Bridge of Sighs

the room. In that moment of recognition my heart contracts like a fist, just as it did when I saw that first drawing of hers, the one of her little brother in the Congregationalist hall when we were kids. I’d been filled with wonder, not just that Sarah had this talent, but that something so compelling could’ve been so completely hidden, and that she trusted me with the knowledge of her little brother’s death and how she’d felt about that horrible loss. She’d invited me into her heart. Me, Lucy Lynch. By the time she drew Ikey’s the next day I was already in love, with Sarah, with the intimacy of her gift and with the prospect of being known and understood so fully. I was, in other words, still a child. It hadn’t yet occurred to me how difficult it is to be fully known to yourself, much less to another person. “And how well do you know yourself?” her father once asked me in the English honors class he taught.
    “Take your time,” Tom says. “The door locks automatic.”
    When he’s gone, I pull up a stool and take off my ruined loafers. Next to the easel with Sarah’s canvas is a music stand on which she’s propped a glossy Italian travel book, so I pick this up and read about the photograph she’s using. From across the room it looked like a painting of a railroad overpass, but in fact I see it’s a stone bridge in Venice, the Bridge of Sighs, which connects the Doge’s Palace in St. Mark’s Square to the adjacent prison. Crossing this bridge, the convicts—at least the ones without money or influence—came to understand that all hope was lost. According to legend, their despairing sighs could be heard echoing in the neighboring canals. A melancholy subject, it seems to me. Tonight I will ask Sarah why she chose it.
    Perhaps because I saw him earlier, a man without money or influence, or because he’s lost just about everything a man can lose, I find myself thinking about Gabriel Mock and the night Whitcombe Hall burned to the ground, finally putting an end to the decades-long debate whether money should be raised for its restoration. It was nearly midnight when the fire trucks arrived, and the Hall, actually little more than a shell, was engulfed in flames. A very drunk Gabriel Mock capered nearby, just inside his fence, whooping and hollering and having a grand old time. Did you do this? the police demanded. Did you set this fire? Johnny K.’s boy the one done it, Gabriel told them. You want to know who’s responsible, ask Johnny K. Junior.
    Perry Kozlowski, he meant. To the astonishment of everyone who knew Perry as a boy, he’d become a college professor out west. He hadn’t stepped foot in Thomaston for nearly twenty years, not since his father died and his mother moved away, but he
was
in town that particular weekend, as Gabriel had good reason to know. In fact, that afternoon he’d delivered the commencement address at Thomaston High. Neither Sarah nor I had attended, though we later heard that Perry had credited her father with saving his life by “turning him on” to books, transforming his blind, objectless rage into what he called “a passion for knowledge.” Apparently, that oblique mention of the anger that had once possessed him was his only reference to the beating he’d given Three Mock behind the theater. The younger people in the audience had no memory of that incident, but even their elders were on Perry’s side when Gabriel, roaring drunk even then, in the middle of the day, disrupted the ceremony. It must have been a bad moment for Perry, to be confronted on such a public occasion by his accusing and unforgiving past in the person of a tiny black man. People said he turned very pale, and even after Gabriel had been escorted none too gently from the auditorium—to a chorus of “Send him out!”—it took Professor Kozlowski several moments to get back on track, though everyone agreed he gave a good speech, that he seemed a changed man. And maybe he was, but I had to smile when I heard that before returning home the next day he’d accidentally broken the nose of our assistant principal, elbowing him in a pickup basketball game.
    Even though I chaired the Committee for the Restoration of Whitcombe Hall, I couldn’t really find it in my heart to blame Gabriel, if indeed it was he, not a lightning strike, that caused the fire. I understood. I did. It would’ve been too much for any one man to bear—his son long dead in Vietnam, and our high school