Bridge of Sighs

said in his own voice. “Ahab’s speech on the quarterdeck. You were supposed to have read it for today.”
    He was grinning now, and Ahab’s madness had gone out of his eyes, and everyone visibly relaxed. Lucy, in particular, seemed relieved that it had been just a role-playing game after all. Noonan alone detected a more personal madness, its volume having been amped up just a notch. Mr. Berg might have been sane compared with Ahab, but by any other measurement Noonan wasn’t so sure.

    T HERE WAS an explanation for his increasingly bizarre behavior, but Noonan thought this made things worse, not better.
Mr. Berg’s novel was finished.
At least that’s what he let on to Sarah when she returned from her holiday on Long Island. He had never worked on it except during the summer, when he had two uninterrupted months, but this year, when Sarah went off to spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s with her mother and her new husband, Mr. Berg went down to the bank, took the fifteen-hundred-page, single-spaced manuscript from its safety-deposit box, read it through from start to finish—which took him most of the week—and pronounced it complete. The night she returned, they celebrated the event by going out for pizza. The book was not only finished, he told her, it was brilliant. It took his breath away. He’d written the most ambitious, comprehensive and accurate portrait of America since the conclusion of the Second World War. There was nothing to do but publish it and return to New York in triumph.
    What worried Sarah, she confessed to Noonan, was the timing of all this. His confrontation with the Jewish mothers had occurred the day after he learned his wife was going to remarry. His turn as Ahab seemed to be occasioned by the wedding. Now, more than ever, he needed something that would prove to his ex-wife that she’d backed the wrong horse. So the novel was not only done, it was perfectly done. Their lives, he told his daughter, were about to change, so she’d do well to prepare for fame and fortune. He’d decided to call the book
Tannersville,
and its publication would detonate the real place that had inspired it, along with everyone in it. How Sarah would laugh one day—she’d have to trust him on this—at the idea she’d ever been serious about a boy from such a place.
    Since Mr. Berg’s turn as Ahab, Lucy had reluctantly come to share Noonan’s sense of foreboding, and he was particularly concerned when told that Mr. Berg’s novel was finished. “He’s not even revising?” That was one of the things Mr. Berg had been stressing all year. “Writing
is
revision,” he reminded them every time he handed back their essays, each awash in red ink, and he always insisted they make every single correction he’d suggested before moving on to the next assignment.
    “Apparently it’s word perfect,” Noonan said. “Dictated by the Holy Ghost.” That, Mr. Berg had told them, was the claim Kerouac had made to his editor when he delivered
On the Road.
    According to Sarah, her father submitted the book in early January to a handful of New York publishers—only the best houses of course and their best editors, men already associated with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Ellison—and had immediately commenced racing through the mail every day. By February, upon further reflection, he acknowledged that perhaps his expectations had been unrealistic. The size of the manuscript, the density of its prose, the sheer number of its characters and the complexity of their interconnecting conflicts might
hint
at greatness, but the editors he’d chosen, the busiest and most important men in New York, couldn’t be expected to judge its brilliance until they’d read the whole thing. He’d initially imagined them tearing it out of the box and diving right in, but it now occurred to him that the book might have been routed through the infamous “slush pile” of manuscripts submitted by unknown, unagented writers. From this pile it might take weeks, even months, to emerge. Though he’d been very explicit in his cover letter that the manuscript was intended only for the eyes of the editor to whom it was addressed, it might possibly be read first by a junior editor, and a less experienced and discerning reader might not realize what he held in his hands. Mistakes happened, which was why, the more he thought about it, he came to regret trumpeting the novel’s imminent publication to that