The Bridge Ladies (7 page)

I tell Anne that I need to get along with my mother, now that we live twelve minutes apart. I can't keep letting her get to me. And more, I say, I don't want to repeat these patterns with my own daughter, though I already hear myself sounding like my mother: begging her to trim her split ends (It's healthier! Your hair will grow faster!), and freaking out when all the clothes I've laundered and folded are in a heap on the floor. I tell Anne about the silver incident, only now I am trying to entertain her, be funny and ironic about the whole thing. But my efforts are hollow. I am like a comic about to get the hook.

I am tired of myself and this same tape loop and the inexplicable ways in which it involves my mother. I am tired of therapy, that obligatory first session with a new shrink when you empty the rocks from your pockets. Mine begins when my mother took me to my first shrink when I was fifteen, ostensibly for help, only she seemed angry that I had gone off script; her bright precocious girl turned dark and moody, reeking of pot smoke, grades tumbling. I tell Anne about a major depression in college and complete breakdown in graduate school. And how one psychiatrist after another prescribed whatever new antidepressant was on the market, all leaving me more lethargic, more depressed. I felt there was a scrim between the world and me. Sometimes, in college and later, out of desperation, I would call home and then not be able to speak. I could hear my mother's voice cycling through worry, distress, and aggravation.
Are you there? Are you there?
Betsy
,
are you there?

I assure Anne that I've been well for a long time, stable for over two decades. How I eventually found a doctor who suspected I was manic-depressive and treated me with lithium. I stress to Anne that I never go off my meds. In fact, I'm a model patient, a straight-A student in the school of mental health. I don't want her to think that a jagged pile of psychiatric shards is
sitting in front of her. I still feel a wave of shame admitting my illness, as if I am defective, unreliable, could suddenly bug out. I still resist the label, though the medication has worked for over two decades: I've never bottomed out again, never felt my brain on fire. Even though I have come to Anne for help, I don't want to admit I need it.

I tell her that more than once my mother has given me all the credit for getting well, for not giving up, for doing it on my own. I know she means it as great praise, but it makes me angry. Why did I have to do it all on my own? Then guilt sets in: my mother did the best she could, I say. Right?

Anne doesn't say anything.

I describe how I was afraid to have children, especially a daughter. I didn't think I could tolerate any more mother-daughter drama. My worst fears dissipated when I got pregnant and even more when I found out I was having a girl. Almost overnight, I embraced everything I had rejected, mainly homemaking and domesticity. I took months painting a raw wooden dresser for my daughter's room with bold colors on the trim, hunting down antique glass pulls decorated with kittens that I had seen in a magazine. When she was little we baked! From scratch! I bought cookie cutters for every holiday. We'd decorate cats and witches for Halloween, wrap them in black and orange tissue paper with ribbons of the same color, and bring them to the neighbors.
Maybe I was manic?
Sometimes I would stand back and look at my little girl decorating our cookies covered with icing and sprinkles and marvel that she was mine. Or see myself: Where was the girl with the Doc Martens and unquiet mind? Was she in remission or gone forever?

Only now, I couldn't understand why things weren't better with my mother. Would I have stabbed her to death with the fork she was polishing? No. But I thought having my daughter,
having our relationship, would reset my compass. Wasn't I lavishing her with the love I craved? Wasn't our closeness proof that some cycle had been broken? Hadn't I gotten anywhere in the mother-daughter wars?

I start to cry. It comes on suddenly. I have to take off my glasses and reach for a tissue. I tell myself to get a grip, that this is pathetic, only I can't stop crying. I can't even look at Anne. Then I feel giddy and nauseated at the same time, as if thrown from a swing.

Finally, I look up. Anne's expression remains unchanged. I find this intensely comforting. This will be the beginning of a few years of work. Over the course of our sessions together, I will try every trick in the book to distract, entertain, and antagonize Anne, but she will not flinch. She will not be my mother, much as I throw myself against her walls. She asks if I'd like to come back. I nod that I would. Anne takes out her planner, which looks more like a teacher's attendance book, and opens it on her lap. We agree on a time for the next session. She marks it with a pencil.

Like Rhoda's, Bea's place is furnished from a previous lifetime. There is a heavy credenza, couch and chairs covered in dark fabric. The ladies play in a breakfast nook in her kitchen with corner windows and a Tiffany-style lamp hanging over the table, decorated with a slot machine's bright cherries. There's a small TV off to the side.

As I've observed, talking subsides once they start playing. The game requires total concentration. Rhoda takes a long time to lead and Bea mutters, “Play it. You're not going to sleep with it.” She rarely needs time to ponder which card to play and flicks it
insouciantly into the middle of the table. Her speed is intimidating, dealing quickly and scooping up tricks in one quick motion.

Between rounds, Bette reports that a good friend had a fall. She has a black eye, a gash on her head, and a sprained wrist. It could have been worse, the ladies say in unison, as if in reading responsively at services. It also comes out that a friend is down to ninety-three pounds and is in so much pain she can't make it upstairs to her bedroom. They've transformed the dining room into her bedroom. I know my mother would rather die than set up camp in a hospital bed in the dining room for all to see.

Now that the subject of death has been broached, I ask the ladies if they fear death. Rhoda, first, emphatically says no. Jackie and Bette look down, stricken. “Yes, I do,” Bette finally says, and Jackie commiserates. I have pushed them to talk about something difficult and yet I suddenly don't want the responsibility of holding up an unwanted mirror. Do they think about how many days of glorious sunshine are left? How many more winters will wash through their bones? Just hearing them admit fear scares me. Of course, we all think our mothers will never die, that cord never cut.

More than death, my mother fears becoming a burden. She's also concerned about the availability of a good manicurist and electrologist in the nursing home, should it come to that. Bette's doctor told her if she falls it would be the end of her.

“You need to get a new doctor,” Rhoda chimes in.

Then I ask Bea, who has been uncharacteristically quiet, if she is afraid of dying. “You're dead, you're dead,” she barks back.

Bea's father died when she was eight years old some years before penicillin could have cured him. She cocked her head when she
told me this, as if to say:
thems the breaks
. I figure it's her way of pushing it off; what else can she do? It was a long time ago. She has been fatherless for many decades. At eight, do you even understand the magnitude of such a loss? And at eighty, do you still long for him?

I suspect Bea's life was irrevocably changed when she lost her fun-loving father, an only child left with a mother she never quite connected with.

“Every year we lost at least one teenager,” Bea told me that first meeting at the diner. She was tired by then and was no longer animated. “The kids were warned not to go swimming in the quarries,” she said, disgusted that the warning wasn't heeded. Her class lost a beautiful young boy called Millard Fleetwood, age sixteen. The cliffs were as beautiful as they were treacherous; the sheer rock face rose as high as it plunged beneath the blue-green water, irresistible to teenagers who believed themselves impervious to danger, indestructible. It was easy for a swimmer's arm or leg to get caught between the crags of limestone invisible to the eye. There was nothing abstract about the death of a classmate, a boy you might have danced with or had a crush on, or watched playing basketball among a welter of other beautiful young men whose futures just as easily, cruelly, could have been cut down.

Much would be left behind in Bedford: the ready-to-wear dress shop owned by a young Jewish family, a yard full of deflowered chickens, and the last bounce of a basketball on a gymnasium floor after a crushing defeat. When I ask Bea where her father is buried, she tells me the Jewish cemetery in Louisville. I ask if she ever visited the grave with her mother. She looks at me and doesn't answer right away, as she usually does. “No,” she finally says, shaking her head, “we never did.”

Bette's perfectly appointed living room could be the set of an Edward Albee play: handsome 1960s-style furnishings, the paintings and knickknacks placed just so. There is no wet bar with carafes of scotch and bourbon, crystal rocks glasses, and a silver ice bucket with claw-shaped tongs, but it's easy enough to imagine. The room is immaculate; a vacuum cleaner has left a wide wake in the carpet. When I first arrive, Bette leads me into this room once filled with friends and cocktails and hors d'oeuvres being passed on silver platters, but whatever ghosts mingled here have long faded. The room isn't gloomy, but the house feels lonely with three grown children long gone. A daughter in Hartford practicing law, another in Paris for more than twenty years, and a son in Baltimore, an emergency room doctor.

Arthur and Bette bought their house in Woodbridge as a young married couple and have lived here for sixty years. “My parents thought we were crazy,” Bette says. “It was like the
wilderness. There were no streetlights. No stop signs.” All of New Haven's suburbs had once been agricultural; Woodbridge was known for dairy farming. In the 1950s and 1960s, most of that farmland would be divided into two-acre plots where young families would raise their kids in ranch houses and colonials.

The rest of the ladies would also settle in the surrounding suburbs. If White Flight was a national phenomenon in the sixties, New Haven was its poster child. Its policies for public housing and urban renewal were so misguided as to insure a tale of two cities. Racial tensions played out on a national stage when Black Panther leader Bobby Seale was tried for murder in the New Haven courts. Bette's neighbor prosecuted the case. He and his family had bodyguards for the duration of the trial. “It didn't affect us all that much,” she says. “We still lived our lives.”

The ladies were not oblivious, but they were insulated. Woodbridge had everything they needed: good public schools, country clubs, a synagogue, and the nearby Post Road for shopping. It's not that they weren't aggrieved by the world around them, but within it they had constructed their own.

Outside their kitchen windows, each shared a view of Connecticut's hardwood trees, which change with the seasons like the set of a Chekhov play. It's where they've washed a million dishes, wiped the counter a million times. This is where you could find them at almost any hour of the day, making a meal, filling the dishwasher, emptying it. And when they were younger, smoking a cigarette while talking on the phone, the curlicue on the cord stretched tight, watching the evening sky as it went from indigo to navy to black, or the red tail lights on a husband's car, garishly reflected against the asphalt in the New England night.

Of all the Bridge Ladies, I've always felt closest to Bette, in part because of her friendship with my mother. When the
weather is good, they walk together on a path, a half-mile loop around a cornfield. Our families also celebrate some of the Jewish holidays together, now that we've all got skeleton crews. Her husband, Arthur, is my favorite of the Bridge husbands. He was loyal to my father in the aftermath of his stroke and long past the point when most friends fell away. And after my father died, he'd readily volunteer to help my mom with things around the house, often “fixing” an appliance by just plugging it in, always more amused than chagrined.

Bette also comes to all of my daughter's plays. She comes in part because of her friendship with my mother, but her fidelity to these fledgling productions isn't a chore; she loves watching ninth graders attempting
The Tempest
, or hoofing their way through
Thoroughly Modern Millie
. Bette had been the star of the drama club at Hillhouse High. When the cast list was put up, she was confident that she would land the lead in all the school plays, and she always did. “I thought I was the greatest thing going!”

Bette isn't at all reticent to talk with me, says she's been looking forward to it, clears her throat and leans in.

“So when did you win your first Oscar? When did it all begin?”

Bette laughs, settles back into her chair, but she doesn't need to search her memory. She might as well be telling me about something that happened that morning.

“Well, actually, it started in the second grade. I was playing the part of Mrs. Upper Lip, and I opened my mouth and out came this wonderful voice, and I remember looking around and having everyone pay attention to me. I decided then that drama was going to be the thing that I would do with my whole life.”

Bette has a deep sonorous voice and perfect articulation. When she speaks it's as if she is reading a short story aloud, speaking in full sentences with well-placed pauses. No
ums
, no
ahs
. All of this dates back to a Chapel Street studio in downtown New Haven where Bette first took elocution lessons.

Enter Julia Jacobs. Masculine like Joan Crawford and angular like Katharine Hepburn, she was the embodiment of the young actress's dream. “I loved her. As a matter of fact, I would imitate her when I got home. The way she pronounced certain words, I would pronounce certain words. I just worshipped her. And I was her star.”

Elocution lessons were popular in the 1930s and 1940s for people who needed professional coaching and for new immigrants hoping to shed their accents. Most of the kids in Bette's class were there to work on “self-presentation,” which basically meant manners, but not Bette Cohen. She was there to hone her craft. Her dream solidified when she saw the movie and performance that would change the course of her life: Bette Davis in
Dark Victory
. From that day on she changed the spelling of her name from
Betty
to
Bette
in homage to the great actress.

“You were just a kid. How did your parents let you do that?”

“I just did.”

Bette's father had no use for his daughter's fancy lessons. When she was old enough to drive, he refused to let her take a car from the lot. A tight-fisted used-car salesman, his constant refrain was: If you crack up the car we'll go broke. Bette didn't care; she even enjoyed the two-mile walk to the studio, rehearsing the monologues in her head, preparing to recite them for Julia, or incorporating her feedback on the walk home. When Bette's father threatened to renege on the dollar for lessons, Julia cut the price in half.

“I still think about her to this day, sometimes I even feel myself leaning in the way she would, the angle of her body.”

Bette admits that she befriended Ginger Bailey because her grandfather owned the storied Shubert Theater. All the
Broadway-bound shows previewed there, including Rodgers and Hammerstein's
Oklahoma!
,
The King
and I
, and
Carousel
.

“I felt so guilty at the time, but Shubert's had all the opening shows. Everything started here. Oh, I used to just drool over it.”
An actress has to do what an actress has to do.
It isn't hard to imagine Bette playing the part of Ginger's new best friend, sharing the family box with its gold-leaf garlands and plush red seats, waiting for the curtain to rise while off-kilter notes filled the air from the orchestra pit below. “They were always the best two hours of my life.”

When it came time to go to college, most kids from the 1949 graduating class of Hillhouse High were on their way to the University of Connecticut. Not good enough for Bette. She convinced her mother that Skidmore was the place where her youthful goals would be realized, and Sylvia Cohen made it so. She had lost a six-year-old daughter, and when Bette was born a year later, she arrived as a miracle. Her mother called Bette her charm and maneuvered around her husband to find the money to send her. She would do anything for her bright, beautiful, and talented girl. And Bette rewarded her throughout high school with one successful show after another, and to cap it all off, delivering the senior class speech. Bette was poised to step onto that college stage and shine.

Freshman year, the theater department staged
Our Hearts Are Young and Gay
, the very play Bette had just starred in during her senior year. She thought she had the lead sewn up.

“Oh my god, that's an easy one for me.” But she got the second lead. She had no idea then that it would be the best part she would get during the next four years, when she was uniformly cast in one insignificant role after another. And with each defeat came eroded confidence. Every rejection was followed by days of dejection.

Her first year of college had brought with it the single, debilitating fact that would inform the rest of her life. All of the girls at Skidmore who had been the stars of their high school were now competing for the lead parts in the plays. “I was no longer the star, and I also was no longer getting straight A's because the competition on the curve put me further down.” Bette lowers her head, closes her eyes, and takes a beat, only she isn't acting. It was the awakening that would come to define all of life's disappointments, only this one the first and most crushing. Bette looks up, shrugs. “There were a thousand Bette Cohens.”

Of course I know that Bette didn't go on to become an actress; instead she became a wife and mother and, as I always knew her, a Bridge Lady. Only sitting with her now, in her spotless living room, I feel her disappointment as if it happened days instead of years ago.

“The whole thing was such an awakening to me that I shiver when I think about it. I would try out for parts and not get them. And it broke my heart.

“My poor roommate,” Bette says. “I was so glum, trying to get it into my head that I wasn't going to be an actress.”

The Importance of Being Earnest
was the final play of her college career. During tryouts, the all-too-familiar feeling of dread crept in. Once again, anxiety conquered confidence, and Bette left the audition utterly devastated. Driven by despair, the clock on her college career ticking down, she did something she didn't know was in her: she went back to the director and pleaded for the part. “It was a huge risk. The audience would be full of parents. I was an unknown quantity for a lead as pivotal as Lady Bracknell.”

“You begged her?”

Bette knew the director couldn't take the risk, but desperate not to see this last chance fall away like all the other roles she'd
lost during her four years, she went back and begged, and astonishingly the director relented. Bette would play the part, reprising the high falsetto of her second-grade performance as Mrs. Upper Lip. The performance was a smashing success. The director found Bette after the show and apologized for having never cast her in any significant parts. She had no idea how good she was.

“How did it feel?”

Bette falls silent.

They were crumbs for a girl with a heart already broken.

It's early April, and Connecticut is still refusing to warm. It's the first Monday of the month and Bridge is at Bette's. She wears perfectly fitting slacks and a sweater that doesn't match so much as goes with it. Matching is for amateurs. The way Bette puts clothes together is intrinsically correct; it's the mark of a woman confident in her looks and taste, and this poise extends throughout her home. It's as if all the energy she had once put into performance has been channeled into the presentation of self and home. Like all of the ladies, she took the road more traveled; her decision alone seems tinged with regret.

As the ladies filter in, Jackie remarks on the repaired skylights, which instantly triggers irritation in Bette. A tree had crashed through their den during a recent storm, and Bette is not happy about the repairs. Apparently the trim on the old skylights was flush with the ceiling but not so with the replacements. Bette points this out to the girls, disgusted. The ladies can't tell the difference, but Bette insists that it's not right. Arthur stops in for a minute to say hello and overhears Bette complain about the moldings. He throws up his hands.
There is nothing wrong with them!
Arthur is about as good-natured as they
come, but everyone has a breaking point. You know that if he hears one more word about the moldings, no, if he so much as sees Bette glance skyward and register disdain, he might blow. But for now, he just leaves. No scene.

Bette and Arthur have been together for nearly sixty years. I know the trim on the skylights is not about to topple a marriage of this duration. These marriages are built to last, like the appliances from their era, made of cast iron and steel. Put another way: divorce was not an option. At different times, the ladies have asserted that marriage “forces” couples to stay together, and that this is a good thing. “You're forced to work out your problems, to stick to it,” Bette says. Rhoda agrees; people divorce too quickly. I don't know that I agree or disagree, but like a high school debater assigned the affirmative position, I'd feel the need to defend divorce and choice in general. I'd argue that the deeper commitment is staying together when you're free to go.