by Betsy Lerner
Again, my mother is astonished. “At their age! What do they need it for?”
I point out that a cat needs very little care.
She’s not buying it.
“Mom,” I say, “they love cats. Why should they stop having pets just because they’re older.”
“Whatever.”
Whenever my mother adopts the dismissive language of my generation it’s a bad sign. I want to get her to admit that she’s being too judgmental, that for Jackie and Dick getting a new cat has nothing to do with age. But she wasn’t having any of it and ended the conversation with her standard sign off: “They should live and be well.” Only it has the unmistakable ring of condescension from a person who clearly knows better.
Bette brings in dessert. A pretty tray of pastel-colored coconut candies in the shape of tiny Jell-O molds. Bette explains that they’re from Vermont, which in this context suddenly sounds exotic. Everyone agrees they are too rich to eat more than one before taking seconds.
Conversation returns to an ongoing story in the news: whether or not the Metropolitan Opera will stage The Death of Klinghoffer, a controversial new opera. Ever since the production was announced, the Met has been besieged with protests and cries of anti-Semitism. The ladies have been following the story for months and are disturbed by the pivotal scene in the opera, based on a true story, wherein an elderly Jewish man in a wheelchair is thrown overboard and killed by Palestinian terrorists. They all believe in free speech, but you don’t scream fire in a movie theater is how my mother justifies her opinion that the opera should be shelved. Jackie alone is of the opinion that the opera should go on. Without seeing it, she will not be convinced that the message is propagandist. On the contrary, she thinks it might do some good. I’m with her on this, but when the Met cancels the international simulcasts it becomes clear that powerful voices have shut it down. It’s not clear to me whether censorship or safety was more responsible for the decision, but the ladies are relieved.
In Berlin, an exhibit at the Jewish Museum has been dubbed “Jew in a Box,” where a Jewish person sits in a Plexiglas box and the public is invited to ask the person questions about Jewish life, customs, and identity. The exhibit was meant to promote an open dialogue between Jews and Germans. Instead, it caused a public outcry. Some in the Jewish community believed the box itself was reminiscent of the boxcars that transported Jews to the concentration camps. When the ladies read about it in the news, they agreed it sounded awful. They also admitted that when they meet a German in his seventies or eighties, they wonder where he was during the war. It was only Bea with her twin gifts of being straightforward and friendly who once posed the question to a German woman with whom she found herself playing Bridge at the Senior Center. “I asked her where she had been during the war. She said she was from a small town, that she was a small child. I left it at that.”
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 Bur
nett 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.
The last time I visited my father’s grave, I was agitated; a work situation was spinning out of control. These were the times I missed him most, as my business mentor. I know how he would have advised me, but I felt like visiting. Once there, the idea seemed forced and I felt self-conscious. Plus the day suddenly turned ugly with a sky the color of cement. I got up to leave after a few minutes and looked around at all the graves of the men my father knew. They are all buried here, the men who attended B’nai Jacob, who financed the building of the JCC, and gave bonds to Israel. All the men my father did business with, golfed with, and played cards with in the men’s room of our country club. They’re all here: Katz, Kasowitz, and Shapiro. It sounds like a law firm. I give a nod to all of them, this place where the alter kockers have come to rest. All their headstones crowded with rocks.
Suddenly I was seized with the need to find Barbara’s grave. We had gone once as a family when my father died. My older sister had found out where she was buried from the undertaker and arranged for us to go after the burial. There wasn’t a headstone, just a plaq
ue in the ground. Whatever catharsis she hoped for us, for my mother, wasn’t forthcoming. She barely got out of the car before she got back in, her body shrunken, hunched over. I don’t remember the drive back to my mother’s house, only that when we returned it was already filled with people.
There were rows and rows of plaques in long lines like a fallow field. I walked up and down, reading the names, growing increasingly distressed when I couldn’t find her. I surveyed the entire cemetery, certain that I had walked down every row. She was gone again. Disappeared. This is so fucking typical. Determined to find her, I started to search again, even more methodically this time. Then I saw it, her plaque beside a tree, moss beginning to take the edges. I touched it as if I could touch her. I left three rocks, one from each of us, her sisters. Then one more, for my mother.
CHAPTER 17
Bette in Flames
It’s been months since the Bridge Ladies have gotten together. Their vacation schedules were all over the place, didn’t mesh. Winter weather. Worse, Arthur got a bad case of shingles that landed him in the hospital. From there he went back and forth from the hospital to rehab, having been weakened by each hospital stay. Bette was out of commission as a result. She had too much to deal with even to return most phone calls. For the most part, she fills my mother in on Arthur’s progress or lack thereof, and my mother relays what little news there is to the Bridge Ladies and a larger circle of their friends. I know my mother does not want to be illness central, the designated bearer of bad news, but she is a devoted friend. I ask her nearly every day about Arthur’s health, and she says the same thing: What can I say? Or: a little better. When I see her and ask after him, she tilts her hand back and forth like a flipper, by which she means: so-so. I leave Bette some messages just to say that I’m thinking of her. I fear they sound hollow, but I hope they are better than nothing.
When I finally reach her, I ask how she’s coping and she tries to sound as upbeat as possible, but the strain is there.
