Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  “We’d both be bleeding.”

  That was the other new thing. They were now able to say such things without raising their voices. Both seemed to comprehend that, even though these were potent, dangerous words, they needn’t trail dire consequences. It was as if, when they were alone in the car, Willie was their constant companion. They could say angry things as long as they didn’t actually become angry. Their barbed exchanges took on the tonal quality of jokes, though they both understood they weren’t joking, at least not entirely. In fact, talking about making each other bleed had the power to prevent it.

  “Anyway,” he replied, getting out of the car, “like you said, there’s no reason to fight. You don’t get her pregnant again, everything’ll be fine.”

  They were learning, Noonan concluded, to get along, which wasn’t lost on his brothers, who were both grateful and suspicious. “So,” David had said when he let slip that these days he saw his father pretty regularly at Nell’s, “you’re on his side now?” Noonan assured him it meant no such thing, but since his brother had introduced the subject, he decided to ask him about something that had been on his mind since that first night. “Do you think he’s changed? Dad?”

  The answer surprised him. “You both have.”

  Noonan decided his brother must be practicing some weird new diplomacy. “I mean, does he seem different to you? Less pissed off?”

  “You both do.”

  “Anyway,” he said, disappointed but unwilling to push the kid any further, “you don’t have to worry. I’m still on Mom’s side.”

  He assumed this would be the end of it, but David surprised him again. “Do you think we’re all his?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “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.

  THE 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 Jewish. 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.

  THERE 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.

  Since Mr. Berg’s turn as Ahab, Lucy had reluctantly come to share Noonan’s sense of foreboding, and he was particularly concerned when told that Mr. Berg’s novel was finished. “He’s not even revising?” That was one of the things Mr. Berg had been stressing all year. “Writing is revision,” he reminded them every time he handed back their essays, each awash in red ink, and he always insisted they make every single correction he’d suggested before moving on to the next assignment.

  “Apparently it’s word perfect,” Noonan said. “Dictated by the Holy Ghost.” That, Mr. Berg had told them, was the claim Kerouac had made to his editor when he delivered On the Road.

  According to Sarah, her father submitted the book in early January to a handful of New York publishers—only the best houses of course and their best editors, men already associated with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Ellison—and had immediately commenced racing through the mail every day. By February, upon further reflection, he acknowledged that perhaps his expectations had been unrealistic. The size of the manuscript, the density of its prose, the sheer number of its characters and the complexity of their interconnecting conflicts might hint at greatness, but the editors he’d chosen, the busiest and most important men in New York, couldn’t be expected to judge its brilliance until they’d read the whole thing. He’d initially imagined them tearing it out of the box and diving right in, but it now occurred to him that the book might have been routed through the infamou
s “slush pile” of manuscripts submitted by unknown, unagented writers. From this pile it might take weeks, even months, to emerge. Though he’d been very explicit in his cover letter that the manuscript was intended only for the eyes of the editor to whom it was addressed, it might possibly be read first by a junior editor, and a less experienced and discerning reader might not realize what he held in his hands. Mistakes happened, which was why, the more he thought about it, he came to regret trumpeting the novel’s imminent publication to that dolt of a principal, Watkins. He didn’t doubt the end result, but a delay of any duration guaranteed that Watkins and his colleagues in the English department would constantly inquire, and he’d have to say he was still waiting for a response and then endure their envious, small-minded snickers. Worse, it meant his ex-wife would be permitted to live that much longer in the bliss of her ignorance. He’d hoped she might commence the process of bitter regret in a more timely manner.

  The first rejection came on the Ides of March, a form letter stating that the book didn’t suit the publisher’s needs at this time. Since the letter was unsigned, there was no way to tell whether the book had been read by the editor he’d selected or by someone else, though Mr. Berg felt confident it must be the latter. He’d been right! Mistakes of this sort not only happened, they happened to him. Another rejection came later in the month, also an unsigned form letter. This one caused him to suffer yet another doubt. Since he’d sent the manuscript off, an even better ending had occurred to him, so he sat down and composed a letter for all the remaining editors, outlining the new ending and explaining why he thought it might conceivably be an improvement over the old, though of course he’d understand if they were wedded to the original. Was it Hemingway who always said, “First thought, best thought”?

  This letter’s only immediate effect was to generate another form rejection. The day after Mr. Berg received it, a note appeared on the honors classroom door, canceling class without explanation and giving everyone a reading day in the library. But at the end of that period Lucy observed him leaving the principal’s office, his face ashen. Had he requested the meeting or been summoned? Had they patched up their disagreement over the Jewish mothers, or was their conflict deepening? Noonan saw Watkins later in the day, and he seemed in excellent spirits. All of this had happened on a Friday. By Monday Mr. Berg was his old self again—manic, sarcastic, mock-confidential, insulting, over the top. But according to Sarah he’d spoken hardly a word all weekend. On Saturday he’d sat on the front porch in the bitter cold, gripping the arms of a wicker chair with white knuckles until the mailman came. He’d taken an envelope into the study and closed the door. Sarah didn’t see him again for the rest of the day.