90. Extra-sensory Perception
The next night he borrowed the Lincoln to escort Paquita to a basketball tournament in the municipal auditorium. While driving down Troost toward the north end of town, where she lived with her sister, who was a burlesque dancer, he passed a drive-in restaurant. He neither stopped nor slowed down, but as he went by his attention was caught by a singularly voluptuous carhop, with the result that when the traffic light changed he did not see it because he was looking backward. He drove into the rear o the car ahead of him. No one was injured, but all parties were somewhat dazed and Douglas got himself a lump on the forehead. The grille of the Lincoln was dented and a wheel knocked out of alignment.
At home, when asked how the accident occurred, he replied without hesitation that it was because of a woman.
“Oh-ho!” said Mr. Bridge, who was of the opinion that traffic problems would disappear on the day women were no longer licensed to drive. “What have I been saying all these years?” He asked his son no more questions, only took the paper on which Douglas had written the license number of the other car, and said he would notify the insurance company.
Douglas wisely volunteered no further information and believed he had gotten out of the embarrassing accident rather cleverly until he chanced to look at his mother. Although she had not said a word, he perceived that in some fantastic manner she sensed the complete truth, and he reflected that in matters however distantly related to sex she possessed supernatural powers of divination.
91. Frayed Cuffs
Ordinarily Mrs. Bridge examined the laundry that Ingrid carried up from the basement every Tuesday afternoon in a creaking wicker basket, but when she was out shopping, or at a luncheon, the job fell to Harriet, who never paid much attention to such things as missing buttons or loose elastic. Thus it was that Mrs. Bridge discovered Douglas wearing a shirt with cuffs that were noticeably frayed.
“For heaven’s sake!” she exclaimed, taking hold of his sleeve. “Has a dog been chewing on this?”
He looked down at the threads as though he had never before seen them; in fact he hadn’t.
“Surely you don’t intend to wear this shirt?”
Since he was already wearing the shirt this struck him as a foolish question, but he said, “It looks perfectly okay to me.”
“Why, just look at these cuffs! Anyone would think we were on our way to the poorhouse.”
“So is it a disgrace to be poor?”
“No!” she cried. “But we’re not poor!”
92. Sex Education
Thereafter she kept a sharp eye on the laundry, going through it piece by piece to see what needed mending, after which she separated it into three stacks: one for the master bedroom, one for the room which Ruth and Carolyn had shared and which now was Carolyn’s alone, and a third for Douglas’s room. One by one she carried these piles of clothing into the proper room and there divided them further, handkerchiefs, underwear, blouses, and so forth, and arranged them neatly in the proper drawers.
One afternoon she carried Douglas’s laundry into his room as usual and placed it on his bed as she always did in order to sort it. She put the newly laundered shirts on top of the others in his dresser and was about to go on with her work when it occurred to her that in all likelihood he was wearing the same shirts again and again; probably the ones in the bottom of the drawer were never being worn, and with the idea of reversing the order she took them all out and beneath the final shirt she found a magazine. Although she had never before seen one like it she knew instinctively what it was.
Mrs. Bridge sank to the edge of the bed and gazed dismally at the wall, the unopened magazine in her hands. She could hear Harriet singing hymns in the kitchen while peeling green apples for a pie, and the fervency of those good shrill Christian notes caused Mrs. Bridge to feel more desolate and abandoned than ever. She closed her eyes and shook her head in disbelief. The last thing on earth she wanted was to look Into this magazine, but it had to be done. She looked at one page. There was a naked woman. That was enough. She looked no more. Never in her life had she been confronted with a situation like this and she did not know what to do. She was under the impression that these magazines had been legislated against and were not available. She asked herself where she had failed. With him, as with Ruth and Carolyn, she had adroitly steered around threatening subjects; in no way had she stimulated his curiosity quite the contrary. Where, then, had she failed? She had let him realize, without her having to say so, that there were two kinds of people in the world, and this was true, she knew, for it was what she had been taught by her father and mother.
She kept expecting Douglas to say something about the magazine which she burned in the incinerator but if he noticed it was gone he gave no indication. Weeks passed. She did not want to rush him. She wanted him to come to her and confess of his own free will. Carolyn was now a freshman at the university, which was located in the town of Lawrence, about forty miles distant; she often came home on week ends, but during the week she was gone, with the result that Mrs. Bridge and Douglas were sometimes the only members of the family at the dinner table. These dinners were silent and unpleasant for them both; they tended to avoid looking at each other. She waited patiently for the moment when he would give a sign a single deep look would be enough and she would know then that he wanted to have a talk. Still time went by and, since he made no move, she began to fasten her eyes on him. These mute invitations had a singular effect on Douglas; whenever he became conscious of her mournful, wretched gaze he would leave the house. She thought he was touched and full of remorse at the unhappiness he was causing and so she continued to gaze deeply at him whenever they were alone. However, more time went by and for some reason he failed to come to her.
One evening, therefore, she walked upstairs to his room and tapped on the door with her fingernail. The door was closed but she knew he was at his desk and that he was staring at the door. She was right, because after she had waited a few minutes she heard the chair creak and then his footsteps on the carpet. He jerked the door open and found her there smiling miserably. She glided past him into the room and to his desk where, without a word, she placed on the blotter a slim, musty pamphlet with a gray cover and sepia pages which she had gotten from a trunk in the attic. The pamphlet had a faint dried odor, like the crumbled wings of moths, and the elaborate typography related a little story about the marriage of a sperm and an ovum. On the frontispiece, beneath an attached sheet of tissue, were two circular photographs taken from laboratory slides.
He had followed her across the room and was now standing on the opposite side of the desk with his fists clenched behind his back. Seeing him so tense she thought that if she could only manage to rumple his hair as she used to do when he was a small boy everything would be all right. Calmly, and a little slyly, she began easing toward him.
Seeing that she was after him he also moved to keep the desk between them.
93. Words of Wisdom
A few days later on his return from high school Douglas saw, beneath the hairbrush on his dresser, a page torn from a magazine. On one side of the page was an automobile advertisement, and on the other side was a picture of an elderly Chinese gentleman called the Old Sage, together with a list of maxims: