The Bridge Ladies (29 page)

The next morning my mother calls to tell me that Arthur has died. She says he's at peace now and we both know she doesn't mean this. The end of suffering yes, but peace no. We are not sentimental about death. We don't think we will be reunited with our loved ones or anything like that. I start to cry; my mother remains quiet. Six months ago Arthur was grocery shopping, he and Bette were going to movies, out to dinner and to the JCC, where he walked on the treadmill and kibitzed with the kibitzers. When he first got sick, Bette consoled herself and anyone who asked that at least it wasn't life-threatening. All that unraveled in a matter of months.

My mother says it's okay to stop by Bette's; only when I do, there are no cars in the driveway. For a moment I think I'm in the wrong place or that this isn't a good time to come. I had imagined a crowd. When I ring the bell, Bette comes to the door where she has greeted me so many times for our talks and for Bridge. She looks tiny, gray, and when I hug her I can feel every bone in her back and I fear I will crush her. She ushers me inside. Outside on the deck her two-year-old twin grandsons are filling plastic watering cans and watering the flowers. The water mostly goes all over the deck and their comic relief is a small miracle. Bette is happy Arthur lived to see them.

We pass a half hour with small talk mostly. How I filled in for Bridge, any inane thing I could think of to offset my nervousness. Bette's daughter Amy is there and offers me a glass of
wine. Bette's son Jack entertains his two boys, throwing a ball high in the sky, which makes them squeal and run in circles like puppies. When I finally ask Bette how she is doing, she flinches, shrugs; I'm not sure which. Then she tells me that they had to make arrangements earlier in the day—Arthur would be cremated—until then she had kept it together. Upon leaving the crematorium, the director said to Bette, “Don't worry, I'll take good care of him.”

It was something he probably said by rote, a gesture, and that was all. But it set Bette off, “Who are you to take care of my husband? I'll take care of my husband.”

Later, she will confide that she doesn't know what to do when people say “God bless,” or when they say they are praying for Arthur. She knows they are well meaning but she doesn't know what God has to do with it. She wants to tell them to pray for themselves.

Everyone, including Bette, would say Arthur took care of her, lived for her, and that she was the center of his life. He spent a lifetime not complaining about a job he never liked or wanted. The only thing he kept from their fabric store is a glass-fronted case with brightly covered spools of thread in lockstep like a row of soldiers. That was Arthur, in lockstep with dutiful men of his generation. Bette's children worry about how she will manage on her own. Amy is the closest in Hartford. Davi, her middle daughter, lives in Paris. Her son, who lives out of town, is riddled with worry, wonders how she will make it through the winter, as if Woodbridge were Siberia and she had only a keep of apples to last her through the snows.

Sometimes a spouse will die shortly after losing a lifelong companion. It's known as broken heart syndrome and in some ways it has the same romantic appeal as when young lovers die
together like Romeo and Juliet. Only most people outlive their spouses by more than five years and longer. Still, these stories, rare as they actually are, appeal to us. We want to believe that love can remain so strong that a person can't go on living without the other.

“Sixty years is a long time,” Bette says when I leave. “How much more can you ask for?”

The minute I see my mother in the parking lot, I regret the entire outfit I've concocted to wear for Arthur's memorial service. It's a black cotton dress that I cinch at the waist with a worn brown leather belt that in my mind's eye has a quasi–Ralph Lauren look. Only the fabric has attracted every thread and microbe of lint in the state of Connecticut and glows as if under a black light. The dress wanted a small heel, not the ballet flats that I've been wearing since last summer. Even my teenager suggested I change my shoes.

A week after Arthur died, the first named hurricane of the year touched down in North Carolina with hundred-miles-per-hour winds, with cyclone warnings and families evacuating along the coast. Cruelly or perhaps providentially, it was named Arthur. By the time it reached New England the storm was at its tail end: flash flooding, road closings, and power outages. Again, I tell myself not to read too much into it, and again it's impossible not to.

It's been a few weeks since Arthur died and it was unclear where Bette would hold a service—she and Arthur quit the synagogue years ago. She settled on our old country club, another landmark from my childhood that hasn't changed down to the hooks on the valet's pegboard where keys hang in clusters.

My mother and I kiss on the cheek. As usual, we are a study in opposites. She is wearing too much makeup, me not any. Her black patent leather Ferragamo handbag is the size of a kidney-shaped swimming pool; mine is as small as a kidney bean. Her hair is colored and fluffed into shape, mine is still wet and hanging limply. I know this also makes her crazy.
How could you go out with a wet head?
And while we're at it
: Don't you want to color those grays?
Only now, here, she won't say anything about how I look. We have come a long way, my mother and I.

Only then, she can't help herself and reaches out to pull a few of the more obvious threads from the dress. I don't want her de-linting me, or touching me for that matter, but I let it go. Nor do I insult her Eileen Fisher green cotton separates, which could easily double as surgeon's scrubs. This is supreme progress on both of our parts. Has proximity made friends of us? If we have learned anything I would say it is this, the first cardinal rule most of our mothers taught us: If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

At thirteen, at twenty-one, all through my thirties and forties, everything my mother said felt like a steel plate hurtling toward my head. Now, not so much. After three years with Anne, I felt ready to move on. When I told her I was ready to stop therapy, she nodded in agreement. She didn't suggest that I still had issues to work through, or make me feel insecure about my decision. Every shrink I'd ever seen tried to get me to stay, sometimes dragging out sessions for months. Still, it was hard to leave Anne and our weekly sessions, imagine someone else
taking my place, my hour, sitting across from Anne looking to her for answers.
Good luck with that.
I'd like to think that she would miss me, and my fascinating life. Oh, how I admired her! Loved her! She never budged, never coddled or condescended. I didn't have to do anything, fix anything, or entertain anyone. There was no epiphany exploding like a chrysanthemum in a night sky of fireworks, no golden fields of barley. I didn't have to love myself first or embrace the journey I was on, which astonishingly led me to a 14-plex with my octogenarian mother on my arm. Unlike every other therapeutic relationship I'd ever been in, she actually helped me accomplish what I hoped to accomplish: she helped me care for my mother and by extension myself.

We see my older sister pull into the parking lot and wait for her before going inside. Nina has come from Boston, and my mother comments on how nice it was of her to make the effort.

“Mom.” She sounds exasperated. “Of course I would come.”

Our mother always claims ignorance about matters of the heart. “I didn't realize you felt that close.”

My sister rears back. “Really, you don't know how I felt about Arthur? Or Bette?”

My mother remains oblivious. “I'm just saying it's very nice.”

This response is yet more maddening. “Mom,” my sister says, “I'm here, for you, too.” Then she shoots me a look:
Can you believe her?

It's Bette and Arthur's middle daughter Davi whom I first glimpse through the crowd backed up at the receiving line. Davi and I were in the same grade, are the same age, and are daughters of the Bridge Ladies. But we never really connected in high school. Then she went to Paris to live for most of her adult life. Had she followed a dream or was Paris anywhere but here? Did
she become fluent and ride a bike with a baguette in the basket on her way home from work? Did she have many lovers? Like her mother, Davi is beautiful. When I see her I remember that she has a small white cloud in her right eye, just a fleck that always made her seem mysterious to me. Did she see the world through it? When I get up to her in the line, she says, “Isn't this bizarre? Why am I smiling?”

We laugh at the absurdity and I recognize the smile locked on her face. It's the one I wore to my father's funeral standing in that surreal receiving line.

I spot Bette in the center of the room, enveloped by people. She has some color again. I can't tell if it's rouge or if she's getting back some of the wind that was knocked out of her. She's wearing a pretty peach top and slacks with a matching peach and crystal choker around her neck. Was Bette able to manage herself or did Amy help her fix the clasp at the nape of her neck, the place where our mothers once held us, cooed and kissed our fat heads?

A slide show is projected against a wall, but sunlight streaming through the windows bleaches the pictures. Ghost images on a repeating cycle: Arthur in the Korean War, Arthur's college graduation, Arthur with Bette on the beach, her figure to die for. Arthur with his three babies, with his son hiking, with Bette on vacation. They are all handsome: this little band of Arthur's, the sailors on his ship. The images appear and disappear.

When Bette's son takes the microphone to welcome everyone, his voice sounds so much like Arthur's that it's scary, as if Arthur could come out from behind the curtain.
Just kidding. Still here.
But the curtains are still, the room quiet. Jack recalls a day at the beach when he was six or seven.

“There is a very brief window in a boy's life when he can hold his father's hand,” Jack says.

Every one of us gathered knows about brief windows: the ineffable smell of a newborn, childhood, your first kiss. And windows that refuse to close: the first shame, the first betrayal, saying something you wish you'd never said.

Amy reads from some pithy letters Arthur sent her when she first went away to college. They are nonsensical and hilarious, capturing his slightly absurdist humor. But beneath the humor you could hear a father's longing to tell his girl he missed her, loved her, and hoped she was thriving. I marvel that she has held on to these letters all these years, as if she knew she would need them now. Davi speaks, too, the middle, like me, full of conflict, full of woe. She doesn't have a story, or a memory that anchors her speech as Jack's and Amy's did. She unfolds a piece of ruled paper from an ordinary notebook that looks like the kind you would pass to a friend in junior high, her voice losing strength as she starts to read, “I want to thank my father.”

Later, Bette will tell me that Davi was extremely close to her father. She is also a nurse and was extremely helpful at hospice. It's easy to see how: She moves through the world slowly and with great care. “He wanted his binoculars,” Davi told me. “Everyone thought it was silly since he couldn't get out of bed.” Davi brought the binoculars. Then he wanted his nail file and she brought that, too. I like to think that Arthur was planning to break out, take his last run, more likely he wanted to keep his family safe, as he had always done.

When Jack invites the assembled to share stories, an old friend of Bette's from high school and college stands up first and introduces herself as Sis Levine. I immediately like her. Great gravely voice, wide smile, the kind of person who makes everyone feel welcome, or so I imagine.

“Bette was always an actress,” Sis says, “I saw her in all of her plays.”

Later Bette tells me that it was Sis who sent her flowers after her first performance at Skidmore. “I never forgot that, can you imagine doing such a thing?”

Bette once showed me an eight-by-ten photograph of herself as Lady Bracknell in a long dark Victorian-style dress and a black bonnet from that final performance at Skidmore. She was twenty, maybe twenty-one, completely in character. During our first visit I asked Bette what she loved so much about acting. Characteristically, she gave it some thought before answering.

“Well, I'd get very, very uptight before going onstage. The whole day of a performance, I'd be uptight. The minute I would walk out on the stage the nervousness would leave. It was as though I had a need to be somebody different—to not be Bette Cohen. And then I would relax because I wasn't me anymore.”

I'm certain this is how she must feel today, would give anything to shed her widow's costume.

My husband joins me at our table. He arrived late and will leave early, but I am hugely touched that he has taken time out of his busy workday to come. He wanted to be here. He has shared many holiday meals with Bette and Arthur and has always felt warmly toward them. Still, I wouldn't have asked him to come. We are not a couple from the Eisenhower era and I am not a 1950s wife. It's not how we run our show. Independence trumps obligation.

When John and I were newly married, I fell into one of my worst depressions. Like my mother's postpartum, it seemed inconceivable that this could happen in the wake of something I had hoped for so deeply. I was barely functioning, unable to make simple decisions. Every beautiful thing turned menacing: the roots of trees, the distant whistle of our morning train, and when John took me for a walk near the ocean, hoping it would make me
feel better, the sun appeared as a circle of paper punched from a hole, and the ribs of sand gently carved by the waves like a ghostly carcass of animal remains. I was terrified of being fired from my job, and all throughout pushing John away with my unwashed hair, stale breath, and clothes I could barely change out of. One night I heard him talking on the phone, keeping his voice low.

Later, he told me it was my mother.

“What did you tell her?”

“I said I was scared.”

“What did she say?”

“She told me to hang in.”

“What else?”

“She said you were worth it.”

When John gets up to leave, I walk him to the door. I thank him for coming.

“Of course,” he says.

The points on the collar of his shirt are curled up in the summer heat and I smooth them down. I don't want to let him go.

Two ladies at the table behind me are the Siskel and Ebert of memorial services. They narrate the entire proceedings while friends and family continue paying tribute to Arthur. They aren't even subtle about it, loudly croaking their opinions: “Too long,” “Too rambling,” “Is that Arthur's cousin?” “Is she sick?”

Last, a family friend gets up and starts to read from what looks like a few pages.
Groan
. His cadence is a mix of politician and preacher. His oration is a mix of clichés and homilies. Time moves slowly. The slide show clicks through again and again. Arthur, Arthur, Arthur. Finally, he asks all of us if we know what “the dash” is. No one seems to know what he's talking about. He surveys the room.

“The dash? Anyone?”

Finally, when no one wagers a guess, he enlightens us. It's the dash on a gravestone. It's what's between your birth year and death year. “The dash,” he says, “is the way you lived your life. It's what you do between those years that's important.”

Siskell, from behind me, pipes up, “What did he say, the gash? What's the gash?”

Then, from Ebert, “I can't hear anything.”

It's like sitting in front of hearing-impaired Jews at the movie. Actually, I
am
sitting in front of hearing-impaired Jews.

No one else gets up to speak and it looks as if the testimonials are over.

People start to stand, head toward the buffet lunch. Only then does Bette stand up with the help of her daughters. She has something to say.

“I want to thank everyone for coming,” she starts. “Arthur would have been surprised to see so many people, but I'm not.”

Before we leave, I make my way around the room to say good-bye to Rhoda, Jackie, and Bea. They are camped out in the corners of the room like sturdy legs of a table. Bea is sitting closest. She is wearing black. It makes me long for her purples and lime greens.

“Hi, sweetie pie,” she says and squeezes my hand and I smile at the few people sitting with her. It's hard to know what she is feeling today. She lost Carl a decade ago after a series of strokes. He was in a wheelchair and unable to communicate, but he stayed home with a full-time aide. “It was rough” is all Bea will ever say.

“Bea, you're amazing.” I've told her this more than once. And she always says the same thing in response. “Betsy, it's amazing what you get used to.”

Every time we talked, Bea loved to shock me with tales from Carl's days as a young ophthalmology resident.

“You want to know how they learned surgery, Betsy?”

“How, Bea?”

“On a cadaver's head, no, half a head,” she corrected herself, and then wound up for the big finish. “They went right in for the eye and eye socket!”

Bea and Carl were married for sixty years. At Bridge, she brings out cocktail napkins with their initials monogrammed on the corners. The plates on her car still say MD. She tells me that when Carl died, she left a golf ball on his grave instead of a stone. When she went back some time later, of course it was gone.