Bridge of Sighs

wanting my reaction to the unexpected death of Robert Noonan, the painter and former Thomaston resident who’d died of an aneurysm in New York. She’d called our local paper, where someone remembered that Bobby and I were friends once upon a time and that I could most reliably be reached at Ikey Lubin’s market. Bobby had died, the reporter filled me in, during a dinner celebrating his triumphant new show. He’d simply slumped forward in his chair and was gone.
    I, too, reach up to touch his figure on Sarah’s old drawing. Asked what he’d been like as a boy, I told the reporter how we’d surfed my father’s milk truck, that Bobby had been fearless and liked to shut his eyes going into the curves, that he wanted what was coming down the road to be a surprise, even if it meant he got hurt. That story must have struck a chord, because it was picked up in several other obituaries, including the one in
Time.
“Do you think that’s what artists have to do if they want to be great?” the reporter asked me, and I told her I didn’t know about that, only that Bobby had been brave, that I’d admired his courage and still did. Then she asked if I knew why he’d left Thomaston. Was it because he’d nearly killed his father in an altercation, as she’d heard, or had he left the country to avoid the draft? Was it true he’d gotten a girl pregnant and maybe ran away to avoid marrying her? I quickly made an excuse, telling her the store had gotten busy and I had to hang up. Was there anyone else in Thomaston she could talk to? Anyone who’d known Mr. Noonan well? No, I told her. No one.
    Bobby. Hearing that he’d died brought home to me that I’d spent most of my life saying goodbye to him: first when his family moved from Berman Court, and then again a few years later when the Marconis moved from the East End to the Borough. All of this I recounted in my story, and were I to continue it, I suppose I’d have to describe the day Bobby left Thomaston for good, how his mother, looking pale and frightened, had appeared unexpectedly at Ikey’s. My father and I were alone in the store, but it was my mother, her old confidante, that Mrs. Marconi had come to see, and my father agreed, like he always did, that if anybody could help, it would be my mother. “They don’t have to sit outside,” he told her. All of Bobby’s brothers were crammed into the family sedan that was parked outside, the oldest at the wheel. “They can come in and have a soda. I wouldn’t charge ’em or nothin’.”
    So in they all trooped and selected their free sodas from the cooler, while I went across the street to fetch my mother. When we returned, she shooed the boys back outside, then led Mrs. Marconi to the table by the coffeepot, where they sat down. My father looked as if he hoped we might be sent away as well. It had been a rough spring: Sarah’s mother dying, her father’s disgrace, the persistent rumor that Nan Beverly hadn’t returned to graduate with the rest of us because she was pregnant and now what had happened between Bobby and his father. All of it had sorely tested my father’s optimism, his deep conviction that things would work out all right in the end. “It’s like everything’s gone crazy,” I heard him say to my mother the night before, his voice once more coming up through the heat register. He didn’t want to hear any more bad news now, and you had only to look at Mrs. Marconi to know that was all she had.
    “The doctor says I could die,” we heard her whisper to my mother, who was holding both of her hands in her own, and I remembered the time I’d come home from school and seen them like this in the Marconi kitchen. “What should I do?”
    And my mother said, “I’ll go with you.”
    “He’ll be so angry.”
    Hearing this, I looked at my father, and he at me. Clearly, the reality of Mrs. Marconi’s circumstance hadn’t fully registered. Her husband was in critical condition in the hospital, being fed through a tube, but out of long, sad habit it was still his wrath she feared most, even when her pregnancy might kill her.
    “It’ll all be over,” my mother assured her. “He’ll have to accept it.”
    Frightened though she was for herself, there was something else that scared Mrs. Marconi even more. “They’re blaming Bobby,” she said, as if this were the height of unfairness. “What if they arrest him?”
    Actually, that morning we’d heard the police were just waiting for a judge