Bridge of Sighs

him I knew that, and that when David had tried to kiss me I’d pushed him away, that we hadn’t been friends since, which reassured him.
    Except for what happened in the voting booth, my father had no secrets from my mother, so that night at dinner he told her about the terrible things David’s father had said. “The poor boy,” my mother sighed, looking at me.
    “That don’t mean you got to be mean to him or nothin’,” my father told me, as if he’d forgotten that David was dead. Probably he just meant that if something like that ever happened again, with some other boy, I wasn’t obligated to be cruel, but my mother looked at him as if he’d just sunk to a new low, stupiditywise. “Jesus, Lou,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. “Christ on a crutch.”
    Was
I, as my father put it, “that way”? I didn’t know. I did not. Was David? I didn’t know that either. He was just a boy. I knew only that he was frightened to be in a strange new place and terribly grateful I’d befriended him. He felt about me like I’d once felt about Bobby. “Adoration” is probably not too strong a word to describe that heady mingling of intense affection and dependence. Back when we lived at Berman Court, and even later on Third Street, during that summer when we surfed my father’s truck, I’d
wanted
to kiss Bobby. I had. I’d known it wasn’t permitted, but what, I thought, was so wrong about it? I remember thinking about little Gabriel Mock kissing my mother so long ago. How powerful his feelings for her must have been to risk the consequences that were sure to follow. And, like David, he’d done it in broad daylight. Could it be that acts committed in the privacy of darkness became wrong only in the public light of day? Wasn’t that the very adult wisdom Perry Kozlowski had tried to convey to me in the balcony of the movie theater shortly before he went out into the brilliant afternoon sunlight and beat Three Mock half to death?
    I might have written all this, but did not. Why? The answer to that question, I suspect, can be found in that photo of my father hanging on the wall of my study. My story was written under his watchful eye, and if I’ve told it dishonestly, it’s because I didn’t want to embarrass him. To write about David would have meant admitting to my deepest thoughts about what my mother described so accurately as the “mean old world” we share, that its meanness resides deep within each of us. It would’ve revealed what I’ve always known to be true, though I’ve denied it to my mother, my father and myself—that I’m as much her son as his. For my father, the world wasn’t a complicated place. Its rules mostly made sense and they were for our own good. I’ve always wanted to be the person he believed me to be, which at times has kept me from being a better one. A terrible realization, this.
    I look over at Sarah and wonder how I’ll manage without her, absent her ability to see what’s there instead of what I prefer to see. I’ll have to make sense of things for myself. She’ll wake up soon and then be gone, so for a while I’ll watch her breathe and dream. So lovely. She’s wearing a cotton nightgown, modest and opaque, but of course it reveals what isn’t there, the breast she surrendered last year to save her life, and looking at her now, knowing the small secrets she’s kept in her good heart, I feel a little better about my own. Perhaps we are all entitled to keep a small place that’s our own.
    The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we’re left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.
    Blame love.

THE BLUE DOOR
     
    T RUE, IT WASN’T MUCH of a plan. When the Albany train deposited her at Penn Station, Sarah intended to take a taxi up to the Waldorf-Astoria. She and her mother stayed there once over the Labor Day weekend, splurging, they’d called it, though it was her mother paying for it. Sarah’s babysitting money, a goodly sum by the end of August, got put away for college. She remembered, during those end-of-summer goodbyes, going to museums, window-shopping, sometimes strolling across town to see the kind of Broadway show her mother