Introduction by Lionel Shriver
PENGUIN BOOKS
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On returning to Mr Bridge some thirty years after I first read it, I was surprised to discover that the novel is set in the 1930s. I had remembered this study of a stiff, upright, undemonstrative family man as set in the 1950s.
A second reading helped to explain why in memory I might easily have transported its era forward by a generation. For most Americans like me who didn’t live through the decade, the prevailing images of the 1930s are of soup kitchens. Tented encampments of the homeless. Investors plunging from the windows of tall buildings. Despairing treks across the dust bowl. From across the Atlantic, Europe casting the penumbral shadow of a pending world war.
By contrast, the Bridges are middle class. Walter Bridge is a lawyer, and economic near-collapse elsewhere does not appear to have made an appreciable dent in his steady, decent income. In his affluent neighbourhood of Kansas City, the Great Depression has evidenced little impact. Evan S. Connell recognized astutely that few people are tortured by premonitions of upcoming historical upheavals before they occur; thus ructions in Germany appear only briefly. The Nazi invasion of Poland is primarily significant because it cuts short the Bridges’ holiday tour of Europe.
Yet I might have recognized this parallel-universe 1930s, for it was the life of my paternal grandfather – also a lawyer, who powerfully resembled Mr Bridge. My father’s family did not especially suffer during the Depression, living in a solid brick house in a leafy area of Norfolk, Virginia. The children had separate bedrooms with fresh sheets; they didn’t go hungry.
Mr Bridge doesn’t only feel loosely moored to the period because the defining aspects of the 1930s seem so far away. Walter Bridge is an American type that transcends any single decade, and in some respects survives today. Conjuring an image of Connell’s staid, outwardly wholesome protagonist, I inevitably draw on the television I watched as a child. In my head, Mr Bridge is a blurred amalgam of Robert Young in Father Knows Best, Hugh Beaumont in Leave it to Beaver, and Fred McMurray in My Three Sons. All three of the characters these actors played were meant to engender positive, inspiring visions of American manhood: responsible, hard-working, loyal, and ready with sage advice right before the credits roll. But Connell’s depiction of this same hat-doffing salaryman is insidiously bleak.
Although this novel and its companion Mrs Bridge (published eleven years earlier in 1958) are together traditionally described as a portrait of a marriage, both books evoke a bone-chilling loneliness. So completely does Walter neglect to confide in his wife, and she in him, that their marriage, in any serious emotional sense, seems almost non-existent. His wife India has a sudden, uncharacteristic apprehension of this when for no reason that Walter can understand – he had simply been laying out snail poison in the garden – she exclaims, ‘What people say about you is true!’ and demands a divorce. Yet their conduct of this anomalous discussion betrays the very claustrophobia and estrangement to which she is reacting. ‘You’ve never cared about me,’ says India, and Walter reassures her, ‘You know perfectly well I care for you.’ The muted language of ‘caring’ for each other is painful, the argument’s resolution predictable: ‘after thinking quite a lot about this incomprehensible fit of hysteria he decided the best procedure was to ignore it.’
Walter Bridge well illustrates how conventional gender roles have been as imprisoning, as punishing, for men as for women. Walter has no real partner. He assumes sole responsibility for his family’s upkeep. He works long hours in order to support a family that he therefore seldom spends any time with. Trapped into a traditional masculinity that values above all, as Walter itemizes himself, ‘financial security, independence, and self-respect’, Mr Bridge doesn’t seem like an oppressor. He’s a victim.
In protecting her from the exigencies of fiscal survival, and ensuring that India enjoys the isolated leisure of a housewife with servants, Walter is the leading contributor to his wife’s naïveté about ‘a desperate, harsh, remorseless world where everybody knew there was a piece of paper inside a Chinese fortune cookie’. Everyone but India, that is, who, having never encountered a fortune cookie before, eats the paper message. For Walter, this primitive ignorance – largely his fault – ‘was more than merely odd. It was more than strange. It was a bit grotesque.’ Clearly, he feels deprived on his own account. As well he should. Who wants a lifelong companion so stiflingly unworldly – a de facto nincompoop, an eternal child?
Were Walter Bridge merely ‘stuffy’, as India calls him, and ‘a consummate Puritan’, in the words of the psychiatrist Dr Sauer (a mere acquaintance; do not imagine Walter would submit to therapy), this novel wouldn’t still be finding new audiences so long after its publication in 1969. For Connell’s portrayal of an American everyman is far more layered than Fred McMurray’s.
To the contemporary eye, Walter’s attitudes towards blacks and Jews are offensive, though his racial and class prejudices are inconsistent, unexamined and standard-issue for the time. When his daughter Carolyn is invited to the home of the black gardener’s daughter, Walter declares, ‘Carolyn doesn’t belong at Thirteenth and Prospect any more than you or I do. Those people resent us.’ (Indeed, they surely do.) Yet he is on sufficiently personable terms with their black housekeeper to introduce her to alcohol with a daiquiri that he mixes himself. On the one hand, he says late in the novel, ‘Hitler was insane, and this was unfortunate because some of his ideas were sensible,’ and he’s been overheard ‘joking’ that he hoped the British ‘didn’t stop Hitler too soon’. On the other hand, when his son quotes the latter remark back to him, he vehemently denies having made it, and Walter writes at length to his daughter Ruth, ‘I am acquainted with a number of fine Jewish people,’ delineating a host of Jews who are ‘a credit to the neighborhood’.
Moreover, Walter’s bigotries are at odds with his rigid sense of justice – a justice so exacting that he reviles the white-collar shortcuts to wealth like stock tip-offs. But his bigotries are of a piece with his commitment to order. When Carolyn threatens to quit her sorority to protest against the rejection of a black pledge, her father despairs, ‘I don’t know what gets into kids these days, but they can’t let well enough alone.’
I’m familiar with this brand of racial cognitive dissonance. A Southerner, my grandfather would often complain about the ‘niggrahs’ – the pronunciation was most specific – and how lazy they were, how ruined by welfare. Yet he was also the man glad to take the seat next to a black guest at a Rotary Club or Chamber of Commerce luncheon when everyone else would shun the chair. He would never use outright racial epithets, and like Mr Bridge was always kind to the family’s black housekeeper. My grandfather didn’t so much believe in segregation per se as dislike the notion of stirring things up, of making trouble, when the world worked, after its fashion, the way it was. Because his attitudes towards minorities were conflicted and contradictory, he had no motivation to examine his views closely, which might have led him to question whether some of these attitudes weren’t at odds with a profound decency that characterized him in other spheres.
As they were for my grandfather, for Walter Bridge prejudices are handicaps. They cloud his thinking and violate his own moral code. Presented without authorial comment, the racism and anti-Semitism in these pages make me feel sorry for the peoples the protagonist slanders and Walter both.
Mr Bridge may seem conventional and law-abiding, but his rectitude does not extend to Prohibition, which he freely flouts and for which he expresses overt contempt. His conformity does not extend to religion, either. His wife occasionally succeeds in dragging him to church, but Walter is bored by services and dreads their annual dinner with the pastor, Dr Foster – whose book of essays Walter finds stultifying: ‘There was nothing specifically wrong, except that it was dull. It was remarkably dull. The man seemed to possess an exceptional gift for being dull. Sentence after sentence had been hauled to the surface as though he had cranked them out of a cistern in a bucket. And like most men who are incurably dull he considered himself lively …’ Walter despairs of the minister, ‘He had no more sinew than a dish of custard. He could no more be despised or hated than he could be loved or respected.’
This eschewal of piety puts Mr Bridge at odds with his surviving prototype: the Midwestern evangelical. Like many a born-again in the heartland, Connell’s protagonist would surely be broadly uncomfortable with a black American president, and Walter – queasy about male ballet dancers and alarmed when Ruth lives with a homosexual roommate in New York – would never support gay marriage, either. But his affection for tipple and an impatience with religion bring him a measure closer to Godless Europeans than to the contemporary heirs to the Father Knows Best fedora.
Those passages about the insufferable Dr Foster are a relief, in part because they suggest a sense of humour whose presence is sparsely felt, but also because they burst with emotion. Repressed, yes, but Walter isn’t stoic. The feelings he expresses, however, tend to fall into the narrow range of anger, exasperation, scorn, indignation, disgust and dismay. In this negative sphere, he’s capable of considerable nuance. Yet he is cut off from extremes of enjoyment – exhilaration, delight and celebration, never mind ecstasy, are all foreign to him – and when India cries from happiness at the end of their European tour Walter is mystified. One gets the impression that he finds bliss not only alien but unseemly, unmasculine. In the very first scene, the orderly manner in which he has arranged his financial affairs in preparation for his death provides him satisfaction. But otherwise the giddiest height to which his emotions rise is contentment. Even the visitation of this mild sense of tranquillity is rare, though when the serenity does descend the effect is touching: ‘He listened to his daughters and his wife and he observed his son, but he no longer understood what was being said; as he listened to their voices and to the seasonal music of the insects the problems which had troubled him during the day did not seem important, and he reflected that he had practically everything he ever wanted.’
On some level, Walter is aware of what he’s missing. After having watched the scandalous cancan with India in Paris, he turns to his wife’s sleeping form in their hotel: ‘He thought of her affectionate embrace, which was invariably the same, and he felt resentful, for something which rightfully belonged to every man had been denied him.’ Moreover, the confinement of his conformity shows itself in his outsize annoyance over Dr Sauer’s yellow socks. The flamboyant psychiatrist’s whole get-up enrages Walter: ‘The gaudy vests with glass buttons were almost insulting. The European suits and the shoes with crepe soles … It seemed to Mr Bridge that all of this was an affectation. He shook his head resentfully.’ That word – ‘resentfully’ – again. Walter has boxed himself in and cannot wear yellow socks. Because of the ‘despotic obstinacy’ that he also recognizes in his son, he can’t even wear a party hat on New Year’s Eve.
Displaying a self-awareness that most modern-day fathers would frantically suppress, Walter confesses more than once to finding his daughters physically stirring, especially Ruth: ‘She had never been more beautiful. He was shaken by the sight of her, and he knew he loved her in a way he could not ever love the other children, perhaps because she was the first, or because of the strange darkness in her which he could feel also within himself.’ Later, more explicitly still, ‘Desire for his own daughter had surged from the depths where it must be concealed.’
So Walter is aware that the attraction is taboo, and he never acts on these urges. But, in preparation for this introduction, I encountered another essay claiming that the sexual allure of the daughters in Mr Bridge is evidence that the protagonist is ‘twisted’. I’d take issue with that. A father’s fleeting physical attraction to his daughter must be common as dirt. But in the years since this novel was published, Western culture has taken a giant step backwards towards the prudish, the squeamish, the repressive and the punitively normative in relation to anything concerning children and sex. Walter’s admission that he experiences moments of desire for his daughters is far more shocking now than when this book was written in 1969, and chances are high that an author crafting a version of Mr Bridge today would leave those sections out.
Walter Bridge is a classic warts-and-all character, marred by prejudice and limited by both his idea of himself and the conventions of his time. Flaws make him seem fuller, rounder and more real. But is he likeable? Somehow, liking or not liking this character is beside the point. Mr Bridge is sympathetic. If he has plenty wrong with him, you can understand how he got that way. The ways in which he is stunted are poignant, and his blinkered mindset invites compassion.
Connell constructs an archetype, as opposed to a stereotype. Walter is vividly particular, yet there remain legions of Walter Bridges out there—for the upright, uptight family man with strict ideas about what one does and doesn’t do isn’t merely an American model of manhood. This is an enduring portrait, if only because generations to come are sure to repeat Walter’s experience: one of rigorously following the rules, only to feel a little cheated of whatever life is supposed to be about. I was never intrigued by the enigmatic inner lives of Jim Anderson in Father Knows Best, Stephen Douglas in My Three Sons, or Ward Cleaver in Leave it to Beaver. But with the help of Connell’s extraordinary tenderness and attention to detail, a man we might customarily dismiss as boring – as a known quantity, without secrets – rises in relief into a memorable and moving icon, an exquisite tragedy in miniature.
Lastly, a word on style. The tiny chapters, like dabs on a canvas, are pointillistic, painterly. The prose is clear, declarative, and pleasingly simple. True to the voice of his character, Connell seldom avails himself of literary devices like metaphor. The text is easy to read, and invitingly narrative. But what I most admire about both Mr Bridge and Mrs Bridge is their authorial neutrality. Connell never tells the reader what to think. He leaves the reader to draw conclusions about, for instance, whether Walter is a bigot, and if so why that might be. The writer does not make his presence felt. In this volume, there is only Mr Bridge and what Mr Bridge thinks and does. I myself have never been able to craft a manuscript so perfectly cleansed of my own bullying, manipulative intervention. It’s a shame that this author virtually abandoned the novel form after 1976, because from the beginning of his career Connell had mastered perhaps the most crucial skill for any fiction writer: he knew when to shut up.
Lionel Shriver
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
EVAN S. CONNELL was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1924. He graduated from the University of Kansas in 1947 with a BA in English, before going on to study creative writing. In addition to his novels Mrs Bridge (1959) and Mr Bridge (1969), which were later made into a film starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, he has written many novels, short stories, and works of non-fiction and poetry, including the bestselling Son of the Morning Star (1984), a biography of General Custer. In 2009 he was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement, and in 2010 he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives in New Mexico.
LIONEL SHRIVER is a novelist whose previous books include, among others, So Much for That, The Post-Birthday World, Double Fault, A Perfectly Good Family and We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the 2005 Orange Prize and was subsequently made into a film. Her most recent novel is The New Republic; Big Brother follows in 2013. She is widely published as a journalist and has written for the Guardian, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. She lives in London and Brooklyn, New York.
Often he thought: My life did not begin until I knew her.
She would like to hear this, he was sure, but he did not know how to tell her. In the extremity of passion he cried out in a frantic voice: ‘I love you!’ yet even these words were unsatisfactory. He wished for something else to say. He needed to let her know how deeply he felt her presence while they were lying together during the night, as well as each morning when they awoke and in the evening when he came home. However, he could think of nothing appropriate.
So the years passed, they had three children and accustomed themselves to a life together, and eventually Mr Bridge decided that his wife should expect nothing more of him. After all, he was an attorney rather than a poet; he could never pretend to be what he was not.
Each morning as soon as he walked into the office he glanced at the photograph of his wife and children which stood on the desk in a silver frame. He had placed the picture exactly where he wanted it, so that it never interfered with his work but at the same time he could see the family as often as he liked. Later pictures had been taken but this one pleased him best: Ruth was five years old, Carolyn three, and Douglas was a baby. The girls were seated on the studio couch, one on either side of their mother, who was holding Douglas in her lap. The photograph was orderly, symmetrical, and serene.
One Monday morning when he entered the office he noticed that the photograph had been moved. Evidently the woman who cleaned the office over the weekend had forgotten where it belonged. He put it back where he wanted it. Then for a few minutes he remained motionless in his swivel chair and stared at the picture; and he wondered again what would have happened to him if he had never met this woman who became his wife. He felt profoundly obligated to her. It seemed to him that the existence of the family was a mysterious accomplishment to which he had contributed very little. She had done this, somehow, almost by herself. He had provided the money and he had made decisions, but these things appeared insignificant when he compared them to what she had done; and he reflected on some lines from a letter by a famous man which he had read not long after meeting her: Thou only hast taught me that I have a heart – thou only hast thrown a deep light downward, and upward, into my soul. Thou only hast revealed me to myself; for without thy aid, my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow – to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions. Indeed, we are but shadows – we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream – till the heart be touched. These lines had impressed him so that he copied them and kept them a long time; he had often been on the point of reciting them to her because they expressed his own feelings with such lucidity and tenderness.
The idea of life without her caused him to move restlessly.
Then, because it was time to begin work, he cleared his throat, blew his nose, and rang for Julia.
Occasionally he went to the bank around the corner from his office in order to look at his securities. Before going down to the vault in the basement he usually stopped to see the president, Virgil Barron, whom he had known for several years. They lived not far apart in the Mission Hills district, and both were members of a group that reserved a round table for lunch in the Terrace Grill of the Muehlebach Hotel. After visiting with Barron for a few minutes he would walk downstairs, ask for his safe-deposit box, and carry it into one of the walnut-paneled cubicles. There, after placing the long black metal box in the middle of the table, he locked the door, put on his reading glasses, opened the box, and began to examine the stock certificates and bonds.
Each bond and each stock certificate was neatly folded to fit into a business envelope. On each envelope he had listed the contents: the certificate numbers, the number of shares, the date purchased, and the amount paid. On the back of each envelope he had noted the recommendations of his broker to sell or hold, together with the date and the selling price. If he had accepted the broker’s advice and sold a particular security he made a note of this. But he seldom sold anything, because it seemed to him that if one invested in a substantial, well-managed corporation it should almost never become necessary to sell. There would be exceptions, the most prudent investor must be prepared to admit that times change; even so, as he reminded his wife every now and then in order that she should have this principle irrevocably planted in her head by the time of his death, it is better to trade too little than too much.
Frequently while he was looking through his securities – sometimes reading the italicized print which set forth the conditions, but more often gazing at the handsome heavy papers as though they were exhibits in a gallery – he would remember the bad judgment of his father, and a frown of displeasure would crease his face. Several thousand dollars had been wasted on penny gold mines, on the schemes of inventors, and similar speculations. Now there was nothing but one bulky envelope stuffed with these testimonials to folly: certificates of corporations with names like Amazon Bonanza and Del Rio Silver King, and handwritten promises to repay loans. These were folded as his father had folded them many years ago. Most of the companies were defunct and the few that existed could not be found on any exchange, and the men who had promised to repay the money were dead; but it was not much trouble to keep the documents and it might be foolish to destroy them. However, it gave him no pleasure to consider them. They angered him and left him with a feeling of embarrassment for his father’s naïveté.
Otherwise, the fact that his father had left him nothing did not trouble him. An inheritance would have simplified things and it was a shame the money had been squandered; beyond that Mr Bridge seldom thought about it. And in one respect he intended to benefit by the foolishness of his father: he would not repeat his father’s error.
So he bought shares in companies that he considered essential. Metropolitan public utilities seemed the safest because their services were indispensable and their monopoly was guaranteed; but he had also bought into several food and drink corporations with long records of uninterrupted dividends, and he had bought small amounts of somewhat more speculative companies such as American Tobacco and the Union Pacific Railroad. All of these, he thought, were manifestly solid concerns, and during periods of fluctuation on the stock exchange he observed with pleasure and satisfaction the stability of his investments.
He had said to his wife: ‘When the time comes, India, that you are alone, do not sell these stocks. These are sound corporations with fine records and they will not let you down.’
She had promised to keep them and to pass them along to the children.
He had said to her: ‘These securities are worth a nice little sum of money today. They ought to be worth a great deal more in years to come.’
Ordinarily he brought with him the latest issue of the Wall Street Journal and spent some time jotting down current prices on a scratch pad in order to calculate the value of his holdings; then he would consider the provisions of his will and ask himself whether a few changes should be made. At present almost everything had been assigned to his wife, yet perhaps this was not the wisest policy. Might it not be wiser to apportion the stocks: a certain number of shares to each of the children upon his death, the remainder to her. Naturally this would reduce her income, which was most important, but at the same time the children would be given a degree of independence. Thirty shares of American Tobacco, for instance, might be willed to each of the children, thus providing them with a quarterly check. Or the entire Tobacco holding might go to Ruth, an equivalent holding of General Foods to Carolyn, and some shares of Bethlehem Steel to Douglas. Or, because the dividend was liberal, it might be best to leave Bethlehem in the name of Mrs Bridge. Douglas, being young, might be better endowed with a stock that displayed a somewhat more favorable growth pattern. These were things to be considered.
A copy of the will was in the safe-deposit box, and though he knew every word of it he sometimes read it through, searching for possible points of contention. The logic and clarity of the will were pleasing to him; the measured cadence of the sentences he had composed was reassuring, as though the measure of his mind must be respected when it was read aloud at some future date. Often he read to himself particular passages from the will, imagining the delight and surprise with which it would be heard for the first time by his wife and by the children, not merely for the precision of language but because they had no idea of the value of the investments.
Only once had he shown her the contents of the box. Then he had pointed out an envelope containing five one-hundred-dollar bills to be used in case of emergency, and had unfolded a few certificates and gone over them with her so they would seem familiar; but he had minimized the total worth of the documents in the box. Women tended to behave curiously where money was concerned. She was not extravagant, at least she had not been extravagant so far; if anything she was quite the opposite, worrying mildly about the cost of almost everything. Still, change was in the nature of women and no good could come of letting her know his exact worth.
The fact that she knew so little about these securities apparently did not trouble her; since that day she had never inquired, or hinted, or shown the faintest sign of wanting more information. He was puzzled by this. He had expected her to ask a great many questions, but she had merely looked attentive. He suspected she had not understood everything he attempted to explain; he remembered her perfunctory smile and how she nodded each time he paused. But at least she did know of the existence of the box and she knew what was in it.
The children had not yet been informed, although he meant to show them, one at a time, as they grew older. It pleased him to anticipate the time when he could go over all of the securities with the children, pointing out what he had paid for each and comparing this price with the current market value.
So he meditated as he unfolded his certificates, absently gratified by the parchment quality of the paper, and checked them against the notations to make certain everything was in order, and studied the earnings reports, the forecasts, and the dividend news reported in the Journal. Sometimes he would read a market letter or a corporation analysis which he had brought along in his briefcase; but more often he spent these tranquil moments in the basement of the bank examining the handsomely engraved certificates and contemplating the satisfaction they would give after his death.
He seldom spoke to his wife about what went on at the office or in court. Before they were married and for a while afterward she had inquired, doing her best to appear interested, trying to comprehend the life he lived apart from her; but he had answered briefly because he knew she did not really care, so that as time went by she asked less and less, and now it had been reduced to a ritual like a fragment excerpted from a play. She would greet him at the door, glance at the briefcase, and put on an expression of dismay or resignation, saying, ‘Now truthfully, Walter, couldn’t whatever it is wait till tomorrow?’ By this she demonstrated her concern for his health and reminded him that he did not need to work such long hours for the family’s benefit. They had plenty of food, a nice house, and money enough to pay the bills. Then he would reply that he was only planning to work a little while after dinner or that he was going to finish a few things which should have been taken care of a week ago, or he might remark that it was Julia’s fault. Julia was to blame for saddling him like a burro with more than he could carry during the day. Then she answered that she was going to call Julia in the morning and tell her to cut down on the amount of work.
This familiar and lifeless scene was not as unnatural as it appeared; after all, he himself did not care what happened at the house during the day. There was no more reason for her to be curious about his work than for him to be concerned with groceries, laundry, getting the children to school, and whatever else she did. Yet it would seem rude, almost brutal, to drop the pretense and admit that neither particularly cared what the other was doing. A display of interest, however shallow, made life easier.
Julia, on the other hand, did not need to pretend. She cared vitally about the progress of each case, and about such things as the rumor that a new federal courthouse might be built; and as the years went by he found that he was discussing these matters as intimately with Julia as he had once imagined he would discuss them with his wife. This, too, he reflected, must not be unnatural; no doubt other men had found themselves living a similarly divided life, involved with two women almost equally.
He was grateful that they got along well together. Julia was quite a pretty young woman, but so far his wife had shown no jealousy. Perhaps she sensed that he was not attracted to Julia, and occasionally he wondered why he was not. Julia’s features were regular and delicate and she had a charming smile. She walked gracefully. Her figure was trim. She never slouched or scratched her head or chewed a pencil. She dressed modestly, as women should, and did not smoke. She was intelligent and clean, and impudent to the point of mild impertinence. She ought to be physically inviting; it was curious that she was not, yet he could feel no desire for her. Somehow the idea of putting his arms around her was disagreeable.
Those evenings when they worked later than usual he drove her home instead of letting her take the bus. She lived in an ugly gray building just off Valentine Road, sharing an apartment with a much older sister who was crippled by arthritis. Each time he drove her there he felt uncomfortable and obscurely guilty, and after watching until she was inside the door he continued toward Mission Hills with a sense of relief. Her misfortune was not his fault. The salary she got was comparable to what she could earn anywhere else, and every few months Mrs Bridge invited her to the house for dinner.
Except for these occasions when he escorted Julia home he seldom thought about her. He did not know whom she was seeing at night, if anybody. He did not care. She might possibly be planning to get married, although she had given no hint of this. If she did decide to marry it would be all right, providing she did not have a baby.
These two women were growing around him like strands of ivy, but the feeling of entanglement was not disturbing; it seemed to him that these persistent female tendrils were supporting and assisting him.
Around dinnertime it usually occurred to Mr Bridge that there were, in fact, three women on whom he depended and Harriet was not the least of them. She was such a marvelous cook that he resented the occasions when he and Mrs Bridge were invited out. There were traces of the South in her cooking. Such dishes as jambalaya appeared on the table, and frequently she served barbecued ribs which he loved with a love he held for very few things on earth. She could prepare sugar-cured ham with red-eye gravy far better than any restaurant, and hot biscuits and honey, and turnips which tasted like no other turnips, and candied yams with the flavor of marshmallow. She never used a cookbook. She knew. Sometimes while he was eating he would torment himself by trying to decide whether Harriet or Julia was more indispensable.
Every night he looked forward to his dinner and he was sorry when Thursday came around, which was Harriet’s night off. On Thursday there was apt to be macaroni casserole, or leftovers from Wednesday.
He concealed his dismay at these Thursday suppers, and told himself it was not his wife’s fault if she no longer cooked as well as she did when they were first married; after all, cooking requires practice like everything else, and since Harriet had taken over the kitchen there was not much for Mrs Bridge to do. Once she had been quite good, never in a league with Harriet, but there had been a time when she could make excellent little puddings and special kinds of bread to go with the fried chicken and the pot roast. She could bake an agreeable cherry pie, a rich banana upside-down cake, and crisp tarts, and she knew how to make chili without using too much tomato sauce. He had never been dissatisfied with her cooking – even now it was not bad – but on Thursday nights he could not overcome a sense of weariness as he plunged his fork into the casserole.
Each year on their anniversary they went out to dinner. He insisted on this because it was traditional, although he knew she would just as soon stay home. Sometimes they went to the Mission Country Club, sometimes they went downtown to one of the big hotels or to a restaurant they had heard about. One year they decided to try a supper club near the Warwick Theater which the Barrons had recommended, and they were not disappointed. The food was excellent, there was nothing wrong with the service, and the atmosphere was pleasant. After dinner they lingered awhile listening to the music and they got up several times to dance. Then it was time to go home so Mr Bridge signaled for the check. It came to eleven dollars and twenty-five cents. He examined it to be sure they had not been overcharged and that the addition was correct. Then he laid three five-dollar bills on the tray. The waiter, bowing and smiling, inquired in a practiced murmur whether there would be anything else, and Mr Bridge was astounded to realize that he meant to keep all of the money.
‘You will bring me the change,’ he said.
When the change was brought to him he counted it and found that it was correct. He put two dollars into his wallet, twenty-five cents went into his trousers pocket, and he left one dollar and fifty cents on the tray. Then he stood up, the waiter held the chair while Mrs Bridge got to her feet, and they walked out.
As they were driving along Ward Parkway he considered what had happened. He was afraid his wife had been embarrassed.
He said, ‘Maybe I should have let that fellow get away with it. After all, another two dollars wouldn’t break me.’
She replied that she thought he had done exactly the right thing.
‘I’ve had waiters pull that stunt on me before,’ he said, to justify himself. ‘They take advantage of people every chance they get.’
She agreed, and told him about a very similar experience on the Plaza when she was having lunch with Grace Barron.
‘My Lord,’ he muttered, ‘that fellow was hoping for thirty per cent!’
‘He did seem awfully pushy,’ she remarked. ‘Next year we’d better try someplace else.’
According to the mileage on the speedometer it was time once again to have the Reo lubricated. The company recommended a lubrication every one thousand miles and he did not like to drive farther than this without having the job done. He suspected it was not necessary quite so often; however, he did not want to take a chance on damaging the motor. The company also recommended a change of oil every thousand miles and he had accepted this without thinking about it, but now the idea began to irritate him: very possibly the auto manufacturers and the petroleum industry were conspiring to sell the public more oil than the cars required. He decided there was no reason to change the oil each time the car was lubricated. As long as the filter was functioning the oil should be all right.
At the garage where he parked he looked around until he located the manager, whose name was Jerry Buckworth. He was wearing his usual blue smock with Jerry stitched in white script above the pocket, but Mr Bridge addressed him formally because he was the manager.
‘Good morning, Mr Buckworth,’ he said.
The manager took the cigar out of his mouth and replied, ‘Good morning, Mr Bridge. What can we do for you?’
‘I would like to have the Reo greased.’
‘When will you need it?’
‘Six would be soon enough. Don’t change the oil.’
‘We’ll have her for you,’ the manager said.
Mr Bridge nodded and walked out of the garage.
That evening when he returned to pick up the car he was met by the manager, who explained apologetically that the oil had been changed.
‘I told you not to,’ said Mr Bridge.
The manager explained that he had forgotten to tell the mechanic.
‘Well,’ Mr Bridge said, ‘I am not going to pay for that oil.’
‘What we can do is this,’ the manager said, ‘we’ll let you have it at cost.’
Mr Bridge shook his head. ‘I intend to pay for the lubrication, nothing more. This mistake is not my fault. I distinctly told you. I will not be charged for something I did not order. I have been parking here for six years and nothing of this sort has happened before. Why does it happen now?’
‘It was our fault,’ the manager said. ‘We’ll take care of it.’
And that was how it ended.
Whenever he went to the garage to pick up his car it was brought out of the stall by Lester. Lester did not depend on tips for a living. He got a salary, and few of the garage patrons tipped him, but Mr Bridge always handed him fifty cents. Parking cars day after day was not much of a life, and not only was Lester colored, he was cross-eyed. Mr Bridge knew nothing else about him, not even his last name, but he liked Lester and he was sure the garage attendant returned this feeling – which had nothing to do with the fifty cents a day. They could not become more friendly than they were, yet it was a satisfying relationship they had, and Mr Bridge occasionally wondered if there was anything else he could do to make life a little easier for Lester.
One afternoon when he was met by a strange attendant and did not see his friend anywhere he was puzzled. He asked if Lester was sick. The new attendant replied that he had been hired just that morning and did not know.
Mr Bridge pointed to the stall where his car was parked. ‘Get me the blue Reo,’ he said. Then he walked to the cashier’s window, where he saw Mr Buckworth discussing something with the cashier.
‘I notice you have a new man,’ he said. ‘What’s become of Lester?’
‘Lester’s not with us any longer.’
‘Now don’t tell me you fired him!’
The garage manager cleared his throat and looked at Mr Bridge uneasily. ‘They tell us he cut somebody up last night. You know how they are when they get to drinking. Him and some other nigger got in a fight. We don’t know what about. We found out this noon after Lester didn’t show up for work. They got him in city jail.’
‘Great God,’ said Mr Bridge softly.
‘Too bad. Lester was a good worker. He was with us a long while. But I’ll see Bob takes care of you.’
On his way home Mr Bridge tried to believe what he had been told, but not until he saw it in the evening Star, a small article on the fourth page, could he accept it. Lester’s full name was Lester Leroy Titus. He was forty-six years old. He lived in a hotel on Wabash and he was an ex-convict. He had served ten years in Leavenworth prison for armed robbery.
He pointed out the article to his wife and asked if she had seen it. She had not, but after reading it she said, ‘Honestly, there’s so much crime these days.’
He realized that she had not recognized the name so he told her who it was. She often parked in the garage while she was downtown shopping.
‘Oh, my word!’ she exclaimed, drawing back with a shocked expression. ‘Oh, I simply can’t believe it!’
‘I didn’t either.’
‘He seemed so nice.’
‘Yes, he was,’ Mr Bridge said. ‘He certainly was. He was one of the nicest and most dependable Negroes I have ever known.’
‘Do you suppose you could help?’
‘I doubt if I could do much. Apparently he’s got a temper and now he’s got to pay for it. Furthermore, I cannot afford to get mixed up in something like this.’
‘He was always so helpful. It’s such a shame.’
‘Those people!’ Mr Bridge said, shaking his head. ‘Time and time again. If it isn’t a knife, it’s a razor.’