Bridge of Sighs

second-floor bedrooms. His first night back, in June, Noonan had smelled his father on the thin mattress and known the truth, that he’d driven him back into the master bedroom and also that his mother had understood this would be the inevitable result of her son’s return, at least on those nights when her husband wasn’t in the West End.
    Tonight, he could tell from the clumsy banging in the kitchen that his father had been drinking, but he was surprised when he appeared in the arched doorway and stood there staring as Noonan pretended to sleep. In his inebriation had he forgotten who now occupied the room? Did it take him a moment to realize who was sprawled across the pullout? For the longest time he just stood there, breathing heavily, until finally he said, “You’ve got it
all
wrong, Buddy Boy. You think you’ve got all the answers, but you haven’t even bothered to ask the questions.”
    It was a strange sensation, being spoken to in the dark, and stranger still when Noonan thought he heard something of Mr. Berg in his father’s voice. Was that possible? Had Sarah’s father gotten so far into his head? The two men’s voices couldn’t have been more different—one deep and gruff, the other thin and brittle—and his father’s powerful silhouette bore no resemblance to the emaciated Mr. Berg. Where, then, was the similarity? Something in the message itself, he decided. In honors, the teacher’s underlying assumption was that they had the wrong answers because they hadn’t asked the right questions. They’d come in thinking they were smart—chosen for honors, after all—but Mr. Berg was there to prove them wrong. Was it possible that Mr. Berg was a bully like his father, just a different kind?
    Noonan found himself smiling in the dark, for it occurred to him now that his father might one day become the dying man in the Hughes poem. That after all his sons were grown and departed, he would wake up one day, broke and broken, his health shot, and ask for a fish. Noonan’s mother would look that up in her dream book and play the number, maybe even win. She had it coming, God knew. Maybe that was how things would play out: his father dead (no fish) and his mother with the winnings. Except this wasn’t a very good reading of the poem. Its title was “Hope,” sure, but it offered little for either the dying man or his wife, merely the longest of odds and the ignorance necessary to make the odds look short.
    For some reason Noonan’s thoughts drifted from the poem to Lucy. At first he’d assumed it was the discussion of parents, the first great mystery in a life full of them, that had sent Lucy into his funk, but maybe not. According to Nan, he’d been best friends with that kid who’d taken his life. Noonan had been surprised to hear about this friendship, and now it occurred to him why. Back in June, that first day he’d gone over to Ikey’s, Lucy had rattled on for hours, catching him up on everything that had happened while Noonan was away at the academy, and there hadn’t been a single mention of David Entleman. Probably he just hadn’t wanted to revisit such a sad subject.
    Poor Lucy. Except for Sarah, he’d been mostly unlucky in his friends, including Noonan himself, who always tried his best to conceal his ambivalence. But maybe in his heart of hearts Lucy knew. With a start Noonan thought about that day at the railroad trestle. By then the Marconis had moved out of the West End, though Noonan still missed his friends from the old neighborhood. Sometimes, instead of going straight home after school like he was supposed to, he’d head down to Berman Court in the hopes of running into Jerzy and the others, which was how he happened to find them the afternoon they’d put Lucy in the trunk and pretended to saw it in half. It had been his panicked, muffled screams that drew Noonan to the trestle, and he should’ve made Jerzy let him out right then. Why hadn’t he? Because the danger wasn’t real. The boys were just taking turns sawing away at a crossbeam that was five feet above the trunk. They’d tried to scare Noonan with the same trick earlier in the summer. Unlike Lucy, he’d climbed into the trunk on a dare. Then, once he was inside, they told him they were going to saw him in half, but they were his friends and he could tell they weren’t sawing on the trunk itself. Eventually, when Lucy got tired of screaming and really listened, he’d realize that, too. That’s why