Mr. Bridge_ A Novel - Evan S. Connell [48]
He decided not to tease his son any further. “If you are concerned about finishing it,” he said, “maybe you should spend some time working on it after school.”
Douglas answered seriously that he had been thinking about this, but he was afraid to ask Mr. Teale’s permission.
“Are you afraid he would laugh at you?”
“I thought he might get mad.”
“I doubt it,” Mr. Bridge said. “Why don’t you ask?”
Douglas said he might.
“Do any of the other boys stay after school to work on their boats?”
“No,” he said. “They don’t care what they’re doing. They clear out as soon as the bell rings.”
“If you expect to have a first-class product you must be willing to pay the price. Good merchandise isn’t found in a bargain basement. Cheap goods are cheap because the workman did just enough to get by. There’s nothing criminal about that, in fact it happens to be the way a majority of people live their lives—doing just enough to get by. Just enough to get by, that’s all.
“Yeh,” Douglas said.
“I’m not urging you to work after school, understand. If you want to play marbles or basketball or whatever, that’s your privilege. So long as your grades are satisfactory I ask nothing more. Do as you please.”
No more was said about it, but Mr. Bridge listened, and later that week Douglas hinted that he was staying after school to do some work on the boat. His parents knew it was nearly finished when he bought a piece of white cloth in the dime store and borrowed his mother’s shears to cut the sails. She offered to hem the sails on her sewing machine, but he refused. He said he would do it by hand, which he did, and he managed to sew on the brass curtain rings which would hold the sail to the boom. Harriet instructed him in the use of the flatiron so that he was able to iron out the wrinkles and flatten the puckered stitches. And then very carefully he rolled up the finished sails and took them to school.
“He’s dying to win that race,” Mrs. Bridge said.
Mr. Bridge had not thought much about the race. Douglas was hoping to win, of course. That was taken for granted. But he had not talked about it, he talked mostly about the boat. This began to seem rather strange.
“Oh, he’s talked to me about it,” Mrs. Bridge said. “He’s obsessed with the idea of a blue ribbon. Really, Walter, I’m beginning to get alarmed. There will be so many boats, and I just don’t know what might happen if he doesn’t win.”
“Well,” Mr. Bridge said, jingling the coins in his pocket, “Abraham Lincoln observed that in this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all, and to the young it comes with bitterest agony because it takes them unawares, whereas the older have learned to expect it. If Douglas is defeated in that race he must accept his defeat with grace and with dignity.”
“I suppose,” she replied; but he did not think she had been listening.
On the afternoon of the race Ruth and Carolyn had better things to do, so Mr. and Mrs. Bridge together with Douglas, who was carrying his boat in his arms, got into the Chrysler and drove along Ward Parkway to the pond. There they found an unexpectedly large crowd made up almost entirely of boys with their parents. The pond was dotted with boats. Other boats lay on the grass like captive pelicans. More boats arrived every minute.
“I didn’t think there’d be this many,” Douglas said with an expression of dismay.
“I just know you’re going to win,” his mother said, but she did not sound convincing. There were too many boats.
Mr. Bridge said, “I don’t see how they expect