Mr. Bridge_ A Novel - Evan S. Connell [45]
Mr. Bridge knew it would go down. It was due for a severe setback.
But it continued to go up, and finally Avrum Rheingold passed the word. The time had come to sell. Everybody in the group sold out, very well satisfied because they had quadrupled their money, all except Virgil Barron who had jumped aboard after the train was moving.
“You got away with it,” Mr. Bridge addressed them. “More power to you. My personal opinion is that if you keep pulling stunts of this sort you are headed for trouble.”
He had not mentioned Nevacal at home, because it did not concern the family—except that if the shares had dropped in value he meant to cite this as an example of irresponsible investing. Unfortunately Nevacal had done just the opposite, so there was no sense discussing it. To do so would only encourage the children toward similar speculations when they were old enough to take an interest in such things. Instead, as soon as he observed during a brisk market rally that Kansas City Power & Light had scored a fifty-cent advance he pointed this out to the children, reminding them that they should always pay attention to basic values.
49 Fleur-de-lis
He felt no particular obligation to instruct or prepare the girls for their future except to make certain they were neat, polite, truthful, modest, and adequately educated; the rest of the business could be handled by their mother. Once out of school they might work at one job or another while waiting to get married, and if they spent a year or so doing something trivial it would not really be a waste of time. Quite the opposite. Better a couple of years in an office typing letters and running errands than an impulsive marriage ending in divorce. But for Douglas to squander his time at one meaningless task after another would be ridiculous. Accordingly, he planned to speak to his son about the future, to encourage him to start thinking about it, and by delineating not only the rewards but the liabilities of his own career he hoped to provide some suitable points of reference. He wished to impress upon his son three things which he felt that he himself had achieved: financial security, independence, and self-respect. In his mind these were of supreme importance. They stood together like the points of the fleur-de-lis.
50 The Family Tree
In the bedroom in an ordinary black picture frame was a letter appointing Henry Thompson Bridge a colonel in the Army. The letter was dated 1812 and it was signed by James Monroe, who was then Secretary of State. Mr. Bridge could not recall the first time he had seen this letter, which had belonged to his uncle, but he had been fascinated by it as long as he could remember, and his uncle had willed it to him. Now, although the letter had been hanging in the same place in the bedroom for quite a few years, he was still aware of it, and he thought it may have been this document which first caused him to become curious about his ancestry, with the result that he had commissioned a genealogist to do some research. The genealogist eventually brought him a little history of his predecessors, which he had read many times, and considered, and which he had shown to his wife and the children. He was somewhat disappointed that they did not find it as fascinating as he did himself. It was understandable, of course, that his wife would be less interested in his forebears than she would be in her own; he had been thinking of employing the genealogist again to do a similar paper on her family, which might be a nice surprise for her birthday. As for the children, they ought to be interested, and he hoped they would be when they were older. Carolyn did show signs of curiosity, but Ruth and Douglas were singularly unimpressed.
He had told them that in Delaware there was a town named after their great great-grandfather, and that the brother of this man was at one time the lieutenant governor of Ohio. Another ancestor was a Scottish earl who owned a castle which still stood near the village of Auldearn by Moray Firth. What did they think about that! Another