Bridge of Sighs

Evangeline offered no response to this weighty diagnosis, he said, “Whereas
you
think…”
    “I think you’re just fucked up.”
    He couldn’t help but chuckle. “Thanks. That’s as close to a vote of confidence as I’ve had all day.”
    “People just slip into funks,” she said wearily, as if she knew firsthand whereof she spoke.
    “So this is just a phase I’m in? I wait for it to pass?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know, Noonan. I really don’t.”
    “That’s the difference between you and Hugh Morgan. In the almost forty years I’ve known him, he’s never once used that particular phrase.”
    She came around now, unbuttoning her silk blouse. “That’s just one of the differences between us,” she said, letting the blouse drop to the floor and sitting down gently on his lap.
    “
This,
he claims,” he said, indicating the portrait, “is a study in self-loathing.”
    Kicking her shoes off, she used her big toe to rotate the chair a quarter turn so she, too, could study the canvas. “Well, it’s true you won’t be accused of narcissism.”
    She’d seen it before and, like Hugh, assumed it was a self-portrait, though if she’d been repulsed by it, she never said so. And something else now occurred to Noonan, that his father, near the end, had apparently gone batty in his solitude. The neighbors reported hearing him inside the house, cursing at no one in particular, or perhaps everybody. When he did emerge, his hair uncombed, his shirt untucked, his fly unzipped, he always managed to give the impression it was only a supreme act of will that prevented him from punching everyone he passed on the street. When people tried to engage him in conversation, he just glared at them, as if he didn’t trust himself to utter so much as a single syllable for fear that the dam would burst and swamp them in a torrent of abuse. Which made Noonan wonder. Late in life, long after he was gone, did his father also suffer episodes of inexplicable grief, or night terrors? And what would the cause have been? Something originating in the Cayoga Stream? Could it have been the
water
? If so, in what sense could anybody truly be blamed for anything?
    Evangeline turned away from the painting and regarded him through narrowed eyes. “Either we drape that,” she said, “or we drape me.”
    Noonan kissed her bare breast. “I was supposed to stop by the gallery, wasn’t I.”
    “You were.”
    “I’m a shit.”
    “You are.”
    “But you love me anyway.”
    “I wouldn’t go that far.”
    “How far would you go?”
    “Downstairs. One flight.”
    As they started down to the bedroom, Noonan said, “I have a bone to pick with your husband. He witnessed one of my crying jags, and he’s been telling people about it.”
    “Yeah, well, if he had clue one, he’d have a bone to pick with you, too.”

THE ROUTE MEN
     
    T HE HOUSE my parents purchased on Third Street in the East End was plain and gray shingled. The residents of our new neighborhood were all working people, mostly Irish but with a healthy smattering of Italians and Poles and Slavs. Third Street was seven blocks long, anchored by Tommy Flynn’s corner market at the lower end and Ikey Lubin’s at the upper. Its single-family homes were modest and built close together on small lots, each with a thin grass terrace between the sidewalk and the street. Upstairs, typically, were two small bedrooms and a bath, downstairs the kitchen, dining room and living room, though, after the advent of television, most families wedged a dinette into one corner of the kitchen, thus converting the dining room into a TV-centered family room. The living room generally went unused, except when company came.
    For each single-family home, however, there were two or three larger houses divided into upstairs and downstairs flats. Often, in terms of square footage, they were as large as the single-family homes, but after Berman Court we felt privileged not to be sharing our dwelling. My father liked to remark to our new neighbors that he couldn’t live with somebody underfoot or overhead, though that was precisely what we’d
been
doing. My mother would scold him for such comments, but too gently to make much of an impression, so great was the pleasure he took in our change of fortune.
    Of the three of us, I think he was the one most deeply affected by our move. My mother was glad to be out of the West End but wary, too, afraid of how much money she’d had to take from my