Bridge of Sighs

staring out at her in wonder.
    “Drawing the store?” I said.
    “She’s drawing the store,” he said, apparently not having heard me. “You should see her go with that pen.”
    I’d only been in the back room for about twenty minutes, but evidently that was long enough for Sarah to begin half a dozen drawings, now scattered on the grass next to her. Some had just a few lines, while others looked half done, and I couldn’t tell what it was about any of them that had caused her to stop and start over. Even the ones she’d abandoned after a few lines looked more promising than the drawing I’d worked on for a week. The one she was working on currently was the best. She’d done the outline of the whole store, dividing it into quadrants, and now appeared to be working from the center out, though for some reason, every now and then, she’d quit the section she was working on, as if an idea had occurred to her, and she’d squint at Ikey’s, then at her sketch pad, and draw a few lines in an adjacent quadrant before going back to where she’d been. “Your dad’s nice,” she said without looking at me. “All the way down. Most nice people are nice just partway.”
    She herself seemed nice “all the way down,” and I searched for the courage to say so, but it took too long and I gave up. I was glad to see her, though, glad that she hadn’t forgotten her promise to draw Ikey’s, glad she’d come by the very next day, glad she still seemed as at ease and comfortable as the day before. After the art show we’d gone for a Coke at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, and in the middle of the afternoon we had the place to ourselves. Accustomed to Karen Cirillo, I expected to pay, but Sarah said no, it had to be Dutch treat. Even before our Cokes arrived, she’d launched into a personal history. Her family was Jewish, she said. They didn’t practice the religion but instead something her father called humanism, which was more of a belief system. They didn’t go to church, just put their faith in what her dad called the fundamental nobility of man. They ate pork chops like we did, Sarah gave me to understand, and also celebrated Christmas, at least as a season of fellowship, even if they didn’t, as humanists, subscribe to the notion of Jesus being God or anything like that. That he was
good
was full and sufficient. People who believed that good wasn’t good enough, that Jesus had to be
God,
were the ones who gave us the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust. All of these confidences came out in a rush that inspired me to offer intimate revelations of my own. We were Catholics, I told her, though she seemed already to have guessed that much. Nor did she seem that surprised that I’d gone to St. Francis until junior high, which meant we believed that Jesus
was
God, though we probably agreed that the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition—which I looked up later—and the Holocaust were bad things. If I understood Mr. Berg’s humanism, I suspected we were listing in that direction ourselves. Ikey’s was open on Sunday, a point Father Gluck had raised with my mother and was told, for his trouble, to mind his own business, after which we hadn’t gone to Mass for a month and now ate meat on Fridays, ecumenical behavior that put us on a par with the Bergs eating pork chops, at least so far as I could see.
    The Bergs had moved to Thomaston from Long Island when she was in second grade, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear even to Sarah. Her father had been a high school teacher there as well, and from what she said, or didn’t say, I got the impression that he’d gotten into some kind of trouble that required him to look for a new job. He hated Thomaston, Sarah confided, because our town sorely tested his belief in the fundamental nobility of man, and because you simply couldn’t get a decent bagel, with or without the lox to put on it.
    Also, this. It had been her father who insisted she accept young Gabriel Mock’s invitation to the fateful movie. As a rule he didn’t let his daughter go out on dates, but here was a chance to make a statement. In Mr. Berg’s opinion, Thomaston’s Negroes had been ghettoized by people who, when it came to bigotry and ignorance, rivaled the citizenry of Birmingham and Selma. And why not? Did we not descend, at least symbolically, from Sir Thomas Whitcombe, like Thomas Jefferson a slave owner? No doubt both believed that all men were created equal, if