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Authors: Betsy Lerner
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indestructible. It was easy for a swimmerâs arm or leg to get caught between the crags of limestone invisible to the eye. There was nothing abstract about the death of a classmate, a boy you might have danced with or had a crush on, or watched playing basketball among a welter of other beautiful young men whose futures just as easily, cruelly, could have been cut down.
Much would be left behind in Bedford: the ready-to-wear dress shop owned by a young Jewish family, a yard full of deflowered chickens, and the last bounce of a basketball on a gymnasium floor after a crushing defeat. When I ask Bea where her father is buried, she tells me the Jewish cemetery in Louisville. I ask if she ever visited the grave with her mother. She looks at me and doesnât answer right away, as she usually does. âNo,â she finally says, shaking her head, âwe never did.â
CHAPTER 4
A Thousand Bette Cohens
Betteâs perfectly appointed living room could be the set of an Edward Albee play: handsome 1960s-style furnishings, the paintings and knickknacks placed just so. There is no wet bar with carafes of scotch and bourbon, crystal rocks glasses, and a silver ice bucket with claw-shaped tongs, but itâs easy enough to imagine. The room is immaculate; a vacuum cleaner has left a wide wake in the carpet. When I first arrive, Bette leads me into this room once filled with friends and cocktails and hors dâoeuvres being passed on silver platters, but whatever ghosts mingled here have long faded. The room isnât gloomy, but the house feels lonely with three grown children long gone. A daughter in Hartford practicing law, another in Paris for more than twenty years, and a son in Baltimore, an emergency room doctor.
Arthur and Bette bought their house in Woodbridge as a young married couple and have lived here for sixty years. âMy parents thought we were crazy,â Bette says. âIt was like thewilderness. There were no streetlights. No stop signs.â All of New Havenâs suburbs had once been agricultural; Woodbridge was known for dairy farming. In the 1950s and 1960s, most of that farmland would be divided into two-acre plots where young families would raise their kids in ranch houses and colonials.
The rest of the ladies would also settle in the surrounding suburbs. If White Flight was a national phenomenon in the sixties, New Haven was its poster child. Its policies for public housing and urban renewal were so misguided as to insure a tale of two cities. Racial tensions played out on a national stage when Black Panther leader Bobby Seale was tried for murder in the New Haven courts. Betteâs neighbor prosecuted the case. He and his family had bodyguards for the duration of the trial. âIt didnât affect us all that much,â she says. âWe still lived our lives.â
The ladies were not oblivious, but they were insulated. Woodbridge had everything they needed: good public schools, country clubs, a synagogue, and the nearby Post Road for shopping. Itâs not that they werenât aggrieved by the world around them, but within it they had constructed their own.
Outside their kitchen windows, each shared a view of Connecticutâs hardwood trees, which change with the seasons like the set of a Chekhov play. Itâs where theyâve washed a million dishes, wiped the counter a million times. This is where you could find them at almost any hour of the day, making a meal, filling the dishwasher, emptying it. And when they were younger, smoking a cigarette while talking on the phone, the curlicue on the cord stretched tight, watching the evening sky as it went from indigo to navy to black, or the red tail lights on a husbandâs car, garishly reflected against the asphalt in the New England night.
Of all the Bridge Ladies, Iâve always felt closest to Bette, in part because of her friendship with my mother. When theweather is good, they walk together on a path,
Much would be left behind in Bedford: the ready-to-wear dress shop owned by a young Jewish family, a yard full of deflowered chickens, and the last bounce of a basketball on a gymnasium floor after a crushing defeat. When I ask Bea where her father is buried, she tells me the Jewish cemetery in Louisville. I ask if she ever visited the grave with her mother. She looks at me and doesnât answer right away, as she usually does. âNo,â she finally says, shaking her head, âwe never did.â
CHAPTER 4
A Thousand Bette Cohens
Betteâs perfectly appointed living room could be the set of an Edward Albee play: handsome 1960s-style furnishings, the paintings and knickknacks placed just so. There is no wet bar with carafes of scotch and bourbon, crystal rocks glasses, and a silver ice bucket with claw-shaped tongs, but itâs easy enough to imagine. The room is immaculate; a vacuum cleaner has left a wide wake in the carpet. When I first arrive, Bette leads me into this room once filled with friends and cocktails and hors dâoeuvres being passed on silver platters, but whatever ghosts mingled here have long faded. The room isnât gloomy, but the house feels lonely with three grown children long gone. A daughter in Hartford practicing law, another in Paris for more than twenty years, and a son in Baltimore, an emergency room doctor.
Arthur and Bette bought their house in Woodbridge as a young married couple and have lived here for sixty years. âMy parents thought we were crazy,â Bette says. âIt was like thewilderness. There were no streetlights. No stop signs.â All of New Havenâs suburbs had once been agricultural; Woodbridge was known for dairy farming. In the 1950s and 1960s, most of that farmland would be divided into two-acre plots where young families would raise their kids in ranch houses and colonials.
The rest of the ladies would also settle in the surrounding suburbs. If White Flight was a national phenomenon in the sixties, New Haven was its poster child. Its policies for public housing and urban renewal were so misguided as to insure a tale of two cities. Racial tensions played out on a national stage when Black Panther leader Bobby Seale was tried for murder in the New Haven courts. Betteâs neighbor prosecuted the case. He and his family had bodyguards for the duration of the trial. âIt didnât affect us all that much,â she says. âWe still lived our lives.â
The ladies were not oblivious, but they were insulated. Woodbridge had everything they needed: good public schools, country clubs, a synagogue, and the nearby Post Road for shopping. Itâs not that they werenât aggrieved by the world around them, but within it they had constructed their own.
Outside their kitchen windows, each shared a view of Connecticutâs hardwood trees, which change with the seasons like the set of a Chekhov play. Itâs where theyâve washed a million dishes, wiped the counter a million times. This is where you could find them at almost any hour of the day, making a meal, filling the dishwasher, emptying it. And when they were younger, smoking a cigarette while talking on the phone, the curlicue on the cord stretched tight, watching the evening sky as it went from indigo to navy to black, or the red tail lights on a husbandâs car, garishly reflected against the asphalt in the New England night.
Of all the Bridge Ladies, Iâve always felt closest to Bette, in part because of her friendship with my mother. When theweather is good, they walk together on a path,
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