Paul Bass Photo
Betsy and Roz Lerner at WNHH.
Radio interviewer: Roz, do you remember saying you love Betsy?
Roz: I may not have said it. But I certainly felt it. I adore my three girls.
Radio interviewer: So you love Betsy?
Roz: Absolutely.
Radio interviewer: Betsy, do you want to start telling your mom that now?
Betsy: No. It’s like a game of chicken.
Betsy Lerner loves her mother Roz. She just wrote a book that, amid hundreds of pages worth of fact-finding and card-playing and memories of loss and pain, makes that clear.
But she doesn’t tell her mother, “I love you.”
Roz loves her daughter Betsy. She hasn’t made a practice of telling her that, either.
Asked on the record, on an episode of WNHH’s “Dateline New Haven,” Roz confirmed the other day that she has always loved Betsy and been proud of her.
Betsy didn’t say the same in return about her mom. But she did read aloud the following excerpt from her new book, The Bridge Ladies. The excerpt describes a conversation they had decades after Betsy’s younger sister Barbara died as a baby, a subject they never discussed much until Betsy worked on the new book.
Recently in a rare and unexpected moment driving past our synagogue, taking my mother home, she told me that she loves Thanksgiving but that it’s always tinged in sadness. At first I can’t think why and look at her for a reason.
“Barbara died in November,” she says.
The utterance of her name on my mother’s lips is startling. I want to reach out, reach out to her, but I stay on my side.
They say you’re supposed to tell the people you love that you love them every day. My mother and I never say those words. Sometimes, when she stalls for a moment before getting out of the car, I think she’s going to say it, but it never comes. And I’m relieved. Saying it at this point feels scarier than not saying it. I always watch as she punches in the code to her garage, turns to wave, and disappears inside the house. I see the light in the front hall pop on.
“Mom,” I’ve often asked, “why don’t you leave lights on?”
“Why should I leave lights burning?”
“So you can see.”
“I can see plenty.”
I’ve always imagined that my mother doesn’t say I love you as a hedge against further tragedy, the same way the Israelites marked their front doors to keep their firstborns from being slaughtered in the Passover story. With their doors marked, their houses would be passed over. Our house had not been passed over. The Jewish practices surrounding death are specifically designed to help a person gradually move through the stages of grief. Instead, she went it alone: driving herself to yahrtzeit on a cold, dark November night.
Roz spoke about how back in the 1960s and 1970s, when she raised Betsy, parents thought they should protect their children from difficult truths. It never occurred to her to tell Betsy about her debilitating depression following Barbara’s death, about her own mother’s traumatic background.
The five Jewish women in Roz’s bridge club had the same approach, with their children and with each other. They played bridge together every Monday for over 50 years. They were close, but they tended not to share their difficult personal and family experiences, or talk about, say, sex or drugs or alcohol use, the way that peers began to in Betsy’s generation.
Betsy never had much interest in that bridge club when she grew up in Woodbridge. Now a successful literary agent and author, Betsy moved back to New Haven in her 40s and found herself helping care for Roz while Roz recovered from surgery. She saw Roz’s bridge buddies bring over meals every day.
“Wow,” Betsy thought to herself, “if I get to my 80s and I get sick, I wonder if anyone would bring me a pot roast. Probably I’ll just get a bunch of texts with emojis.”
She began to see the bridge ladies in a new way. She asked to sit in on their games and to interview them individually about their lives. She gained an appreciation for bridge. (She now has her own local bridge club). And she gained a new appreciation for the bridge ladies themselves. Especially her mom, with whom she had had a difficult relationship.
So The Bridge Ladies is a memoir about, yes, the game of bridge, but also about the relationships between moms and daughters.
Radio interviewer: How did you like the book?
Roz: I loved it. I loved it because it was a lot of work for Betsy.
Radio interviewer: How did you feel reading about yourself?
Roz: It doesn’t matter. I’m moving to Canada.
As a rebellious teen during fast-changing times, Betsy said, she saw the bridge ladies as “very square, very traditional, not role models for me. And probably even kind of boring. Once I started to interview them, all of those thoughts fell away immediately. Once I started to see them as individuals, just hearing about them as little girls blew me away. I tell people, ‘Now I have five Jewish mothers.’”
In the book, Betsy doesn’t romanticize the bridge ladies. She rues the freedoms they were denied as stay-at-home moms who put aside career dreams, who could have been closer to each other if they could have spoken more openly about their personal lives.
Betsy: Opening up and sharing what’s going on in your life with people, you have a chance to be more intimate, closer, to help each other, instead of being private, almost ashamed of certain issues.… Take away the stigma of mental illness. Take away the stigma of alcoholism. I think each of the ladies probably took their kids to psychiatrists and never talked about it.
Radio interviewer: Roz, Were you aware of what was happening in their lives anyway?
Roz: Yes, we shared, happy events, unfortunate events. But only to a point.
Radio interviewer: So you think Betsy’s right [about the benefits of being more open]?
Roz: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Betsy: Oh, I love hearing my mother say I’m right!
Radio interviewer: When did that last happen?
Betsy: I don’t know. I can’t remember.
About That Story …
Bridge Ladies shows how — if you’re lucky enough to have parents who are still alive — it’s never too late to break through a lifetime of emotional barriers and get closer, get to know each other.
The WNHH interview with Roz and Betsy revealed that more memories remain to be mined even after you write a book about it.
Roz: When [Betsy] was about 15 she wrote a short story that absolutely blew me away.
Radio interviewer: Did you tell her, “I love that story”?
Roz: Yes. I think I did.
Radio interviewer: Betsy, do you remember her telling you, “You wrote a great story,” when you were 15 years old?
Betsy: I don’t even remember writing a story.
Roz: The story was about an older sister who comes home from college vacation, and how Betsy felt about her arriving home from vacation.
Betsy: It sounds ghastly.
Roz: I think though it was a difficult story, it was a wonderfully written story. …
Don’t you recall when you won a prize for poetry in the Connecticut Poetry Association? And you were only in high school? And we all went to a beautiful library in Hartford to receive the prize? She didn’t want to go. We had to drag her practically kicking and screaming to accept this award
Betsy: I didn’t want to go with them. I feel terrible now thinking about it. I was just very angry with my parents. I don’t think I wanted them to share in anything positive with me. Did we wind up going?
Roz: Oh yes.
Betsy: I don’t even remember. I remember not wanting to.
Click on or download the above sound file to hear the full interview with Betsy and Roz Lerner on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven.” You can order Betsy Lerner’s “Bridge Ladies” here.