The Cardturner (4 page)

"He's perfect," my uncle said. "He knows nothing about bridge, and even better, he knows he knows nothing."

I wasn't sure whether I was being complimented or insulted.

"Well, aren't you going to introduce us?" asked the woman.

My uncle didn't say anything.

"You don't know his name, do you?" accused the woman.

He remained quiet.

She reached her hand across the table. "I'm Gloria."

"Alton," I said, shaking her hand.

"Don't feel bad, Alton. I've been Trapp's partner for eighteen years, and he only just learned my name last Wednesday."

"Hah!" laughed my uncle.

9
Shuffle and Play

Gloria was an elderly woman with blond hair. She wore lots of jewelry, including earrings that looked like cards, the queen of hearts and the queen of clubs. She was nicely dressed, as were most of the women in the room. It was mostly the men who were slobs.

You know what? I'm not going to describe anybody else as
elderly
. Let's just say that if you take my age and double it, I would still have been the youngest person in the room,
by a lot
.

A man came around and placed two metal trays on each table. The room, which had been abuzz with bridge gibberish, began to quiet down.

"There are fourteen tables," the man announced. "We will play thirteen rounds, two boards a round, with a skip after round seven. Shuffle and play."

I didn't know he was called the
director,
or that the metal card-holding trays were called
boards
. This isn't easy. I'm trying to relate my overwhelming sense of confusion and at the same time let you know what was going on—even though I didn't.

A board is a small rectangular tray, with four slots for the cards. The slots are labeled
North, South, East,
and
West
. Each board is numbered. Our boards were numbered five and six.

One thing did become clear to me. Gloria was my uncle's partner. I was to be his assistant, his cardturner. Before each hand, I was to take him aside and tell him what cards he held, and then he would tell me which card to play.

That made more sense.

Sort of.

The cards were shuffled and dealt; then each hand was placed back into the slots on the board. I learned later that this would be the only time all day that the cards would be shuffled. The same hands would be played over and over again at different tables.

We began with board number five. Everyone removed their cards from their corresponding slots. Since my uncle and I were in the South position, I removed the cards from the South slot. The bridge studio was now as quiet as a library.

It may seem silly, but I suddenly felt very nervous.

I stood up and led my uncle to the coffee alcove. I think that was why he always sat at table three. It was the one closest to the alcove.

No, I didn't let him have any
"café."
Even if my family did hope to inherit his fortune, I wasn't about to do anything to speed up the process. The coffee alcove was just a place where I could tell him his hand without other people overhearing.

I spoke quietly, slightly above a whisper. "Nine of spades, king of hearts, three of clubs, jack of spades, ten of di—"

"Stop!" he suddenly shouted, covering his ears. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Just telling you—"

"Are you a moron?" he asked. "Or are you just trying to drive me insane?"

I didn't know what I'd done wrong. Everyone in the room had stopped what they were doing to look at us.

The director hurried over and asked if there was a problem.

"Yes, there's a problem," said my uncle. "My new cardturner is an imbecile!"

"Keep it up, Trapp," the director warned, "and I'm going to penalize you half a board."

"Yes, penalize him," said Gloria, entering the alcove. "Maybe he'll learn some manners." She said this even though penalizing my uncle would also have meant penalizing her.

My uncle threw up his hands. "He just starts rattling off cards!"

"Well, did you explain how you wanted it done?" asked Gloria.

He sputtered a moment, then admitted he had not.

"Then I suggest you do," said Gloria. "But first you owe him an apology."

She gave me a sympathetic smile, then returned to the table.

He didn't apologize, but he did explain how I was supposed to tell him his cards. I had to sort them into suits first, and then tell him his spades, highest to lowest, then his hearts, then diamonds, then clubs. Always that order.

"You got that?" he asked.

"Spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs," I repeated, trying to sound bored and uninterested, as if I found the whole thing beneath me. I was angry that he'd called me a moron and an imbecile in front of everyone.

I gave him his hand as directed. "Spades: ace, jack, nine, three, two. Hearts: king, nine. Diamonds: ten, six, four. Clubs: ace, queen, three.

"Is that better?" I asked, filling my voice with contempt, both for him and for his stupid game.

He didn't seem to notice my tone, or care about what I thought. His mind was focused on those thirteen cards.

We sat back down. On each corner of the table there was something called a bidding box.

Gloria reached into her bidding box, took out a green pass card, and placed it on the table. "Pass," she said aloud. At every other table, the bidding was done in silence.

The man next to her, in the East seat, also passed.

"One spade," said my uncle.

I reached into my bidding box, removed the 1
card, and set it on the table. "One spade," I repeated.

I should mention that nobody bothered to explain bidding boxes to me. I figured out what I was supposed to do all by myself, but do you think my uncle gave me any credit for that?

No.

Over the next two and a half hours we played twenty-six hands of bridge. "Nine of hearts," my uncle would say, and I'd set the
9 on the table. "Queen of clubs," and I'd lay down the
Q. He never once forgot what cards he held. His voice remained flat, so I had no clue how well he was doing, but after a while I got the impression that my uncle and Gloria were doing very, very well.

Each time, one of the hands became the dummy. That hand was placed faceup on the table for everyone to see. The dummy's cards were said aloud for my uncle's benefit, once and only once, always in the same order: spades, hearts, diamonds, then clubs. So not only did he have to memorize every card in his own hand, he had to memorize all of the dummy's cards too. That's twenty-six cards, half the deck.

Every North-South pair was a team, and every East-West pair was a team. When we finished a hand, everyone would place their cards back in their original slots on the board. We played two boards each round; then the East-West pair would leave and a new team would sit down against us. We would pass the boards we had played to table two and get new boards from table four.

It was like some sort of odd dance, with the people moving in one direction and the boards moving in the other. After the seventh round, every East-West pair skipped a table to avoid playing boards they had already played.

At least three women commented on Trapp's "handsome" new cardturner. Gloria always had to introduce me since my uncle still didn't know my name.

It might not have been just the jacket and tie. Women over a certain age tend to think I'm handsome. Girls under twelve too. According to Leslie, all her friends think I'm hot. Whenever her friends are over, I can hear them giggle when I walk past. The first few times it happened, I checked to make sure my fly was zipped.

When it was all over, Trapp and Gloria had played against every East-West pair except for the team that had skipped them. (I'll call him Trapp, since that's what everyone else called him.) They'd played twenty-six of the twenty-eight boards. The director gathered all the score sheets and entered the results into the computer.

"Did you win?" I asked.

"We'll have to wait and see," said Gloria.

It was odd that after playing for almost three hours, we had to wait for the computer to tell us who won.

"Thank God for computers," said Gloria. "In the old days, we had to wait around for almost an hour while the director tallied the scores by hand. Sometimes we didn't find out until the next day."

Gloria explained that the final score depended on how she and Trapp did on each board, compared with every other North-South pair. So even if they only took two tricks on board nineteen, they would still get a high score on that board if most other North-South pairs only took one trick.

I liked that. I was unlucky when it came to cards. Cliff always beat me at poker. He must have won close to a hundred dollars off me, and we only played for quarters.

I guess that was the one good thing about him being with Katie. We hadn't played any poker for a while.

But in this game, luck wasn't a factor. It didn't matter if Trapp was dealt bad cards. It was just how well he played those bad cards, compared to every other person sitting in the South position, who had to play the same bad cards.

A woman came up to my uncle and asked his result on board fourteen, a hand we probably played an hour and a half ago.

My uncle thought for no more than seven seconds. "We set three no-trump two tricks."

"You set it? They made an overtrick against us!"

"You have to knock out dummy's king of spades," said Trapp, "and then hold up twice on your diamond ace."

But he still couldn't remember my name.

The printer spat out the results, and the director posted them on the wall. The scores were given in terms of percentages. Trapp and Gloria won with a 65 percent game. That might not sound like much, but second place was only 56 percent.

I take back what I said about luck. The East-West pair who skipped table three was very lucky.

10
An Apology of a Sort

We drove back in silence, which was just fine with me. I was having a difficult enough time trying to follow the directions from his house to his club, in reverse.

"I'm going to give you thirteen letters," he suddenly said. "I want you to repeat them back to me."

Before I could even say
"What?"
he began rattling off random letters.
"G-b-c-d-i-o-a-o-r-y-t-g-l."

I gave it my best shot—"Um,
g, b, c
. . ."—but then stopped. "Look, I get it," I said. "Your memory is better than mine."

"It's not memory. It's context. I'm going to give you the same thirteen letters, but in a different order. Concentrate really hard now."

I sighed.

"G-i-r-l, b-o-y, c-a-t, d-o-g."

I didn't bother saying them back to him.

"Hah!" he laughed, then said, "They're the same letters. I just sorted them into suits for you."

Half an hour later we were parked in his driveway and I escorted him to the front door.

"How much did Mrs. Mahoney tell you?" he asked.