Bridge of Sighs (72 page)

“Mom,” he said. “Hi. I was just coming to find you.”

When they hugged, she felt feverish and smelled strongly of sleep and medicine. “Don’t you want to go into the living room?” he said when she pulled up a rickety plastic chair and sat down.

“No, I like it here,” she said dreamily, closing her eyes like a cat. “It’s peaceful.”

“You’re kidding, right?” he said, studying her closely. Peaceful? The dryer was old and noisy, and the washer, when the load got unbalanced, bounced off the wall like an epileptic.

“Sometimes, when I’m tired of watching TV or reading magazines, I come in here and just sit and think.”

If he’d been surprised back in the fall to realize how much his father had aged, he was equally surprised now to discover how young his mother looked. If anything, she looked younger than she had a decade ago. She’d put on weight, for one thing, which had smoothed out the anxiety wrinkles on her face and neck. Her frame had always been slender, almost fragile, and when pregnant she carried her babies right out in front of her. To Noonan, as a boy, her pregnancies always looked fake, like the ones you saw on television sitcoms. And when she delivered, the extra pounds fell off immediately. This new weight was permanent, and it made her look both soft and young. She exuded a baby-powder scent these days as well, which reminded him of his father’s unkind assessment: “Your mother’s a child.” According to David there was something she wanted to talk to him about, but now she seemed completely absorbed in watching his clothes tumble past the window of the dryer, as if he was in there with them and she was waiting patiently for the end of the cycle.

Finally she said, “Remember the day you went out and gathered up all my clothes and brought them home in that broken suitcase? I was out to here and your father was so angry at me. Remember? And he warned you to leave my things in the street, but you, little as you were, you marched right out and got my suitcase out of the stream and put everything back in the best you could and trudged home on your little legs. Most of the clothes were ruined and I had to throw them away later, but there you were, my little man. I can still see you tugging that suitcase up the front steps.”

She delivered this memory as if it were a fond one, worthy of nostalgia. Her own terrible unhappiness, her desperate attempt to escape his father’s bullying—these features of the story apparently weren’t worth mentioning. He understood, of course, that what she was really nostalgic about was his former devotion to her. Back then, he’d been her little man, whereas now, a couple nights a week, he climbed onto a barstool next to the man he’d once tried so valiantly to protect her from. Which could only mean that he was coming to see things as his father did.

She closed her eyes again and was quiet for so long that Noonan fell into a reverie of his own, until he felt her eyes on him and saw that she was studying him with terrible sadness, as well as an alert awareness that her medications usually prevented. “What’s she like?” she asked him.

He knew, of course, who she was talking about, but pretended not to. “Who?”

“That woman.”

“Max?” he said, and saw how it wounded her, that he’d called her Max rather than Maxine.

“Yes, her.”

“She’s not pretty like you,” he said, because he imagined that would please her, though it didn’t seem to. “Kind of tough looking, actually. I don’t know what the attraction is, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“The attraction is she’s not me,” she said. “Do you like her?”

This was the question Noonan dreaded most. “Mom. We don’t have to talk about this.”

“Do you like her?”

“She’s a hard worker,” he said. “She doesn’t take any shit from Dad.”

“Do you
like
her?”

“Well enough, I guess,” he admitted lamely, aware that even so weak an endorsement was a betrayal. “I don’t
dis
like her.”

“You used to like me.”

“I love you, Mom.”

She looked askance at him now, as if to acknowledge that, yes, sure he loved her, but
love,
as everyone knew, was no answer. “She has a son.”

“Willie,” Noonan told her. “He’s a sweet kid. He’s got Down’s syndrome.” Why was he telling her this? So she wouldn’t be jealous of the woman? “They say he probably won’t live to be thirty.”

The dryer stopped just then, silence filling the room.

After a moment his mother stood to leave. “Good,” she said.

B
Y THE TIME
Noonan left his mother’s house it had begun to snow. It was late afternoon, and the sky was low and dark. As he crossed from the Borough into the East End, streetlamps began to click on, one by one, lighting his way, as if that were necessary. He thought about heading straight downtown so he could drop off his laundry bag. From there he supposed he might go out to Nell’s, if he could find a ride. If the restaurant was busy, he could help Max behind the bar or bus tables or give Willie a hand in back, in return for which he’d be fed. But if it continued to snow as predicted, business was likely to be slow and there’d be nothing to do but talk to his father, who’d want to know if he’d gone out to see his mother, and he wasn’t anxious to recount what had happened there. He’d have to lie, say she seemed fine, that they’d had a pleasant conversation about nothing much in particular. He’d never tell him what she’d said about Willie.

On a normal Saturday night, he and Nan and Lucy and Sarah would’ve gone to a movie and maybe from there to Angelo’s for pizza or back to Ikey’s, but Mrs. Beverly had flown in from Atlanta that afternoon, and so Nan was spending the evening with her parents. Noonan had always assumed that if there was one family in Thomaston insulated from strife, it was the Beverlys, though apparently this wasn’t the case. Last week, Nan had confided to Sarah that the story her family had told everyone—that Mrs. Beverly had gone on ahead to Atlanta to prepare their new home and lives, that she and her father would join her there after her graduation—wasn’t true. In fact, her parents had separated. At issue was the rapid decline in the family’s fortune, for which Nan’s mother blamed her father, whom she considered a pale imitation of his father and grandfather, real men of business who would never have allowed the tannery to fail, any more than they would’ve frittered away on bad investments the wealth amassed by previous generations of Beverlys. A real man would have gone on the offensive, unlike Mr. Beverly, who’d chosen a more timid course, and was contesting the myriad lawsuits directed against them on technical grounds, practically conceding that these outrageous charges—that the Beverly family had not only polluted the Cayoga Stream but also knowingly poisoned the entire community—had merit. What kind of strategy was that? As a result of his cowardice their fortune was gone, except for what she’d inherited from her own parents, and she was damned if he was going to get his hands on that. Nan loved her father and sided with him as, over the long winter months, this dispute escalated. She hadn’t wanted him to agree to the trial separation, but he was as passive in defending his marriage as he’d been about defending the business. He assured his daughter the separation was only temporary, that he still loved her mother and was hoping that absence might make her heart grow fonder. This weekend, he said, would tell if there was any chance of that.

As much as Noonan didn’t want to spend Saturday night with his father at Nell’s, the idea of spending it alone in his unheated flat was even less appealing, so he decided to stop in at Ikey’s. If Lucy and Sarah had something planned, maybe they’d invite him to tag along. If not, they’d just hang out there all evening, as they so often did, and Mrs. Lynch could be counted on to feed him. He would later regard this decision to stop as his initial mistake in a night full of them, the first seemingly harmless domino to fall. On the threshold of Ikey Lubin’s, in fact, he paused for a moment, his hand outstretched, in the exact pose Sarah had drawn four years earlier, though he didn’t think about that at the time. But he would later realize he might’ve changed his mind. Mr. and Mrs. Lynch were there, but they hadn’t noticed him yet. Was it their concerned expressions that made him pause, their attention focused on the table at the rear of the store where Sarah and Lucy appeared to be in urgent conversation with someone who was partially obscured. He saw Sarah reach out and put a hand on this other person’s, and for a moment Noonan thought it had to be a child. In the next instant he was inside, his decision suddenly made.

“Bobby!” Nan cried, leaping to her feet when she saw who it was, her chair tipping over backward as she ran to him. Her eyes, he saw, were red and almost swollen shut. “I hate her!” she sobbed, burying her contorted face in his chest. “I hate her, I hate her, I hate her.”

His only thought was how ugly she looked.

I
T HAD BEEN CLEAR
from the moment her mother got off the plane in Albany that absence hadn’t made her heart grow fonder, of her father or even her daughter. In fact, she was spoiling for a fight. Once her suitcases were loaded in the trunk and they’d turned toward Thomaston, she’d made one hateful statement after another, her husband, for the most part, suffering this in silence. By the time they got home, she’d turned her anger on Nan, calling her vain and shallow and spoiled. “If you weren’t such a selfish brat, we’d all be living together someplace nice.” Last spring, she reminded her daughter pointedly, they’d had a decent offer on their Borough house. But no, Little Miss Special had to finish her senior year with her friends. Why? Because she was scared she wouldn’t be the prettiest girl, or even the fifth prettiest, in some new school. In Atlanta, her daddy wouldn’t be anybody special, and neither would she. “Well, you know what, little girl? That’s life. Get ready for it.” Disappointments, she continued, were right around the corner, legions of them. The college sorority she’d have her heart set on? Forget about it. That handsome Sigma Nu? He wouldn’t know she was alive. The new convertible she was expecting as a graduation gift? Think again. And that’s only what they’d lost by not selling the house when they should’ve. For the far more significant losses she could thank her beloved father, who was more mouse than man. Did Nan have any idea what he’d made them? Poor. That’s what they were now, so get used to it, little girl.

This narrative was far from coherent and broken up by sobs and fury, but Noonan was to hear it several times over the course of the evening. As he listened to it at Ikey’s, he felt sorry for the Lynches, who were clearly being treated to the same story all over again, Nan having been there for about an hour by now. Determined to punish both her parents, she’d left home without telling them where she was going. “Let them think I froze to death in a snowbank,” she said darkly.

“Aw, you don’t mean that,” Lucy’s father said. But in truth he seemed truly shocked by her recital. Noonan couldn’t tell which surprised him more—that anyone would say such things about people as important as the Beverlys, even if the speaker
was
a Beverly, or that Thomaston’s long-time first family, who lived in the finest house in the whole county, should exhibit the same resentments and marital recriminations as other people. It was almost as if they were no better than anybody else.

“Mind your own business, Lou,” his wife said.

“I ain’t sayin’ it’s my business,” Big Lou told them all. “I’m just sayin’—”

“Well, don’t,” Tessa said. “Don’t say a thing. Pretend you don’t have an opinion.”

Dec Lynch came in then, smelling of aftershave, his black hair slicked wetly back. “What the hell’s all this?” he said, taking in the situation at a glance.

“Pretend you don’t have an opinion either,” Tessa told him.

“I don’t,” Dec said. “I’m pretty sure I’ll disagree with Biggy when all the facts are known, but other than that…”

Noonan was afraid Nan would deliver the narrative once more for this new listener, but fortunately all the sobbing had given her the hiccups. “I hate my mother,” she said. “She’s ruining my life.”

“Oh, that,” Dec said.

“I mean it,” she said, and hiccupped loudly.

“Yeah, I know, Cupcake,” he said. “But try to keep things in perspective. In a hundred years, we’ll all be dead.”

“I’m going to go home and take a whole bottle of aspirin,” Tessa said when the door closed behind her brother-in-law. “Whatever you kids decide to do, you better do it quick.” She pointed outside, where it was now snowing so hard they could barely see the streetlamps.

O
BVIOUSLY,
the thing to do was to take Nan back home, but she was adamantly opposed to that. “I’d rather freeze to death in a snowbank,” she repeated. They’d recently read
Ethan Frome
in honors, and the story must’ve taken firm root in her mind. Lucy, taking a tip from his mother, decided that he should get Sarah home while the roads were still passable. Noonan went with him to get the car, leaving Sarah to hold Nan’s hand until they returned.

“Poor Nan,” Lucy said. “I feel sorry for her.”

“I guess.” Maybe he had high standards when it came to parental discord, but to Noonan this dispute seemed pretty mundane. After all, Mr. Beverly hadn’t cocked his fist at Mrs. Beverly, hadn’t called her a dumb cunt or broken open her suitcase and strewn her intimate apparel out the car window on the drive home from the airport. As far as he knew, Nan’s father didn’t have another woman on the side. And while he didn’t doubt that her mother’s fury was real, at least that anger was evidence that she was in full possession of her faculties. If you sat her down in front of a clothes dryer, she wouldn’t lose her train of thought while watching her own bras spin around. Before leaving Ikey’s he’d tried to suggest as much by reminding Nan that other people of her acquaintance had it worse. She’d grudgingly allowed that this might be true, but then remarked that this made them lucky, because they were used to it, whereas her parents had thoughtlessly insulated her against every sort of unpleasantness and now, at the eleventh hour, were unfairly piling their misery on her shoulders. Couldn’t they at least have waited until she was safely off at college?