Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

“Perry Kozlowski got his bell rung in practice today,” Noonan told him. Which was the truth but not, to quote Mr. Berg, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Rather, it was the answer he preferred, since he himself had met Perry helmet to helmet on the fifty-yard line, their collision leaving the other boy dazed and disoriented. Noonan had taken a handoff and run between the tackles, the secondary opening up in front of him. Had he continued left, he might’ve made it all the way to the end zone, but instead he lowered his head into a surprised Perry, the team’s captain and middle linebacker. Noonan’s own fingers and toes were buzzing for the next hour. Coach took him aside after the play. “What is it with you two?” he wanted to know. Noonan just shrugged, not knowing quite what was between him and Perry, or why he thought it might be fun to pin him to the ground with his knees and pop his zits, one by one. Worse, at the satisfying moment of impact, he’d felt some diminishment in the more important loathing he harbored for his father. Was it possible that a person possessed a finite amount of such a valuable commodity?

  “Terrific,” Dec said. “The one guy on our team who can tackle. I may have to buy a disguise and drive up to Mohawk and watch them practice.” Before heading back upstairs, he stopped at the cooler and grabbed a beer, letting the door swing shut with a soft thud, and Noonan wondered how having Dec Lynch living above Ikey’s represented an improvement over Buddy Nurt. Hadn’t they just replaced one slow leak with another? According to Lucy his uncle paid no rent and took whatever he needed or wanted from the store. On the plus side, he was paid little more than what he needed to cover his weekend carousing, and that was under the table, so he could still collect unemployment.

  “So,” Lucy said, once he’d left, “you going to stick it out with Berg or switch to Summers?”

  “Berg,” Noonan said, with no hesitation. “He may be nuts, but he’s not dull.”

  In fact, the class had been nothing short of exhilarating. When they’d finally gotten around to discussing the four-line poem on the blackboard, Mr. Berg had unfolded it the way the sun opens a flower, patiently, one petal at a time. The class began by agreeing the words made no sense, that something must be missing or wrong with the poem, so they were shocked to hear that in Mr. Berg’s opinion the poem was perfect as it stood. Indeed, he’d gone so far as to suggest there might be something wrong with them.

  “Okay,” Perry challenged him, “then tell us what it means.”

  Grinning, Mr. Berg asked a question instead. “What’s a dream book?” They’d all looked at one another. “Nobody knows what a dream book is?”

  Clearly nobody did, and Noonan was surprised when a voice said, “It’s where you look it up.”

  Everyone had forgotten Three Mock, who, unless there was a ventriloquist in the room, had actually spoken. He sat motionless, as before, still facing the front. To look at him, you wouldn’t have guessed he was wired to any external reality.

  “Thank you, Mr. Mock,” Mr. Berg said, apparently not surprised at all. “Would you be willing to elaborate? It’s where you look what up?”

  “What you dreamin’.”

  “So, if I dream of a fish,” Mr. Berg said, “I can look it up in this book?”

  The boy nodded.

  Berg turned back to the rest of the class. “Interesting. How is it that Mr. Mock knows what a dream book is and the rest of you don’t? How could we account for that?”

  “Easy,” Perry said. “You told him before class. To make the rest of us look stupid.”

  “Ah,” Mr. Berg said. “The people-are-up-to-no-good thesis again. Mr. Mock, did I tell you what a dream book was before class?”

  All eyes now on him, Three Mock shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  “Do you believe him, Mr. Kozlowski?”

  “No,” Perry said.

  “How about you, Mr. Lynch?” When Lucy hesitated, he moved on, “Mr. Marconi?”

  “Yes,” Noonan said, partly because he did, but mostly because he wouldn’t agree with Kozlowski unless he had no choice.

  “Our resident agnostic believes him.” Mr. Berg chuckled, turning again to Nan. “Funny how that works out sometimes, no? Doubters believing. Believers doubting.”

  “What difference does it make?” Perry Kozlowski demanded. “Everybody knows what a fish is. Why would you look it up?”

  “Mr. Mock?”

  “Dream book give you a number,” he said, and Noonan felt some inner door swing partway open on an unseen hinge, allowing a breeze to blow in. He glanced over at Lucy, who’d felt it, too.

  Not Perry, though. “What good would this number do?”

  “You could play it,” Lucy said, a little breathlessly, like this sudden realization had left him weak. “You could bet your dream.”

  Mr. Berg just grinned his wolfish grin, and the bell rang. As if he’d planned that, too.

  “HE MUST BE TRYING to get himself fired,” Tessa Lynch speculated.

  She’d come into the store with two big tubs of macaroni and potato salad a few minutes after Dec Lynch went upstairs. Taking one look at Noonan, she scooped a generous portion from each into a paper boat, handing it to him along with a plastic spoon. He didn’t bother denying he was famished, as usual. After practice he was always hungry, and he just dug in.

  “Nobody feeds you at home?” she said, watching him and looking pleased.

  “My mother usually tries to save me something,” he said, which was true. His little brothers had the appetites of young dogs, though, and if he got home late, they’d have grazed through whatever she’d set aside for him. From upstairs came the smell of Dec’s pork chops frying—it would’ve been nice to have one of those to go with the salads—and the sound of the ball game he’d turned on. “Why would he want to get fired?” Noonan said.

  “Right off the top of my head, I can think of about a dozen reasons.” Mrs. Lynch gazed around the store. “There’s times I wish somebody’d fire me.”

  Noonan noticed his friend’s face cloud over when she said this.

  “It’d make sense. He’s always hated it here, and after Sarah graduates there won’t be any reason for him to stay. Sarah says he’s close to finishing that book of his.”

  “I’d like to read it,” Noonan admitted after she left, but Lucy appeared not to have heard. He was watching his mother cross the intersection, his expression troubled. He hated the very idea of change, Noonan knew, and its inevitability was what his mother was trying to prepare him for. “Part of it, anyway,” he added, trying to draw him back. “Just to see what it’s like.”

  Lucy’s focus returned. “You’re his favorite,” he said, a little enviously, Noonan thought.

  As the class had progressed, Mr. Berg continued to focus on Nan and Perry. If anything, his comments and questions became even more probing and personal, Noonan’s suspicion that he was conducting some sort of bizarre experiment deepening. And he knew a lot—too much, really—about every kid in the class. It was almost as if the books they’d be reading were really just for show, and the actual subject of the class would be themselves, the fifteen students handpicked to investigate the American Dream. And not only them either, but also their parents and the rest of Thomaston. It occurred to Noonan that he hadn’t even taken roll, that he already knew who each student was. Of course he might’ve had some of them in other classes, and he knew Lucy through Sarah. Still, he’d never met Noonan before today, yet he somehow required no introduction. Had Sarah been talking about him? Was he hastily being written into the famous novel?

  They now heard Dec on the stairs again. He came in wiping his mouth on a paper napkin that he wadded up and threw at Lucy, who ducked, picked it up off the floor and dropped it in the trash pail behind the counter.

  “What worries me is those Puerto Ricans,” he told Noonan, apparently confident the subject hadn’t changed since he left the room half an hour earlier.

  Ten years ago, a dozen Puerto Rican families had moved to Mohawk to work for a company that manufactured cheap plastic wading p
ools. The temperature on the factory floor was routinely over a hundred degrees and the air liquid plastic, which people said reminded them of home.

  “They’re speedy little bastards,” Dec said, “and if they ever get loose in our secondary, it’s all over.”

  “We’ve got some speed,” Noonan said out of a loyalty he hadn’t known he felt until the words were out of his mouth. He, too, had heard the Puerto Ricans were quick.

  “Coach should be recruiting some of those Negro kids from off the Hill,” Dec said. “They can run, at least the ones that haven’t been beat up to the point of brain damage. I’m guessing even in his present state that Mock kid could run circles around you and Kozlowski.”

  “You should bet on Mohawk,” Noonan suggested, “if you think they’re so much better.”

  “I might,” he said. “But that’s assuming I could find somebody to bet on you.”

  MR. BERG’S NEXT CLASS WAS even more disconcerting. The same poem was still on the blackboard, and he picked up right where they’d left off, with Lucy’s brainstorm about the wife betting on her husband’s dream.

  Perry still refused to see it. “That’s stupid,” he said. “Why would she bet on somebody else’s dream? Besides, the guy’s hallucinating. The whole thing’s crazy.”

  “Who remembers David Entleman?” Mr. Berg asked, and evidently Noonan was the only one who didn’t. The Entleman family, he learned later, had moved into a house in the East End shortly after he’d been sent to the academy. One morning about a year later, Mr. Entleman had gone into the garage and found his son David dangling from a rafter. The next day everybody had picked the day/month/year of his suicide as their number. Had it hit, local bookies joked, they’d all have had to join that fucking kid on the rafter.

  “Your father never bets the number?” Mr. Berg asked Perry.

  “He used to, back when he worked at the tannery.”

  “Not anymore?”

  “You can’t bet at GE,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not allowed. They don’t let bookies in.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s against the law.”

  “But wasn’t it also against the law at the tannery?”

  “People want to bet. They enjoy it.”

  “Like smoking,” Mr. Berg said, taking this opportunity to light up. He again offered the pack to Noonan, who this time declined. “So if you really enjoy something, it’s okay, even if it is against the law.”

  Perry shrugged.

  “How do you think the bookies got into the tannery?”

  Perry snorted. “They walked in. They made the rounds every day. Everybody knows.”

  And Mr. Berg again leaned forward, crooking his finger for Perry to lean toward him, which he reluctantly did.

  Noonan was beginning to recognize this as part of the game they’d all embarked on. It was like Hamlet, alone onstage, addressing his innermost thoughts to the audience in the form of a monologue: To be, or not to be…

  “Even…Miss Beverly’s father?” Mr. Berg whispered, just loud enough for everyone to hear.

  Perry snapped back in his chair. “How would I know?”

  “No idea?”

  Perry shrugged, torn between loyalty to a pretty girl who’d never given him the time of day and his desire not to appear stupid. “It’s his factory.”

  Mr. Berg nodded thoughtfully. “His business to know,” he said, as if it pained him greatly to acknowledge this. “I see what you mean.” Then he looked over at Nan, whose eyes, Noonan noticed, had filled with tears. “Want to know a secret?” he asked her, his voice full of sudden, alarming good cheer. “I never even knew what my father did for a living.”

  “Come on,” Perry said, though the man was no longer talking to him.

  “I shit you not,” said Mr. Berg, still looking at Nan, like he was about to reach out and take her hand.

  “You never asked him?” Perry said.

  “Claimed it was none of my business. Acted like I had a hell of a nerve to ask. Said there was food on the table and that was all I needed to know. Mr. Mock here knows more about his father than I knew about mine,” he said, turning to the silent boy. “What’s your father do, Mr. Mock?”

  “Paints the fence.”

  “See? Mr. Mock knows what his father does. He paints the fence around Whitcombe Hall. And what’s he do when he finishes, Mr. Mock?”

  “Paints it again.”

  “So your old man was a hoodlum or something?” Perry interrupted—anxious, Noonan thought, that they linger on the Mock family no longer than absolutely necessary.

  “It’s a mystery,” Mr. Berg said, throwing up his hands dramatically. “That’s what our parents are. The first mystery we encounter in a mysterious world. We see them every day as they go about their business. Painting the fence. Painting it again. But who are they? Why do they paint that fence? One thing’s for sure, they aren’t telling us. Isn’t that so, Mr. Lynch?”

  Noonan turned around to look at Lucy, who was sitting directly behind him, and saw he was wearing a strange, distant, almost fearful expression, as if he’d just remembered he had a major exam next period and forgotten to study for it. He hadn’t even heard Mr. Berg’s question. “Hey,” he said. “Lucy?”

  The boy’s eyes flickered.

  “Lou,” Noonan said, worried he was having a spell.

  This time Lucy looked back at him.

  “Mr. Lynch,” Mr. Berg said. “Welcome back.”

  Lucy looked around, red faced, surprised to see everybody staring at him.

  “The subject is parents,” Mr. Berg continued, “and we’re anxious to hear your opinion. Do you know who they are, your parents?”

  “Sure,” Lucy blinked. “They’re my parents.”

  “You know all their secrets? What they’re thinking? What they do after you fall asleep?” This occasioned some snickering. “Do you know who they were before you came along?”

  Noonan couldn’t be sure, but unless he was mistaken, his friend was angered by this question.

  “I know who they are now,” he said, his jaw working.

  “You do. Excellent. How well, though, I wonder? Would you say you know them as well as you know yourself?” Lucy didn’t answer, and his silence was rewarded with one of Mr. Berg’s yellow grins. “And how well would you say you know yourself?”

  Again he was silent, but this time it didn’t matter because Mr. Berg had pivoted back to Nan. “You want to know another secret? I don’t want to frighten you, Miss Beverly, but I don’t know myself any better than I knew my father.”

  “How can you not know yourself?” Perry said.

  Mr. Berg threw up his hands in mock despair. “Too much evidence. Too much information. Most of it contradictory. Evidence here suggests one thing; other information suggests the opposite. No clear picture emerges. Won’t hold steady. I like jazz music, I know that about myself. And I like to smoke. But then sometimes I think to myself, Do I really like jazz, or do I just think I do? Do I like to smoke, or just the idea that smoking’s forbidden? What if I wake up tomorrow morning hating Louis Armstrong? Who would I be?”

  “The same person,” Perry said, confident, yet exasperated. “If I woke up tomorrow liking Marconi, I’d still be me.”

  “Except smarter,” Noonan said, eliciting a smile from Nan.

  “Mr. Berg?” It was Lucy. “I think I need to see the nurse.”

  Noonan thought so, too. Every bit of blood had drained from his friend’s face. He wobbled when he tried to stand and steadied himself against his desk.

  “Mr. Marconi,” the teacher said, “maybe you should accompany your good friend.”

  Same emphasis as the day before. Good friend.

  Later, Perry shrugged the class off. “He just likes to mess with us. What do you want to bet Lynch drops out?”

  “Why would he do that?” Noonan said.

  “He’s always been a pussy.”

  “It wasn’t very nice,” N
an said, “bringing up David Entleman like that.”

  “And your dad?” Perry said. “That sucked, too. What is it with this guy and our parents?”

  “What about David Entleman?” Noonan said.

  “He and Lucy were best friends, weren’t they?” Nan said.

  “I know I’m sticking around until Marconi gets his,” Perry said.

  “Maybe I won’t,” Noonan said.

  Noonan feared Kozlowski might be right. The next class might well put him in the hot seat, the others smirking while he squirmed under the Berg scalpel. Did the man know, for instance, that his mother had been trying all her married life to run away? That on her first attempt his father had caught her, broke open her suitcase and tossed all her intimate apparel into the street? And what about the woman on lower Division? Would he make reference to this when they read a story about adultery? The possibility was real. In the first week of class Nan’s, Perry’s and Lucy’s parents had all been introduced. Did Mr. Berg not understand that there were boundaries, or didn’t he know where they were? Despite the man’s brilliance, Noonan wasn’t sure, and this, more than anything else, was what made the classroom experience both thrilling and scary.

  That evening he stopped by Ikey’s. The color had returned to Lucy’s cheeks, and he said he felt fine, that it must have been something he’d eaten in the cafeteria, but Noonan could tell he was still troubled. “You think he’s really crazy?” Lucy said.

  “It’s possible.”

  “What happened after I left?”

  “He gave me my final exam topic,” Noonan told him. “Kozlowski, too.”

  A few minutes before the bell, Noonan had asked the question that had been on everybody’s mind. “Why us?”

  Perry had apparently been lying in wait for him, because he immediately chimed in “Which answer would you prefer?” clearly hoping that others would join his laughter and scowling when they didn’t.

  “Why not you?”

  “What I mean is,” Noonan continued carefully, “this is honors. It’s supposed to be for the best students.”

  “Okay, Mr. Marconi. That will be your personal final exam. An essay on the subject of why you. Why the fifteen of you and not the smart Jews you were expecting.” Then, when Nan flinched: “You don’t mind if I use the word ‘Jews,’ do you?”