Bridge of Sighs (70 page)

“Me and Philip. We don’t look like the rest of you. Or each other.”

“That’s crazy.”

David shrugged. “I walked in on her one day.”

“Walked in on her
what
?”

“With the man from the phone company. They had their clothes on and everything, but he was kissing her. And she wasn’t, you know, making him stop. When she saw me she just smiled. It was weird.”

“Did you ask her about it?”

“No.” He was blushing.

“How come you didn’t tell me?”

“It was before. You weren’t living here then.” Something told him this was the one thing his brother was lying about. What he was describing had happened recently.

“She was kissing him back?”

“I don’t know,” David said, clearly wishing he hadn’t brought this up. “I shouldn’t have told you. Now you’ll—”

“No,” he said. “It’s not her fault.”

“I know,” he agreed.

It’s not her fault, Noonan repeated to himself. And it was true. It wasn’t his mother’s fault. Ironically, his brother’s story made him even more certain about Tessa and Dec Lynch. Of course it might not have been Lucy’s mother’s fault either.

T
HE FAMILY
in the most trouble, though, had to be the Bergs. Sarah’s new stepfather was an alcoholic, and apparently the idea had been that they would keep each other sober, because, Sarah explained, her mother needed to cut back on her own drinking. For a while it had seemed to work, though lately, when Sarah called on the weekend, her mother’s speech was often slurred. But it was her father, in Noonan’s opinion, who bore watching. While rattled, he hadn’t come completely unglued when his ex-wife remarried, as Sarah had feared he might. And he continued to maintain that once his novel was published and he returned to the city in triumph, she’d drop this new husband like a bad habit. Yet his public behavior, always eccentric, had become dangerously erratic. Back in October, for instance, a group of Jewish mothers had formally accused him of anti-Semitism. Their evidence for this surprising charge was, first, that Mr. Berg and his daughter never attended synagogue and, second, that there wasn’t a single Jew in this year’s honors English. Nonsense, Mr. Berg responded. He himself was a Jew.
You
don’t count, they maintained. How could a Jew not count as a Jew, he replied. If you’re going around counting Jews, you have to count them all. Not that he advocated counting Jews. In his view, many people who qualified, by strict definition, didn’t measure up, at least not to his standards. Thomaston Jews in general, he maintained, were mostly not the real article. About the most you could say for them was that they were Jew
ish.
The year before, he reminded them, his honors English had been made up almost exclusively of Jews; by the end of the year he’d had it. Enough with the Jews, already. Try something different. So, this year,
no more Jews.
Nor, he assured the Jewish mothers, would he permit his daughter to date their sons. There’d be plenty of time for Jews later, he reasoned, real Jews. Once his daughter got to Columbia, there’d be no scarcity. Not small-town or suburban Jews either. Real New York Jews. At this point the argument grew so heated that Principal Watkins had been called in to mediate. When no satisfactory resolution could be found, he suggested that perhaps the time had come for the honors English course to be rotated among the entire staff. In response to this suggestion Mr. Berg had proposed his own solution. Just as soon as his novel was accepted, he said, he’d be tendering his resignation. When the book was published, he wouldn’t be teaching anymore. He’d be taught.

Lucy, who apparently had no idea his girlfriend’s father held him in such low regard, agreed with Noonan that he was pushing the envelope, behaviorwise. Still, he was genuinely fond of the man and didn’t want to believe there was anything seriously wrong. After all, he argued, wasn’t Mr. Berg’s lunacy born of genius? Even though Lucy loved and defended Thomaston, he had to admit that the man was out of place there. He was despised by most faculty members and secretly made fun of, but even those who loathed him feared his acid wit, his searing intelligence. For all his eccentricity, he was the best teacher either of them had ever had, and honors was worth more than all their other classes combined, not so much in spite of its instructor being dangerously off center as because of it. The weirder things got, the more boundaries that were ignored, the more interesting things became. But what if one of the boundaries they were crossing was the one that separated sanity from madness? Lucy, perhaps out of loyalty to Sarah, didn’t want to believe that this was what they were witnessing. Noonan, though, was apprehensive.

As luck would have it, the first book of the winter term was
Moby-Dick.
They were to read the first half of the book over the holidays, but in the first class it immediately became clear that very few had even begun the novel. While Mr. Berg normally wouldn’t tolerate a flagging discussion, that first Monday back he seemed more distracted than incensed. The next day, when they arrived at the classroom, there was no sign of him. Usually, he and Three Mock were already there, the record player set up and Monk or Miles or Louis scratching away, Mr. Berg standing with his feet set wide apart and snapping his fingers to the beat, grinning his yellow grin. Only when they were all present and in the proper mood for unconventional learning would he turn the volume down. That day, though, even Three Mock and the record player were missing. In the center of the room a narrow, rickety stage had been erected, and the desks were all pushed back against the wall. They’d just about concluded that the classroom had been commandeered for some other purpose when they heard a clomping sound out in the hallway, some distance off but steadily drawing nearer. When Noonan looked over at Lucy, he was grinning at him as if the most wonderful thing had just occurred to him.

Mr. Berg’s only friend on the faculty was Mr. Davis, the industrial-arts teacher who was thought by most to be mildly retarded, which may have been why Mr. Berg so enjoyed publicly proclaiming him the second-smartest instructor at Thomaston High. Though he never identified the smartest one, everybody could guess who he meant, and his high opinion of Mr. Davis, people said, wasn’t so much a compliment to the shop teacher as an insult to everyone else.

What Mr. Davis had fashioned for Mr. Berg today was a short length of two-by-four attached with adjustable, sandal-like straps to his scuffed brown shoe and then fastened tight. Noonan and Lucy had realized in the same moment that it wasn’t Mr. Berg clomping toward them down the corridor but mad Ahab himself. Knowing Mr. Berg’s fondness for theatricality, Noonan was surprised not to see full sea-captain regalia when he flung the classroom door open and entered, with Three Mock in attendance. But except for the block of wood attached to his shoe, he was dressed as usual, in dark slacks dusted liberally with cigarette ash and a short-sleeved white shirt, its neck stained yellow. With difficulty he mounted the stage—Mr. Davis’s awkward apparatus apparently meant to suggest Ahab’s whalebone prosthesis. Three Mock, his black Pip, Noonan supposed, lent a hand until, no longer needed, he retreated to the far corner of the stage.

Mr. Berg stood still for a moment, his back to the class. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded as if it were traveling up from a dark, deep cave. “
All…visible…objects
…are but as pasteboard masks,” he said, then fell silent.

“Mr. Berg?” Perry Kozlowski said, and was ignored.

“Some unknown but reasoning thing puts forth the molding of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will
strike
—”

And with this the block of wood came down on the feeble stage to thunderous effect. Everyone jolted upright. Noonan glanced over at Nan, who happened to be sitting closest to the door, and she looked ready to bolt.

Now Mr. Berg pivoted painfully, looking very much like a man whose leg had been shorn from his body, his face contorted, positively aglow with madness. “
Strike
through the mask!” he said, shaking his fist at them so violently that he lost his balance and nearly fell. “How can the prisoner reach outside except by
thrusting
through the wall!”

The question was clearly rhetorical, but Perry raised his hand. “Uh, Mr. Berg?”

Good God, Noonan thought. Did Perry really think he was going to forestall his dramatic performance in order to answer some stupid question like
Will this be on the test?

Focusing on Perry as he would a mutinous seaman, Mr. Berg clomped over to the edge of the stage and glared down on him with such a murderous expression that Perry actually leaned back in his chair. Ahab’s voice became low, conspiratorial. “To me,” he confided, “the white whale is that wall. Sometimes…I think there’s naught beyond.” Perry didn’t look like this possibility troubled him greatly, though everything else about the proceedings did.

“But ’tis enough,” Mr. Berg continued, straightening now and clomping back down the stage, stopping before each member of the class and inspecting the student as a captain would his crew, assessing character and courage. “He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him hideous strength with an insidious malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate, and be the white whale agent or principal, I will
wreak
that hate upon him.”

Perry, exasperated, was now scanning the novel’s table of contents. “Mr. Berg,” he pleaded, “can you at least tell us what chapter you’re on?” he pleaded.

Mr. Berg practically flew back down the stage. “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man!” he exploded, as if Perry had done precisely this. “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me!” And to emphasize this point, he again crashed the wooden block down on the stage. “Who’s over me?” he demanded to know, first of Perry, then the rest of them. “Who’s over me?”

Noonan half expected Perry to suggest Principal Watkins, but to everyone’s surprise it was Lucy who spoke. “God?” he suggested, precisely as the
Pequod
’s first mate, Starbuck, had done in the book, if Noonan remembered correctly from his reading the night before. His friend, however, seemed to be raising the point on his own, and Noonan could tell he was serious. He didn’t know, though, whether it was the game itself that had turned serious or something outside the game. Was this Starbuck finally standing up to Ahab, or Lucy Lynch confronting the man who despised him?

Mr. Berg said nothing for a long moment, and when he finally did, his whisper was barely audible, intended only, so far as Noonan could tell, for the boy he was fixing:
“Truth…knows…no…confines.”
There was something both vicious and contemptuous in his delivery of these words, something Noonan didn’t recall from the novel. Hadn’t Ahab considered Starbuck his sole friend, the one man on the
Pequod
who might understand his purpose? Lucy did his best to hold his gaze, but finally had to look down at his desktop. Only then did Mr. Berg turn his attention back to Perry. “Chapter thirty-six,” he said in his own voice. “Ahab’s speech on the quarterdeck. You were supposed to have read it for today.”

He was grinning now, and Ahab’s madness had gone out of his eyes, and everyone visibly relaxed. Lucy, in particular, seemed relieved that it had been just a role-playing game after all. Noonan alone detected a more personal madness, its volume having been amped up just a notch. Mr. Berg might have been sane compared with Ahab, but by any other measurement Noonan wasn’t so sure.

T
HERE WAS
an explanation for his increasingly bizarre behavior, but Noonan thought this made things worse, not better.
Mr. Berg’s novel was finished.
At least that’s what he let on to Sarah when she returned from her holiday on Long Island. He had never worked on it except during the summer, when he had two uninterrupted months, but this year, when Sarah went off to spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s with her mother and her new husband, Mr. Berg went down to the bank, took the fifteen-hundred-page, single-spaced manuscript from its safety-deposit box, read it through from start to finish—which took him most of the week—and pronounced it complete. The night she returned, they celebrated the event by going out for pizza. The book was not only finished, he told her, it was brilliant. It took his breath away. He’d written the most ambitious, comprehensive and accurate portrait of America since the conclusion of the Second World War. There was nothing to do but publish it and return to New York in triumph.

What worried Sarah, she confessed to Noonan, was the timing of all this. His confrontation with the Jewish mothers had occurred the day after he learned his wife was going to remarry. His turn as Ahab seemed to be occasioned by the wedding. Now, more than ever, he needed something that would prove to his ex-wife that she’d backed the wrong horse. So the novel was not only done, it was perfectly done. Their lives, he told his daughter, were about to change, so she’d do well to prepare for fame and fortune. He’d decided to call the book
Tannersville,
and its publication would detonate the real place that had inspired it, along with everyone in it. How Sarah would laugh one day—she’d have to trust him on this—at the idea she’d ever been serious about a boy from such a place.