Bridge of Sighs

father assured him, pulling up in front of the Rexall. “Take it from me.”
    “Okay,” he said, opening the door.
    “Why not let go of this, son? Does it make sense to keep fighting?”
    “We’re not fighting,” he said. “If we were, you’d be bleeding.”
    “We’d both be bleeding.”
    That was the other new thing. They were now able to say such things without raising their voices. Both seemed to comprehend that, even though these were potent, dangerous words, they needn’t trail dire consequences. It was as if, when they were alone in the car, Willie was their constant companion. They could say angry things as long as they didn’t actually become angry. Their barbed exchanges took on the tonal quality of jokes, though they both understood they weren’t joking, at least not entirely. In fact, talking about making each other bleed had the power to prevent it.
    “Anyway,” he replied, getting out of the car, “like you said, there’s no reason to fight. You don’t get her pregnant again, everything’ll be fine.”
    They were learning, Noonan concluded, to get along, which wasn’t lost on his brothers, who were both grateful and suspicious. “So,” David had said when he let slip that these days he saw his father pretty regularly at Nell’s, “you’re on his side now?” Noonan assured him it meant no such thing, but since his brother had introduced the subject, he decided to ask him about something that had been on his mind since that first night. “Do you think he’s changed? Dad?”
    The answer surprised him. “You both have.”
    Noonan decided his brother must be practicing some weird new diplomacy. “I mean, does he seem different to you? Less pissed off?”
    “You both do.”
    “Anyway,” he said, disappointed but unwilling to push the kid any further, “you don’t have to worry. I’m still on Mom’s side.”
    He assumed this would be the end of it, but David surprised him again. “Do you think we’re all his?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Me and Philip. We don’t look like the rest of you. Or each other.”
    “That’s crazy.”
    David shrugged. “I walked in on her one day.”
    “Walked in on her
what
?”
    “With the man from the phone company. They had their clothes on and everything, but he was kissing her. And she wasn’t, you know, making him stop. When she saw me she just smiled. It was weird.”
    “Did you ask her about it?”
    “No.” He was blushing.
    “How come you didn’t tell me?”
    “It was before. You weren’t living here then.” Something told him this was the one thing his brother was lying about. What he was describing had happened recently.
    “She was kissing him back?”
    “I don’t know,” David said, clearly wishing he hadn’t brought this up. “I shouldn’t have told you. Now you’ll—”
    “No,” he said. “It’s not her fault.”
    “I know,” he agreed.
    It’s not her fault, Noonan repeated to himself. And it was true. It wasn’t his mother’s fault. Ironically, his brother’s story made him even more certain about Tessa and Dec Lynch. Of course it might not have been Lucy’s mother’s fault either.
             
     
    T HE FAMILY in the most trouble, though, had to be the Bergs. Sarah’s new stepfather was an alcoholic, and apparently the idea had been that they would keep each other sober, because, Sarah explained, her mother needed to cut back on her own drinking. For a while it had seemed to work, though lately, when Sarah called on the weekend, her mother’s speech was often slurred. But it was her father, in Noonan’s opinion, who bore watching. While rattled, he hadn’t come completely unglued when his ex-wife remarried, as Sarah had feared he might. And he continued to maintain that once his novel was published and he returned to the city in triumph, she’d drop this new husband like a bad habit. Yet his public behavior, always eccentric, had become dangerously erratic. Back in October, for instance, a group of Jewish mothers had formally accused him of anti-Semitism. Their evidence for this surprising charge was, first, that Mr. Berg and his daughter never attended synagogue and, second, that there wasn’t a single Jew in this year’s honors English. Nonsense, Mr. Berg responded. He himself was a Jew.
You
don’t count, they maintained. How could a Jew not count as a Jew, he replied. If you’re going around counting Jews, you have to count them all. Not that he advocated