In the Cards

All that summer and into the fall, the Pauleys would leave their house and walk to Independence Avenue where they would cross that busy thoroughfare to follow the bend of Benton Boulevard around past the Chief Theatre and to the top of our block in Kansas City. Usually it would be after seven o'clock, supper done and dishes washed and put up in most houses, and my grandmother would have cleared the dining room table and given the dark mahogany veneer a quick wipe as my grandfather lined up two pencils, freshly sharpened, next to the notepad. Then he would open the deck of cards and do the first of several shuffles before smacking the neat mass down on the tabletop with an "ahem" as he cleared his throat. He was ready for battle and could have cocked a gun.

How they met Fred and Jenny Pauley and how they began meeting weekly to play bridge remains a mystery to me; my interests at twelve were model airplanes and a girl named Mary Lou in the seventh grade at Scarritt School. So, I wasn't paying attention to these weekly games beyond my appointed duty of serving the homemade wine my grandfather kept in an old bourbon barrel in the basement. The Pauleys' house four blocks away and across Independence Avenue was at a distance beyond casual encounter, out of the neighborhood, so I'm guessing my grandmother may have first made contact through her political affiliation with the Pendergast organization of the Democratic party. Or maybe it was a women's group like the Daughters of Isabella, for which she served as president. What Fred Pauley did for a living, I cannot recall; he may have been retired, though that status would not have been likely then. Every morning, my grandfather would walk downtown to the city hall where he would take up his pen as an accountant in the Water Department, inscribing ledgers with his immaculate script. Family talk was that my grandmother had secured the job to get him out of the house.

"Here they come," I would alert my grandparents from the front porch. The Pauleys had turned at the top of our block and begun walking down the sharp incline of Roberts Street. Almost hand in hand, I want to say, but certainly in step with each other. Both roundish figures, healthy looking. Fred Pauley wore rimless glasses, and his appreciable paunch seemed to steer his progress confidently. Jenny Pauley was also on the plump side with a prettily featured face. She was a woman of many handkerchiefs, always one tucked into the sleeve of her blouse or pinned on her left shoulder or readily available in her purse to shake out freshly and dab at the perspiration on her brow or in the crease of her nose. She raised a fragrant dusting about herself.

My grandfather read both the Star and the Post thoroughly on the front porch in good weather and in the large wing chair by the dining room pocket door in winter. He read every square inch of both papers. Reading had been the means of his self-education and his self-taught mastery of civil engineering, so I suspect he learned the rules of contract bridge from the syndicated columns written by Eli Culbertson that were published in one of the newspapers. In the same way, he had learned how to make wine from the Encyclopedia Britannica shelved near the radio in the living room.

One fall he had all of us, including my mother, home for a visit, pressing grapes in the basement, sieving their juice into the large barrel he had bought from a distillery put out of business by Prohibition. My job was to serve this wine during certain intervals of play, along with the pound cake my grandmother would have made that afternoon. Sometimes Jenny brought something from her oven. The riffle and slap dash of the cards would be suspended, and my grandfather would review the score he kept on the pad at his right hand. Almost always, my grandparents would be ahead, mostly due...