The Bridge Ladies (3 page)

All the women know this to be true and nod affirmatively.

I'm still confused. Isn't this man's outburst “bad for the Jews,” as the expression goes.

No, no, the women explain. If a gentile had cursed, he would be accused of anti-Semitism and that would be far more incendiary. They are willing to take one for the team to avert even worse repercussions. Their logic seems warped to me until I realize that the goal is to draw the least amount of attention as possible, deflecting even the slightest whiff of anti-Semitism. I'm impressed with their diplomatic chops, their nuanced grasp of the issues; if only the Bridge Ladies could be sent to the Middle East. After all, who better understands the art of compromise than a person married for over fifty years. Rhoda concludes the conversation, as I will discover she often does, with her customary disgust of contemporary life: “The whole level of public discourse is in the sewer.”

The very fact of the Bridge club, its endurance, speaks in some ways to the ladies resisting change or upholding the status quo. If the Bridge Ladies said so, my mother tended to go along.
They were like city hall. One Bridge daughter said they were like the Supreme Court. Their decisions were treated as the letter of the law. They were mavens, advising on camps and colleges; they referred doctors and plumbers, mechanics and gynecologists. Where to get your rugs cleaned and dresses hemmed. What the golf course was to men, the Bridge table was to women, the de facto social networking of its time. You would sooner argue with Talmudic scholars than challenge their collective wisdom.

These days, the ladies shy away from controversy. I know my mother wishes the ladies would mix it up more. She religiously reads the
New Yorker
,
Harper's
, the
Nation,
and the
Atlantic
. She attends lectures on politics, Israel, art, and more recently Black Lives Matter. She has strong opinions, they all do, but the ladies hew to the truism that it's best not to talk about politics or religion. And I suspect for a long time, this suited my mother. After all, it was her great success as a Brooklyn-born socialist that she passed as a suburban matron who learned how to play golf and tennis, joined the Sisterhood and eventually three Bridge clubs.

Her socialism, her Zionism, all of this was shelved when we moved to Woodbridge, our affluent suburb northwest of New Haven. She traded in her Karl Marx for Emily Post, the high priestess of etiquette, as if adhering to her advice could spare us the kind of social disgrace that in an earlier era would have landed us in the stocks. The landscape appeared as a minefield where she could easily trip up not knowing how people were related, who went to school with whom. She was anxious about nearly every aspect of social life: what were the customs for entertaining, the protocol for extending invitations and reciprocating? Margaret Mead had an easier time in Samoa!

I didn't get it. She constantly harped on the fact that she felt
like an outsider. Our suburban ranch, two cars, and membership to the synagogue and Jewish Country Club all looked plenty normal to me. Too normal! Her mother had emigrated from Russia without knowing English. How could my mother, coming from Brooklyn, via Stamford, to New Haven feel so alien? Only it wasn't about distances. I was much older before I realized my mother felt like an outsider because of how inadequate she felt about herself.

Sitting down for our first “official” talk, she is eager to tell me about her family's poverty in Jersey City as if it's a badge of honor. We are in my living room and she's all dressed up and made up like a Russian Matryoshka doll brightly painted with many shiny layers of varnish. She has always been like the tiniest doll, the one that's impossible to crack.

Only now, she enthusiastically recalls having lived in one tenement after another with the buckled linoleum floors and refrigerators cooled by blocks of ice, relatives arguing leftist politics like in a Woody Allen movie except it wasn't exactly funny.

“Is this what you're looking for?” she asks, wanting to please me.

I'm not sure what I want now that we're here. I feel awkward and embarrassed. Aren't I already supposed to know my mother?

“I had one doll,” she proudly remembers, a gift from a wealthy relative, and a favorite red cable stitch “skating” sweater she knitted with her friend Cookie Ginsberg whose mother owned a yarn shop.

“What kind of a name is Cookie?” I ask.

“What kind of a name is Cookie?” my mother repeats. Her use of a question to answer a question is right out of the linguistic Yiddish playbook, and I understand immediately that she not only deems the question foolish, but has no intention of answering it.

“Do you remember that sweater?” she asks hopefully, “with the zipper.”

I act as if I can't remember but I know exactly the sweater she's talking about—only I am ashamed because I never liked it, found its homemade stitches crude, the zipper hard to work. It was the sole artifact from a life I couldn't fathom, full of import like the red balloon, only I failed to appreciate my mother's girlhood handiwork.

“I know I kept it. You children wore it. I don't know what finally happened to it. Do you remember it, the red sweater with the cable stitch?”

“Sort of,” I say, “yeah I think I do.” And then I have a sudden longing for it—the embarrassing hand-knitted item of clothing—and I see myself skating as a little girl with a bright red face pushing off toward the middle of the pond in our backyard. But it's a manufactured memory, more a wish or an image I conjured from having heard a story many times.

“I remember every coat I ever had,” she proudly tells me, most notably a taupe coat with a Persian lamb collar and cuffs she wore when she was engaged. When I question how she could afford it, she doesn't hesitate, “If I could only have one coat, I wanted the best and my mother would splurge for me.” She adds, “I'm still like that.”

She also makes the point that unlike today's clothes hers lasted for years and years, and more than that: she took care of them. Her veiled accusation/criticism is not lost on me, a citizen of the wasteful generation. “I wore that Persian coat for years, I gave it to my cleaning lady. And it was still in good shape.”

The only time I glimpsed the residue of her impoverished childhood was when she yelled at my sisters and me for not taking care of our things. Once she found a blouse under my bed with its tag on. I thought her head would explode. We
didn't know the value of a dollar! We could not fathom her life, nor were we especially impressed with her hardships. We were spoiled suburban girls who had multiples of everything.

“We didn't
feel
poor,” my mother says now with a degree of wonder in her voice. “We just didn't.”

They were all children of the Depression, the ladies, though they all claim it didn't affect them. They were too young, and their families were spared complete financial ruin. It wasn't about the “haves” and “have-nots,” they tell me; everyone was a have-not. To hear the ladies talk about the Depression: no biggie. Still, they knew the value of a dollar and remembered when a loose cigarette cost a penny, a dime for a ride on the trolley, and twenty-five cents for a movie.

“Here,” my mother would say, pushing the phone toward us to say hello to my grandmother. Talking to her mother always seemed like a chore, placed more out of duty than love. I always assumed my mother was embarrassed by my grandmother's Russian accent and Old World ways. She wore her hair in a bun held together by netting that, turned upside down, could have doubled as a bird's nest. She colored her hair black with a tube of something that resembled shoe polish. She gripped a sugar cube between her front teeth when she drank tea, and used Vaseline exclusively and liberally on her entire body, and then kept pennies in the empties.

Only now, she speaks with great pride about the young Russian immigrant who signed up for language lessons as soon as she came through Ellis Island. I suspect my mother is scrubbing her history. When she finally told us about my grandmother's violent and tragic past, it was impossible to comprehend the magnitude of trauma this sweet, gentle woman had survived. She and her two sisters discovered their parents murdered in their home during the Kiev pogroms of 1919.

I want to know everything, but all my mother will say is that she had nightmares her whole life and that she would cry out in her sleep.

“It was very, very traumatic.”

When I challenge her about keeping all of this secret, she shrugs. “What can I tell you—protect the children. That's how I was raised. Was it right? I guess not.”

“Mom, how could you not have told us?”

“It was the culture, Betsy. Go question culture.”

“Did she long for Russia?”

“She loved this country, its ideals, everything it stood for. I was born on Washington's birthday and my brother was born on election day. My mother took it as a good omen.”

When she first arrived, my grandmother worked in a millinery factory, but once her English improved enough she landed a job as a saleswoman at Russeks, one of Manhattan's first upscale department stores.

“She loved clothes and she would buy them with her discount. She loved I. Miller shoes, a very fancy shoe store, like Ferragamo today.”

The next time I am in New York I attempt to find the store on West Forty-Seventh Street. I don't see it at first. The building is surrounded with scaffolding and looming cranes. I peek through the fencing and there it is, a once grand building made of white stone now almost completely black. The store had catered to actresses, and through the grime I make out the names Mary Pickford and Ethel Barrymore etched into the facade where their statues once stood, recessed into the building like Greek gods. A man on the construction site tells me it's coming down in a few days. I'm seized with panic; it suddenly feels as if this small detail from my grandmother's life is about to be demolished and with it every trace of her. I want to stop the
flow of traffic on the busiest corner of New York City and tell everyone how she shopped here, a young immigrant extending her foot like a Russian aristocrat as a salesman removed a shoe from its tissue.

I knew firsthand that my grandfather's abuse was cataclysmic, epic, ruining many good times and almost every holiday meal. He once stopped talking to me for two years because I wouldn't give him a piece of bread from a fancy Italian loaf I believed my aunt was “saving” for a special dinner. I was probably ten years old when he shook his fist and thundered, “You deny your grandfather a piece of bread!” It was biblical! It was Moses at Mount Sinai finding the Israelites worshipping false idols and going ballistic.

“He came into conflict wherever he went.” My mother's voice lowered, even though we are alone in my living room, sitting at opposite ends of my couch. “No one could tell him anything, no one was smarter than your grandfather.” Her tone was sarcastic, angry.

His volatile temper could be triggered by anything: something as small as an empty bottle of milk in the refrigerator, a newspaper creased incorrectly. Our grandmother did everything she could to quell his outbursts, to keep him from making a scene, especially in public. I had no idea how desperate my mother was to leave home, how dark her thoughts sometimes turned.

My grandmother also longed to leave him, but what options did she have? She was twenty-nine when they married, an old maid by the standards of the day. He was a tall, blond American man, he had a job, and he asked her to marry him after a week. At first he seemed heaven-sent. They were married six weeks later. A woman in their building, also a Rus
sian Jew, had left her husband and was raising two children on her own. “My mother both admired her and felt sorry for her. On the one hand, it could be done. On the other, better you should move to Siberia. It was a terrible
shonde
.” A shame.

When my mother was still in grade school and they were leaving Jersey for Brooklyn, she overheard a teacher say, “We always lose the good ones.” She wore this modest feather in her cap for years to come, providing some small ballast against her father's belittling. She wishes her mother had the conviction to end the marriage, end the bullying and constant insults he showered down on the family. More than once, her father berated his bright young daughter. “You have always been stupid, you are stupid, and you always will be stupid.”

My mother could play Bridge day in and day out, laugh and gossip and swap recipes for quiche Lorraine, but it wouldn't change the fact that she was covering a raft of secrets and the crippling effect of her father's cruelty. Still, it's always there, at least to me, fear born of insecurities, dark moods that unexpectedly flare, and sadness that folds itself in silence.

I wanted to reach out to her, but her arms were crossed over her chest, her mouth puckered, the lines scored more deeply. I had always dismissed my mother's insecurities as shallow: Did we use the right decorator? Did the shoes match the bag? Everything had to match; I now see why. I disrespected her for only caring about how things looked. I never understood how much there was to hide.