Evan Connell - Mrs. Bridge

“Do tell,” murmured Harriet, her voice not giving away her thoughts, and Mrs. Bridge, frozen to the upstairs phone, could almost see her seated on the pantry stool with her legs crossed, blowing smoke rings.

There was a crucial pause. Mrs. Bridge was now afraid to replace the receiver because the click would be audible; all she could do was hold her head and wait.

“I feel/* Harriet murmured, **Mr. and Mrs. Bridge could not precisely survive too well should I depart here.” With chilling poise she added, “However, it was extremely nice of you to call.”

And that, as even such a bald soul as Mrs. Porter could tell, was the end of the matter.

The Porters were regular church-goers, and after the telephone incident Mrs. Bridge felt a sense of exasperation whenever she saw Mrs. Porter in church, It was difficult to imagine how a person could be so devout and so conniving, but that was Mrs. Porter.

For better or worse Mrs. Bridge did not often encounter her there, the reason being that she did not like attending church alone and it was quite difficult to get Mr. Bridge to go. He had little enough use for dogma and would rather lie abed reading vacation brochures on those Sunday mornings when he did not go to the office, or, dressed in old clothes, he would spend the morning in the yard with a can of snail poison. Now and then she became worried about his apathetic attitude toward religion, especially after one of Dr. Foster’s sermons on the consequences of atheism, and she would then half-fearfully go after her husband.

“When I need to know anything/’ he would reply with awful finality, “I go to someone who knows more than I do/* This was quite a slam at Dr. Foster.

“But don’t you think he has some very good ideas?** she would counter. “It certainly wouldn’t hurt you to attend once in a while. And people do ask where you are/”

So it came about that once or twice a year he would silently drive to church. They would climb to the balcony, for what reason she could never understand, and there with heads al-most touching the stained-oak rafters, surrounded by stifling, humid air, they sat through the sermon.

One Easter, an unusually warm day, just as Dr. Foster began easing into the familiar narrative the empty tomb, and so forth the scent of lilies became overpowering. Or was it the sight of Mrs. Porter looking altogether righteous? In any event Mrs. Bridge felt herself swaying. She reached toward the balcony rail for support and whispered giddily that she was going to faint. Mr. Bridge had been dozing, but he woke up immediately and turned his head and glared at her severely.

“Not here! Wait until we get outside/’ he told her in a voice that was audible throughout the balcony.

“All right, I’ll try/’ she whispered. She thought he meant to escort her outside, but apparently not, because he did not get up, and in a few minutes she realized he meant for her to wait until church was over. There was nothing to do but to try not to faint, and so she did try, and succeeded.

Dr. Foster had such an Impressive vocabulary that Mrs. Bridge was moved to amplify her own. She Intended to, she had been intending to for quite a while, but the opportunity never presented Itself until she received as second prize at bridge club a little book on how to build a more powerful vocabulary in thirty days. The dust jacket, an eye-catching red, guaran-teed that if the reader spent only a few minutes a day, his ability to express himself would so noticeably improve that within two weeks friends would be commenting. Tests had proved, so said the dust jacket, that the great majority of employers had larger vocabularies than their employees, which, the jacket hinted, was the reason for the status quo.

Although Mrs. Bridge had no more thought of becoming an employer than an employee, she was delighted with her prize; everyone else in Kansas City was reading it and she had, therefore, been planning on buying a copy If she could not get It from the rental library. She began to read it that same afternoon as soon as she got home. The next day she was busy, but the day after that she spent almost three hours studying, completing several lessons filling in the blanks and doing the multiple-choice exercises at the back of the book. She spoke of it enthusiastically to her friends, most of whom had either read it or were definitely intending to, with the exception of Grace Barren, who always read books no one else ever heard of.

At the end of two weeks she was on her thirteenth lesson, very nearly on schedule, when the telephone interrupted; Madge Arlen was calling to say that a delivery truck had run over their next-door neighbor’s boxer. Dogs were always being run over by delivery trucks. The Bridges had lost a collie several years before, and some people named Ilgenfritz who lived in the next block had lost two dachshunds.

“Oh, not really!” Mrs. Bridge began. “What a shame!”

“I tell you I’m up in arms!” replied Madge. “When Edith told me about it I was so put out I simply couldn’t speak/*

Presently the conversation got around to the vocabulary book and Mrs. Bridge praised it and recommended it quite strongly to Madge, who answered that she’d just finished reading it.

Mrs. Bridge was very much surprised by this news. “You did?” she asked uncertainly, for the book had obviously not affected Madge’s vocabulary.

“Yes, and it was marvelous! Every last one of us ought to read it.”

Mrs. Bridge felt rather subdued after this talk with Madge; however she continued with her lessons whenever there was time. She did want to complete the book because she was al-ways meeting people who asked if she had read it, and within the month she had reached the twentieth lesson, where one turned adverbs into nouns. So far none of her friends had commented as the dust jacket promised; consequently Mrs. Bridge was a little discouraged. The book began to wander around the house. It found its way from the coffee table in the living room to the window seat in the breakfast room; after that it lay in a dresser drawer in the upstairs bedroom for about a week, and briefly in the room shared by Carolyn and Ruth. From there it traveled again to the breakfast room, to the basement, and finally, Its pages already turning a sulphur color and its jacket mended with Scotch Tape, it died on a shelf between T. E. Lawrence and The Rubdiydt.

Madge and Grace were so different; Mrs. Bridge felt drawn to them both, and was distressed that the two of them did not care for each other. Now and then she felt they were compet-ing for her friendship, though she could not be sure of this, but if it was true it was both exciting and alarming. She often thought about them. She felt more comfortable with Madge, who liked everything about Kansas City, more secure, more positive; with Grace Barron she felt obliged to consider everything she said, and to look all around, and she could never guess what Grace would say or do.

Tobacco Road, practically uncensored, had come to Kansas City, and Madge Arlen possibly jealous of Grace Barron’s attentions called to ask if Mrs. Bridge wanted to go to the Wednesday matinee. She had not thought about it, but there was no reason not to, particularly since almost everyone was going to see it in spite of its shady reputation, so she agreed.

The play had scarcely got under way when she received a brief but severe shock: one of the girls in the cast looked extremely like Ruth with her hair uncombed. For an instant she feared it truly was Ruth; it wasn’t, of course, and as the play went on she could see that the actress was a few years older.