Mr. Bridge_ A Novel - Evan S. Connell [25]
“In the front of the room.”
“In view of the other children?”
“She usually takes the girls into the cloakroom, but she likes to give it to the guys where everybody can see.” After a meditative pause he added, “I don’t think she’ll do it to me anymore.”
“Why do you think that?”
Douglas struggled to answer, but could not find the words. At last he said, “I just got a hunch.”
Mr. Bridge had been sitting on the edge of the bed with his arms crossed. He stood up, told his son good night, and walked downstairs. He was no longer particularly concerned about the teacher, because Douglas had almost destroyed her. Very possibly she had never before encountered a child whose will was greater than hers. It was not likely that she would be the same again. She must have understood while she was beating him that she was losing, and knowing the child was aware of this must have made it very hard for her.
As to the effect of this punishment on Douglas, Mr. Bridge was not sure. He suspected that the beating had affected Douglas, too, though, not necessarily for the worse. There had been that odd quality in him, like the resiliency of ironwood, as he described what happened. This quality might be useful to him when he grew up, and what the woman had done was to nurture it. At any rate, he had not been damaged. Like a young Trojan he had displayed his wounds in public. Probably, if left alone, he would not have washed his hands for a week.
28 Stiff Lower Lip
Whenever he thought about his son’s confrontation with the teacher a thin smile touched his face and he reflected that Douglas had inherited much of his own temperament. This more than anything else assured him that he did indeed have a son. Not even the physical resemblance—the lank body, the bony Anglo-Saxon features, and the dry, reddish hair—none of these irrefutable signs persuaded him as deeply as certain temperamental characteristics which he could recognize as his own. And of these the most unmistakable was that despotic obstinacy which could not conceive of surrender, no matter what the cost. He knew this in himself. So he smiled as he considered it in his son.
29 Barbarians
Rodney Vandermeer and Douglas were expelled from school for two days. They had run amuck for no comprehensible reason. First, they had rushed into the girls’ dressing room in the gymnasium, shouting and terrorizing the little girls. Summoned to the office of the principal and severely reprimanded, they were contrite. But at lunchtime they had somewhere found a box of F.D.R. campaign buttons; they bent the pins straight up and scattered the buttons on the classroom seats. Again they were taken to the principal, who ordered them to bring their mothers to school for a talk. But they were no sooner released from the office this time than they ran around to the rear of the building and urinated against the wall, in plain view of the policeman at the corner.
Mrs. Bridge was bewildered. Mr. Bridge listened silently to her account of everything that happened. He could not make sense of it either. He said he would have a talk with Douglas.
Douglas was brought into the study, but he did not know why they had done what they had done. He mumbled, he scratched his neck, he picked at the braces on his teeth, he scraped his shoes together, examined the pencil he was carrying behind his ear, and could not explain. He did not even remember whose idea it was to invade the girls’ dressing room, nor could he remember which of them had first thought about the campaign buttons. They had just felt like doing it, that was all.
The buttons were serious. The other two acts were foolish and vulgar, but if one of the children had seated himself on a pin there would have been real trouble.
“Somebody might have been badly injured,” Mr. Bridge said. “Weren’t you aware of that?”
“We only left them in the girls’ seats,” Douglas answered.
And suddenly the various outrages were linked. It was not incomprehensible after all, only a little bizarre.
30 Boxtops
According to Douglas there