The Bridge Ladies (23 page)

The ladies act shocked at Bea's temerity; Bea remains unfazed.

Whenever I've asked the ladies what they knew about the Holocaust when they were growing up, they claim very little. They were too young and the atrocities were not prominently reported in the newspapers; the true horrors of the Holocaust would be revealed more fully over time.

In high school, Jackie dated Edward Lewis Wallant, a boy who went on to write
The Pawnbroker
, a novel about a Holocaust survivor who loses his family and ends up a bitter and broken man working in an East Harlem pawnshop. I ask Jackie if she had any idea that these things were on his mind, if they talked about the Holocaust.

“Not at all. I really thought he would be a painter.”

“Did you stay in touch?”

“He died,” Jackie said.

“Recently?”

“No, a long time ago.”

“You mean as a young man?”

“Yes, he was in his thirties and had an aneurism or something like that. That's why I remember him.”

We're quiet then, as if observing a moment of silence.

Then Jackie adds, “He died right after the book was published.”

Though none of the ladies experienced anti-Semitism directly, they are aware of it as an ever-present threat, whether in anti-Israel politics, when a small comment could be misconstrued, or when something like the debate over this opera is waged in their own backyard. Becoming the potential object of persecution is always on their radar. Their bags aren't packed with unleavened bread in the event they have to flee the country, but they are highly aware of a terrifying rise of anti-Semitism, especially in Europe. These news stories never escape their notice.

As children in Hebrew school, we were given white pins with bold Hebrew letters in red that said
“Zachor!”
Remember! They were always trying to instill in us something the ladies had in their bones: fear.

My first teenage rebellion against religion took the form of refusing to return to Camp Laurelwood, where all the good New Haven Jewish boys and girls went every summer and where I had gone since I was ten. My father was in line to be camp president and my refusal to go stung him both personally and publicly. But I prevailed and coerced my parents into letting me attend Cornwall Workshop, an artsy camp in Litchfield County, nestled along the Housatonic River. My worldview opened before me: I met kids from Manhattan! From divorced families! I got my first crush on a non-Jewish boy with a thick ponytail of black shiny hair! Even more sacrilegious: the drama counselors said Neil Simon was a hack! We were here to make art! Art!

On afternoons when the theater barn was too hot to rehearse in, we'd sometimes take inner tubes down the river, floating the mile or so toward the covered bridge in Cornwall, where we'd get an ice pop. We'd be together in our little flotilla but alone, too, draped over our inner tubes fat as doughnuts, our feet and hands dangling a path through the silty water. The leaf pattern from the trees above continuously changed as we floated downriver, the sun filtering through an infinite grid like mirrors inside a cylinder. It was my thirteenth summer. Everything I craved, everything my parents feared, was here.

My parents, like many Jews of their generation, sought the comfort of a known world. Coming from Brooklyn and without a college degree, my father was able to establish himself relatively quickly within the business community by becoming a trusted
member of the Jewish community. I once asked him why he went to synagogue if what he really wanted was to play golf, especially on those perfect days of Indian summer when the tips of the leaves were starting to turn. I couldn't believe his answer: “It's good for business.”

I was shocked at the time; now I'm shocked at how naïve I was.

I once asked Dick if my father's take was accurate, if you had to align yourself within the Jewish community to succeed in New Haven? Absolutely, Dick said. His family was among the first wave of Russian immigrants to settle in New Haven in the late 1880s and they did extremely well.

When Dick's grandfather settled in New Haven, it was a one-temple town with 1,000 Jews. By the 1930s, the Jewish population had swelled to 25,000 people, with eighteen separate synagogues. Dick took a sociology class at Yale and remembers the professor referring to New Haven Jewish life as a “ghetto system” whereby German, Polish, Russian, and Ashkenazi Jews largely stuck together in separate neighborhoods. “And he called Woodbridge the Golden Ghetto,” Dick says, referring to the suburb where my mother and Bette still live. “I'm not saying it's right, but it's how he said it.”

At the same time, the quota system was firmly in place when Dick went to Yale, but he claims he didn't notice it. Dick had come from a Yale family. He wanted to go, assumed he would get in. So secure was he that he didn't apply to any other schools. When his father went to Yale, the Jewish students weren't allowed to attend proms or other social events. They were restricted from dorms, sports, and Yale's famous secret societies. It was only as part of the Yale University Band that Dick's father was allowed to attend the prom. More unbelievable, Jackie had an uncle who graduated in 1899, likely the first Jew to do so.
Only he changed his name from Bernard Goodman to Burnett Goodwin and became an Episcopalian.

“Didn't it bother you? The quota system? All the restrictions against Jews?” I continue to prod Dick. “Didn't the anti-Semitism get to you?”

He says it never crossed his mind. “If I wasn't welcome, I just stayed away. It was a similar experience in the military if you must know.”

Dick also tells me that there were companies that wouldn't hire Jews, and as a young engineer he stayed clear of them. “I guess I was arrogant enough to feel that they were the loser.”

I can't get over Dick's attitude. Wasn't he supposed to internalize some of that anti-Semitism as self-loathing? Hadn't he read his Philip Roth? Seen a Woody Allen movie from time to time?

As the ladies make their way over to the dining room table, my mother mentions that a good friend had died earlier in the week. At the service, her grandchildren told stories about her warmth and generosity, and her one triumphant win at Yahtzee, how she proudly hung the score on her fridge. Sitting next to my mother at the memorial, I found it was impossible not to imagine the day when she would be gone, my own daughter choking out words of remembrance. I've stood on the sidelines and marveled at the relationship between the two of them. Mall rats to the core, they spend endless hours in the dressing rooms of various department stores, the scene of so many of my teenage meltdowns. My mother hasn't missed a beat, still continues to espouse her belief in flattering cuts, slimming designs, and bright colors. None of this my daughter minds. She loves her
grandma unconditionally. So what if she's opinionated? So what if she's intrusive? She's a grandma!

My mother visited with her friend right up until the end, though I could see it rattled her more than most. Her final weeks and days were cruel testament to the body's stubborn will to live no matter how incapacitated. Once when I was visiting with Rhoda she had just come back from seeing a friend in hospice. It was a grim chore; her friend mostly gone, just a body, but Rhoda continued to visit as long as the woman held on. A small container of ice cream had been left on the tray, though her friend had stopped eating for days. Rhoda brought a spoonful up to her friend's mouth. She only just touched it with her lips. “What if I hadn't been there? She wouldn't have had that ice cream.” Rhoda and I both know the truth: her friend was already gone.

Rhoda's eyes filled with tears just then, she tilted her head back, took a moment, and stared at the ceiling. I stayed quiet, not sure how to comfort her. When I put my hand on her back, she sat up at my touch, composure returning to this proud, strong woman. Then she said she hoped God would be more merciful when it was her time. “Just take me,” she said, lifting her arms to the skies the way people sometimes pray for rain.

I dread the day when one of the Bridge Ladies dies, these women whom I barely knew a year ago, who I didn't think worth knowing except as the ladies who played cards with my mother for a million years. I also worry that the club will fall apart. My mother laughs at this. “The club won't fall apart,” she says. “We'd find someone to fill in.”

It seems cold to me, but Bette confirms this to be the case. Some years ago, when a former member suddenly died, they found someone to fill in and played the following week. “Of
course we all went to the funeral, and we were all sad, but it didn't stop us at all.”

When my father died after a series of strokes, our family was relieved to the extent that his suffering was over. I think my mother was pleased with the funeral, especially with the way my sisters and I comported ourselves. (She has two edicts for funeral protocol: keep remarks as brief as possible and no sleeveless dresses. You'd think our synagogue was a mosque, given her insistence on sleeves.) Of all the images I take from that sad day, I mostly remember gnats flying around a huge arrangement of edible fruit, a sculpture mostly made of pineapple and melon on wooden skewers sticking out in all directions from a half globe of Styrofoam. They swarmed around the bouquet as if it were a dead dog in Cairo. “Have you ever seen anything more stupid?” my mother said when she dumped the half-eaten sculpture into the trash.

Rhoda's husband, Peter, also suffered a series of strokes. When I ask Rhoda to tell me about it, she delivers a series of facts: he had a stroke on a commuter train, he was taken to Bellevue, and no one called Rhoda.

“Until I got somebody to talk to me, I thought I would lose my mind.”

Peter would make a full recovery, but over the next seven years he would continue to have ministrokes, each one more debilitating, until he finally started to show signs of dementia. He still recognized Rhoda and could communicate, but his behavior became erratic and sometimes violent.

“I was despondent, despairing. It was a terrible time, terrible. I wondered what in the world I could do. I just couldn't bring him home, there was no way I could have managed him. What's worse, no one from that damn place said to me ‘You know what's happening here.' No one ever said anything, which I don't understand to this day.”

Peter spent the last year and a half of his life in a nursing home in a section for Alzheimer's and dementia patients. I ask Rhoda how she coped, and she didn't hesitate. “I coped by living as closely to my normal way as I could. I kept up with my theater subscriptions, my concerts, and activities at B'nai Jacob. And I had many good friends, and without them I could not have survived.” There was a support group at the nursing home, but Rhoda wasn't interested. “I had my own friends, and I had my own tale of woe, and that was enough for me.”

I ask Rhoda if she was able to grieve.

“Yes, oh yes. Absolutely. There's no question about it. I'm still grieving. Fifty-nine years is pretty long to have a relationship with someone.” She tells me that she thinks about Peter when he was healthy. Maybe even as the robust young man who ditched his date and exclaimed that Rhoda was going to be his bride literally at first sight. But I can see the shadow image: her husband in his wheelchair or being lifted in and out of the pool by a hoist. My father, too, had been transported in one of these cranes with a sling tied from end to end that made me think of a stork carrying a new baby. Rhoda's voice cracks, “That was my athletic husband.”

My mother isn't one for going to the cemetery, but on the day of her friend's funeral, she's brought some rocks from our yard to place on my father's grave.

“I don't know why, I just felt like it.”

My father's grave is a simple stone with just our last name carved into it. No “beloved husband,” “devoted father.” I like the simplicity of it. He was a man with plain tastes, didn't own a single thing more than he needed. He didn't even have
a middle name, joked that his parents were too poor to afford one. I know my mother won't talk to him, as people do, graveside. She wouldn't know what to say: confess her worries, kvell over the grandchildren, or admit to how angry she still is that he got sick and abandoned her. What's the point? She knows he can't hear it. The stones will have to speak for her.