Bridge of Sighs

the events of this day in the dark of night, I incline toward her assessment. There is, after all, recent evidence. Over dinner I told Sarah about our encounter with Buddy Nurt and how it upset my mother, but I said nothing about how we’d argued, nor did I repeat her accusations. I’ve kept them secret because I know my mother will never tell a soul, not even Sarah, of whom she’s extraordinarily fond. They will remain locked safely away unless I myself decide to reveal them, and I’ve already decided I will not.
    It is the nature of some things, I believe, to remain locked away for the simple reason that revealing them serves no earthly purpose. For instance, I’ve never told anyone, even Sarah, what my father confided to me when he was ill. I’ve wanted to. His secret has weighed heavily on me, especially these last few years. I tell myself that he didn’t mean I shouldn’t tell Sarah, whom he loved and whose kind heart he trusted. But his instructions were “Don’t tell nobody,” and so I haven’t. I’ve told no one that when my father entered the voting booth each Election Day, he stayed there for as long as he judged it would take to complete a ballot, then returned his to its protective sleeve, unmarked. Unable or unwilling to follow my mother’s advice, he wasn’t confident enough of his own conclusions to act on them. He felt the burden of democratic responsibility and believed that decisions of such magnitude should not rest with men like him. Because he was a proud American, he knew he had the right to vote. But he also knew he had the right not to, and he exercised both of these rights each Election Day.
    Have I kept his secret so long because I’m ashamed of him, as my mother would’ve been if she’d known? Or because it would break Sarah’s heart to hear it? Or because it broke my own, to know that he considered voting to be something for my mother, and later for me, but not for him? I don’t know, but his secret is mine to keep, and so I will. I am not Buddy Nurt. I don’t mine humiliation for gold. That said, what then can be the point of telling my story? Why scan the past for the shapes and meanings it surrenders so reluctantly if you mean to suppress some and exaggerate others?
    But is the living of life so different from the telling of it? Do we not, a hundred times a day, decide
not
to bear witness? Do we not deny and suppress even at the level of instinct? Today, for instance, my mother and I both saw something in that haunted alley that was almost certainly responsible for our bitter quarrel over my father, though neither of us acknowledged it then or afterward. My mother may be old, but her vision remains sharp, and I’m sure she noticed the old moth-eaten varsity jacket Buddy was wearing, saw that the threads used to stitch the original owner’s name below the cloth collar had been removed, leaving behind a ghostly reminder like the smudge that manages to seep through repeated paintings of the wall behind her sofa—that the jacket had once been the proud possession of someone who announced himself to the world as BIG LOU . Are we not complicit in each other’s secrets?
    I will have to make a concerted effort not to brood about the fact that Buddy’s walking around Thomaston in my father’s old coat. After all, things like this happen all the time in small towns. When I was growing up it wasn’t difficult to trace the provenance of a particular item of clothing. A blue blazer, for instance, might be purchased for a junior high or high school boy by his Borough parents; by the following summer he would have outgrown it, and the blazer would then be donated to their church’s clothing drive, after which it would reappear on the back of some East End kid, whose parents would take it the following year to Goodwill, where a West End mother would purchase it for her son. Nor will I ever forget the senior prom when a Borough girl, a friend of Nan Beverly’s, came over specifically to tell Sarah how pretty she looked, that the dress she was wearing really looked much better on Sarah than it had on her at last year’s junior prom.
    Is it any wonder our adult lives should be so haunted? Over and over we go up and down the alley between the theater and the dime store, as my mother and I did today, moving through space, yes, but also through time, meeting ourselves, as Owen always says, coming and going. How beautiful Sarah looked in that dress. How important it must have