Bridge of Sighs

curiosity get the better of her. She recognized her mother in the protagonist’s faithless wife, who abandoned him in “Tannersville” and returned to “the city.” Fragments of the terrible arguments she’d overheard before her mother finally left were reproduced verbatim. About the only imaginative liberty he seemed to have taken was that the protagonist and his wife were childless, an enormous relief to Sarah, who at thirteen hadn’t been anxious to know what her father thought of her. But it did trouble her that Rudy had also been erased. That her father should mimic life’s cruelty seemed unforgivable.
    Otherwise, however, she understood. The fictional reality of her father’s summer, during which he had no daughter either on the page or in the house, was difficult to surrender, and her return—always sudden because he’d managed to lose all track of time—was startling enough to give him the bends. Until he could accustom himself to the reality, she would remain, albeit physically present and undeniable, somehow inconclusive. Over Labor Day she would
become
conclusive, and this painful transition was for her the saddest part of reentry: her father’s realization that summer was over, that he had a daughter, that he made his living as a high school teacher in a backwater burg, that he wasn’t a writer, not really, and couldn’t even pretend to be one again until he completed yet another long season in purgatory. Sarah herself, she came to understand, was her father’s discontent personified. These three months in front of his typewriter had convinced him that this was his realest, truest life, and her return each September reminded him—very dramatically—that it was only a vivid illusion. He actually locked the door to his study, refusing to enter the room during the school year lest it remind him of his real work, his real life, that he was cheated out of for nine months of the year. On Tuesday, he always took the stack of pages he’d written to the Thomaston Savings and Loan, placing them with the others in a large safety-deposit box. That nothing in his life was more valuable than the contents of that box couldn’t have been more clear.
    The good news was that his transformation from writer to teacher, from bachelor to father, though dramatic, was never prolonged. Sarah always returned on Sunday afternoon, and by Tuesday morning he had to appear at the high school prepared to teach another crop of sullen, militantly uneducable Thomaston teens, so for the both of them, Labor Day Monday was full of unremitting labor. Having refused even to think about school during the summer, her father had to generate or modify lesson plans for all his courses. The morning after his daughter’s return, he’d rise early, take a long shower, shampoo his mane, shave his beard and actually dress. His trousers would demonstrate that he’d again lost weight and would have to pay another visit to his only friend at the high school, the shop teacher, and ask him to punch an additional hole in his belt. Over breakfast he’d test his vocal cords by quizzing his daughter about her summer, how babysitting had gone, if she’d made any friends, how her mother was faring, and if
she’d
made any friends, and hoping, Sarah could tell, to be told that she was still struggling, still losing accounts to her competitors, still had no man in her life and was therefore closer to admitting she couldn’t make it on her own, closer to returning to their lives.
    When she was younger, Sarah had worried that the lies she told about her mother’s life at the Sundry Arms weren’t convincing. After all, when she fudged the truth about her father, her mother’s arched eyebrow always let her know she knew better. But her father never seemed suspicious, accepting her bland falsehoods and equivocations as if no daughter of his would
know
how to lie. “He doesn’t
want
to know the truth,” her mother once explained. “He likes his version of things, and what you tell him allows him to believe what he wants. Think of it as a kindness,” she suggested. “Why burst his bubble?” Sarah had never quite gotten the hang of considering lies kindness, but did allow that her mother must be right about why this man with such a questioning mind, a perfect terrier when it came to rooting out the falsehoods of politicians and advertisers and other professional liars, never grilled her or begged details. Normally rational, he craved