Bridge of Sighs

counting Jews. In his view, many people who qualified, by strict definition, didn’t measure up, at least not to his standards. Thomaston Jews in general, he maintained, were mostly not the real article. About the most you could say for them was that they were Jew
ish.
The year before, he reminded them, his honors English had been made up almost exclusively of Jews; by the end of the year he’d had it. Enough with the Jews, already. Try something different. So, this year,
no more Jews.
Nor, he assured the Jewish mothers, would he permit his daughter to date their sons. There’d be plenty of time for Jews later, he reasoned, real Jews. Once his daughter got to Columbia, there’d be no scarcity. Not small-town or suburban Jews either. Real New York Jews. At this point the argument grew so heated that Principal Watkins had been called in to mediate. When no satisfactory resolution could be found, he suggested that perhaps the time had come for the honors English course to be rotated among the entire staff. In response to this suggestion Mr. Berg had proposed his own solution. Just as soon as his novel was accepted, he said, he’d be tendering his resignation. When the book was published, he wouldn’t be teaching anymore. He’d be taught.
    Lucy, who apparently had no idea his girlfriend’s father held him in such low regard, agreed with Noonan that he was pushing the envelope, behaviorwise. Still, he was genuinely fond of the man and didn’t want to believe there was anything seriously wrong. After all, he argued, wasn’t Mr. Berg’s lunacy born of genius? Even though Lucy loved and defended Thomaston, he had to admit that the man was out of place there. He was despised by most faculty members and secretly made fun of, but even those who loathed him feared his acid wit, his searing intelligence. For all his eccentricity, he was the best teacher either of them had ever had, and honors was worth more than all their other classes combined, not so much in spite of its instructor being dangerously off center as because of it. The weirder things got, the more boundaries that were ignored, the more interesting things became. But what if one of the boundaries they were crossing was the one that separated sanity from madness? Lucy, perhaps out of loyalty to Sarah, didn’t want to believe that this was what they were witnessing. Noonan, though, was apprehensive.
    As luck would have it, the first book of the winter term was
Moby-Dick.
They were to read the first half of the book over the holidays, but in the first class it immediately became clear that very few had even begun the novel. While Mr. Berg normally wouldn’t tolerate a flagging discussion, that first Monday back he seemed more distracted than incensed. The next day, when they arrived at the classroom, there was no sign of him. Usually, he and Three Mock were already there, the record player set up and Monk or Miles or Louis scratching away, Mr. Berg standing with his feet set wide apart and snapping his fingers to the beat, grinning his yellow grin. Only when they were all present and in the proper mood for unconventional learning would he turn the volume down. That day, though, even Three Mock and the record player were missing. In the center of the room a narrow, rickety stage had been erected, and the desks were all pushed back against the wall. They’d just about concluded that the classroom had been commandeered for some other purpose when they heard a clomping sound out in the hallway, some distance off but steadily drawing nearer. When Noonan looked over at Lucy, he was grinning at him as if the most wonderful thing had just occurred to him.
    Mr. Berg’s only friend on the faculty was Mr. Davis, the industrial-arts teacher who was thought by most to be mildly retarded, which may have been why Mr. Berg so enjoyed publicly proclaiming him the second-smartest instructor at Thomaston High. Though he never identified the smartest one, everybody could guess who he meant, and his high opinion of Mr. Davis, people said, wasn’t so much a compliment to the shop teacher as an insult to everyone else.
    What Mr. Davis had fashioned for Mr. Berg today was a short length of two-by-four attached with adjustable, sandal-like straps to his scuffed brown shoe and then fastened tight. Noonan and Lucy had realized in the same moment that it wasn’t Mr. Berg clomping toward them down the corridor but mad Ahab himself. Knowing Mr. Berg’s fondness for theatricality,