Mrs. Bridge (21 page)

She kept expecting Douglas to say something about the magazine which she burned in the incinerator but if he noticed it was gone he gave no indication. Weeks passed. She did not want to rush him. She wanted him to come to her and confess of his own free will. Carolyn was now a freshman at the university, which was located in the town of Lawrence, about forty miles distant; she often came home on week ends, but during the week she was gone, with the result that Mrs. Bridge and Douglas were sometimes the only members of the family at the dinner table. These dinners were silent and unpleasant for them both; they tended to avoid looking at each other. She waited patiently for the moment when he would give a sign a single deep look would be enough and she would know then that he wanted to have a talk. Still time went by and, since he made no move, she began to fasten her eyes on him. These mute invitations had a singular effect on Douglas; whenever he became conscious of her mournful, wretched gaze he would leave the house. She thought he was touched and full of remorse at the unhappiness he was causing and so she continued to gaze deeply at him whenever they were alone. However, more time went by and for some reason he failed to come to her.

One evening, therefore, she walked upstairs to his room and tapped on the door with her fingernail. The door was closed but she knew he was at his desk and that he was staring at the door. She was right, because after she had waited a few minutes she heard the chair creak and then his footsteps on the carpet. He jerked the door open and found her there smiling miserably. She glided past him into the room and to his desk where, without a word, she placed on the blotter a slim, musty pamphlet with a gray cover and sepia pages which she had gotten from a trunk in the attic. The pamphlet had a faint dried odor, like the crumbled wings of moths, and the elaborate typography related a little story about the marriage of a sperm and an ovum. On the frontispiece, beneath an attached sheet of tissue, were two circular photographs taken from laboratory slides.

He had followed her across the room and was now standing on the opposite side of the desk with his fists clenched behind his back. Seeing him so tense she thought that if she could only manage to rumple his hair as she used to do when he was a small boy everything would be all right. Calmly, and a little slyly, she began easing toward him.

Seeing that she was after him he also moved to keep the desk between them.

A few days later on his return from high school Douglas saw, beneath the hairbrush on his dresser, a page torn from a magazine. On one side of the page was an automobile advertisement, and on the other side was a picture of an elderly Chinese gentleman called the Old Sage, together with a list of maxims:

It is as easy to grin as to growl.

Hatred is self-punishment.

Rotten or decayed wood cannot be carved.

Have no care for the future and you will sorrow for the

present.

Life is a mirror that gives back as much as it receives. A record is often broken when competition gets keen. A good cure for drunkenness is while sober to see a drunken man.

Courage at the critical moment is half the victory. Words show the wit of a man, actions his meanings. The anvil lasts longer than the hammer. The pleasure of doing good is never tiresome. Contentment is an inexhaustible treasure. A handful of common sense is worth a bushel of learning.

Douglas went through these more and more rapidly. Having finished, and not knowing exactly what to do with the list, thinking she might want it back, he put it in a desk drawer and paid no further attention to it. In the days that followed their eyes occasionally met and locked, in-expressively.

He knew she was waiting for him to comment; she knew he had read the maxims.

Ruth did not write home as often as Mrs. Bridge had expected, nor was it possible to guess from her letters what sort of a life she was leading in New York; however she seemed to be getting along all right and did not sound unhappy. She wrote that she had moved into an apartment near the Hudson, that she was now working for a fashion magazine, and that she hoped for a promotion before long. In April she was promoted; she became an “assistant editor,” whatever that meant, but it did sound important and Mrs. Bridge was very proud and let her friends know about Ruth’s success. That same month they were surprised and delighted when she flew home for a visit. She had changed a great deal; she had become very sophisticated.

Carolyn came home from the university that week end, and Mrs. Bridge was struck by the difference in the girls. It was hard to believe they were sisters Ruth so dark and sleek, and really too thin, angular, sauntering about and smoking one cigarette after another and having cocktails with her father as though she had been drinking for years; Carolyn so active and blond and determined, and rather sturdy-looking in low-heeled golfing shoes, for she had begun playing golf in high school and was now getting exceptionally good.

Ruth was undeniably more mature and Mrs. Bridge noticed an odd fact: Ruth and Douglas liked each other very much. There was no reason they should not in fact they certainly should like each other but she could not get over a sense of astonishment when she heard them laughing together, or saw them earnestly talking in the breakfast room, drinking pots of coffee and discussing she did not know what. They appeared to have developed a new relationship. They were no longer just brother and sister, and Mrs, Bridge felt a little thrilled and more than a little sad.

She and Ruth did not have much time alone, and all at once, so it seemed, Ruth was on the telephone checking her plane reservation to New York. On her last evening in Kansas City the two of them remained in the dining room after Douglas and Mr. Bridge had left the table. They had only a few minutes because a young man named Callaway Rugg was coming to take Ruth to a Little Theatre production of Cyrano, but while they were talking at the dinner table she mentioned that one of the men who worked in her office in New York was a homosexual.

“Just what do you mean, Ruth?” asked Mrs. Bridge soberly. She had picked up a spoon and was slowly stirring her coffee.

“Why, he’s gay, Mother. Queer. You know/’

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” said Mrs. Bridge.

Ruth could not tell whether her mother was serious or not. The idea of her mother not knowing was too incredible, and yet, thinking back, and having talked with Douglas about things that had happened recently, and after a long, probing look into her mother’s eyes, Ruth knew her mother was speaking the truth. This realization so shocked her that she said coldly, “Then it’s time you found out.” Feeling cruel and nervous and frightened she continued, in the same tone, “I’m very fond of him, Mother. One morning he brought me a dozen long-stemmed roses/’

From the hall came the sound of the front door chimes. Immediately Ruth jumped up and hurried to open the door, leaving Mrs. Bridge as isolated as she had ever been in her life, as she had been isolated by her husband that day on the rue Auber.

Seldom had anyone from the country-club district attracted national attention, but there had been a few. A girl named Catlett, whose mother Mrs. Bridge knew slightly, went off to the Bahamas for a summer vacation and came back triumphantly engaged to a senator. Then there were the twins who were featured in a toothpaste advertisement, and occasionally one of the older men would be mentioned. But of the younger people the most celebrated was Callaway Rugg. He was a few years older than Ruth, but he had known her in high school and used to take her on long drives through the country; he would speak of the brevity of human affairs and of how vital it was to live as one wanted to live. He himself did not know how he wanted to live, but after playing in some dramatic productions staged in a barn on the outskirts of the city he was picked up by a talent scout and sent to Hollywood, where for the first two weeks

they were under the impression he was a lion tamer. After this was straightened out he was put into a movie-The Tattler spoke of “Kansas City’s own Carleton Reynolds/’ which was what Hollywood named him. Surprisingly, or so Mrs. Bridge had thought, the fact that he was a Kansas Citian did not noticeably increase the run of the picture. She had gone to see it. Rugg had appeared in only one scene: on the stroke of midnight, arms bound behind his back and a sack over his head, he fell out of a grandfather clock.

“Of course his part was small/’ she had remarked while discussing it with Madge Arlen, “but I do think he’s quite talented/’

However Hollywood must not have thought so, for Rugg was next heard from selling encyclopedias on the Plaza.

The new Tattler came out a few days after Ruth returned to New York and Mrs. Bridge mailed a clipping to her; “Found holidaying at the charming home of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Bridge of Crescent Heights Drive, was the lovely eldest, Ruth, now setting Gotham aflame. Scores of admirers hope the fascinating and exotic editoress-to-be won’t become a permanent Manhattanite.” On the back of the clipping was the conclusion of an article of advice to hostesses: “… jungle the natives simply peel and eat, and so should we! No more worry about knives and forks, left-hand or righthand.” And below this was the first line of a quotation from Thoreau.

Mrs. Bridge wrote that Carolyn was playing golf every afternoon and had beaten one of the boys who was on the university team, that the weather in Kansas City was awfully pleasant this time of year, that some man named Genaro had telephoned just after she returned to New York but hadn’t left a message, that the city was finally widening the street in front of the Junior League clubhouse, and that her visit to Kansas City had seemed awfully brief. Ruth had remarked on the graft in New York, so Mrs. Bridge wrote, “Isn’t it awful there’s so much graft? We have it here, too. It just makes you wonder about people.”

She also mentioned what had been going on socially and what events were on the calendar. ”Wednesday evening the Arlens are staging a cocktail party for Anne who’s off to Europe and it sounds quite intriguing. Thursday, Madge and I are off to a recital given by some folk singer who plays the dulcimer, and then on Friday there’s to be a church doing (at which a Moslem will talk!) but I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it. I’ve been having a siege of headaches and they just don’t seem to be able to make heads or tails of them. Dr. Stapp told me it’s all mental but that doesn’t make sense. Dr. Mclntyre (he’s so nice!) thinks it may be an allergy but if so I wish they’d hurry up and get together, whatever it is. Then next Monday there’s a reception at Crestwood for the McKinney girls who’re just back from a month at the Royal Hawaiian. That must have been grand… .”

Ruth chose to answer this letter one night while she was in bed with a man named Dowdey, whom she had met the previous week. She wrestled the pillow away from him and put it behind her back in order to sit up more comfortably, and with an airmail pad on her knees she began: “The weather in New York has been lovely, but otherwise there isn’t very much news. I can’t stand my boss because he’s an absolute tyrant, but everybody else is nice, and we’re trying a new format that I like better. A man who works in the next office” and she dropped one hand to give Dowdey a pinch on the buttocks “has been awfully sweet although I don’t know him very well yet. I haven’t been going out much lately, I usually come home after work and get to bed early. It was marvelous seeing everybody in Kansas City.” Here she paused and tapped the pen against her teeth, and finally added that she hoped to visit Kansas City again before long.

Dowdey, having rolled over and raised himself to one elbow, was reading the letter with his chin propped on Ruth’s shoulder.

“Jus’ like I aim to get back to San Antone,” he said, and began kissing her throat.

“Hush/’ she said. “And stop. You’re bothering me!”

“Come on down here and le’s bother all over/’ said Dowdey, “on account of you can write yo’ little mama in the morninY’

“Cut that out/’ said Ruth. “Now cut that out!*’

“Yo* mama look like you?” he asked, sliding his arms around her waist.

“She’s my sister’s mother!”

And as if by hearing these words she realized what she had said, Ruth touched her lover gently and looked down into his unblinking hazel eyes. She caressed the wind wrinkles of his leathery face; he became solemn and expectant.

“I’ll only be a little while/’ she said. For a few minutes she sat with her knees drawn up to her chin and gazed across the river and the buildings on the western shore, and she was able to see her home, not as it was now, but ten years before, at a time in her life when she would never have thought to say her mother was not her own: when she had been as tall as the new evergreen trees in the yard, when her brother was a baby. Now this was gone, and it was gone forever. She wondered why she was in New York, why she would soon give herself to this man for whom she had no feeling.

“I don’t think it’s her fault/’ Ruth whispered, with her head on her knees, and when Dowdey asked what she had said she did not answer. Presently she sighed and continued with the letter, thanking her mother for sending a box of oatmeal cookies Harriet had baked, and said they were wonderful, though in truth they had arrived broken and crushed, and she had sprinkled them on the window sill for the pigeons. Having signed the letter with love, as she always did, she ordered Dowdey to open his mouth and hold out his tongue to lick the envelope.

“That all?” he asked, grinning, as she leaned across him to place the letter on the night table.

“It depends on what you mean,” Ruth said. She turned out the light. When he covered her she was looking across the dark river, gravely thinking of her home.

With Ruth gone and with Carolyn at home only an occasional week end, with Mr. Bridge continuing to spend long hours at the office, and with Douglas appearing only for meals, Mrs. Bridge found the days growing interminable; she could not remember when a day had seemed so long since the infinite hours of childhood, and so she began casting about rueful and disconsolate for some way to occupy the time. There were mornings when she lay in bed wide awake until noon, afraid to get up because there was nothing to do. She knew Harriet would take care of ordering the groceries, Harriet would take care of everything, Harriet somehow was running the house and Mrs. Bridge had the dismal sensation of knowing that she, herself, could leave town for a week and perhaps no one would get overly excited. At breakfast lunch if she chose to call it so she would consider the newspaper with sober apathy, sighing at the events in Europe, lethargically eating whatever Harriet prepared toast and orange juice, chipped beef and cinnamon rolls, fruit salad, bacon and tomato sandwich, a dish of sherbet; whatever it happened to be Mrs. Bridge would eat some of it though it seemed tasteless. Summer had come again, another summer, another year.