Evan Connell - Mr. Bridge

New Year’s Eve the Montgomerys gave a party. Mr. Bridge did not want to attend. He disliked New Year’s Eve, and after listening to football games on the radio all afternoon he wanted nothing more than to spend the evening in bed reading travel brochures and a mystery novel he had gotten for Christmas. However, they were obligated to go because they had turned down a previous invitation from the Montgomerys, and the invitation to this had been sent so far in advance that another rejection would be embarrassing.

The party was exactly what he had feared it would be. Just before midnight the butler broke open boxes of confetti, streamers, paper hats, horns, whistles, and other noisemakers. Mr. Bridge got behind the piano where he sipped a glass of champagne and hoped he would not be noticed until the worst of it was over, but his wife found him.

Gaily she cried, “Don’t be an old stick-in-the-mud! Tonight you’re going to put on a paper hat and enjoy yourself!”

“I will not wear a paper hat,” he said. “That’s final.”

“Oh, goodness, we all feel silly,” she replied, adjusting the peppermint-red hat she had chosen, “but everybody’s wearing one.”

“I am not everybody,” he said.

“You certainly aren’t,” she said. “But can’t you make an exception on New Year’s Eve?”

“No,” said Mr. Bridge.

If Carolyn proved to be the most intelligent of the children, Douglas was growing up to be the most obdurate. To persuade him was as difficult as it was simple to command him; in the depths of his soul some recalcitrance was rooted which could neither be examined nor assuaged. If he was about to be punished he would argue against it, not very effectively, and finally accept it without comment, leaving no doubt that he considered himself undefeated. Punishment failed because he either knew he had done wrong, in which case the punishment seemed unnecessary and therefore ridiculous, or he remained convinced that he had been treated unjustly. Neither his mother nor his father knew quite what to do. Strange wood was growing; both of them sensed it.

“What in the world have you on your hands?” his mother demanded.

Douglas gazed at the backs of his hands, which were blotched with purplish marks, as though he observed nothing unusual. He said it was crayon.

“Crayon!” she exclaimed. “Young man, if you think for one instant you can sit down at the table without washing those hands, you have another think coming. Hop to the kitchen right now.”

“Let me see those hands,” his father said.

Douglas obediently walked around the table. Mr. Bridge took his son’s hands in his own and looked closely at the curious marks. He turned the hands over and looked at the palms, which were clean.

“How did you get this?” he asked.

Douglas said he had gotten the crayon on his hands during geography class, but he did not explain.

“Let’s hear the rest.”

“What rest?”

“How did you get these marks?”

After a long silence Douglas said: “From a ruler.”

“Go on.”

“Ye cripes,” Douglas said, and rolled his eyes. “It’s a little bit of purple crayon. You act like it was the end of the world. It was just Miss Breuhauf, that’s all. She got sore and gave me the business with her ruler. I guess it had a little purple crayon on it.”

“Do you mean to say,” his mother asked with a shocked expression, “she struck you with a ruler?”

“Don’t worry. He deserved it,” said Carolyn.

“A fat lot you know,” said Douglas. “She probably did worse than that to you when you had her class.”

Mr. Bridge was still examining his son’s hands. The skin had not been broken. He said, “Does she make a habit of this?”

“Sure,” Douglas said. “She loves to beat up kids. She gives somebody the business all the time. Rodney Vandermeer got it last week. If she gets sore she gets good and sore.”

“Do your hands ache?”

“Not too much. They swelled up at recess but they’re okay now.”

“I simply cannot believe this,” Mrs. Bridge said. “She ought to be reported.”

“Don’t report her,” Douglas said patiently. “She’d just take it out on us. She’s nutty as a fruitcake.”

“Why did you provoke her?” his father asked.

“I didn’t.”

“Spitballs,” said Carolyn.

Douglas sneered. “How do you know so much? Were you there?”

“No. But I know somebody who was.”

“That will be enough, both of you,” Mrs. Bridge said. “Corky, eat your salad.”

“Well,” Douglas said, “am I supposed to wash my hands, or not?”

“Yes. Go do it,” said Mr. Bridge, and with a thoughtful expression he began to whet the carving knife. Carolyn probably was right, very probably Douglas did deserve to be punished for whatever he had done; but he did not like the idea of a teacher who made a habit of beating children.

Later that evening he stopped by his son’s room to talk about it some more.

Douglas had assumed the matter was ended, and he was bored. He admitted, after questioning, that he had been trying to antagonize the teacher, and he did not seem to feel that he had been mistreated. Yes, he said, it hurt while she was beating him. Then he said, “She thought I was going to try and jerk my hands away, so she grabbed hold of them, but I just let her do whatever she wanted. She sure got mad. I thought she was going to have a heart attack. She kept asking if I was sorry. That’s what she asks kids when she beats them up.”

“Did you apologize?”

Douglas laughed. “Shoot, no.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s what she wanted.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Nothing.”

“Where did this take place?”

“In the front of the room.”

“In view of the other children?”

“She usually takes the girls into the cloakroom, but she likes to give it to the guys where everybody can see.” After a meditative pause he added, “I don’t think she’ll do it to me anymore.”

“Why do you think that?”

Douglas struggled to answer, but could not find the words. At last he said, “I just got a hunch.”

Mr. Bridge had been sitting on the edge of the bed with his arms crossed. He stood up, told his son good night, and walked downstairs. He was no longer particularly concerned about the teacher, because Douglas had almost destroyed her. Very possibly she had never before encountered a child whose will was greater than hers. It was not likely that she would be the same again. She must have understood while she was beating him that she was losing, and knowing the child was aware of this must have made it very hard for her.

As to the effect of this punishment on Douglas, Mr. Bridge was not sure. He suspected that the beating had affected Douglas, too, though, not necessarily for the worse. There had been that odd quality in him, like the resiliency of ironwood, as he described what happened. This quality might be useful to him when he grew up, and what the woman had done was to nurture it. At any rate, he had not been damaged. Like a young Trojan he had displayed his wounds in public. Probably, if left alone, he would not have washed his hands for a week.

Whenever he thought about his son’s confrontation with the teacher a thin smile touched his face and he reflected that Douglas had inherited much of his own temperament. This more than anything else assured him that he did indeed have a son. Not even the physical resemblance — the lank body, the bony Anglo-Saxon features, and the dry, reddish hair — none of these irrefutable signs persuaded him as deeply as certain temperamental characteristics which he could recognize as his own. And of these the most unmistakable was that despotic obstinacy which could not conceive of surrender, no matter what the cost. He knew this in himself. So he smiled as he considered it in his son.