The Bridge Ladies

by Betsy Lerner

  On the morning when I come for my next visit, Jackie is just waking up. Dick insists I come in and keeps me company while I wait. From then on, he always stays for some part of our visit. I can’t tell if he and Jackie are inseparable or if he simply doesn’t want to be left out. I ask Dick if he ever had any doubts about marrying, or if he ever questioned whether he would get married.

  “Absolutely not. I never doubted it. Never. It’s like it was ordained.” I am always wary of people who go through life with absolute certainty, but when Dick says this I know he is speaking for the Greatest Generation, a time when men did the right thing: they fought for their country, they tipped the shoe-shine boy, and they hung up their hats before sitting down to a meal. No baseball caps, bills back, at the dinner table. They worked forty hours a week, took out insurance policies, and married good girls. Being a man meant getting married and having a family and supporting them. Girls were girls and men were men. Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

  For Dick the choice was simple: he wanted the most beautiful woman in the room. “Never had a flicker of a doubt.” It was Dick’s senior year at Yale and Jackie’s junior year at UConn. She had come home for the weekend of the Yale-Princeton football game, for the social whirl. It was at a cocktail party where she and Dick first met. Only Jackie had come with a date, obvs. No matter. Dick marched right up to her and asked her out. I ask him how he had the chutzpah to approach her; she had come with a date after all. Wasn’t he dissuaded?

  “Nope.”

  “Really?” I pressed. “Weren’t you, you know, kind of poaching?”

  “Every man for himself.” Dick doesn’t blink. It is downright Darwinian. I look at the man across from me, now in his eighties, in leather slippers and a tartan plaid robe, and I think: you devil. Still, Jackie had to consult her calendar. For all his confidence, Dick didn’t get a date with Jackie until Christmas. Get in line.

  Dick points to a house through the woods. “That’s where I grew up,” he says proudly. “That’s where we got engaged.” Apart from living in an apartment for two years while their house was being built, Jackie and Dick have lived here for their entire married life. The mailbox is rusted, a long-abandoned nest under an eave hangs on precariously, and a step between the foyer and den is swayback from daily use. They raised two children here, a successful son who, like Dick, became an engineer, and a highly accomplished daughter, who works in communications. Dick swears they never had to push or prod; the kids understood what was expected academically, and life went according to plan.

  Jackie comes into the den in a mauve robe and slippers. A small silver clip has become dislodged and hangs by a thread of hair. I want to reach out and refasten it, but that would be too familiar.

  I want to know if it was usual to date a few guys at time.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Were you ever dumped?”

  “No.”

  Then, excited, Jackie does remember one time, “I had the German measles and my boyfriend came to visit along with one of my girlfriends, and I never heard from either of them again. They eventually married, and I later learned divorced. Subsequently, I met her daughter and she was divorced as well.” Snap!

  The dating scene was centered on weekly dances. It was the era of the jitterbug, Lindy, and swing, even more outdated now than Bridge. The men uniformly wore white shirts and black jackets, narrow ties fixed with small clips, and hair pomaded off their faces. The girls favored long gowns with cinched waists or dropped waistlines, skirts billowed, light as a Mallomar cookie.

  “There were a lot of dances. It was important to have a date and I always did,” Jackie says nonchalantly.

  “Were you happy to go out with any guy who asked?”

  “No, I was choosy.”

  Lest Jackie get too big a head, it was her mother who harshly dropped her back down to earth, always withholding a compliment of any kind, especially where her beauty was concerned.

  “She always said, ‘That is for other people to say.’ And she said it more than once.” As if great beauty could also invite great tragedy.

  When her father suffered a financial setback and temporarily moved the family into his sister’s house, they had to tiptoe around Jackie’s aunt, nicknamed Lady. Jackie remembers listening with her mother to the morning radio show “Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick.” It portrayed a Park Avenue couple reporting on their glamorous New York life from their penthouse apartment complete with a butler and chirping parakeet. It was either a fabulous distraction or a ridiculous charade for Jackie’s mother, her elbows deep in dishes, tiptoeing around Lady and her formidable airs. Still, when it came to dances, Jackie’s mother always had money for dresses and nylons, bags and shoes. But it was her father who was fussy about her looks. He wanted her to look different from the “hoi polloi” and made sure she had well-tailored clothes and wore her hair in a demure fashion, unlike the pompadours and updos piled high with victory rolls like a surfer’s perfect wave.

  Dick took Jackie to the cozy Fireside Restaurant for dinner on their first date. After that he drove up to UConn on weekends to see her, though they still weren’t exclusive. I ask Jackie if she was keeping her options open.

  “A little bit.”

  When she spent a summer in New Hampshire doing summer stock, Dick followed her there, pretending that he shared her love of theater and painted flats all summer just to be around her and to ward off other suitors.

  I ask Jackie if she fell in love or was it more that she could imagine seeing herself with Dick for the rest of her life.

  “A little bit of both.”

  “Do you think women of your generation were more pragmatic choosing their husbands?”

  “I suppose.”

  Why didn’t the Bridge Ladies feel they had a choice? Ruth Bader Ginsberg is a contemporary of theirs. She grew up in Brooklyn. For all I know she could have been Israeli folk dancing at the East Midwood Jewish Center with my mother. She probably plays Bridge! Yet nothing stopped her from pursuing her dreams of social justice all the way to the Supreme Court. The ladies marvel at her, but it ends there. They would not pursue careers; it wasn’t in the cards.

  I vowed that I would always work and bring home my own paycheck. I craved the independence my mother forfeited—at least that’s how I saw it growing up. Once a group of junior high friends were talking about what we wanted to be when we got older. All of us wanted careers: doctors, lawyers, writers, and artists. Only one girl said she wanted to get married and make babies. That’s how she put it: make babies. It sounded like a factory. It sounded like the 1950s.

  Jackie’s wedding album is big and heavy, almost like a piece of furniture, the photographs mounted on heavy stock, the black-and-white pictures creamy. Jackie was married in the grand ballroom of the Taft Hotel. It was a New Haven institution and was the place to get married. The lobby had seventy-foot Corinthian columns and a rotunda with a Tiffany stained-glass dome. (Bette also got married there. It was “the place” to get married in New Haven. An underground tunnel connected it to the Shubert Theater where Bette had been mesmerized as a girl. The most famous actors of the day traversed the tunnel from hotel to stage door. A key scene from All About Eve was filmed there, where the manipulative Eve Harrington plots to usurp the great Margo Channing, played of course by Bette’s hero and self-appointed namesake, Bette Davis. The proximity must have been bittersweet for Bette; her alternate universe a minute and a million miles away. Neither she nor Jackie can remember how their parents could afford the Taft or the dresses they shopped for in New York, only that they did.)

  Dick looks more like a bar mitzvah boy than a groom in the pictures, each one a familiar tableau from every Jewish wedding throughout the ages: the bride and groom beneath the chuppah, the groom breaking the glass, the first dance. Jackie looks somber on her father’s arm. She reminds me that he had been sick in the months leading up to the wedding, steadily declining. Still, he would walk his only girl down the aisle�
�a father’s sacred duty. Though he would be gone within the year.

  Dick follows us into the dining room but stands off to the side. Jackie turns a few more pages: tables of guests stare out, one indistinguishable from the next. When she turns another page a Polaroid slips out of the album and wafts down to the floor. I pick it up.

  “Whoa. Is that you?”

  Jackie nods. “That’s right.”

  She is in a high-waist bikini sunning, her body draped over some huge rocks. She looks like Rita Hayworth.

  “Where was that?”

  She looks at it more closely. “Summer stock, I think. New Hampshire.”

  It had been the summer Dick painted flats and didn’t let her out of his sight.

  I am more knocked out by the photograph than the entire album. It’s so . . . sexy.

  “How does all this make you feel?” They shrug at each other. Then Dick says something about it all being a long time ago.

  The last picture in the album is kitschy in the extreme. Dick and Jackie peeking out of their hotel room with a sign dangling from the doorknob: DO NOT DISTURB. It’s adorable. Still, I can’t help but wonder what those wedding nights were like for nervous couples possibly having sex for the first time. All that pressure and inexperience.

  “What if it’s awful?” I once asked my mother.

  “You try again,” she said, “and again.”

  “Do you recognize yourselves in these pictures?”

  “Of course,” Dick says, his certitude back in full force. Only it’s not exactly what I meant.

  I want to know what lasts: if some piece of Jackie is still that girl on the rocks. And Dick the man who would follow her anywhere.

  Rhoda’s husband, Peter, strikes me as something of a prince. Like Dick, he, too, was determined to build a house in his hometown of Roanoke, Virginia, when he and Rhoda moved there as newlyweds. Rhoda didn’t want to; she didn’t think they were ready for such an undertaking. They didn’t have a family yet!

  “I just did not want to do that, but he did, and so we did.”

  “How could he do that? How could you let him?”

  “I did not want to make waves. That was definitely not my style. That was not in my nature at all.”

  Rhoda is by far the most outspoken and confident of the Bridge Ladies. It’s almost impossible to imagine her as deferential about anything she didn’t want.

  “Really, you couldn’t confront Peter?”

  “No, I could not.”

  The house that Peter built was a contemporary ranch with a sunken living room, three bedrooms, glass-fronted cabinets, and radiant-heated floors.

  “It was all Peter. I think I picked out the color for the kitchen cabinets.”

  Her parents didn’t question the move, even as they were devastated sending their only child so many miles away from their home in Salem, Massachusetts.

  “My parents said that’s where you’re going to live. Where your husband is, that’s where you live. I knew how painful it was for them. They were happy that I was happily married, but the separation was very painful.”

  Rhoda tears up remembering saying good-bye to them and uprooting. She was an only child and the center of her parents’ lives. She never felt deprived, never hungered for siblings, never lacked for friends. Her father had lavished attention on her and she was proud to watch from inside his Ford while he went from door to door collecting insurance payments, handsome in his suit and tie. Unlike Willy Loman, her father was a successful salesman. No small feat for the son of a Russian immigrant to land a job with John Hancock, the prestigious nationwide insurance company. “He was a very social creature. He knew everyone and everyone knew him. If you were late with a payment, he would extend the deadline, do what he could before canceling a policy.” Then he’d take her for a favorite foot-long and a walk by the sea.

  Rhoda confides that she was closer with her father. “My mother loved and adored me, but it was my father’s love, I don’t know, he was very protective and caring. If there was a raindrop in the sky, he’d be there in his car waiting for me.”

  “Ain’t no sex!” Rhoda is emphatic when I pry into her college years. “Kissing, yes. But no sex.” She crosses her arms over her chest and stares hard at me, lips clamped, when I ask about college life.

  “Nothing beyond kissing?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “Like what?”

  I want to push. Did you go to third? All the way? But I’ve clearly entered a no-fly zone with her. Maybe it’s for the best; Rhoda and I aren’t in the girls’ locker room sharing a smoke instead of here in her perfect home with a place for everything and everything in its place.

  At Russell Sage, the all-girls college she attended, you could get bounced for getting caught with a boy in your dorm room, let alone getting pregnant.

  “I don’t remember a lot of complaining about it. We accepted it. I sort of took it for granted. Those were the rules. You know, if there was a rule, I had to obey it. I remember in school you would hear so and so did such and such, and I would be totally shocked out of my shoes.”

  “Shocked?”

  “I was!”

  “Are you telling me that all of the women at Russell Sage were virgins?”

  “Why do you think they married so young!”

  Until that moment, I thought women married young because it was the social norm, because their career path was as wife and mother. It really never occurred to me that they were raring to go. Bette remembered weekends at Skidmore when the girls were “let out of their cages,” and went wild. They had largely come from private girls’ schools and hadn’t had much contact with boys. “They were breaking crazy.” Bette reported. “On Thursday nights it was the Four S’s: shit, shower, shine, and shampoo.” Shine?

  Rhoda met Peter at a Hillel party in the fall of Rhoda’s junior year. Peter had come with a date, but when he saw Rhoda, he apparently told his date, “I do apologize, but that’s the girl I’m going to marry!” Apocryphal or not, he pursued Rhoda and she eventually fell for the young man who had enlisted in the navy at seventeen, was in Officer Training School, and had come back to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for a second degree. An officer and a gentleman, and Jewish! Love lifts us up where we belong.

  Still, Rhoda made Peter wait until she finished school. They were engaged by March and married right after she graduated.

  “Do you remember how you felt that day?”

  “Nervous.”

  “Nervous because . . . ?”

  “Just nervous. I think most brides are, were.”

  “I just can’t get over all of you women marrying at such a young age,” I say, still incredulous.

  “And I can’t get over all of you women marrying at such an old age,” Rhoda witheringly returns. Advantage: Rhoda.

  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 absol
utely 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.