The Bridge Ladies (9 page)

“Gosh, there were so many. I can't remember them.” Jackie is referring to all the boys who hoped for a date with her: the girl with the size-four figure, wide-set eyes, and porcelain skin, alluring as a portrait of a nineteenth-century noblewoman, and almost as aloof. There was never a shortage of young men who called the Brody household in hope of a date.

This is our first visit, and Jackie has led me into her formal living room. It's beautifully furnished with exquisite antiques, but it also has a ghostly quality, not Havisham-esque, but long untouched. It's a great room and has likely seen its share of lavish parties; today it's more of a museum without the velvet cordons and security guard shuffling in the doorway.

Jackie grew up in Morris Cove, a spit of land on the Connecticut shoreline. As a girl, she and her classmates visited the Morris House, one of the oldest homes in the area, built around 1750. For some children, it was just an old house filled with a
lot of old stuff, a butter churn, a chamber pot, and a fireplace big enough to roast small children. Jackie admired the austere yet elegant furnishings, the many-paned windows with rippled glass, and the shiny black hansom cab in the garage. She comes by her love of all things colonial honestly. “It's where my love of eighteenth-century furniture started,” she tells me, and I can see her taste on display all around me. The house, Jackie tells me, is still there.

I offer to take Jackie for a “field trip” to the Morris House and also to her childhood home, hoping to jog some memories. She agrees, and a few weeks later on a cold April morning, we set out. Townsend Avenue is a wide boulevard where ordinary houses are washed out in the weak sun and American flags, once symbolic of this proud Revolutionary battleground, now hang slack and tattered. The first place Jackie spots is her grammar school, named for Connecticut war hero Nathan Hale. (“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”) She and her brother walked a mile to and from school every day and again in the middle of the day for lunch. I marvel that they had time. More astonishing, her mother prepared a hot meal every day: pot roast, roast chicken, sometimes liver.

“No Hot Pockets? Lunchables?”

“No,” Jackie says, a small smile.

It's the same brick building she remembers except for a new wing off to the side that probably houses the gym and cafeteria. It's a huge modern thing, and predictably Jackie doesn't like it.

We pass the Morris House. I pull into the driveway, closed for the season. It looks more like a farmhouse than the grand mansion I expected. It takes some backtracking then, but we finally find Jackie's house. She is shocked to see the yard covered in lawn ornaments and junk, all of it coated in some white ma
terial that looks like asbestos or the fallout of a nuclear holocaust. An awning hangs off the house, sneering in a malevolent grin. Jackie remains silent. When I ask her if she wants to leave, she nods yes.

This excursion was a bad idea. What was I expecting? That we would bond on our little adventure, that she would open up and show me where she smoked her first cigarette or made out with a cute boy? And what about Jackie? Had she expected to see her home as if preserved in a Norman Rockwell painting? Maybe that's how we all remember our childhood homes.

She wants to go home, but I push to see the famous carousel at Lighthouse Point Park. Originally built in 1916, it has been restored to its former grandeur. Jackie remembers riding on it as a girl on special occasions. Only now there are stand-alone barricades blocking the entrance. The road down to the carousel is too far for her to walk. No one is around, and I take a wide turn around the fences.

“You can't do that,” Jackie says, alarmed, her hand pressed up against the window.

“It's okay, just for a minute.”

“No, please, turn around.” I can tell she's upset, but I'm sure that when she sees the carousel it will be worth it.

“No one's here. It's fine.” I try to reassure her, but her eyes are wide with fear.

I'm not sure what emboldened me. Usually I follow rules like a Girl Scout. I'm also not sure why I disregarded Jackie's wishes; was I that desperate to make her happy, convinced I could? Jackie is the most difficult of the Bridge Ladies to get to know. I can't tell if she's shy and reserved, or just shy and reserved around me. She is also the most alluring, her allure born in part from her reticence, a quality I have never managed, though wished, to cultivate. I've even nicknamed her The Sphinx. She
had been clear about not wanting me to bypass the gates and I crashed right through anyway. I realized later it was no longer about Jackie. My need trumped hers. I don't know what I expected to happen: that the sight of the mighty carousel would bring Jackie's childhood back in a warm bath of nostalgia? That I would make her happy? Was I trying to do this with all of the ladies, my mother most of all, the Uber-Sphinx?

I pull up to the octagonal structure that houses the great carousel, keeping it safe from the elements and vandals alike. I jump out of the car and press my face against the Plexiglass. Inside, dragons with scales dipped in gold, horses set four abreast brightly painted to a high gloss, at the top a frieze of the Connecticut seashore, and a Wurlitzer that pumps garish waltzes from the core. Jackie stays inside the car, staring straight ahead. I open the car door and ask if she wants to take a look, even though I know she isn't going to budge. I take one last peek again through the Plexiglass; the huge flared nostril of a horse and its angry eye black as a marble stares back at me.

Pulling out of the parking lot, I ask if she'd like to get an ice-cream cone.

“That would be fine.”

I flash on Jackie as a young girl just then, atop her favorite horse, her mother waving as she came around, her father digging in his pocket for loose change as the bells on an ice cream truck tinkle in the distance.

When Jackie hosts Bridge she also treats the ladies to a meal out in a diner near her home in Bethany. It's the most rural of New Haven's suburbs, a place where farms unfold like quilts, and horses stand still as plastic toys. The only signs of spring
are the garish forsythia bushes, their buds exploding yellow like movie-theater popcorn, and early tulip shoots peeking up out of the earth like hungry beaks looking for food. The sky is overcast with gray bunting; the roads are bleached from salting.

When I pull into the parking lot, I see Jackie getting out of her ancient station wagon with wooden trim and side panels. She no longer drives and her freedom is hugely curtailed. Dick, who doubles as a chauffeur, does a three-point turn in the parking lot, slowly maneuvering the wide car like a yacht in a harbor. Jackie takes small, worried steps toward the entrance. She is bundled up, her pocketbook resting in the crook of her arm. From a distance, she looks like a doll, her hair coiffed and her lips painted coral. When I bound up to her in the parking lot, she looks frightened at first, as if startled by a deer. Then she recognizes me, “Oh, hi.”

As we walk up the ramp into the diner, Jackie says, “I have to tell you something. I didn't like that trip at all. It depressed me.” I open the door for her and we go inside. I feel terrible but I don't know what to say. I decide to shelve the other field trips I had started to contemplate.

The Country Corner Diner is a lot less “jazzy” than the Athenian. More homespun. A handwritten white board announces the specials: chicken and rice for soup, roast beef and mashed potatoes for a main. Goulash!! The ladies arrive and find their usual spot at the table. When my mother greets me, she says, “Well, hello there,” as if we are casual acquaintances instead of mother and daughter. She likes to keep up this charade as if she were just another Bridge Lady.

A beautiful young woman gives us our menus and will be back for our order. She is slim, has high cheekbones, and her shiny brown hair is pulled back into a ponytail. She is a source of speculation among the women. Supposedly she has an advanced
degree and at one time had a high-paying job in Boston or New York. Now, she works here, in an ordinary diner, on an ordinary country road. What is the story here? The ladies can't fathom how a girl this beautiful
and
educated is waiting tables. I speculate that she embezzled funds to support a cocaine addiction. The ladies do not brook such foolishness; my imagination is too vivid for them. Still, the ladies feel sorry for her. Didn't she have any options? Was there no one to catch her? Waitressing is not streetwalking, but the ladies' pity suggests as much.

For them, marrying and staying married kept dangerous waters at bay. None of the Bridge Ladies fell through the cracks like Lily Bart. None wound up in a polyester dress and white wedgies. Whatever opportunities they missed out on by
not
working, they were also protected
from
working. Why hadn't our lovely young waitress been protected thus? No one says it, but it's in the air: this wouldn't happen to a Jewish girl. Though of course it could and does.

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.