Ladies Bridge Club

That’s my grandmother smiling broadly on the left in this scan of a battered and creased photograph made in 1960 at a bridge club meeting. I’ve always loved this photo because it represents a way of life that died around the time I finished high school. They would play bridge for a while, munching on salted nuts, and then indulge themselves with tea and delicately-shaped watercress or chopped meat sandwiches followed by a ring-mold of what they called salad, usually involving mayonnaise, canned pineapple, and gelatin. They topped that off with angel food cake or chess pie and maybe a square of homemade fudge for the drive home. My grandmother’s cohort loved to eat and took great pains to impress each other as the club moved from house to house through the summer. She dreaded her turn to cook like a law graduate dreads the bar exam.

Although I adored both my grandparents, their marriage was a disaster, and I wonder if anybody’s marriage ever worked in those days before second and third chances to get it right. It was nobody’s fault. His family was brash, competitive, and not always ethical; hers was fading from glory and self-righteous. He found her snobbish and frigid; she found his sensuality repulsive and couldn’t help flinching when he touched her or patted her bottom. They both knew nothing about farming but spent the first ten years of their incompatible marriage laboring over a failing cotton farm in South Carolina. Their finances improved slightly when they moved to North Carolina so he could manage his father’s hardware store, but it wasn’t till Roosevelt saved the economy that they made ends meet—and then only just barely. He escaped by having a fairly open affair with a woman she called “the floozy,” and then he got Leukemia and died at fifty-nine, leaving her to the bridge club and years of genteel poverty. 

I found another rabbit warren to get lost in when I came across the Find A Grave entry for my grandfather, and that led me to the (free, no subscription required) We Remember page in Ancestry. I had to stop and leave memories, and then suddenly a dreich day turned to dusk and was done. I tried to find a way of telling the truth about my grandparents on these websites without offending other living relatives or lying, and I didn’t leave the apartment today (posting this on Feb. 25, 2021).