Mrs. Bridge (9 page)

At the end of two weeks she was on her thirteenth lesson, very nearly on schedule, when the telephone interrupted; Madge Arlen was calling to say that a delivery truck had run over their next-door neighbor’s boxer. Dogs were always being run over by delivery trucks. The Bridges had lost a collie several years before, and some people named Ilgenfritz who lived in the next block had lost two dachshunds.

“Oh, not really!” Mrs. Bridge began. “What a shame!”

“I tell you I’m up in arms!” replied Madge. “When Edith told me about it I was so put out I simply couldn’t speak/*

Presently the conversation got around to the vocabulary book and Mrs. Bridge praised it and recommended it quite strongly to Madge, who answered that she’d just finished reading it.

Mrs. Bridge was very much surprised by this news. “You did?” she asked uncertainly, for the book had obviously not affected Madge’s vocabulary.

“Yes, and it was marvelous! Every last one of us ought to read it.”

Mrs. Bridge felt rather subdued after this talk with Madge; however she continued with her lessons whenever there was time. She did want to complete the book because she was al-ways meeting people who asked if she had read it, and within the month she had reached the twentieth lesson, where one turned adverbs into nouns. So far none of her friends had commented as the dust jacket promised; consequently Mrs. Bridge was a little discouraged. The book began to wander around the house. It found its way from the coffee table in the living room to the window seat in the breakfast room; after that it lay in a dresser drawer in the upstairs bedroom for about a week, and briefly in the room shared by Carolyn and Ruth. From there it traveled again to the breakfast room, to the basement, and finally, Its pages already turning a sulphur color and its jacket mended with Scotch Tape, it died on a shelf between T. E. Lawrence and The Rubdiydt.

Madge and Grace were so different; Mrs. Bridge felt drawn to them both, and was distressed that the two of them did not care for each other. Now and then she felt they were compet-ing for her friendship, though she could not be sure of this, but if it was true it was both exciting and alarming. She often thought about them. She felt more comfortable with Madge, who liked everything about Kansas City, more secure, more positive; with Grace Barron she felt obliged to consider everything she said, and to look all around, and she could never guess what Grace would say or do.

Tobacco Road, practically uncensored, had come to Kansas City, and Madge Arlen possibly jealous of Grace Barron’s attentions called to ask if Mrs. Bridge wanted to go to the Wednesday matinee. She had not thought about it, but there was no reason not to, particularly since almost everyone was going to see it in spite of its shady reputation, so she agreed.

The play had scarcely got under way when she received a brief but severe shock: one of the girls in the cast looked extremely like Ruth with her hair uncombed. For an instant she feared it truly was Ruth; it wasn’t, of course, and as the play went on she could see that the actress was a few years older.

She did not enjoy the play, neither did Madge Arlen; they left after the second act. On the way out of the theater Mrs. Bridge remarked, “Frankly, I don’t see why a play like Tobacco Road is necessary/’

“We expected it to be earthy,” Madge Arlen observed with some lenience, “however, I do agree with you. It went much too far.”

It was very hot that summer.

For as long as she could remember, Mrs. Bridge had known that unless she was wearing slacks slacks were worn only for gardening she must wear stockings. In summer this could be uncomfortable, but it was the way things were, it was the way things had always been, and so she complied. No matter where she was going, though it might be no farther than the shopping center at Sixty-third Street, or even if she was not going out of the house all day, she would put on her stockings.

But one morning and an extraordinarily hot day it promised to be, because by ten o’clock the tar in the street was glis-tening she decided not to wear stockings. It was Harriet’s day off, Ruth and Carolyn had gone swimming at Lake Lotawana, and Douglas had gone to a model-airplane meet in Swope Park, so nobody would ever know the difference. Hav-ing selected the lightest dress she could find in her closet, she put on a pair of blue anklets and the clogs she wore at the country-club swimming pool. Thus dressed, she considered herself in the mirror and shook her head at the sight, but went downstairs all the same. The Beckerle sisters, two elderly wid-ows who were seldom seen about the neighborhood, chose that morning to come visiting.

“Oh, goodness,” cried Mrs, Bridge as she greeted them at the door, “I look like something out of Tobacco Road!”

Having been repelled by Tobacco Road to the point where it obsessed her, she employed it as a pigeonhole: whatever she found unreal, bizarre, obnoxious, indecorous, malodorous, or generally unsavory, unexpected, and disagreeable henceforth belonged in Tobacco Road, was from there, or should have been there. So, finding ker son in ragged tennis shoes, she let him know where he was from. He didn’t mind. He had never cared about clothes one way or another, unless lie had become attached to a particular garment, in which case he wore it until she threw it away. Whenever it became necessary to get him some new clothing there would be a quarrel, and after much wrangling the two of them would drive off to one of the young men’s shops where he would be turned over to a clerk experienced in these situations, and finally, after all three of them were exhausted, the purchase was made. The argument in re-gard to the gray suit was typical: ‘Tve already got a suit.”

“But that’s a summer suit/’ she countered.

He looked in his closet and found another outfit. “What’s the matter with this, I’d sure like to know?”

“You’ve outgrown it, and besides, it’s time you got another.”

“I never wore it anyway,” he said triumphantly, his voice changing pitch during the sentence.

“This is absolutely ridiculous. We’re going down to the Plaza right now and get you something to wear, so you might as well get used to the idea.”

“This suit works all right. I don’t want another one.”

“Can you imagine your father going to work In old clothes? Why, he’d be laughed out of court!”

Douglas said he didn’t think it was so funny, and furthermore he couldn’t understand what difference it made; for her part she could not understand why he objected to having new clothes. But, as always, they ended by going to the Plaza, where a very nice gray suit was purchased, although on the way home he said bitterly that he would not ever wear it. He did, of course, as they both knew he would; it was just that he could not admit he liked the suit. In fact he decided it was necessary to claim the suit was giving him a heart attack. Mrs. Bridge was so startled by this announcement that she was temporarily unable to reply.

“Well, it is!” he said, and began to stagger and clutch his chest. “It’s too heavy. I can’t breathe.”

“The only thing wrong with you, my young friend, is your big imagination.”

“Okay, then,” he retorted gloomily. And with his head lowered he walked slowly away, stopping every few steps to feel his heart. At the door he hesitated, and before going out he said truculently, “But I’m just telling you, if I keel over dead, don’t be surprised.”

“Very well,” she replied, “I won’t.”

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge were giving a party, not because they wanted to, but because it was time. Like dinner with the Van Metres, once you accepted an invitation you were obligated to reciprocate, or, as Mr. Bridge had once expressed it, retaliate.

Altogether some eighty people showed up in the course of the evening. They stood around and wandered around, eating, drinking, talking, and smoking. Grace and Virgil Barron were there Grace sunburned, freckled, and petite, and looking rather pensive; the Arlens arrived in a new Chrysler; the Heywood Duncans were there; and Wilhelm and Susan Van Metre, both seeming withered, sober, and at the wrong party; Lois and Stuart Montgomery; Noel Johnson, huge and alone, wearing a paper cap; Mabel Ong trying to begin serious discussions; and, among others, the Beckerle sisters in beaded gowns which must have been twenty years old, both sisters looking as though they had not for an instant forgotten the morning Mrs. Bridge entertained them In anklets. Even Dr. Foster, smiling tolerantly, with a red nose, stopped by for a cigarette and a whisky sour and chided a number of the men about Sunday golf.

There was also an automobile salesman named Beachy Marsh who had arrived very early in a double-breasted pin-stripe business suit, and, being ill at ease, sensing that he did not belong, did everything he could think of to be amusing.

He was not a close friend but It had been necessary to Invite him along with several others,

Mrs. Bridge rustled about her large, elegant, and brilliantly lighted home, checking steadily to see that everything was as it should be. She glanced into the bathrooms every few minutes and found that the guest towels, like pastel handkerchiefs, were still immaculately overlapping one another at evening’s end only two had been disturbed, a fact which would have given Douglas, had he known, a morose satisfaction and she entered the kitchen once to recommend that the extra servant girl, hired to assist Harriet, pin shut the gap in the breast of her starched uniform.

Around and around went Mrs. Bridge, graciously smiling, pausing here and there to chat for a moment, but forever alert, checking the turkey sandwiches, the crackers, the barbecued sausages, quietly opening windows to let out the smoke, discreetly removing wet glasses from mahogany table tops, slip ping away now and then to empty the solid Swedish crystal ashtrays.

And Beachy Marsh got drunk. He slapped people on the shoulder, told jokes, laughed uproariously, and also went around emptying the ashtrays of their cherry-colored stubs, all the while attempting to control the tips of his shirt collar, which had become damp from perspiration and were rolling up into the air like horns.

Following Mrs. Bridge halfway up the carpeted stairs he said hopefully, “There was a young maid from Madras, who had a magnificent ass; not rounded and pink, as you probably think it was gray, had long ears, and ate grass.”

“Oh, my word!” replied Mrs. Bridge, looking over her shoulder with a polite smile but continuing up the stairs, while the auto salesman plucked miserably at his collar.

The evenings were growing cooler, September was here, au-tumn not far to the north, and the trees rustled uneasily.

Having ordered the groceries and having spent the remainder of the morning more or less listening to the radio, and being then unable to find anything else to do, she informed Harriet who was In the kitchen furiously smoking one cigarette after another while cutting up dates for a pudding that she had some shopping to take care of on the Plaza and would not be home until late that afternoon. She felt somewhat guilty as she said this because in reality there was no shopping to be done, but, with the children again in school and with Harriet to do the cooking and housekeeping and with the laundress coming once a week to do the washing, Mrs. Bridge found the days were very long. She was restless and unhappy and would spend hours thinking wistfully of the past, of those years Just after her marriage when a day was all too brief.

After luncheon in her favorite tearoom she decided she might as well look at candlesticks. She had been thinking of getting some new ones; this seemed as good a time as any. On her way to Bancroft’s, which carried the nicest things on the Plaza, she stopped at a drugstore for a box of aspirin, then paused In front of a bookstore where her eye was caught by the title of a book in the window display: Theory of the Leisure Class. She experienced a surge of resentment. For a number of seconds she eyed this book with definite hostility, as though it were alive and conscious of her. She went inside and asked to see the book. With her gloves on it was difficult to turn the pages, so she handed it back to the clerk, thanked him, and with a dissatisfied expression continued to Bancroft’s.

If she bought a book it was almost always one of three things: a best-seller she had heard about or seen advertised, a self-improvement book, or a book by a Kansas City author no matter what it was about. These latter were infrequent, but now and again somebody would explode in the midst of Kansas City with a Civil War history or an account of old Westport Landing. Then, too, there were slender volumes of verse and essays usually printed by local publishing houses, and it was one of these that lay about the living room longer than any other book, with the exception of an extremely old two-volume set of The Brothers Karamazov in gold-painted leather which nobody in the family had ever read and which had belonged to Mr. Bridge’s grandfather. This set rested gravely on the mantelpiece between a pair of bronze Indian-chief heads the only gift from cousin Lulubelle Watts that Mrs. Bridge had ever been able to use and was dusted once a week by Harriet with a peacock-feather duster.

The volume that ran second to The Brothers Karamazov was a collection of thoughts by the local minister, Dr. Foster, an exceptionally short and congenial man with an enormous head which was always referred to as leonine, and which was crowned with golden white hair. He allowed his hair to grow very long and he brushed it toward the top of his head so as to appear taller. He had written these essays over a period of several years with the idea of putting them into book form, and from time to time he w r ould allude to them, laughingly, as his memoirs. Then people would exclaim that he surely mustn’t keep them to himself until he died, at which Dr. Foster, touching the speaker’s arm, and perhaps rising on tiptoe, would laugh heartily and reply, “We’ll see, well see,” and thereupon clear his throat.

At last, when he had been preaching in Kansas City for seventeen years and his name was recognized, and he was often mentioned in The Tattler and sometimes in the city paper, a small publishing firm took these essays, which he had quietly submitted to them several times before. The book came out in a black cover with a dignified gray and purple dust jacket that showed him gazing sedately from his study window at dusk, hands clasped behind his back and one foot slightly forward.