won’t you?”
That evening she instructed Carolyn. “You should say the cleaning ‘woman.’ A lady is someone like Mrs. Arlen or Mrs. Montgomery.”
10 • TABLE MANNERS
Mrs. Bridge said that she judged people by their shoes and by their manners at the table. If someone wore shoes with runover heels, or shoes that had not been shined for a long time, or shoes with broken laces, you could be pretty sure this person would be slovenly in other things as well. And there was no better way to judge a person’s background than by watching him or her at the table.
The children learned it was impolite to talk while eating, or to chew with the mouth open, and as they grew older they learned the more subtle manners—not to butter an entire slice of bread, not to take more than one biscuit at a time, unless, of course, the hostess should insist. They were taught to keep their elbows close to their sides while cutting meat, and to hold the utensils in the tips of their fingers. They resisted the temptation to sop up the gravy with a piece of bread, and they made sure to leave a little of everything—not enough to be called wasteful, but just a little to indicate the meal had been sufficient. And, naturally, they learned that a lady or a gentleman does not fold up a napkin after having eaten in a public place.
The girls absorbed these matters with greater facility than Douglas, who tended to ask the reason for everything, sometimes observing that he thought it was all pretty silly. He seemed particularly unable to eat with his left hand lying in his lap; he wanted to leave it on the table, to prop himself up, as it were, and claimed he got a backache with one arm in his lap. Mrs. Bridge told him this was absurd, and when he wanted to know why he could not put his elbow on the table she replied, “Do you want to be different from everyone else?”
Douglas was doubtful, but after a long silence, and under the weight of his mother’s tranquil gaze, he at last concluded he didn’t.
The American habit of switching implements, however, continued to give him trouble and to make him rebellious. With elaborate care he would put down the knife, reach high across his plate and descend on the left side to pick up the fork, raising it high over the plate again as he returned to the starting position.
“Now stop acting ridiculous,” she told him one day at lunch.
“Well, I sure bet the Egyptians don’t have to eat this way,” he muttered, giving “Egyptians” a vengeful emphasis.
“I doubt if they do,” she replied calmly, expertly cutting a triangle of pineapple from her salad, “but you’re not an Egyptian. So you eat the way Americans eat, and that’s final.”
11 • ALICE JONES AGAIN
It seemed to Mrs. Bridge that Saturday came around quite often. She was selecting some sugar buns from the bakery man when Alice dashed up the driveway with a long piece of clothesline in her hand, and the first thing that came to Mrs. Bridge’s mind was that the girl had stolen it.
“Good morning, Alice,” she said. Alice dropped the clothesline on the back steps and ran directly into the house to find Carolyn. A few minutes later the gardener appeared and asked, as he always did, whether she was being a nuisance. Mrs. Bridge smiled briefly and shook her head, not knowing how to be truthful without hurting his feelings.
The children were in Carolyn’s room playing jacks. Mrs. Bridge looked in on them after a while and asked why they didn’t play out of doors, the day being so nice, and she thought—but could not be sure—that as she suggested this the little Negro girl gave her a rather strange look. In any event the suggestion appeared to take hold, because a few minutes later she heard them outside shouting with laughter about something.
Shortly before noon, while rearranging the handkerchiefs in her husband’s bureau, Mrs. Bridge heard Carolyn singing at the top of her voice: “My mother, your mother, live across the way, eighteen-sixteen East Broadway! Every night they have a fight, and this is what they say—” Here Alice Jones took over the song: “Goddamn you, goddamn you, goddamn you, goddamn you—”
Mrs. Bridge rushed to the nearest window and looked down. One end of the clothesline was tied to the rose trellis. At the other end was Carolyn, churning the rope with both arms, and in the center was Alice leaping up and down.
Next week, when Alice came racing up the driveway and tried to open the screen door to the kitchen, she found it locked. Mrs. Bridge was in the kitchen and said, “Who is it, please?”
“It’s me,” replied Alice, rattling the door.
“Just a minute, Alice. I’ll see if Carolyn is at home.” She went into the living room and found her daughter looking at one of the movie magazines that Ruth had begun buying.
“Alice is here again. I’ll tell her you’re busy.”
But at the first word Carolyn had jumped up and started for the back door.
About ten o’clock both of them came into the kitchen for a bottle of soda pop and wanted to know what there would be for lunch.
“Corky is having creamed tuna on toast and spinach,” said Mrs. Bridge pleasantly.
Alice observed that she herself didn’t care for spinach because it was made of old tea bags.
“I believe you’re supposed to have lunch with your Daddy, aren’t you?”
Alice heard a note in her voice which Carolyn did not; she glanced up at Mrs. Bridge with another of those queer, bright looks and after a moment of thought she said, “Yes’m.”
12 • AGREEABLE CONVERSATION
The Van Metres were no more Egyptian than Douglas was, but in a sense they were quite foreign to Mrs. Bridge. She thought them very odd. The Van Metres, Wilhelm and Susan, were about fifteen years older than the Bridges; they were rather pompous—particularly Wilhelm—and they were given to reading literary magazines no one had ever heard of and attending such things as ballet or opera whenever a company stopped in Kansas City. Mrs. Bridge could not quite recall how she and her husband became acquainted with the Van Metres, or how they got into the habit of exchanging dinners once in a while. Nevertheless this situation had developed and Mrs. Bridge was sure it was as awkward for the Van Metres as it was for them—each couple felt obligated to return the other’s hospitality.
On those occasions when the Van Metres were hosts they drove over to the east side of the city to a country club that had gone out of fashion ten years before. Wilhelm Van Metre never drove faster than about fifteen miles an hour, and he sat erect and tense with both hands firmly on the wheel as though expecting a fearful crash at any instant. He came to a dead stop at almost every intersection, ceased talking, and examined the street in both directions. Then, unless his wife had something to say, he would proceed, the result of all this being that they seldom reached the club before nine o’clock. Once there he would drive the old automobile cautiously around the circular gravel drive and switch off the engine at the front entrance.
“Ladies,” he would say, suggestively, in his rumbling and pontifical monotone, whereupon Mrs. Bridge and Mrs. Van Metre got out and walked up the steps to the club. He did not start the engine again until he had seen them pass safely into the clubhouse; then, driving in low gear, he went on around the gravel circle to the parking lot.
“I
