Bridge of Sighs

injuries, we Borough parents spare our children similar scrapes and bruises by dressing them in high-tech helmets plus neon-colored knee and elbow pads. Nor do we mind if they’re scoffed at by kids from the less affluent West or East End. We have the wherewithal to keep our children safe, so we do.
    Borough residents are mostly Protestant and politically conservative, descendants of Tories like Sir Thomas Whitcombe, who settled our valley and built the great Halls. Loyal to King George, if they’d had their way, they would’ve preserved the Adirondacks, if not all of America, as a giant game reserve for aristocratic Englishmen. My wife’s father used to argue that instead of restoring the Hall, as Sir Thomas’s great residence is locally known, to its former splendor, the town fathers should have razed it and erected a discount store in its place. But he was a man of many opinions, most of them outrageous, and in any case the Hall, by then a mere shell, caught fire years ago and burned to its foundations.
    Though we in the Borough are outnumbered by the ethnic Catholics and registered Democrats in both the East and West Ends, our town always has a Republican mayor and is considered a write-off by downstate liberals who don’t waste much campaign money in our local television market. As an East End boy, I wondered how a majority could be outvoted by a minority, and my father could offer no explanation except that this was the way it had always been. My mother, on the other hand, knew why. The reason was fingernails. People in the Borough had clean fingernails because they never had to get them dirty, whereas West Enders got them so dirty, day after day, that they never came entirely clean, and eventually they stopped trying; East Enders like us worked hard, too, my mother claimed, but it was our nature to scrub ourselves raw with stiff brushes and coarse soap, to scrub until we bled, so our fingernails were as clean as those that never dirtied them to begin with. It was human nature, she explained. You don’t identify with people worse off than you are. You make your deals, if you can, with those who have more, because you hope one day to have more yourself. Understand that, she claimed, and you understand America, not just Thomaston. When I asked if it would always be that way, she opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again. “How about I ask
you
that question in about twenty years?” she suggested. I agreed enthusiastically, enjoying the idea that in twenty years I might be smart enough to figure out what she couldn’t, so we set the date and pledged not to forget, but of course we did.
    Though we now live in the Borough and have done so for years, I doubt anyone in Thomaston is more democratic and egalitarian than my wife and me. I myself, in a sense, am spread all over town by virtue of owning property in both the West and East Ends, and I’ve been a walker of Thomaston streets all my life. Even now, I walk at least an hour a day through Thomaston’s different neighborhoods, where I’m recognized and, I hope and trust, respected in all of them. “One of these days you’re going to meet yourself either coming or going, Pop,” our son, also a lifelong resident of our town, often observes, and there’s a good deal of symbolic truth to this remark. Almost nowhere in Thomaston am I not within sight of a personal memory.
    The self I meet coming and going is, I confess, relentlessly unexceptional. I’m a large man, like my father, and the resemblance has always been a source of pleasure to me. I loved him more than I can say, so much that even now, many years after his death, it’s hard for me to hear, much less speak, a word against him. Still, there’s also something bittersweet about our resemblance. I am, I believe, an intelligent man, but I’ll admit this isn’t always the impression I convey to others. Over the course of a lifetime a man will overhear a fair number of remarks about himself and learn from them how very wide is the gulf between his public perception and the image he hopes to project. I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood? I tend to be both self-conscious and reticent. Where others regret speaking in haste, wishing they could recall some unkind or ill-considered opinion, I more often have occasion to regret what I’ve