Mr. Bridge_ A Novel - Evan S. Connell [100]
In regard to news closer to home we read in the Star that one of your classmates, Sue Ellen Stubbs, who is the niece of a friend of your mother, Margaret Hockaday, is engaged to a West Point man whose name escapes me at the moment. They are being married in the autumn at West Point. October, if memory serves. Should you wish to attend the wedding, I am sure it could be arranged. Let your mother know and she will telephone Miss Hockaday. I do not know how close you and this girl were during your schooldays, however it seems to me that a West Point wedding ought to be very colorful.
I do not believe there is much else. Mrs. Barron and your mother are planning to visit the Nelson Gallery this afternoon. Mrs. Barron spends a great deal of time visiting art galleries of all sorts. It is too bad you and she did not get to know each other better. I suspect the two of you have much in common.
Our weather has changed for the better. We have been reasonably comfortable the past several days with moderate temperatures, thunderstorms, and showers.
Love,
Dad
105 Art of India
Finding himself a few minutes ahead of schedule, he decided to walk to the federal courthouse instead of calling a taxi. On the way he passed a bookstore, and in the display window stood an expensive volume on the art of India. He stopped walking. Elephants with painted foreheads, cribs of women, moaning beggars, funeral pyres, ancient red-stone forts, leprosy, children infested with lice, and quite a lot more of what he found in India had been described by Dr. Sauer while eating lobster bisque at the Terrace Grill. Among the spectacles he described were the temples of Konorak and Khajuraho, whose walls were decorated with erotic sculpture—thousands of men and women in fantastic positions and groups of people performing as though they were animals—and this was what first came to mind when Mr. Bridge thought about India, because it represented an attitude toward life very distant from life as he knew it in Kansas City. Children dying of starvation on the streets of Calcutta were easier to imagine than the existence of temples covered with swarms of copulating figures, perhaps because poverty in some degree was common. Everywhere in the world one could find sick and hungry people. In Europe there was filth, hunger, and squalor, and this could be found also in Kansas City; but nowhere else was anything comparable to these Indian temple displays of licentiousness.
He walked into the store and asked to see the book. It was filled with handsome, colored photographs of painting and sculpture. There were no pictures of the scenes Dr. Sauer had described; however, there were a good many photographs of impossibly voluptuous, dreamily smiling dancers with almond eyes and bells on their ankles.
He bought this book and at home he placed it on the coffee table in the living room. Mrs. Bridge promptly exclaimed over it, but then she began to look through it, and after that she did not have very much to say.
Days passed. She did not mention the book again. Douglas frequently looked at it, Harriet was found with it in her lap when she was supposed to be vacuuming the carpet, and Carolyn looked at it when nobody else was around. But the book was never mentioned. Mr. Bridge considered the situation, and one evening without a word he picked it up and carried it into the breakfast room where he made a place for it on the top