Bridge of Sighs

you.”
    “Get some sleep.”
    Downstairs, getting undressed, he glanced at the fat Columbia University envelope, thinking maybe he’d read through the material again as a sleep aid, but he managed to knock it down between his bed and nightstand. Retrieving it, he found another piece of mail—unopened by the look of it—had fallen into the same narrow space. Its return address immediately made him wish he’d left the envelope where it was: 37 Elm Street, Thomaston, New York, USA. It had arrived a couple weeks earlier, maybe a month, and there’d been no need to open it, at least not right away, because all Lucy letters were alike. Invariably occasioned by either death or fatal diagnosis, it would contain an obituary from the local newspaper and a handwritten note that could be summarized in a single word: remember? Often that was the very first word.
Remember Scooter Walsh? Third Avenue? Well, his daughter has cystic fibrosis, and they don’t have any medical insurance, so anything you could do…I know you’re like me when it comes to kids, so…
Always there was that implied intimacy, as if he and Noonan had remained best friends down through the long years, sharing the same bedrock values.
Lou,
Noonan remembered replying to that one,
whatever gave you the idea I like kids?
He’d sent a check nonetheless, but just as often he refused. Once, many years ago, Lucy had written as chair of the committee raising funds to restore Whitcombe Hall:
Bobby, I know you haven’t been back home since senior year, but Sarah and I hope you can help out. It’s our history. Who will care if we don’t?
Noonan had written back,
No one, I hope. I know I sure don’t. Love to Sarah.
Apparently he hadn’t been offended, as Noonan had half hoped he might be, because the appeals kept coming, at least one a year, usually on behalf of someone Noonan didn’t remember, though the old, faded school photos Lucy often enclosed sometimes jogged the faintest of recollections.
    He held the not-entirely-opaque envelope up to the light, shook it and saw a small square dislodge itself from the folded, lined notepaper inside: a school photo. There also appeared to be a narrow column of newsprint, the obligatory obit. But Noonan also noticed something that had escaped his attention back when the envelope arrived. The small neat hand that had addressed it was Sarah’s, not Lucy’s, and a guilty chill ran up his spine. Had something happened to Lucy? Noonan felt something very like fear at the idea that his boyhood friend—fussbudget and general pain in the ass that he’d become—had left this earth, that the photo contained in the envelope might be of him. Fortunately, an instant’s reflection suggested how unlikely this was. Sarah would have contacted him immediately. No, the envelope might have been addressed by Sarah, but its contents were pure Lucy.
    Tearing it open, he saw not one but two yearbook photos. He didn’t expect to recognize their subject but immediately did: Jerzy Quinn. According to the obit, sixty-two-year-old Jerzy had been drunk when he crossed the median and hit the other vehicle head-on. For a moment, as Noonan read the lurid details, he was no longer in Italy, a grown man, but a boy in Thomaston, New York, kneeling on Jerzy’s shoulders and punching him in the face, with his fist dangling from a broken wrist. That fight had been the first time he’d ever lost control of himself so completely, and he remembered marveling afterward at the intense feeling of liberation. It was as if he’d temporarily become another person. Only when he finally returned to his own body and his right mind did he realize he’d rebroken his wrist, the one he’d snapped like a twig in Lucy’s father’s milk truck. Now, halfway around the world, it was throbbing again with pain delayed a good fifty years. Massaging it, he read Lucy’s note:
Remember the footbridge? Remember how I never had to pay when I was with you?
For Lucy, remarkably short. Usually there were a good dozen things he wondered if Noonan remembered.
    He returned to the photos, examining them more carefully now. In the first, nine-year-old Jerzy was identified as a third grader at Cayoga Elementary, but he already looked like a kid who regarded the world with deep suspicion. They’d been secret friends back then. Of necessity, all Noonan’s friendships had been secret. His father—who now stared out from the canvas upstairs—had been a rigid, angry man whose