by Betsy Lerner
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.
Across the room Jackie and Dick are sitting with three other couples. They all must know how lucky they are. The odds are against them in marriages of over sixty years, with both spouses still in relatively good health. Every year, Dick and Jackie exchange anniversary cards. This year, their sixty-third, they picked out the same card for each other of a lion and a lioness. I nearly swoon; how romantic is that? Jackie brushes it off.
“Come on, don’t you think it’s incredible?”
Both of them independently cruising the racks at Walgreens or CVS and picking out the same card.
She shrugs.
“What do you think it means?” I urge her for an insight.
“That we’re on the same page?”
Once Jackie told me that the secret to marriage was that she accepts Dick for who he is. It struck me as a completely radical concept. Was I supposed to accept my husband for who he is? Was I supposed to accept myself? On good days, we considered ourselves works in progress. Our parents didn’t wonder what they would be when they grew up, or for that matter if they’d grow up. They were grown-up!
I notice Jackie is wearing her three-pronged ring. She told me some time ago that it was her lucky ring.
“Lucky for what?”
“Flying at first. I got it when we started flying and always wore it.”
“And now?”
“For life, I guess.”
Rhoda has come alone, but she mentions that she’s seeing George later. He comes over every weekend, and she cooks a Shabbat meal for him on Friday night. More than once Rhoda has mentioned that George loves her cooking and he’s always grateful.
“You can make him an egg and he loves it!”
They go to the movies, lectures, and plays. They socialize and travel. They go on cruises together! (The ladies believe they share a cabin.)
“George is a gentleman,” Rhoda says, and then to illustrate, “a gentleman in the truest sense of the word. He always opens doors and pulls your chair out.” They’ve never gone Dutch on anything!
It’s clear that George meets Rhoda’s high standards, and that’s saying something. He even meets with Beth’s approval. Rhoda naturally felt some trepidation the first time the two of them met. But the day went exceedingly well and Beth sent an e-mail that night: “I love him. He’s a keeper!” Her son was also happy for her, happy for the companionship.
Once, when Bridge was at Rhoda’s, Bette asked if George brought the flowers on the coffee table.
“George always brings flowers,” Rhoda said, a little cocky, and who can blame her: finding love in her eighties.
“Why don’t you get married?” Bette asked.
“Then there’d be no flowers!” Rhoda laughs loudly at her own joke.
“It must be nice,” Bette said, “to have a companion, someone to watch TV with.”
“Don’t be so naïve, Bette,” Rhoda shot back.
Rhoda and George have been together for three years. When I asked her if she was in love, she blushed. Then she said yes, very much so.
They are all here, the Bridge Ladies. If you didn’t know them you would never guess that they’ve been together in a club for over fifty years, thousands of lunches, many more thousands of hands of Bridge. All the bowls of Bridge mix, the disputes over bad bids, the number of tricks taken, tricks lost. Their club has more staying power than most marriages. Children born, schooled, launched into the world. A tidal wave of worries, a string of happy days, a family singing together in a station wagon on a long ride home. The nest emptied. Husbands buried. Sunrise, sunset.
I had assumed the Bridge Ladies’ bond was inviolable, enviable. I imagined they confided their deepest secrets, confessed their worst fears, worried about their children, and groused about their husbands. You know: what happens at the Bridge table stays at the Bridge table. I often wished the ladies tasted some of our freedom to sleep with different guys before committing to one. My mother once said all cats are gray in the dark. As far as I know she didn’t have a control group. I wished the ladies felt that they could have pursued careers: Bette on Broadway, my mother an author, Jackie her own travel agency, and Rhoda a rabbi. Bea, well, she could have done anything: feed the hungry, start a social media company, or become a Grand Life Master at Bridge. I wanted them to confide in each other and draw comfort from doing so. I wanted them to hug!
Their periods never aligned like girls in a dorm, they never got high and drove through the winding roads of Woodbridge with the windows down, the volume up on a Bruce Springsteen ballad or a Bob Marley beat. They never did anything really stupid, rocked any boats, or went out very far on any limbs. They haven’t fought any wars or even picketed any causes. For the most part, they upheld the conventions they were raised with. Mostly, they’ve hung in. They meant their marriage vows when they said them. They raised their children and they continue to help them into adulthood when they falter, meet with life’s rough breaks: loss of jobs, divorce, health problems, money problems. When I stumbled out of the starting blocks of my life, my mother said she believed in late bloomers. And when I stumbled again, she repeated it. I never thought I would say this, but I think the Bridge Ladies are brave.
Driving my mother home from the memorial, my mother mentions a piece about the poet Edward Hirsch that she just read in the New Yorker (for the record, she is the only person I know who is up-to-date on her New Yorkers).
“Do you know him?”
“I don’t know him but I’ve read him.”
“Really?”
“Mom, I have an MFA in poetry.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Why?”
“There’s a piece on him in the current New Yorker, have you read it?”
“What about it?” I’m like a yea
r and half behind.
“Well, he lost a son and he’s written a book about it. Something in there really touched me.”
“What about?”
“You’ll read it, you’ll see.”
“Just tell me.”
“It’s about suffering.”
The conversation ends there. I go home and look up the article. I see it right away, the verse near the end of the piece:
Look closely and you will see
Almost everyone carrying bags
Of cement on their shoulders
That’s why it takes courage
To get out of bed in the morning
And climb into the day.
“My life is over,” Bette confides in my mother when they are back on the trail a week or so after Arthur has died, their sensible shoes crushing the leaf rot as they turn the corners.
“It’s not over, Bette,” my mother says. “It’s shattered.”
How many times has my mother’s life been shattered? Her father a tyrant, her coat in flames, pushing a sad carriage with a blank face. And what of our chapel, its shards of stained glass—yellow, orange, burnt orange—soldered together like an antique map. What is it like for my mother to return to this place? Her young life shattered; the pieces here?