Bridge of Sighs

believed, except for Jerzy. He must’ve been eleven, maybe twelve. Below the photo, his name was followed by a colon, then a chunk of white space where, presumably, you’d list extracurricular activities—CYO, the debate team, science club. There wasn’t a single notation for Jerzy. Rather cruel, Noonan thought, to include that colon.
    Their fight that day had been about far more than either of them comprehended at the time. In Jerzy’s utter lack of fear and his total disregard for consequence there lurked the frozen “tramp” on the back porch and an understanding of a world in which that sort of thing could happen. No wonder something had hardened in him, causing the boy to navigate the world with red, cynical rage. No wonder he wanted to share it.
    But hadn’t the same been true of Noonan himself? This was the same summer his own hard education had begun, and he learned the reason for his mother’s terrible unhappiness, the West End woman his father visited most days after finishing his mail route and before returning home to the Borough. He later learned that his mother had been aware of this since they’d lived in Berman Court. His father had made no great secret of the affair, nor had he been the least flustered the afternoon he looked out the apartment window in the West End and saw his oldest son sitting on his bike, watching from across the street. At dinner he’d fixed the boy with a dark look and asked what he’d been doing on lower Division Street, a place he had no business being. At that moment Noonan learned several valuable lessons, including the fact that right and wrong were beside the point, what mattered was power. His father’s authority derived only from that. Otherwise, why would
Noonan
feel guilty under his gaze? It was his
father
who had no business on lower Division Street, but that simply didn’t matter. And he’d also learned, to his utter surprise, that it was possible not to love your own father. To hate him, in fact, with a kind of purity that filled up the void of love’s loss and gave purpose to your own life. A hate that gave you the necessary determination and patience to wait for the day when the power shifted, when you were old enough and big enough to usurp it and secure for yourself an authority equal to his own.
    The West End woman’s apartment was next door to where the Quinns lived, which was how Jerzy had come to know of the affair before he himself did, knowledge Jerzy likely wouldn’t have shared until he heard that Bobby had talked his girlfriend—who happened to be Noonan’s second cousin—into a game of strip poker. The idea that Noonan had seen his girlfriend’s bare breasts, a sight he himself had not yet been treated to, was what their fight had ostensibly been about, but it was really about their fathers, the dead one wished alive, the living one wished dead, with no possibility of either wish being granted.
    When the cops brought Noonan home and said he’d been in a fight, the first thing his father wanted to know was who started it. Noonan told him the truth, that he and Jerzy had thrown punches more or less simultaneously, and one of the policemen confirmed that this was what had happened.
    “That Quinn boy’s two years older than my son,” Noonan’s father reminded them.
    That might be true, they conceded, but the fight had been so savage that they’d had to take the Quinn kid to the hospital.
    “How come you didn’t take my son to the hospital, too?” He’d noticed what the cops hadn’t, that his hand flopped limply at the end of his broken wrist.
    “Your boy won. He don’t need no hospital.”
    His father grabbed Noonan’s forearm roughly and held it up for their inspection. “A broken wrist doesn’t qualify?”
    That was the last thing Noonan remembered. He woke up in the hospital alone, with a lump on his forehead and his wrist in a cast. He didn’t see either of his parents until they came the next day to take him home. In the car, his father announced that in the fall he’d be attending military school, where he might learn self-discipline. Somewhere his father had heard the fight had been about his second cousin. “What’d you do with her?” he said. Noonan, realizing that he was far angrier about this than about the fight itself, didn’t want to answer. His mother was in the car, and he wasn’t about to explain about the strip poker with her and his little brothers all piled into the backseat. “Nothing,”