Mr. Bridge_ A Novel - Evan S. Connell [130]
She handed him the briefcase without saying anything and resumed stirring the soup. He walked out of the kitchen and went upstairs. In the bedroom he discovered that he had forgotten to take off his hat and coat. He put them on the bed, undressed, and went into the bathroom to take a shower, but presently he saw that the tub was almost full. He did not remember turning on the water for the tub; however, it did not make any difference, so he stepped in and sat down and shut his eyes. He thought about Grace Barron. He recalled the rainy day he had eaten lunch with her and how she had insinuated that he was sympathetic to the Nazis. Perhaps deliberately and maliciously she had misinterpreted what he said. He reflected that he had never liked her very much. If she had not been such a close friend of his wife he would have avoided her. She had always been contentious and unstable. She was a lost, unhappy woman. Virgil had given her whatever she wanted. She had been given too much, which might be the reason she was critical of people, critical of everything which did not coincide with her own prejudices. In fact, she had seemed critical of her own pampered existence. She was spoiled and disagreeable. She had not known enough to appreciate her good fortune, the security Virgil had provided, nor whom to thank for it. Her death was a shock, but each death is a shock, whether it is a person who dies or whether it is something as inconsequential as a gray squirrel or an old elm tree, and he concluded that he felt no particular regret.
He began to think about the snow, which would make it difficult for his wife to get home. He remembered how dark it had been all day and how the snowflakes were swirling past the streetlights when he drove through the Plaza. The flakes were as large as moths, floating and sailing everywhere in silvery profusion.
He heard what he thought was the peck of a bird at the bathroom window, but then he knew it must be his wife tapping at the door. He sat up, realizing he had gone to sleep, and saw his dripping hands, which for an instant he could not recognize. They had been lying under the water for so long that they were shriveled and wrinkled.
“May I come in?” she asked.
“The door is unlocked,” he said.
She stepped into the bathroom. She looked tired and subdued. He asked how Virgil was feeling and she answered that Dr. Foster was there.
“Dr. Foster,” he said. “If you want my opinion, Virgil is more in need of a sedative than any spiritual consolation.”
She replied vaguely, “Oh? I suppose. I was on the phone most of the day. So many people called.”
“Was it a heart attack?”
“We’re afraid it was an overdose of pills. Lois and Madge have been there. We’re telling callers we don’t know the cause. We decided it wouldn’t do any good to disturb the men at work. That’s why I didn’t call you.”
“Sleeping pills,” Mr. Bridge said. “I suspected as much. Sleeping pills!” The idea of suicide exasperated him. Now her children must suffer, and she had hurt her husband in the cruelest way a woman can hurt a man. Rather than go on living with him she had willfully destroyed herself. She had shown her children how little they meant. She had left her husband to endure every ugly speculation. He knew he had been correct to feel nothing at the news of her death. What she had done was cowardly. What such a woman deserved was scorn and contempt.
139 The Volunteer
The news from Europe got worse. Chamberlain, of course, was responsible; Roosevelt, too, because he had concurred with the British capitulation at Munich. Much of the world soon would be at war, there was no longer any doubt about it.
I warned you, he said to his friends, for he remembered very clearly predicting what was going to happen as a result of the Munich appeasement. A policy of firmness could have deterred Hitler, but the appeasers in London and Washington had been given their way. What Hitler already had done, and what he would do, was disastrous; consequently there was no choice,