Bridge of Sighs (69 page)

Noonan studied his father and swallowed the impulse to say something nasty. If he could piss him off, make him really angry, then maybe some of that pure old hatred could be coaxed back. What prevented this was the realization that though his father was offering far less than he was owed, and much, much less than what his mother was, it might just be the best deal he’d ever get from him. Trying to drive a harder bargain would be pointless. “How about a little advice?” he heard himself ask.

This elicited a grin. “Hey, what kind of father doesn’t have advice?”

Was this irony? Noonan wondered. Mr. Berg had taught them the three different types: dramatic, verbal and situational. This, unless he misremembered, was verbal, where the speaker says or implies something different from, maybe even the opposite of, what he means. Was his father admitting that even he didn’t think much of the job he’d done so far?

Noonan took a deep breath, realizing that what he’d told Sarah earlier was no longer precisely true. He didn’t hate his father all the time. He meant to. He had once and surely would again. But what he said was “There’s a girl. Two of them, actually.”

His father nodded, waiting for the rest.

PASSION CURVE

N
OONAN SELDOM MADE
predictions about paintings, but when he did he was usually right. Sarah, he’d told Hugh, would paint herself. He worked feverishly in the studio for the rest of the day, quitting only when darkness fell. After taking a shower he discovered, much to his surprise, that he was famished, and not just for food. For about two seconds he considered dropping by Evangeline’s gallery but decided against it. Too bad Hugh wasn’t still in town, he thought next, then thought better of that as well.

Anne Brettany couldn’t have looked more surprised to see who was pounding on her studio door.

“Let me take you to dinner,” he said. “Anywhere but Harry’s.”

They went to a small neighborhood place in Cannaregio, where Noonan’s appetite was better than it had been in months. Anne ate like a bird and couldn’t stop staring at him.

“What?” he finally said.

“You don’t
look
insane,” she remarked.

Had Hugh told her about the portrait, or was this a more general reference to the gossip circulating about him? “You could do me a large favor,” he told her over espresso. “I’m not looking forward to this flight to New York.”

Anne also admitted she was a wreck whenever she flew, and they decided to have Hugh book them on the same flight so they could at least hold each other’s hand.

By the time Noonan returned to the studio it was late enough that he had to consider his options. He could take advantage of the agitation and excitement that always accompanied a new canvas and work through the night, thereby avoiding the risk of a night terror. On the other hand, he’d drunk a bottle of wine and he knew from experience that the best time to quit work was when he was going good, when he knew exactly what his next brushstroke would be and why. With some trepidation he decided to take a chance and get the sleep he knew he needed. He’d taken an even bigger chance the night before, allowing Lichtner to bunk down among his paintings. That maybe he’d luck out two nights in a row was his last conscious thought before exhaustion claimed him.

He awoke with the sun in his face, wondering how many hours he’d lost to blessed, dreamless sleep. Standing in his bathrobe, he examined the two paintings resting side by side. Yesterday, without giving it a moment’s thought, he’d made his most important artistic decision in a long time by setting up that spare easel. He could’ve removed his father from the first one, turned the miserable prick’s face to the wall and just painted Sarah. Instead he’d allowed them to coexist, and he now began to see the wisdom of that impulse. They wouldn’t be companion pieces by any stretch, but they were strangely codependent. The light spilling from Sarah’s window had no choice but to fall on his father and the Bridge of Sighs behind him. Though one painting was nearly finished, the other just begun, they would parallel each other for a while.

That, it occurred to Noonan, was how life had been during his senior year in that faraway place called Thomaston, New York. At sixty, halfway around the world, he was able to see clearly what had eluded him at the time—that the narrative of his life had split onto two tracks that ran, at least for a while, closely parallel. He and his friends were on one, their parents on the other, and neither group realized until it was too late that the tracks’ convergence in the distance was no optical illusion. The Marconis, the Lynches, the Beverlys and the Bergs. Not one of these families would emerge unscathed from the collision. Only one would survive intact.

D
ESPITE
S
ARAH’S CERTAINTY
that there was nothing going on between Dec and Tessa Lynch, he continued to be suspicious. Dec offered no further outbursts, at least in Noonan’s presence, and before long things returned to normal at Ikey’s. He had the impression that Tessa had privately read her brother-in-law the riot act about his behavior, because for some time he seemed chastened. Still, Noonan couldn’t figure out what Dec’s outburst had been about in the first place. Unless he was mistaken, Sarah either knew or suspected, but she wasn’t telling. “Bobby,” she said, regarding him sternly when he asked about it again, “Tessa loves Lou-Lou.” End of discussion.

If Noonan remained suspicious of Tessa Lynch, she seemed not to have quite made up her mind about him either. She appeared to be genuinely fond of him, happy whenever he showed up at the store and quick to offer him a plate of food, as if she had two sons instead of one. But even as he gratefully wolfed down whatever she gave him, he was aware that she was observing him closely, especially if Sarah was also present, and something about her expression suggested that she was reminding herself not to trust him. Had she intuited his feelings for Sarah, fearing that he’d one day betray Lucy? Did that—as yet—unwarranted suspicion originate in her own personal experience of betrayal? And what about his own suspicions of her? Wasn’t their source his own parents’ marriage as much as anything he’d witnessed between her and Dec?

His lingering doubts notwithstanding, the Lynches seemed the most stable of the four families, and Ikey Lubin’s seemed an extension of that stability, which perhaps explained why Noonan and his friends spent so much time there. He knew from various things Lucy let drop that the store might fail at any moment, that each new month was a struggle to stay profitable, but to Noonan it seemed as solid as any business in Thomaston, probably because the Lynches themselves were solid, if not terribly exciting, people. It might be that they’d never truly prosper, but neither could he imagine them failing, either their store or themselves. Lucy seemed less sanguine. Of course he was a worrier by nature, but after his uncle’s outburst he became ever more vigilant about all things Ikey’s. Noonan could tell he hated being away from the store, even for school, and he seemed palpably relieved each afternoon when he returned and found things exactly as he’d left them, with the three adult Lynches at their respective posts and no visible realignment.

Oddly enough, if stability was the criterion, Noonan would’ve ranked his own family second to the Lynches. True, what his parents had couldn’t really be called a marriage, but in most other respects life was less stressful now than when he was a kid. Though his brothers remained feral, they were also remarkably self-sufficient. They doted on their dazed mother and shared responsibility for her care. Now that she wasn’t likely to become pregnant, she seemed uninterested in flight. They got part-time jobs and managed to stay out of their father’s—and each other’s—way. Noonan regarded them less as individual boys than parts of a single organism, each devoted by means of discrete tasks to the survival of the whole. They came home from school with black eyes and swollen, busted lips and wrestled with one another like young wolves, even at the dinner table, while their mother looked serenely on. Their father would come by from time to time to restore something like order, but for the most part he seemed to have surrendered the field.

Noonan and his father had finally managed a truce, maybe something even better, though it stopped well short of trust or affection. Whatever it was, it had something to do with Nell’s. There, Noonan discovered, he could encounter his father without fear of conflict, thanks in large part to Willie, whose sensitivity to discord actually seemed to prevent it. The boy was slow witted in the extreme, but Noonan quickly grew fond of him. And his father either liked the boy, or at least didn’t mind having him around. It was as though, having neither expectations nor responsibility for him, he could just let him be, a luxury he’d never afforded Noonan even for a minute. He wasn’t sure either what his father’s feelings were for Maxine, whom he treated with a kind of gentle consideration that Noonan at first found impossible to credit. It had to be an act, he thought, the purpose of which was to convince him that his mother had brought on herself all the ill treatment she’d suffered at his hands—and, by extension, Noonan too. He kept waiting for the façade to crack, for the man he knew to reveal himself to both Maxine and her son, but so far it hadn’t and he began to wonder if maybe it wouldn’t. After all, his father had been part of their lives almost as long as he’d been with his original family.

At home, though, things could still get tense, so without ever discussing the matter he and his father had arrived at an unspoken agreement that on those rare occasions when they both turned up at the house, one or the other would leave. It was as if their relationship had become site specific, and it was the Borough house itself that was toxic.

Noonan had continued to tend bar at Murdick’s on Sundays through the end of November, then moved out to Nell’s, where Max—as he’d started calling her immediately—taught him to make martinis and manhattans and dozens of other cocktails. He got his own tips from the patrons, plus a small percentage of the waitresses’ tips from the dining room, which added up to a good deal more than he’d made drawing beers at Murdick’s. After a month of Sundays Max gave him a couple hours on Friday nights, too. This was by far the busiest night of the week, and though the cocktail lounge was small he and Max worked what she called tits back, trying to keep up with cocktail orders. After their first Friday night together, he asked, “What did you do before me?”

“Oh, I’d coax your father off his stool. He wasn’t half the worker you are, though,” she said, loud enough that he could hear. “At least on this side of the bar.” This, Noonan guessed, was a reference to the fact that his father was never without a drink. The old man drank top-shelf scotch but never got drunk, though it occurred to Noonan that he was perhaps never entirely sober either.

By nine on Fridays the rush was over, after which Max usually told him to go join his friends, and sometimes he did, but just as often he climbed onto the stool next to his father and had something to eat. Other times, if Will was behind in the kitchen, he’d help him by scrubbing pots or ferrying clean glasses out to the bar. With Dec’s motorcycle put up until spring, he had to depend on his father for a ride back into town, so often it was easier to settle in at Nell’s. Many times he’d look up in surprise when Max announced last call, realizing that somehow the evening had slipped away, that he’d gotten tipsy on free beer, that Nan and Lucy and Sarah had probably waited for him in vain at Ikey’s or Angelo’s.

“You want to come home tonight?” his father suggested one night when they rolled back into town.

“No, just drop me off at my place,” Noonan said.

“Why not come home? It’s gotta be cold up there with no heat.”

“It is,” he admitted, though only on nights when the outside temperature fell below freezing was he uncomfortable. Heat leaked upward from the drugstore, and he had a down sleeping bag and a small electric space heater.

“Your mother misses you,” his father said.

“I miss her too,” he replied, which was both true and false. In her dreamy, medicated state she wasn’t the woman he remembered and loved, and in any case she seemed to have everything she needed in his brothers.

“How long since you spent any time with her?”

“I don’t know. How long since
you
did?”

“Okay, if that’s the way you want it.”

“It’s not the way I want it. It’s the way it is.”

“And you think I’m to blame.”

“
I’m
sure not.”

“And you think the day won’t ever come when you’re the reason somebody’s unhappy?”

“I don’t know.”

“It will,” his father assured him, pulling up in front of the Rexall. “Take it from me.”

“Okay,” he said, opening the door.

“Why not let go of this, son? Does it make sense to keep fighting?”

“We’re not fighting,” he said. “If we were, you’d be bleeding.”

“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?”