Bridge of Sighs

rigidity derived from military discipline, his anger from not having seen combat, or at least that’s what Noonan now supposed. Arriving in Europe after the end of the Second World War, he’d been stationed in Germany for a year, most of it spent behind a desk. When he finished his hitch, he had no real choice but to return home to Deb Noonan, the East End girl he’d knocked up before he learned self-control. She’d been living with her parents while he was overseas, and by the time he returned she barely recognized him as the easy, charming fellow who’d talked her into bed. Grim and unyielding, he explained the discipline he now practiced in all things. It demanded that they be strict about both time and money, and he informed her as well about his newfound belief that sex between husband and wife was about procreation, not pleasure. He was severe with himself, with her, with the little boy who’d arrived in his absence. He was particularly vigilant in the matter of his son’s friends. Jews, Negroes, Poles, Slavs and the Irish were all unsuitable. In his view they occupied the lowest rungs of society for a reason. Truth be told, he didn’t have much use for Italians and Catholics either, though to his shame he was both.
    The Quinns, who lived in an unpainted ruin of a house on lower Division Street, couldn’t have been more Irish, of course. Their only talent seemed to be producing feral children they couldn’t afford, one right after the other. Jerzy’s father was a good-natured if maudlin drunk who was always getting tossed out of bars, not for fighting, like so many other denizens of the Gut (a term he’d forgotten until Lucy used it in one of his letters), but rather for singing. Early in the evening someone would suggest he give them a tune, and he’d oblige, then someone else would buy him a drink, which always made him feel like singing another. Before long people would be heckling him to shut the hell up, but by then he’d hit his stride and was convinced the majority wished him to continue. To ensure he could be heard above the din, he liked to stand on the bar and seemed never to recollect that climbing up there invariably resulted in his ouster, often rude and violent, from the premises. He usually arrived back home after the bars closed, sporting a fat lip, his chin scraped and oozing from a hard landing on the sidewalk, all the song gone out of him and in its place a heartbroken self-awareness. Waking his wife, he’d hand her a dull paring knife from the kitchen drawer and say, “Put me out of my misery, Peg. You and the kids will be better off without me.” Which of course was true, but the woman apparently was susceptible to bathos because she invariably disarmed him and led him to bed, evidently with an eye toward filling the whole town, or at least the West End, with little Quinns.
    The second photo, from junior high, looked to Noonan like an early Polaroid, the sort included in the yearbook only if its subject had skipped school both on the day the official photos were taken and when the reshoots were done. By now a transformation had occurred, the boy’s eyes revealing not just suspicion but knowledge of both death and betrayal, and Noonan remembered the horrific story of how the boy’s father had died. By then his wife had reluctantly come to share his conclusion that she and her brood were better off without him. He’d been living above the pool hall, but sometimes, when he was drunker than usual, he forgot this and returned home. That particular snowy night the door was locked, and he hadn’t been able to raise his wife despite singing a love song directly beneath her bedroom window, which had been known to work, if not recently. However, he did raise a neighbor, who informed him the police had been called, whereupon the elder Quinn slogged around back through the deep snowdrifts to hide from them. When the cops were gone, he put his hand through a pane of glass in the back door, cutting himself badly in the process. When the door continued to resist entry, he apparently sat down on the step to consider his options, of which he was out, though he didn’t know it. His wife and children found him sitting right there two days later, frozen solid and covered with snow, when they returned from visiting her parents in North Bath. In that condition the children didn’t recognize their father, so their mother, thinking quickly, told them it must be a tramp, a lie they all