Bridge of Sighs

her family had told everyone—that Mrs. Beverly had gone on ahead to Atlanta to prepare their new home and lives, that she and her father would join her there after her graduation—wasn’t true. In fact, her parents had separated. At issue was the rapid decline in the family’s fortune, for which Nan’s mother blamed her father, whom she considered a pale imitation of his father and grandfather, real men of business who would never have allowed the tannery to fail, any more than they would’ve frittered away on bad investments the wealth amassed by previous generations of Beverlys. A real man would have gone on the offensive, unlike Mr. Beverly, who’d chosen a more timid course, and was contesting the myriad lawsuits directed against them on technical grounds, practically conceding that these outrageous charges—that the Beverly family had not only polluted the Cayoga Stream but also knowingly poisoned the entire community—had merit. What kind of strategy was that? As a result of his cowardice their fortune was gone, except for what she’d inherited from her own parents, and she was damned if he was going to get his hands on that. Nan loved her father and sided with him as, over the long winter months, this dispute escalated. She hadn’t wanted him to agree to the trial separation, but he was as passive in defending his marriage as he’d been about defending the business. He assured his daughter the separation was only temporary, that he still loved her mother and was hoping that absence might make her heart grow fonder. This weekend, he said, would tell if there was any chance of that.
    As much as Noonan didn’t want to spend Saturday night with his father at Nell’s, the idea of spending it alone in his unheated flat was even less appealing, so he decided to stop in at Ikey’s. If Lucy and Sarah had something planned, maybe they’d invite him to tag along. If not, they’d just hang out there all evening, as they so often did, and Mrs. Lynch could be counted on to feed him. He would later regard this decision to stop as his initial mistake in a night full of them, the first seemingly harmless domino to fall. On the threshold of Ikey Lubin’s, in fact, he paused for a moment, his hand outstretched, in the exact pose Sarah had drawn four years earlier, though he didn’t think about that at the time. But he would later realize he might’ve changed his mind. Mr. and Mrs. Lynch were there, but they hadn’t noticed him yet. Was it their concerned expressions that made him pause, their attention focused on the table at the rear of the store where Sarah and Lucy appeared to be in urgent conversation with someone who was partially obscured. He saw Sarah reach out and put a hand on this other person’s, and for a moment Noonan thought it had to be a child. In the next instant he was inside, his decision suddenly made.
    “Bobby!” Nan cried, leaping to her feet when she saw who it was, her chair tipping over backward as she ran to him. Her eyes, he saw, were red and almost swollen shut. “I hate her!” she sobbed, burying her contorted face in his chest. “I hate her, I hate her, I hate her.”
    His only thought was how ugly she looked.
             
     
    I T HAD BEEN CLEAR from the moment her mother got off the plane in Albany that absence hadn’t made her heart grow fonder, of her father or even her daughter. In fact, she was spoiling for a fight. Once her suitcases were loaded in the trunk and they’d turned toward Thomaston, she’d made one hateful statement after another, her husband, for the most part, suffering this in silence. By the time they got home, she’d turned her anger on Nan, calling her vain and shallow and spoiled. “If you weren’t such a selfish brat, we’d all be living together someplace nice.” Last spring, she reminded her daughter pointedly, they’d had a decent offer on their Borough house. But no, Little Miss Special had to finish her senior year with her friends. Why? Because she was scared she wouldn’t be the prettiest girl, or even the fifth prettiest, in some new school. In Atlanta, her daddy wouldn’t be anybody special, and neither would she. “Well, you know what, little girl? That’s life. Get ready for it.” Disappointments, she continued, were right around the corner, legions of them. The college sorority she’d have her heart set on? Forget about it. That handsome Sigma Nu? He wouldn’t know she was alive. The new convertible she was