The Bridge Ladies (11 page)

Bette was in a bind. She had met and started dating Donald, a young doctor, during his residency in New York when she was a junior at Skidmore.

“We had a very passionate thing going on between us that was overwhelming. I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world.”

I'm imagining Richard Chamberlain as Dr. Kildare, but Bette says he wasn't very handsome. His attraction was his personality.

“He was as bright as can be, very smart, charismatic, very exciting.”

Bette desperately wanted to marry Donald. She was twenty-two and soon to become the last single girl on the face of the earth, or so it felt. Only Donald kept presenting obstacles. Bette suspects that he wanted a woman with means.

“Between us we had very little. I think he wanted his companion to come from a wealthy family. I was not that person.”

She also knew that beyond his charisma he was a man wired with insecurities.

“First of all,” Bette says, leaning forward in her chair, as if the revelation were still somehow taboo, “he was an illegitimate child.”

The story Bette proceeds to tell is outright Dickensian: Donald's biological father never accepted him; he absolutely renounced any part of his parenthood. Part of Donald's drive to become a doctor, she says, was to show his father that he had done something important with his life, with no help from him. This desire culminated in a long-anticipated journey to his father's law office.

“He walked in and said, ‘I am your son and I am now a doctor and I have a residency at Mount Sinai Hospital.' The father turned to him and said, ‘I have no son. Please leave.'”

“Oh my god. How does a person recover from that?” I ask.

“I think there were a lot of reasons for him to have great insecurities.”

In retrospect, Bette can see that the chemistry between them was all mixed up with that anger and disappointment. “And the relationship reflected that.”

“What did you do?”

“I finally realized that there was not going to be a future with Donald.”

Enter Arthur. He was a local boy working in his family's thriving fabric business. Smart as well, he was educated at the University of Chicago, where he was recruited at sixteen. A friend set them up on a blind date.

“I sensed someone who had both feet on the ground, wasn't a dreamer, was gentle and kind.” Bette could tell that Arthur went into the family business under some duress; he was too smart to
be behind a counter cutting fabric. Bette was also aware that her parents were hoping for a match.

“My family thought, oh my god, if she could ever marry into that family. And I sensed that.”

The break with Donald wasn't clean, and Bette saw him on-again, off-again when she started seeing Arthur.

“Did he know that you were also dating the doctor?”

“He did,” Bette tells me, “but he never said a word about it.”

“Did the doctor know about Arthur?”

“He did,” she says. “He could be quite snide, saying things like, ‘What are you going to talk about at night, yards of calico?'”

Two male egos couldn't be more different. Donald: cocky, argumentative, arrogant, and insecure. Arthur: kind, laissez-faire, humble, and stalwart. After five months of dating, Arthur asked Bette to marry him. When she said no, he stopped calling. No drunk dialing, no just-happened-to-be-in-the-neighborhood ruses. Arthur took his lumps and kept his distance.

Every time Bette and Donald had broken up, Bette became more and more distraught, but after two months of near constant fighting, she finally broke it off for good. “I finally realized that there was no future with the doctor. I knew it was over.” All the gray area cleared. Bette saw a future with Arthur and she knew she'd be a fool not to try again.

“Okay, I think it's time for me to marry Arthur Horowitz. I went down to the store on a Saturday, which was the busiest day, and I remember walking into the store and saying, ‘If you'd still like to marry me, let's go to New York—leave the store right now—and buy an engagement ring, and get married.'”

Arthur dropped everything, and they went to the city to buy a ring.

“I bought this ring—
he
bought this ring.”

Bette also admitted that she would have never married a poor man, couldn't fall in love with one. She remembers buying furniture as a newlywed in New York, Arthur writing a check for the couch, the chairs, and the dining room table. This was amazing to Bette, having grown up under her father's constant penny-pinching. Suddenly, here was a man who could write a check for anything she picked out. “I wasn't grabby. I was amazed, and grateful.” Bette's father, upon first coming to his daughter's spacious three-bedroom house in Woodbridge, broke down in tears standing in the living room. “It was the first and only time I saw him cry.”

Betty twists her engagement ring around her finger to show me the diamond. “I've worn it to this day.”

“I've told you about Eugene.”

Yes, my mother has told me about Eugene Genovese a hundred times, the Italian boy she had a huge crush on. It's her West Side Story without the snapping. He was smart, outspoken, and a leader in the socialist movement American Youth for Democracy.

“Do you know what a Red Diaper baby is?” my mother asks in a pointed, accusatory way. She always assumes that a “young person” can't possibly know anything about the world pre-the-year-they-were-born.

“Yes, I know what a Red Diaper baby is,” I say, full of annoyance.

“Okay, I didn't know. Just asking.”

When Carl Bernstein published
Loyalties
, his memoir about being a red diaper baby, my mother, nearly sixty at the time, first divulged her youthful allegiances.

“I felt if a journalist of his stature could divulge his background, why couldn't I?”

There has always been some version of this war going on inside my mother: should she do what she really wants or conform, say what she really thinks or keep quiet, not risk offending anyone?

Of course, by then no one really cared.

I like to imagine my mother handing out leaflets like Barbra Streisand in
The Way We Were.
Or eschewing marriage and going to work on a kibbutz in Israel as she once dreamed, picking oranges from high up on a ladder in khaki pants and a cotton blouse tied in a knot at her midriff.

Like all of the Bridge Ladies, she would marry a Jewish boy—not a Chava among them, Tevye's youngest daughter in
Fiddler on the Roof
, who defies her father and marries a gentile. The first time I saw the musical I was stunned when Tevye refused his last chance to say good-bye to his beloved youngest daughter when they were forced to flee Anatevka. What kind of father would do that to his daughter? The Bridge Ladies would not test this. (Predictably, I would.)

Eugene Genovese went on to become a highly respected historian known for his Marxist perspective. My mother would sequester herself away with the reviews whenever he published a new book, nursing what I imagined must have been the delicious, unanswerable question:
what if?
But my mother is pure pragmatist, never once indulging my fantastical childhood questions
: What if you married Eugene? What if you didn't marry Daddy? What if I wasn't born!
No matter how much I begged her to wager an answer, contemplate an alternate scenario, to make believe just one time, she was unwavering, refused to play along, was wholly dismissive of the enterprise. Now, she shows me his picture in her high school yearbook, small as a postage stamp,
and remarks on how handsome he was. All I see is a boy with an exceedingly high forehead and a tiara of curly hair. His inscription was deflating at best:
Dear Roz
,
You better come to more meetings. Best
,
Eugene.

“Mom, were you hurt?”

“I can't remember.”

“What do you mean you can't remember?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“It's not exactly a nice message. He's scolding you for not going to more meetings.”

“What do you want me to say?”

We are different, my mother and I. She's not interested in the past, while I've nursed every romantic disappointment since the third grade when a boy raced by my desk and dropped a tiny, promotional bottle of Shalimar on it, only later confessing that he meant it for the girl sitting at the desk next to me and wanted it back.

Years later, when my mother discovered that Genovese returned to his Catholic roots, she was bitterly disappointed. He was no longer the man she remembered. My mother, down to her core, is a socialist and atheist, no matter how bourgeois she appears or how many tennis bracelets she wears.

We're in the kitchen, finishing our turkey sandwiches, when I ask my mother if she was a virgin when she married. She puts down what's left of her sandwich, disgusted, the crust like a crude smile.

“Why do you have to know that?”

“I want to know.”

“Do you ask the other ladies?”

“Not directly.”

“Then why me?”

“C'mon, Mom,” I whine, my finely honed reportorial skills in full force. She clams up.

I had lost my virginity in high school on a summer trip to Israel with a youth group. I was sort of in love, but more I craved experience in ways I didn't fully understand, not realizing how much I wanted to separate and distance myself from my parents, especially my mother—no longer her little girl, no longer a little girl at all.

Most of the ladies admit to necking and some petting. Though I will later learn (please cover your ears if you don't want to be scandalized) that some of the ladies were sleeping with their intendeds before their wedding night. Once you were engaged, I discover, the ban was quasi-lifted though that was never spoken of. Engagement, it turns out, was the gateway to sex.

“Did your mother ever talk to you about sex?” I continue, trying another tack.

“No, never. It was a private thing.”

Only then my mother pauses, “Well, I knew my parents were hot stuff.”

“Hot stuff?”

She remembers her father coming up from behind her mother and embracing her. “She would scream, ‘Murray, Murray!' meaning: not in front of the children.” My mother gleaned two things from this: sex is private and that sex is hot stuff.

She learned about sex from reading
Studs Lonigan,
who sounds to me like the protagonist of a Harlequin romance, but the book turns out to be a Depression-era drama about an Irish boy on the South Side of Chicago who goes from being a good kid to a downtrodden alcoholic. When I remind my mother of this after having looked it up, she replies, “Well, it had sexy parts in it. What can I tell you?”

“So you slept with Dad before you married.”

“Why are you obsessed with this?”

“Because this whole one-man thing, this saving-yourself business, I just can't fathom it.”

By the time the boomers came of age, the sexual landscape had completely changed. There were girls in my high school who were waiting for their wedding night. We, the mighty experienced, looked down on them as if they were pitiable. Some girls wanted to be in love, others were looking to get it over with. I knew a few who were planning to lose their virginity on prom night. Some wanted to lose it before college but didn't manage to make it happen. They hoped no one in their freshmen dorm would detect their inexperience, and if asked point-blank they'd lie and take a sophisticated puff off a cigarette. I remember one girl who was so determined to lose her virginity before going to college that she steadied her sights on a hapless sophomore who thought he was just going out to the movies.

“The Pill changed everything,” Bea once said, and she was right about that. She proudly told her kids that when she walked down the aisle, she deserved her white dress.

“Ma,” they said. “That's too bad.”

“C'mon, Mom. Just tell me,” I whine again, shocked at my own childishness. When I sit down to talk with the other ladies, I act like an adult. When they clam up, I respect them. My mother picks at the frayed ends of a dishcloth, “Dad was just wonderful. I've told you before I liked everything about him and he always remained a great date his whole life. It was great going places with him. He always wanted the best seat, the best table. I just loved it. I loved the attention. I loved being chased, and he truthfully was the only one I ever had sex with. That is true.”

Okay then.

“Do you think Dad was faithful?”

“Betsy, now you're really going too far.”

For as long as I could recall, my mother would make the pronouncement that women who didn't know if their husbands were cheating didn't
want
to know. They couldn't afford to know is more like it. They didn't bury their heads in the sand so much as look the other way. What else could they do, with small children to care for and no means of support?

Apparently there were a lot of affairs in our town, including a much-gossiped-about, high-profile case where a woman hired a hit man to kill her husband's girlfriend. It's as if her violent and dramatic act was fueled, at least in part, by the tamped-down anger of every desperate housewife of Woodbridge. This woman wasn't a hero, but she wasn't a victim either. According to Bette, she went to prison and remarried when she came out, as if that's the moral of the story.