Mr. Bridge_ A Novel - Evan S. Connell [101]
106 Publishers’ Graveyard
That the only large bookshelves should be in the breakfast room had always seemed curious; nevertheless, that was where they had been built, so there most of the household books eventually were laid to rest. There lay the old Agatha Christies and Erle Stanley Gardners he had employed as soporifics after the tension of the day. There stood several abandoned cookbooks, the dictionary, The Rubáiyát, The Sheriff of Chispa Loma, the travel adventures of Lowell Thomas, Dr. Foster’s little volume of essays titled Thoughts at Eventide, Hammond’s Illustrated Nature Guide, and Northwest Passage, and various school textbooks which for one reason or another had not been exchanged at the beginning of the new school year. There rested, all forgotten, those diaphanous novels penned by ladies with three names which Mrs. Bridge had hurried out to buy because everybody that season was buying them, or which she had won as a prize at an afternoon card party. There, too, like a warped tombstone, leaned a gaunt volume of Currier and Ives prints, and Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, and The Magnificent Ambersons, and a biography of Marie Antoinette. And there were others. Unreadable Christmas gifts and birthday gifts. In the dappled sunshine of the breakfast room, arranged solemnly side by side or piled one atop the other could be found an almanac with humorous drawings, books about gardening, A Treasury of Best Loved Poems, a short history of the Civil War, the collected lyrics of Sara Teasdale, Great Wines of France, The Santa Fe Trail, Of Human Bondage, Bambi, and numerous others—undisturbed by any hand, unless it might be Harriet indolently dusting the shelves with a wand of peacock feathers.
107 Good Luck
En route to Europe they stopped three days and two nights in New York, but Ruth spent only one evening with them. While they were finishing dinner at a Chinese restaurant she offered a confused and apologetic explanation as to why she could not see them on the second evening, immediately adding that when they came through New York on the way back to Kansas City she would have more free time. To conceal his disappointment Mr. Bridge picked up his fortune cookie, broke it, and pulled out the paper.
“ ‘Good luck who wait.’ ” he read aloud. “This must be a misprint. I suppose it means ‘Good luck to those who wait.’ ”
Ruth snapped her fortune cookie apart and straightened the crumpled paper. “ ‘Your new affairs will turn out well,’ ” she read, and laughed.
Both of them turned to Mrs. Bridge, who looked at them blankly. There was no fortune cookie on her plate. She had eaten it.
“Mother,” said Ruth with an incredulous expression, “did you eat the paper?”
With as much dignity as possible she said, “I thought there was something odd inside.”
After a long silence Mr. Bridge said, “Do you mean to tell me you never saw a fortune cookie before?”
She smiled stiffly.
“Well,” he said, “I’m not sure just what we do now. Would you like another?”
“No, thank you, I don’t believe so,” she replied, and she touched her pearl necklace as if it were a talisman which would protect her from everything strange.
In the days that followed this remarkable incident he found that it affected his feelings toward her, reawakening his desire to guard and shelter her. He had nearly forgotten her extraordinary naivete because he had grown accustomed to it. He began to remember astonishing remarks she made in pure faith, and attitudes which touched him deeply because they were born of genuine innocence. She had never smoked a cigarette, and never had he heard her use a vulgar expression. She believed that women should refrain from saying or doing anything coarse, just as she believed most people to be generous, well intentioned, and trustworthy. He wondered again, as he used to wonder when they were first married, how she had managed to live this much of her life with such simplicity, unaware of treachery, suspicion, malice, guile, and so