year later, Mr. Entleman had gone into the garage and found his son David dangling from a rafter. The next day everybody had picked the day/month/year of his suicide as their number. Had it hit, local bookies joked, they’d all have had to join that fucking kid on the rafter.
    “Your father never bets the number?” Mr. Berg asked Perry.
    “He used to, back when he worked at the tannery.”
    “Not anymore?”
    “You can’t bet at GE,” he said.
    “Why not?”
    “It’s not allowed. They don’t let bookies in.”
    “Why not?”
    “It’s against the law.”
    “But wasn’t it also against the law at the tannery?”
    “People want to bet. They enjoy it.”
    “Like smoking,” Mr. Berg said, taking this opportunity to light up. He again offered the pack to Noonan, who this time declined. “So if you really enjoy something, it’s okay, even if it is against the law.”
    Perry shrugged.
    “How do you think the bookies got into the tannery?”
    Perry snorted. “They walked in. They made the rounds every day. Everybody knows.”
    And Mr. Berg again leaned forward, crooking his finger for Perry to lean toward him, which he reluctantly did.
    Noonan was beginning to recognize this as part of the game they’d all embarked on. It was like Hamlet, alone onstage, addressing his innermost thoughts to the audience in the form of a monologue:
To be, or not to be
…
    “Even…Miss Beverly’s father?” Mr. Berg whispered, just loud enough for everyone to hear.
    Perry snapped back in his chair. “How would I know?”
    “No idea?”
    Perry shrugged, torn between loyalty to a pretty girl who’d never given him the time of day and his desire not to appear stupid. “It’s his factory.”
    Mr. Berg nodded thoughtfully. “His business to know,” he said, as if it pained him greatly to acknowledge this. “I see what you mean.” Then he looked over at Nan, whose eyes, Noonan noticed, had filled with tears. “Want to know a secret?” he asked her, his voice full of sudden, alarming good cheer. “I never even knew what
my
father did for a living.”
    “Come on,” Perry said, though the man was no longer talking to him.
    “I shit you not,” said Mr. Berg, still looking at Nan, like he was about to reach out and take her hand.
    “You never asked him?” Perry said.
    “Claimed it was none of my business. Acted like I had a hell of a nerve to ask. Said there was food on the table and that was all I needed to know. Mr. Mock here knows more about his father than I knew about mine,” he said, turning to the silent boy. “What’s your father do, Mr. Mock?”
    “Paints the fence.”
    “See? Mr. Mock knows what his father does. He paints the fence around Whitcombe Hall. And what’s he do when he finishes, Mr. Mock?”
    “Paints it again.”
    “So your old man was a hoodlum or something?” Perry interrupted—anxious, Noonan thought, that they linger on the Mock family no longer than absolutely necessary.
    “It’s a mystery,” Mr. Berg said, throwing up his hands dramatically. “That’s what our parents are. The first