Bridge of Sighs (68 page)

Noonan heard a chair scrape and saw that Lucy had gotten to his feet, his face beet red. He’d never seen his friend mad before, and now he looked ready to combust.

“Sit down, Bub,” Dec told him, “before you have one of your famous spells and I get blamed for that, too.”

When Lucy remained standing, Tessa said, “Could everybody calm down? Nobody’s blaming anybody for anything.”

“Yeah, right,” Dec said, and let the door slap shut behind him.

Noonan realized that he himself had remained rooted to the spot, and that everybody was looking at him. “You coming or going?” Tessa said.

“I’m trying to decide,” he replied, the joke falling flat.

“Tell me about it,” Tessa snapped, and then, when she saw her son’s face, added, “Oh, quit, for heaven’s sake.”

“I wonder what all that was about,” Big Lou said, staring out at the sidewalk, as if his brother was still there.

“It wasn’t about anything,” Tessa told him. “Forget it.”

Lucy finally sat down, but his expression was still furious. Sarah, Noonan noticed, had taken his hand under the table.

“I don’t know what I done to him,” Big Lou told Tessa when she joined him at the register. “We been doin’ real good, him and me.”

“Forget it. He’ll be fine in the morning.”

“You want to go out someplace?” he said.

“Not tonight.”

“We could, sometime,” he said, tenderly if without great enthusiasm. “Get Louie to watch the store—”

“If you don’t stop talking, I’m going to cry. I mean it.”

He reached out and took her hand, and then they were quiet.

That left Noonan and Nan the only people in the store
not
holding hands, so as soon as he sat down, she promptly took his, visibly relieved that the silly bickering was over. “Help us decide,” she told him happily. “Which is better, Truman or Spencer?”

N
OT LONG
after Dec Lynch’s angry departure, the rest of them decided to call it a night. Lucy said he thought he might be coming down with something, but Noonan thought it more likely his uncle’s strange outburst had upset him and that he blamed his mother for it as much as Dec. Tessa had already left, and when she did, Sarah had whispered something to Lucy that Noonan didn’t quite catch, but his friend’s facial muscles relaxed a little. Nan was the only one who seemed disappointed the evening was ending so soon, and when Noonan told her he was feeling tired and beat-up after the game, she’d shaken her head in annoyance at both him and Lucy. What they needed, she explained to Sarah, were new boyfriends. She offered Sarah a lift home, but since that was the opposite direction from the Borough, Sarah said she’d catch a ride with Noonan.

“It’s pretty cold,” he warned her before she climbed on behind him. In fact, he’d been thinking on the way over to Ikey’s that he’d have to put the bike up soon. After the first snowfall, it would be unsafe. But Sarah said no, it’d be fine.

They rode in silence, Sarah’s arms linked around his middle. Normally she chattered in his ear the entire time she was on the Indian, but not tonight, and Noonan guessed that what had transpired back at Ikey’s had upset her, too. Maybe, he thought, his spirits rising a bit, she’d want to talk about it. Once, when he’d given her a ride home back in September, she’d invited him in and they’d talked quietly on the enclosed front porch for over an hour. Sarah had confided how afraid she was that her mother was about to remarry for all the wrong reasons, and her father might go off the deep end when she finally became another man’s wife, something he’d always insisted would never happen. These revelations had been so forthright, so trusting and intimate, that Noonan had surprised himself by confessing how strained things were between himself and his father, and how the little pill his mother took every day made her vaguely content but more or less out of it. He even told her that the doctor had warned his father not to get her pregnant again, since she couldn’t possibly survive another birth. He’d known better, of course, than to tell her of his threat to kill him if he ignored that warning.

He hoped she’d invite him in again tonight, because she was the one person he wanted to tell about what happened earlier at Nell’s. But when they turned into her driveway, the downstairs lights were all ablaze, and Miles Davis was leaking from the stereo inside, and her father must’ve heard the motorcycle, because they saw him leap from his chair in the living room and begin windmilling his arms around like a madman. That would have been funny except that Noonan knew Sarah was worried about the smell of what could only be marijuana that greeted her when she returned home on weekend nights, especially when, as now, she arrived earlier than expected.

He brought the bike to a shuddering rest, but Sarah made no move to get off. “Is it okay if we just sit a minute?” she said.

It was, it was. He enjoyed the trusting, unself-conscious way she nestled against him on the bike. It was far more enjoyable, in fact, than the passionate good-night kiss Nan had given him outside of Ikey’s. Nan loved nothing more than to kiss for show, and tonight she’d been particularly anxious for him to understand what he was missing as a result of being such a grump.

“Do you want me to come in with you?”

“No,” she said. “Let’s just give him a minute.”

So they just sat there, facing the shabby little house where Sarah and her father had lived since her mother left. Eventually, it dawned on him that Sarah was quietly crying.

“Do you think we’re all going to end up like them?” she said, and he immediately knew she was talking not just about her present father and absent mother but also about all of their parents—Lucy’s, his, maybe even Nan’s.

“That’s up to us, I suppose,” he said.

Mr. Berg, no longer windmilling, came over to the window and peered outside, perhaps wondering why his daughter hadn’t come in yet. But you could tell he was seeing mostly his own reflection, and after a moment he gave up and returned to his chair.

“He hates Lou,” Sarah said.

“Your dad?” Noonan said, genuinely surprised. “Really?” He would’ve liked to turn around and face her, but her arms were still wrapped tightly around him, as if she imagined the bike might take off of its own accord. Did she not want him to see her crying? Or was she afraid if she didn’t keep him facing forward that he’d take her in his arms?

“What kind of grown man hates a boy?” she said. Noonan wanted to say that Lucy was almost eighteen, not a boy anymore, but she added, “He says Lou’s everything that’s wrong with America.”

“That’s crazy,” Noonan said. The words were out before he could call them back.

“He says he’s gullible and a craven conformist,” she said. “And something even worse.”

“Which is?”

“An innocent. He says there’s nothing worse than that.” She was clutching Noonan even tighter now. “He wants us to break up.”

“Will you?” Noonan said, his own heart clenching.

“Of course not.”

“Right.”

“He thinks I should be dating you.”

Did she want his opinion? He couldn’t tell. He also couldn’t tell whether she viewed the idea as repugnant or simply impossible. “I don’t see how it’s any of his business,” he said.

She didn’t say anything else for a minute. Finally, she put her forehead between his shoulder blades and said, “I hate him sometimes, Bobby. My own father.”

“You’re lucky,” he told her. “I hate my father all the time.”

After a moment she said, “Let’s make a pact, you and I. That after tonight we’ll never say such terrible things again.” Only after he agreed did she give him one last squeeze around the waist and climb off the bike. When he started to follow suit, she put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t,” she said, so he stayed where he was. She wiped the tears away with her sleeve, then surprised him by taking his hand. “What if it isn’t up to us?” she whispered, like a scared child. “What if we’re going to end up like them and there’s nothing we can do about it?”

Since Noonan didn’t know how to answer that, he said, “Do you think there’s something going on between Dec and Mrs. Lynch?”

She let go of his hand abruptly, as if it had just occurred to her that she was holding it. “No,” she said. Her certainty surprised him a little, but he could also tell that his question hadn’t surprised her. She, too, had considered the possibility. “Tessa loves Lou-Lou.”

You
love Lou-Lou, he thought. You don’t
want
it to be true. “That doesn’t mean—”

“I know what it doesn’t mean, Bobby.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, though he was none too sure why he should feel the need to apologize. “I didn’t—”

“It’s okay. It’s just…they’re all so dear, the Lynches. I don’t know what we’d all do if we lost Ikey’s.”

And then she was gone.

Instead of backing out of the drive he stayed where he was, astraddle the Indian. Inside, Sarah gave her father—the man she’d just admitted to hating—a hug and a kiss good night, then headed upstairs. A moment later a light came on and she appeared in one of the second-floor windows, bathed in yellow light, and his heart was now like a fist in his chest. It must have dawned on her then that she hadn’t heard the motorcycle start up and roar away, because she raised her hand, and when she smiled sadly waggling her fingers in his direction, he tooted and turned his key in the ignition, trying
not
to know what he knew for absolute certain: that he was in love with Lucy’s girlfriend and, if she’d have him, that friendship wouldn’t stand in the way. And his own girlfriend? Poor Nan didn’t even factor into it.

E
XCEPT FOR HIS FATHER’S CAR,
Nell’s parking lot was empty by the time he pulled in and parked the motorcycle beneath the solitary pole-mounted lamp and then stood looking up at the yellow halo of light in the vast blackness of the night sky. It reminded him of something, he couldn’t remember what, until suddenly he did: his weird dream about the cathedral that morning. Incredible. It felt like a month ago. How strange to think that the day had begun with clarity. Now, not so many hours later, everything was a hopeless muddle—including, for instance, what the hell he was doing back at Nell’s.

His father was sitting in the same spot at the end of the bar, but now he was drinking coffee. Glancing at his watch, he said, “Just in time for last call.”

“No thanks,” Noonan said, taking the same stool as before. The dining room was empty except for a waitress and a busboy doing setups for the next day. Then Maxine came out of a storage room behind the bar and pushed through the door into the kitchen, where she came up behind her son as he drew a tray of steaming dishes from the washer and grabbed him firmly by the elbows. When she planted a kiss on his balding pate, Noonan could hear his bray of delight before the door swung shut again. He looked over at his father then, trying to fathom how long he’d been a part of this domestic scene.

“That boy,” Noonan said. He’d meant to complete some sort of sentence, but instead let the two words just float there in the air between them.

“No relation to you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I wasn’t worried, only curious. Also curious about why you prefer her to Mom, or this other family to ours. And maybe when you’re done explaining that…” Once more, words failed him.

“What?” his father said. “Go ahead. You’ve got a good head of steam up. You might as well finish.”

Except he wasn’t sure how. Was there one thing he wanted an explanation for, or everything? Without warning, his father had stopped being a simple man. Did Noonan want an explanation for the kindness he’d shown this Maxine and her idiot kid, or for the mean-spirited bullying he’d offered his mother, his brothers and himself?
The best guy,
Willie had called him. In what reality was his father even a decent guy? It was as if the first seventeen years of Noonan’s life had taken place under a full moon that suddenly had waned, allowing his wolf of a father to take on the shape of an ordinary man. How had he managed to miss that transformation? What was it Sarah had asked back at her father’s house—whether they’d all end up like their parents? Actually
become
their parents, without having any choice in the matter? He now felt some of his long-cherished loathing begin to leak away, crowded out by the fear that she could be right.

“Look,” his father said, after the silence had stretched out too long. “What you need to figure out is simple. What do you want from me? If it’s something I can give you, fine. Right now, for instance, if you want a cup of coffee or a piece of pie, just say the word. Next year, if you need help with college expenses, I’ll try. I’m not rich, but I’ve got a little saved. I saved it with you in mind, actually, in case
you
ever changed. If you really don’t want anything from me, or want what I don’t have or can’t give you, then what can I say?”