Mrs. Bridge (20 page)

After Niki came another Negro man, but there was always a faint odor of whisky around him, and Harriet, when asked for an opinion, compressed her lips significantly and shook her head. After this man came another Oriental, who, within the first month, failed to show up five times. And so at last they were obliged to abandon the idea, and Mrs. Bridge, when discussing the matter with her friends, some of whom had chauffeurs and some of whom were considering it, was apt to say, “Well, it does have advantages, but of course there are drawbacks.”

The principal advantage, of course, so far as she was concerned, was that in case of difficulty there was a man around to take charge. Occasionally something unfortunate would occur while she was out driving and she then found herself in a quandary, not knowing whether to telephone her husband and run the risk of interrupting him at work or to try to handle the situation alone. One day, for instance, the Lincoln simply stopped in the middle of Ward Parkway. Luck was with her on this occasion, because a tow truck came by and when she had explained what happened the man looked under the hood. He asked how long it had been since the Lincoln was overhauled. She did not know, but thought it had been quite a while. She knew mechanics often tried to take advantage of people who knew very little about automobiles and so she bent over to peer into the engine, holding her fur coat tightly to her breast so it would not touch anything greasy, and after looking at different things for a few seconds she withdrew and said, “Well, do the best you can. About how long do you think it will take? I have a luncheon appointment on the Plaza.” Aside from mechanical difficulties there was always the parking problem; she had been amazed and impressed with the way the chauffeurs could park the Lincoln, and now that she was again on her own she was more than ever conscious of her inadequacy. Douglas, inadvertently, made the situation worse. A few days after taking up the study of geometry he began to measure everything. In his pocket he carried a carpenter’s flexible steel tape, a compass, and a scratch pad, and he was obsessed by a desire to calculate all such things as the number of cubic feet in the attic, the radius of the mahogany dining-room table if it had been circular instead of elliptical, and the angle formed by the radio and the sofa and the fireplace. Among other things he measured the chimney, the back porch, the stove, and the wicker laundry basket, and one evening he pedantically announced that the pantry was almost exactly two cubic feet smaller than the Lincoln. The next time she tried to park the car she was reminded of his calculations. She pulled on one side of the steering wheel with both hands, backed up a few feet, pulled on the opposite side of the wheel, moved forward, backed up, and so on, gasping for breath in her efforts to maneuver the formidable machine, and she was not assisted by the knowledge that it would have been easier to park the pantry.

Douglas liked it, though, and he had no more than gotten his first driver’s license when he began asking to borrow the car. She was glad enough to let him have it, only cau-tioning him to drive carefully; if she had to run an errand while he was using the Lincoln she did not mind catching a bus, and if the weather was bad she could telephone one of her friends. She often wondered where he went and what he was doing, but she did not worry much about him because he was growing to be rather conservative, which gratified her, and furthermore he seemed to be using his head more effectively than he did as a child. He was even taking a reasonable amount of interest in schoolwork. In short he was becoming a sober, self-reliant young man, a bit too mysterious, perhaps, but otherwise agreeably normal. She was, therefore, almost startled out of her wits to encounter him on the Plaza with the wildest-looking girl in the world. He had borrowed the car to go bowling and Mrs. Bridge had later decided to go shopping for some cocktail napkins and so, quite unexpectedly, they met. The girl was a gypsy-looking business with stringy black uncombed hair, hairy brown arms jingling with bracelets, and glittering mascaraed eyes in which there was a look of deadly experience. She was wearing a sheer blouse of burnt orange silk and a tight white skirt, and Mrs. Bridge did not need a second glance to realize that was practically all.

“How do you do, Paquita?” she said, smiling neutrally, after Douglas had sullenly mumbled an introduction. The girl did not speak and Mrs. Bridge wondered if she understood English. The hairy arms and the rancid odor were almost too much for Mrs. Bridge to bear. “I hope you two are having a nice time,” she said, and heard a bracelet jingle and saw Douglas and Paquita exchange a deep, knowing look.

“Dad will be home early this evening for a change, so Harriet is planning on dinner at six sharp. I hope you won’t be late. It’s nice to have met you, Paquita/ 5 And she could not be sure, but it seemed to her that a moment after she turned away the girl spat on the sidewalk.

On the bus going home with the cocktail napkins she tried to make sense of it. She tried to be fair. Why would he want to go bowling with someone obviously from a different high school when there were so many nice girls at Southwest? Why would he want to see this girl at all? What could they possibly have in common? Where could he have met her?

“You’d think I was poison/’ she said to him that evening, jokingly and very seriously, as they entered the dining room. “Why not tell us when you’re beau-ing someone new? Your Dad and I are interested in knowing your friends/

Douglas, having pushed her chair in as usual, went around the table and seated himself without a word.

“Paquita certainly jingles/’

“She likes bracelets,” he said trenchantly.

Mr. Bridge entered, and in passing behind Douglas’s chair gave him a solid, affectionate rap on the skull with his knuckles.

“Well,” said Douglas, grinning, “you must have had a good day today. You make another million bucks or something?”

Mr. Bridge laughed and picked up the carving knife, and while examining the roast he said, “I hear you’re turning into quite a basketball player/’

“Who told you that?”

“Never mind who told me.”

“Oh, I don’t know/’ Douglas said, blushing. He played forward on the church team and was trying to make the high-school squad but so far had been unsuccessful.

“Maybe you should butter up the coach’s daughter/’ said Mr. Bridge, busying himself with the roast.

Douglas groaned in elaborate agony. “Anyway, I don’t even know if he’s got a daughter. And besides, that’s no way to make the team/’

“Well, how else are you going to do it?”

“Oh, you have to play just the way the coach likes. I mean he likes real smooth dribbling and things like that that really aren’t important. I guess I told you about our church team skunking the Southwest second team, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did. Pass your mother’s plate/’

“Well, doesn’t it stand to reason that if we can beat the second team we ought to be at least as good as the first team? I mean, this coach has got his favorites, see? And if you aren’t one of his favorites, well, you just don’t have a chance/’

Mr. Bridge glanced at him and said calmly, “You’re joking about that, so I don’t mind. But don’t let me catch you whining seriously. This million dollars you referred to if I had earned it I wouldn’t have earned it from being the judge’s favorite. This country operates on the principle that the more industry and intelligence a man applies to his job the more he is entitled to profit. I hope it never changes/’

“Yuh, okay/* Douglas muttered, trying to end the conversation before it turned into a lecture.

“Remember that.”

“I will. Okay. Okay.”

The telephone rang at that moment and Harriet came into the dining room to say it was for Mr. Bridge. No sooner was he out of the room when Mrs. Bridge remarked, “I saw Patty Duncan the other day. She asked how you were.”

“Tell her I’m still alive and kicking.”

“She’s such a lovely girl. And they say she’s becoming quite the pianist.”

“Okay,” said Douglas, who had found himself assaulted from both ends of the dinner table. “For the love of Mike, I mean can’t I live my own life?”

For the remainder of the meal she said no more about the encounter on the Plaza, but it had so disturbed her that she waited up until he got in late that night.

“Were you out with Paquita?” she asked, gazing at him earnestly.

In silence, face averted, Douglas took off his leather jacket.

“Does she live around here?” Mrs. Bridge asked, following him to the closet and picking a bit of lint from his sweater.

He hung up the jacket and walked into the living room, where he took a comb from his hip pocket, stooped a little in order to see himself in the mirror, for he was now almost six feet tall and still growing soon he would be taller than his father and began combing his long red hair straight back in the style he had recently adopted. His hair would not lie down, it grew stubbornly in various directions, and the more he combed it the more rebellious it looked, but he would not give in and the hair would not lie down.

“You’re just like your Dad,” she said, observing him, and there was not only love but vexation in her tone. Douglas, scowling, combed his hair and mashed it with his palms. As soon as he lifted his hands the hairs began to rise.

“Dear/* she said, having followed him from the closet. She now stood a little way in back of him, looking at his face in the mirror. He slipped the comb in his pocket and bent a look of deep hatred against the mirror.

“What is it?” he asked brutally.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Well, good night/’ he said and turned to go upstairs, but she reached out and caught his arm.

“Douglas, why do you want to go around with that sort of person?”

At this he jerked his arm free and went to the closet, where he got his jacket and left the house again. She remained with one hand resting on the banister and was sick with anxiety, not so much because of the girl, for she knew he would outgrow her, but because she did not want to lose his friendship. She had lost his love, she knew not why, as she had forfeited that of Ruth, and the thought of losing her son entirely was more than she could endure.

The next night he borrowed the Lincoln to escort Paquita to a basketball tournament in the municipal auditorium. While driving down Troost toward the north end of town, where she lived with her sister, who was a burlesque dancer, he passed a drive-in restaurant. He neither stopped nor slowed down, but as he went by his attention was caught by a singularly voluptuous carhop, with the result that when the traffic light changed he did not see it because he was looking backward. He drove into the rear o the car ahead of him. No one was injured, but all parties were somewhat dazed and Douglas got himself a lump on the forehead. The grille of the Lincoln was dented and a wheel knocked out of alignment.

At home, when asked how the accident occurred, he replied without hesitation that it was because of a woman.

“Oh-ho!” said Mr. Bridge, who was of the opinion that traffic problems would disappear on the day women were no longer licensed to drive. “What have I been saying all these years?” He asked his son no more questions, only took the paper on which Douglas had written the license number of the other car, and said he would notify the insurance company.

Douglas wisely volunteered no further information and believed he had gotten out of the embarrassing accident rather cleverly until he chanced to look at his mother. Although she had not said a word, he perceived that in some fantastic manner she sensed the complete truth, and he reflected that in matters however distantly related to sex she possessed supernatural powers of divination.

Ordinarily Mrs. Bridge examined the laundry that Ingrid carried up from the basement every Tuesday afternoon in a creaking wicker basket, but when she was out shopping, or at a luncheon, the job fell to Harriet, who never paid much attention to such things as missing buttons or loose elastic. Thus it was that Mrs. Bridge discovered Douglas wearing a shirt with cuffs that were noticeably frayed.

“For heaven’s sake!” she exclaimed, taking hold of his sleeve. “Has a dog been chewing on this?”

He looked down at the threads as though he had never before seen them; in fact he hadn’t.

“Surely you don’t intend to wear this shirt?”

Since he was already wearing the shirt this struck him as a foolish question, but he said, “It looks perfectly okay to me.”

“Why, just look at these cuffs! Anyone would think we were on our way to the poorhouse.”

“So is it a disgrace to be poor?”

“No!” she cried. “But we’re not poor!”

Thereafter she kept a sharp eye on the laundry, going through it piece by piece to see what needed mending, after which she separated it into three stacks: one for the master bedroom, one for the room which Ruth and Carolyn had shared and which now was Carolyn’s alone, and a third for Douglas’s room. One by one she carried these piles of clothing into the proper room and there divided them further, handkerchiefs, underwear, blouses, and so forth, and arranged them neatly in the proper drawers.

One afternoon she carried Douglas’s laundry into his room as usual and placed it on his bed as she always did in order to sort it. She put the newly laundered shirts on top of the others in his dresser and was about to go on with her work when it occurred to her that in all likelihood he was wearing the same shirts again and again; probably the ones in the bottom of the drawer were never being worn, and with the idea of reversing the order she took them all out and beneath the final shirt she found a magazine. Although she had never before seen one like it she knew instinctively what it was.

Mrs. Bridge sank to the edge of the bed and gazed dismally at the wall, the unopened magazine in her hands. She could hear Harriet singing hymns in the kitchen while peeling green apples for a pie, and the fervency of those good shrill Christian notes caused Mrs. Bridge to feel more desolate and abandoned than ever. She closed her eyes and shook her head in disbelief. The last thing on earth she wanted was to look Into this magazine, but it had to be done. She looked at one page. There was a naked woman. That was enough. She looked no more. Never in her life had she been confronted with a situation like this and she did not know what to do. She was under the impression that these magazines had been legislated against and were not available. She asked herself where she had failed. With him, as with Ruth and Carolyn, she had adroitly steered around threatening subjects; in no way had she stimulated his curiosity quite the contrary. Where, then, had she failed? She had let him realize, without her having to say so, that there were two kinds of people in the world, and this was true, she knew, for it was what she had been taught by her father and mother.