In the Shadow of the Bridge

by Joseph Caldwell

  But I was not thinking of Jimmy on May 25, 1959, as I continued the slow rise to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge. I could see coming toward me from the bridge’s Manhattan side a young man wearing chinos and a white shirt with long sleeves, and an unbuttoned collar. I kept walking toward him. He kept walking toward me. A second or two before we passed each other, he abruptly shifted his gaze in my direction, connecting with my own reflexive glance. I continued on. He continued on. After about fifteen paces, I stopped and turned around. He was standing at the footpath railing. I walked back. We greeted each other. He fit easily into the category of “acceptable.”

  When he spoke, there was a slight formality in his tone and the shaping of his words, almost as if he were translating from another language. He wasn’t. He was shy, which meant, by my definition of shy, that he was afraid of revealing what was really on his mind.

  We exchanged what are called pleasantries. His name was Gale. My name was—and is—Joe. After a few more inanities I mentioned that I lived nearby, gesturing in the direction of where the roof of my building connected with the gray stones of the bridge. This intrigued him. I invited him home. He accepted.

  We walked toward the west, passed under the Manhattan-side tower, down the (then) steps. I pointed out my building as we continued the gradual descent that would lead us off the bridge.

  At the end of the footpath we turned onto Frankfurt Street, just above Rose and Gold Streets. Under the overhang of the bridge, we skirted the trucks parked at the loading platforms of the warehouses built into the foundations of the bridge.

  We went past Vanderwater Street, then turned left and walked under the vaulted arch where Cliff Street and Hague joined in a cul-de-sac, where a fading sign declared the presence of “Jos. Vidootsky, Herring Importers.” Then a quick turn to the right where could be seen the only slanted cellar door I’ve ever seen in Manhattan. That was my building.

  We’d been talking, of course. Fewer inanities, more specifics. He lived in Brooklyn, on Myrtle Avenue. He was a photographer. He’d just completed a project: a series of photographs of the bridge. In turn, I told him I was a playwright currently employed by the New York Times classical music radio station, WQXR. He was reading a biography of the American composer Charles Ives, about whom he’d developed a great enthusiasm. I told him I’d written a play that had scenes on the bridge.

  In the apartment, one flight up, he took an amused interest in the Franklin stove. But we wasted no time. We undressed and got into bed. His ardor was beyond the ordinary and I responded with an involvement equal to his.

  We spent the day together. During a midafternoon sexual event he told me he loved me. A simple declarative sentence that had within it the slightest hint of surprise. I pretty much assumed that this was an understandable expression of his intensity. In acknowledgment, I paused for a moment, then resumed without comment.

  It became apparent during the rest of the time we spent together that day and night that his straightforward declaration had, for him, been an honest statement of fact. He became more interesting. And he was obviously very happy to be in my company, as I was to be in his. And why not?

  With his show of affection and his recognition of my singular qualities—perceptions not so readily apparent to others who’d been given a no less informative opportunity to discern my superior attributes—it became apparent that I had never before made so complete a conquest. And this was not a negligible man. Tall, straight shoulders, a more than passable face that suggested an Asian intrusion into what I would later discover was his Finnish ancestry, ancestors he would claim, who were highly successful reindeer thieves. He also had a perfect nose enhanced by a fleshy fulfillment at the nostrils, and lips of already proven capabilities. I reveled in it all, accepting it as my due. I was being recognized at last for who and what I truly was.

  I gave him a key to my apartment; he gave me a key to his, as well as a key to his downstairs hall. (My downstairs hall had not been deemed worthy of a lock. Remember, my rent was twenty-four dollars a month—a just and fair amount.)

  On weekdays we went to our respective jobs—I to WQXR, Gale to a studio near Gramercy Park where he worked as an assistant to a Broadway set designer. I’d gotten my job at the radio station through the head of “Continuity,” the designated word for the scripted commentary that was written to introduce the music. The man admired my plays that he’d read and knew of my enthusiasm about and knowledge of opera and classical music. He offered me an opportunity to work as a temp during the summer vacations of the other writers: two fledgling composers and two music majors. My work was sufficiently appreciated that I was then given a permanent job.

  Evenings and weekends Gale and I were together in his or my apartment. He lived above a butcher shop, a floor-through, with the front windows facing Myrtle Avenue and the El. The El itself was exotic to say the least. Some of the cars were so ancient as to be made of wood and the windows could be opened. Also, there was a conductor to collect tickets. No less memorable, Gale would unfailingly be straddling the middle front window of his apartment waiting for me to arrive. He would also be there to see me off when I took the train either to work or to my apartment.

  We went for walks. To Central Park, to Fort Greene Park, where he showed me the monument to those who, in our Revolutionary War, were imprisoned on ships in New York harbor, where the British, with their customary imperial response to discontent, left the captured soldiers to die of either starvation, sickness, or, not unlikely, suffocation.

  We checked out the name on a mailbox on Cumberland Avenue—the poet, Marianne Moore, a favorite of both of us. Keep in mind that all of this was really a part of our lovemaking. We went to see Ethel Merman in Gypsy and came away ecstatic. We went to the City Ballet for the first performance of Balanchine’s Episodes. In Episode I, a Martha Graham dancer, Paul Taylor, danced the male lead. Episode II was Martha in her newly choreographed dramatization of incidents in the life of Mary, Queen of Scots. A slight note of tension: Gale responded with great enthusiasm to the Balanchine, but scorned Martha. Hers was, in fact, a decidedly inferior work, but I was a devoted acolyte and bristled, especially since I was less than enthralled with Episode I. (On later viewings, with Martha’s contribution removed, I changed my mind. I was not at the time, however, receptive to contradiction, but I managed not to press my case.)

  Gale was a well-informed advocate of contemporary music. He would play recordings, and I readily found his enthusiasm contagious. I came to appreciate the angularity, the ferocity, the revelatory sense of discovery, to say nothing of the composers’ assault on those more readily accepted forms—harmony, and melody—which had been for me my earliest interests. I had for years been well primed and even eager to be receptive to all that was being offered.

  At the age of four or five, I became aware that there existed a kind of music that had a different effect on me than the usual fare offered on the radio and in movie musicals. It was when I heard on the radio what the announcer called “Handel’s Largo”—actually an orchestration of the aria “Ombra mai fù” from the composer’s opera Xerxes (or in the Italian that had never admitted the letter x into its alphabet, Serse). Listening to it, I felt what I can only describe as a sense of nobility. Yes, I felt noble. I had never felt noble before. I did not know until that moment that I possessed the nobility that was now being revealed to me. Further, within that nobility was—for whatever reason—a sad dignity that deepened my response and my sense of myself. (I felt this even years later when I discovered that this profound influence in my life was occasioned by, no less, a mezzo-soprano’s or alto’s apostrophe to a tree. Oh well. I, rather than the tree, am the greater beneficiary.)

  Later, when my oldest sister, Mary Ellen, demanded quiet in the house as she went about her Saturday chores while listening to the opera broadcast from New York, I protested. I complained. I rebelled. The opera was all meaningless and unending and indeciph
erable caterwauling—a word unknown to me at the time. My sister would offer some explanation or instruction but I used the information to repeatedly ask, “Is she dead yet?”

  “No, she’s not dead yet. So be quiet.”

  As the years went by, when the winter Saturday afternoons often cast a shadow on the high-piled, soot-stained snow outside, I began to become more attentive. First, there was the applause, the shouting. It gave what had preceded it a retroactive value. What could excite an enthusiasm that bordered on pandemonium? Then I began to hear some of the arias, explained by Mary Ellen. Then I became aware of certain singers. The name of Caruso—dead by then—was known to everyone and revered. But these singers were alive and singing. Rosa Ponselle, Lily Pons, Giovanni Martelli, Lauritz Melchior, James Melton. Then, too, I became aware—thanks to the inimitable commentator, Milton Cross—of the plots. Thwarted love, death, and anguish beyond bearing. What’s not to like?

  Then came the Sunday broadcast from Carnegie Hall in New York City. On Mondays, the Firestone Hour (a half hour) and the Bell Telephone Hour (the other half hour). The Longines Symphonette conducted by Mishel Piastro on Thursday. I couldn’t wait. Jack Benny, the Hit Parade, Lux Radio Theater began to lose prominence.

  In New York, along with some close friends I formed a cult that worshipped the great Swedish tenor, Jussi Bjoerling, to us the reigning tenor at the Met. Eventually, our most exclusive ritual was our observation of his birthday, February 2. One of us—usually Diffy or I—would cook and invite the initiated for dinner during which we would not converse but would spend the entire evening listening to his incomparable recordings. Very seldom would our vow of silence be broken.

  My intimate devotion to Bjoerling found its fulfillment at his death. When I came to work on September 9, 1960, I was told he had died the night before. I was devastated. I was his most devoted champion. A memorial broadcast was scheduled for that evening. I asked the program director if I could select the arias, and write the text. So there I was in the enviable position of being allowed to pay a national tribute to the man whose art had thrilled me for all those years.

  I started with “Non piangere Lui” from a recently released recording of Puccini’s Turandot. I included “Che gelida manina” from one of his signature roles, Rodolfo, in La Bohème. Also, “Amor ti vieta” from Fedora and a few more arias, ending with another aria from Turandot “Nessun dorma” (“None shall sleep”).

  As a concession to the tears freely flowing that morning, the continuity editor allowed me to include in my introduction a word previously forbidden because it violated the station’s neutrality: “greatest.” Here are the first words: “This morning on the island of Siarö, off the coast of Sweden, the greatest lyric tenor of our time, Jussi Bjoerling, died.”

  That evening those of us who had celebrated his birthdays listened to the program together. In silence.

  In the earlier days of our relationship, Gale, too, was advancing to an even more specialized and adventurous appreciation of music. As I mentioned, his great enthusiasm when we met was not just for classical, but for new and contemporary work. Whatever was emerging in the world of music was of immediate interest to him. He introduced me to Piston, Sessions, Stockhausen, Carter—and his then current hero, Charles Ives. What I heard seemed, at first, to be undisciplined and arbitrary cacophony—a willful descent into chaos. The more I listened, the more I came to accept and even admire what I was hearing. Here was an emotional life that could find expression in no other way. The wilder the seeming cacophony, the greater the excitement. The boundaries seemed now to be extended considerably. The explorations, the discoveries could be endless.

  Not surprisingly, I was given a particularly heavy dose of Mr. Ives. Gale, as I mentioned, was reading a recently published biography by Frances and Henry Cowell. It soon became an assignment which I eagerly accepted. And to think: Charles Ives, the composer, also headed the well-known insurance agency that had operated from an address on William Street right there in my Hague Street neighborhood.

  Recordings of his work were rare. The Second and Fourth Symphonies would come several years later. (The First had been dismissed because of imposed mutilations made by his Yale mentor, Quincy Porter.) Still, Gale and I, silent, intent, would play the extant recordings of the Third Symphony, Three Places in New England, The Unanswered Question, and a recording of songs that included “General Booth Enters Heaven” and “Central Park in the Dark.” There was also a brief but charming song with a text by the composer’s wife, celebrating a neighborhood street I knew quite well. I quote the lyric in its entirety: “Ann Street/Is a very short street.”

  Most of the composers’ names were already known to me, partly because of my job at WQXR. Now, however, I became the contemporaries’ advocate—with extremely limited success.

  An example: A Sunday afternoon half-hour program on WQXR was called Music on the American Scene. It was devoted to the work of American composers, some of them contemporary. As heaven and the program director would have it, a program featuring the music of Ives was scheduled. Again I asked if I could make the selections and write the commentary. Again the answer was “Yes.” I scheduled one of the Three Places in New England, some of the songs, and my favorite, The Unanswered Question. I considered it all a most worthy accomplishment, especially since it gave me a chance to engage in a bit of propaganda central to my cause. I was able to note that Charles Ives was increasingly being recognized as a colossus among American composers.

  On the following Monday morning, I was busy at my desk when Mr. Sanger, the head of the station, walked into the room. “Who did Music on the American Scene yesterday?” he asked. Certain that I was about to be given a well-deserved medal, I raised my hand. “I did.”

  Mr. Sanger: “You called Charles Ives a colossus. That’s a word we reserve only for Beethoven.” (He pivoted on the ball of his right foot and left the room.)

  In one of our walks in my neighborhood along Pearl Street on a Saturday afternoon, as we were approaching Hanover Square, I began whistling. This was my habit. Even when conversing with a companion, unknowingly I’d begin to whistle. It was tolerated at times, disrupted at others and a minimal sense of decorum reinstated. Instead of being put off by the intrusion, Gale simply said, “That’s ‘Simple Gifts.’” From Appalachian Spring. I knew it was from Copland’s Ballet for Martha, the score for one of her signature dances, but I didn’t know it was the melody of a Shaker hymn the composer had appropriated for his own purposes.

  In my thinking, that melody became forever associated with Gale. With the two of us. In later times I would summon it as I remembered our meeting on the bridge. And when I’d come to the fortissimo repeat of the central theme, I’d picture the two of us, just about to pass through the western tower, dwarfed by its massive thrust toward the sky, marking our entrance as through a lofty portal, into the strange future that awaited us both.

  2.

  To me, Gale was a true Brooklynite. At that time Brooklynites seemed different from those of us who lived in Manhattan. (I presume no knowledge of the Bronx and Queens. Staten Island would come later.) Brooklynites are of a different temperament—calmer, less aggressive, self-assured with no need to be snobbish (except those living in Brooklyn Heights) or condescending. This appraisal may derive from the fact that Gale at the time was the only Brooklynite I’d ever known so intimately.

  And perhaps because he was a Brooklynite, Gale loved our walks throughout lower Manhattan, which was to him like another frontier. On one of these walks, he told me that he’d read my play, The Bridge, that he liked it and felt that I was a good writer. Not content with that, he went on to say, “But you jerk off too much.” Actually, he was telling me I wasn’t disciplined enough. He was right.

  Another time, we were walking past Chinatown after having gone there for dinner. We could see the Tombs, the massive prison not that far to our right, and I mentioned that I’d been there,
that I’d once been arrested—and not all that long ago—sometime in late April. I explained that I’d been taken in for civil disobedience. I gave him an abbreviated version of the following:

  During the previous spring, a friend of mine, Bobby Cone, a virulent anti-Catholic, who was sitting across from me at my kitchen table, eating a dinner I’d prepared, said, “If you’re such a great Catholic, how come you’re not joining Dorothy Day and the people from The Catholic Worker at the protest?” He was referring to a protest of the air-raid drill that was part of civil defense awareness of a potential nuclear attack.

  I let him know I knew nothing about the protest. I did, however, know about Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker—mostly from a lengthy and appealing article about her and her cause that had appeared in The New Yorker more than a few years before, also from having read her autobiographical book, The Long Loneliness. And the more than several times I had bought in Union Square for a penny her newspaper, The Catholic Worker, which kept me informed of her advocacy for the rights of immigrant workers exploited by the fruit and produce growers, as well as the repeated times she and her colleagues and followers walked the picket lines in support of those demanding a fair wage. I also knew about her soup kitchen feeding the needy who, in those long-gone days, consisted mainly of Bowery derelicts.

  And so I shrugged and accepted Bobby’s challenge. We’d go together to the protest. It would take place in City Hall Park, just up the road, across the street from the Manhattan entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. Bobby would come to my apartment and I’d make a hot lunch. Then we’d go up and get ourselves arrested. With Dorothy Day.

  I did believe in her cause, her response to the idea that getting under a desk, going into a hallway, or standing in a doorway off the sidewalk would protect you from a nuclear bomb. She insisted that the only true protection from the bomb was to make sure it would never fall. And, by extension, the bomb should stop being stockpiled and, better yet, stop being made. Radical but rational.