In the Shadow of the Bridge

by Joseph Caldwell

  We had lamb stew with a thick gravy, a generosity of fresh vegetables, whole wheat bread, and cups of sassafras tea. Next to me was an elderly woman the size of a wren. She wore glasses as thick as the bottom of a Coca-Cola bottle. Her name was Deane Mowrer, and she had the sweetest, softest voice I’d ever heard. No matter the subject, she always managed to sound cheerful.

  One thing I recall quite vividly. We had touched on the subject of Miss Day being in jail. With her softly smiling voice, she gave me an unexpected insight into Miss Day’s several imprisonments. Was I familiar with Jesus saying that what we did for the least of our brethren, we did for Him? I did. Did I remember Jesus saying, “When I was in prison, you came and visited me?” I did. Well, when Dorothy Day would go to jail it wasn’t only to give moral force to her protests, it was to search out and to find among those already locked behind prison walls the presence of her redeemer. All this made the dear good woman smile. Softly.

  With these experiences, my attraction to The Worker intensified. It was definitely increased one afternoon when Judith and I stopped by the apartment of two men, who, like Judith, were regular volunteers. They had already completed their plastering and painting and had some leftover yellow we could use. They were readily friendly and commended me for the work Judith and I had almost finished. One of the men, early thirties probably, was, according to my response to the sight of him, highly presentable. Rather than strive for an accurate description, I might be more convincing to just say that at the sight of him an internal switch flicked on and I immediately felt an alert intensification that could be used to attract his attention.

  Would that I were a “Worker,” sharing an apartment, a life, with this desirable man. Of course, there was not the slightest indication whatsoever that this object of my compulsions would be in any way susceptible to my activated charms. More important, both the society and the religion in which I had been nurtured had succeeded in impressing upon me an irrefutable fact central to my identity: I was not worthy to serve in the company of these enviably dedicated people.

  We finished our job, Judith and I. I was in the apartment when Miss Day arrived to see the preparations we had made for her return. Without comment she acknowledged all that had been done, probably not for a lack of gratitude but from a weariness with repeated expressions of thanks, as unending, as unrelenting as the need she had for the kindness and generosity of others to support and fulfill her mission.

  I settled for the honor of walking at her side with Judith as we went from the apartment to the loft on Spring Street. She spoke mostly to Judith and took little notice of me. It was more than enough. It was I, not Miss Day, who should have offered thanks. She had given me the opportunity to cast myself in this brief drama as a character at a considerable remove from my usual performance. I thank her now. And, always, I will take pride in my belief that I had performed my part most convincingly. I had almost convinced myself that I had become the man I had so expertly played. Almost.

  After I had finished recounting this story, concentrating mostly on the voluntary arrest and being put in the Tombs, I expected to be greeted with deserved praise, awe, and approbation. Instead, Gale said, “Purposely getting yourself arrested? And then put in the Tombs? Over an air-raid drill? That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” I decided then and there not to try to guide him to a more preferred response. Was this the first time that my exalted status was being called into question? That those unassailable perfections of mine were being subjected to reconsideration? From the beginning, all approval, all love, all passion had been heaped upon me as my rightful portion. Perhaps it was at this moment I (subconsciously) became aware that the time was approaching when all the heapings might have to be earned.

  Which, in hindsight, introduced the fatal element that would lead eventually to the end of it all. I began to court him. I made it my first purpose to please him. This was a mistake. A courtship, I would soon learn, was the one activity most likely to precipitate rejection. We spent fewer nights together. He would plead work—that irrefutable claim that can be very handy when needed. Now I was painting my Hague Street apartment. He helped, but disapproved of the color. “Yellow is really a shade of gray.” He sometimes made it seem the new color was driving him out the door.

  On one occasion we were coming back from Chinatown, late afternoon. An old mansion on Chatham Square that had done long and venerable service as a pawnbroker’s imposing headquarters was being torn down. He insisted that we go inside and explore, trespassing or no trespassing. Walls were gone, floors were unreliable, stairways at a precarious tilt. But it had all once been a place of true magnificence, a home built by a highly successful businessman or fortunate heir not shy about his affluence.

  Still, we knew we shouldn’t be there and my unease kept growing as we went up flights of possibly unsupported stairs. He loved it. He couldn’t get enough of it. The greater the danger, the more determined his trespass, the more gleeful became his insistence. And then it occurred to me: he was trying to drive me away, to make me leave, to admit failure, to prove that I was an inadequate companion. I didn’t leave, even when his exultation at the ruins around us drove him to unattractive laughter. Finally, he had had enough of his adventure. We left. We’d escaped without getting caught. I had done what I could to prove myself an acceptable partner in crime.

  He then pleaded work. I went home alone.

  One Saturday he came over and, at some point, was washing his face at the kitchen sink. There was a mark on his neck made by either a bite or a prolonged sucking.

  “What’s that?”

  “A mosquito bite.”

  Did I bang him on the head with a frying pan? No. I made no issue of it. I knew a challenge would only drive him further away. And by this time I lived in terror of a separation.

  But I’m getting ahead of my story. We were, after all, easily companionable, sharing many interests, starting with the bridge where we’d met. He had his photographs. I had Hague Street. Then, too, my first full-length play identified its inspiration by being called, quite simply, The Bridge—with the placement of several scenes justifying my choice of title. The bridge became not only a muse but, in its own inspirational fashion, a means of extended financial support.

  The play won for me the Arts of the Theater Foundation Award, granting me a monthly income of $133.33 for a year. With my twenty-four-dollar-a-month rent and my necessary habit of frugality, I was able to quit my job and live for a year struggling to write a second play.

  The Bridge next got me the John Golden Fellowship in Playwriting at Yale. As if the paid tuition and monthly stipend weren’t enough, the play was given a full production on the main stage, one of four presented each year. Added to all this, its favorable reception landed me a television sale of celestial proportions: a thousand dollars.

  A lesson learned: for the production, each third-year set designer was required to offer a design, one of which would be chosen by me and the faculty director, Frank McMullen. We went to make our choice. Each designer made his or her presentation: a Brooklyn cabdriver’s living room–dining room, and, above it, a section of the Brooklyn Bridge. Donald Oenslager, who headed the design department and was a highly successful Broadway set designer of the time, presided over the presentations.

  One design in particular had a bridge that fulfilled Hart Crane’s description “harp and altar.” It was stunningly beautiful. At the other end of the offerings was a bridge relegated to a lowering of the grid that could be used for stage lights for other productions, backed by a transparent screen with painted, diagonal strokes suggesting “Brooklyn Bridge.” Without hesitation I pointed to the harp and altar. Oenslager gave his response calmly and immediately. “That is the set for the play you wish you’d written. This,” he said, indicating the transparency, “is for the play you actually wrote.”

  An informed choice had been made.

  I have already m
entioned Gale’s proprietary claim to the bridge: his photographic series. Strange as it seems to me now, he showed me only a few of the bridge photographs. He worked with patient dedication, allowing only some few to be seen. I will not try to describe them and I would not insult them by setting down a generalized critique. Ten years later, he gave me a print on pasteboard of a rising tower angled into the shadows, the strung harp of the cables reaching down. The photograph now hangs to the left of my bed, last glimpsed at night, a first sighting of the new day.

  Just past midsummer Gale began to spend more nights away. He would stay in his apartment and do his necessary work. This made all the sense in the world. Evenings were the only available time for either of us to do what we had been put on this planet to do: Gale to develop and print his photographs, I to work on the play I was writing. There was no possibility that we could work in proximity. Ours were solitary tasks that could be accomplished only by the absolute absence of any other human presence. Easily acceptable—until the absences he initiated became more frequent.

  After a little more than three months of a most impressive association, the inevitable arrived. One incident gives an idea of the deterioration and the impending separation. By then it was an established custom that when we were together, it was no longer a given that we would spend the night together, a decision Gale himself would make, usually toward the end of an encounter. “You can stay over if you want to.” Together we might be, but we no longer “made love.” We “had sex.”

  The time when we had bestowed on each other a passionate fulfillment of our deepest urges had now become—on a good night—a sportive exercise that canceled rather than fulfilled those urges, not a negligible event, except that it gave an undeniable and accurate measure to what had been lost and would never return.

  The affair, however, was not quite over. A Saturday night in August. The Brooklyn Bridge. Pleasant weather, the end of the star-fall season, more scientifically called a time of meteor showers, when a cosmic confluence allows Earth dwellers to see in the night sky one piece of cosmic debris, then another, then another, fall—each to its own extinction. More than once, on this same bridge, seeing the thrilling spectacle, I had sometimes wondered to myself if a moment would finally come when, on a distant planet, some sentient being would look up and, without expectation, observe a descending light that traced the final trajectory of my own planet toward its inevitable end. If any stars or meteors fell that August night, I failed to see them.

  Earlier, I had phoned a few friends, offering each my company for any activity suitable for a Saturday night in New York City. No takers. Restless after a solitary meal, I had gone out onto the bridge, possibly hoping for an encounter that would distract me from my present predicament: the dissolution of my relationship with Gale. I had already determined that I could effectively cope with my disappointment. I would dismiss the entire episode as one that had come and gone, not without its rewards, and that I would now simply, as they say, move on.

  Of one thing I was definitely sure: I would not suffer. It was forbidden that I should even indulge in regrets, much less brood over a loss or permit myself to yearn for the return of the ardent fulfillments I’d recently known. I was mature. I could accept realities, even those not of my choosing.

  On that August night on the footpath of the bridge from which rose the Manhattan-side tower, I stopped to look out over the harbor, an obeisance to the view I seldom failed to offer. Maybe someone would come along and a distraction be guaranteed.

  Suddenly, I terrifyingly felt warned that the spot where I was standing had been marked by some malevolent force intent upon a devastation beyond imagining.

  I quickly moved away, still sheltered by the tower overhead. The warning repeated itself. My only recourse was to continue my walk across the bridge. A good brisk walk would come to my rescue. Still, the fierce warning I’d experienced had no point of reference. I had had no intimations of it as a possibility. I continued to walk. Whether I passed anyone else, I don’t remember. All I knew was that I had been marked for a calamity that could strike at any moment.

  Nearing midway, I ignored the familiar well-loved views: to my right, the harbor, the statue, the islands, the river, and, to my left, the inimitable skyline of the city I still loved.

  The threat became unavoidable. I was about to lose my mind. At any moment I would go mad. I had an image of myself clawing my way up a wire fence, a desperate attempt at escape.

  I walked back home. The world and my place in it had changed irrevocably. I undressed and got into bed. No relief seemed possible. I got dressed again and went to the Beekman Downtown Hospital emergency room a few blocks away. Only one person was there in the reception room, most likely a nurse, a man. I said all that I was capable of saying: “There’s something wrong with my head.” His diagnosis, without further inquiry, must have been that I was complaining of a headache. “You’ll have to come back in the morning. To the clinic.”

  On a Sunday?—a question I was incapable of asking. I was without the means to offer a more detailed description of my ailment. By its nature, the “ailment” cautioned that involvements of any kind were dangerous, that protests or a more intensified claim of need could bring me that much closer to the imminent dissolution.

  I went back home. I phoned my friend Ted, who was a longtime enthusiast of psychoanalysis, with which he himself was intimately familiar. I told him what was happening. He made no diagnosis; he offered no advice. A man of ready empathy, he simply told me to come to his place.

  He lived on Seventy-Sixth Street and Riverside Drive. To confine myself to a subway or a bus was impossible. To take a cab never occurred to me. How many miles it was from Hague Street to there I do not know. But I walked, trying to be as unaware of everything around me as possible. I do remember, however, that, as I made my way among the derelicts on the Bowery, I consciously envied them. They were free of what was happening to me. Whatever else might plague them, they had been spared this and were far more fortunate than they knew.

  What I must have looked like, I have no idea—the expression on my face, my movements, the way I held my body. All I know—and remember—is that a Bowery derelict, in passing, scoffed and muttered something that I deciphered as “Nothing can be that bad.” Well, yes, it can. And it was.

  On Broadway, as I neared Times Square, the terror lifted. I was too exhausted to have a response beyond an acknowledgment of the fact. A few blocks further on, I had a Nedick’s orange drink.

  I arrived at Ted’s. My impression is that we said very little. It was well past the middle of the night. In bed, next to Ted, my final words of the day were:

  “Gale and I aren’t together anymore.” Nor do I remember if we had any discussion the following morning.

  Obviously I didn’t hang around too long, since I walked back home. While passing through Chinatown,

  on Mott Street, I stopped at the Church of the Transfiguration for Sunday Mass. The word “uneasy” best describes my approach to this lifelong practice. All through my experience with Gale, I had never missed a Sunday Mass. Although my commitment to him—to say nothing of the lovemaking—presumably placed me well beyond the pale, I, with very little trouble, avoided confronting the truths of my situation. I made it all possible by pretty much ignoring it. Pertinent thoughts might have insinuated themselves into my consciousness and, perhaps, even my conscience, but I never allowed them to become an issue that required serious attention. I would, as a variant of the saying goes, “Jump off that bridge when I came to it.”

  I survived the Mass. I had not felt compelled to declare myself in prayer an abject penitent, nor did the mental tremors of the night before return—although they seemed to be just barely dormant, waiting to pounce again.

  It was my friend Eddy Parone’s birthday. When I went to the celebratory gathering, I gave him a sketchy description of the previous night’s terrors, and he dismissed the in
cident but still gave me the name and number of his psychiatrist. “It won’t happen again,” he assured me. Since he was in analysis, he surely must know.

  It did happen again. And I soon became aware that it could happen as it first did, unbidden, but with one slight variation. The first event came upon me without warning. Now I was constantly warned, not always alarmingly, but let’s say it was a presence—like a malevolent murmuring underscoring every thought, every act. No moment was completely safe, no thought, no act immune from its infliction. But I was not completely debilitated. I could go to work and function without diminished competence. The work provided distractions. The weekends could be more problematic, but I’d already started my psychotherapy, my analysis.

  The doctor’s name was Robert Gould. I talked. He listened. He might comment from time to time, or ask a question, but most sessions could pass without him saying a word. That was his method and I felt no need to challenge it.

  When I mentioned to my play agent that I had gone into analysis, she asked, “Does this mean you’re not going to be a Catholic anymore?”

  A touch of grace came upon me. I was immediately, at Cindy’s words, reminded of the response James Joyce is reputed to have given to an acquaintance who, after being told by Joyce that he no longer considered himself a Catholic, had asked him, “Does that mean you’ll become a Protestant?” Without hesitation, Mr. Joyce is said to have replied, “Please, I’ve lost my faith, not my mind.” By God’s good grace, I said to Cindy, “Cindy, please, I’ve lost my mind, not my faith.”

  A final scene with Gale. The Monday after the Sunday after the Saturday. Even before the Saturday attack I had resolved to end the relationship. It would be announced in no uncertain terms on the Monday get-together already planned. Without reference to the events of the weekend, I would thrust upon him that most absurd of all punishments so often resorted to by those in my position. I would, in effect, say to him, “Since you don’t want me to come around anymore, I’m going to punish you by not coming around anymore!”