Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  “What I want to know is why he’s here,” Perry said, indicating Three Mock, again sitting right up front, though today he’d not said a word. “He doesn’t even go to our school.”

  Mr. Berg grinned at him. “And that’s your final.”

  THAT NIGHT, Noonan lay in bed trying to figure out Mr. Berg and wondering why he needed to. The rest of his teachers were simply who they were and transparent in their expectations, which didn’t amount to much at all. His history teacher, for instance, had begun class by announcing his intention to keep them busy, then handed out a five-page syllabus amplifying that modest academic goal.

  Mr. Berg was more like a dentist with a wire pick, intent on probing each student until he located the nerve he was looking for; to what purpose Noonan couldn’t fathom. He obviously wanted them to think, but apparently didn’t believe that was possible without first undermining not only their fundamental assumptions but also the very underpinnings of their personalities, and the man’s yellow grin made Noonan doubt he was motivated by sheer goodwill. And while it might be true that he’d settled on him as a favorite, as Lucy believed, Noonan was convinced he had a reason that didn’t involve actually liking him. Even when he said, “No fool, our Mr. Marconi,” his intonation suggested irony and doubt.

  Still, why should any of that matter? So far, the class had been thrilling. He’d unfolded the final petals of “Hope” with delicacy and precision, laying bare both its meaning and the students sitting there. They’d had trouble understanding the poem, he explained, because it had been written by a Negro, Langston Hughes, who lived in Harlem, in black America, which could boast little or no commonality with white America, as represented by Thomaston, New York. Every Negro in Harlem knew what a dream book was, so it was no mistake that Three Mock was the only student—that was the word Mr. Berg had used to describe him, even though he wasn’t enrolled in the class—who had any idea what the poem was about. He wasn’t smarter, just the only one who had access to a key buried deep in poverty and superstition, racial injustice and despair. Readers in white America were unlikely to discover this key, especially if they had no interest in looking for it, if their parents discouraged the search, if their America was purposely structured to ensure its own prosperity and the continued subjugation of the other America. As Mr. Berg spoke, Noonan was surprised to realize that he himself harbored such subversive thoughts though he lacked the ability to articulate them. This was the class he’d look forward to, the only one that would matter in the end. Given all this, why distrust the man? Even if Mrs. Lynch was right and he was trying to get himself fired, that was no skin off his students’ noses. Why not sit back and enjoy the spectacle?

  He was about to fall asleep when he heard his father come in, the door off the kitchen banging shut, then the sound of surly muttering in the dark. Since returning to Thomaston, Noonan had slept in the room they’d always referred to as the den, which had no door. The big desk where his father paid the bills—it was locked now—had been moved out to make room for him. The sofa was a pullout; there was a small closet for his clothes. His brothers all doubled up in the second-floor bedrooms. His first night back, in June, Noonan had smelled his father on the thin mattress and known the truth, that he’d driven him back into the master bedroom and also that his mother had understood this would be the inevitable result of her son’s return, at least on those nights when her husband wasn’t in the West End.

  Tonight, he could tell from the clumsy banging in the kitchen that his father had been drinking, but he was surprised when he appeared in the arched doorway and stood there staring as Noonan pretended to sleep. In his inebriation had he forgotten who now occupied the room? Did it take him a moment to realize who was sprawled across the pullout? For the longest time he just stood there, breathing heavily, until finally he said, “You’ve got it all wrong, Buddy Boy. You think you’ve got all the answers, but you haven’t even bothered to ask the questions.”

  It was a strange sensation, being spoken to in the dark, and stranger still when Noonan thought he heard something of Mr. Berg in his father’s voice. Was that possible? Had Sarah’s father gotten so far into his head? The two men’s voices couldn’t have been more different—one deep and gruff, the other thin and brittle—and his father’s powerful silhouette bore no resemblance to the emaciated Mr. Berg. Where, then, was the similarity? Something in the message itself, he decided. In honors, the teacher’s underlying assumption was that they had the wrong answers because they hadn’t asked the right questions. They’d come in thinking they were smart—chosen for honors, after all—but Mr. Berg was there to prove them wrong. Was it possible that Mr. Berg was a bully like his father, just a different kind?

  Noonan found himself smiling in the dark, for it occurred to him now that his father might one day become the dying man in the Hughes poem. That after all his sons were grown and departed, he would wake up one day, broke and broken, his health shot, and ask for a fish. Noonan’s mother would look that up in her dream book and play the number, maybe even win. She had it coming, God knew. Maybe that was how things would play out: his father dead (no fish) and his mother with the winnings. Except this wasn’t a very good reading of the poem. Its title was “Hope,” sure, but it offered little for either the dying man or his wife, merely the longest of odds and the ignorance necessary to make the odds look short.

  For some reason Noonan’s thoughts drifted from the poem to Lucy. At first he’d assumed it was the discussion of parents, the first great mystery in a life full of them, that had sent Lucy into his funk, but maybe not. According to Nan, he’d been best friends with that kid who’d taken his life. Noonan had been surprised to hear about this friendship, and now it occurred to him why. Back in June, that first day he’d gone over to Ikey’s, Lucy had rattled on for hours, catching him up on everything that had happened while Noonan was away at the academy, and there hadn’t been a single mention of David Entleman. Probably he just hadn’t wanted to revisit such a sad subject.

  Poor Lucy. Except for Sarah, he’d been mostly unlucky in his friends, including Noonan himself, who always tried his best to conceal his ambivalence. But maybe in his heart of hearts Lucy knew. With a start Noonan thought about that day at the railroad trestle. By then the Marconis had moved out of the West End, though Noonan still missed his friends from the old neighborhood. Sometimes, instead of going straight home after school like he was supposed to, he’d head down to Berman Court in the hopes of running into Jerzy and the others, which was how he happened to find them the afternoon they’d put Lucy in the trunk and pretended to saw it in half. It had been his panicked, muffled screams that drew Noonan to the trestle, and he should’ve made Jerzy let him out right then. Why hadn’t he? Because the danger wasn’t real. The boys were just taking turns sawing away at a crossbeam that was five feet above the trunk. They’d tried to scare Noonan with the same trick earlier in the summer. Unlike Lucy, he’d climbed into the trunk on a dare. Then, once he was inside, they told him they were going to saw him in half, but they were his friends and he could tell they weren’t sawing on the trunk itself. Eventually, when Lucy got tired of screaming and really listened, he’d realize that, too. That’s why Noonan hadn’t intervened. They’d free him soon, Jerzy had whispered, after they’d had a little fun, and afterward they’d all be friends. Noonan remembered rationalizing, as he trudged up the bank, that the experience would be good for Lucy, who was scared of his own shadow. When he was finally set free, he’d understand that there’d been nothing to fear.

  But this wasn’t the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. Not so help him God. In fact he’d been resentful of Lucy for a long time. From the beginning, really. He hated being taken out of Cayoga Elementary and sent to school with the weird Catholic kids, and he particularly hated that his mother insisted he make friends with Lucy Lynch, the weirdest of them all. He resented having to accompany him to and from school, but when he complained about how weird Lucy was and how none of the other kids liked
him, his mother had grown even more insistent, reminding him the Lynches were both neighbors and nice people, especially Mrs. Lynch, who’d confided how the other kids made fun of her son with that cruel nickname and were always trying to scare him.

  For his mother’s sake, Noonan tried his best, though he soon grew weary of being Lucy’s only friend. To him, moving away from Berman Court meant a blessed end to that solemn duty. Sure, he was sorry about what happened on the trestle, but he still didn’t want to be his friend anymore, and his father, for perhaps the first time, took his side. When the Lynches had followed them to the East End, it was his father who, over his mother’s objections, had negotiated the friendship down to just Saturdays, when he and Lucy rode around pretending to surf in Mr. Lynch’s milk truck. There, he learned that Lucy’s experience in the trunk hadn’t left him wiser, only more needy and clinging. So when they moved to the Borough, he’d felt relieved a second time.

  He was sleepily pondering all this when he heard his father again, in the bathroom this time, and wondered if he’d return to the den with further observations. But the toilet flushed and the door to his parents’ bedroom opened and closed, and his mother asked softly if everything was all right. He thought again about Mr. Berg’s confession, if that’s what it was, that he never knew what his father did for a living, knew even less than the Mock kid did about his. Noonan’s own problem was the reverse. He knew his father all too well.

  Realizing that he’d once more balled his hands into fists, he decided it might be more pleasant to fall asleep thinking about Nan Beverly, who really was pretty and did have a good body and who would, against her better judgment, surrender to him one day. They had several classes in common, and today she’d suggested they study together sometime. Later, in the locker room he’d overheard some boys saying he was her new boyfriend. Somewhere, though, on the gray border between wakefulness and sleep, Nan became Sarah, and he was visited by yet another unwelcome, groggy thought: what would happen to Lucy if he stole her away? That he should have such a thought, even in passing, shamed him, and he rolled over so as not to face the den’s arched doorway, lest he imagine Mr. Berg with that yellow grin of recognition. And in that instant he decided what to do about Mr. Berg: he’d learn everything he could from the man while keeping him at arm’s length.

  He slept, then, and didn’t dream. When he awoke the next morning there was nothing to look up, no number to bet.

  THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS

  THE JUNIOR HIGH has emptied out, its art room locked up by the time I arrive. Fortunately, I know the custodian, Tom Shipley, whom I find in the broom closet screwing a cap back onto a pocket flask. “Mr. Mayor,” he says, grinning at me as if he’s the one who caught me in the act. “I do something for you?”

  I tell him my wife has a new painting in the art studio that I’m here to look at, and that same knowing grin suggests I have some other, secret purpose, but that no matter what it is, he won’t tell on me. I follow him up the corridor in my squishy shoes, still soaked from the Cayoga Stream, leaving footprints on his shiny floor. Tom keeps a big nest of keys attached to his belt by a chain, and when he inserts one to unlock the art room door, he has to go up on tiptoe and thrust his pelvis forward, a vaguely obscene gesture.

  “I won’t be long,” I tell him, already spotting my wife’s painting across the room. In that moment of recognition my heart contracts like a fist, just as it did when I saw that first drawing of hers, the one of her little brother in the Congregationalist hall when we were kids. I’d been filled with wonder, not just that Sarah had this talent, but that something so compelling could’ve been so completely hidden, and that she trusted me with the knowledge of her little brother’s death and how she’d felt about that horrible loss. She’d invited me into her heart. Me, Lucy Lynch. By the time she drew Ikey’s the next day I was already in love, with Sarah, with the intimacy of her gift and with the prospect of being known and understood so fully. I was, in other words, still a child. It hadn’t yet occurred to me how difficult it is to be fully known to yourself, much less to another person. “And how well do you know yourself?” her father once asked me in the English honors class he taught.

  “Take your time,” Tom says. “The door locks automatic.”

  When he’s gone, I pull up a stool and take off my ruined loafers. Next to the easel with Sarah’s canvas is a music stand on which she’s propped a glossy Italian travel book, so I pick this up and read about the photograph she’s using. From across the room it looked like a painting of a railroad overpass, but in fact I see it’s a stone bridge in Venice, the Bridge of Sighs, which connects the Doge’s Palace in St. Mark’s Square to the adjacent prison. Crossing this bridge, the convicts—at least the ones without money or influence—came to understand that all hope was lost. According to legend, their despairing sighs could be heard echoing in the neighboring canals. A melancholy subject, it seems to me. Tonight I will ask Sarah why she chose it.

  Perhaps because I saw him earlier, a man without money or influence, or because he’s lost just about everything a man can lose, I find myself thinking about Gabriel Mock and the night Whitcombe Hall burned to the ground, finally putting an end to the decades-long debate whether money should be raised for its restoration. It was nearly midnight when the fire trucks arrived, and the Hall, actually little more than a shell, was engulfed in flames. A very drunk Gabriel Mock capered nearby, just inside his fence, whooping and hollering and having a grand old time. Did you do this? the police demanded. Did you set this fire? Johnny K.’s boy the one done it, Gabriel told them. You want to know who’s responsible, ask Johnny K. Junior.

  Perry Kozlowski, he meant. To the astonishment of everyone who knew Perry as a boy, he’d become a college professor out west. He hadn’t stepped foot in Thomaston for nearly twenty years, not since his father died and his mother moved away, but he was in town that particular weekend, as Gabriel had good reason to know. In fact, that afternoon he’d delivered the commencement address at Thomaston High. Neither Sarah nor I had attended, though we later heard that Perry had credited her father with saving his life by “turning him on” to books, transforming his blind, objectless rage into what he called “a passion for knowledge.” Apparently, that oblique mention of the anger that had once possessed him was his only reference to the beating he’d given Three Mock behind the theater. The younger people in the audience had no memory of that incident, but even their elders were on Perry’s side when Gabriel, roaring drunk even then, in the middle of the day, disrupted the ceremony. It must have been a bad moment for Perry, to be confronted on such a public occasion by his accusing and unforgiving past in the person of a tiny black man. People said he turned very pale, and even after Gabriel had been escorted none too gently from the auditorium—to a chorus of “Send him out!”—it took Professor Kozlowski several moments to get back on track, though everyone agreed he gave a good speech, that he seemed a changed man. And maybe he was, but I had to smile when I heard that before returning home the next day he’d accidentally broken the nose of our assistant principal, elbowing him in a pickup basketball game.

  Even though I chaired the Committee for the Restoration of Whitcombe Hall, I couldn’t really find it in my heart to blame Gabriel, if indeed it was he, not a lightning strike, that caused the fire. I understood. I did. It would’ve been too much for any one man to bear—his son long dead in Vietnam, and our high school commencement address delivered by the very person who’d once beaten him into a coma. I myself had been willing to let bygones be bygones. If it weren’t for Sarah, normally the most forgiving of souls, and my mother, I probably would have attended. I never missed graduations, and I’ll admit I was curious to see what kind of man Perry had become. Sarah was willing to concede that he might’ve changed, but she couldn’t forgive what he’d done, and of course my mother was even more outraged by his triumphant return. It was she, when Gabriel was arrested out at Whitcombe Park, who insisted we make his bail.

  Poor Gabriel. He’
d vomited in his cell during the night and did so again on the steps of the police station when we left. I remember how he sat there in the bright morning sun, staring at but not seeing or smelling the awful mess he’d made, as horrified passersby gave both of us wide berth. “What kind of a town we livin’ in, Junior, you tell me that?” he asked. By which he meant How could any town so honor the boy who’d savagely assaulted his son? Gabriel’s “setbacks” were often tied to such unanswerable questions. “What kind of a country we livin’ in,” he’d asked me two decades earlier when the news came of his son’s death. “Take a boy and send him halfway round the world to get killed. Boy that don’t never speak. Don’t say nothin’ to nobody. Ask him if he want to go over there and kill people, and he don’t say nothin’, so they send him over.” And of course, he frequently asked, as my mother had, what kind of people stood by while a boy got beat half to death.

  What kind of town? What kind of country? What kind of people? If my father had been on the courthouse steps that day, he might have been able to summon his deeply held conviction that ours was a good town, a good country, and that we were good people, but I couldn’t think what to say, and Gabriel seemed grateful that things made no better sense to me than they did to him.

  At some point, half in this shameful, sorrowful past and half in the thrall of my wife’s new painting, I feel a terrible confusion come over me, followed by that all-too-familiar vagueness, the sense that time itself has slowed. I finally realize I’m having a spell, that I’ve been flirting with one all day, maybe for the last several days. I should’ve paid attention this morning when Owen wondered if that’s what was happening, and later when I found myself standing ankle deep in the Cayoga with no memory of having slipped in. As always, knowing I’m “spellbound” isn’t nearly as helpful as it should be. It’s like knowing you’re asleep and dreaming, an awareness that should wake you up but doesn’t. In the throes of an episode I’m often peaceful, serene. I know full well that my life is “elsewhere,” that I should return to it, but “elsewhere” is such a long way off and I’m so very tired. Besides, where I am isn’t so terrible. That had been true even in the trunk.