The Bridge Read online

  At Chief Poking Fire's museum, things are different; here it's strictly for the tourists, with the Chief and his family assembling in full regalia a few times each day to dance, whoop, and holler for the tourists and wave tomahawks so that the tourists, clicking their 16-mm. cameras, will have something to show for their visit to an Indian reservation.

  The Indian mayor of Caughnawaga is John Lazare, who believes he might be a Jewish Indian. He succeeded his brother, Matthew, as mayor, and Matthew succeeded their father. The Lazares run a gas station on the same side of the road as Chief Poking Fire's museum, and they also sell liquid gas to Indians for home use.

  The political viewpoint that has kept the Lazares popular with other Indians all these years is Mayor Lazare's speeches that usually include the sentence, "The Indian should be allowed to do whatever he wants," and also the Lazares' long-time denunciation of the license plate on automobiles. Indians hate to drive with license plates on their cars and would like to remove them, presumably so they'll get fewer speeding tickets (although many Indians ignore all tickets on the grounds that they are not valid documents, having never been agreed to by treaty).

  On Saturday afternoons, when the Indian men get out of bed (if they get out of bed), they usually play lacrosse, if it is not too cold. In summer months they might spend their afternoons skimming along the St. Lawrence Seaway in a motorboat they themselves built, or fishing or watching television. On Sunday morning they have their traditional breakfast of steak and cornbread, and usually loll around the house all morning and visit friends in the afternoon.

  Then, anywhere from 8 P.M. to 11 P.M., the big cars filled with ironworkers will begin to rumble down the reservation's roads, and then toward the routes to the expressway back to New York. It is a sad time for Indian women, these Sunday evenings, and the ride back to New York seems twice as long to the men as did the Friday-night ride coming up. The alcohol that many of them sip all the way back to New York is the only thing that helps make the trip endurable— and the thing that may help kill them.

  And so on this Sunday evening, Danny Montour kissed his wife goodbye, and hugged his son, and then went to pick up the others for the long ride back.

  "Now be careful," Lorraine said from the porch.

  "Don't worry," he said.

  And all day Monday she, and other Indian women, half-waited for the phone calls, hoping they would never come. And when they did not come on this particular Monday, the women were happy, and by midweek the happiness would grow into a blithe anticipation of what was ahead—the late-Friday sounds of the horns, the croaking call of Cadillacs and Buicks and Oldsmobiles, the sounds that would bring their husbands home . . . and will take their sons away.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BACK TO

  BAY RIDGE

  In the spring of 1964, to the astonishment of nobody in this neighborhood that had long suspected it, there was discovered behind the black curtains and awning and white brick wall at 125 Eighty-sixth Street, in the plush Colonial Road section of Bay Ridge, a whorehouse.

  Some people, of course, blamed the boomers, recalling the sight of those slinky blonds who lingered along the shore behind the bridge. But the Brooklyn Spectator, which broke the story on March 20, after the police finally had sufficient evidence to make arrests, reported that there were some prominent Bay Ridge citizens among the clientele, although it gave no names. The story caused a sensation—"the first story of its kind to appear in this paper mits thirty-two-year history announced the Spectator—and not only was every copy suddenly sold out. but the newspaper office was left with none for its files, and it hastily had to announce that it would repurchase, at the regular price of ten cents, any copies of the March 20 issue m good condition.

  After arresting a thirty-six-year old blond madam who swore she was a "real estate broker," and two other blond women who gave their occupations as "baby nurse" and "hostess," the police revealed that even the kitchen of the house had been converted in to a boudoir, that the wallpaper was " "vivid" and that there were mirrors on the ceilings.

  Many respectable, old time Bay Ridge residents were shocked by the disclosure, and there was the familiar lament for yesteryear. And a few people, apprehensively gazing up at the almost-finished bridge, predicted! that soon the bridge might bring many more changes lor the worse more traffic through residential streets, more and cheaper apartment, houses (that might be crowded with Negroes), and more commercialism in neighborhoods traditionally occupied by two-family house's.

  It had been five years since the bridge first invaded Bay Ridge, and, though the protestors were now quiet and the eight hundred buildings that stooel in the path of the bridge's approach-ways had now all disappeared, many people had long memories, and they still hated the bridge.

  Monsignor Edward J. Sweeney, whose parish at St. Ephrems had lost two thousand of its twelve thousand parishioners, thus diminishing the Sunday collodion considerably, still became enraged at the mere mention of the bridge. The dentist Henry Amen, who had put on forty pounds in the last five years, and was now prosperous in a new office one mile north of his old office, was nevertheless still seething, saying, "I strongly resent the idea of being forced to move."

  In some cases the anger in Bay Ridge was as alive in 1964 as it was back in 1959 when "Save Bay Ridge" banners flew; when people screamed "That bridge—who needs it?" when an undertaker, Joseph V. Sessa, claimed he would lose 2,500 people "from which to draw"; and when the antibridge faction included the disparate likes of housewives, bartenders, a tugboat skipper, doctors, lawyers, a family of seventeen children (two dogs and a cat), a retired prizefighter, a former Ziegfeld Follies girl, two illicit lovers, and hundreds of others who reacted generally as people might react anywhere if, suddenly, the order was delivered: "Abandon your homes—we must build a bridge."

  In all, it had taken eighteen months to move out the seven thousand people, and now, in 1964, though a majority of them had been relocated in Bay Ridge, they had lost touch with most of their old neighbors, and had nothing in common now but the memories.

  "Oh, those were depressing days," recalled Bessie Gros Dempsey, the former Follies girl who now lives four blocks from the spot where her old home had stood. "When those demolition men moved into the neighborhood, you'd have flower pots full of dust on your windowsills at night, and all day long you'd see them smashing down those lovely homes across the street.

  "That crane was like the jaw of a monster, and when it cracked into those buildings, into the roof and ceiling and shingles, everything would turn into powder, and then the dogs would start barking because of all the strange sounds a building makes when it is falling.

  "I remember back of where I used to live was this big brownstone—an artist lived there, and the place was built like an Irish castle. When the crane hit into it, it was a horrible sound I'll never forget. And I remember watching them tear down that colonial house that was directly across the street from me. It had columns in front, and a screened-in porch, and it was lived in by a nice elderly couple that had twin daughters, and also an uncle, Jack, a crippled fellow who used to trim those hedges. Such pride was in that home, and what a pity to see that crane smash it all down/

  The couple with the twin daughters now lives in upstate New York, Mrs. Dempsey said, adding that she does not know what became of the crippled uncle named Jack. The artist who lived in the brownstone behind her old home is now dead, she said, along with five other people she used to know in her neighborhood in the prebridge days.

  Airs. Dempsey and many others in Bay Ridge in 1964 were citing the bridge as an accomplice in the death of many residents of the old neighborhood; they said that the tension and frustration in losing one's home and the uncertainty of the future had all contributed to the death of many since 1959. One woman pointed out that her husband, never ill before, suddenly had a heart attack and died after a "Save Bay Ridge"rally, and another woman blamed the bridge for her faltering eyesight, saying she never had to wear glasses
until the announcement that her home would be destroyed by "that bridge/

  Most of the older people who had owned their homes, particularly those on pensions or small fixed incomes, said that the relocation caused them financial hardships because they could not match the price of a new home of comparable size in a comparable neighborhood.

  There were, to be sure, a minority who said they were happy that the bridge had forced them to move, or who felt that they had been unjustifiably pessimistic about the changes the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge would bring. Mrs. Carroll L. Christiansen, who had moved from Bay Ridge to Tenafly, New Jersey, into a suburban home with a quarter-acre of land around it, said, "It's a lot better here than in Brooklyn." She added, "In Brooklyn the people didn't mix socially—and never had too much to do with one another. But here it is entirely different. I've learned to play golf since coming here. And my husband and I play cards with other couples in the evenings, and we go to dances at the country club. My daughter, who is seventeen now, felt uprooted for about a year or so, but since then she's also made lots of new friends and the whole life is much easier here."

  The undertaker, Joseph Sessa, who had feared he would lose thousands of people, was surviving nicely in Bay Ridge five years later; and the two lovers—the divorced man and the unhappily married woman who used to live across the street from him— have gone their separate ways (she to Long Island, he to Manhattan) and neither blames the bridge for coming between them. "It was just a passing fancy," she says of her old affair, now being moderately contented with her new home, her husband, and children. The lover, a forty-six-year-old insurance company executive, has met a girl at the office, unmarried and in her middle thirties, and each evening they meet in a dimly lit cocktail lounge on Park Avenue South.

  Florence Campbell, the divorcee who with her young son had held out in her old apartment until 1960, despite the murder on the floor below, now believes the bridge has changed her life for the better. In her new block, she was introduced by a friend to a merchant mariner, and a year later they were married and now live in a comfortable home on Shore Road.

  The old shoemaker who had screamed "sonamabitch" at the bridge authorities for tearing down his little store five years ago, and who returned disillusioned to Cosenza in Southern Italy, has since come back to Brooklyn and is working in another shoe store. He became restless in Italy and found life among his relatives unbearable.

  Mr. and Mrs. John G. Herbert, parents of seventeen children, all of whom once lived in a noisy and tattered frame house on the corner of Sixty-seventh and Seventh Avenue in Bay Ridge before the bridge intruded, now live on Fifty-second Street in a three-story, nine-room house that they own, and, in a sense, they are better off than when they were only renting at the old place.

  This newer house is two rooms larger than the other one, but it is not any more spacious, and it is also jammed in the middle of a block of teeming row houses. The Herbert children miss the rambling grass yard and trees that used to surround the old property.

  Mr. Herbert, a short, muscular Navy Yard worker with blue eyes and a white crew cut, sometimes escapes the clatter and confusion of his home by drinking heavily, and when guests arrive he often greets them by pounding them on the back, pouring them a drink, and shouting, "Com'on, relax—take off your coat, sit down, have a drink, relax,'" and Mrs. Herbert, shaking her head sadly, half moans to the guests, "Oh, you're lucky you don't live here," and then Mr. Herbert, downing another drink, pounds the guests again and repeats, "Com'on, relax, have another drink, relax!"

  Two of the Herbert boys—Eugene, who is twenty, and Roy, who is nineteen—are very sensitive to such scenes, and both recall how happy, how hopeful they'd been five years before when they had first heard that their old house would be torn down. Finally, they thought, they'd be out of the city altogether, and moving into the country as their father had so often said they would.

  When this did not happen, the family being unable to afford any home except the one they now have, the boys felt a bit cheated; even five years afterward, they missed their old home, yearned for another like it. One day in the early spring of 1964, Eugene and Roy took a nostalgic journey back to their old neighborhood, a mile and a half away, and revisited the land upon which their old home had stood.

  Now all was flattened and smoothed by concrete—it was buried by the highway leading to the bridge, the path toward the tollgates. The highway was three months away from completion, and so it was without automobiles. It was quiet and eerie. Eugene walked around in the middle of the empty highway and then stopped and said, "It was about here, Roy—this is where the house was."

  "Yeah, I guess you're right," Roy said, "because over there's the telephone pole we used to climb . . ."

  "And over here was where the porch was . . ."

  "Yeah, and remember how we used to sit out there at night in the summertime with the radio plugged in, and remember when I'd be on that swinging sofa at night with Vera?"

  "Boy, I remember that Vera. What a build!"

  "And remember when on Friday nights we all used to sit on the steps waiting for Dad to come home from the Navy Yard with a half-gallon of ice cream?"

  "I remember, and he never failed us, did he?" "Nope, and I remember what we used to sing, all of us kids, as we waited for him . . . You remember?"

  "Yeah," said Roy. Then both of them, in chorus, repeated their familiar childhood song:

  You scream, I scream,

  We all scream

  For ice cream.

  You scream, I scream,

  We all scream

  For ice . . .

  They looked at one another, a little embarrassed, then remained quiet for a moment. Then they walked away from where the house had stood, crossed the empty highway, and, turning around slowly, they rediscovered, one by one, other familiar sights. There was the sidewalk upon which they used to roller-skate, the cement cracks as they had remembered them. There were some of the homes that had not been destroyed by the new highway. There was Leif Ericson Park, where, as boys, they played, and where they once had dug a deep hole in the grass within which to bury things—Scout knives, rings, toys, new baseballs—anything that they had wanted to keep away from their brothers and sisters, because at home nothing was private, nobody respected another's ownership.

  They searched along the grass for the hole that they had covered with a metal plate, but could not find it. Then they crossed the street to one of the few houses left on the block, and an elderly woman was shaking a mop outside of a window, and Eugene called up to her, "Hello, Mrs. Johnson, we're the Herbert boys. Remember, we used to live across the street?"

  "Why, yes," she said, smiling. "Hardly would have recognized you. How are you?"

  "Fine. We're over on Fifty-second Street now."

  "Oh," she said, softly. "And how's your mother?"

  "Fine, Airs. Johnson."

  "Well, give her my regards," the woman said, smiling, then she pulled the mop in and closed the window.

  The boys walked on through the vacated neighborhood, past the yellow bulldozers and cement mixers that were quiet on this Saturday afternoon; past the long dirt road that would soon be paved; past the places that had once been alive with part of them.

  "Roy, remember that barking dog that used to scare hell out of us?"

  "Yeah."

  "And remember that candy store that used to be here?"

  "Yeah, Harry's. We used to steal him blind"

  "And remember"

  "Hey," Roy said, "I wonder if Vera is still around?"

  "Let's get to a phone booth and look her up."

  They walked three blocks to the nearest sidewalk booth, and Roy looked up the name and then called out, "Hey, here it is— SHore 5-8486."

  He put in a dime, dialed the number, and waited, thinking how he would begin. But in another second he realized there was no need to think any longer, because there was only a click, and then the coldly proper voice of a telephone operator began, "I am sorry. T
he number you have reached is not in service at this time. . . . This is a recording."

  Roy picked out the dime, put it in his pocket. Then he and his brother walked quietly to the corner, and began to wait for the bus— but it never came. And so, without saying anything more, they began to walk back to their other home, the noisy one, on Fifty-second Street. It was not a long walk back—just a mile and a half—and yet in 1959, when they were young teenagers, and when it had taken the family sixteen hours to move all the furniture, the trip to the new house in a new neighborhood had seemed such a voyage, such an adventure.

  Now they could see, as they walked, that it had been merely a short trip that had changed nothing, for better or for worse—it was as if they had never moved at all.

  CHAPTER TEN

  RAMBLIN' FEVER

  A disease common among ironworkers—an itchy sensation called "ramblin' fever"—seemed to vibrate through the long steel cables of the bridge in the spring of 1964, causing a restlessness, an impatience, a tingling tension within the men, and many began to wonder: "Where next?"

  Suddenly, the bridge seemed finished. It was not finished, of course—eight months of work remained—but all the heavy steel units were now linked across the sky, the most dangerous part was done, the challenge was dying, the pessimism and cold wind of winter had, with spring, been swept away by a strange sense of surety that nothing could go wrong: a punk named Roberts slipped off the bridge, fell toward the sea—and was caught in a net; a heavy drill was dropped and sailed down directly toward the scalp of an Indian named Joe Tworivers—but it nipped only his toes, and he grunted and kept walking.

  The sight of the sixty-four-hundred-ton units all hanging horizontally from the cables, forming a lovely rainbow of red steel across the sea from Staten Island to Brooklyn, was inspiring to spectators along the shore, but to the ironworkers on the bridge it was a sign that boredom was ahead. For the next phase of construction, referred to in the trade as "second-pass steel," would consist primarily of recrossing the entire span while lifting and inserting small pieces of steel into the structure—struts, grills, frills—and then tightening and retightening the bolts. When the whole span had been filled in with the finishing steel, and when all the bolts had been retightened, the concrete mixers would move in to pave the roadway, and next would come the electricians to string up the lights, and next the painters to cover the red steel with coats of silver.