A fully fledged existential nightmare – beneath the surface, that is Mrs Bridge. On the surface, the novel appears far simpler. It tells the life of a Kansas City housewife between the two World Wars as she dutifully meets her social obligations, ministers to her husband, and raises her three children. The novel comprises 117 short, chronological chapters, each displaying a Confucian exactness. There’s not one unnecessary word in the book. It is almost entirely free of flashback. Its sentences are straightforward, fine but unadorned, which makes the occasional lyrical climb more breathtaking. Mrs Bridge is portrayed, not unsympathetically, as unimaginative, unthinking, and continually stupefied. Her way is uncertain, her repression legion. She defers judgment on all matters, domestic and otherwise, to her husband, who contains her completely. She attempts to guide her children according to the ineffectual platitudes of her own childhood, horrified by any stamp of individuality they betray, until they mature and the roles reverse, and she happily yields to being treated as the child. From the first of those short chapters to the very last, the book is a chronicle of Mrs Bridge suffering one psychological shock after another, each directed at some aspect of her being – her composure, her understanding, her very existence. Everywhere she goes, she is besieged.
Mrs Bridge is also a very funny book; there is surprise on every page. Sometimes the humor is intimate. Connell knows how to make a sentence swerve unexpectedly toward the absurd, the non sequitur, and the comic, but always accurately. One of Mrs Bridge’s daughters has a childhood friend, the unjustly treated Alice, who informs Mrs Bridge ‘that she herself didn’t care for spinach because it was made of old tea bags’. Tea bags! How perfectly that captures a child’s imagination, how oddly appropriate the analogy, and how funny. I especially like the exchanges between Mrs Bridge and her son Douglas – the boy mischievous and practical, the mother continually confounded. Here the humor becomes more expansive, and Connell conducts a masterclass on the comic scene. In one episode, Mrs Bridge decides that Douglas has reached the age when a young man should wear a hat. He does his best to resist, but finally they drive downtown and buy ‘a very nice conservative hat’. ‘She never expected to see it on his head,’ Connell writes, ‘but very soon he was wearing it everywhere.’ He starts wearing it backwards, and, even more strange to Mrs Bridge, acquires a glazed yellow button for the hat that reads ‘Let’s Get Acquainted!’ Mrs Bridge simply can’t understand her son’s ways. The ironic play of the two characters so wildly at odds with one another underscores the alienation that we come to understand is Mrs Bridge’s essential condition. The humor that accompanies it, along with several tender passages, makes this more serious business palatable, and more affecting.
Irony is the book’s engine. It appears in the first sentence, when Mrs Bridge’s given name is revealed to be India, a name evoking mysticism, exploration, and the search for self-knowledge. Connell writes, ‘Her first name was India – she was never able to get used to it.’ We are a long way from Melville’s bold announcement of an Emersonian self when he has his hero declare, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Her exotic name is a gentle frustration to Mrs Bridge, a flummox, the first in a series of psychological shocks. ‘It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her. Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter?’ Even the innocence of birth is shattered by the inscrutable motives of other people. Perhaps, though, because she has failed to make any use of it, she herself is somehow to blame? Thus begins a pattern: Mrs Bridge’s confusion, followed by some half-hearted reflection, which is invariably supplanted by distraction and dismissal. ‘As a child she was often on the point of inquiring [about her name], the opening paragraph concludes, ‘but time passed, and she never did.’ She will never explore the world, nor will she ever search for herself. And nor will the reader have any more opportunity than she to get used to her name. By the end of the first chapter – one that hardly stretches to two pages – India will be sweetly courted and duly married. She will become Mrs Walter Bridge, and Mrs Bridge she will remain.
Soon, Mrs Bridge will have children, attend social events, make and lose friends, hire and fire help, vacation in Europe, gossip over coffee, press her picture-albums on everyone, and pass a life away, without ever making a meaningful connection with anyone. Her husband is a dependable and condescending comfort almost entirely absent from her everyday life. Her children are strangers to her almost from the day each is born. Ruth is conspicuous and liberated, Douglas a constant source of head-scratching. Her friends are unremarkable, unless, like Grace Barron, they make uncustomary breaches of etiquette that can’t be comprehended. The occasional neighbor, teacher, servant, or bohemian comes along to bemuse her, and she is happy when they disappear. Mrs Bridge is a bridge to no one; no bridge at all; rather, an island.
What Mrs Bridge experiences first-hand as incomprehension, outrage, or assault, the reader understands fully. As the book advances, the ironies grow larger, more capacious, damning, and comic. First-time readers will likely be struck by the tender if unsparing portrayal of Mrs Bridge by a male author writing in the same libido-addled era as Roth and Updike, neither of whom would be capable of showing Connell’s interest in or sympathy for a character so fully circumscribed by repression, naïveté, lack of curiosity, a willful conservatism, a sheltered domesticity, and an overall helplessness. But the book’s re-readers will notice that Connell is more unsparing of Mrs Bridge than they might have initially suspected. It is only a small stretch to say that in every one of the 117 chapters, Mrs Bridge is exposed to something that destroys her equilibrium and sends her reeling. She is described variously as puzzled, astonished, perplexed, startled, disturbed, troubled, deeply troubled, dismayed, confused. Things come at her as a shock, a blow, a horror. She is left in the wake of each of these visitations to reflect in an unhappy, muddled way on what she doesn’t understand. Her reflections never lead her to adjust to the strangeness of the world; rather, they exacerbate her alienation from it. Her reflection is cut short by some distraction – a ringing telephone will do, or her name being called by one of the children – and the matter is soon forgotten.
These shocks may appear trifling – Ruth’s suggestive posture, or the gift of a pair of brass balls from second-cousin Lulubelle Watts ‘which apparently should have had an instruction booklet’ – or they may be a matter of life and death, as in Grace Barron’s growing despair, or the tornado bearing down on Mr and Mrs Bridge as they dine one evening at their country club. My favorite takes place in Chapter 51, entitled ‘The Low-Pressure Salesman’. The salesman turns out to be Mrs Bridge’s former art instructor. His mere presence at the Bridge residence on a day of extraordinary cold gives Mrs Bridge a modest shock as she exclaims, ‘Why, it’s Mr Gadbury!’ She invites him in and gives him tea. He drips and shudders, incapable of getting warm. Mrs Bridge converses with him politely as he tries to collect his wits. The suspense grows: why is Mr Gadbury there? He comments on a painting of a cathedral hung above the sofa, which nobody in the family has looked at in years. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he remarks, and then adds, with marvelous vagueness, ‘There’s a quality, all right.’ Finally he declares his intention. It isn’t love or art or anything so profound on his mind. He’s only come to sell Mrs Bridge a subscription to a magazine, the title of which is The Doberman. But why? The exchange grows increasingly strange and uproarious before collapsing into heartbreak, a marvelous scene of great economy – again, only a few pages – working many of the registers that mark any great work of literature. It brings me as much joy as anything in The Great Gatsby or Lolita.
While Connell is playing variations on his major theme – one shock following another, Mrs Bridge’s fitful reflections, a distraction, oblivion – something darker and more compelling is going on in the minor key. It would not be hard to contextualize Mrs Bridge within the American fiction of its time, to see his strait-laced and tight-lipped Bridges as the dull counterpoints to Rabbit Angstrom or Alexander Portnoy, and to understand the book as a social novel or cautionary tale, or even less, as finely wrought portraiture with some vague historical value. One might be compelled to compare it specifically with Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, as that classic’s counterpart. No blow-out fights here. No wretched unraveling tragedy. But despite their very different presentations of domestic life, the two books have in common characters who sense something beyond, and better than, the settled contentment of their prosperous lives. Yates’s Frank Wheeler and Connell’s Mrs Bridge share a predominating characteristic, namely, their narcissistic tendency to believe that they are being observed, scrutinized, and judged by everyone. As a result, they are always performing, always theatrical, always to some extent inauthentic. What bedevils Frank Wheeler is a want of daring and his own awareness of it. Mrs Bridge is buffered from her want of daring by the dictates of decorum. Her tragic flaw is the inability to isolate that one thing toward which she might throw off the decorum and show no want of daring at all. As in the Yates novel, the reader always feels the ironic distance separating the character’s wisdom from the reader’s own.
Connell’s ultimate concern, however, is grander than Yates’s. For though she lacks curiosity, understanding, and will, and is at her center nearly a complete void, Mrs Bridge experiences moments of naked dread where, finally, she is the reader’s equal. In isolated moments, Mrs Bridge’s reflections reflect a different Mrs Bridge: a soul lost in a meaningless world, incapable of finding its purpose. In the words of Beckett: ‘He looks old and it is a very sorry sight to see him solitary after so many years, so many days and nights unthinkingly given to that rumour rising at birth and even earlier: What shall I do? What shall I do?’ Mrs Bridge, solitary, giving her days and nights unthinkingly, does not know what she should do. ‘They had started off together to explore something that promised to be wonderful, and, of course, there had been wonderful times. And yet, thought Mrs Bridge, why is it that we haven’t – that nothing has – that whatever we—?’ This comes early in the book, when the question ‘What shall I do?’ takes the form of ‘What shall we do?’ – for Mrs Bridge is always the consummate wife and mother – the answer to which can only be a series of unformulated questions. As the book advances, however, and Mrs Bridge ages – no book reminds you so relentlessly of the relentlessness of time – the question becomes more intimate, more implacable, and it menaces Mrs Bridge on nearly every page. Here is the closest she comes to putting her finger on it. ‘An evil, a malignancy, was at work. Its nature she could not discern, though she had known of its carbuncular presence for many years … Thinking back she was able to remember moments when this anonymous evil had erupted and left as its only cicatrice a sour taste in the mouth and a wild, wild desire.’
No doubt much of what oppresses Mrs Bridge is an unsustainable domestic condition. The generation of women after hers – that of her two daughters – would have more freedom, more opportunity, and more perspicacity. But as Connell pursues this ‘carbuncular presence’, and as it becomes the great preoccupation of the book, deepening and expanding, like the exhalations of a crouching beast, we come to know it as something universal, harrowing, and irremediable: an existential fear, the sour taste of wasted life, the wild, wild desire to rectify that waste. In chapter 102, entitled ‘Joseph Conrad’, Mrs Bridge remembers a time when
… she had taken a book down from a shelf and had begun turning the brittle, yellow pages. She stood beside the bookcase for quite a while, growing absorbed in what she read, and wandered, still reading, into the living room, where she did not look up from the book until someone called her, because she had come upon a passage … which observed that some people go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain; and this passage she had read once again, and brooded over it, and turned back to it again, and was thinking deeply when she was interrupted.
And Mrs Bridge remembered now that she had risen and had said, ‘Yes, all right, I’m on my way,’ and had placed the book on the mantel, for she had intended to read further. She wondered what had interfered, where she had gone, and why she had never returned.
The paraphrase of Conrad captures Mrs Bridge’s fear – a fear I share, and one I suspect anyone truly invested in life is acquainted with: how does one prosper against the threat that one might be skimming over the years, ignorant of how life should have been lived, might be lived, must be lived? What shall I do? What shall I do?
There is no certain answer, and in this uncertainty, the ironic distance between Mrs Bridge and the reader is closed. We no longer see her as victim of one or another comical shock, an object of pity or ridicule, or a hopeless case of repression and neuroses. She is Merseault without the epiphany of atheism, Molloy without the solace of scatology, Dr Rieux without the nobility of resistance. She is a reflection of you and me, an exemplar of our shared humanity and all the terror and opportunity it so briefly provides – so necessary to seize, and so easy to squander.
Joshua Ferris
Introduction by Joshua Ferris
PENGUIN BOOKS
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.
Joshua Ferris was born in Chicago in 1975. His first novel, Then We Came to the End (2007), won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was a National Book Award Finalist and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and Tin House, among other publications, and his second novel, The Unnamed, was published in 2010. He lives in New York.
Her first name was India – she was never able to get used to it. It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her. Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter? As a child she was often on the point of inquiring, but time passed, and she never did.
Now and then while she was growing up the idea came to her that she could get along very nicely without a husband, and, to the distress of her mother and father, this idea prevailed for a number of years after her education had been completed. But there came a summer evening and a young lawyer named Walter Bridge: very tall and dignified, red-haired, with a grimly determined, intelligent face, and rather stoop-shouldered so that even when he stood erect his coat hung lower in the front than in the back. She had known him for several years without finding him remarkable in any way, but on this summer evening, on the front porch of her parents’ home, she toyed with a sprig of mint and looked at him attentively while pretending to listen to what he said. He was telling her that he intended to become rich and successful, and that one day he would take his wife – ‘whenever I finally decide to marry’ he said, for he was not yet ready to commit himself – one day he would take his wife on a tour of Europe. He spoke of Ruskin and of Robert Ingersoll, and he read to her that evening on the porch, later, some verses from The Rubáiyát while her parents were preparing for bed, and the locusts sang in the elm trees all around.
A few months after her father died she married Walter Bridge and moved with him to Kansas City, where he had decided to establish a practice.
All seemed well. The days passed, and the weeks, and the months, more swiftly than in childhood, and she felt no trepidation, except for certain moments in the depth of the night when, as she and her new husband lay drowsily clutching each other for reassurance, anticipating the dawn, the day, and another night which might prove them both immortal, Mrs Bridge found herself wide awake. During these moments, resting in her husband’s arms, she would stare at the ceiling, or at his face, which sleep robbed of strength, with an uneasy expression, as though she saw or heard some intimation of the great years ahead.
She was not certain what she wanted from life, or what to expect from it, for she had seen so little of it, but she was sure that in some way – because she willed it to be so – her wants and her expectations were the same.
For a while after their marriage she was in such demand that it was not unpleasant when he fell asleep. Presently, however, he began sleeping all night, and it was then she awoke more frequently, and looked into the darkness, wondering about the nature of men, doubtful of the future, until at last there came a night when she shook her husband awake and spoke of her own desire. Affably he placed one of his long white arms around her waist; she turned to him then, contentedly, expectantly, and secure. However nothing else occurred, and in a few minutes he had gone back to sleep.
This was the night Mrs Bridge concluded that while marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was not.
Their first child, a girl, curiously dark, who seldom cried and who often seemed to want nothing more than to be left alone, was born when they had been married a little more than three years. They named her Ruth. After the delivery Mrs Bridge’s first coherent words were, ‘Is she normal?’
Two years later – Mrs Bridge was then thirty-one – Carolyn appeared, about a month ahead of time, as though she were quite able to take care of herself, and was nicknamed ‘Corky.’ She was a chubby blonde, blue-eyed like her mother, more ebullient than Ruth, and more demanding.
Then, two years after Carolyn, a stern little boy was born, thin and red-haired like his father, and they named him Douglas. They had not wanted more than two children, but because the first two had been girls they had decided to try once more. Even if the third had also been a girl they would have let it go at that; there would have been no sense in continuing what would soon become amusing to other people.
She brought up her children very much as she herself had been brought up, and she hoped that when they were spoken of it would be in connection with their nice manners, their pleasant dispositions, and their cleanliness, for these were qualities she valued above all others.
With Ruth and later with Carolyn, because they were girls, she felt sure of her guidance; but with the boy she was at times obliged to guess and to hope, and as it turned out – not only with Douglas but with his two sisters – what she stressed was not at all what they remembered as they grew older.
What Ruth was to recall most vividly about childhood was an incident which Mrs Bridge had virtually forgotten an hour after it occurred. One summer afternoon the entire family, with the exception of Mr Bridge who was working, had gone to the neighborhood swimming pool; Douglas lay on a rubber sheet in the shade of an umbrella, kicking his thin bowed legs and gurgling, and Carolyn was splashing around in the wading pool. The day was exceptionally hot. Ruth took off her bathing suit and began walking across the terrace. This much she could hardly remember, but she was never to forget what happened next. Mrs Bridge, having suddenly discovered Ruth was naked, snatched up the bathing suit and hurried after her. Ruth began to run, and being wet and slippery she squirmed out of the arms that reached for her from every direction. She thought it was a new game. Then she noticed the expression on her mother’s face. Ruth became bewildered and then alarmed, and when she was finally caught she was screaming hysterically.
Her husband was as astute as he was energetic, and because he wanted so much for his family he went to his office quite early in the morning while most men were still asleep and he often stayed there working until late at night. He worked all day Saturday and part of Sunday, and holidays were nothing but a nuisance. Before very long the word had gone around that Walter Bridge was the man to handle the case.
The family saw very little of him. It was not unusual for an entire week to pass without any of the children seeing him. On Sunday morning they would come downstairs and he might be at the breakfast table; he greeted them pleasantly and they responded deferentially, and a little wistfully because they missed him. Sensing this, he would redouble his efforts at the office in order to give them everything they wanted.
Consequently they were able to move to a large home just off Ward Parkway several years sooner than they had expected, and because the house was so large they employed a young colored girl named Harriet to do the cooking and cleaning.
One morning at the breakfast table Carolyn said petulantly, ‘I’m sick and tired of orange marmalade!’
Mrs Bridge, who was mashing an egg for her, replied patiently, ‘Now, Corky, just remember there are lots and lots of little girls in the world who don’t have any marmalade at all.’
That there should be those who had marmalade, and those who did not, was a condition that appealed to Carolyn. She looked forward to Christmas, at which time the newspaper printed a list of the one hundred neediest families in Kansas City. Every year Mrs Bridge adopted one of these families, seeing to it that they had a nice holiday, and Carolyn now took a definite interest in this annual project. Each needy family was described in the paper – how many children, how old, what they needed particularly, and so forth – and Carolyn helped her mother decide which family they should adopt. Ruth and Douglas did not seem to care very much.
A bushel basket, or perhaps two, would be filled with canned goods, possibly some clothing, and whatever else the poor family could obviously use – a smoked ham, a bag of flour, a bag of salt – and the basket would then be topped with candy canes and a paper angel or a Santa Claus, and the edges trimmed with scallops of red and green crepe. Then on the day before Christmas Mrs Bridge and the children would deliver the basket to the address furnished by the newspaper.
During the preparations Mrs Bridge would sometimes ask the children if they could remember the family they had adopted last year. Ruth, being the oldest, usually could, but it was always Carolyn who could describe most sharply the details of poverty.
Douglas, possibly because he was so young – or so Mrs Bridge reasoned – did not enjoy these trips. Each Christmas when he saw the basket being filled and trimmed he grew restless and obstinate; she did not know why, nor could she get him to explain. He did not want to go, that was clear, but she wanted him to appreciate his own good fortune, and not to grow up thinking he was better than someone else, so she insisted he go along to visit the poor family; he would ride in the back seat of the Reo with one arm resting on top of the Christmas basket, and he never said a word from the moment the trip started until they were home again. But he, like Ruth, remembered. This was why he hated to go. He could remember the very first visit. He had been just three years old when he first joined his sisters on the annual expedition to the north end of the city – had it been to Strawberry Hill, where he had expected to see a bowl of strawberries on top of the hill? – no matter, he remembered how he had been sitting in the back of the Reo when the door was opened and a man leaned in and took the basket away. Then, while the door was still open and snowflakes were falling on his knees, someone else leaned in – he could not remember whether it was a man or a woman – and quickly, neatly touched the cushion of the Reo.
Although many years were to pass before Douglas could understand why someone had wanted to touch the cushion, or why the memory of that gesture should persist, each Christmas thereafter when he saw the basket being filled and trimmed he grew restless and obstinate.
On a winter morning not long after one of these excursions Mrs Bridge happened to come upon Douglas in the sewing room; he was standing quietly with his hands clasped behind his back and his head bent slightly to one side. So adult did he look in the depth of his meditation that she could not resist smiling. Then she saw that he was staring at the dummy of her figure. She had kept the dummy there near the sewing machine for a long time and had supposed that no one in the family paid any attention to it, but after this particular day – unless she was using it to make herself a dress – the dummy stood behind an upended trunk in the attic.
That summer Carolyn began playing with Alice Jones, the daughter of the colored gardener who worked next door. Every Saturday morning he would appear from the direction of the streetcar line, his daughter Alice capering wildly around him. As soon as they came in sight of the Bridges’ house she would rush ahead, pigtails flying. In a minute she would be at the back door, pressing the bell with both hands. Often Mrs Bridge would be in the kitchen polishing silver or planning the week-end menu while Harriet did the heavy cleaning somewhere else in the house, so Mrs Bridge would answer the door.
Alice Jones was always out of breath from the run and her eyes were shining with expectation as she inquired if Corky could come out and play.
‘Why, I think she can,’ Mrs Bridge would say, and smile. ‘Providing you two behave yourselves.’ About this time the gardener would come walking up the neighbor’s driveway and she would say through the screen door, ‘Good morning, Jones.’
‘Mornin’, Mrs Bridge,’ he always answered. ‘That child bothering you all?’
‘Not a bit! We love having her.’
By this time Carolyn would appear and the two children would begin their day. In spite of Carolyn’s excellence at school she was not very imaginative, and no matter what she suggested they do that day Alice Jones had a better idea. Carolyn was a little stunned by some of the suggestions, and for a few minutes would grow petulant and arrogant, but when she found that Alice could not be intimidated she gave way and enjoyed herself.
One morning they decided to take apart the radio-phonograph and talk to the little people inside the cabinet; another morning they made sandwiches and filled a Thermos jug with milk because they planned to leave on a trip to Cedar Rabbits, Iowa. Again, they composed a long cheerful letter to Sears, Roebuck & Co. in which Alice told how she murdered people. Some Saturdays they would stage extremely dramatic plays which went on for hours – with time out for other games – the leading part always being taken by Alice Jones because, at her grade school in the north end of the city, she was invariably the Snow Queen or the Good Fairy or some other personage of equal distinction. Carolyn, whose stage experience had been limited to a Thanksgiving skit in which she had been an onion, seldom objected and in fact had some difficulty keeping up with the plot.
Long before noon they were at the back door, wanting to know if it was not yet lunchtime, and when at last Harriet, or perhaps Mrs Bridge, set up the breakfast-room table for them they would turn on the radio so that during lunch they might listen to the livestock reports, which Alice Jones found hilarious.
One day a fire truck went by the house and Alice, wagging her head in amazement, exclaimed, ‘There they go again! Who they going to burn down this time?’ Dismayed by the wickedness of the firemen, she rolled her eyes and sighed and helped herself to more caramel pudding.
Mrs Bridge, who was making up a grocery list, paused and smiled affectionately at both children, pleased that Carolyn was not conscious of the difference between them.
Alice and her father appeared every Saturday, and the two children, occasionally joined by Ruth – who more often spent the day lying on the porch swing – would play together as comfortably as on the first Saturday they met. The gardener never failed to ask Mrs Bridge if Alice was a nuisance; Mrs Bridge always smiled and assured him she was not.
For a month each summer the Bridges went to Colorado; they hired Jones for this month to water the grass after he had finished working for the neighbors, and so Alice amused herself on the familiar grounds and frequently asked her father how soon Corky would be back.
‘Soon enough,’ was his usual reply, but one day he paused, and as if considering the future, he told her, cryptically and a little sadly, ‘She liable to not come back, child.’
But at last the vacation ended and Carolyn returned, full of sunshine and sophistication.
‘The mountains are awfully big,’ she said primly, and, echoing her mother, ‘It was just grand.’
Then Alice Jones said, ‘You know what I got in this here pocket?’
Carolyn, reluctant to become once more the planet instead of the star, affected disdain.
‘Who cares?’ she announced, coolly turning away.
‘A human gizzard,’ murmured Alice with a mysterious expression, and before much longer Carolyn was convinced a summer in Kansas City would have been much more exciting than the mountains. She said as much to her mother, who replied a trifle brusquely, being harried at the moment, ‘Don’t be silly, dear.’ And Mrs Bridge was about to add that there must be other girls besides Alice to play with, but she did not say this; she hesitated, and said, ‘Corky, you know perfectly well you enjoyed Colorado.’ Soon, she knew, the girls would drift apart. Time would take care of the situation.
As time went on it became evident that Douglas was the most introspective of the three children, but aside from this – to his father’s disappointment – he appeared to be totally unremarkable. Mr Bridge had hoped for a brilliant son, and though he had not yet given up that hope he was reluctantly adapting himself to the idea that his son was no prodigy. If Douglas amounted to anything in later life, he concluded, it would be less the result of brilliance than of conscientious effort.
Ruth, even more obviously, had no intention of relying on her brains; but Carolyn, as soon as she entered kindergarten, began to make a name for herself, and very shortly was known as the brightest child in the class. Furthermore she appeared to understand her own superiority and when, through some mischance, another child equaled or exceeded her for a moment, Carolyn would grow furiously vindictive, and was not above lying or cheating in order to regain her position at the head of the class, so that by the time she was in the third grade she was beginning to be envied and disliked by her classmates and carefully observed by her teachers. It was no surprise to anyone when she was allowed to skip the second half of the third grade.
The teacher of Carolyn’s fourth-grade class was a young lame woman named Bloch, who wore eye shadow and mascara and had one rather strange habit: every day she would call one of the children to her desk, give the child a comb, and then, bowing her head and shutting her eyes, she would instruct the child to take the pins out of her hair. Her hair was thick and greasy and hung down to her waist.
‘Who can find the Caspian Sea?’ she would murmur, and the child behind her would begin combing.
‘Who knows where to find the Caspian Sea?’ she would ask again, and without opening her eyes she would say, ‘Albert Crawford knows.’
Then the boy she had named would walk to the great green and blue map pulled down over the blackboard, and with the pointer he would locate the sea.
‘Carefully, dear,’ she would whisper if the comb snarled, but even then she seemed not displeased.
Although the children did not like this curious task they seldom thought of it once they were out of class. Carolyn, however, happened to mention at home that she had been chosen that morning. Mrs Bridge was aghast; she had never heard of Miss Bloch’s habit. After questioning Carolyn and becoming convinced it was the truth, she resolved to telephone the school and report the incident to the principal, and yet, for some reason, she could not do it. Several times she picked up the telephone, shivering with disgust, but each time she put down the receiver with an expression of doubt and anxiety; she decided it would be better to visit the principal’s office, and yet this, too, was beyond her. She did not know why. In the end she told Carolyn that if she was ever again called upon to comb the teacher’s hair she was to refuse. Having done this, Mrs Bridge told herself the teacher was no longer a threat and the entire affair, therefore, was closed. And so it was. Carolyn was not called upon for the remainder of the term, and the following September she had a different teacher. There were times later on when Mrs Bridge wondered if she had done the right thing; she wondered if Miss Bloch was still calling children to comb her hair, and when Douglas entered fourth grade she waited anxiously to learn who his teacher would be. It was not Miss Bloch; if it had been she would have gone to the principal and demanded that something be done. But it was not, and Mrs Bridge, who disliked making trouble for anyone, was greatly relieved, and found that she was no longer obliged to think about the matter.
For semi-annual housecleaning Mrs Bridge hired additional help. Carolyn answered the back door and reported to her mother, ‘The cleaning lady is here.’
‘Oh, fine,’ Mrs Bridge said, and put away her sewing basket and went to the back door, smiling and saying genially, ‘How do you do? Come right in, won’t you?’
That evening she instructed Carolyn. ‘You should say the cleaning “woman.” A lady is someone like Mrs Arlen or Mrs Montgomery.’
Mrs Bridge said that she judged people by their shoes and by their manners at the table. If someone wore shoes with run-over heels, or shoes that had not been shined for a long time, or shoes with broken laces, you could be pretty sure this person would be slovenly in other things as well. And there was no better way to judge a person’s background than by watching him or her at the table.
The children learned it was impolite to talk while eating, or to chew with the mouth open, and as they grew older they learned the more subtle manners – not to butter an entire slice of bread, not to take more than one biscuit at a time, unless, of course, the hostess should insist. They were taught to keep their elbows close to their sides while cutting meat, and to hold the utensils in the tips of their fingers. They resisted the temptation to sop up the gravy with a piece of bread, and they made sure to leave a little of everything – not enough to be called wasteful, but just a little to indicate the meal had been sufficient. And, naturally, they learned that a lady or a gentleman does not fold up a napkin after having eaten in a public place.
The girls absorbed these matters with greater facility than Douglas, who tended to ask the reason for everything, sometimes observing that he thought it was all pretty silly. He seemed particularly unable to eat with his left hand lying in his lap; he wanted to leave it on the table, to prop himself up, as it were, and claimed he got a backache with one arm in his lap. Mrs Bridge told him this was absurd, and when he wanted to know why he could not put his elbow on the table she replied, ‘Do you want to be different from everyone else?’
Douglas was doubtful, but after a long silence, and under the weight of his mother’s tranquil gaze, he at last concluded he didn’t.
The American habit of switching implements, however, continued to give him trouble and to make him rebellious. With elaborate care he would put down the knife, reach high across his plate and descend on the left side to pick up the fork, raising it high over the plate again as he returned to the starting position.
‘Now stop acting ridiculous,’ she told him one day at lunch.
‘Well, I sure bet the Egyptians don’t have to eat this way,’ he muttered, giving ‘Egyptians’ a vengeful emphasis.
‘I doubt if they do,’ she replied calmly, expertly cutting a triangle of pineapple from her salad, ‘but you’re not an Egyptian. So you eat the way Americans eat, and that’s final.’
It seemed to Mrs Bridge that Saturday came around quite often. She was selecting some sugar buns from the bakery man when Alice dashed up the driveway with a long piece of clothesline in her hand, and the first thing that came to Mrs Bridge’s mind was that the girl had stolen it.
‘Good morning, Alice,’ she said. Alice dropped the clothesline on the back steps and ran directly into the house to find Carolyn. A few minutes later the gardener appeared and asked, as he always did, whether she was being a nuisance. Mrs Bridge smiled briefly and shook her head, not knowing how to be truthful without hurting his feelings.
The children were in Carolyn’s room playing jacks. Mrs Bridge looked in on them after a while and asked why they didn’t play out of doors, the day being so nice, and she thought – but could not be sure – that as she suggested this the little Negro girl gave her a rather strange look. In any event the suggestion appeared to take hold, because a few minutes later she heard them outside shouting with laughter about something.
Shortly before noon, while rearranging the handkerchiefs in her husband’s bureau, Mrs Bridge heard Carolyn singing at the top of her voice: ‘My mother, your mother, live across the way, eighteen-sixteen East Broadway! Every night they have a fight, and this is what they say—’ Here Alice Jones took over the song: ‘Goddamn you, goddamn you, goddamn you, goddamn you—’