Bridge of Sighs

prospered in the end, vindicating what he’d seen all along. As did our family. Sarah and I bought one of the houses on my father’s old milk route in the Borough, just as he said I might one day, if that was what I wanted. She and I married, as he wished, and we’ve had a son who’s a good, gentle man. All of this, every word, is true. It’s just not the whole truth, and I suppose that’s another reason to leave my story as it stands. Now, today, after the Bridge of Sighs, if I continued to write, it would end up being the story of my betrayal of the woman who has saved my life not once but over and over again. A betrayal that began, I fear, with our marriage.
    After high school, Sarah went off to school in the city and I to the state university in Albany, with the unspoken understanding that we’d marry someday, perhaps after we took our degrees. Meanwhile, we’d spend holidays together, maybe even summers. Poor Sarah. Her letters that first autumn in New York were full of anxiety and self-doubt. She said everybody at Cooper Union was more talented than she would ever be, and she wondered out loud if maybe her father had been right. An advocate of traditional liberal arts education, he’d long argued that what undergraduates needed most was to read, and to do so as broadly as possible. Art school, to his way of thinking, was little better than trade school, someplace you’d go if you wanted to learn to fix carburetors or refrigerators. Students required not a narrow set of skills but a broad, sturdy foundation upon which to build a real life of the mind. There’d be plenty of time for studio work later, in graduate study. Back in high school, Sarah’d had little trouble discounting his advice. She’d always known that he undervalued her gift, and also that no matter how sound his abstract argument might be, his underlying purpose was to undermine that gift in the hopes she’d discover another passion that was more to his liking.
    But now that he was gone, she began to remember, perhaps for the first time, his advice, and to torment herself with self-doubt. Typically we spoke on the phone on Sunday afternoons, when the rates were low. “What if I’m not that good?” she said one Sunday in late September. I knew she was thinking of her father, of the decade he devoted to his great novel only to have it rejected. “What if I spend years and nothing comes of it?” I told her she was as talented as anyone at CU, and my mother, overhearing, chimed in that otherwise she wouldn’t have been admitted. Before we hung up my father got on the line and said her drawing of Ikey’s still hung in the place of honor above the cash register and that people commented on it all the time. She was grateful for our reassurance, but her doubts persisted, and when one of her professors was harshly critical of a project she’d devoted many long hours to, she joked that when she flunked out, maybe she’d come join me in Albany, and God help me, I echoed her father’s arguments about the value of a broad educational foundation.
    And what did I tell Sarah about my own life that first semester at Albany State? The truth, mostly, but not—to borrow one of her father’s favorite phrases—“the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, so help me God.” I wrote her long letters in which I admitted missing her terribly, which was true. I said I was doing well in my classes (also true), that I attended them regularly and fulfilled all my academic obligations dutifully (true again), but I also gave her to understand that I’d adjusted to university life about as well as could be expected (not even remotely true). That first fall semester I was, in point of fact, a university student in name only. Sarah knew I returned home on weekends to help out at the store. Because I was needed, I told her, which was true enough, but less true than admitting I needed Ikey’s on weekends, that once classes were finished I couldn’t imagine staying on campus, where I hadn’t made a single friend. Worse, I resented Sarah’s courage and character: alone in a strange city, battling heroically to conquer her feelings of inadequacy. Whereas I hadn’t even tried. I came gradually to understand that this resentment mirrored that which I’d felt toward Bobby when we were boys. Like him, Sarah was dead game, metaphorically willing to surf blind in the rear of any truck, nor would she cry if she got tossed around. But I was still playing it