Bridge of Sighs

Noonan hadn’t intervened. They’d free him soon, Jerzy had whispered, after they’d had a little fun, and afterward they’d all be friends. Noonan remembered rationalizing, as he trudged up the bank, that the experience would be good for Lucy, who was scared of his own shadow. When he was finally set free, he’d understand that there’d been nothing to fear.
    But this wasn’t the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. Not so help him God. In fact he’d been resentful of Lucy for a long time. From the beginning, really. He hated being taken out of Cayoga Elementary and sent to school with the weird Catholic kids, and he particularly hated that his mother insisted he make friends with Lucy Lynch, the weirdest of them all. He resented having to accompany him to and from school, but when he complained about how weird Lucy was and how none of the other kids liked him, his mother had grown even more insistent, reminding him the Lynches were both neighbors and nice people, especially Mrs. Lynch, who’d confided how the other kids made fun of her son with that cruel nickname and were always trying to scare him.
    For his mother’s sake, Noonan tried his best, though he soon grew weary of being Lucy’s only friend. To him, moving away from Berman Court meant a blessed end to that solemn duty. Sure, he was sorry about what happened on the trestle, but he still didn’t want to be his friend anymore, and his father, for perhaps the first time, took his side. When the Lynches had followed them to the East End, it was his father who, over his mother’s objections, had negotiated the friendship down to just Saturdays, when he and Lucy rode around pretending to surf in Mr. Lynch’s milk truck. There, he learned that Lucy’s experience in the trunk hadn’t left him wiser, only more needy and clinging. So when they moved to the Borough, he’d felt relieved a second time.
    He was sleepily pondering all this when he heard his father again, in the bathroom this time, and wondered if he’d return to the den with further observations. But the toilet flushed and the door to his parents’ bedroom opened and closed, and his mother asked softly if everything was all right. He thought again about Mr. Berg’s confession, if that’s what it was, that he never knew what his father did for a living, knew even less than the Mock kid did about his. Noonan’s own problem was the reverse. He knew his father all too well.
    Realizing that he’d once more balled his hands into fists, he decided it might be more pleasant to fall asleep thinking about Nan Beverly, who really
was
pretty and
did
have a good body and who
would,
against her better judgment, surrender to him one day. They had several classes in common, and today she’d suggested they study together sometime. Later, in the locker room he’d overheard some boys saying he was her new boyfriend. Somewhere, though, on the gray border between wakefulness and sleep, Nan became Sarah, and he was visited by yet another unwelcome, groggy thought: what would happen to Lucy if he stole her away? That he should have such a thought, even in passing, shamed him, and he rolled over so as not to face the den’s arched doorway, lest he imagine Mr. Berg with that yellow grin of recognition. And in that instant he decided what to do about Mr. Berg: he’d learn everything he could from the man while keeping him at arm’s length.
    He slept, then, and didn’t dream. When he awoke the next morning there was nothing to look up, no number to bet.

THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS
     
    T HE JUNIOR HIGH has emptied out, its art room locked up by the time I arrive. Fortunately, I know the custodian, Tom Shipley, whom I find in the broom closet screwing a cap back onto a pocket flask. “Mr. Mayor,” he says, grinning at me as if he’s the one who caught me in the act. “I do something for you?”
    I tell him my wife has a new painting in the art studio that I’m here to look at, and that same knowing grin suggests I have some other, secret purpose, but that no matter what it is, he won’t tell on me. I follow him up the corridor in my squishy shoes, still soaked from the Cayoga Stream, leaving footprints on his shiny floor. Tom keeps a big nest of keys attached to his belt by a chain, and when he inserts one to unlock the art room door, he has to go up on tiptoe and thrust his pelvis forward, a vaguely obscene gesture.
    “I won’t be long,” I tell him, already spotting my wife’s painting across