Mrs. Bridge (24 page)

A few minutes later she re-entered the dining room with a loaf of grocery-store bread on a silver tray. She smiled and said, “It’s been a long time, I’m afraid.”

“Never mind/ 1 said Mr. Bridge as he removed the lid o the casserole, and the next day he brought her a dozen roses.

Time was passing more rapidly than she thought; she was al-most overcome when Carolyn appeared in the middle of the week with an engagement ring she had gotten the night before from a thin, shaggy boy with protruding teeth whose name was Gil Davis. He was a junior at the university. He was studying business management and working part-time in the dean’s office.

Mrs. Bridge, seeking a moment to recover from the shock, looked at Carolyn’s ring and said, “It’s an opal, isn’t it?”

“Gil doesn’t have much money/’ Carolyn explained. “He told me he thought diamonds were absurd. And you know, Mother, he’s worked for everything he owns!”

She was fascinated by this. She had never known a boy who was poor. In high school she had known boys who worked during summers and some who worked after school in order to have spending money, but none of them had been forced to work in order to eat and buy clothing. “Well, I think it’s lovely!*’ said Mrs. Bridge, squeezing her hand, “Does your father know?”

“No,” said Carolyn.

“Well, I’m afraid you’d better tell him, don’t you think so?”

“Why don’t you call him?” Carolyn suggested.

“This isn’t my engagement,” replied Mrs. Bridge.

Mr. Bridge, being informed of his daughter’s engagement, was outraged. He had never heard of any Gil Davis, and who did Gil Davis think he was? And as for Carolyn, there was to be no more of this ridiculous nonsense. She was to return that ring to that upstart boy, whatever his name was, and that was to be the end of the matter. Carolyn immediately burst into tears and threw her ring on the carpet. Her father had never talked to her like that before. When she returned to the university the ring was in her pocket. She had promised to give it back.

Gil Davis, being informed that his suit had been rejected, was also outraged. He was twenty years old and never before in his life had he been the cause of any trouble. He looked at the ring, he looked at Carolyn, and then he ran out of the dean’s office and ran all the way to the bus station, where he bought a ticket to Kansas City. He pushed his way past the secretary who wanted to know what his business was and he walked into Mr. Bridge’s private office without bothering to knock. He emerged at eight o’clock that night in company with his intended father-in-law; they ate sausage and buckwheat cakes together in a lunch wagon, both of them exhausted, and they had agreed he was going to marry Carolyn. So, for the second time, Gil Davis placed his opal ring on her finger and she wore the ring with a truculent expression.

“I know you two are going to be very happy,” Mrs. Bridge said, hugging her. “I’m so relieved everything worked out all right.”

Carolyn said, “You do like him, Mother, don’t you?”

“Why, of course, dear! He’s awfully nice. It’s just that he’s so different from the kind of boys you’ve been used to.”

Gil Davis was aware of this fact; he quit the university because he saw he would need steady money and quite a lot of it as soon as he married Carolyn. He returned to his home town, which was located near the Oklahoma border in southern Kansas, and there he went to work for his uncle, who owned a dry-goods emporium. Carolyn wanted him to work in an air-craft factory where he could get overtime wages, but saw the sense of his decision when he told her his uncle was considering retirement.

The friends of Mrs. Bridge were avid for information about Carolyn’s engagement.

“Is her ring a blue or a white?”

“It’s a lovely opal/’ Mrs. Bridge replied, facing the inquiries with her best smile.

“What a nice idea!”

“It’s what Carolyn was hoping for,” Mrs. Bridge countered.

“I understand he’s not a Kansas Citian.”

“From Parallel,” she replied serenely, and scored a point by not explaining where Parallel could be found.

“It sounds quite far.”

“They’ll be driving up for visits, I’m sure.”

“What does the father do?”

He was a plumber. Mrs. Bridge had confronted herself with this fact a thousand times; there was simply no way around it. She imagined herself replying to this question, which, inevitably, would be asked, replying evasively that he was associated with a company that did household installation, and yet she knew in her heart she must speak the truth. It seemed to her that Carolyn’s happiness depended on the acknowledgment of this condition, and, for better or worse, the acceptance of it.

Said Mrs. Bridge and her throat was so constricted she was afraid the words would lodge there “Mr. Davis is a plumber.” She was astonished to see she had very nearly scored again, for she had spoken with such ease that one might almost believe everybody nowadays was marrying the sons of plumbers.

“I hear the boy is a Beta.”

“Well, no. As I understand the situation, Gil is of the opinion fraternity life can be a liability.”

“Oh, how true,”

“And how does he stand with the draft?”

His feet were as flat as ironing boards and his teeth were bad; he had been rejected as generally unsatisfactory. There was no sense going into detail, such details as Carolyn had given, and so she replied that he had been exempted for medical reasons. She believed he had had rheumatic fever when he was a child. In any event this sounded plausible, and was acceptable.

“You say he’s in Parallel now?

Mrs. Bridge knew what was next. She nodded.

“I see. I didn’t realize he’d already graduated/*

“According to what Carolyn tells me, in his opinion a four-year university education is actually less worth while than a certain amount of practical experience/’ It had been badly put, she knew, and it was a retreat, but the business of the plumber had broken her composure.

Wedding gifts arrived. Day after day they arrived and Carolyn received enough silver to open a shop. She tore open the packages greedily and her blue eyes gleamed more brightly than the richest plate. Mrs. Bridge, meanwhile, seated at her writing table with a notebook and fountain pen, dutifully jotted down what it was and who had sent it. Carolyn would be expected to memorize this list in order to be able to thank everyone personally and specifically: she would be expected to, but would she? Mrs. Bridge was uneasy. She, herself, no matter how long it took, no matter how arduous the job, would have learned to identify every gift. She could only hope Carolyn would be as considerate.

There were a few awkward presents a green bronze frog to be used as a doorstop, a queer desk lamp that resembled a pagoda, two or three novels and a book of Persian poetry, and from cousin Lulubelle Watts in Memphis a lifetime subscription to a magazine no one had ever heard of. There was one gift, however, worse than these. It was a present from Douglas. It was a toaster.

Douglas had delayed until the last moment because he hated to give or to receive presents. He liked his sister but he did not see where spending fifteen or twenty dollars would prove he wished her happiness. In deference to custom, however, on the next to last day he decided to buy a toaster because she had said she would need one. He walked to the Plaza “Nobody’s using the Lincoln/’ she had said, but he replied that he felt like walking and on the Plaza he looked them over, hands in his pockets, while a salesman demonstrated. He was shown the most elaborate toasters that money could buy, but he was not pleased. The dials were set, the pointers turned, the levers pressed, the machine plugged in, the concealed tray that collected crumbs was removed, all for his benefit, but he was not pleased. At the conclusion of the demonstration he walked across the street to a dime store and bought a primitive toaster such as his parents had had when they were first married.

No one criticized the gift. Carolyn thanked him. Mrs. Bridge exclaimed over how simple it was to operate, and in-deed it was simple. Neither of them mentioned the four magnificent automatic toasters which had been delivered that same morning.

Of course the amount of money spent was not the important thing, everyone admitted that, and everyone said something really should be done to make wedding gifts more reasonable; all the same, people would want to know what Douglas had given his sister, and either Mrs. Bridge or Carolyn would be obliged to point it out. Clearly it had not cost more than two dollars. Mrs. Bridge was absolutely baffled by her son. Never in her life had she so wanted to shake him.

To southern Kansas Carolyn moved after the ceremony and a one-week honeymoon at Excelsior Springs. Mr. Bridge had offered them a wedding trip to the Bahamas, but Gil refused, saying they would honeymoon on the money he himself had earned, so Excelsior Springs was the extent of it. Carolyn had wanted to see the Bahamas ever since she could remember. The wedding gift metamorphosed into one hundred shares of expensive, conservative stock.

Gil began working nights in order to convince his uncle that it was feasible to retire and leave the dry-goods business in his hands, the result being that Carolyn was lonely and bored, and became petulant, and frequently drove to Kansas City for the night after leaving a note pinned to the tablecloth. She would stay in her old room and, if there chanced to be a party that week end, she might remain in Kansas City until Monday. From the beginning she disliked Parallel and could not make up her mind whether she could stand living there.

“The golf course is pathetic, Mother/* she said one evening, a nine-hole public course and by public I mean anybody, but anybody, even if they never saw a golf club before, can play there. I mean, really, how does Gil expect me to accomplish anything there? It’ll absolutely ruin my game. The greens there aren’t any greens, Mother, they’re as hard as wood and the grass is burnt to a crisp. It isn’t any fun. Anybody can hit the ball three hundred yards, just about they just go on rolling. My God! I mean, actually, Mother, you should see that place! I had no idea it would be like that.”

Mrs. Bridge was extremely anxious for Carolyn to be happy. “I should think it would be nice for a change,” she said.

Carolyn was not listening.

“Gil’s a type, really. He is. He’s a small-town boy, and it shows, Mother. He got simply furious when I tried to tell the barber how to cut his hair. I got so mad I wouldn’t speak to him for three days.”

“Dear, I wish you wouldn’t argue with him.”

“Listen, Mother, no man is ever going to push me around the way Daddy pushes you around.”

Subsequent events proved that Carolyn and her husband had their reconciliations, no matter how brief, for she very soon was pregnant.

She drove up from Parallel one snowy afternoon and said as she came in the door, stamping snow from her galoshes, “You’ll never believe this, Mother, because it’s too perfectly incredible/’ And she said this repeatedly, as if to convince herself it was a dream. It was less than a dream, or more, depending, though she continued to exclaim for about three months, “I mean, this is just insane!”

Eventually she grew accustomed to her situation and it appeared to Mrs. Bridge that the marriage was going to work out all right. Gil and Carolyn were looking for a house in Parallel; their apartment would be too small when the baby came.

“But everything is so high,” said Carolyn. They were in the kitchen. It was Harriet’s day off and Mrs. Bridge was baking some oatmeal cookies to send to Ruth, and Carolyn was helping. “We want something with a decent yard,” she went on, sliding a spatula under a row of hot cookies and transferring them to a towel spread on the drainboard. “And Gil insists on a dry basement. That’s the first place he goes. The real-estate agent no more than has the door open when Gil heads for the basement and I’m left standing there as big as an elephant. He’s gone mad on turning out salad bowls on a lathe. A friend of his has a lathe. He says it calms his nerves, and so that’s why he has to have a dry basement so it won’t rust the goddamned lathe. Really, how berserk can a man go?”

Mrs. Bridge, carefully drawing a second tray of cookies from the oven, observed that there should be lots of pleasant homes in Parallel.

“Oh, there are, there are,” Carolyn mumbled, “but you’ve got to check the neighbors.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“The niggers are moving in.”

Mrs, Bridge slowly put down the tray of cookies. She did not know just what to say. Such situations were awkward. On the one hand, she herself would not care to live next door to a houseful of Negroes; on the other hand, there was no reason not to. She had always liked the colored people she had known.

She still thought affectionately o Beulah Mae and worried about her, wondering if she was still alive. She had never known any Negroes socially; not that she avoided it, just that there weren’t any in the neighborhood, or at the country club, or in the Auxiliary. There just weren’t any for her to meet, that was all.

“That reminds me, Carolyn. You’ll never guess who I bumped into the other day. Alice Jones! We got on an elevator together/’

“My God! I’d absolutely forgotten that girl.”

“Don’t you remember how you two used to play together? You were practically inseparable. I almost had to pry you apart at lunch time/’

“Did she recognize you?”

“Oh, right away.”

“What’s she doing?”

“She’s married now and she’s working as a maid in one of the downtown hotels.”

“How many children does she have?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Does she look the same?”

“Heavens, no! She’s almost as tall as Douglas and she looked so black. It’s such a shame.”

Carolyn became thoughtful, and finally said, “I think I’d like to see her. Which hotel is she working at?”

“I’ve been trying to think. I knew you’d want to see her. And she told me which one it was.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter, I guess. I don’t know what we could say to each other, it’s been so long.”