Evan Connell - Mr. Bridge

“I thought you knew,” she added. “Didn’t Mother tell you?”

Nobody had told him. He sat down, laid his briefcase across his knees, loosened his collar, and took out a handkerchief to wipe his forehead. Ruth had placed the electric fan on the table beside the swing where she could get the benefit of it, otherwise there was no breeze at all. The sun was blazing. The grass in the yard smelled like hay. The birds and the locusts were silent. The entire neighborhood was silent. Nothing moved. He could almost hear the roaring of the sun. He had no sooner patted his forehead than it felt damp again. “Now, what is all this?” he demanded. “Start from the beginning. Do you or do you not have a job?”

Ruth dropped one bare foot to the floor and gave the swing a leisurely push. He observed that she had painted her toenails, and apparently she had been shaving her legs because there was a patch of adhesive tape on her shin. Her indolence was exasperating.

“You have quit, I take it. Did you quit merely because you happened to feel like quitting? Am I entitled to quit because there are times I would rather loiter on the swing and drink lemonade?”

“It’s so hot,” she murmured. “Let’s not squabble. Ask Mother if you want to know why I quit.”

“I am asking you, not your mother. And I want an answer, and I want an answer fast. Do you hear?” Everything about the day had been unsatisfactory, and her attitude was the culmination of it. She was lounging around the house two-thirds naked; she knew what he thought of this, yet there she lay — idly swinging herself, sipping lemonade, and reading a movie magazine.

“Do you hear?” he repeated. “I am talking to you. I have had just about enough for one day.” His heart was beginning to flutter. He frowned and slipped one hand inside his coat.

Ruth was almost wallowing in the swing while the breeze from the electric fan swept across her body. She continued sipping lemonade through a green straw. Her eyes were nearly shut. A drop of water wriggled down the side of the glass and plopped on her stomach.

“If you must know,” she murmured with a foolish smile, “Mr. Bliss was always — well, it’s just too gruesome to try to explain. I mean, you can get mad at me if you want to, but I actually don’t think you’d want me to keep on working there. I mean, really, I don’t think I should.”

Mr. Bridge considered this information for a few moments. Then he said, pointing to the lemonade pitcher, “Suppose you pour me a glass of that while I take a shower and change clothes.”

That summer another member of the family concluded it might be time to go to work. Douglas, either bored with life at the country club or stimulated by his elder sister’s example, went out one Saturday morning to look for a position suiting his talents, came home late in the afternoon, located his parents in the back yard, and announced that on Monday he was starting to work as a garbage man. Then he began dancing back and forth as though he was in vaudeville, lifted his baseball cap, and bowed.

Mr. Bridge, who was worried about the condition of the yard which was thick with dandelions and crab grass, was not sure he had heard his son correctly. “Stop prancing around,” he said.

Douglas clutched his heart and collapsed on the lawn.

“All right, now. Behave yourself,” his mother said.

He sat up, put his cap on backward, and explained that he had gotten a job as a helper. He would be paid three dollars a day and would be given his lunch. “Ordinarily a route took eight hours,” he said, “but with a fast driver, if everybody on the truck worked hard, a route could sometimes be finished in five hours. So he might earn a full day’s pay in five hours. How many jobs were like that?”

Mr. Bridge asked what his duties would be. Douglas replied that he would follow the men while they were emptying the cans and clean up whatever they spilled.

“Oh, well, I just don’t know about this,” said his mother, who had been listening uneasily.

Mr. Bridge agreed. He told Douglas he would have to find another job. Douglas promptly flung his arms wide apart to indicate despair.

“For the love of Mike, why? I mean, why? I mean, what’s the matter? I don’t get it!”

“I don’t want you to come home smelling like a pig.”

“So we’re too ritzy to let me work on a garbage truck?”

“Not at all,” Mr. Bridge said with a thin smile. “I have done manual labor myself. From the time I was old enough to know what money was I knew that if I wanted it I had to earn it. My parents never had enough to give me an allowance. You don’t know how lucky you are. And, as a matter of fact, there were plenty of times when I was a kid that it never occurred to me to keep what I earned. I handed it over to my parents without question so they could buy enough to keep us alive. You seem to be under the impression that because we live in a decent neighborhood and have plenty to eat I do not know what poverty is all about. Nothing could be further from the truth. I tell you this: I do know it. I know the smell of it and the sight of it and the anxiety of it firsthand, and I thank the good Lord that you and your sisters and your mother have had no such experience. I hope you never know what it means, because it is not very pleasant. It is not fun. It is not amusing. I do not look down on laboring men. We are not too ‘ritzy,’ as you express it, for you to work on a garbage truck this summer. However, there are other jobs available. You will have to find something else. You may take any sort of work you wish to, provided it is legal and reasonably clean. I do not mean you cannot get your hands dirty, but there is no necessity for you to clean sewers or pick up garbage.”

Mr. Bridge paused; but then he continued, moved by the memory of things he had not thought about for a long while: “I used to get up before dawn to work on an ice wagon pulled by a couple of old broken-down nags. Lord, I’ll never forget. I worked until time to go to school. And I don’t mind letting you know it was not very agreeable chipping and carrying ice at five or six o‘clock on a January morning with the snow coming down in blankets and a north wind howling. To this day I remember the sight of my fingers raw and bleeding. And many’s the morning I sat down at my school desk with my fingers too stiff to hold a pencil. That was no fun, let me tell you, but I did it without complaint. I never thought I was too ‘ritzy’ for hard work. Never. As Abraham Lincoln once observed: ‘I am not ashamed to confess that twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer.’ ”

Douglas was bored.

“All right, I won’t lecture you. Go out and find yourself a job. It’s what you need. But you are not going to work on a garbage truck. Is that clear?”

“Right-o,” Douglas answered with heavy sarcasm. Mr. Bridge gave him one brief, significant look to indicate that he had heard this and did not want to hear any more. Douglas shambled into the house to telephone his regrets to the garbage men.

Mr. Bridge resumed his survey of the weeds in the yard.

But while he contemplated the dandelions his thoughts went back to the time he had been working on the ice wagon. He thought of the black-leather vest which buckled at the waist and hung down almost to his knees like a garment from the Middle Ages, and the iron tongs, the rag he strapped across his shoulder so the cakes of ice would not be quite so painful, the grizzled old man whipping the struggling horses up the wintry hills, the bumping wagon, the dampness, and the sleet bouncing off the long blocks of ice. He lifted his right hand and considered the palm. He rubbed his thumb across his palm where the calluses used to be. Now the hand was as soft as the hand of a surgeon.